Dwellers (10 page)

Father claimed that he received death threats aimed at the family.
His
family, to be precise. So Celeste was called home and I never got the chance to step into a college classroom.

I was 16. Celeste was 18. The twins were four years old, and—blessedly innocent, blessedly clueless—were happy that their sister was home for an extended vacation.

The “extended vacation” lasted three years.

WE LOST THE banks and the telecom company within a year. While the family fought for control of the bus line, the estate hospital ran out of medicine, and tools and machinery
that broke in the sugar mill took forever to be replaced, if they were ever replaced at all. Father started downsizing. The teachers were the first to go and with them went the promise of free
education for the workers and their children. Uncle Pedro, Grandfather’s third son and overseer of the sugar mill and sugarcane plantations, imposed longer hours on the farmers to increase
production. Before long, my father was sending Celeste with Pedro to talk at the estate’s monthly meetings. It took me a while to realize why: the farmers were getting angry and Father
thought sending a young face, a face that symbolized a fairer future, would appease them.

Celeste always looked like a walking corpse whenever she came back from these meetings, her face pale, her eyes frightened. She refused to tell me why.

IT WAS AROUND this time when Father removed the televisions from the mansion, cut our Internet connection, edited the bookshelves in the mansion library, and threw out the
“forbidden” books, including
Lord of the Flies,
the book I was reading when Grandfather was still alive. He said I was filling my head with garbage and God was punishing me
through the family’s businesses. My parents were Roman Catholic and we were raised Roman Catholic, but Father turned to his faith with such fervor that it became frightening. Celeste and I
had frequent shouting matches with him until Mother fell ill, so we stopped fighting. Even the twins, sensing that my father could explode at any moment, stopped complaining about the cartoons they
couldn’t watch anymore, and prayed the rosary on their knees.

With the corporate takeovers, and my Grandfather’s death, Father turned to a world he could control—his own house, where he still sat at the head of the table and where the checkbook
still needed his signature.

OF COURSE, THIS insight came to me in retrospect. At the time, I walked around with what felt like a boulder on my shoulder blades, thinking our lives were falling around our
ears, and my father was going insane.

But then: Perhaps I was right about that, too. Especially considering what happened after.

19

LOUIS, WHO VISITED us often, offered to help us leave the estate. We could stay with him in the city until things settled down. But we couldn’t leave Mother, and
Louis’s father, who was still somehow loyal to my father, would never allow it.

So we stayed, and the years marched on. We lost the bus line, we got buried in debt. The farmers went on strike, went back to work, went on strike again. Auntie joined Uncle Pedro in the talks
after Celeste refused to attend the meetings. A lot of the workers left the property in the middle of the night, abandoning the farmers’ housing complex. Creditors started calling and sending
letters, wanting a piece of the dying property while my father and his siblings tried their best to ward them off.

I asked my sister why she refused to talk to the workers. I volunteered to go. She said she was just tired, and I should focus instead on taking care of Mother and the twins.

“Would you do it?” she asked, suddenly.

I was confused. “Take care of Mother and the boys?” I said. I thought I was doing that already.

“No. Leave me for dead with broken legs even if there’s a chance I can take over another body.”

It took me a moment to recall her conversation with Grandfather. Which, I must note, happened more than a year ago at this point.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was true. I really didn’t know.

But she was no longer paying attention to me. She was looking away, lost in her thoughts.

“I hate my body,” I heard her say.

“Don’t say that.”

“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked.

“You are beautiful,” I said.

“That’s good.”

She sounded like a person in a waking dream.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I feel dirty,” she said.

I was just about to say something when she turned to me and asked, “Among our cousins, which one would you choose?”

I was very, very confused at this point.

“Which one?” she insisted. “Which body?”

I couldn’t reply. I felt cold all over.

“I’m thinking Jessica.” She was Uncle Pedro’s only daughter. “She’s younger, but she’s slight, like me. Same height. It wouldn’t be too
disorienting.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

Celeste frowned. “What?” she said, then shrugged and turned away from me. “Jessica,” she said. “That’s the one.”

LOUIS WAS HOME for the summer the year I turned 19. He awakened me in the middle of the night and told me that Celeste was not in her room.

WE LOOKED FOR her in the twins’ room, the kitchen, the dining area, the adoration chapel. She wasn’t in the mansion. We didn’t want to alert anyone else,
especially Father, so we decided to head out to look for her ourselves.

I thought she had left the estate, and felt both mournful and glad. She deserved to be out of this constricting place, I thought.

If only.

We didn’t have to go too far. Louis insisted that he heard a sound coming from the estate cemetery. We walked around the headstones for what felt like hours until I saw a glint of metal in
the moonlight. Celeste was in the farthest corner of the cemetery, surrounded by trees, near the wall that separated the estate from the rest of the town. In this corner were the oldest headstones,
weathered down by the centuries.

We found Celeste surrounded by our long-dead ancestors, digging up a hole. Digging up a grave.

We were so shocked we couldn’t say a word. She was knee-deep in the hole, wearing a silk nightgown stained with grass and soil. She stopped to arch her back. That was when she noticed us.
And that was when I noticed the girl lying on the grass beside the grave.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, picking up something from the ground and pointing it at us in one fluid stroke. She stepped out of the hole, using the shovel to boost her up.

“Where did you get that gun, Celie?” Louis said, and sees our cousin Jessica lying there on the grass. This stopped him in his tracks.

“Same place I got the shovel and the sleeping pills,” Celeste said. Her gaze hardened. “I’m doing this,” she said. “All right?”

That was when our last conversation made complete sense. “You can’t do this to Jessica,” I said, finally finding my voice.

She responded by turning the gun on herself.

“If any of you interrupt me,” she said, “I will shoot myself. Clear?”

She didn’t wait for our answer. With the gun still trained on her right temple, she started reciting the words, words that we only saw in that handwritten journal that smelled of death.
This can’t be happening,
I kept thinking.
This can
not
be happening.

I wondered then how desperate Uncle Manolo felt. How desperate and helpless and alone.

Jessica started to moan. We didn’t know how long Celeste had been digging in the cemetery, but clearly the sleeping pills were wearing off. “What,” she said, eyes fluttering
open. “My head,” she said, pulling herself up. “Celie? Celie, what did you do to me?”

Celeste did not miss a beat. She grabbed Jessica and placed a hand over her mouth before Jessica could scream. The gun was now pointed at us. We raised our hands. My sister continued with the
incantation.

I would never forget Jessica’s frightened eyes.

Louis leapt and tackled Celeste. All three of them fell into the hole. Lightning crackled in the distance. In its split-second light I stepped closer and called out: “Louis? Celie?
Jessica?”

The first sound I heard was Louis crying.

Jessica was on her knees, with her back toward me, tangled up in Celeste’s limbs. She touched her face, her hair. She started to laugh. “It worked!” It was Jessica’s
voice, but in it I heard my sister’s deranged sense of wonder.

Celeste, clad in Jessica’s skin, climbed out of the grave. Louis wouldn’t get up. He sat there, catatonic, beside Celeste’s body.

“Get up or I’ll shoot,” she said, pointing the gun at me.

“You are doomed, Celie,” Louis said. He clambered out, moving like an old man. He shoveled dirt into the hole.

20

LOUIS AND I fell asleep on the floor in the twins’ bedroom, probably just out of sheer weariness, because I remember looking over at Louis at three in the morning and
seeing him still staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

I was frightened out of my wits but I couldn’t process the grief and terror anymore. I had just helped bury my sister’s body. I had just helped my sister slip into another home,
which was her home now. It was too much. It was much too much. And so I fell asleep, and, eventually, Louis did, too.

The light was still weak when I felt someone shaking me. The twins, asking me what we were doing in their room, and why we were covered in dirt. That jolted me awake, and I nearly kicked Louis
to wake him. We had to clean ourselves before the maids saw us.

Before my parents could realize that Celeste was missing, they became preoccupied with another tragedy. Uncle Pedro was found dead in his room. There was an open bottle of sleeping pills on the
bedside table, its contents scattered around it and on the floor. Everyone thought,
He overdosed. He made a mistake. He was suicidal.

But there was blood and vomit on his chin and pillows.

And then we found the note:

The first time he did it was after our meeting with the farmers. He threw me to the ground behind the sugar mill and said that was how he liked it, on the grass, under the
stars. A true romantic, our Uncle Pedro.

He did it five more times after that, in this very same bed, while his children slept, until I finally mustered the courage to tell Father.

Who did not believe me.

Who thought I was making up stories so I would be allowed to leave the estate.

Who said I should be kinder to the “poor widower”.

So I mixed cyanide with the poor widower’s tea and smothered him with a pillow.

Shame on you, Father. Shame on you, Pedro, devil, viper. Shame on this family.

C.

I ran out of the room and threw up in the corridor.

I DON’T REMEMBER much from Uncle Pedro’s funeral. The family kept the police out of it. Of course they did. The news mentioned “death from a brief
illness”.

One of my uncles said the cyanide crystals, which they used for fumigation until the mid-80’s and now very occasionally as rat poison, were kept in a locked vault in Uncle Pedro’s
office in the sugar mill. They checked the vault and the crystals were gone. No one knew how Celeste got access, but everyone assumed she managed to leave the estate after murdering Pedro. No one
noticed the patch of freshly turned earth in a corner of the cemetery, where my sister’s body lay rotting.

MY MOTHER AND the twins were inconsolable. Only the family accompanied Uncle Pedro during the wake. Nearly everyone left just after the first night, when we heard Jessica tell
Father: “He did it to me, too. For years.”

After that revelation, the maids could have rolled Uncle Pedro into an old
banig
and thrown him over the wall for all my Father cared.

“CAN YOU BELIEVE that,” Jessica (Celeste—let’s call her Celeste) told me during the wake, “your Father only believed what your sister wrote after I
spoke to him. So he’d believe someone else’s daughter before he could believe his own?”

Why didn’t you tell me, I told her. Why didn’t you tell me. It was all I could say. I started crying and she looked away, disgusted.

MY MEMORIES OF those final weeks in the estate were hazy. I remember only: the sticky sweet feel of the summer, Jessica seen in the distance like a mirage, the dust motes in the
sunlight inside the library, the occasional rain, and the twins pulling me out to play under the downpour. Father was always out in meetings and Mother was always in her room, so I only had my
little brothers as constant company inside the mansion. I still remember them jumping up and down in the rain, clambering on top of me to wrestle me to the ground.

THEY WERE SO happy.

21

I HAVE NOT seen Jessica up close since Uncle Pedro’s funeral, so when I saw Jessica in the vestibule on my last afternoon inside the estate, I moved away from her and
nearly tripped on my own feet.

Of course, I didn’t know then it was going to be my last afternoon in my own home, but the dread was there, the feeling of something ending. There was another workers’ strike. Louis
and his father were with Auntie and my parents, trying to get a conversation going with the workers’ leaders, trying to get the media out of it. I was ashamed, frightened, and angry at how my
father continued to cling to this notion that the estate operated as it did in the past, when Grandfather was still alive, when the workers still received the treatment they deserved, when people
still treated each other like family.

“What’s wrong?” Celeste said through Jessica’s mouth. She was wearing a black dress and carrying a wicker basket filled with tin cans and a bag of chocolate chips.
“One of the maids let me in but she disappeared back into the laundry room.”

“Sandra,” I said. “She’s new.” Most of the helpers had left or had been let go at that point. Dust had settled all over the mansion and there were weeds in the back
garden.