Contigo

 

1.   Bird Song

Here’s Goldy, lips pressed to the head of her toy microphone, making me-me-meee sounds. She’s five. The French doors are open on the third floor balcony where a Mediterranean breeze dances in the curtains. Pilar sits cross-legged on the narrow balcony, Fisher-Price xylophone across her lap, rubber mallet in one fist, raised and waiting. She’s four-and-a-half.

“Me-me-meee,” goes Goldy into the plastic microphone that makes her voice sound like it’s coming from a radio. Her blonde hair is all flaxen wisps and tangles.

“Shhh!” goes Pilar with a finger to her lips. She’s tinier than Goldy, with black hair and a commanding gaze. “They’re going to start!”

Goldy waggles her microphone. “I have to call them. They don’t know we’re waiting.”

Pilar throws up her arms. “¡Cállate, Goldy! You’re scaring them!”

Goldy pouts, but complies. She holds the microphone at the ready. The bodies of the trees rustle beyond the balcony railing. The swaying tips of the twin cypress in front of the townhouse, the glossy bursts of palms in the plaza across the street, the silver and green eucalyptus shivering beyond. Barcelona’s tile rooftops, jagged with chimney pots and antennae, the soft blue haze that hangs over the twilight city. Goldy and Pilar, sisters in every way except blood, waiting for the birds to begin.

It always starts with a two-tone call: a whistling note, and then its pair, three steps down. The girls turn wide eyes on each other, whatever tension between them melting off in the moment. Goldy holds the microphone to her lips but waits for Pilar’s note. Pilar taps her mallet on one of the painted bars of the xylophone, and it’s roughly the same note as the first note of the bird’s song. And then—because she’s done this many times, she speaks birdsong just like she speaks her father’s Spanish and Goldy’s English and the city’s Catalan—she aims her mallet three bars to the left and taps a lower note that echoes the second part of the bird’s call. TING-ting!

Goldy, barely containing her glee, pushes her voice into the resonating tube of her microphone: “BAH-bah!”

And the bird answers, twin whistles: TOOT-toot!

The girls cheer and cackle and squirm, and do it again. TING-ting, BAH-bah!

TOOT-toot!

Other birds twitter, somewhere a raven caws, but Goldy and Pilar stay keyed into the two-tone whistler. Pilar tap-taps the xylophone’s colorful bars in what becomes a steady rhythm, just those two notes, and Goldy jumps and struts and echoes the notes on her microphone, nonsense words, even as Pilar sings along: “MISTER bird, WHERE you go? WHAT you say? WE don’t know…” And Goldy repeats that and they sing it all again, together, a wild rumpus on the balcony above the city in the Spanish evening.

Later that night, or another night just like this one, Goldy’s mother and Pilar’s father hit some adult limit and everything in their world comes crashing down, and the two girls are thrown far apart for most of the rest of their lives. What Pilar would always think of as The Night of Breaking Glass. But on this day, and the many other days just like it, they discover who they are just by singing with the birds.

 

2.   A Goddamn Masterpiece

Twenty years later, on the other side of the world. Goldy smoking, Pilar tuning her harp, both of them out on the porch in the late morning. Boulder, Colorado, Pilar’s bungalow, Goldy visiting for a long weekend mid-way through the Bad Bush years. Goldy sat on the porch rail, steel string acoustic across her blue-jeaned thigh, American Spirit threading smoke past her squinted eyes as she dug a riff out of a chug-chug strum between B-minor and F-major. With the harp’s soundboard tipped into her lap, Pilar’s fingers plucked a string, turned the peg a shade, pluck-pluck, tweak. The needle on the handheld tuner on her knee bounced and bobbed toward true. Black coffee in their cups, hangovers receding sip by sip.

Pilar’s fingers fell in sync with the chords Goldy was playing and, for a moment, the body of a song emerged, half-harp and half-guitar: driving rhythm, resonating tones, harmonics popping above the notes like glints of sunlight. And then Pilar hit an off note, a string she hadn’t tuned yet, and Goldy—thinking Pilar was intentionally upping the challenge—threw in a new chord that wrenched the melody away. Just like that, the jam fell apart. Goldy didn’t say it, but she had the thought: Why can’t we ever line up? 

Because it never worked, at least not for long. Both of them musicians, born from the same bird song, and yet they could never find a common frequency where they both resonated, not since they’d been little. Apples and oranges. TING-tings and BAH-bahs, VHS and Betamax, football and soccer, sunny days and moonlight. These were lines and images from a song Goldy had written about it, their ongoing mismatch. A song she never intended to play for the sister who had inspired it.

Later at Dot’s Diner, they scarfed huevos rancheros and more black coffee, looking out the window next to their booth at the hippies and punks and granola people waiting outside for the next table. More coffee, more smokes. Last night had been an epic booze-up at the cast party for the show Pilar was playing in, The Lonesomest Man in the Universe. Defying the title, Goldy had hooked up with the lead actor from the production. He’d come home with them, 4 a.m., spent what was left of the night drinking and making out on the couch with Goldy, then split before the sun came up. The only trace he left was a sticky-note doodle of a smiley-faced Moon and Sun sitting on a sofa with a storm of hearts erupting between them, his phone number below that. Goldy showed this to Pilar, who smirked. 

“Did you screw Sir Laurence on my couch?” 

Goldy snickered. “Sir Laurence! Why do you call him that?”

Shrug. “Because he thinks he’s the second coming of Olivier. The thing is, he’s almost right.”

Goldy beamed. “He is pretty good. Almost.”

“Are you talking about the acting or the screwing?”

Goldy just sipped her coffee, eyes shining over the rim of her cup. Neither of them knew it yet, but Sir Laurence would go on to blast a jagged hole in the back-half of Goldy’s twenties, a great and annihilating love affair that would leave a high-water mark in her soul. Not only for the companionship and the sex, but the self-knowing that resulted. How he would push her to “melt” herself onstage, how to seduce every mind out in the darkness beyond the proscenium lights. How he didn’t seem to realize that rock’n’roll gigs didn’t usually involve proscenium lights (the dork!). How he would nurse her through hard times but would get competitive and shitty when she had successes in her teaching career or with her music. Too much booze all around. Too many drugs. How, four years from now, she’d storm out of the theater lobby during the intermission of a performance of Swan Lake because she was convinced he had an engagement ring in his pocket and he was about to propose, and she’d already seen how catastrophic marriage could be thanks to the doomed union of her mother and Pilar’s father, and so she manufactured an argument, exploded on him and stormed out. How she would move out that same night and live in her Subaru for three weeks until she found a bungalow for rent, moving in just in time to start the school year with a new crop of unhinged gangster wanna-be ninth graders who couldn’t read. And that would be the end of it: the Sir Laurence Affair leaving her temporarily homeless and broke and soaked in sadness but perhaps a shade wiser, a touch readier for the world, a Moon who once shared a sofa with the Sun amid a storm of swirling hearts that all fluttered away. Knowing none of this yet, Goldy clinked Pilar’s coffee cup and said, “To Sir Laurence. I’m going to start calling him that to his face.”

“That’ll just give him a bigger head.”

“I like big head,” Goldy said, archly.

“Oh my god, I’m going to have to get the couch cushions dry-cleaned.” Pilar laughed, but a shadow of distaste remained on her features. Goldy shook her head to mean she wasn’t being serious, but she also felt a twinge of judgment, and it made her want to exaggerate even more to scandalize her sister who used to be so wild but who had become so straight. She timed her next comment for the moment after Pilar took a sip of coffee: “He suggested we should have a threesome—you, me, and him.”

Pilar choked on her coffee. “¡No mames, guëy!”

“I mean, he said it like he was joking, and I told him to fuck off, but I guarantee he was fishing for it.”

“Ew. I have to see his face at rehearsal tomorrow, and for five more shows.”

“Lucky you. It’s a nice face. Almost.” Goldy enjoyed watching Pilar squirm. It was nearly an opposite dynamic from when they’d been little. Here’s Goldy, just turned four, pedaling her tricycle down the tile hallway next to a wall of glass bricks. Sunlight lying in jewels on the black-and-white grid that flashes beneath her wheels, and then BAM! A baseball bat swings, bashes her in the face, knocks her right off the tricycle which continues rolling and squeaking as Goldy’s body smacks onto the floor. And here’s Pilar, in a freaking diaper, holding the inflatable bat like a Viking warrior brandishing a longsword, cackling at the sky with a mouth of snaggleteeth, eyes afire. Goldy crying, Pilar laughing right up until the moment mamá showed up and then Pilar was crying too but it wasn’t a genuine cry, it was a cry which mocked Goldy’s cry, but only Goldy knew that. This dynamic had repeated and compounded since they’d been babies. Even though Goldy was older, it was Pilar who made the rules of their games, and Pilar who took whichever toys she wanted, and Pilar who knew how to manipulate adult opinion to her own advantage. Goldy just took what she was given. 

Are we forever stuck being who we are, but spend our lives trying to be something else? Does anyone ever make it?

These questions Goldy asked of the bottom of her coffee cup, a quarter moon with the dregs of black joe making the negative space. No answer. When she wasn’t around Pilar, she could be Pilar, and kick all the asses. But with Pilar—well, then she was just Goldy, waiting for the next move. 

“Hey,” Pilar said. “Here’s what we do. We hit the Sundown Saloon on the way back home—they open at noon. Get a couple of whiskies, neat, then we write some lyrics on a cocktail napkin, but only as long as it takes to drink the whiskey. Then we high-tail it home and spend exactly thirty minutes writing a song. We egg-timer it. You guitar, me harp, whatever, switch it around, who cares? We record it on the 4-Track, mix that fucker down and listen to it.” Jazz hands. “A masterpiece.”

Goldy had allowed her eyes to widen with each element of this plan. Which, to be fair, sounded exhilarating. But she was also annoyed at how brazenly Pilar was hijacking the day. “I was actually thinking about giving Sir Laurence a call. See if the magic still works in daylight.”

Pilar made a face. “Magic? You prefer magic over music?”

Goldy didn’t know how to answer that. “It’s kind of the same thing.”

“So make the booty call when we’re done. How often do we get to make music together?”

Goldy clocked the manipulation even as it steered her. Pilar was right; it might be years before they hung out again. And best not to appear too eager with Sir Laurence. She made herself grin and clinked her empty cup to Pilar’s. “Okay then. Let’s make a goddamn masterpiece.”

 

3.   Where Are You Now?

Here’s Pilar, awakening from afternoon dreams to find herself alone in a sun-splashed tent on the back slope of Pikes Peak. Another long weekend of rekindling sisterhood, and this time it was Pilar who was visiting, early in the Obama years. She’d dreamt about Kiki, her husband of less than a year, a sought-after actor in the demi-monde of Spanish cinema, and he’d been angry in the dream, jealous of the time she was spending with Goldy. Could the dream contain any truth? It left her unsettled, wondering what time it was in Barcelona and failing to summon the mental acuity to make the calculation. She tugged at the roots of her hair to awaken her scalp, patted her checks and brow to clear the grogginess away. Slipped the bookmark between the pages of the astrophysics book that had put her to sleep. Goldy was nowhere to be seen, her sleeping bag neatly rolled up, her boots missing. Leaf shadows quivered on the tent walls, wind shushing in the pine boughs above. 

As soon as Pilar unzipped the door and climbed outside, she heard it. A voice pierced the swirl of wind through the boughs and leaves. With a spike of alarm she caught what the voice was saying: “Where are you now?”

Screamed into the wind, it sounded urgent. Lost hikers? She stepped into the sun-dappled afternoon where all the trees were stirring. 

And somewhere nearby, across the creek and beyond a glade of aspens, that voice hollering: “Where are you now?”

Goldy. It was Goldy’s voice. 

Pilar’s alarm jumped a notch before she caught herself. A guitar jangled under the words like its own kind of gurgling stream; Goldy was singing. Pilar stepping-stoned her way across the rushing water, then weaved through white-barked saplings, around the lashing twigs of juniper and scrub oak that clustered within the aspen grove. The voice and guitar clarified as she approached through the trees. The tune was halfway familiar, that chord progression, but what song?

There was Goldy, strutting atop a low sprawl of limestone slabs in her skinny black jeans and a concert tee (The Melvins), acoustic guitar slung around her neck and flashing with reflected sunlight. The rocks made a natural stage in the clearing, and she was putting on a show for the wild. Not yet noting Pilar’s arrival, Goldy tossed her head back, throat to the sun, and howled the refrain again. She startled when she found Pilar grinning from the clearing’s edge. “I thought you were a forest sprite,” Goldy said. She tousled her short blonde hair where sweat had matted. 

“Maybe a witch.” Pilar sat on a tilted boulder at the edge of the rockfall.

“Sorry if I woke you up. Being alone in the wilderness inspired me to belt it out.”

You’re so American, Pilar wanted to say. Always louder than you need to be. Instead, she said, “Your voice is actually amazing. I don’t know how you can do that every night.”

“I can’t—not yet. But this is helping.” Goldy passed Pilar the guitar and then sat on a flat spot. Next week, after this camping trip, Goldy was heading out on the road with her band, Screamy Deluxe, on a Western states tour that might make her a star or might destroy her, depending. 

Pilar fingerpicked quietly, plucking chords that fit together like puzzle pieces, up and down the neck. 

Goldy watched her sister’s hands. “Did you recognize the song?”

“Yes, but I can’t place it. What is it?”

Goldy sang the refrain with the same melody but different words. “¿Dónde estás, cabrona?”

“Oh my god.” Pilar started playing it, but in a different key. “Our egg-timer song!”

“Fuck yeah.”

“I can’t believe you remember that.”

“How could I forget?”

Which was something of a theme in their relationship: Goldy remembering everything which somehow faded from Pilar’s grasp. Now Pilar played the chords, but jazzy versions of them, all diminished and augmented and softened with sixths and sevenths and ninths. She hadn’t forgotten at all, she just hadn’t actively remembered. “I haven’t thought of that song in years.”

“A good song never dies.” Goldy hooked an eyebrow up.

“Hmm. I feel like good songs die all the time.”

“I was listening to your album a while ago,” Goldy said, “that MirrorrorriM thing you did with Harry and Memo, and I tried to learn some of your songs, but Jesus, girl. You wrote some complicated shit.”

“Ha! That’s what Harry said too. I think he just didn’t quite have the chops.”

If Goldy perceived the subtle dig, she ignored it. “Your songs were better than his, though. Obviously.”

Pilar, regretting how snotty her last comment sounded, handed the guitar back in unspoken contrition. “Maybe we’re doomed to never find men who can match us.” 

Goldy grinned. “There’s not a man alive who possibly could.”

“That’s what imaginary friends are for,” Pilar said.

“Oh! You have one, too?”

Pilar gave a wink. “My imaginary friend is you.” 

Goldy popped her eyes out. “Mine too!”

“Ha!” Pilar went to the sky, a genuine laugh, without knowing how serious either of them were being. 

 

They climbed a trail through the pine trees at the far end of the clearing. Limestone bluffs loomed to the left, the narrow throat of a green valley to the right. Stepping over roots and rocks, Pilar led while Goldy followed with the guitar dangling from her back. They hadn’t talked about their love lives since the summer Pilar played with the Boulder Philharmonic—the summer of The Lonesomest Man in the Universe—but they did now, catching each other up with tales of crushes and flings and long term delusions that flamed out and faded away. Pilar told the tale of Memo, his charm and then his stasis, how he couldn’t seem to grow up and move beyond the small set of things he loved to do and was quite good at: drinking, fucking, playing guitar.

Goldy nodded in recognition. “I know the guy.”

“You know Memo?” She was sure they’d never met.

“I know all the Memos.” Goldy told about the woman she’d recently been involved with, Rosaura, who rode a vintage Vespa and played stand-up bass in a fusion jazz trio. Tattoos upon every inch of her below the jaw, but the face of a ceramic doll, long Marsha Brady hair, eyes as  shiny black as a bird’s. 

“I’m picturing a bird of prey,” Pilar said.

“Fucking right. And I’m a dumbass groundhog.”

Pilar touched Goldy’s back, a gesture at sympathy, and they both scanned the tree line for raptors. The low clouds made a giant face in Pilar’s mind: bulbous eyes, bulging lips and cheeks. The sky flashed, then cracked open with thunder. The sun was still shining from a low angle but dark clouds shredded and boiled over the rocky rim. The sound of thunder descended and cascaded across the valley, across the world. The sisters turned wide eyes on one another and U-turned. They were in a pasture of tall grasses and wildflowers, thirty steps from tree cover. Their walk quickened into a shambling run. Lightning making x-ray flashes all around. With a fist around the guitar’s neck to keep it from jostling, Goldy said, “There’s metal on this thing.”

“Yeah there is,” Pilar hollered, meaning it as a joke but then clocking the implication.

Goldy pulled the strap over her head and ran, holding the guitar like a football under one arm. Rain descended in dollops until they made the trees.

More flashes, unending thunder. Cascades of it, rumbling far across the mountains, rolling back, getting louder. The sisters quick-walked along the trail through the dripping pines, their clothes dampening and then growing cold with rain. A fork in the path. Flash-crack! Rummmmmble. Which way to go?

Pilar, the chooser of games and setter of rules, charged into the right fork. And was the old thunder getting louder again? Or was that new thunder? Did the thunder ever stop?

“Are you going to play that song with Screamy Deluxe?” Pilar said, aiming for distraction. 

“Yeah, if you’re cool with that. But we do it in English.”

Pilar stopped in her tracks, turned to face Goldy who nearly ran into her. “Promise me something,” Pilar said. “Keep your head on straight when you’re on tour. With the drugs and booze and dick and everything.”

Goldy smirked. She’d already toured several times in the past couple years with Screamy Deluxe. “Oh, I could tell you stories about that that would make your hair curl.”

Pilar grimaced. “Please don’t. I like my hair the way it is, and you don’t do that shit anymore, do you?”

“What shit?” A shade of defensiveness crept into Goldy’s affect.

“I just mean, like, the rock’n’roll cliché. Trashing motel rooms, fucking the bass player. That kind of thing.”

“Jesus, no. And the bass player is fucking the drummer, anyways. I’m like the den mother of the band. I tear it up onstage, but I keep it chill offstage, believe me.”

Pilar squeezed Goldy’s elbow in contrition. “I’m not trying to be judgy. I know you know how to handle yourself.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to get an audiobook for the road. Keep my mind elsewhere, you know?”

“Oh, good idea. I have just the book for you.”

“Don Quixote?”

“Ha.” Am I just a Spanish joke to you? Pilar thought but resisted saying. Rain splatted on their foreheads, the tips of their noses. Looking at her like this, face flushed, freckles blooming under golden hair and blues eyes popping against the verdant background with the storm overhead, Pilar thought she’d never seen her sister look so beautiful. “No, Kiki gave me this freaking door stop for the plane ride, The Elegant Universe. Astrophysics stuff. I’ll leave it with you, it’ll turn your mind inside-out.”

Goldy grinned. “Hmmm. Sounds like the antidote to rock’n’roll. I’ll take it.”

Fast-walking down the trail again, Goldy called ahead. “Speaking of Kiki—how’s married life?”

Pilar spoke over her shoulder. “Chaos, madness, heartache, all attached to a gorgeous Spanish cock. Two thumbs up!”

Now it was Goldy who barked “Ha!” at the sky.

 

Soaked to the bone and teeth chattering, they made it back to the tent where they stripped to thermals and tied their wet clothes up in plastic bags. Goldy toweled off her guitar like it was a baby while Pilar cocooned in her sleeping bag near the electric lantern. She stared into the glowing coils. This was a fucked up place to be, alone in a campground deep in the woods, cold and wet in a tent with the sun going down, no way to cook dinner at the sodden fire pit, trapped here with her sister whom she barely knew. What road had led to this unpromising moment? Pilar knew it was her discomfort doing the thinking, the present sourness of her mood, but her mind shuffled back through the gallery of her life, all the way to the moment when little Goldy had left her house for the last time. The Night of Breaking Glass. How if that night hadn’t happened, everything would be different now. Goldy and Pilar in sundresses on a terrace under Mediterranean twilight, cocktails and cigarettes, while their spouses murmured out in a garden under bougainvillea and their children slept in cool bedrooms, exhausted from the day’s fun. Pilar watched Goldy polishing her guitar but without seeing, wrapped in the veil of what would never be. “We’re living the wrong life, G.”

Goldy snorted. “Yeah we are,” she said with good-natured vehemence. “Looks like crackers and jerky for dinner. Good thing the wine’s in here.”

Pilar roused herself to crack open the wine’s twist top, swigged and passed it. The rain made a gentle hiss against the tent’s nylon panels. The stronger patter of drips falling from branches. A musty atmosphere gathered.

Goldy’s pale eyes held the lantern’s glow like twin jewels. “You know, when you sent me that CD of you and Harry, I made a playlist where I alternated all the songs with tracks from Fleetwood Mac. My roommate at the time thought I’d found a super-rare album of Rumours outtakes.”

Pilar beamed. “Wow—that’s just about the best compliment you could give.”

“It’s true. And it sounds like you guys were balls-deep in drama just like Lindsey and Stevie.”

“Balls-deep,” drawled Pilar, staring into the lantern. “You know, making that album, Harry and I thought we were inventing our destiny by writing songs about it. We were singing about love and heartbreak that hadn’t even happened yet.”

“I get that.” Goldy was equally transfixed by the glowing coils. “You put it in a song first, so when the real thing bites, the teeth aren’t so sharp.”

Now Pilar regarded her sister with the same gravity she’d been watching their ersatz campfire. “You and I are the same person. You ever think that? Like something split us in two a long time ago. We just got slightly different halves.”

Goldy gave a knowing look. “When I perform, I channel a feral version of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Babette. That’s what I call her. Black wig, lots of strutting around the stage and not looking at my guitar when I’m playing, just like you. That’s what you saw on the rocks today.”

“I strut around?”

“No, that’s the feral part.”

Pilar didn’t know how to take this. “Babette. Huh.”

Goldy flashed her eyes. “When I’m her—meaning, when I’m you—I’m a superhero.”

Pilar was perplexed. What she’d seen on the rocks today was a cartoon of American-style rock’n’roll, nothing at all like herself. Still, she knew that Goldy was flattering her, not insulting her. Maybe she’d been more feral than she knew, back when they were little? Or maybe Goldy just didn’t really know her at all. How unfair that they’d lost so many years, and so much of each other. The path of their lives had forked on the Night of Breaking Glass, and they’d charged down the wrong trails. Everything since then was just mistake upon mistake. 

She said none of this. She wished she could peek out at the moon where she might find some comfort or oblivion, but the screen flaps were zippered shut against the rain and their tent was a tomb: yet more proof that everything was wrong. Mindful breathing helped, in through the nose, out through the lips. She rubbed Goldy’s still damp hair, caressed her back between the shoulder blades. Swig, pass, the wine warmed them from the inside. When they finally doused the lamp, the tent was toasty, the light outside long gone, raindrops still tap-tapping under the trees. Night on the mountain, the sisters slept. 

 

4.   (Casi) Siempre Contigo

Here they are, twelve years later, Pilar steering her little black Fiat around tight curves where forest loomed, Goldy peering out at the jagged Pyrenees beyond the trees. Their twin guitar cases riding like extra passengers in the back seat, swaying with the car’s motion. It had been a couple of good days at Pilar’s cabin outside Timonza where the sisters had reconnected in a stress-free getaway. Pilar on holiday from her university lecturing gig, Goldy in the midst of a 6-date European cabaret tour supporting her latest solo album. Well, Babette’s album. She and Pilar had barely seen each other in the decade-plus since their last camping trip on the back side of Pikes Peak, but it was easy to revert to their roles. Something about the common denominator of their shared toddlerhood made it impossible to be anything other than what they’d always been: two little girls enchanted by the magic of the world. They’d improvised recipes, having no remembered family traditions to draw from: linguini carbonara, squash soup, fried rice, enchiladas suizas. They’d put barely a dent in Kiki’s wine cellar (a crate under the porch), having acquired more of a taste for tea than booze, but they’d gotten deeply baked with a mason jar of weed that Pilar had procured through one of Kiki’s film people. Three consecutive nights sitting slack-jawed on the porch while the dark forest chittered and shooting stars etched the sky. Talking shit and giggling until the owls hooted them silent.

They’d played each other their favorite songs and their friends’ songs and their Saddest Songs in the World, one sister strumming and singing, the other watching and listening, but they didn’t actually play together. It turned out they didn’t know many of the same tunes. Pilar intentionally played her songs with the most challenging chord progressions, songs whose complexity or delicacy defied the kind of easy, rock’n’roll jamability that Goldy so excelled at—what Pilar thought of as Goldy’s regrettable Americanism. Goldy ended up feeling deflated by it all, a sense of having lost something. “You know, we should have started a band,” she said as the final strum of one of Pilar’s broken-hearted love songs faded between them. “Imagine what we could have done.”

Pilar hmmm’d at that. “I guess we never lined up.”

Goldy arched one eyebrow. “It’s never too late.”

Pilar let that statement disprove itself with several beats of silence and a wry smile. “You’re the one who’s a rockstar, G. Why would you want to share the stage with an old linguistics professor?”

“Oh, come on. You know what you are. You’re more of a star than most of the stars I know.”

Pilar shook her head and laughed even as the flattery warmed her. “You need to find some bigger stars then.”

Goldy found herself managing the disappointment that threatened to color her face. “I’m not gonna lie: I was always jealous of what you had with Harry. The music you guys made together.”

“Jealous,” Pilar said, as if tasting the word. “You know, I get that. I’m actually jealous of my younger self for the times we used to have, him and me. We had a good thing.”

“Yes, you did.”

“And then it was over.”

The sisters watched each other across the chasm of everything that had been lost. Then Goldy strummed a G-major and started in on an old Patsy Cline tune, and their voices finally meshed in something like harmony on the line, “I’m lonesome as I can be.”

 

Pilar lay awake that third night in the cabin, wondering why she felt resistant to the idea of collaborating musically with Goldy. Was she intimidated by Goldy’s performance chops, so much more developed than her own? Did she want to protect her precious songs from whatever altering force Goldy would exert on them? Did she resent Goldy in some way for abandoning her all those years ago, these mistaken lives they’d been living ever since? Pilar asked these questions of the moon as she lay in her bed staring up through the window pane behind the headboard. The moon, in its new phase, was just a dark circle against the star-pricked sky, and no answer came except for a tentative Yes to all of the above, which whispered from her own dark heart. Pilar was a bad sister, she knew, because this was a bad world, and only bad things flourished. And then, after restless sleep, the sun rose and the world was good again, or at least good enough for a while. 

Goldy lay awake in those same hours, chewing over her own badness: the secret she knew she had to keep from her sister. Worried that it might slip out in a side comment, some innocent word. The hurt it would cause if it did. And then with dawn already painting itself around the edges of the curtains, she finally sank into a vivid dream. The two of them raced down the long hallway in the townhouse in Barcelona, Goldy and Pilar in their toddler incarnations, pedaling their tricycles along the tiled floor where the sun through a wall of glass bricks made magical shapes of light. The thrill of the race, the exaltation of whoever was winning, crazy dancing on the sun jewels, their clasped hands as they jumped up and down shrieking. The fullness of it all. Later, squirming together under a blanket in one of their beds—they always slept together, every single night since they were babies—telling stories and making faces and inventing songs by flashlight. Competing to see who could rhyme the most words, or who could think of the funniest name for a stuffed animal. Was this a dream now, or a memory? The flashlight dying out, their minds settling into an exhausted psychic hum, foreheads touching under the sheets and sleeping the gluttonous sleep of toddlers. How they’d still be holding hands when the birds began to sing at dawn. 

Awakened by a sunbeam, in the musty tent under dripping trees, Goldy struggled to hold onto the sensation even as it vanished. She ended up feeling only a lingering warmth and a residual tenderness for Pilar, whose hands she hadn’t held in many years. 

 

Pilar’s husband, Kiki, had arranged for them both to attend the premiere of his new film at what promised to be a star-studded night of glamour and excess in Barcelona. A red carpet event, necessitating outfits and elegance—the other end of the spectrum from their super-baked retreat in the woods. Now the road from Timonza to Vic descended the mountain in a series of hairpin curves that cut through pines and birch and clusters of gnarled oak. The valley below extended in patchwork fields, alfalfa and lavender, the points of cypress rising above tile roofs and flashes of tin outbuildings, the glints of windshields casting sunlight across the miles. The hazy wash of sky that rose above the distant Mediterranean. Wordless now as they rode the curves and watched the world below. 

Goldy had just been here, only two years ago. This was the festering secret she’d been keeping. A guy she was seeing had swept her off to Barcelona for a weekend and she’d declined to mention the fact that her sister still lived here. Didn’t text Pilar, didn’t call, and she didn’t know why. Maybe she thought that seeing her would consume all her energy, leaving nothing for what was supposed to be a romantic getaway with this dude who was, after all, paying for everything. And maybe the idea of explaining to him why their little family had ruptured so catastrophically was too daunting. Now she looked across the countryside of the land she’d been born in and felt like a foreigner. The guilt corkscrewed into tension, which set her leg to jumping on the floor mat as if she were pedaling a kick drum at 160 beats per minute. 

“You have to pee?” Pilar said.

Goldy needed to stretch her legs, shift her brainwaves. “Just pull off the road,” she said. She twisted around to check that there was no traffic behind. Peeing on the side of the road being a perennial feature of touring with a rock band.

They parked on a wide turn-out at the apex of a hairpin curve, rolling to a stop on a gravel skirt that bordered a thicket of foliage. Goldy took a tissue from the glovebox and made her way into the trees, formulating as she went how she might unburden herself of the shameful truth. You’re never going to believe this / What if I told you / Here’s a funny thing… But none of those were going to work. It would only hurt Pilar, and put a damper on this whole visit, and expose an ugly void within herself where her loyalty or sisterliness (or something) ought to be. She watched the stream of pee hitting the leaves between her Chuck Taylors and knew that she’d have to bury the secret so it wouldn’t hurt anyone. But how to bury a secret so it stays buried? As the pee stopped, she heard the strumming of a guitar, Pilar’s high, clear voice.

 

Pilar had gotten out of the tiny Fiat to stretch her legs. On a whim, she’d pulled her hardshell case from the back seat and extracted her steel-string Fender, now leaning on the car’s warm hood and strumming. There had been one song she hadn’t played last night, because she’d been afraid that Goldy would somehow decipher that the song was about herself. Of course, there was no way for Goldy to intuit that the “you” in the song was really Goldy, the person who was an almost constant presence in Pilar’s heart and mind despite her nearly uninterrupted absence. How the lyrics, if you really listened, suggested that Pilar preferred the imaginary version of her sister to the real one. Everyone who heard the song assumed that it was about some inadequate lover, but Pilar was sure that Goldy would sense the real weight of it. Now, safely alone on the turn-out with Goldy just out of sight behind the bushes, she plucked the chord progression that lay below the melody. Sang the first verse to the empty curve of the road. Her sister’s footsteps approached on the gravel even as Pilar shifted into the chorus: “Casi siempre contigo.”

She kept playing. Part of it was the thrill of being found out, but also the desire to see if Goldy would join in, how their voices might mesh. Apples and oranges, TING-tings and BAH-bahs. Now Goldy’s voice chimed in, trying to harmonize three steps up but finding her limits and shifting to a lower line. Pilar’s voice was naturally higher and clearer while Goldy’s was textured and hoarse. They didn’t exactly meld. The melody’s shifts into minors and sevenths snuck up on Goldy and caught her off-guard. Pilar found herself simplifying her chording, switching to straight open chords. Midway through the song, after an attempt at the second chorus, she let a root chord ring out and ended the song there. “I wasn’t sure if you knew that one,” Pilar said. 

“It was on your CD, wasn’t it? I haven’t heard it in years but I used to listen to it a lot.”

“Well, if you can reach just one person,” Pilar said, letting the rest of the sentiment go unspoken. She meant it as self-deprecation, but Goldy nodded sincerely.

“You reached me.”

“That’s because the song is about you.” Pilar surprised herself by saying it. Secrets were like splinters, she supposed. They just worked themselves out.

Goldy tilted her head as she considered this. “Really? So I’m ‘almost always with you’?”

“Almost always. Except for when we’re actually together, and then I don’t know what the hell is happening.”

Goldy gave a throaty laugh, head back in the sunlight, and Pilar punctured the moment with a strum on a barred A-major. The rock’n’roll chord. A white van came descending the road, the same way they’d come. Tires crackling, it pulled into the turn-out and drew up alongside the tiny Fiat. Pilar registered that their exit was blocked. She stilled the guitar’s strings with an open palm. Goldy crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. The van’s passenger window powered down and the driver leaned into view. A bearded man in his thirties, grey coveralls and mirrored sunglasses. In the dialect of Catalan native to this region, he said, “Do you ladies need help with anything?” Wide smile. 

Pilar was already shaking her head, lifting the guitar strap over her head to put it away. But Goldy shot her a mischievous look and mouthed, Watch this. She took a step forward, channeling the tension in her bones into a coiled spring. She clapped a hand to the rear waistband of her jeans, then swung around and aimed along a straight arm. One hand cupping the other, the way cops brandished guns in movies, sighting along a two-fingered barrel as she yelled in English, “Get the fuck out of here, asshole!”

Pilar saw the gun in Goldy’s hands even as she clearly saw that there was no gun, just the pointed fingers braced with the other hand. A pantomime of a gun.

The man’s expression went slack and he recoiled. In an instant he was gone, peeling out on the gravel and shooting down the highway as if his van were a bullet shot out of Goldy’s imaginary Glock. His tires sprayed them with pebbles which pricked their legs and pinged off the Fiat’s fenders. They watched him go and then Goldy turned a wide grin on her sister. She returned her invisible gun to the waistband at the small of her back. 

Pilar, wide-eyed, watched her. “What the fuck was that?”

Goldy shrugged. “That was Babette. She’s got a gun.”

“That was insane, G. I think he really believed it.”

“It’s all about selling the illusion. And it’s a handy way to deal with, uh, over-enthusiastic groupies.”

Pilar shook her head, incredulous. “That wasn’t a groupie. He might have been a perfectly nice guy, just looking to help us out.”

“Statistically speaking,” Goldy said, giving her sister an I-regret-to-inform-you face, “probably not.”

They laughed about that. Which, it wasn’t funny. Pilar returned the guitar case to the back seat, wondering when exactly her sister had gone full American psycho. Unless the guy really had been a threat, and Goldy had just saved them both?

“Besides,” Goldy said across the car’s roof, “I’m supposed to protect my little sister.”

Pilar smirked. The sentiment touched her, but she refrained from saying, So why did you let our lives go so wrong? Instead, she gave Goldy an arch look. “You better ditch that gun before we get to the city. This is Europe—we don’t pack heat at fancy movie premieres.”

Goldy reached into her waistband, withdrew the imaginary pistol, then spun like a shot-putter to fling it into the trees where she’d just peed. “Remember this spot,” she said, “in case we need to come back for it.”

 

Goldy, chin in hand, watched out the window as Pilar drove, offering an occasional “Beautiful” as they passed a lavender field or an ancient stone house in a glade of cypress. Pilar didn’t know if this landscape was nostalgic for Goldy, who had been born here like herself but did most of her growing up in the American suburbs. When they passed the field where Pilar had emergency-landed her Cessna during an engine malfunction last year, she said nothing, not wanting to go into everything about Orgo who was, after all, a shadow of Goldy herself.

Entering the gravity of Barcelona, Pilar joined the freeways that swooped along the city’s flanks. Past apartment blocks and church towers down the long avenues that fanned away like rows of fields. Detouring into the Sant Antoni neighborhood, Pilar steered them through narrow streets to stop in a plaza. A statue of Garcia Lorca, a bronze man in a bronze chair, watched over the sun-splashed square. Eucalyptus and palms. Facing one side of the plaza, behind twin cypress trees that were taller than the roofs, stood the three-story townhouse that had once been their home. The front stoop where they’d collected olive stones that dropped from the palms and obsessed over the comings and goings of ants. The balcony outside their parents’ room where Pilar’s father and Goldy’s mother would sit in bathrobes sipping espresso and sharing the newspaper. The smaller balcony, higher up, where Goldy and Pilar performed their songs for the birds. Wordless now, the sisters sat in the car looking up at the townhouse through the bug-speckled windshield.

Goldy said nothing about the fact that she had been here, in this very spot, just two years ago on vacation with Señor Credit Card. Back then, seeing this place had given Goldy a profound sense of loss—how far she’d fallen. Maybe that was why she hadn’t reached out to Pilar? Fear that her beautiful and successful Spanish sister would outshine her, present the more favorable fork in their destiny—Goldy the shadow, Pilar the sun. Why would you choose to stand next to a more perfect thing?

Goldy exhaled and, with her mind, drove the secret into the ground. A flaming arrow from the pit of her stomach, it shot through the floor mat, the Fiat’s chassis, the paving stones, a streak of regret plunging for the center of the Earth which would consume it. Let it melt into lava.  

Looking out at the townhouse now was like peeking through a pinhole into a strange Universe where everything had happened differently. “We should have grown up here,” Goldy said, softly.

Pilar offered a smile. “We did. For a little while.”

Goldy shook her head. “It’s like someone else’s memory, not mine.”

What they both remembered was that the end had come on an ordinary evening. The girls doing stuffed animal theatre on a pile of blankets in their bedroom. Downstairs, a wine glass shattered like a bomb. Voices rose, their mother—well, Goldy’s mother—shouting in English and Spanish, every bad word they knew and several more. And then she marched into the room and pulled Goldy away, shoving clothes into a duffel bag, dragging everything and Goldy down the stairs to the front door. Goldy’s face a mess of tears and snot. Pilar at the top of the stairs, peering through the banister slats as their father—well, her father—shouted and begged. The front door swinging open, Goldy and her mother slipping out into darkness, the door slamming again. A terrible silence tattooed with footsteps clacking away. And then the wailing. Her father, tearing at fistfuls of hair, careening around the house punching the glass out of every single picture frame. The singing of all that glass sounded like someone pounding on the upper keys of a piano. Later, as he sat moaning on the hallway floorboards with knuckle-bloodied hands over his face, he sounded like a long, raspy stroke across the bottom string of a cello.

“You were four,” Goldy objected. “You didn’t even know what a cello was.”

Busted, Pilar shot a glance at her sister in the passenger seat. “I guess I thought of it later. Cellos have always sounded so sad to me. It’s why I played the harp instead.”

Goldy hummed at that. Beyond the windshield, seagulls wafted, nearly motionless above the palms. “What I remember of that day was the ice cream sundae mamá bought for me at the airport. I gave myself brain-freeze so bad I thought I was going to die, and I screamed so much she bought me a Stewardess Barbie in the gift shop to shut me up.”

“At least you got a Barbie. All I remember is my dad stayed in bed for days.” In fact, Pilar remembered something more sharply than that: How hard it had been to fall asleep in her princess bed alone, that first night without Goldy. The first time she could remember sleeping without her. Menacing shadows on the ceiling, the moaning and buzzing of the city. The shining eyes of stuffed animals in the dark. Some version of that terror and loneliness still lingered within her; it wasn’t so much that she remembered the feeling; it was more that she was still feeling it. None of this she shared.

“They were selfish bastards,” Goldy said, “the both of them.”

Neither parent had ever confessed to what caused the rupture, but Goldy later figured out that the man her mother married after leaving Pilar’s father was an old high school flame who’d been writing her love letters. He ended up being a good guy, her stepfather, who put a guitar in her hands and taught her to play, and that was even better than the Barbie. Growing up in an American suburb, she never forgot what she lost that day—half of her family, a language, and a city—but she tried not to think about it too much. Why stare into a hole?

Looking past Pilar’s profile, she studied the doorway of their old townhouse. Had it always been blue? “Do you remember anything from when we were all together?”

“Yes.” Pilar watched the blue door. “I remember mamá’s hands pushing our stroller. She popped a piece of fruit into my mouth. A piece of yellow fruit, and a blue sky. So sweet, and so vivid.”

Goldy smiled at this. “So that means I was there, too, on the other side of that stroller. We had one of those twinsie double-seaters, remember?”

“Yeah, but what I remember of you is how we used to hold hands in that thing. We couldn’t see each other when we were sunken back in our little bucket seats, but we held hands across the middle.”

Goldy, from her own bucket seat now, reached for Pilar but Pilar’s hands were resting on the wheel, so she squeezed her leg.

“Mostly,” Pilar said, “I just remember missing you when you were gone.”

Goldy watched a vee of birds crossing the sky until they disappeared beyond the rooftops. “I never forgot about you.”

Heaviness gathered. Regret like a ghost, like a smell, filling the car. Sensing she’d made a mistake in coming here, Pilar guided them back into traffic, cutting through the heart of the city. Unlike Goldy, she actually had grown up in that house with the blue door, living there with her father until her study abroad year in Denver when she lived with Goldy and her mother and stepfather in Denver to establish residency for college. Maybe taking Goldy back to the old house had been something like a taunt, some competitive instinct like her reluctance to collaborate musically. Why did Goldy bring out this mean streak in her? Repentant, she squeezed Goldy’s knee. They curved through the roundabout where Christopher Columbus perched atop a column, bestride a stone orb of the globe he so deeply misunderstood.

 

They washed up and got ready at Pilar and Kiki’s penthouse on the 25th floor of a modern tower that commanded the marina. Little black dresses for both. Pilar’s scoop neck accented with a loosely braided chain of gold filigree that Kiki had given her for the occasion. Goldy accessorized with a matador jacket covered in sequins like a disco ball. Thinking that Goldy would appreciate an alternative to the costume jewelry she wore onstage, Pilar gifted her a choker of pearls and white gold that had been among her father’s things when he died, intuiting that it had once belonged to Goldy’s mom. In their dresses and heels, they sipped Aperol spritzes on the balcony as the sun went down beyond the hills and towers. City shadows darkened as the lights came up and made the blue haze of sea air softly glow. Kiki was already at the theater, doing photo shoots. A night of glamour awaited them, a car on its way, and this moment alone together on the balcony might be their last intimacy before the revelry to come, the after-party, the breakfast with Kiki and his famous co-star and then Goldy’s departure for her next performance as Babette in Paris. 

Maybe it was the cocktail, maybe it was the luxurious exhaustion after three days of smoking weed in the woods, but a deep contentment seeped into Pilar’s bones. She spied Goldy from the corner of her eye and loved her. Maybe they were perfect sisters after all. Maybe the long absences in their lives were just what they needed to make the times together this good. She said none of this, only let the feeling waft through her like a long pull on a funny cigarette. The moment passed as so many others had, in silence, each with her own thoughts as the world laid down and stretched out at their feet. 

 

The car dropped them off, at Pilar’s request, on the far side of the plaza from the Filmoteca de Catalunya. They walked, the almost-sisters, across the wide expanse of paving stones, toward the lights of the cinema where cars were depositing fancy people at the end of a red carpet that flowed to the entrance. Flashes strobing, the cooing and delight of the crowd gathered along velvet ropes. 

“Are we walking the red carpet?” Goldy wanted to know, anticipation in her voice.

“We are, but here’s the thing.” Pilar made a show of searching in her handbag. “I forgot to grab the VIP passes Kiki left for us.” Wide eyes. “We’re going to have to charm our way past security.”

Goldy’s eyes gleamed. “Crackerjack!”

“Good thing you left your gun in the woods.” 

Goldy looked sheepish. “I’m sorry about that, Pilar. I know that freaked you out.”

“Hey, I get it: you grew up in America and I didn’t.”

“Guns and fear, baby.” Devil horns.

Pilar snapped her handbag shut on the satin pouch where the two glossy VIP passes were tucked right where she’d stowed them. “We do it the Spanish way tonight, ¿vale?”

Goldy’s face shone with reflected lights. The last thing Pilar wanted was the spotlight, but she knew that her sister thrived in it. Without the passes, getting into the premiere would be an adventure. They might have to linger outside the service dock, sneak in with the caterers, carry their high heels to scamper through some back hallway before slipping into the lobby, breathless, flushed and giggling. Or maybe Babette would make an appearance, strutting past the security guards and rendering them insensate with her poise and glamour. Maybe she’d even be recognized from her recent cabaret show in Madrid, and they’d gain entrance on Babette’s cachet, not Pilar’s? 

Anything could happen, and they’d wing it together, which was the point. Ting-tings and Bah-bahs. The staccato of their heels on the paving stones telegraphed confidence and momentum. Unstoppability. Two striking women in evening dresses walking out of the night. Pilar spied, in the cinema’s open doors, Kiki in his ivory linen suit, posing for photos, beaming as bright as the flashes that flickered all around. On the marquee overhead, the film’s title was spelled out in block letters under the director’s name: ALMODOVAR: La Muerte Viene por Todos los Conejitos. At Kiki’s side stood an American actress, his co-star, as famous as anyone either of them had ever seen. 

Goldy pointed. “There with Kiki, is that—?”

“Yes. And we’re going to walk right up to them and into their arms like we’re old friends.”

Goldy grinned. Something in her eyes sharpened, Babette peeking out.

Klieg lights swept the sky. Pilar watched the long beams that swung through the hazy night like lightsabers. One of the spotlights seemed to point out the moon, just a sliver in the sky, the curve of a question mark. “Do you think we’re living the right life after all?” Pilar said.

Goldy tilted her head. “Sometimes I wonder the same thing.”

Pilar, eyes shining, grabbed her wrist. “Answer on the count of three.” Then she counted, uno-dos-tres.

Eyes locked, they both said, “Yes!” and laughed. The twinned words popped inside Pilar’s mind, cartoony with a sizzle and flash, lightning bolts and stars.

“Hell yeah,” Goldy added.

The paparazzi spotted them, a pair of beautiful and mysterious women emerging from the night. Who can they be? Camera lenses swing around. Flashes catch them striding across the street and into the open channel of velvet ropes that line the red carpet. Security hesitates, steps aside. Goldy holds her head high, eyes sparking, and Pilar straightens her spine, steeling herself, turning that yes! over and over in her mind and using it to forge a smile for the world to see. She reaches for Goldy’s hand, squeezes it, and holds on.