The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [99]
They put their hands over their mouths and gasped as they tried to silence their hilarity. They heard his voice coming up the stairs:
“Do I have to come up there?”
“Oh please do,” crooned Gaby. “Papasito!”
This made them scream into their fists, and they heard a defeated Tomás slam his door in anger.
After a while, they grew still and all lay on their backs, feeling the house tick into silence. Moonlight washed over them, turning the covers silver in the darkness. A western breeze furled the curtains. Teresita had set some herbs on fire in a small pot to keep mosquitoes out of the room. They watched the small red flickers of the fire make patterns on the walls. Her dried herbs hung in aromatic bunches from the heavy square beams above them.
These were the best nights she would ever have, lying beside her two friends, blind still to what was coming.
“Take us on a trip,” Josefina said.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
Gaby nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said. “Take us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes.”
She had discovered a new talent in bed with these girls. It had come to her as a realization a few months before. She simply knew one night that she could capture their dreams and direct them. She could not explain how it happened, or why. But if she concentrated, she could take the girls on journeys as if they were flying in the wind.
“Where should we go?” she asked.
Josefina shuddered in expectation.
“I don’t know!” she said.
“We went to the ocean last time,” Gaby reminded her. “We saw ships all covered in lights.”
“Oh yes!” sighed Josefina. “The people were dancing!”
“I have only seen the ocean on our travels at night,” Teresita confessed.
“Me too,” said Josefina. “Y tú, Gaby?”
“I have seen the sea,” Gabriela said. “We go often to Guaymas. It was as it was in the dream. You can smell the salt in the air. The breeze never stops.”
“We were really there,” Teresita told them. “It was more than a dream.”
“I believe you,” said Josefina.
“Maybe,” said Gabriela.
“I have never seen a city,” Teresita said.
“Me neither,” said Gaby.
“I have been to a city!” La Fina said.
“What city have you been to?” demanded Gaby.
“Alamos!”
Gaby laughed.
“Ay, cómo eres tonta, Fina! Alamos is not a city. Es un pueblo, but it is not a city! Cities are great things! Paris is a city!”
La Josefina sighed: Paris!
“New York, or Mexico City!”
Teresita smiled.
“Cities,” she said, “are like a hundred towns all put together.”
“One thousand towns!” Gaby whispered. “A city is like the ship we saw—all lights and avenues as far as you can see!”
“How do you know?” asked Fina.
“I just know.”
“Hundreds of lights,” murmured Teresita, as she closed her eyes.
She reached out to them under the covers. They put their hands in hers. La Fina wrapped her legs around Teresita’s leg. She liked the contact, but she was also afraid to fly. No number of assurances from Teresita made her trust that she wasn’t going to fall.
The three held hands.
Teresita said, “Feet—go to sleep. Go on, you’ve had a hard day. Now sleep.”
She worked her way up their bodies, and they grew drowsy as she talked.
Slowly, her soft mattress felt as if it were surging, billowing beneath them. And they grew lighter. First, it strained against their backs. But soon, the sheet lifted from the bed as if it were being shaken out in the morning, and they rode the billows.
“We are rising, rising, can you feel it? We are light now as cottonwood fluff. Feel it. The earth falls away. We have been prisoners of the ground, and now it releases its grip on us. Yes. Yes. The air moves us freely. We are like water. The air is like water. We are water. We are clouds. We are air.”
And then they were above the billows. They were in midair, held up by its freshness, its love. The air loved them—they could feel it.
“Is it angels?” Josefina whispered.
“Shhh,” said Teresita.
The air moved through their hair like water. They were moving.
“Keep your eyes closed,” she whispered. “Just a little longer. Don’t look.”
Sounds expanded all around them, and beneath them. The closeness of the room