Page 67 of An Immaculate Deception

I look away, silent. I don’t know what to say; I have nothing to recover from.

More uneasy silence passes between us, in which I seek familiarity, a spark of recognition, but all I see is a startled and demure person wearing my mother’s body. It is more unsettling by the second. I want her to say a single word to show she is seeing me. Mention the priest. Mention her own room. Give me an order, scold me. Not the small smile and side-eyes. For her to come back after all this time and somehow not see me is harrowing.

“Leandro,” she says softly. “Do you remember our conversation from last night?”

“Last night?” I feel hopeful suddenly. “I remember holding your hand.”

She sits up straighter, beaming. “Yes…so you do remember! In the carriage, what I told you…”

The carriage. She doesn’t remember.

I rub my face.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter, bereft.

“I was referring to”—her voice is tentative and too high-pitched—“what we discussed in the carriage. Do you remember?”

The air feels too thin to breathe.

It is unbearable. I spin around and make to leave.

“What’s the matter, Leandro?”

I’m caught between a desperate urge to leave her presence and the awareness that my behavior is frightening her. I can’t leave the room like this.

“I apologize for my abruptness but I must take my leave now,” I say. “I have urgent matters to take care of. But I’m happy that you’re, uh…I’m happy you’re here.”

She smiles. “I’m happy to be here with you, too.”

I light up for a moment, seeing a flicker of warmth in her smile. But her sugar-sweet voice is wrong. And I am not the one she is beaming at.

40

I smoke in my office, listening to the sounds of movement upstairs. I keep thinking of the way she talked to me. I’m happy to be here with you, too. Neither the words nor the manner in which they were spoken sounded like Mother. The dumbstruck look on her face. The openness of the smile. There was something absent. A sharpness that wasn’t there. The more I think about it, the more it rattles me.

She was looking at me and seeing my father. A ghost. A dead man. Her warm smile was for him. She was talking to a dead man and I was, without realizing, playacting as him.

It is worse than when her eyes were closed.

I think about my father, this man she was beaming at. I never really think about him. He is a stranger to me. All I have of him are his name and his looks, according to what Mother says. He is the only person from her past that she seems to be fond of. When she speaks of him, it’s only ever to say how wonderful he was. How delightful, how enchanting, how good-humored and handsome, and how utterly in love they were. When she’s in good spirits, happy with me, she points out that I am like him, not in personality so much, but in my eyes and height and the way I walk sometimes. But when she’s angry with me, she makes a negative comparison. Your father would never speak to his mother that way, and so on.

I don’t know what it’s like to have a father. I don’t even feel sad that he’s dead, although I pretend to when people talk about him. I know that our lives would have been so much more prosperous if he hadn’t died. As a child I felt his absence when I saw other families in public, with mothers and fathers and siblings all together as a happy unit. Our family always felt so small, just Mother and me.

Mother’s family abandoned her when she chose to keep me. My father’s family, the Neveses, never publicly acknowledged that I was his child. When severe droughts turned much of the province into arid backlands, once-prosperous estates became run-down wastelands. Slavery was abolished, finally putting an end to the evil institution. Laborers migrated from the sugar and cotton plantations in the Northeast to the coffee plantations in the Southeast. Old, decaying, far-flung, and no longer profitable with its broken mill, the Fazenda Santa Tereza was abandoned by the Neves family, suffering much the same fate as many other fazendas and engenhos did. Mother told me the Neveses gifted us the Fazenda Santa Tereza because deep down they knew I was their legitimate heir, and I believed that for a long time. But eventually I understood that the Fazenda Santa Tereza had been abandoned when Mother and I took residence.

Even so, I don’t miss my father. You can’t miss what you never had.

But now, seeing Mother beaming at my father so vividly—through me—he feels more real to me than ever. It’s a strange reminder that he once was a concrete, vivid part of Mother’s life. He isn’t just a memory or a dream. And she never beams at me like that.

A sudden cry erupts from above, along with the clang of crashing objects. My heart somersaults in my chest as I run up the stairs. Once on the upper landing, I hear movement coming from her room. Not the guest room where she woke up, but her actual room.

I rush there as fast as I can, but still feel as though my body is moving slowly, like I’m underwater. I find Mother kneeling on the floor, grimacing. She’s surrounded by broken pieces of glass, pooling dark liquid, and scattered jewels. A pungent odor of perfume wafts over me.

“What happened?” I say. “Are you unwell?”

She looks up at me, wide-eyed and stricken, then at the mess around her. Maybe the shock of seeing her own room was too much for her nerves, in her fragile state. Doctor Lobo warned me she may not be ready to be confronted with the memories of the past yet, that the mind represses traumas to protect itself. I’m struck by a terror that she has fallen into a permanent stupor like the patient from the case study. Already, so soon after awakening, she’s reverted to a state reminiscent of her former ghostliness…?

“I apologize,” she says, a tremor in her voice, and I’m relieved to hear her speak. She is not in a stupor after all. “I came in here for a moment, then felt faint, and accidentally knocked over the jewelry box and perfume bottle. Must be the…”