Chapter 1 - The Checkered Floor Where She Said My Name
The block was warm from my hands. I held it with both of them against my chest, the light wood with its two clean holes pressed into my cream sweater, and felt my own breathing move it up and down. My mother's hand was on my arm. She was kneeling beside me on the white marble steps, close enough that I could smell her perfume and see the gold of her dress catch the chandelier light, and her voice was soft the way it was when other people were in the room.
"No quieres jugar, cielo," she said.
I didn't answer. That was the contradiction the whole house was built on. I was three, maybe four, in brown pants and brown shoes that they'd laced for me, standing on that staircase like I was supposed to be presented, and I wouldn't let go of that one small toy. In the background under the big crystal chandelier, my father stood watching in his black suit, his tattooed right hand curled around the cut-crystal tumbler with the amber liquid still at the same level it had been all evening. Everything in the foyer was perfect and still and expensive, and I was holding on too tight.
My name is Sofia. That winter I hadn't heard anyone say it out loud in that house for a long time.
The camera in my memory stays tight after that. The foyer didn't go quiet all at once, it just narrowed. I remember the sound of the chandelier humming faintly and the muffled way voices carry in a marble room. I looked to the side, slow, the way you do when you don't want to be noticed looking. My sweater itched at the neck. The block shifted a little against my ribs. I could feel my mother's fingers loosen on my arm, not pulling away, just resting there because she didn't know what else to do with them. No one told me to move. No one told me to play. The air just sat there.
Then I was down on the checkered floor. I don't remember being carried or walking, I just remember standing there again at the bottom of the stairs with my back mostly to them, the black-and-white marble cold under my shoes. A round silver tray lay flat near my feet where it had fallen or been left, its polished surface reflecting the cream walls and the black scrollwork of the railing. I stared at it because I didn't know where else to look. Then movement from the right.
She came in from the side hallway, the maid with her dark hair in a low bun and her burgundy dress with the white collar and the white trim at the sleeves. She didn't walk past me. She stopped and then she knelt, right there on that checkered floor, and put both her palms open and up toward me. Her hands were empty. Her face was calm, not performing.
I told myself she was just being kind. That she hadn't meant anything by looking at me like that.
She looked right at me and said it plain and soft.
"Hola, Sofía."
My father made a sound from behind her under the chandelier. He didn't move his feet. He just lifted his glass a fraction, the tattoos on his hand catching the light, and said it low, surprised, like he'd misheard her on purpose.
May you like
"Qué?"
No one moved after that. My mother was still behind me near the stairs, standing now, her gold dress bright against the white pilasters. The maid stayed kneeling with her hands out. I looked down. The block was still there at the bottom of my vision, held tight against my sweater, my knuckles pale around it. I could hear my own breath again and the faint tick of the big floor lamp. The hallway door to the kitchen was still closed, but someone's shadow passed behind its frosted glass, about to push it open, and none of us had answered what she'd just called me.
