The Santiago Sisters (19 page)

Soft music played. Tess marvelled at the polished deck, pristine and sparkling, outrageously expensive, and through the double doors a swathe of luxury furniture and glinting chandeliers. Steven guided her through the interior, waiting slightly peevishly as she put the flowers in water, and out the other side. On the bow, a white-clothed table looked out at the ocean, laid with silver cutlery and elegant stemmed glasses. Candles flickered shadows across the deck. She could smell cooking, flavours in tune with the salt and depth of the sea. Steven pulled out her chair.

‘What’s all this for?’ she asked.

‘It’s Valentine’s Day,’ Steven said, helping her in, ‘and I love you.’

It was the first time either of them had said it. Steven delivered the sentiment with unselfconscious ease, as simply as he might say them to his mother or his sister. Tess, for many years, had agonised over this exotic triumvirate of words, imagined the many scenarios in which she might voice them, the possible suitors she might find the courage to express them to, and now, sitting here, she had absolutely no impulse to say them back. Thankfully, Steven’s carefree comment didn’t require it.

The vessel began to move, a rumble as it backed out of the harbour, then, as it crossed into open sea, gaining momentum, slicing through the violet sheet. When land was out of sight, a waiter brought their first course. The feast was sumptuous. Fried shrimp with hunks of bright lemon and saffron cream; swordfish fillet with crunchy fennel, vivid orange and plump black olives; then vanilla
panna cotta
to finish, which Steven insisted on feeding her. Throughout, he talked happily about a new project the studio had signed, every so often reaching under the table to stroke her knee, or across to clasp her fingers. Afterwards, she felt full and content.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Steven’s eyes glittered in the dark. He tossed down his napkin. ‘Come on,’ he murmured. ‘Time for another surprise.’

He darted off into the night, down a set of steps, and, by the time she followed and reached him on the lower deck, he was stripping off. His trousers were in a heap, then his tie was loosening, tugged off, dropped, then his shirt. Finally he stepped out of his underwear, scaled the low safety rope and flung his body into the black ocean.

Seconds later, he surfaced, shaking his head. ‘It’s beautiful!’ he called, his face pale against the inky water. Above, in the sky, a whole moon shone down as perfect as a pearl. The Big Dipper swung above them, huge and ancient.

Tess peeled off her dress, bra, knickers, and went in after him. The water was freezing and had the same effect as being tickled, making her catch her breath.

‘You’re incredible,’ said Steven, kissing her. His hands cupped her ass and lifted her so her knees hitched around his hips. He was working a thumb inside her and she tried to take pleasure from it, pressing against him. Encouraged by this, he drove harder, pushing deeper as he nibbled and grazed her collarbone. It felt strange to be opened up in the sea, but at the same time made urgent, primal sense; Tess felt her body being returned to the water, some place it had always belonged.

Treading water, it was hard for Steven to get purchase. Knowing their goal, they swam to the boat and Tess clasped the bottom rung of the ladder, then turned away from him, as he prodded and bucked against her back. Water slurped beneath the prow, sinking her ass one minute and lifting it
to the surface the next. With one hand Steven gripped the ladder and with the other he guided himself inside her. It had stopped hurting by now, but Tess still felt that familiar squeeze of discomfort as he broke through and began to rut. She was thankful he wasn’t more generously endowed. Finally, it was over. Steven came silently, intensely, and the second he pulled away she felt him spill out from her into the sea. She had decided the female orgasm was a myth. ‘I love you,’ he said again, and this time it wasn’t so casual. The moment hung for her to say it back, and instead she kissed him, deeply, to make up for it.

Back on board, Steven fetched them towels. They sat, huddled together, beneath the stars. ‘This is the most amazing night of my life,’ said Steven.

‘It’s wonderful,’ agreed Tess.

Abruptly, he got up, vanishing inside for a moment before he returned, and then everything that followed seemed to do so in a blur. First, Steven dropped to his knees, the towel around his shoulders falling with the motion. Then he knelt, naked, one foot flat on the deck. At last, he produced a box. Small, crimson, unequivocal; she fought panic. He opened it. A diamond the size of a grape blinked up at her.

‘Tess Geddes …’ he said, and in that moment she realised that another girl was being proposed to, not her, not the real her, not Teresa Santiago. ‘Will you marry me?’

One small word gave way to a media frenzy. Every paper wanted an exclusive. Every channel craved coverage. Every site demanded an interview. The press went into overdrive, reporters camping outside the villa, Maximilian’s office ringing off the hook, designers and artists trampling over each
other to pitch their ideas. Tess and Steven became the most photographed, talked-about duo in Hollywood. They were royalty. Before, she had been popular; with Steven Krakowski, she was gold.

Simone flew in and spent a couple of days playing the role of Dejected Mother, for which she could have safely added to her awards collection, before grudgingly partaking in the preparations. After all, she was a woman who embraced the limelight. In all her painstaking plans for Tess, she could never have rehearsed such a windfall. ‘As long as you know what you’re doing,’ she counselled.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Steven’s … an acquired taste.’

‘I guess I’ve acquired it.’

Simone gave her a strange look, but promised to bite her tongue from now on: Steven was to be Tess’s husband and he deserved the family’s respect. Instead she took it upon herself to organise every aspect of the big day, while Tess gritted her teeth and humoured her as best she could. Steven smiled indulgently as the women went about their daily meetings, comparing fabrics, favours, and menu cards.

Tess wondered what Simone’s own wedding day had been like. If she ever thought of marrying again; if she thought of marrying Lysander … After Tess had overheard their dialogue at the
White Candle
audition, Lysander was rarely, if ever, spoken of: a glaring elephant between them. The UK tabloids reported difficulties in the marriage with Brian, having not seen the couple together since a premiere in the spring. GEDDA LOAD OF GEDDES, one declared, on capturing Simone chatting quite platonically with a man who wasn’t her husband. CHILCOTTS’ MARRIAGE BLOWS COLD. Maybe that explained Simone’s unwillingness to push the
Steven issue. Tess had an ace in her hand and she sure as shit couldn’t be made to play it.

One day, a note arrived from Alex Dalton. Tess was surprised to receive it.

The note should have made her smile; the sentiment was kind, but for reasons she didn’t care to analyse, it didn’t. She hated his pitying tone, his consolatory words: the inference that she was some poor foundling who deserved a break.
I’m making my own breaks, thanks very much. I neither need your sympathy nor welcome it.

At the weekend, Mia flew out. Her friend was into her second year at Zurich’s most prestigious Art Institute and full of tales about the guy she was seeing. Tess was elated to see her. ‘Would you be my bridesmaid?’ she asked one day over lunch.

Mia hugged her hard. ‘I’d love to.’ Then she pulled back, concerned. ‘Hey, why do you look so scared?’

‘I am scared,’ Tess admitted. ‘Of everything.’

‘Don’t be. Everything’s going to be great for you. I know it.’

But that night, like every night, the past surfaced in dreams. Those things Tess wanted most to be rid of were the same that inched their way towards her in the dark. She had always thought that Calida would be with her on her wedding day. It had been a safe assumption, a given that as twins they would in some way share the most momentous day of their lives. Calida would never have the chance to get married.

Instead, she had been shot dead on a store floor and left to bleed to death.

It serves her right,
a voice told Tess. And when she thought that, she was strong. She was filled with hate and hate kept her going, like coal in a fire.

Other times, Tess dreamed of her twin. That she was still alive.

She dreamed of the life she might be living.

New York

C
alida Santiago travelled to New York on a sweltering hot day in June. The city was alive and insistent: corridors of skyscrapers, metallic and towering, a maze of mirrors that reflected their neighbours in silver-sharp angles, doubling and tripling her vision—she was disorientated at being unable to see through or over them; the cauldron of streets; the surge of Manhattanites rolling in a relentless wave down Fifth Avenue, in suits, on phones, carrying coffee, and the tourists, like her, out of sync as they gazed up at tiers of life piled one on top of the other. High above, mosaics of clear blue sky danced between spires. Calida took one look and thought:
Yes. It’s here. This is mine.

Paola Ortiz had a cousin who lived in Belmont and had arranged for Calida to housesit a couple of weeks while the cousin was away. The apartment was tiny but cosy, a flavour of her beloved Argentina on every wall and in every picture frame.

One day, in a busy café on Mercer, she noticed a girl flicking through apartment rentals on her phone. Calida slipped in opposite her.

‘OK if I sit?’ she asked, without waiting for a reply. The girl nodded.

Calida stole a glance at her companion. Early twenties, like her, with blue eyes, pale candyfloss hair, and a large, straight nose that she touched every so often, in the way of someone who wears glasses and keeps checking they haven’t slid down. She was locked on her phone and, when after several fraught minutes she released a huge, exasperated sigh that couldn’t go uncommented on, Calida put down her book.

‘Everything OK?’ she asked. The girl glanced up, put down her phone and sighed again. It was a wistful, romantic sigh, one that belonged in a black-and-white love story, or a rooftop in Vienna, or a Casablanca beach, not a bursting café whose barista was getting yelled at for putting too much foam in a cinnamon latte.

‘I’m officially homeless,’ the girl admitted. Calida placed the accent—a warm, southern twang. ‘And this coffee tastes like shit.’ She took a sip and cursed it when it was too hot. ‘I’m, like,
this
close to getting my Brooklyn share,’ she pinched a slice of air between her thumb and forefinger, ‘and my best friend, who by the way
isn’t
my best friend since, like, nine o’clock this morning when she called to say she was moving to freaking
Philadelphia
—I mean, hello, who the fuck goes to Philadelphia?—was meant to come with me. That was the condition. It’s a shared room, see.’

Calida had a solid grasp of English from her work in Buenos Aires, inevitable since most of the tourists she had dealt with spoke not a word of Spanish. She nodded at the girl’s plight. ‘I’m Calida,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Lucy. Lucy Ackerman of Austin, Texas. You’re pretty, Calida. I like your eyes.’ It was said perfunctorily, in precisely the same tone that Lucy had announced that the coffee was
shit. ‘You know what it’s like to be so
near
to something you really, really want, then it gets ripped away, and there’s nothing you can do about it?’

‘Yes. I know that feeling.’

‘What do you do about it?’

‘You make it happen. If you want something, you go after it.’

Lucy rested her chin on her hand. ‘So here’s the story,’ she said. ‘One of the guys in this house, he’s the hottest guy
ever.
He’s an artist and his name’s Brandon and I’ve liked him for ages, ever since I went to one of his shows and for some crazy reason he got talking to me. I don’t know, maybe he saw something in me that no one else does. And just because I don’t dress like his friends, like I’m not a hipster or whatever, it doesn’t mean I’m not smart …’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry. We only just met and listen to me. I mean,
stop
listening to me! I’ve got diarrhoea.’ At Calida’s expression, she clarified, laughing,
‘Verbal
diarrhoea—meaning I talk too much.’

Calida seized her opportunity. ‘I need a place to stay, too. I travelled from Buenos Aires. I’m in New York to make it. Money, fame—I want it all.’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Have you been in love?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I’m in love with Brandon. Is that even possible? I barely know him.’

‘Of course,’ said Calida. ‘You don’t have to know everything about a person to be sure they’re right. You just …
know.
Take you and me. I can tell inside five minutes that we’ll be friends.’ As she’d planned, Lucy glanced up, her expression open. ‘Let’s take the room together,’ said Calida. ‘Solve both our problems.’

Lucy’s blue eyes brightened. ‘Seriously?’

‘Sure, why not?’

Lucy blinked, then beamed. ‘I can’t think of a reason! OK, I guess—yes! God, I can’t believe it, this is going to be so much fun!’

Calida smiled back. ‘You’re right about that. Lucy, you’re going to be glad you met me today. You, me, all of this, it’s meant to be.’

The Williamsburg share was everything Lucy had promised: a six-storey brownstone sheltering a collection of self-conscious creatives, who spent their days drifting in and out of communal areas where they indulged in lengthy conversations about socialism and the evils of religion, and then locked themselves away for hours on end in their bedrooms with the aim of producing ‘work’ but never elaborating on what that work was. The most Calida saw were a couple of Danish Johann’s poems stuck on the refrigerator, one of which began with the line:
‘I am an apple, you are a bowl; I sit in state in the cup of your hands.
’ Calida thought she was missing something.

‘They love you,’ Lucy encouraged during their first week, as they sat over bowls of spaghetti at the little wooden table in the kitchen. Calida didn’t mention that neither girl’s presence seemed to have registered with the housemates; on the whole they were ignored, but she was happy with that. Moreover, she wished to spare Lucy the realisation,
which surely must have occurred, that Brandon Carter had barely sent two words in her direction since they’d arrived. Calida could see Brandon’s appeal: he had the loveliest, darkest skin she had ever seen. His art—sketchy charcoal impressions that he exhibited at nearby galleries, and that Calida, with her devotion to the illuminating, absolute photographic image, found good if a touch frustrating—gave him an extra dimension. He was kind to Lucy, but clearly had his radar trained on another of the housemates, an elfin, French beauty named Evie.

Lucy was oblivious. ‘Did you hear Brandon ask me out?’ She sucked up a string of pasta. Calida liked that she ate with gusto, and wasn’t prissy like the hipsters with their lentil salads and rye crackers that resembled rectangles of carpet.

‘To the warehouse party?’ Yesterday, they had walked in on Brandon making plans for a downtown birthday celebration. He’d been obliged to extend the invite.

‘Sure! You are coming, aren’t you? I can’t go on my own.’

‘I thought you wanted to be alone with him.’

‘I do—but not at first. I can’t turn up by myself.’

After a week of pestering, Calida finally agreed. She liked Lucy and wanted to help her, but equally she was aware that every night spent partying with rich kids who pretended poverty and acted like they were the Next Big Creatives but in fact were heading nowhere was going to wind her up just the same. She had to find a path in. Manhattan, the money and the mission: some channel that would lead her to her twin.

The warehouse was on Fulton Street and was packed with Brandons and Johanns. Chilled beats throbbed through the space and an array of beers, drugs, and smoking paraphernalia littered each surface, around which saggy armchairs and
burst-leather benches were gathered. Everyone was thin and beautiful, and slightly tortured.

‘There he is!’ Lucy grabbed her arm.

Brandon’s impressive Afro could be seen hovering by the decks. He was talking with a guy in a neon baseball cap who was languidly putting on records that nobody recognised but were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t recognise.

Calida urged her to hang back, wait for Brandon to come to them, for it struck her as uncool for Lucy to be falling at his feet. But Lucy wouldn’t be discouraged.

‘Brandon,’ they sidled up next to him and Lucy’s voice turned into a purr, ‘what’s up? Great party.’

‘Oh.’ Brandon looked surprised to see her: perhaps he had forgotten the invitation. ‘Hey. Yeah. Cool.’ He perked up a bit when he saw Calida.

‘Like your boots,’ he commented.

Calida had thrown on a black dress and her old gaucha boots, which she wore on bare legs. ‘Thanks.’

His handsome face broke into a smile. ‘Want a drink?’

‘Just a beer.’

‘Sure.’ He held her gaze.

Calida turned to Lucy. ‘You want the same?’ Lucy nodded, stricken, and when Brandon departed she wailed: ‘He was flirting with you!’

‘No, he wasn’t.’

‘I know flirting when I see it. God! I feel like hurling.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I don’t even like him that way.’

But, to be safe, she spent the rest of the night avoiding Brandon. Instead she got talking to Johann, if the term could be applied to the intermittent grunts that emerged in between tokes on a joint. He was grudging and only passed it to her twice.

‘What’s Denmark like?’ Calida asked.

‘It’s cool.’

‘How long have you been in New York?’

‘Three years.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s cool. I guess. Though, sometimes, it can be uncool.’

For a man who wrote on fridges about apples and bowls and cups made of hands, Johann had a surprisingly limited vocabulary.

At midnight, someone started letting off fireworks. They climbed a stepladder and, out on the roof, Calida found Lucy clinging to Brandon and gazing so dotingly at him that she missed the show. It was a spectacle: showers of red, pink, and green raining down on the Manhattan skyline, framing the Brooklyn Bridge and shimmering off the water.
This is my city,
thought Calida.
I’m going to fucking well take it over.

Lucy staggered up. ‘I think this is it,’ she slurred. ‘He’s into me. I can feel it.’

Calida was about to ask how drunk Lucy was and if maybe she ought to go home, when, over her shoulder, she spotted something problematic. Brandon and Evie were pressed against each other, kissing like their lives depended on it. She tried to distract Lucy and lead her away, but it was too late. Lucy saw, and was silent.

Watching her friend’s eyes fill with disappointment, she was reminded of the night she had sneaked into town and found Daniel at
Las Estrellas.
How it had felt to see him with that other girl. Now, he was married to another girl, a girl who got to have him in her bed every night, feel his body, wake up to his face every morning.

She put her arms around Lucy and held her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Can we go?’ Lucy asked in a small voice.

‘Yes,’ said Calida. ‘Of course we can.’

That night, she told Lucy her story: about the farm where she’d grown up, about Daniel, about Julia, and finally about her sister. She told her how she had sent the money from the sale of the
estancia
to Cristian Ramos and his family, and in doing so had put their struggles to some good use of which her papa might be proud.

She stopped short of making the Tess Geddes connection, instead referring to her twin only as Teresa and saying she was living somewhere in England but she didn’t know where. She couldn’t risk Lucy’s loose tongue leaking it to Brandon, then Evie, then Johann—and where would it end? No. She must keep it to herself.

They drank vodka, shared a packet of cigarettes, and stayed up until five, when the sun was bleeding over the river. She told Lucy because she thought it might cheer Lucy up, make her see she wasn’t the only one for whom life was hard, but she also told her for herself. To remind herself why she was here and what she had to do. To refresh the hatred she checked in on every day, feeding it, keeping it warm, so that when the time came she could unleash it. Watch it savage the thing for which it was bred.

In time, Lucy got over Brandon. She had to, given that every day she was confronted by him and Evie draped over each other, giggling and kissing, and darting off for shared showers in the middle of the afternoon. It was painful, but at least it made an effective cure for her crush. Despite this, Calida wasn’t immune to the occasional flirtatious comment from Brandon—whose sly advances corroborated Lucy’s suspicion
that he did indeed have it bad for her—and even a stoned offer one night to draw her naked.

‘You’d make the perfect subject,’ Brandon said, leaning in, eyes red-rimmed, ‘kind of lost and sexy … I’m really into you, Calida. Evie and I have an understanding … she’s cool about other girls. What do you say we make this happen …?’

Flatly, Calida turned him down, before getting up and going to bed.

‘Hey,’ he moaned at her retreating back, ‘you could at least suck me off?’

‘Suck yourself off, dickhead.’

The next morning Brandon attempted to retract his advance, mortally embarrassed, and make out like he’d been so out of it he hadn’t known what he was saying. ‘I thought you were Evie,’ he wheedled. ‘You won’t tell her, will you?’

Calida had no intention of mentioning the slip to Evie but she chose not to tell Brandon this. It was useful to own a piece of him—especially since he’d begun work at a studio in Manhattan and was returning to Williamsburg each night brimming with stories about the city’s power clique. Brandon was the key; she felt it. Now she only had to keep her eye out for the door—and, soon enough, that door appeared.

Brandon and Evie became closer, exacerbating his fear of Calida’s reveal. The job offer bought and secured her silence: they both knew it.

It came about through a friend, who was assistant to a fashion photographer on East 8th. The friend was going abroad and the studio was seeking a replacement: did Brandon know anyone? Calida had already shared her photographs of New York with him—golden light falling in shafts across the Chrysler Building, the crinkled face of a storekeeper by the side of the road, the majestic, emerald Statue of Liberty like
a giant aquarium ornament—and he encouraged her to put them in a portfolio.