The Wrong Name

That autumn, Lourdes rearranged her working week so that she could spend every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at her mother's flat. She was determined that whatever the illness took from Consuelo, it would not take the two of them away from each other without a fight. She brought soup in glass jars and sorted the pills into a plastic box with the days of the week printed on the lids. Then she sat with her mother by the window that looked out over the plane trees, whose leaves were turning the colour of weak tea.

It was on the third Thursday in October that her mother looked up from her cup, smiled with a warmth Lourdes had not seen in months, and said, "Remedios. You came." Remedios was Consuelo's younger sister, and she had been dead for almost forty years.

The first time it happened, Lourdes corrected her gently. "Mamá, it's me. It's Lourdes." Her mother's face closed like a door. She looked from her daughter's face to the window and back again, and then, frightened and ashamed in equal measure, she began to apologise for something she could not name. It took an hour to calm her. Afterwards, the nurse who visited on Mondays told Lourdes, kindly but frankly, that she need not correct her mother every time. "You could, of course," she said, "but you might ask yourself who the correction is really for."

Lourdes thought about that all week. If she corrected her, her mother would be frightened; if she did not, she would be lying to the one person who had taught her never to lie. She was still undecided the following Tuesday when Consuelo reached for her hand and said, "Remedios, sit down. There's something I should have told you years ago."

Lourdes sat down. She said nothing, which she would later realise was the decision itself.

"The winter Lourdes was born," her mother said, "I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't even hold her. I would lie there and listen to her cry, and I felt nothing, nothing at all, and I was so ashamed of it that I wanted to disappear. You came every single day. You fed her and you sang to her. And every evening you sat me in front of the mirror and brushed my hair, a hundred strokes, starting at the left side, humming that song of Mamá's about the river, until I could look at my own face again." She pressed her daughter's fingers. "Lourdes thinks it was me who sang to her. I let her believe it. I never thanked you, Reme, because thanking you would have meant admitting it."

Lourdes had grown up with that song. She had sung it to her own children, convinced that it was the first thing her mother had ever given her. Had she corrected her mother that afternoon, she would never have known that it had come from someone else entirely, from an aunt she remembered only as a laugh in a kitchen and a bottle of perfume. For a moment she felt robbed, and then, almost at once, she felt something closer to the opposite.

She stood up, found the hairbrush on the dressing table, and moved behind her mother's chair. "There's nothing to thank me for, Consuelo," she said, in a voice that was not quite her own. Then, starting at the left side, she began to brush her mother's thin white hair, slowly, a hundred strokes, humming the song about the river.