Catalina

I am standing in the living room the first time Catalina appears. I am taller, but she is prettier. I write to the Guinness World Records every day for two years because Catalina has been having the hiccups for two thousand and twenty-nine days. It’s all a joke, of course. The hiccups stop whenever I tell her to. 

Catalina is just like a girl who used to be famous. She never tells me anything about before, she just puts a finger to my lips, and whispers, “It’s a secret..” She’s a secret. She is more beautiful than any girl in the junior high yearbook. I see her flipping through it sometimes, imagining her face as one of the little squares. 

Catalina appears in my bedroom doorway at night, her shadow blurring together with my dreams. “I have a test tomorrow. You have to help me.” she says to me. She gets confused a lot. Sometimes, she believes she is her own person. She is truly lovely in those moments, when her eyes sparkle with tears and a disbelief settles in her posture. 

She straightens her back, like she wants to fight me. “You have to help me.” she repeats. 

My mama used to get confused whenever I sang, “Catalina.. come out, come out wherever you are..” as we played hide and seek. I told her that it was my favourite song. 

“Why do you have to pick that song? Out of all the songs in the world, why a song called Catalina?” 

I picked it because she is a song. Her name rolls off my tongue like lemonade, the sound of summer. I remember when Papa brought home a book called Names for Newborns. I opened it to page number 24, because that was going to be Catalina’s birthday even though we didn’t know she was going to be Catalina back then. We just called her ‘baby’. Now, she is everything. She is scribbles of blue in my little kid drawings, the hand-me-downs that mama kept, the only one who still questions everything. 

“Aren’t you glad I never had a birthday?” Catalina says, one day. I am sitting on the radiator trying to warm up before bed. She is wearing a summer dress, just to spite me. I tell her I don’t know what she is talking about. 

“You would be so jealous. I was August 24, you were August 25.” she flicks her hair to the side. “You would be so jealous if the baby came home the day before your birthday.” 

Only one day apart. Catalina spends my birthday with me anyways, but never manages to blow out her half of the candles. How is it possible that every year we get older, she still looks like someone from a magazine? I try to ignore this because it doesn’t matter. No one will ever fall in love with her. 

On Valentine’s day she sits next to the vase of roses in my room and leans close to the petals, “Do they smell nice?” Catalina asks, her face cloudy. 

“They smell like heaven.” 

She narrows her eyes, and I can tell she is about to burst into tears. “I guess you’ll never know what it’s like to smell flowers from a boy.” I shrug. Catalina’s face crumples, I move to console her, the vase

shatters on the floor, she is gone. She is gone for two years. In her absence, I can still sense her watching me as I fall asleep. Her silence owns me. 

On my sweet sixteen, she appears in my bedroom doorway. Girls are sleeping on mattresses beside me, Fiona whispers to Gabriela even though she is asleep, and from the sliver of moonlight I see Catalina’s almond eyes, watching me. I do not dare to move. She is terrifying and beautiful, her milky white dress fluttering over the girls, her eyes boring into mine. A dull spider of pain begins to eat me from the inside. 

“Catalina..” I whisper. “Who’s Catalina?” Fiona asks, loudly. “Shh!” everyone says. She knew then, even before I did. 

Papa locked himself in the garage and tore down the crib he built, piece by piece. Mama cut off her hair, one lock for every day she lived in her black hole. Catalina was cursed to be my dear sister, a bruise on my life, from the very beginning. 

Catalina and I used to watch clouds in the dusk, when nothing was real except for the outline of our faces. She once asked me what it would feel like to not have a sister. 

It feels like reaching for a doorknob in the dark. If I just managed to grasp it, Catalina would be standing in the doorway like she always used to, before I threw her away.