“And the shades of night begin to fall, and the traveler hurries home, and the campesino bids his fields farewell,” Dedé recites.

The woman gets up hurriedly from her chair as if she has just been shown the way out. “I didn’t realize it was this late.”

“No, no, I wasn’t throwing you an indirecta.” Dedé laughs, motioning the woman to sit back down. “We have a few more minutes.” The interviewer perches at the edge of her chair as if she knows the true interview is over.

“That poem always goes through my head this time of day,” Dedé explains. “Minerva used to recite it a lot those last few months when she and Mate and Patria were living over at Mamá’s. The husbands were in prison,” she adds, for the woman’s face registers surprise at this change of address. “All except Jaimito.”

“How lucky,” her guest notes.

“It wasn’t luck,” Dedé says right out. “It was because he didn’t get directly involved.”

“And you?”

Dedé shakes her head. “Back in those days, we women followed our husbands.” Such a silly excuse. After all, look at Minerva. “Let’s put it this way,” Dedé adds. “I followed my husband. I didn’t get involved.”

“I can understand that,” the interview woman says quickly as if protecting Dedé from her own doubts. “It’s still true in the States. I mean, most women I know, their husband gets a job in Texas, say well, Texas it’s going to be.”

“I’ve never been to Tejas,^» Dedé says absently. Then, as if to redeem herself, she adds, ”I didn’t get involved until later.“

“When was that?” the woman asks.

Dedé admits it out loud: “When it was already too late.”

Dedé worries this woman will never find her way back to the main road in the dark. Such a thin woman with fly-about hair in her face. What ever happened to hairspray? Her niece Minou’s hair is the same way. All this fussing about the something layer in outer space, and meanwhile, they walk around looking like something from outer space.

“Why don’t I lead you out to the anacahuita turn,” she offers the interview woman.

“You drive?”

They are always so surprised. And not just the American women who think of this as an “underdeveloped” country where Dedé should still be riding around in a carriage with a mantilla over her hair, but her own nieces and nephews and even her sons tease her about her little Subaru. Their Mama Dedé, a modem woman, ¡Epa! But in so many other things I have not changed, Dedé thinks. Last year during her prize trip to Spain, the smart-looking Canadian man approached her, and though it’d been ten years already since the divorce, Dedé just couldn’t give herself that little fling.

“I’ll make it fine,” the woman claims, looking up at the sky “Wow, the light is almost gone.”

A car nears and turns into the drive, its headlights beaming into their eyes. Dedé and the woman stand paralyzed like animals caught in the beams of an oncoming car.

“Who could this be?” Dedé wonders aloud.

“Your next compromiso, no?” the interview woman says.

Dedé is reminded of her lie. “Yes, of course,” she says as she peers into the dark. “¡Buenas!” she calls out.

“It’s me, Mamá Dedé,” Minou calls back. The car door slams—Dedé jumps. Footsteps hurry towards them.

“What on earth are you doing here? I’ve told you a thousand times!” Dede scolds her niece. She doesn’t care anymore if she is betraying her lie. Minou knows, all of her nieces know, that Dedé can’t bear for them to be on the road after dark. If their mothers had only waited until the next morning to drive back over that deserted mountain road, they might still be alive to scold their own daughters about the dangers of driving at night.

“Ya, ya, Mama Dedé.” Minou bends down to kiss her aunt. Having taken after both her mother and father, she is a head taller than Dedé. “It just so happens I was off the road an hour ago.” There is a pause, and Dedé already guesses what Minou is hesitating to say, for therein awaits another scold. “I was over at Fela’s.”

“Any messages from the girls?” Dedé says smartly. Beside her, she can feel the eager presence of the interview woman.

“Can’t we sit down first,” Minou says. There is some emotion in her voice Dedé can’t quite make out. She has soured her niece’s welcome, scolding her the minute she gets out of her car. “Come, come, you’re right. Forgive your old aunt’s bad manners. Let’s go have a limonada.”

“I was just on my way out,” the interview woman reminds Dedé. To Minou, she adds, “I hope to see you again—”

“We haven’t even met.” Minou smiles.

Dedé apologizes for her oversight and introduces the woman to her niece. Oh dear, what a mishmash of gratitude follows. The interview woman is delirious at the good fortune of meeting both sister and daughter of the heroine of the Fourteenth of June underground. Dedé cringes. She had better cut this off. Unlike their aunt, the children won’t put up with this kind of overdone gush.

But Minou is chuckling away. “Come see us again,” she offers, and Dedé, forced to rise to this politeness, adds, “Yes, now you know the way.”

Dedé hears her niece swallow some emotion. What could be wrong? Dedé wonders. Gently now, she prods Minou, “Tell me what the girls had to say today?”

“That’s just it,” Minou says, her voice still uneven. “They wouldn’t come. Fela says they must finally be at rest. It was strange, hearing that. I felt sad instead of glad.”

Her last tie, however tenuous, to her mother. So that’s what the emotion is all about, Dedé thinks. Then it strikes her. She knows exactly why Fela was getting a blackout this afternoon. “Don’t you worry.” Dedé pats her niece’s hand. “They’re still around.”

Minou scowls at her aunt. “Are you making fun again?”

Dedé shakes her head. “I swear they’ve been here. All afternoon.”

Minou is watching her aunt for any sign of irony. Finally, she says, “All right, can I ask you anything just like I do Fela?”

Dedé laughs uneasily. “Go on.”

Minou hesitates, and then she says it right out, what Dedé suspects everyone has always wanted to ask her but which some politeness kept them from. Trust Minerva’s incarnation to confront Dedé with the question she herself has avoided. “I’ve always wondered, I mean, you all were so close, why you didn’t go along with them?”

She had been preparing a new bed in the garden, enjoying the rare quiet of an empty house. The girl had the day off, and as usual on a Sunday afternoon, Jaimito had gone to the big gallera in San Francisco, this time taking all three boys. Dedé wasn’t expecting them back till late. From Mamá’s house on the main road, her sisters must have seen Jaimito’s pickup drive away without her and hurried to come over and pay Dedé this surprise visit.

When she heard a car stop in front of the house, Dede considered taking off into the cacao grove. She was getting so solitary. A few nights ago Jaimito had complained that his mother had noticed that Dedé wasn’t her old lively self. She rarely dropped by Dona Leila’s anymore with a new strain of hibiscus she’d sprouted or a batch of pastelitos she’d made from scratch. Miss Sonrisa was losing her smiles, all right. Dedé had looked at her husband, a long look as if she could draw the young man of her dreams out from the bossy, old-fashioned macho he’d become. “Is that what your mother says?”

He’d brought this up as he sat in slippers in the galería enjoying the cool evening. He took a final swallow from his rum glass before he answered, “That’s what my mother says. Get me another one, would you, Mami?” He held out the glass, and Dedé had gone obediently to the icebox in the back of the house where she burst into tears. What she wanted to hear from him was that he had noticed. Just his saying so would have made it better, whatever it was. She herself wasn’t sure what.

So when she saw her three sisters coming down the path that afternoon, she felt pure dread. It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dedé’s life from falling apart.

Patria had approached her in the fall with a strange request. Could she bury some boxes in one of the cacao fields in back of their old house?

Dedé had been so surprised. “Why, Patria! Who put you up to this?”

Patria looked puzzled. “We’re all in it, if that’s what you mean. But I’m speaking for myself.”

“I see,” Dedé had said, but really what she saw was Minerva in back of it all. Minerva agitating. No doubt she had sent Patria over rather than come herself since she and Dede were not getting along. It had been years since they’d fought openly—since Lío, wasn’t it?—but recently their hot little exchanges had started up again.

What could Dedé say? She had to talk to Jaimito first. Patria had given her a disappointed look, and Dedé had gotten defensive. “What? I should go over Jaimito’s head? It’s only fair. He’s the one farming the land, he’s responsible for this place.”

“But can’t you decide on your own, then tell him?”

Dedé stared at her sister, disbelieving.

“That’s what I did,” Patria went on. “I joined, and then I talked Pedrito into joining me.”

“Well, I don’t have that kind of marriage,” Dedé said. She smiled to take the huffiness out of her statement.

“What kind of marriage do you have?” Patria looked at her with that sweetness on her face that could always penetrate Dedé’s smiles. Dedé looked away.

“It’s just that you don’t seem yourself,” Patria continued, reaching for Dedé’s hand. “You seem so—I don’t know—withdrawn. Is something wrong?”

It was Patria’s worried tone more than her question that pulled Dedé back into that abandoned part of herself where she had hoped to give love, and to receive it, in full measure, both directions.

Being there, she couldn’t help herself. Though she tried giving Patria another of her brave smiles, Miss Sonrisa burst into tears.

“Swear you’ll keep your distance from them!”

When he got upset, he would just raise his voice. But that night, he grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her on the bed, only—he said later—to make her come to her senses. “Swear!”

Now, when she thinks back, Dedé asks herself as Minou has asked her, Why? Why didn’t she go along with her sisters. She was only thirty-four. She could have started a new life. But no, she reminds herself. She wouldn’t have started over. She would have died with them on that lonely mountain road.

Even so, that night, her ears still ringing from Jaimito’s shout, Dedé had been ready to risk her life. It was her marriage that she couldn’t put on the line. She had always been the docile middle child, used to following the lead. Next to an alto she sang alto, by a soprano, soprano. Miss Sonrisa, cheerful, compliant. Her life had gotten bound up with a domineering man, and so she shrank from the challenge her sisters were giving her.

Dedé sent Patria a note: Sorry. jaimito says no.

And for weeks afterwards, she avoided her sisters.

Dede’s heart was beating away as she stood to welcome them. “How wonderful to see you!” She smiled, Miss Sonrisa, armed with smiles. She led them through the garden, delaying, showing off this and that new planting. As if they were here on a social call. As if they had come to see how her jasmine shrubs were doing.

They sat on the patio, exchanging the little news. The children were all coming down with colds. Little Jacqueline would be one in a month. Patria was up all hours again with Raulito. That boy was still not sleeping through the night. This gringo doctor she was reading said it was the parents of colicky babies who were to blame. No doubt Raulito was picking up all the tension in the house. Speaking of picking up things: Minou had called Trujillo a bad word. Don’t ask. She must have overheard her parents. They would have to be more careful. Imagine what could happen if there were another spying yardboy like Prieto on the premises.

Imagine. An awkward silence fell upon them. Dedé braced herself. She expected Minerva to make an impassioned pitch for using the family farm for a munitions storage. But it was Mate who spoke up, the little sister who still wore her hair in braids and dressed herself and her baby girl in matching dresses.

They had come, she said, because something big, I mean really big, was about to happen. Mate’s eyes were a child‘s, wide with wonder.

Minerva drew her index finger across her throat and let her tongue hang out of her mouth. Patria and Mate burst into nervous giggles.

Dedé couldn’t believe it. They’d gone absolutely mad! “This is serious business,” she reminded them. Some fury that had nothing to do with this serious business was making her heart beat fast.

“You bet it is,” Minerva said, laughing. “The goat is going to die.”

“Less than three weeks!” Mate’s voice was becoming breathy with excitement.

“On the feast day of the Virgencita!” Patria exclaimed, making the sign of the cross and rolling her eyes heavenward. “Ay, Virgencita, watch over us.”

Dedé pointed to her sisters. “You’re going to do it yourselves?”

“Heavens, no,” Mate said, horrified at the thought. “The Action Group does the actual justice, but then all the different cells will liberate their locations. We’ll be taking the Salcedo Fortaleza.”

Dedé was about to remind her little sister of her fear of spiders, worms, noodles in her soup, but she let Mate go on. “We’re a cell, see, and there are usually only three in a cell, but we could make ours four.” Mate looked hopefully at Dedé.

As if they were inviting her to join a goddamn volleyball team!

“This is a little sudden, I know,” Patria was saying. “But it’s not like with the boxes, Dedé. This looks like a sure thing.”

“This is a sure thing,” Minerva confirmed.

“Don’t decide now,” Patria went on as if afraid what Dedé’s snap decision might be. “Think about it, sleep on it. We’re having a meeting next Sunday at my place.”

“Ay, like old times, all four of us!” Mate clapped her hands.

Dedé could feel herself being swayed by the passion of her sisters. Then she hit the usual snag. “And Jaimito?”

There was another awkward silence. Her sisters looked at each other. “Our cousin is also invited,” Minerva said with that stiff tone she always used with Jaimito. “But you know best whether it’s worth asking him.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dedé snapped.

“I mean by that that I don’t know what Jaimito’s politics are.”

Dedé’s pride was wounded. Whatever their problems, Jaimito was her husband, the father of her children. “Jaimito’s no trujillista, if that’s what you’re implying. No more than ... than Papa was.”

“In his own way, Papá was a trujillista,” Minerva announced.

All her sisters looked at her, shocked. “Papá was a hero!” Dedé fumed. “He died because of what he went through in prison. You should know. He was trying to keep you out of trouble!”

Minerva nodded. “That’s right. His advice was always, don’t annoy the bees, don’t annoy the bees. It’s men like him and Jaimito and other scared fulanitos who have kept the devil in power all these years.”

“How can you say that about Papá?” Dede could hear her voice rising. “How can you let her say that about Papá?” She tried to enlist her sisters.

Mate had begun to cry.

“This isn’t what we came for,” Patria reminded Minerva, who stood and walked to the porch rail and stared out into the garden.

Dedé raked her eyes over the yard, half-afraid her sister was finding fault there, too. But the crotons were lusher than ever and the variegated bougainvilleas she hadn’t thought would take were heavy with pink blossoms. All the beds were neat and weedless. Everything in its place. Only in the new bed where she’d just been working did the soil look torn up. And it was disturbing to see—among the established plantings—the raw brown earth like a wound in the ground.

“We want you with us. That’s why we’re here.” Minerva’s eyes as she fixed them on her sister were full of longing.

“What if I can’t?” Dedé’s voice shook. “Jaimito thinks it’s suicide. He’s told me he’ll have to leave me if I get mixed up in this thing.” There, she’d said it. Dedé felt the hot flush of shame on her face. She was hiding behind her husband’s fears, bringing down scorn on him instead of herself.

“Our dear cousin,” Minerva said sarcastically. But she stopped herself on a look from Patria.

“Everyone has their own reasons for the choices they make,” Patria said, defusing the charged atmosphere, “and we have to respect that.”

Blessed are the peacemakers, Dedé thought, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what the prize was that had been promised them.

“Whatever you decide, we’ll understand,” Patria concluded, looking around at her sisters.

Mate nodded, but Minerva could never leave well enough alone. As she climbed in the car, she reminded Dedé, “Next Sunday at Patria’s around three. In case you change your mind,” she added.

As she watched them drive away, Dedé felt strangely mingled surges of dread and joy. Kneeling at the new bed helped calm the shaking in her knees. Before she had finished smoothing the soil and laying out a border of little stones, she had worked out her plan. Only much later did she realize she had forgotten to put any seeds in the ground.

Next to that decision, attending the underground meeting over at Patria’s was nothing but a small step after the big turn had been taken. All week she refined the plan for it. As she beat the mattresses and fumigated the baseboards for red ants, as she chopped onions for the boys’ breakfast mangú and made them drink limonsillo tea to keep away the cold going around, she plotted. She savored her secret, which tasted deliciously of freedom, as she allowed his weight on her in the dark bedroom and waited for him to be done.

Next Sunday, while Jaimito was at his gallera, Dedé would ride over to the meeting. When he came back, he would find the note propped on his pillow.

Their life together had collapsed. From puppydog devotion, he had moved on to a moody bossiness complicated with intermittent periods of dogged remorse that would have been passion had there been less of his hunger and more of her desire in it. True to her nature, Dedé had made the best of things, eager for order, eager for peace. She herself was preoccupied—by the births of their sons, by the family setbacks after Papa was jailed, by Papá’s sad demise and death, by their own numerous business failures. Perhaps Jaimito felt broken by these failures and her reminders of how she had tried to prevent them. His drinking, always social, became more solitary.

It was natural to blame herself. Maybe she hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe he sensed how someone else’s eyes had haunted her most of her married life.

Lío! What had become of him? Dedé had asked Minerva several times, quite casually, about their old friend. But Minerva didn’t know a thing. Last she’d heard Lio had made it to Venezuela where a group of exiles was training for an invasion.

Then, recently, without her even asking, Minerva had confided to Dedé that their old friend was alive and kicking. “Tune into Radio Rumbos, 99 on your dial.” Minerva knew Jaimito would be furious if he found Dedé listening to that outlawed station, yet her sister taunted her.

One naughty night, Dedé left Jaimito sleeping heavily after sex and stole out to the far end of the garden to the little shack where she kept the garden tools. There, in the dark, sitting on a sack of bark chips for her orchids, Dedé had slowly turned the dial on Jaimito Enrique’s transistor radio. The static crackled, then a voice, very taken with itself, proclaimed, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!”

Fidel’s speech was played endlessly at these off hours, as Dedé soon found out. But night after night, she kept returning to the shack, and twice she was rewarded with the unfamiliar, blurry voice of someone introduced as Comrade Virgilio. He spoke his high-flown talk which had never been what had appealed to Dedé. Even so, night after night, she returned to the shed, for these excursions were what mattered now. They were her secret rebellion, her heart hungering, her little underground of one.

Now, planning her exodus, Dedé tried to imagine Lio’s surprise at hearing Dedé had joined her sisters. He would know that she, too, was one of the brave ones. His sad, sober eyes that had hung before her mind’s eye for so many years melted into the ones that looked back at her now from the mirror. I need to get out. I cannot go on with this travesty.

Enrique, Rafael, David, how could she possibly leave them?

Jaimito would never let her keep them. He was more than possessive with his sons, claiming them as if they were parts of himself. Look at how he had named them all with his first name as well as his last! Jaime Enrique Fernández. Jaime Rafael Fernández. Jaime David Fernández. Only their middle names, which perforce became their given names, were their own.

It wasn’t just that she couldn’t bear losing her boys, although that in itself was a dread large enough to stop her in her tracks. She also couldn’t desert them. Who would stand between them and the raised hand when their father lost his temper? Who would make them mangú the way they liked it, cut their hair so it looked right, and sit in the dark with them when they were scared and the next morning not remind them she had been there?

She needed to talk to someone, outside her sisters. The priest! She’d gotten lax in her church attendance. The new militancy from the pulpit had become like so much noise in a place you had come to hear soothing music. But now that noise seemed in harmony with what she was feeling inside. Maybe this new young priest Padre de Jesus would have an answer for her.

She arranged for a ride that Friday with Mamá’s new neighbors, Don Bernardo and his wife Doña Belén, old Spaniards who had been living down in San Cristóbal for years. They had decided to move to the countryside, Don Bernardo explained, hoping the air would help Dona Belen. Something was wrong with the frail, old woman—she was forgetting the simplest things, what a fork was for, how to button her dress, was it the seed or the meat of the mango you could eat. Don Bernardo was taking her to Salcedo for yet another round of tests at the clinic. “We won’t be coming back until late afternoon. I hope that won’t inconvenience you very much?” he apologized. The man was astonish ingly courtly

“Not at all,” Ded6 assured him. She could just be dropped off at the church.

“What have you got to do all day in church?” Doña Belen had a disconcerting ability to suddenly tune in quite clearly, especially to what was none of her business.

“Community work,” Dede lied.

“You Mirabal girls are so civic-minded,” Don Bernardo observed. No doubt he was thinking of Minerva, or his favorite, Patria.

It was harder to satisfy Jaimito’s suspicions. “If you need to go to Salcedo, I’ll take you tomorrow.” He had come into the bedroom as she was getting dressed that Friday morning.

“Jaimito, por Dios!” she pleaded. He had already forbidden her to go about with her sisters, was he now going to keep her from accompanying a poor old woman to the doctor?

“Since when has Dona Belén been a preoccupation of yours?” Then he said the thing he knew would make her feel the guiltiest. “And what about leaving the boys when they’re sick?”

“All they have is colds, for God’s sake. And Tinita’s here with them.”

Jaimito blinked in surprise at her sharp tone. Was it really this easy Dede wondered, taking command?

“Do as you please then!” He was giving her little knowing nods, his hands curling into fists. “But remember, you’re going over my head!”

Jaimito did not return her wave as they drove away from Ojo de Agua. Something threatening in his look scared her. But Dedé kept reminding herself she need not be afraid. She was going to be leaving him. She told herself to keep that in mind.

Midafternoon, she spotted a green panel truck pulling up to the rectory gates. Padre de Jesus was in the passenger seat, another man was driving, a third jumped out from the back, unlocked the courtyard gates, and closed them after the truck pulled in.

Dedé hurried across the street. There was only a little time left before she had to meet up with Don Bernardo and Doña Belén at the clinic, and she had to talk to the priest. All day, the yeses and noes had been swirling inside her, faster, faster, until she felt dizzy with indecision. Waiting on that bench, she had promised herself that the priest’s answer would decide it, once and for all.

She knocked several times before Padre de Jesus finally came to the door. Many apologies, he was unloading the truck, hadn’t heard the knocker until just now. Please, please come in. He would be right with her.

He left her sitting in the small vestibule while he finished up with the delivery Dedé could hear going on in the adjoining choir room. Over his shoulder as he departed, Dedé caught a glimpse of some pine boxes, half-covered by a tarpaulin. Something about their color and their long shape recalled an incident in Patria’s house last fall. Dedé had come over to help paint the baby’s room. She had gone into Noris’s room in search of some old sheets to lay on the floor, and there, in the closet, hidden behind a row of dresses, she’d seen several boxes just like these, standing on end. Patria had come in, acting very nervous, stammering about those boxes being full of new tools. Not too long after, when Patria had come with her request to hide some boxes, Dedé had understood what tools were inside them.

My God, Padre de Jesus was one of them! He would encourage her to join the struggle. Of course, he would. And she knew, right then and there, her knees shaking, her breath coming short, that she could not go through with this business. Jaimito was just an excuse. She was afraid, plain and simple, just as she had been afraid to face her powerful feelings for Lío. Instead, she had married Jaimito, although she knew she did not love him enough. And here she’d always berated him for his failures in business when the greater bankruptcy had been on her part.

She told herself that she was going to be late for her rendezvous. She ran out of that rectory before the priest could return, and arrived at the clinic while Doña Belén was still struggling with the buttons of her dress.

His pickup hadn’t been in the drive, but then he often took off after a workday for a drink with his buddies. However, this silence was too deep and wide to be made by just one absence. “Enrique!” she screamed, running from room to room. “Rafael! David!”

The boys’ rooms were deserted, drawers opened, rifled through. Oh my God, oh my God. Dedé could feel a mounting desperation. Tinita, who had come to work in the household four years ago when Jaime David was born, came running, alarmed by her mistress’s screams. “Why, Doña Dedé,” she said, wide-eyed. “It’s only Don Jaimito who took the boys.”

“Where?” Dedé could barely get it out.

“To Doña Leila‘s, I expect. He packed bags—” Her mouth dropped open, surprised by something private she wished she hadn’t seen.

“How could you let him, Tinita. How could you! The boys have colds,” she cried as if that were the reason for her distress. “Have Salvador saddle the mare,” Dedé ordered. “Quick, Tinita, quick!” For the maid was standing there, rubbing her hands down the sides of her dress.

Off Dede rode at a crazy canter all the way to Mama’s. It was already dark when she turned in the drive. The house was all lit up, cars in the driveway, Minerva and Manolo just arriving from Monte Cristi, Mate and Leandro from the capital. Of course, it would be a big weekend. But every thought of the meeting had faded from Dedé’s mind.

She had told herself on the gallop over that she must stay calm so as not to alarm Mama. But the moment she dismounted, she was crying, “I need a ride! Quick!”

“M‘ija, m’ija,” Mama kept asking. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Mama, really. It’s just Jaimito’s taken the boys to San Francisco.”

“But what’s wrong with that?” Mama was asking, suspicion deepening the lines on her face. “Is something wrong with that?”

By now, Manolo had brought the car around to the door, and Minerva was honking the horn. Off they went, Dedé telling them her story of coming home and finding the house abandoned, the boys gone.

“Why would he do this?” Minerva asked. She was digging through her purse for the cigarettes she could not smoke in front of Mama. Recently, she had picked up a bad cough along with the smoking.

“He threatened to leave me if I got involved with your group.”

“But you’re not involved,” Manolo defended her.

“Maybe Dedé wants to be involved.” Minerva turned around to face the back seat. Dedé could not make out her expression in the dim light. The end of her cigarette glowed like a bright, probing eye. “Do you want to join us?”

Dedé began to cry. “I just have to admit to myself. I’m not you—no really, I mean it. I could be brave if someone were by me every day of my life to remind me to be brave. I don’t come by it naturally.”

“None of us do,” Minerva noted quietly.

“Dedé, you’re plenty brave,” Manolo asserted in his courtly way. Then, for they were already in the outskirts of San Francisco, he added, “You’re going to have to tell me where to turn.”

They pulled up behind the pickup parked in front of Dona Leila’s handsome stucco house, and Dedé’s heart lifted. She had seen the boys through the opened door of the front patio, watching television. As they were getting out of the car, Minerva hooked arms with Dedé. “Manolo’s right, you know. You’re plenty brave.” Then nodding towards Jaimito, who had come to the doorway and was aggressively blocking their way in, she added, “One struggle at a time, sister.”

“My sons,” Dedé said, coming up on the porch. She felt brave with Minerva at her side.

“My sons,” he proclaimed, “are where they should be, safe and sound.”

“Why, cousin, don’t you say hello?” Minerva chided him.

He was curt in his greetings, even to Manolo, whom he had always liked. They had together invested their wives’ inheritance in that ridiculous project—what was it?—growing onions in some godforsaken desert area where you couldn’t even get Haitians to live? Dedé had warned them.

But Manolo’s warmth could thaw any coldness. He gave his old business partner un abrazo, addressing him as compadre even though neither one was godparent to the other’s children. He invited himself in, ruffled the boys’ hair, and called out, “Doña Leila! Where’s my girl?”

Obviously, the boys suspected nothing. They yielded reluctant kisses to their mother and aunt, their eyes all the while trained on the screen where el gato Tom and el ratoncito Jerry were engaged in yet another of their battles.

Dona Leila came out from her bedroom, ready to entertain. She looked coquettish in a fresh dress, her white hair pinned up with combs. “¡Manolo, Minerva! iQué placer!” But it was Dedé whom she kept hugging.

So he hadn’t said anything to his mother. He wouldn’t dare, Dedé thought. Doña Leila had always doted on her daughter-in-law, so much so that Dedé sometimes worried that Leila’s five daughters would resent her. But really it was obvious they adored the sister-in-law-cousin who encouraged them in their small rebellions against their possessive only brother. Seven years ago, when Don Jaime had died, Jaimito had taken on the man-of-the-family role with a vengeance. Even his mother said he was worse than Don Jaime had ever been.

“Sit down, please, sit down.” Doña Leila pointed to the most comfortable chairs, but she would not let go of Dedé’s hand.

“Mamá,” Jaimito explained, “we all have something private to discuss. We’ll talk outside,” he addressed Manolo, avoiding his mother’s eyes.

Doña Leila hurried out to assess the porch. She turned on the garden lights, brought out her good rockers, served her guests a drink, and insisted Dedé eat a pastelito snack—she was looking too thin. “Don’t let me hold you up,” she kept saying.

Finally, they were alone. Jaimito turned the porch lights off, calling out to his mother, that there were too many bugs. But Dedé suspected that he found it easier to address their problems in the dark.

“You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to.” The agitation in his tone carried.

Doña Leila called from inside. “You need another cervecita, m‘ijo?”

“No, no, Mamá,” Jamito said, impatience creeping into his voice. “I told Dedé,” he addressed his in-laws, “I didn’t want her getting mixed up in this thing.”

“I can assure you she’s never been to any of our gatherings,” Manolo put in. “On my word.”

Jaimito was silent. Manolo’s statement had stopped him short. But he had already gone too far to readily admit that he’d been wrong. “Well, what about her meetings with Padre de Jesus? Everyone knows he’s a flaming communist.”

“He is not,” Minerva contradicted.

“For heaven’s sake, Jaimito, I only went to see him once,” Dedé added. “And it was in reference to us, if you have to know the truth.”

“Us?” Jaimito stopped rocking himself, his bravado deflated. “What about us, Mami?”

Can you really be so blind, she wanted to say. We don’t talk anymore, you boss me around, you keep to yourself, you’re not interested in my garden. But Dedé felt shy addressing their intimate problems in front of her sister and brother-in-law. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“What is it, Mami?”

“Stop calling me Mami, I’m not your mother.”

Dona Leila’s voice drifted from the kitchen where she was supervising her maid in frying a whole platter of snacks. “Another pastelito, Dedé?”

“She’s been like that since the minute I got here,” Jaimito confided. His voice had grown tender. He was loosening up. “She must have asked me a hundred times, ‘Where’s Dedé? Where’s Dedé?”’ It was as close as he could get to admitting how he felt.

“I have a suggestion, compadre,” Manolo said. “Why don’t you two take a honeymoon somewhere nice.”

“The boys have colds,” Dedé said lamely.

“Their grandmother will take very good care of them, I’m sure.” Manolo laughed. “Why not go up to—wasn’t it Jarabacoa where you honeymooned?”

“No, Rio San Juan, that area,” Jaimito said, entering into the plan.

“We went to Jarabacoa,” Minerva reminded Manolo in a tight voice that suggested she disapproved of the reconciliation he was engineering. Her sister was better off alone.

“They have a beautiful new hotel in Rio San Juan,” Manolo went on. “There’s a balcony with each room, every one with a sea view.”

“I hear the prices are reasonable,” Jaimito put in. It was as if the two men were working on another deal together.

“So what do you say?” Manolo concluded.

Neither Jaimito nor Dedé said a word.

“Then it’s settled.” Manolo said, but he must have felt the unsettled-ness in their silence, for he went on. “Look, everyone has troubles. Minerva and I went through our own rough times. The important thing is to use a crisis like this to grow closer. Isn’t that so, mi amor?”

Minerva’s guard was still up. “Some people can’t ever really see eye to eye.”

Her statement broke the deadlock, though it was probably the last thing Minerva had intended. Jaimito’s competitive streak was reawakened. “Dedé and I see perfectly eye to eye! The problem is other people confusing things.”

The problem is when I open my eyes and see for myself, Dedé was thinking. But she was too shaken by the night’s events and the long week of indecision to contradict him.

And so it was that the weekend that was to have been a watershed in Dedé’s life turned into a trip down memory lane in a rented boat. In and out of the famous lagoons they had visited as a young bride and groom Jaimito rowed, stopping to point with his oar to the swamp of mangroves where the Tainos had fished and later hidden from the Spanish. Hadn’t she heard him say so eleven years ago?

And at night, sitting on their private balcony, with Jaimito’s arm around her and his promises in her ear, Dedé gazed up at the stars. Recently, in Vanidades, she had read how starlight took years to travel down to earth. The star whose light she was now seeing could have gone out years ago. What comfort if she counted them? If in that dark heaven she traced a ram when already half its brilliant horn might be gone?

False hopes, she thought. Let the nights be totally dark! But even that dark wish she made on one of those stars.

Early that Saturday Jaimito dropped off Dedé at Mamá’s with the two youngest boys. Mama had asked for Dedé’s help planting a crown-of-thorns border, so she said, but Dedé knew what her mother really wanted. She was worried about her daughter after her panicked visit a week ago. She wouldn’t ask Dede any questions—Mama always said that what went on in her daughters’ marriages was their business. Just by watching Dedé lay the small plants in the ground, Mama would know the doings in her heart.

As Dedé walked up the driveway, assessing what still needed to be done in the yard, the boys raced each other to the door. They were swallowed up by the early morning silence of the house. It seemed odd that Mama had not come out to greet her. Then Dedé noticed the servants gathered in the backyard, and Tono breaking away, walking briskly towards her. Her face had the burdened look of someone about to deliver bad news.

“What, Tono, tell me!” Dedé found she was clutching the woman’s arm.

“Don Leandro has been arrested.”

“Only him?”

Tono nodded. And shamefully, in her heart Dedé was thankful that her sisters had been spared before she was frightened for Leandro.

Inside, Maria Teresa was sitting on the couch, unplaiting and plaiting her hair, her face puffy from crying. Mama stood by, reminding her that everything was going to be all right. By habit, Dedé swept her eyes across the room looking for the boys. She heard them in one of the bedrooms, playing with their baby cousin Jacqueline.

“She just got here,” Mamá was saying. “I was about to send the boy for you.” There were no phone lines out where the old house was—another reason Mamá had moved up to the main road.

Dedé sat down. Her knees always gave out on her when she was scared. “What happened?”

Mate sobbed out her story, her breath wheezy with the asthma she always got whenever she was upset. She and Leandro had been asleep just a couple of hours when they heard a knock that didn’t wait for an answer. The SIM had broken down the door of their apartment, stormed inside, roughed up Leandro and carried him away. Then they ransacked the house, ripped open the upholstery on the couch and chairs, and drove off in the new Chevrolet. Mate stopped, too short of breath to continue.

“But why? Why?” Mamá kept asking. “Leandro’s a serious boy, an engineer!” Neither Mate nor Dedé knew how to answer her.

Dedé tried calling Minerva in Monte Cristi, but the operator reported the line was dead. Now Mamá, who had stood by accepting their shrugs for answers, levelled her gaze at each of them. “What is going on here? And don’t try to tell me nothing. I know something is going on.”

Mate flinched as if she knew she had misbehaved.

“Mamá,” Dedé said, knowing the time had come to offer their mother the truth. She patted a space between them on the couch. “You’re going to have to sit down for this.”

Slowly, Dede pieced together the story Patria was telling.

The SIM had come for Pedrito and Nelson who, alerted by some neighbors, had fled into the hills. Patria had answered the door and told the officers that her husband and son were away in the capital, but the SIM overran the place anyway. They scoured the property, dug up the fields, and found the buried boxes full of their incriminating cargo as well as an old box of papers. Inflammatory materials, they called it. But all Patria saw were pretty notebooks written in a girlish hand. Probably something Noris had wanted to keep private from her nosey older brother, and so hidden away in the grove.

They tore the house apart, hauling away the doors, windows, the priceless mahogany beams of Pedrito’s old family rancho. It was like watching her life dismantled before her very eyes, Patria said, weeping—the glories she had trained on a vine; the Virgencita in the silver frame blessed by the Bishop of Higüey; the wardrobe with little ducks she had stenciled on when Raulito was born.

All of it violated, broken, desecrated, destroyed.

Then they set fire to what was left.

And Nelson and Pedrito, seeing the conflagration and fearing for Patria and the children, came running down from the hills, their hands over their heads, giving themselves up.

“I’ve been good! I’ve been good!” Patria was screaming at the sky. The ground around her was bare, the grass lay in sad clumps at her side.

Why she did what she did next, Dedé didn’t know. Grief driving her to salvage something, she supposed. Down she got on her knees and began tamping the grass back. In a soothing voice, she reminded her sister of the faith that had always sustained her. “You believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and eanh ..

Sobbing, Patria fell in, reciting the Credo: “Light of light, who for us men and for our salvation...”

“—came down from heaven,” Dedé confirmed in a steady voice.

Finally Dedé reached Minerva at Manolo’s mother’s house. How relieved Dedé felt to hear her voice. It was then she realized that after all her indecisiveness, she had never really had a choice. Whether she joined their underground or not, her fate was bound up with the fates of her sisters. She would suffer whatever they suffered. If they died, she would not want to go on living without them.

Yes, Manolo had been arrested last night, too. Minerva’s voice was tight. No doubt Doña Fefita, Manolo’s mother, was at her side. Every once in a while Minerva broke into a fit of coughing.

“Are you all right?” Dedé asked her.

There was a long pause. “Yes, yes,” Minerva rallied. “The phone’s been disconnected but the house is standing. Nothing but books for them to steal.” Minerva’s laughter exploded into a coughing fit. “Just allergies,” she explained when Dedé worried she was ill.

“Put on Patria, please,” Minerva asked after giving the grim rundown. “I want to ask her something.” When Dedé explained how Patria had finally settled down with a sedative, that maybe it was better if she didn’t come to the phone, Minerva point blank asked, “Do you know if she saved any of the kids’ tennis shoes?”

“Aγ, Minerva,” Dedé sighed. The coded talk was so transparent even she could guess what her sister was asking about. “Here’s Mamá,” Dedé cut her off. “She wants to talk to you.”

Mamá kept pleading with Minerva to come home. “It’s better if we’re all together.” Finally, she handed the phone back to Dedé. “You convince her.” As if Minerva had ever listened to Dedé!

“I am not going to run scared,” Minerva stated before Dedé could even begin convincing. “I’m fine. Now can’t Patria come to the line?”

A few days later, Dedé received Minerva’s panicky note. She was desperate. She needed money. Creditors were at the door. She had to buy medicines because (“Don’t tell Mama”) she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. “I hate to involve you, but since you’re in charge of the family finances .. Could Dedé advance her some cash to be taken out of Minerva’s share of the house and lands in the future?

Too proud to just plain ask for help! Dedé took off in Jaimito’s pickup, avoiding a stop at Mamá’s to use the phone since Mamá would start asking questions. From the bank, Dedé called Minerva to tell her that she was on her way with the money, but instead she reached a distraught Doña Fefita. Minerva had been taken that very morning, the little house ransacked and boarded up. In the background Dedé could hear Minou crying piteously.

“I’m coming to get you,” she promised the little girl.

The child calmed down some. “Is Mama with you?”

Dedé took a deep breath. “Yes, Mama is here.” The beginning of many stories. Later, she would hedge and say she meant her own Mama. But for now, she wanted to spare the child even a moment of further anguish.

She rode out to the tobacco fields where Jaimito had said he’d be supervising the planting of the new crop. She had wondered as she was dialing Minerva what Jaimito would do when he came home and found his wife and his pickup missing. Something told her he would not respond with his usual fury. Despite herself, Dede had to admit she liked what she sensed, that the power was shifting in their marriage. Coming home from Río San Juan, she had finally told him, crying as she did, that she could not continue with their marriage. He had wept, too, and begged for a second chance. For a hundredth chance, she thought. Now events were running away with them, trampling over her personal griefs, her budding hopes, her sprouting wings.

“Jaimito!” she called when she saw him from far off.

He came running across the muddy, just-turned field. How ironic, she thought, watching him. Their lives, which had almost gone their separate ways a week ago, were now drawing together again. After all, they were embarking on their most passionate project to date, one they must not fail at like the others. Saving the sisters.

But there was no shielding Mamá any longer, Dedé saw when they arrived at her house. Several black Volkswagens and a police wagon were pulled into the drive. Captain Peña, head of the northern division of the SIM, had orders to bring Mate in. Mamá was hysterical. Mate clung to her, weeping with terror as Mama declared that her youngest daughter could not leave without her. Dedé could hear the shrieks of Jacqueline calling for her mother from the bedroom.

“Take me instead, please.” Patria knelt by the door, pleading with Captain Peña. “I beg you for the love of God.”

The captain, a very fat man, looked down with interest at Patria’s heaving chest, considering the offer. Don Bemardo, drawn by the commotion from next door, arrived with the bottle of sedatives. He tried to coax Patria back on her feet, but she would not or could not stand up. Jaimito took the captain aside. Dedé saw Jaimito reaching for his bill-fold, the captain holding up his hand. Oh God, it was bad news if the devil was refusing to take a bribe.

At last, the captain said he would make an exception. Mamá could come along. But out on the drive, after loading the terrified Mate in the wagon, he gave a signal and the driver roared away, leaving Mama standing on the road. The screams from the wagon were unbearable to hear.

Dedé and Jaimito raced after María Teresa, the small pickup careening this way and that, swerving dangerously around slower traffic. Usually, Dedé was full of admonitions about Jaimito’s reckless driving, but now she found herself pressing her own foot on an invisible gas pedal. Still, they never managed to catch up with the wagon. By the time they reached the Salcedo Fortaleza and were seen by someone in authority, they were told the young llorona with the long braid had been transferred to the capital. They couldn’t say where.

“Those bastards!” Jaimito exclaimed once they were back in the pickup. He kept striking the vinyl seat with his fist. “They’re not going to get away with this!” This was the same old violence Dedé had cowered under for years. But now instead of fear, she felt a surge of pity. There was nothing Jaimito or anyone could do. But it touched her that he had found his way to serve the underground after all—taking care of its womenfolk.

Watching him, Dedé was reminded of his fighting cocks which, in the barnyard, appeared to be just plain roosters. But put them in a ring with another rooster, and they sprang to life, explosions of feathers and dagger claws. She had seen them dazed, stumbling, eyes pecked out, still clawing the air at an attacker they could no longer see. She remembered, too, with wonder and some disgust and even an embarrassing sexual rush, how Jaimito would put their heads in his mouth, as if they were some wounded part of him or, she realized, of her that he was reviving.

It was odd to be riding in the pickup, the dark road ahead, a slender moon above, holding hands, as if they were young lovers again, discussing wedding plans. Dedé half expected Minerva and Lío to pop up in back. The thought stirred her, but not for the usual reason of lost opportunity recalled. Rather, it was because that time now seemed so innocent of this future. Dedé fought down the sob that twisted like a rope in her gut. She felt that if she let go, the whole inside of her would fall apart.

As they turned into the driveway, they saw Mama standing at the end of it, Tono and Patria at her side, trying to hush her. “Take everything, take it all! But give me back my girls, por Dios!” she was shouting.

“What is it, Mama, what is it?” Dedé had leapt out of the pickup before it had even come to a full stop. She already guessed what was wrong.

“Minerva, they’ve taken Minerva.”

Dedé exchanged a glance with Jaimito. “How do you know this, Mamá?”

“They took the cars.” Mama pointed to the other end of the drive and, sure enough, the Ford and the Jeep were gone.

Some of the SIM guards left behind had asked her for the keys. They were confiscating the two vehicles registered under a prisoner’s name. Minerva! No one had ever bothered to change those documents since Papa’s time. Now they were SIM cars.

“Lord.” Mama looked up, addressing those very stars Dedé had already discounted. “Lord, hear my cry!”

“Let’s go talk to Him inside,” Dedé suggested. She had seen the hedges move slightly. They were being spied upon and would be from now on.

In Mamá’s bedroom, they all knelt down before the large picture of the Virgencita. It was here that all the crises in the family were first addressed—when Patria’s baby was born dead, when the cows caught the pinkeye, when Papa had been jailed, and later when he died and his other family had come to light.

Now, in the small room, they gathered again, Patria, Noris, Mama, even Jaimito, though he hung back sheepishly, unaccustomed to being on his knees. Patria led the rosary, breaking down every now and then, Dedé filling in those breaks with a strong, full voice. But really her heart was not in it. Her mind was thinking over all she must do before she and Jaimito left in the morning. The boys had to be dropped off at Dona Leila‘s, and Minou had to be sent for in Monte Cristi, and the pickup had to be filled with gas, and some bags packed for the girls in whatever prison held them, and a bag for her and Jaimito in case they had to stay overnight.

The praying had stopped. Everyone was crying quietly now, touching the veil of the Virgin for comfort. Looking up at the Blessed Mother, Dedé saw where Minerva’s and Mate’s pictures had been newly tucked into the frame that already held Manolo, Leandro, Nelson, Pedrito. She struggled but this time she could not keep down her sobs.

But who would take care of her boys? And Mama? And who would coax Patria back if she wandered away again from the still waters and green pastures of her sanity?

Dedé could not run away. Courage! It was the first time she had used that word to herself and understood exactly what it meant. And so, as Jaimito snored away, Dedé began devising a little exercise to distract her mind and fortify her spirit.

Concentrate, Dedé! she was saying. Remember a clear cool night a lot like this one. You are sitting under the anacahuita tree in the front yard.... And she began playing the happy memory in her head, forcing herself to imagine the scent of jasmine, the feel of the evening on her skin, the green dress she was wearing, the tinkle of ice in Papa’s glass of rum, the murmured conversation.

Every day Dedé would go over to visit, and every day she would have a fight with Minerva. Dedé would start by pleading, then arguing with Minerva to be reasonable, to stay home. The rumors were everywhere. Trujillo wanted her killed. She was becoming too dangerous, the secret heroine of the whole nation. At the pharmacy, in church, at the mercado, Dedé was being approached by well-wishers. “Take care of our girls,” they would whisper. Sometimes they would slip her notes. “Tell the butterflies to avoid the road to Puerto Plata. It’s not safe.” The butterflies, Lord God, how people romanticized other people’s terror!

But Minerva acted unconcerned about her safety. She could not desert the cause, she’d argue with Dedé, and she would not stay holed up in Ojo de Agua and let the SIM kill her spirit. Besides, Dedé was giving in to her exaggerated fears. With the OAS clamoring about all the jailings and executions, Trujillo was not going to murder a defenseless woman and dig his own grave. Silly rumors.

“Voz del pueblo, voz del cielo,” Dedé would quote. Talk of the people, voice of God.

One time, towards the end, Dedé broke down in tears in the middle of one of their arguments. “I’m losing my mind worrying about you, don’t you see?” she had wept. But instead of caving in to Dedé’s tears, Minerva offered her an exercise.

“I made it up in La Victoria whenever they’d put me in solitary,” she explained. “You start with a line from a song or a poem. Then you just say it over until you feel yourself calming down. I kept myself sane that way.” Minerva smiled sadly. “You try it, come on. I’ll start you off.”

Even now, Dedé hears her sister, reciting that poem she wrote in jail, her voice raspy with the cold she never got rid of that last year. And the shades of night begin to fall, and the traveler hurries home, and the campesino bids his fields farewell....

No wonder Dedé has confused Minerva’s exercise and her poem about the falling of night with that sleepless night before their first trip to the capital. A dark night was falling, one of a different order from the soft, large, kind ones of childhood under the anacahuita tree, Papa parceling out futures and Mama fussing at his drinking. This one was something else, the center of hell maybe, the premonition of which made Dedé draw closer to Jaimito until she, too, finally fell asleep.