BY MANOELA TORRES
Copyright is held by the author.
TODAY WE celebrate Bella. Our beautiful, breathtaking, beloved, buried Bella. Our connection was less affection than ancestry, the sort of intimacy that shared blood makes inevitable.
Born less than two months apart, we were always together. Twins they called us, until our features grew too distinguishable to sustain the lie. I was small and sturdy, my skin the deep tan that made Nai Nai click her tongue and mutter about rice pickers and fieldwork. Bella possessed that particular alchemy of mixed blood: jade eyes set in porcelain skin, her father’s Scandinavian height stretched over her mother’s delicate Chinese bones, creating something that demanded worship.
Her clothes hung on her frame like benedictions. Mine, always too short in the torso but gaping at the waist, cut for a body built for endurance rather than admiration. Whenever we stood before mirrors together, Bella would offer me that kind smile, the gentle expression that made it impossible to hate her even as it confirmed the universe’s cruelest arithmetic: some people are born to shine, others to cast the shadows that make their light more beautiful.
At Chinese New Year, relatives would slip her extra hongbao and pat her silky hair, whispering about how she’d marry well, how lucky her parents were, their smiles lingering longer on her face than mine. Even the school photographer would spend extra time adjusting her pose while snapping my picture with the efficiency of someone checking items off a list. Bella never acknowledged the careful way my mother performed miracles with needle and thread, transforming the same three dresses into different incarnations of respectability through sheer will and invisible mending. Or how my textbooks arrived to me scarred with previous owners’ annotations while hers came pristine, their spines unbroken, like newborn things.
When we were six, we began ballet classes together. I stumbled through positions like someone learning a foreign language with a broken tongue, my limbs heavy and ungraceful. Bella moved through the studio like water finding its level, effortless and inevitable. There was something spectral about the way she occupied space, taking up so little of it that the rest of us seemed suddenly, embarrassingly substantial. By the time I turned eight, my mother had quietly given up on the idea of having a ballerina, perhaps understanding that in our family, grace had already chosen its vessel. It wasn’t me.
I took up swimming instead. After all, I was broad shouldered, built for displacement rather than elevation. Bella’s bones were hollow things meant for air. Mine carried the weight necessary to sink, to push, to drag something down until it stopped struggling. In that chlorinated blue silence, I discovered something that felt both terrible and exquisite, like finding a knife that fits perfectly in your palm: swimming was the one thing I did better than Bella. For years, the pool became my sanctuary, each lap carving away at something soft until only the essential remained.
***
We were 13 when Nai Nai died. She left my mother the lake house and her most expensive jewelry. We needed the money more, given mom’s teaching salary and my father’s absence. My aunt received the delicate intimacies: hand-embroidered scarves, jade bracelets too fragile for daily wear, photo albums filled with sepia memories. The kind of inheritance you can afford to treasure when sentiment takes precedence over survival.
The Adirondack lake house was falling apart but the land itself was prime lakefront property we’d soon have to sell. They visited mid-July, after Mom and I had spent a week with borrowed tools and determination patching holes in the walls, sweeping mouse droppings from corners, hammering loose floorboards, anything to make decay look intentional.
I was scraping paint from the porch railing when their car appeared through the trees. My uncle emerged first, unfolding himself like origami in reverse, followed by my aunt who stepped onto our gravel as if it might stain her white linen. Then Bella, pulling her deliberately modest luggage. She greeted me with that careful smile, voice pitched just a little softer than usual, each gesture calculated to hide the fact that she was stepping into a world much smaller than her own.
That first night we cooked together, the four of us moving around each other like dancers who’d never rehearsed the same routine. My mother chopped vegetables with the efficient brutality of someone who had learned to make meals stretch. While I fumbled with can openers and knocked elbows, Bella slipped beside my mother at the stove, somehow knowing exactly when to stir, when to step back, when to hand over the wooden spoon. With Bella by her side, my mother’s shoulders softened, her movements became less urgent, almost graceful. I watched my mother’s face change as she gazed at Bella, her expression melting into something I’d never seen directed at me. Pure maternal pride. Eyes that whispered: if only God had given me her, all of this would be worth it.
After dinner we played mahjong while talking about our futures. Bella’s scholarship to the summer ballet conservatory, her acceptance letters from private high schools that kept arriving like love notes from a world that wanted her, each achievement hung in the air above our heads like lanterns at Chinese New Year, beautiful and unreachable. I mentioned the public high school I’d probably attend, the one with the overwhelmed guidance counselor who managed three hundred students and the textbooks held together with duct tape. When I did, silence settled over the table like dust, everyone suddenly fascinated by their mahjong tiles, the pieces clicking with uncomfortable precision as we all pretended the gap between our destinies didn’t matter.
I was one tile away from winning when Bella discarded a red dragon, the exact piece I needed to complete my hand. Her fingers had hesitated for just a moment over her other tiles, a barely perceptible pause that told me she’d had better options, safer discards that wouldn’t have handed me victory on a porcelain platter. For a moment, I saw something I’d never noticed before: a flicker of understanding, as if she’d been keeping her own scoreboard all along. I caught something else in that hesitation, the weight of calculation, the careful measuring of what her generosity might cost her versus what my defeat might cost me.
When I called “Hu!” and laid down my winning combination, her smile was radiant and immediate, what anyone else would have mistaken for genuine surprise. But when her jade eyes met mine across the table, I saw the truth: she’d been keeping her own scoreboard all along, counting not victories but the precise cost of her advantages.
And in that revelation, something ancient and patient stirred in the deepest part of me, recognizing itself at last. The same hunger that had watched and waited and kept its own careful tallies, now understanding that it had never been alone in its calculations. Some appetites, I realized, are born in pairs — predator and prey learning each other’s rhythms until the roles become indistinguishable, until the dance itself becomes the only truth that matters.
***
The rest of our days dissolved into something thick and unreasonable: rage fermenting in the humid air like fruit left too long in the sun. Each of Bella’s unconscious kindnesses another small weight to scales I had come to realize she too was keeping.
Yet the final day crystallizes with the peculiar clarity reserved for endings, each detail sharp-edged and permanent, as if memory itself knows which moments will demand accounting.
“It’s unbearable today,” I said, sweat beading like evidence across my skin, my body incapable of the sophistication required to hide what stirred beneath.
She glanced toward the window where heat waves distorted the lake into something that looked like breathing.
“One last swim?” she suggested.
We walked to the lake in silence, our feet finding the worn stones through birch and pine.. Ahead, the water glittered between the trees like scattered silver, beautiful and patient as a blade I dove in, feeling the lake’s familiar pull, my strokes steady and sure. The lake welcomed me with its familiar embrace, and for a moment I felt that old satisfaction: here, at least, I was sovereign.
“Race you to the waterfall,” Bella called, her voice bright and careless, as if the word ‘race’ held no weight for her. My scorekeeping was silent.
We began. She had chosen the left side of the lake, cutting straight toward the falls, or perhaps the left had chosen her, the way everything seemed to arrange itself in her favour from the moment we’d emerged from our mothers’ wombs.
I fought through the choppier water on the right, each stroke a battle against crosscurrents that seemed designed to humble me. My strokes were powerful, mechanical, born from years of turning fury into forward motion. She wasn’t even trying hard. I could see it in the lazy rhythm of her stroke, the way she seemed to surf the surface while I churned through it. My technique, honed through a thousand practices, earned through calluses and chlorine-burned eyes, meant nothing against her effortless glide.
Then I watched her stroke pattern change. Her effortless rhythm faltered, becoming choppy, desperate.
By the time I realized Bella was swimming directly into the danger zone, the deceptively calm water that masked the riptide’s pull, she was already too close to the rocks. Her head lifted higher out of the water. The first sign of panic.
I treaded water 20 feet away, close enough to see the exact moment her composure shattered, to watch terror replace the serene confidence that had armored her since birth. As I floated there, my side of the lake suddenly favourable, something warm and terrible bloomed in my chest — the exquisite relief of watching something happen to her that wasn’t orchestrated by whatever gods had always smiled in her direction. Finally, the water was revealing its true arithmetic, its perfect justice — that every grace contains the seed of its own undoing.
She tried to turn back toward shore but the lake had her now, the current’s invisible fingers dragging her sideways toward the stone teeth that jutted beneath the surface like a predator’s smile.
“Help!” The word cracked across the water, higher and thinner than I’d ever heard her voice.
My muscles knew what to do. Had always known. But I found myself studying it like a fascinating specimen, the way fear stripped away all her careful grace. Arms wind-milling. Legs kicking frantically against water that had turned solid as concrete. Bella fumbling through the brutal mechanics of survival she’d never had to learn.
“Please!” she cried, thirty seconds from the stones. My muscles tensed, ready. But I stayed still, the current’s pull louder than her voice.
***
Today they celebrate Bella. The gravestone blooms with offerings, white lilies and baby’s breath arranged like prayers. My aunt’s face still carries the weight of that day when I came home running, screaming “I couldn’t reach her in time.” I stand in the shadows of their grief, still cast as the tragic survivor, still the one who washed ashore when the real treasure was claimed by the depths.
Bella’s shrine in my aunt’s living room has expanded: more photos, more flowers, more evidence of a smile that ended at thirteen but still resurrects itself in strangers’ dreams. Even death has made her more exquisite, transformed her into something worthy of genuine worship rather than the careful performances I’ve always received. They mourn her imaginary futures with more passion than they’ve ever shown for my tangible present — each phantom milestone blazing brighter in their minds than any achievement I could accomplish with actual breath in my lungs.
What haunts me isn’t guilt, there’s no oxygen left in a room crowded with grief, and I learned long ago what it means to hold your breath beneath the surface. But the arithmetic cuts deeper than any current: would my erasure have summoned such devotional mourning, or would I have simply dissolved, another casualty claimed by forces too vast to name, remembered by no one but the riptide?
***
Manoela Torres is a Brazilian writer and translator who graduated from Barnard College with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She dedicates her time to crafting editorials, fiction, and poetry, and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School. She has been previously published in Eunoia Review, The New School Free Press, The Bloomin’ Onion, and Scars Magazine.