The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

looking for the Third and Final Daughter—but when she got to the family in Azua that had bought the girl, they showed her a little grave, and that was it. She had powerful suspicions about this evil family, about the girl, but since she wasn’t a psychic, or a CSI, there was nothing she could do. She had to accept that the girl had perished, and that it was, in part, her fault. One good thing about that shame and that guilt: it blew her out of her mourning. She came back to life. Opened up a string of bakeries. Dedicated herself to serving her customers. Every now and then would dream about the little negrita, the last of her dead cousin’s seed. Hi, tía, the girl would say, and La Inca would wake up with a knot in her chest.
    And then it was 1955. The Year of the Benefactor. La Inca’s bakeries were kicking ass, she had reestablished herself as a presence in her town, when one fine day she heard an astonishing tale. It seems that a little campesina girl living in Outer Azua had tried to attend the new rural school the Trujillato had built out there but her parents, who weren’t her parents, didn’t want her to attend. The girl, though, was immensely stubborn, and the parents who weren’t her parents flipped when the girl kept skipping out on work to attend classes, and in the ensuing brawl the poor muchachita got burned, horribly; the father, who was not her father, splashed a pan of hot oil on her naked back. The burn nearly killing her. (In Santo Domingo good news might travel like thunder, but bad news travels like light.) And the wildest part of the story? Rumor had it that this burned girl was a relative of La Inca!
    How could that be possible? La Inca demanded.
    Do you remember your cousin who was the doctor up in La Vega? The one who went to prison for saying the Bad Thing about Trujillo? Well, fulano, who knows fulano, who knows fulano, said that that little girl is his daughter!
    For two days she didn’t want to believe. People were always starting rumors about everything in Santo Domingo. Didn’t want to believe that the girl could have survived, could be alive in Outer Azua, of all places! 32 For two nights she slept poorly, had to medicate herself with mamajuana, and finally, after dreaming of her dead husband and as much to settle her own conscience as anything, La Inca asked her neighbor and number-one dough-kneader, Carlos Moya (the man who had once kneaded her dough, before running off and getting married) to drive her to where this girl was supposed to live. If she is my cousin’s daughter I will know her just by looking at her, she announced. Twenty-four hours later La Inca returned with an impossibly tall, impossibly skinny half-dead Belicia in tow, La Inca’s mind firmly and permanently set against both campos and their inhabitants. Not only had these savages burned the girl, they proceeded to punish her further by locking her in a chicken coop at night! At first they hadn’t wanted to bring her out. She can’t be your family, she’s a prieta. But La Inca insisted, used the Voice on them, and when the girl emerged from the coop, unable to unbend her body because of the burn, La Inca had stared into her wild furious eyes and seen Abelard and Socorro staring back at her. Forget the black skin—it was her. The Third and Final Daughter. Thought lost, now found.
    I am your real family, La Inca said forcefully. I am here to save you.
    And so, in a heartbeat, by a whisper, were two lives irrevocably changed. La Inca installed Beli in the spare room in her house where her husband had once taken his naps and worked on his carvings. Filed the paperwork to give the girl an identity, called in the doctors. The girl’s burns were unbelievably savage. (One hundred and ten hit points minimum.) A monsterglove of festering ruination extending from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. A bomb crater, a world-scar like those of a hibakusha. As soon as she could wear real clothes again, La Inca dressed the girl and had her first real photo taken out in front of the house.

    Here she is: Hypatía Belicia Cabral, the Third and Final Daughter. Suspicious, angry, scowling, uncommunicative, a wounded hungering campesina, but with an expression and posture that shouted in bold, gothic letters: DEFIANT. Darkskinned but clearly her family’s daughter. Of this there was no doubt. Already taller than Jackie in her prime. Her eyes exactly the same color as those of the father she knew nothing