by Mira T. Lee
“You could help Mami with the cooking,” he says, coldly. “At least when you’re around.”
Her face grows hot. She feels stupid, ashamed.
One night, she dreams she is a clog, a tangle of lint and dirt and hair jammed in the curve of a drainpipe. One night, she dreams she is a black and tan puppy, lost in a bullring, begging for directions to the East Village.
I must do something.
She, Lucia Bok, is a doer of things. Like Ma.
• • •
It comes to her through a series of coincidences. Signs, you could say.
One night she is lying in her small bed in her small room, staring up at the night sky. From the café tables below, bits and tangles of conversation drift and rise. A shaman cleansed my soul. Have you tried it?
The next day it happens at the office. One of the interns asks if she knows anything about the plant medicine retreats in the jungle. The ones run by shamans. No, but she overheard some tourists talking. Why do you ask? she says. I thought it might make a good article, he says, so earnest.
It happens the third time at the farmacia, when she stops in to buy vitamins. Ana Maria smiles, they exchange pleasantries—cómo está?—and she mentions nothing of the itch under her skin or the burn in her chest, but today, quietly, respectfully, Ana Maria asks if, not to intrude or anything, but only as a suggestion, a matter of curiosity, if she is interested, she would like to visit a curandero.
No, not a shaman, not the ones in the jungle. A curandero. A traditional medicine man, a healer. Here in Cuenca. She could refer her to such a person.
Three coincidences. This adds up to a sign. She feels grateful, blessed, calm once more, as the recipient of the universe’s guidance.
• • •
The consultorio is located on a quiet side street in an inconspicuous, unmarked house. In the waiting room, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, a glass case displaying foreign perfumes (Jōvan, Lancôme, Chanel), another with packages of vitamins and other Western medicines. The curandero must be close to her in age, but the skin of his face is loose, jowly, his nose and chin protrude with a shine. A witch. No, a gnome. But wearing a crown of red feathers and a white button-down shirt with decorative stitching, a bit pirate-like, stained with sweat at the armpits. Yet there is something about this man she instinctively trusts, some spark of kindness. He greets her in his office.
“I am Don Gonzalo. What brings you here?” he asks.
He asks many questions. About her habits and routines, her sleep and meals and bowel movements, her dreams and daily stresses. He observes her carefully—her eyes, her neck, her hands, her feet, as if he knows it is too easy to lie with words.
“Debilidad,” he says. A general weakness due to spiritual intrusions. He will perform a ritual cleansing, a limpieza.
She sits on a low stool, close to the floor. He fetches a large sprig of dried herbs, bound together like a feather duster. She closes her eyes, hears the rustle of leaves, the flurry of air as he fans and beats it over her head while emitting high-pitched chirps. He spits into his hands. Touches her hair. Then he passes two eggs over her body and chants. To expel the malevolent spirits from her body, he later explains. He lights a tall candle. Rings a bell, inhales a puff of cigarette, blows the smoke into her mouth. Then he swigs from a bottle of spirits. One minute she smells the alcohol, the next she feels a spray on her face. For a moment she hovers outside herself, envisions the scene through her daughter’s eyes. Mama, why is that man dusting you? He wraps her head with a towel. Swigs. Blows flame. Like a dragon, Mama! Her eyes clench shut instinctively. Heat roars up her back. But there is no fear. No doubt. Only faith.
When the ceremony is over, he presses a small crystal into her hand, a talisman for strength, and prescribes her a tonic, seven drops to be taken in a glass of water twice a day.
As she walks back toward the café, she feels emptied, restored. She marvels at the patterns in the cobblestone sidewalk, admires the large, colorful houses, their stalwart gates. Even the shards of glass on top of the security walls seem to radiate a friendly glint.
She returns to him.
The next time, she asks about his family. He has five children. The youngest, a boy of sixteen, studies the traditional ways. And the others? she asks. The others go their own ways, he says.
The next time, she asks if she may ask him more questions. She works for the gringo newspaper, she explains.
He is a modest, private man. Not exciting for the gringos. The tourists, they want to know about the exotic, the mystical, not what he sees with his eyes.
What does he see with his eyes? she asks.
The bluntness of his answer surprises her.
“You are unhappy,” he says. “You keep things inside. You cannot find peace with all these things trapped inside, like a poison. Like this, you will not find the correct path.”
Trapped? Poison?
She is annoyed, practically offended, by these words she finds both trite and vague. But she presses him. What, then, is the correct path? she asks.
“Ay, Chinita,” he says, smiling. “You are not ready. When you are ready, you will let go, find the ties that bind. Only then can you find the path.”
Ready?
She has moved across an ocean to find the path. The new path. The new air. The new life, untethered to the complications of her past. The life of her own creation.
She returns to her daughter, whose skinny brown arms encircle her neck, who laughs and shouts and screams and cries. Wild and free, Essy is full of joy. She disappears again with the shepherd girls into the campo.
This is happiness.
That afternoon, she and Manny sit together quietly on the stoop outside the casita.
“Where does she go?” she asks.
“She has friends,” he says.
She lets out a sigh.
He echoes it. Spits out a mouthful of watermelon seeds, turns to go inside.
At night, they lie under the mosquito net, Essy asleep between them. She reaches over, puts her hand on his chest. He grunts, turns away.
In the city, she lies in her small bed in her small room, mulling over the curandero’s words. Unhappy. Trapped inside. The ties that bind.
• • •
Ma, what happened to Ba?
Your father died in an accident.
What kind of accident?
A car accident.
But you loved him, you really loved him. Didn’t you, Ma?
I did, Xiao-mei. Once, I did.
• • •
And then she thinks: I don’t love him. I have never loved him. And love is everything. It is as simple as this, and she cannot think why it seemed so complicated before. The ties that bind. There is only one man she has ever loved.
She can hardly remember what it looked like, that shabby apartment in the East Village. Twin mattress on the floor of the living room, security monitors where she watched the store. Why did she leave him in the first place?
Then it comes to her. I gave up love for a baby, traded my soul mate for a child. She is shocked, ashamed that she has put this into words. These words. Bad words. Hurtful, like racial slurs, words that should not be thought at all and certainly never voiced. A mother loves her child unconditionally, without regret. But now encapsulated in words, that tinge of resentment ignites a physical pain, like something in her gut has caught fire. It rises, shoots up to inflame her esophagus, throat, coat her tongue, so she rolls it into a bolus and shoves it back but it lodges in her tonsils and she hacks and hacks until it pops back up and again she must swallow it down. For a few hours she clutches her belly, lies prone in her bed. It gets worse, it gets better, it gets worse. Perhaps it has been weeks, months, years, she has been swallowing it down and her throat, her esophagus, her mouth, even her teeth, now hurt from the effort. The curandero, he is right.<
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• • •
She yearns to hear his voice. But she doesn’t know where he is. Somewhere in Israel. She has his old cell phone number and sometimes when she’s at the office she dials it discreetly and it rings but then an automated voice clicks on. Sometimes it informs her there are technical issues with the number. Temporarily out of service. Other days it says the mailbox is full. Sometimes it rings and rings. It makes no sense at all.
There must be some way to find him. Of course there is. She has always been resourceful, she can track him down, even if he is in Israel. But if she has to try too hard, perhaps it’s the universe’s way of telling her this isn’t to be. She doesn’t believe in God, but she believes in a natural order, a higher directive, to be gleaned and mulled and acted upon. In this way, she and Manny differ. His desires remain inert, stuck in his heart. There is a word for this, a beautiful word that unfurls from the tongue: velleity. The weakest form of volition. A mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it. This has never been her way. But the time must be right. Needs must be aligned. Perhaps they were misaligned in the past, perhaps that was why their relationship fell apart. This time, she is determined, it will not fail.
The days billow in and out. Every afternoon the clouds circle in from the mountains, hunker down over Cuenca, drop their rains before whisking away. The sun reappears, the pavement dries in patches. From her office window she looks out on the neighboring rooftops, where puddles disappear before her eyes. Week after week she watches the rains, each drop a flash of light as it touches down, blip, blip-blip, each blip like the blink of the cursor on her computer screen, and she is mesmerized, the patterns like a code, and then the puddles dry up before her eyes.
And then once more it’s Essy’s birthday, and there is a party with five candles and she and Manny take turns swelling with pride. How can it be that she loves her daughter even more now than a year ago, when she had already loved her then? But Manny dwindles away, preoccupied. And herself, each time she looks in the mirror a gray hair sprouts, and her body is tired like from treading water.
“So restless,” says Tía Alba.
“And where is there to go?” says Tía Camila. “Even when Sylvia sends her sons away, they come back, you see?” She pats Mami’s shoulder.
Tía Camila has never left the campo.
But Ma. She and Ma are the same. Doers of things. Ma, who gave up her family for true love. Ma, who came to America with one daughter’s hand in her hand and the other safe in her belly. Ma, who worked her way from typist to bookkeeper to actuary, from Third Uncle’s basement into the life of her own choosing. But when Ma appears in her dreams, this is what she says: Xiao-mei, be careful. You are too much American.
• • •
And then one day, at the end of the wet season, it happens.
She dials from the office and the connection is crackly, but it is his energy she feels, trickling into her ear. He is there, even before his voice surges through.
“Where are you?” she says.
“New Jersey,” he says.
“New Jersey?” New Jersey! Not Israel.
“Close to beach. It’s beautiful. Everything is good there?”
She stretches for words. Truthful words. “It’s beautiful here, too.”
“What?”
“It’s beautiful here, too,” she says, but so loudly the words lose their shape.
“Yes. It’s night there now?”
“Yoni, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m thinking of coming to the States.” She has rehearsed this line to quell any sense of urgency. She tosses it, gently: “Maybe I’ll come for a visit.”
As if he were still down at the store, and she a quick train ride away. As if it were a week ago they saw each other last, instead of almost four years.
She tosses it. She waits for it to land.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe I’ll come for a visit. Yoni, can you hear me?”
A click. A pause. No, no, he can’t be gone—she shakes the phone up and down, taps it with two fingers, caresses it, coaxes it—please, come back. And then, he is back again.
“Oh, sure,” he says. “But I’m gonna take a trip soon to Israel. Then maybe someplace out west, Arizona or Montana or Minnesota or something, someplace beautiful. Maybe I’m gonna buy some land, build a house. Then you come visit, I have a big house instead of a little shack!” He laughs, his bighearted laugh.
• • •
You come visit, I have a big house. Oh beautiful words! Everything in these words: Come. Big. Big enough for her. Big enough for Essy. I have. You come. An offering. She can see it, a big white house with a big green yard, a fence, a dog! You come visit. An invitation. A welcome. They had a dog once, a long-haired mutt with a black and tan face. Yoni got it from a shelter on the Upper West Side.
She tells herself it is for the greater good. She believes this is true. If she’s gone, Manny will find someone else. A younger woman, perhaps, who will love him truly, and he deserves this kind of love, just as she does, and it will be easier if she is gone. Essy is young, she will forget quickly. Better now than later, like Nipa said. So she will tell him one night after their daughter is in bed and he is sitting in the kitchen, relaxed, shelling peanuts and watching television. Side by side with a Colombian telenovela, nothing feels like drama. She will say it bluntly. It’s not working out. They fight and bicker all the time, such negative energy in a household is not good for a child. They will discuss like civil adults. He will agree. She can go. She should go. It’s for the best. She will bring Essy to visit, of course. Summers. Holidays. School vacations. She will miss Mami and Fredy. Ricky and Juan and Papi, too, though perhaps not the others. The others are not so kind.
And with that, it is decided. She will go to Yoni. She will take Essy and they will go to him.
• • •
But when she arrives at the casita, the two of them are painting again, adding blue and purple polka dots to the white rabbit on the north-facing side. “Look what Papi did!” her daughter squeals.
No. Oh, no. This, in plain sight: He will not give up the child. He loves the child.
The Vargas house. The clay pot with the curved handle, shattered into a thousand pieces. His breath on her face like a wildfire. His unsteady hands, fumbling with the too-small, too-many snaps of a yellow ducky pajama, the determination in his eyes.
No. No. No. It will not work. Of course she cannot ask to take their daughter. He would never let Essy go. She will have to go alone. If she goes to Yonah, she will go alone.
And then she will visit, of course. Commute. She will make it work. She will see her daughter often. Summers and holidays, months at a time. And Essy will come to Arizona or Montana or Minnesota. Her daughter, a world traveler. She will love America. She will live the best of two lives.
Back in her small bed in her small room above the gringo café, she stares up at the wall, plastered with all her beautiful things. A pink coffee cup. Dewdrops on a morning glory. A pair of Venezuelan waterfalls. Well, she could jump on an airplane. This very minute. She could go see those waterfalls. Or someday, she could see them with Yonah.
But the next morning she is once again mired in ambivalence. The heat in her nerves like live wires. She must shake this off. She must go to him. She’ll figure out the rest somehow.
Back in the campo, her daughter, down by the river, hurling mud pies with Fredy, or barefoot, screeching, catching fish with a net. Headstrong, independent, fearless, free. At dinner, sweet, helping Mami set out the dishes. Essy, at age five, already starting to read. She turns away, bites her lip.
I will go and come back. It won’t be long, hija.
Her daughter is smart. And blissfully happy in the campo.
• • •
She sits with her thoughts on the chicken bus. She know
s the drivers by now, the mud, the potholes, the stretches of road where she must hang on tight. She knows how to pack light—her notebook, a pen, raincoat rolled into a little ball—to keep her canvas backpack in her lap at all times, attached to her belt loop by a silver carabiner. She knows to carry her identification separately, in a flat pouch safety-pinned to the inside of her pants, to sit in the front, as close as possible to the driver, to keep a small amount of cash on hand—for candy, for fruit, enough to appease a lazy hoodlum. Three times in her life she has been pickpocketed—in a nightclub in Panama, a bus in Peru, on the A train to Queens during rush hour. Twice she has been mugged—a thin gold chain wrenched from her neck at the West Fourth subway station, a purse snatched off her shoulder at a noodle stall in Hanoi.
She has learned to be cautious, but it is not true to her nature.
So it is unexpected, when she is jarred awake from a gentle doze to find the point of a butcher’s knife six inches from her face.
Blood, pooled to her feet. Stomach dropped like a sack to the floor. She feels cold. Freezing cold. Muscles in shock, useless. She controls her bladder, mostly.
Only her head feels light. Hollow. Emptied, with the exception of a single thought rising up toward the ceiling: No, no. Please, I have a young daughter.
She gives up her belongings. Her canvas backpack, a small sum of cash. A brown paper lunch bag with a Tupperware of beef stew, which is violently chucked to the ground.
The masked men move on, methodically working their way down the aisle like a pair of flight attendants collecting trash. Then they hop off the bus, gone.
“My notebook . . .” she says.
From the bus station her feet carry her straight to the office, where she huddles in the safety of familiar faces, where the interns rush to her side, all sympathy and indignation.
“Oh my God.”
“Are you all right?”
“Have you gone to the police?”
“What did the bastards look like?”
