Tú me robaste el corazón como un criminal, the song went. You stole my heart like a criminal. I didn’t want to listen. The earth churned in my stomach. That curly-haired boy was rooted in my belly like a son in his mama’s heart.
I needed him out. I turned on the faucet as far as it would go, so the sound of running water would carry him away.
I kneeled at the toilet and shoved two fingers down my throat till I gagged. Farther. It hurt. I threw up.
I forgot because I could. I’d never be a mother. I didn’t want to be a mother.
I went back to the faucet, eyes down. I put my hands, then my arms under the stream of water. I took them out, then stuck my face under, and my smarting eyes, which I was finally able to close. The water was healing. I relaxed. I pulled my head out from under the water, turned off the faucet, groped around for a towel, and slowly, as if stroking a burned body, dried myself off. I walked out.
Hernán asked me what was wrong, like he’d seen a ghost.
“Nothing,” I said. “Slept like shit.”
He was quiet. I don’t think he believed me, but he didn’t say anything else.
Cri cri minal had ended, and I decided I didn’t want to listen to music. I felt bad for Hernán, but I just couldn’t. I went to the PlayStation and switched it off.
“I can leave if you want,” he said with wide eyes.
I bit my lip. I browsed the stack my brother kept by the PlayStation, grabbed a sleeve, picked it up.
“Why don’t you teach me how to game instead?”
Round 1 Fight flashed onscreen, and I started.
Hernán insisted I couldn’t fight if I kept laughing, and since I wanted to win I tried not to laugh. At first, I pressed the buttons as fast as I could. But instead of taking cover, my character kept leaping back, and Hernán cracked up.
“Check out the moves list,” he said.
Huh.
“What moves list?”
“Finish this round and I’ll show you.”
I was up against Sheeva. Her body was dark, and she had six brawny arms to fuck me up with. Her bra, like every female character in Mortal Kombat, showed her tits. I’d gone for Sub-Zero, a dude. I liked not needing to worry about having a huge rack, even in a videogame. I’m a twig.
“Hand it over,” Hernán said once I beat Sheeva. “Check this out.”
He pressed a button and a list of special moves popped up on the screen. Forward—Forward—Punch. Forward—Forward—Kick. That sort of thing. And all the way at the bottom, fatalities.
I returned to combat. This time, against Raiden. I got in a few kicks and he immediately poured down on me. I tried out a few special moves. I felt happy for the five seconds it took Sub-Zero’s hands to fill with ice before he hurled that deadly chill at his opponent, freezing him stiff. Then, I hit Raiden from up close and his body shot backward and smashed on the ground.
Raiden sprung up to retaliate and I pressed start.
“It doesn’t count if you pause the game all the time,” Hernán said. I reminded him he had insisted I use the moves list.
“I haven’t figured even half of it out yet,” I retorted, pressing start again and pausing the game.
“You’re such a cheat,” he said, and we laughed.
“Last time, I’m ready now,” I promised, even though it was a lie.
“I can see that,” said Hernán and he laughed. “You’re so bent on winning, you’re not learning how to play.”
I feigned anger so as not to admit he was right. But I kept going back to the list of moves. I practiced one on the joystick and felt like I was finally getting it. I was ready, I pressed start. I went up to Raiden and tried the combo. This time, it worked. The slugging he took drained his health and the words FINISH HIM! flashed onscreen. Raiden wobbled centerstage and I ended him.
For a time after Mamá died, I was convinced Tía and Walter would die too. I didn’t really care about Tía but it fucked me up to picture my brother dead. I would hide away and cry for hours. Then, I started to think of how I could die too, and hard as I might try I couldn’t picture it. Instead, I imagined a dog dragging one of its legs. The dog got sicker and sicker from a tumor in her spine, and I imagined her limping with her leg towed behind her, down the highway, around the neighborhood, and through our front door, her leg progressively mangled by the ground. The tumor grew, like tits on a girl. Thinner and thinner, the dog lost both her appetite and the desire to move. I pictured her wasting away against the property gate and, in her flesh, glimpsed my own death.
Raiden was dead and I was jumping around like a nutso. Hernán too. We hugged. Just as he was about to kiss me on the lips, Walter walked in.
I’d been at the PlayStation for two weeks. At first, I had a hard time choosing between music and games. Then, I figured it out: games at night and music when I went to bed.
It was Sunday and Walter didn’t have work. I was happy ’cause it was the first time he was letting me play with everyone. I ran through the moves in my head. I had a pretty good grasp on the ones for Sub-Zero, Sonya, and Raiden. The others, hardly at all.
Whenever somebody came through, they would start at the fridge, where they left a couple of beers. Everybody did the same. Then, they headed into the room for a spot. There wasn’t space for another soul. There were kids on the bed, the floor, on my brother’s bench, kids standing around clutching beers—the room was slammed.
“Sit your ass on my pillow and that’s the last thing you’ll do,” Walter said.
Hernán hadn’t arrived yet. Though at first I pretended not to mind, I really wanted him to show already. Two weeks of practicing together and today was the day he decided to skip out?
But there he was. He said hi to everybody and held something up for us to see.
“It was at the entrance,” he said. “It’s heavy as fuck.”
“It’s probably the Iglesia Universal paper,” my brother said from the floor where he sat by the door.
Hernán headed to the bed. He wound his way through several people to get to me.
“Look,” he said, handing it over.
Everybody stared at me, and I, surrounded by all those boys, took the package and pretended it was nothing.
“What’s up?” Walter asked.
I didn’t answer. I got off the bed and tiptoed through the legs of the folks on the floor on my way out the door. Hernán took my seat. There were people in every room, so I headed to the bathroom. My brother slipped in behind me, then looked at me. I lifted the package so he could see how fat it was. Walter told me to open it. He shut the door, pressing his weight against it to stop people coming in.
I held the package. I could tell they had weighted the bottom, carefully fastening the package so it wouldn’t come open. As I cut the thread with my teeth, I couldn’t help catching my reflection in the mirror, biting and baring my teeth. I didn’t like it at all. I sealed my lips. Tried to fix my hair, to look more like myself. I tugged at the thread and eyed my reflection again.
I opened the envelope. Inside was a newspaper. I scanned the pages till I came across one with the words “thank you” scrawled in red marker pen and, circled in the same color, a news article: “Runaway Veterinarian Sole Suspect in Murder of Special Needs Teen.” It was the man I’d seen. Except he wasn’t wearing his green coveralls. He looked much younger in the paper, like the photo was taken before he had become Ian’s father.
Inside the newspaper was a load of cash. I didn’t want to count it, so my brother took it from me.
I stared at the man’s photo. I knew they’d probably published his name in the paper, but I didn’t want to read it. I looked at the photo from up close, searched for something in his eyes, but they were only that: two eyes that expressed nothing. Would anyone remember what he had been like before he became a father? I had only seen him after.
Walter slowly counted the money. When he finished, he said:
“Damn . . . It’s a shitload. Enough for a PlayStation 4.” Neithe
r of us laughed.
In the paper was also a black-and-white photo of Ian. He wasn’t smiling either, his eyes angled upward. If I could’ve been beside him and followed his gaze, I thought, I would most likely have found that he was staring at nothing, at least nothing I could see. Beneath the photo: “His body was discovered in . . .” but I didn’t want to read on.
I closed the paper and handed it to Walter.
A few days later, we lost our phone line.
We didn’t miss it. Sometimes I thought there was nothing we missed anymore, that we could adapt to anything so long as we, my brother and me, were together.
We didn’t miss the phone ’cause we hardly ever called anybody and hardly anybody ever called us. Our friends just dropped in; the rest steered clear. The week after we got the package, the phone rang a lot. Whenever one of us answered, a voice said:
“You’re gonna scream, bitch.”
My brother got sick of it and cut the line with a knife. Ta-da, no more phone.
For the first few days, my brother skipped work and stayed with me.
Which was even worse.
Walter was leery of cell phones, the front door, the cars that rolled past, even the handful of zombies that crept up our block after a night out. Everything was on lockdown. Us and the house, in the dark all day long.
I wanted Hernán to come by. Whenever he did, Walter stood his ground and didn’t let us get a word in without him listening. So Hernán would just eat and drink a bunch of crap and come up with an excuse to leave.
One afternoon, you could slice the air with a knife. I opened the door and sat on the floor without venturing out. Walter said nothing.
As a storm brewed outside, I started to cry. My brother sat beside me. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d watched the rain together, if that was something we ever did. I looked up at the sky, then at the droplets battering our land. It was like the rain swept everything away.
The next day was a Friday and the night was thick with kids.
Hernán came through early. He was twitchy. I don’t think he could put up with my brother anymore either, which was painful to watch. I wanted them to stay friends.
As the boys trickled in, my brother went back to his usual self.
And for a few hours, the rest of the world melted away.
We played like we used to when we were little kids, unworried, wanting only to win.
Then, around one, a boy came through. Said there was a car parked by the gate. I thought Walter would tell us to stay put, indoors, locked up, but he and Hernán wanted to check it out right away, like they’d agreed on it beforehand. The rest of us abandoned the PlayStation, walked out of the room, followed them to the door. Not two minutes passed before we heard screaming. We couldn’t see anything, so we all stepped outside.
“No, not you,” my brother yelled as soon as he saw me. “Back inside.”
Till that moment I’d had eyes only for him and Hernán. Then I turned my head and glimpsed the car. That’s when I saw the guy. It was dark out and he wasn’t in green coveralls, but it was him. His eyes. Though his son couldn’t follow or focus his eyes on anything for more than thirty seconds, the father’s eyes could pierce bodies. Fear enveloped me and left me frozen in the front yard of my house. I tried to go inside but couldn’t move.
How was I seeing him? I thought of the vision and wondered if I’d seen him with the same eyes that looked at him now or with some other part of my body.
Still staring, he turned on the engine and pulled out a gun. There was no time. All I knew was I didn’t want to watch him kill me. I turned around and heard gunshots, the revving car, and my breath, my furious heart, my body springing to life.
One of the bullets struck the water tank and water rained from the roof. My brother touched me. It was dark and we could barely see. I had the urge to hug him. Slowly, as if thawing out, we began to move.
I turned to face the street. The car was gone but I still wanted to have a look.
I don’t know if he was a bad shot or if he hadn’t wanted to kill us. Either way, he missed.
Walter was saying it’s all right, the guy’s gone, that he could remember the car and would go talk to the cops. He told me to stay inside, to play a game or listen to some music, that he’d take care of everything. Unlike my brother, Hernán was quiet and distant.
Walter led me inside by the arm. We saw a huge bullet hole over the doorway. Nobody breathed a word.
As the sun rose, I drifted off. I didn’t hear my brother leave, but we’d agreed he should file a report with the cuffs. Even if we didn’t like it one fucking bit.
I slept like in a coma and woke up late feeling like I’d been hit by a train. There was no water and my brother was asking his buddies to go to the junkyard with him for a new tank. They all said yeah, they’d help him buy it, bring it home, it was no bother. But when Walter asked them to keep me company—he didn’t want to leave me alone—they all went quiet. So my brother took a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed it to them, and they said they’d handle it, that’s what friends were for, they’d hit the junkyard and be back in no time. They’d help him change the tank too.
Once they had left, Walter looked at me and said:
“We’re on our own again, lil sis. Just the two of us. Can’t blame them.”
I was quiet. I didn’t expect anything from anyone either.
If it wasn’t their fault, whose was it? My body’s? I couldn’t change what my body saw.
I went to the bathroom and peed. Then I scrubbed my face, trying not to check my reflection in the mirror.
When I came out, it was just Walter and me. He put the kettle on. Tried to get us to buck up. We didn’t talk about it, but I knew he was right. We were alone because of what I saw.
Hernán had left in the morning. He didn’t even take his joystick. No kiss, no chau, nothing. As I smoked and stared out at the street, I knew I couldn’t expect his music to come back through that door.
Part Two
The sun dried everything that yesterday’s rain had turned to puddle and mud, wiping away the footprints of those who were gone: Mamá, our old man, Tía, Hernán, all of them leaving single file like those ants that, no matter how much you set them on fire, keep building their homes underground, where there’s no green nor sunshine and where Florensia’s flesh was turning to bone.
The grass was overrun with weeds. The bay laurel was out of control and grew wherever it pleased. A thousand seedlings that, struck by the sun, shot up and bent the wire around our land like cardboard.
Some plant or other had gotten stuck to the corrugated iron wall and rotted into a stain on the side of the house. Above, passionflower, like in the properties around the abandoned line. Once it blossomed, the flower buzzed with bees hypnotized by the cross at its center, by its dampness and gummy filaments.
If my hair keeps growing, I thought, I can become a wild and strong-legged plant too, daughter of the bay laurel.
No one had yanked me out in time; there I was now, on the stoop, hugging my legs.
Someone tossed a piece of paper over the property fence and I followed it with my eyes. They didn’t care to clap or call out, too scared to even say my name. The wind whipped the paper across the tall grass. “GOD LOVES YOU,” it read and I wished the wind would take it away from there, past the wire fence, which was as far as I went barefoot. There were no voices anymore to say: “Your feet are trailing muck.”
“You’ve got mud in your teeth and fingers,” said the mother of my classmate, Florencia, when she decided to stop letting her hang out with me.
Others didn’t have the guts to come through the gate and instead would leave their loved one’s earth in bottles. They’d leave a card, too, and slung around the bottleneck, a name. I took the bottles and arranged them in the plants. The sun glinted off them. Whenever it rained too heavily, the water crept inside and overflowed, mixing their earth with mine.
Every bottle was a morsel of earth
that could speak.
Marta, Florensia’s mother, did come past the gate. It’d been years since I’d seen her. She barged in like she owned the place. She wanted to pay for “the appointment,” she said.
“No, Marta. I can’t take your money.”
As we stepped into my house, I didn’t mention to Marta—who thought she was all that ’cause she and Florensia went to church on Sundays, her girl blonde and promising as a red paper wasp—that I had missed her daughter after she stopped letting her come over.
The thing is, I saw Marta’s eyes. Pure dark circles from crying.
We went in so that I could sit down and she could park her fat ass on the tiny sofa of my “suite,” and so that I could eat the earth she had brought with her out of the palm of her hand and so that she could ask, always nosing around, always in a rush:
“What do you see? What do you see?”
A car drove past blaring corazón de seda, que no lo tiene cualquiera and I thought of Florensia’s clothes, which weren’t as tattered as her skin, and of Florensia, down there, like the roots of our land’s plants and the stubborn ants marching down their tunnels.
Marta wouldn’t shut up. She was starting to get on my nerves. She thought she was better than everybody ’cause the only blonde head in the barrio belonged to her Florensia and—in church, made of plaster—to baby Jesus.
“What do you see? What do you see?”
I had to gather strength to open my eyes and say:
“Settle down, Marta. I see a lot of light.”
I had never cried with eyes shut. I saw Florensia, maggot-ridden like a sickly heart, her hair a spiderweb peeling off her skull.
“Settle down, Marta, seeing hurts my eyes. She’s fine. Her hair looks like it’s catching the sun.”
Eartheater Page 3
