by Laura Resau
I felt him staring at me. I dared to turn my face toward his. Tears were spilling out of his eyes. I wiped the tears from his face, and then, very easily, our faces moved together and we tasted the salt on each other’s cheeks, each other’s lips.
Mi Amor Is Gone
We kissed in the meadow for a long time. I touched the curve of his cheekbones, the muscled ripples of his shoulders, the dip where his hips met his waist. I had the feeling that I’d landed in a lush forest, a miraculous place that I needed to explore, down to every tree hollow and flower petal, because tomorrow it would all be gone.
We stayed together until just before dawn, when it grew cold and damp. The chickens woke up and the birds started chirping, threads of the world weaving themselves into a new day. We walked back to the room, hand in hand, and kissed again.
After he went to his mattress, I slipped back under the covers, wide awake, still feeling his hand slide over my shoulder, as though he were sculpting it. The particular smell of him stayed in my hair. And the taste of his skin, salty and smooth, lingered in my mouth.
A short time later, Abuelita got up, then Dika, and then there was motion behind the sheet, and Mr. Lorenzo appeared, and then Ángel. I stayed on the mattress and watched him walk by. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, a small gift to me. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, tired and happy and sad all at once.
Within an hour, we were in the kitchen, sipping coffee, hovering over a tattered map spread out on the table. Mexico was a giant white funnel that curved to the east and narrowed at Oaxaca, then widened again into Chiapas. After Chiapas came Guatemala, the pale yellow of summer squash.
Mr. Lorenzo moved his thick, soil-covered finger from Huajuapan along a black line down to Oaxaca City, then farther south, toward the blue Pacific Ocean, and along the coast to Tapachula, the border town. “We’ll catch a pickup truck to Huajuapan later this morning,” he said. “Then we’ll have lunch and buy food for the ride, and then take the evening bus. That way we’ll get there the next morning so we can cross the border in daylight.”
I glanced up from the map. “Why does that matter?”
Mr. Lorenzo cleared his throat and kept staring at the map. “Well, just a precaution. It’s safer in the day. Not as many bus-jackings.”
“Bus-jackings?” Dika cried.
“We’ll be fine, mi amor. During the daylight it’s safe, more or less.”
Dika did not look convinced.
Mr. Lorenzo patted her knee, then moved his finger from Tapachula farther down across the beige borderline. “Next we cross into Guatemala and take a few local buses to here.” He pointed to a space empty of marked roads, not far from the border, near a place called Tecún Umán. “Here is San Juan,” he said. “Our town.”
I saw nothing but yellow space, and for some reason, this made my stomach tighten. I looked at Ángel. He was sitting with Pablo on his lap, whispering to him and staring at me, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “I don’t see any town there,” I said.
Mr. Lorenzo shrugged. “Our town is not big enough for this map.”
“But how will you know where to go?” My voice sounded suddenly shrill, as though Dika had possessed me. “I mean, what if the roads have changed?”
“We’ll ask people,” he said. “No problem.” He took Dika’s pudgy hand in his. Her nails were candy purple, like grape-flavored bubble gum. She must have brought along a collection of nail polish. I was sure that yesterday her nails had been sparkly pink.
“And then, a week later,” Mr. Lorenzo continued with a grin, “I will come back to my girlfriend.” He gazed at Dika and she clung to him like a heroine on the cover of a cheesy romance novel.
None of us ate much of breakfast—the beans and tortillas and salsa felt stuck in my throat. And next thing I knew, the pickup truck was rumbling up the road and we were running out with Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo and their bags, flagging it down. The truck idled in a cloud of dust while Mr. Lorenzo kissed Dika goodbye and climbed on with his suitcase. Then Ángel pulled me to him and planted a long kiss on my lips, right in front of everyone. For a moment he looked hard into my eyes and I looked back. Then he gave Pablo a hug and hopped into the back of the truck with his backpack and duffel bag.
The truck pulled away in a puff of exhaust. Dika patted me on the cheek. “Ha! Finally! You take my advice!”
I didn’t tell her it was too late. Instead I said I was taking a walk to the stream, and I managed to hold back the tears until I was out of sight. I headed into the patch of woods, where Pablo had said the spirit people live. The duendes. I was glad the duendes wouldn’t let anyone cut down these trees. The light filtered through the leaves, making wavy patterns on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught flashes of light dancing like spirits. At the stream, reflections bounced off the water onto the undersides of fallen trees and branches, leaves and water and light moving, never the same from one moment to the next.
I took off my shoes and stepped from rock to rock. They were solid and cool beneath my feet, and the rhythm comforted me somehow, the focus on taking one step after another.
Then Pablo appeared. He must have followed me. I wiped the tears off my face and hoped it wasn’t too blotchy.
“Estás triste, Sophie?” Pablo asked. Are you sad?
“Sí, principito. I’m sad.”
“But you shouldn’t be sad.”
“Why?”
“Because Ángel told me to take care of you and make sure you’re not sad.”
“Big responsibility for a little boy.”
“He said if I take care of you, he’ll bring me a slingshot and show me how to shoot lizards and we can make lizard tacos.”
I felt angry that Ángel would get Pablo’s hopes up, making a promise he didn’t plan to fulfill. But then, a flicker of hope. “When did he say he’d be back?”
“One week.”
“When did he tell you about the present?”
“Right before he left on the bus. When he hugged me.”
Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was coming back. I would have a long week ahead.
“Sophie?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you read me a poem?”
Dika was melodramatic about Mr. Lorenzo’s being gone. Still, she had no doubt he would come back. She knew he was hopeless and helpless as a devoted puppy without her. “Oh!” she cried every few minutes, placing her hand theatrically over her great bosom. “Oh! Mi amor is gone! Oh, I feel lonely! Oh, I miss him!”
I stayed at a quiet distance from everyone else. I stripped the corncobs, fed chickens, made tortillas, all with barely a word. Whenever “Following the Moon” came on, my eyes got watery, and I walked up the path past the outhouse to a clump of white bell-shaped flowers that Abuelita called Reina de la Noche—Queen of the Night—and looked over the valley.
Once, on the trail above the outhouse, I nearly tripped over Ñola. Her eyes were open. Usually she laughed when I almost stepped on her, but this time she looked at me with her clouded eyes and said something in Mixteco. She repeated it. Over and over. Cuaá nanducuvé. She flicked her wrist as though she were brushing something away. Then she started to get up, and I helped her. She plucked a large white flower from the Queen of the Night plant and handed it to me. “Cuaá nanducuvé,” she said, and then inched her way down the path.
I spread open the petals and found, inside, another flower forming, a smaller flower, tender still, and curled up in itself. I pressed my nose into the flower, and inhaled its sweet, musky scent.
Heavy Things, Sharp Things, Blood
At sunset, Pablo and I walked through the empty streets toward the village chapel. It was perched on the top of a hill, a forty-five-degree incline that left me breathless. Pablo darted back and forth between me and the turkeys pecking at the roadside. He had a special bond with all fowl, it turned out. Somehow he could distinguish one turkey from another, even though they all looked alike to me.
“Do yo
u know how lucky you were to end up with a family in downtown Tucson who has chickens?” I asked.
He nodded.
“It’s a sign,” I said. Mom had told me not to pressure him. So I just repeated, looking straight at him, “It’s a sign, Pablito.” We reached the top of the hill, paused to catch our breath. Abuelita used to come here every morning at dawn to pray for Pablo. Now Pablo had asked me to come with him to pray for Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel. Pablo wanted to pray to the Virgin, too—talk to his mother and father through her. I liked the idea. Closure, wasn’t that what it was called? To say goodbye and move on with life.
We stepped into the church’s cool shadows and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. In an alcove near the altar was la Virgen de Nieves—the Virgin of Snows—which was a strange name because it never snowed here. She wore a white lacy dress shaped like an upside-down cone, and a sky blue veil with silver glitter in flower patterns. The aunts said that this church was built on top of a sacred Mixtec site for Cociyo, the god of the waters. I imagined people trekking up the hill to thank him for rain and ask for more rain, until sometime after the Spaniards came, when the god was forgotten, his water freezing into tiny crystals of snow. Now the Virgin of Snows had replaced him, and maybe someday she would transform and become water again. The substance was the same, the form different.
The church was empty except for one woman praying in the third pew. Pablo and I tried to walk quietly, but our footsteps echoed off the stone walls. The eyes of the statues of saints seemed to follow us. Each had its collection of candles, firelight flickering over their faces, animating their eyes.
Pablo held a little paper bag of candles we’d bought.
“Go ahead,” I whispered. “Light one, Pablito.”
“This one’s for Mamá and this one’s for Papá,” Pablo said solemnly in Spanish. “Now, this one’s for Ángel and this one for Mr. Lorenzo.” With the flames of other candles, he lit his candles, melted their bases, and placed them in the pools of wax, his mouth half open in concentration. Then he knelt again and folded his hands in front of his chest.
I said a vague, silent prayer for Ángel to be safe and come back to me. I had never prayed to a Virgin before. But Virgins and spirits were important to Pablo and Ángel. The midwife who delivered Ángel had told him that if you need something done fast, the best strategy is to pray to the Virgin. She tells her Son what to do, and Jesus does it. That’s the chain of command; mothers have the real power. I imagined the Holy Mother hearing my prayer and nagging Jesus about it over dinner in heaven: Have you been protecting Ángel? You’d better get on that, Son.
I sat on a bench two rows behind the woman. Pablo was still kneeling in front of the Virgin, his lips moving, his hands crossing his forehead, his chest, his mouth. When he finished, we left the darkness of the church through huge wooden doors.
The sky had gone from pale golden to the hues of blackberry and cherry and mango, all melting into one another. Pablo had stored-up energy to burn after being quiet in a church for fifteen minutes. He ran into the weedy graveyard and raced around the gravestones decorated with plastic soda bottles cut in half and filled with red carnations. Turkeys meandered around the wooden crosses, pecking at offerings of food that had been left there. He wove in and out of their paths while they eyed him cautiously at first, then went about their business. Finally, he circled back to me.
“Sophie, guess what?”
“What?”
“I telled my mother the poem.”
“What poem?”
“I tell her, Mamá, I’m carry you heart in my heart.” Then he switched to Spanish. “¡Mira! Watch how fast I can run, Sophie.” He ran down the hill, his little legs moving impossibly fast, his arms flailing over his head, his mouth in a wide-open smile, calling out, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” until his voice faded and he was a faraway splotch of red.
They were supposed to be back Monday morning. One week, that’s what they’d said. On Sunday, I washed all my clothes in the cement basin outside. On Monday, I put on the white cotton sundress and the coconut necklace and bracelet. I brushed my hair and braided it carefully in two braids.
By sunset, they still hadn’t come. Dirt smudges and salsa stains flecked my dress. I’d been preparing for the idea that Ángel wouldn’t come back. But I thought at least Mr. Lorenzo would.
Unless they’d found Ángel’s mother.
“Oh, mi amor! How I miss him! How worried I am!” Dika moaned in Spanish over coffee and sweet rolls Monday night.
“Something probably held them up,” I said, unconvinced. “I’m sure they’ll be here tomorrow.”
Dika nodded. “Perhaps they missed the bus.”
Before bed, I washed the white dress. As I hung it on the clothesline to dry for the next day, Pablo came out with his toothbrush and toothpaste. He neatly squeezed out the toothpaste—the all-natural stuff that Mom always got—and began brushing.
His mouth overflowing with foam, he asked, “Are you sad again, Sophie?” He spoke in Spanish.
“Yup.” I tried to ruffle his hair, but he squirmed away. Lately, he seemed to be getting vain about his hair. Some of his cousins wore hair gel already, and they weren’t much older than Pablo. “You know, principito, you should be speaking English to keep in practice for school.”
He shrugged and asked me in Spanish, “Why are you sad?”
“Because I miss Ángel. And I don’t know if he’s coming back.”
“Why don’t you go get him?”
Toothpaste was dribbling from his chin onto his shirt, but he looked so serious I didn’t mention it. “I can’t.”
He spit out his toothpaste and scooped a cupful of water from the cistern. I’d tried to make him use purified water, but he’d insisted this was how he’d always done it. He swished it in his mouth and spit onto the mud, then wiped his sleeve over his face. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to see me. And it’s far away. And I’ve never gone somewhere like that alone.” I twisted my ring around my finger. The moonstone in silver that Mom and Juan had given me for my fifteenth birthday, along with my e. e. cummings book of poetry. That night I’d underlined “and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant,” and I thought, Someday I’ll discover the one to tell this to.
Pablo looked thoughtful, as though he was considering all angles of my answer. Finally he said, “But you’re a big person.”
“Well, sort of.”
“So you can do anything.”
Tuesday morning and afternoon passed, without even a phone call. Dika was fretting. She was sure something must have happened. That a thief had hijacked their bus and killed them. That they’d gotten in an accident or been kidnapped.
That night, I climbed up the trail in my dirty dress, past the outhouse, and stood next to the Queen of the Night. It smelled strong; something about the darkness released a mysterious, sweet scent. I let myself cry for a while.
When I was little and felt sad, Juan would put his arm around me and tell me one of his tales. It always made me feel better hearing how the scrawny heroine gets swallowed by some creature—like an elephant or wolf or whale—and then, right when she thinks all is lost, she discovers that the creature’s gut is actually a passage to another world. Instead of dying in the belly of the whale, she’s reborn. And this time there’s nothing scrawny about her.
I took another whiff of the flower, then walked down the path to wash my dress again in the dark.
Wednesday morning I still clung to some hope. I put on the sundress, now clean and white again, and braided my hair.
Embarrassingly, Dika was primping herself, too. She had grown louder in her panic as I had grown quieter. “¿Donde están?” she screeched at breakfast on Wednesday. Where are they? She threw her spoon on the table. “I have had it! I am going to Guatemala to find them.”
“Tranquila, comadre,” Abuelita murmured.
But Dika did not get tranquil. You could almost see smoke shooting out
of her ears. “I am going to get them!”
“But, Dika,” I said. “They said it was dangerous, remember?”
“Danger! Don’t talk to me about danger. I have been in danger. And now I am scared of nothing!” She ripped into a roll with her teeth.
“Dika, listen.” There was no easy way to say this. “Maybe they don’t want to see us. Maybe they want to stay.”
“Ha!” she snorted. “You know very little of men.”
But she was quiet after that. Only the crackle of the hearth fire in the corner, the muffled squawking of chickens outside. There was an insecurity in her eyes. And she didn’t start packing.
Wednesday night I couldn’t sleep. Dika couldn’t either. Neither could Abuelita, probably because of all our turning over, sighing, adjusting the covers. Even Ñola was murmuring more than usual in her sleep.
I whispered across the room to Dika, “Maybe you’re right. I mean, they at least would have called us. Maybe something happened.”
“I ask to my comadre,” she said, propping up on her elbow. “Psst, comadre,” she called, her face a few inches from Abuelita’s.
Abuelita opened her eyes. She didn’t seem startled to see Dika’s face looming so close. “¿Qué pasa, comadre?”
“We are worried about mi amor and his son.”
Abuelita heaved herself off the mattress and turned on the bare lightbulb. She buried her head in a crate of fabric scraps and clothes and came up with a small box, smaller than Ángel’s, and made of old dented tin. She cleared the wooden table and spread out a white cloth, just as she had done for the limpia.
“Bring the chairs around,” she said.
She lit candles inside glasses and put them on the table and turned off the light. She opened the box and poured out a tiny heap of dried corn kernels. She looked at them with reverence. “The corn will tell me why the men aren’t back yet.”
