Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Emma’s cell phone rang while she was shaking her hands dry. She always turned away when she answered it, Pao had noticed, covering as much of the Wonder Woman case as she could, like it might offend her and Dante by being so shiny and expensive-looking.

  Pao didn’t have a phone of her own. It was just sort of understood that her mom couldn’t afford anything but the army-green landline that hung on the kitchen wall, and Pao didn’t dare ask—even though there was a constellation-tracking app she would have loved to try….

  At least Dante could relate. His abuela probably didn’t even know what a smartphone was, much less appreciate the benefits of having one. And it wasn’t like she was rolling in money either.

  “Dinnertime,” Emma said with a grimace when she hung up. She swung her leg over her purple mountain bike that, according to Dante, “screamed Colorado.”

  “See you tomorrow?” Pao asked her. “You’re bringing the telescope, right?”

  “And you’re bringing the snacks,” Emma replied. “Don’t eat all the pink Starbursts this time.” She pedaled off, kicking up dust on her way west, away from the swampy smell of the summer-low river.

  Pao tried not to envy her too much.

  She and Dante walked away from the lingering glow of the sunset that gilded Emma’s side of town like a blessing. After a mile or so, their own dilapidated apartment complex loomed ahead in silhouette.

  The sun always bails on us first, Pao thought. And wasn’t that fitting?

  The fifteen units of the Riverside Palace apartments (the irony of the name was not lost on Pao) looked like the kind of motel people drove right by. There were two stories, with one sagging staircase right in the middle.

  At one point, there had been sixteen units, but apartment F’s roof had caved in three summers ago and no one had bothered to fix it. F was unoccupied now, of course, but sometimes high schoolers smoked cigarettes in it at night. Whenever Dante’s abuela caught those kids there, she chased them off with her house slipper, yelling curses in Spanish while they sped away laughing on those low-to-the-ground bikes Pao secretly coveted.

  Unit B was empty, too, its dark windows drawing Pao’s eye as always. A boy and his parents had lived there until six months ago, when uniformed men had come in a van and arrested them. Pao, Emma, and Dante had witnessed the whole thing while taking turns on Emma’s bike in the parking lot.

  Pao had tried to ask her mom about it, but she had only hugged her tightly and said something about “privilege” that Pao didn’t quite understand.

  No one had rented the apartment since, and Pao often wondered what had happened to the people who had been taken from it.

  The Palace’s stairs, with their peeling sea-green paint and warped railing, were where Pao and Dante always said good night, before he went up and she stayed down. Their apartments, C and K, were stacked on top of each other, separated only by Pao’s ceiling and Dante’s floor.

  Tonight, when they reached the stairs, Pao lifted her hand for their usual high five. Dante slapped it automatically, but he didn’t go up right away. Instead he lingered, gazing down at Pao’s feet until she was all too aware of the mud on her Kmart Converse knockoffs and the chocolate smudge on his chin.

  He’s taller than me, Pao realized. When had that happened?

  “Hey, so I wanted to say…” he began, still looking at her scuffed sneaker toes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, your algae and stuff? I know I give you crap, but I actually think it’s pretty cool. I mean, not the algae,” he clarified quickly. “But, like, just how much you know about it and stuff. That’s cool. So.”

  “Okay,” she said, her cheeks heating up. “Um. Thanks.” Dante had never acted this way with her before. She wasn’t entirely sure she hated it.

  “But seriously, if you ever try to put that gross stuff in my hair again”—he met her eyes, sounding more like his usual self—“I’ll think of something way worse than a gummy worm to stick up your nose.”

  When he smiled, his teeth were bright white against his summer-browned skin. He bumped her shoulder with his as he headed for the stairs, acting all casual and laid-back.

  But the tops of his ears were flushed purple—she could see it as the parking-lot lights flared to life.

  Pao’s curiosity crackled in the wake of Dante’s blush. She wished she could stay outside to mull it over while the evening air cooled around her. But her mom was waiting. As always, Pao lifted her chin and steeled herself before she went inside.

  Time to face the ghost stories.

  When Pao opened the door to apartment C, the smell of incense was overwhelming. That meant her mom was reading tarot. Pao’s steeliness started to buckle. Her mother only consulted the cards when things weren’t going well.

  “Mom! I’m home!” Pao called, dropping her backpack on the living room floor. There had to be fifteen candles burning on the shelf above the serape-covered couch. Green candles, Pao noted. She only burned those when they needed money.

  Well, more than usual, anyway.

  “In here, mijita!” her mom called from the dining room/kitchen, which only took about five steps to reach in their tiny apartment. Pao pasted on a smile as she crossed the threshold, hoping not to notice any other signs of bad news.

  Her mom sat cross-legged in the paisley-upholstered dining chair, her dark hair in a messy bun held with a single chopstick. Her eyes were narrowed at a tarot spread on the weathered kitchen table, incense smoke swirling around her.

  “You know,” Pao said, “if we had a dog, he could bark for help when you pass out from all this incense and one of the candles sets the house on fire.”

  The smoke alarm had stopped working a year ago, but the manager of the Riverside Palace hadn’t responded to multiple requests (from Pao, of course) to replace it.

  Pao’s mom smiled back from the tiny table, but her eyes were tired. “My old-souled baby,” she said, reaching out to squeeze Pao’s hand. “You’ve always been the adult around here.”

  A sadness settled in Pao’s chest. Mom had said it lightly, like a joke, but Pao didn’t think it was funny. They were always speaking to each other in a kind of code, disguising important facts. Pao wished that, for once, they could just talk. That not everything had to be signs and candles and old souls and too-real jokes.

  “Do those cards say anything about what’s for dinner?” Pao asked, trying to hold on to her smile even though the incense smoke was giving her a headache.

  “Oh no,” her mom said. “Is it that time already?” She pushed aside her too-long bangs and looked in disbelief out the glass door to the patio. Twilight was settling over the crowded terra-cotta pots where Pao’s mom grew herbs and flowers.

  Pao tried to quash a feeling of irritation. Had her mom really been so wrapped up in the cards that she didn’t notice the time? It wasn’t like the whole sky-changing-colors thing was easy to miss.

  But of course, her mom didn’t allow clocks anywhere she did divination work. She always said, along with cell phones and microwaves, clocks “messed with the vibe.” Apparently, the ancestors couldn’t get to her through all that “noise.”

  And the ancestors, among other things, protected them from the ghosts.

  Too bad they can’t also protect us from the rent going up, Pao thought. Her mom tried to hide that kind of stuff from her, but Pao trained her observational powers constantly. She didn’t miss the notices with red rectangles around the past-due amounts.

  Pao never would have admitted it out loud, but her mind went immediately to Emma, who was probably sitting down to a meal consisting of multiple food groups right now. Meat and potatoes and something green that her parents would bribe her with ice cream to finish. At Emma’s house, they didn’t have to joke about fire hazards, or who the real adult was.

  As quickly as the thought landed, Pao swatted it away. It wasn’t fair. Mom’s doing the best she can. Plus, they were a team, and Pao didn’t want to know what would happen if either of them beli
eved otherwise. Even for a minute.

  Pao’s mom got up and rummaged in the freezer until she found a Ziploc bag full of Señora Mata’s cheese-and-jalapeño tamales. “I forgot we had these!” she said, turning around and preheating the oven before Pao could check the leftovers closely for freezer burn. “It’ll only be forty-five minutes, okay? Some brain food for your experiments!”

  On her way back to her seat in front of the tarot cards, her mom kissed her on the forehead, which only made Pao feel worse.

  “You know, I’m actually not that hungry anymore,” Pao said, even though she was. Right then, the urge to get out of the incense-filled kitchen and be alone with her guilty thoughts was stronger than the urge to eat.

  Plus, leftover tamales always got all dry and rubbery when they were reheated in the oven, and the cheese ones were her least favorite kind.

  “We ate a lot of junk food this afternoon—I think I feel a stomachache coming on.”

  “Let me get you some peppermint tincture!” her mom offered, turning too fast. Two tarot cards fluttered down like dry leaves in a wind gust.

  “It’s okay, really,” Pao said quickly. “I’m just gonna go lie down.”

  “You sure?” her mom asked. “You know, El Cuco can hear a growling stomach from miles away…. And I’m working late at the bar—I won’t be here to chase him out of your room tonight.”

  Her mom’s face was somber, but the bogeyman story was so juvenile it only made Pao more eager to escape. She hated pitying her own mother—it felt like wearing a shirt that didn’t fit right.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” Pao said. “What kind of monster would want to eat a skinny kid?”

  Pao didn’t know why she had posed that question. It wasn’t like she wanted to hear her mom’s rebuttal….

  But none came. Her mom’s eyes were glued to the floor, probably already drawing some significance from the way the cards had landed under the table.

  On another day, Pao might have jokingly asked if the Tower and the Fool cards meant they could get a dog. But today, for a reason she didn’t fully understand, she just left the room without saying good night.

  Emma’s mom would follow her daughter into the hallway at a time like this. Pao would’ve bet her Celestron beginner’s microscope kit on it. And not just because the microscope was totally inadequate for someone at her skill level.

  But Pao sat on her bed alone, surrounded by the pictures of the SpaceX and Blue Origin launches she’d printed out at the library, the colored ink streaky and dull. Taped to the wall above her desk (which was her grandma’s old sewing table, so it didn’t have any drawers) was last year’s science project on algae farming. She’d won first place without even mentioning the organism’s potential to power rockets.

  Meanwhile, her mom burned candles in search of money to pay bills and thought the right card layout could keep ghosts and monsters away.

  Maybe, Pao thought sleepily, if she had enough algae, she could blast herself right out of this place….

  In her dream that night, Pao walked along the river, and above her was a darkness so absolute it made her shudder.

  A green glow emanated from the water, and as she made her way toward it, she saw silhouetted shapes beneath, passing back and forth in a haunting kind of dance.

  She knelt on the bank, sensing the fabric of the dream bending and shimmering around her. But even as she recognized the surreality, she was excited about finding bioluminescent creatures this close to home. Would they stay still long enough to let her get a good look?

  One of the creatures broke the surface, and Pao leaned closer, mesmerized by the pale grace of it, the long, fingerlike tentacles reaching for the sky.

  But was one of those tentacles wearing Emma’s ring? Heart-shaped and set with a real ruby, it was kind of hard to mistake, even from a distance….

  That’s when Pao realized they weren’t tentacles. It was a hand. A human hand. With fingernails painted a sparkly purple.

  She tried to scramble back from the river’s edge, but the hand grabbed her by the wrist, the ruby ring glinting in the green glow from the water. Pao screamed, a high, hollow sound drowned out almost instantly by an unearthly wailing that kicked up all around her like a gust of wind.

  Pao was pulled farther toward the water’s terrifying depths, her shoes and socks getting soaked as she fought futilely against the hand’s inexorable grip. The crying grew louder.

  It grew louder still as she stumbled and fell to her knees.

  But somehow it was loudest of all when the hand pulled her under the water’s surface.

  Pao woke in a panic, half off her mattress, a scream lodged in her throat.

  It was a dream, she told herself. Just a dream.

  The weird splash she’d seen yesterday—and its weirder lack of ripples—came to mind. It must have seeped into her subconscious.

  Pao pulled out the clandestine, taped-together alarm clock that she kept under her bed. It read 1:15 a.m. A grumble erupted from her stomach, making her think of El Cuco and her mother’s warning. She’d fallen asleep in her clothes—even her shoes.

  Pao breathed deeply, trying to calm her racing heart, focusing on the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling as the dream’s images slowly faded.

  It had been a long time since she’d dreamed of drowning.

  She’d had her first riverbank dream when she was nine. Nothing much had happened in it. But for third-grade Pao, that terrible, utterly dark sky had been enough to make her wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, and send her running to her mother’s room for comfort.

  Throughout the rest of elementary school, she’d had the dreams at least once a week. Her mom had been at a loss. She’d invited curandera friends and other healers to try to purge whatever was haunting Pao, but nothing worked.

  After that, they’d gone to a real doctor’s office, where nurses attached things to Pao’s head and screened her for all kinds of conditions she didn’t have.

  Eventually, Pao was referred to a child psychiatrist—one her mom would never have been able to afford. Pao was midway through fourth grade by then, and even at that age, she noticed the dark circles under her mom’s eyes from being awakened so often, the wrinkles that appeared on her forehead every time the doctor suggested a new treatment or a test their insurance didn’t cover.

  So Pao had stopped running to her mom. She pretended that the dreams had gone away on their own. Over time, they became just another strange part of her life, one she hardly thought about beyond the first few terrifying minutes after she woke up.

  But she’d never dreamed of a disembodied hand before. And definitely not one wearing Emma’s ring…

  When her pulse had returned to its normal resting rate (more or less), Pao shook herself mentally, cursing her mom for telling her scary stories at such a young age.

  There’s no such thing as ghosts, she told her reflection in the window as she kicked off her shoes, even though she looked a little like a spirit herself, pale in the warped glass.

  Hypothermia, cold pockets, submerged branches, invisible currents. Pao recited the true dangers of the river like a mantra. They were a mile away, no threat to her in this quiet apartment. Hypothermia, cold pockets…

  The hallway was empty, the apartment quiet as Pao headed for the kitchen. Her mom always left for her waitressing job at eight thirty, and she didn’t come home until closing time, around two a.m. If anyone asked, Pao was supposed to say that Dante’s abuela watched her at night, and she had for a while. But when she turned ten, Pao petitioned to be allowed to sleep in her own bed, tired of the stiff, uncomfortable sofa at Dante’s.

  Her mom, so concerned with supernatural threats, had been less concerned with real-world things like home invasions and electrical fires and Child Protective Services, and Pao had gotten her wish.

  Strange as her mom’s priorities were, Pao knew she was grown-up enough to keep herself safe. As if to prove the point, she walked through the living room, checkin
g all the incense burners and candle glasses to make sure everything had been extinguished. Tonight, she noted gratefully, they had. Her mom had even remembered to lock the door behind her, though Pao wasn’t sure why. She was pretty sure La Llorona wouldn’t be deterred by anything as pedestrian as a dead bolt.

  Pao didn’t let herself think of the ghostly hand from her dream. Or the wailing. The memories were already starting to fade.

  “If we had a dog, we wouldn’t need to worry about monsters and ghosts,” Pao grumbled, even though there was no one around to hear her perfectly sound argument.

  The Moscow watchdog was widely considered the best breed for home protection, but their large size made them impractical for apartments. Staffordshire terriers were more sensible size-wise, but apartment managers didn’t love their resemblance to the pit bull. There was a perfect breed out there somewhere, Pao knew. She just had to keep looking.

  In the kitchen, she planned to eat cereal from the box until her stomach quieted down, but she found a plate covered by a pot lid. It held two of the three cheese tamales and a note:

  In case you get worried about El Cuco. I love you.

  This time Pao made a conscious decision not to compare the note, or the cold chewy tamales, to what was probably happening at Emma’s house. But even so, disappointment in her own life took up more space in her stomach than the food.

  Pao woke up for the day at ten, her body adjusting to summer vacation much faster than it had ever adjusted to the school-year schedule.

  No more dreams, she noted, satisfied by her brain’s return to reason.

  Her mom would still be asleep, and Pao probably had an hour before Mrs. Chavez showed up for her weekly remedio. Mrs. Chavez had arthritis, and she paid Pao’s mom to ease her pain with tea and salves made from the herbs on the patio.

  The mystery of how her mom always got up on time without a clock was one Pao had accepted she would never solve with science.