Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “I bet that’s it,” Dante said. He didn’t tease her about overthinking it, and he picked up the cracker wrappers without Pao having to lecture him about the river’s delicate ecosystem, so she knew he was worried, too.

  It almost made her feel better.

  They were just turning their backs on the river when Pao saw it: a shadow on the opposite bank. Only a silhouette against the sunset from here, but definitely a person lurking behind some reeds. Is it Emma? Pao wondered, squinting. Maybe she just hadn’t spotted them. But Pao stayed quiet as she pondered, some instinct stopping her from calling out.

  It didn’t take long for her to realize that the shape was larger than Emma, and it wasn’t a girl, either. What was the guy doing? She would have assumed he was fishing if the pesticides in the river hadn’t given all the fish three heads. (Not literally, of course. The toxins in runoff hurt fish by depleting oxygen in the water, but genetic manipulation was, as far as Pao knew, a fantasy.)

  If this were one of her graphic novels, Pao and Dante would go up to the guy and follow him into some surreal situation that would end up with them magically finding their missing friend.

  But this wasn’t a book, and Pao had to admit she was a little freaked by the prospect of talking to a random stranger, even though Dante was with her. “Should we…go find out if he’s seen Emma?” she asked him, wanting to appear braver than she felt.

  “Yeah, right,” Dante said, taking her arm and pulling her away as quietly as possible. “Are you nuts? We’re going home to call her.”

  “Fine,” Pao said, pretending to be irritated. But deep down she was glad he’d given her an excuse to walk away.

  Just before they were out of sight, Pao turned back to look. The sunset was fading, the reeds were still, and the figure was nowhere to be seen.

  Emma’s smartphone went straight to voice mail, but when Pao called her home number, Mrs. Lockwood picked up right away.

  “Emma? Is that you?” her mother demanded. “I’ve been calling your cell for half an hour!”

  Pao’s heart sank as she wrapped the kitchen phone cord around her pinkie, cutting off the circulation. “Mrs. Lockwood?” she said, her voice thin and high. “It’s Pao…Paola. Santiago.”

  Emma’s mom hesitated, and Pao thought she could feel her heart sinking across the line. “What’s wrong, Pao? Is Emma all right?”

  “She…never showed up tonight,” Pao said. “We were calling to see if she was there. We hung around our meeting spot for a while, but…”

  “Oh my God.” There was a muffled “Arthur!”

  Pao waited, her heart racing, as she listened to the sounds of Emma’s parents’ frantic conversation.

  “You never saw her at all?” Mrs. Lockwood asked Pao, her voice suddenly clear.

  “Not since last night,” Pao said.

  “Where was she meeting you? She said you were going to be looking at the stars from your balcony.”

  Pao almost laughed. Only the Lockwoods would believe that Pao’s apartment had a balcony. “We…” She hesitated. They had a pact never to tell their parents about their frequent visits to the river. But Emma was missing. All bets were off, right? Pao exhaled. “We were supposed to meet at the river at six.”

  Dante’s glowing watch face read 7:28, and Pao quickly did the math. If Emma had left her house on time—say, fifteen minutes before the meeting time—she would already have been missing for almost two hours.

  The pause on the other end of the line was louder than any words Emma’s mother had spoken so far. “We’re going to the police station,” Mrs. Lockwood said at last. “Can you join us there?”

  Pao and Dante lived half a mile from the town’s only police station, but neither had ever been inside. There was an unspoken rule in their families: Never involve the cops. Emma’s parents, Pao realized, wouldn’t have to abide by the same rule. They didn’t have to worry about things like authorities doubting their citizenship.

  The two friends tried to look casual as they entered the lobby to wait for the Lockwoods, but they were soon approached by an officer in uniform, his chest puffed out, demanding to know their reason for loitering.

  “We’re meeting someone here,” Pao said, with all the authority she could muster.

  “Uh-huh,” said the mustachioed man, scanning them with watery blue eyes set too close together. “Let me guess. Your deadbeat dad? Or is it your gangster brother?”

  “No, sir,” Pao said as calmly as she could. When Pao and Dante turned ten, her mom had talked to both of them about never, under any circumstances, escalating interactions with the police. Pao was more scared than she’d been at the riverbank, but she stood up straight. “We’re just waiting for our friend’s parents.”

  “Listen to me,” said the officer, pushing closer, backing Pao against the wall. He stared down at them like they were hardened criminals and not a couple of almost seventh graders. “We’ve seen your kind in here before. Trouble, all of you. Now, if you don’t have business with us, you need to get out.”

  “Don’t talk to her like that!” said Dante, stepping forward. “She’s telling the truth!”

  The look in the officer’s eyes went from suspicious to furious, and Pao put up her hands instinctively, drawing his attention back to her. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just…our friend—she’s missing, and her parents asked us to meet them at the station to help file the report or something. We don’t want to cause trouble.”

  Miraculously, the officer took a step back, still scowling but no longer so aggressive.

  Pao’s breathing slowed.

  “Where did your friend go missing?” he asked, his eyes darting to Dante more often than necessary.

  “We’re not sure,” Pao said. “We were supposed to meet her by the river tonight, and she never showed up.” She couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t taking any notes.

  “Tonight?” His tone made it clear he was dismissing her already. “It’s too soon to file a report. Why don’t you try her boyfriend’s house?” He sneered.

  “We’re twelve!” Pao said, wondering whether he would have said the same thing if he knew who Emma was, what she looked like. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend! We were supposed to use her telescope to look at the stars! And we saw someone out there…someone kind of suspicious—”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah,” said the officer. “I know—a weird crying lady on the riverbank, right? Or maybe it was the bogeyman. Or one of those chupacabra things people are always calling in. ¡Dios mío!” He said this last part in an exaggerated Mexican accent, putting his hands on his cheeks in fake dismay. “I’d like to report a ghost estealing my chili peppers.”

  Pao’s hands shook with rage. “It wasn’t a ghost!” she said, trying to keep her tone even. “It was a—”

  But the officer was already turning around. “Have her guardian come in tomorrow morning if your friend hasn’t shown up yet,” he said over his shoulder. “And leave the spooky stuff at home. We have enough going on without being asked to chase ghosts. Now get on out of here.”

  “We never mentioned a ghost!” Pao called after him, but it was too late.

  They had only been in the station for a few minutes, but Pao felt like it had been a year. She walked out into the heat of the night with a thousand thoughts crowding her head. She was worried about Emma. She was frustrated that the cop hadn’t listened to her. But bubbling underneath it all was something worse than the anger she felt toward that police officer:

  Shame.

  Pao stormed toward home, and Dante followed.

  “What about the Lockwoods?” he asked.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Pao asked. “Lurk outside until the cops accuse us of loitering or trespassing? The Lockwoods know everything we know, and nobody cares what we have to say.”

  “But what about that person we—”

  “Dante!” Pao said, her worry colliding with her anger like the ice crystals inside two thunderheads. “Drop it!”

/>   And he did.

  Once they reached Riverside Palace, she barely said good night to him, ignoring his concerned looks and declining his offer to wait with her until her mom got back from work.

  Inside, she couldn’t settle down, the apartment seeming too small and too large all at once. She paced, calculating the time since Emma’s disappearance and the distance she could have traveled by now. If someone had taken her into his car somewhere between her house and the river, and driven off at thirty-five miles an hour, Emma could be anywhere from…

  “Is there a map around here?” Pao asked no one, heading into the kitchen to tear through the drawers. Clogging them were boxes of incense, empty candle glasses, and matches of all shapes and sizes, but of course, no map. Just superstitious garbage that didn’t work, getting in the way, offering no solutions.

  Pao felt powerless. The cop had made a fanciful ghost story out of her straightforward information. He had assumed she was superstitious because of how she looked, who she was.

  And here was all the evidence of her mom’s beliefs. The stories and ghosts and folktales that had given Pao nightmares and made the police officer dismiss her at a critical time.

  The tension that had been simmering between Pao and her mom lately overflowed in her brain now, roiling and boiling and bursting into flame. Pao paced again, glaring at every tall glass veladora—the saint candles her mom broke out when things were really going sideways. Pao resented every string of beads that wasn’t just a necklace, every corner where her mom claimed a spirit had sat while she communed with the tarot cards or tea leaves.

  On the smallest altar stood a glass jar with a white candle inside that was often lit for Pao’s protection. As a little kid, Pao had loved striking the match herself, holding it up to the wick, and imagining a bubble of white light around her, shielding her from anything that could cause harm.

  Pao glared at the offending object, totally devoid of magical properties. It was only a hunk of wax with a string wick. Lighting it was just another way her mom pretended to control the chaos of their lives, and Pao was tired of being the one who didn’t play make-believe.

  Barely breathing, she picked up the jar, the candle’s hopeful wick just waiting for her mom to get home and give it meaning. But there was no meaning in stories, and magic wasn’t any more real than ghosts. What had any of it ever done for them?

  Pao took the candle into the kitchen, where the linoleum floor was scuffed and in need of mopping. She raised her arm, which seemed like it belonged to someone else, and let every heated thought about her mom’s beliefs buzz through her blood before she dropped the jar, watching it shatter satisfyingly at her feet.

  But breaking the candleholder seemed to have broken something in Pao, too, and she was suddenly more exhausted than she’d ever been. She lay down on the couch without sweeping up the pieces of glass.

  In moments, the dark water of her subconscious overtook her, her last dream continuing like she’d never left it behind.

  The river glowed green again, but this time, Pao knew better than to go closer. There was the hand sticking out of the surface, tension in every reaching finger, the ruby ring glinting in the moonlight. Pao’s fear felt so real—a flip-flopping in her stomach—and yet part of her realized it was just a dream as she watched from the shore.

  A silhouette approached—the guy they’d seen at the riverbank, she somehow understood. His face was obscured, blurry even at close range, and when he knelt at the water’s edge, all the bioluminescence seemed to gather in his hands.

  He laughed, an unearthly sound that made the hair rise on the back of Pao’s neck, and though she felt invisible, he turned toward her, his hair dark and pixels where his facial features should have been.

  Just like the Mesa kidnapper. On the news, his hazy, indefinite features had been a result of poor picture quality, but in the dream, it was something else.

  Something…supernatural.

  He held up his palms, and the green glow flared from them, coming toward her in a wave.

  Pao screamed just before the light engulfed everything.

  She woke with a start to the sound of a key in the door. Pao’s heart was pounding, and the green still seemed to radiate all around her. Was she in the living room or at the river?

  Then she remembered everything—Emma, the police officer, the smashed candle, the anger she’d finally let loose.

  Her mom looked exhausted in the cool light of the streetlamp shining through the open door, and, for a moment, Pao’s familiar guilt came back. The feeling that she should love her mom for who she was and not constantly wish she were someone else. But the frustration was there, too, now tinged with fear.

  The desire for her mom to be the grown-up for once was stronger than ever.

  “What are you doing up, mijita? And what—” She stopped as her gaze traveled to the kitchen. “Are you okay?” Panic replaced the exhaustion on her mom’s face, and Pao saw what she must be seeing: her daughter, groggy and laid out on the couch; the glass on the floor. “What happened in here? Did someone break in?”

  “No,” Pao said, sitting up and trying to gather her thoughts, to turn them into something her mom could handle. But she was too tired, and too scared for Emma, so everything she tried to grab just scattered.

  “Paola,” her mom said, her voice going from concerned to stern alarmingly fast. “Tell me what’s going on right now.”

  “First I gotta check the answering machine,” Pao said, waking up fully. She’d been asleep for hours. Maybe Emma had been found by now.

  Pao darted into the kitchen, carefully avoiding the shards of glass. Her mom shouted behind her, “Young lady, you better start explaining yourself right this—”

  But Pao was already returning to the living room, dejected. The light on the answering machine was disappointingly green, not blinking red like it would have been if the Lockwoods had called to say Emma was safe.

  “Paola! Start talking!”

  “Emma’s missing,” Pao said, looking at the ground. “She disappeared tonight. I tried to go to the police, but”—she sighed—“they didn’t believe a word I said.”

  “Querida, what do you mean? The police? Disappeared from where?”

  “Do you want to know why they didn’t believe me, Mom?” Pao’s voice was louder now. Her frustration was winning against her desire to keep the peace.

  “What I want to know is—”

  “Because they think I’m just another superstitious small-town kid raised on El Cuco and La Llorona! Because they think I don’t know what I saw. Because people…” Pao took a deep breath. Was she really going to say it? But Emma was gone and everything was falling apart and something inside Pao was falling apart, too. “Because people like you talk about ghosts and old folk stories like they’re real. And everyone thinks we’re all like that.”

  It hurt more than she thought it would, voicing this separation between them, putting it out there instead of hiding it in jokes or simply avoiding each other. Pao didn’t want them to be at odds—her mom was all she had. But there was no denying that their perspectives on life were very, very different.

  And unless something changed in a big way, they probably always would be.

  “Paola…” Her mom’s shoulders were slumped, her eyes exhausted, her black T-shirt stained with bar patrons’ food and drink. Her hair was escaping its bun. Pao felt sorry for her.

  But not enough to stop herself.

  “I’m tired of it, Mom,” Pao said, a small part of her watching in horror as it all came spilling out. “The superstitions, the stories, the rituals. They make people think we’re crazy and backward.” She gestured around at the green candles that couldn’t always keep the lights on, at the tarot cards that brought comfort to everyone but them. “It makes everyone feel sorry for us or make fun of us and…not take us seriously when we really need them to.” She stopped then, but the damage was already done. The words she’d been holding back for weeks, maybe months, had
been released, and there was no taking them back.

  “If you think my candles and cards are responsible for all the prejudice against Latinx people in this world, Paola Santiago, you have a lot more to learn about the people in it,” her mom said. She was angry—Pao could tell by the deeper crease between her eyebrows. “Now, I understand that you’re upset,” she continued, calmer now. “You must be terrified for your friend, and furious that the police didn’t listen to your story. But to blame all this on me and my beliefs would be a big mistake.”

  Pao felt like someone had punctured a balloon inside her chest. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t feel she had the right. Not after the things she’d said. She had drawn a line, and now they were on opposite sides of it. Pao crossed her arms, trying to hold everything in.

  “I’ve had a long night at work,” her mom said, crossing her own arms, a mirror image of Pao. “I’ll call the Lockwoods first thing to see if I can help. In the meantime, we both need some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning—after you’ve cleaned up this mess.”

  As her mom walked past the kitchen, Pao wondered if this mess could be cleaned up. Glass and wax could be swept up, and the new scratch in the linoleum floor would barely show, but what about all the frustrations that had caused her to lose it in the first place? Pao’s anger was ebbing, but the toothy thing beneath it stubbornly refused to budge.

  And perhaps most bothersome of all, practical Pao couldn’t stop seeing that pale, long-fingered hand creeping closer and closer….

  The next morning, Pao woke early to the smell of coffee, which her mom didn’t drink, and the sound of adult male voices, which Pao hadn’t heard in this apartment in living memory.

  Wearing her slightly too-small space pajamas, Pao walked out into the living room to find her mom addressing Dante, his abuela, and two uniformed police officers.