Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  As the bus rolled through the dark mountains along the windy road away from the bay and toward our house, I could feel the orange juice burn in my stomach and I began to feel dizzy. When we got off the bus, the high heels from my mother’s shoes sank into the hot black asphalt that was like a lake of chewing gum. She had to lift her legs up high to pull her shoes out of the ooze.

  That day marked the beginning of her anger. Her fury was a seed and it had been planted on that afternoon. By the time she shot Maria that seed had grown into a large tree that covered our lives with its shade of bile.

  When my father came back home that night, he found that his clothes had been thrown out the front door and lay in a small pile on the damp, warm ground.

  I lay in bed listening to them speak to each other in low whispers that were like screams.

  You were something, my mother said. I thought she said.

  Don’t spill yourself, my father said. I thought he said.

  Their angry whispers made broken words and sentences.

  I will speak to God, my mother said. I thought she said.

  In the morning my father was drinking his coffee by the stove. He was not wearing a shirt because all of his clothes were dumped outside. I knew his clothes would be covered in tiny black ants by now. He would have to shake the insects out and pluck them off.

  Good morning, Ladydi, he said.

  There was a huge welt on his shoulder surrounded by indentations. It was a human bite.

  From then on my mother could no longer listen to love songs. Before that night she’d been a songbird. The radio was on all the time and she’d sway, twirl, and spin to Juan Gabriel or Luis Miguel’s songs as she cleaned the house, cooked, or ironed my father’s white work shirts. From then on the radio was turned off and she just might as well have turned her happiness to off.

  Love songs make me feel stupid, she said.

  You’re not stupid, Mama, I said.

  The songs make me feel like I ate too much candy, Coke, ice cream, and cake. The songs make me feel like I’ve come home from a birthday party.

  Once, when we were at Estefani’s house, the radio turned to a love song. The melody filled the rooms. My mother panicked and ran out of the house to get away from the song. She threw up under a small orange tree. She threw up the melody, chords, the waltzes, and drums of love. It was pure green love bile on the green ground. I ran after her and held her hair away from her face as she vomited.

  Your father killed the music for me, she said.

  Being in Acapulco also made me think of the fortune-teller who told my mother the wrong fortune. Did her fortune include this event? Did the teller let her know she was going to shoot her daughter’s sister?

  I looked out the taxi window as we moved through the crowded streets toward the hospital. I looked out on T-shirt shops, taco stands, and restaurants.

  Acapulco also reminded me of the time we had my mother’s wedding band cut off by a locksmith. Most people in Guerrero did not wear rings. Hands and fingers swelled in the heat and, once a ring was on, it might never slip off.

  After my father left us, my mother did not take her slim, gold wedding band off. It grew into her and became part of her finger, lost in the swollen flesh. On cool evenings, I could sometimes see the glimmer of gold in the lumpy skin as she cut up tomatoes or onions.

  One day I watched as she spent most of the morning trying to remove the ring. She tried soap and cooking oil to make her finger slippery, but nothing worked.

  After a few hours she said, We’re going to go to Acapulco and get this damn ring cut off.

  Yes, Mama.

  If they can’t cut it off, I’m cutting off my finger and that’s that.

  It wasn’t until we were on the bus heading to Acapulco that I found out why she’d made this decision. Her biblical logic didn’t surprise me. She’d had a dream.

  My mother listened to her dreams as if she were Moses. She said most problems people had these days were because they did not listen and act on their dreams. If she’d had a dream that locusts were coming we’d have moved off of the mountain years ago. It’s too bad that dream never came to her.

  I’ve had a dream about my ring, she said again.

  The dream contained an important revelation.

  If I don’t get my wedding band off my finger, the birds will stop singing, she said. In the dream she was standing in the dark and parrots, canaries, and sparrows were standing on the branches of one orange tree. They all had their beaks wide open, but no sound emerged as the birds strained their necks back and looked up to heaven.

  The locksmith cut the ring off of my mother’s hand with a sharp file. It only took a second.

  I’ve done this thousands of times, the locksmith said as he placed the ring, now cut into two pieces, in the palm of my mother’s hand.

  She looked down at the two commas of gold.

  What the hell am I supposed to do with this? she said.

  That locksmith did not know he had saved the songbirds of Mexico.

  At the emergency room Maria’s arm was sewn up and bandaged. The doctor said she’d been very lucky. The bullet had only fractured her arm.

  It was my mother’s unlucky lucky day.

  As the doctors were taking care of Maria, her mother, Luz, arrived. This could only mean that my mother had told her.

  I could not look at Luz.

  I stared at the linoleum hospital floor.

  I knew this was retribution. Luz was not going to press charges against my mother. Luz had it coming. How dare she fool around with her friend’s husband? It was payback time and Luz was lucky her daughter was alive.

  In the movies, my mother would have had a huge realization after shooting Maria, which would have made her quit drinking. In the movies, she would have dedicated her life to helping alcoholics or battered women. In the movies, God would have smiled at her repentance. But this was not the movies.

  At home my mother was lying in bed under a cotton sheet. The television was off. For the first time in years, I heard the deep, loud jungle silence. I heard crickets and I heard the mosquito swarms buzz around the house.

  Her form under the white cloth looked like a boulder. On the floor, beside the bed, were three empty beer bottles. The brown glass of the empty containers looked like gold awash in the band of moonlight that came in from a window.

  I sat at the edge of the bed.

  I thought it was your father, my mother whimpered from inside her sheet-cave.

  Go to sleep, Mama.

  I really, really thought it was your father, she said again.

  In the silent room I wanted to reach out and pick up the remote control and turn the television on.

  I did not know what to do with this kind of quiet.

  The sound of the TV had made me feel like we were having a party or it felt like we had a large family. The sound of the television was aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.

  The silence of a mother and daughter alone on a mountain where a crime has been committed was the silence of the last two people on Earth.

  I left my mother and went to my small room. I took off my T-shirt. It had Maria’s blood on it. I took off my skirt and underwear that were stiff from dried urine and lay on my bed.

  The notebook I’d taken, along with Paula’s photographs, was still in the back pocket of my jeans that were laid out at the foot of my bed. I reached for it and sat on the bed and began to read. The handwriting belonged to Paula.

  The notebook contained lists of things written with a blunt pencil. The first pages had lists of animals and animal parts. The rows itemized: two tigers, three lions, and one panther.

  The next few pages had lists of women’s names. Some of the names had last names and some did not. The list read: Mercedes, Aurora, Rebeca, Emilia, Juana, Juana Arrondo, Linda Gonzalez, Lola, Leona, and Julia Mendez.

  The rest of the notebook was blank except for the last page where Paula’s address was written: Chulavista, Guerrer
o, outside Chilpancingo, house of Concha.

  I closed the notebook and placed it under my mattress with the photographs. Then I lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

  The sound of the television woke me up. A bullfight was being broadcast from the great bullring in Mexico City.

  I lay in bed listening. I could not understand why my mother was watching a bullfight as she’d sworn them off years ago. She’d seen a documentary where she learned that horses have their vocal cords severed and that is why they do not neigh, nicker, or scream during a bullfight. On our large, flat-screen television, we also could see that the bulls cry. On our mountain we saw their tears roll out of their eyes and fall on the sand that was stained with blood and sequins.

  I stretched and walked out to the kitchen. My mother was at the kitchen table drinking a beer. She had a plate of toasted peanuts and garlic dusted with orange chili powder in front of her.

  She looked up at me. I was afraid. I wanted to see the change. What was it going to be like? Who were we? Yellow beer tears stained her cheeks.

  Paula was gone. Estefani was moving to Mexico City so her mother could get better medical care. Maria would never speak to me again. Ruth had been stolen forever. My father was over there.

  That morning the mountain was empty.

  I closed my hands into fists so that I would not start to count up the amount of people we had lost on my fingers.

  My mother looked at me and took a swig of her beer. She looked different. If I could have sucked on her finger, as I used to do as a baby, it would not have tasted like mangoes and honey. Her finger would have tasted like those chicken wishbones turned from white bone to purple, which she used to place in a glass jar of vinegar so I could see how the brittle bone turned into rubber.

  At the front door every insect on our mountain was still feeding on Maria’s blood.

  I knew if I walked out the door that trail of insects would lead me straight down the highway.

  Mother, you didn’t clean up, I said. You let the ants do it?

  My mother looked at me with her new face.

  I don’t clean up blood, my mother said. It’s not my thing.

  After this day, my mother’s neck was always bent to one side with her ear craned upward, listening for something. I knew she was listening for his Made in America cowboy boots to step out of a bus, step onto the boiling highway of asphalt, and swagger up the mountain to our home. He was going to say, You shot my daughter!

  My mother sat at the kitchen table and looked at me.

  Ladydi, she said, all this just proves that Maria came out of a goddamn Xerox machine!

  PART TWO

  The next day Mike picked me up on the side of the highway. He acted as if nothing had happened. It was as if my mother had not shot his sister. It was as if he were not picking me up in a red Mustang instead of boarding the bus to take me to my first job as a nanny to a young boy in Acapulco.

  We’d made a date for nine in the morning and I thought he’d never get there. Passenger trucks tumbled past, covering me with dust and diesel fumes as an hour went by. Finally he rode up in the new red convertible and reached over, swung the door open, and gestured for me to get inside. He had his iPod earbuds stuck deep into his ears so he just gestured to get in the car.

  His music was turned up so loud I could hear a soft beat coming out of the earbuds. We raced down the highway with him bopping his fingers on the steering wheel. At one point he turned and offered some Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum. He held up two fingers to say, Take two. I took two of the pieces, chewed it up hard, and blew small bubbles that crushed and broke open in my mouth as we moved down the road.

  Mike steered with his knees as he lit a cigarette. He was wearing a gold ring with a large diamond on his thumb. He had a tattoo of the letter Z on his pointer finger. The letter Z made everything quiet inside of me. Don’t say anything; don’t say anything, I said to myself. Z stands for the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. Everyone knows this.

  Mike was not going to talk about what had happened to Maria. He was plugged into his iPod listening to rap and I was staring out the window at herds of goats. As I looked at him, I thought Maria did not belong to him. She did not even look like him. In that car, at that moment, I knew she was the one I loved most. I did not know this before, even when I held her broken arm in my arms.

  Don’t come back, my mother had said to me last night when she helped me pack up my few belongings. The woman who helped me pack was my new mother. I was still not exactly sure what form this newness would take. This was my after-she’d-shot-Maria mother. It was going to take some time to get to know each other.

  Everyone’s goal was to never come back. It used to be that there was a whole community that lived on this mountain, but that ended when they built the Sun Highway from Mexico City to Acapulco. My mother says that that highway cut our people in two pieces. It was like a machete that cut a body in half. Some people were left on one side of the black oily asphalt and some were left on the other. This meant that everyone had to continually cross the road back and forth. A passenger bus killed my mother’s mother when she tried to cross the road to take her own mother, my great-grandmother, a jug of milk. On that day there was blood and white milk all over the road.

  At least twenty people had been killed crossing the highway in the past years. Dogs, horses, chickens, and iguanas were hit too. Carcasses of snakes that had been run over also lined the highway like red and green streamers.

  After my grandmother was hit, my mother kept her few belongings. My grandmother’s party shoes are still in a shoebox under my mother’s bed. They don’t fit either of us, our feet are flat and our toes are spread wide from wearing plastic flip-flops our whole lives. The elegant shoes are made of blue satin with a pretty blue bow on the front. A famous actress gave the shoes to my grandmother; she swore it was Elizabeth Taylor. My grandmother worked as a cleaning lady at the Los Flamingos hotel which had belonged to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan. All that is left from that old romantic Acapulco are those blue satin shoes under my mother’s bed.

  Ladydi, promise me you’ll keep yourself ugly, my mother had said before I left in the morning.

  At our kitchen table, which was an altar to beer, canned tuna fish, ants, potato chips, and prepackaged donuts dusted in icing sugar, I promised her I would never wear lipstick or perfume and that I would not grow out my hair, but keep it short and boyish.

  Just keep in the shade, don’t walk in the sun, she said.

  Yes, Mama.

  I wondered if I should bring Paula’s photos and her notebook with me and finally placed them in my bag. I knew if I left them here the jungle insects would chew them up or the humidity would soon cover them with mold.

  The construction of the highway was the beginning of the destruction of our families. People began to leave because they needed jobs and so many people went to the United States. My grandfather and my mother’s two brothers and their families all moved to San Diego. They departed after my grandmother was run over. They never wanted to look over their shoulder and so we never heard from them again. My mother said the drug traffickers finally destroyed our mountain. No community can survive so many tragedies.

  All that was left on our mountain were a few women who still knew how to cook an iguana wrapped in avocado leaves.

  As Mike drove me down the road toward the Pacific Ocean the air-conditioning felt nice and cool on my face.

  As we moved down the highway I looked at the pink stone of our mountain that had been cut to make way for the road. It seemed exposed like scraped, raw skin.

  Halfway to Acapulco, Mike turned off the highway and onto a dirt road. I looked at him, but he was so lost inside his iPod I thought he’d forgotten I was with him. I looked out the window and thought of my mother living alone on the mountain drinking beer and watching television and felt so ashamed of myself because I knew that all I wanted to do on this big, round blue planet was find my father.r />
  The speed of the car picked up a dust cloud around us. I thought we were like those television car commercials where the vehicle veers off the road and onto rough terrain to show how it can go anywhere. In the commercial Mike and I would be a couple wearing dark glasses and tight jeans. My frizzy hair would be blown out and cascading down my back.

  We drove for about twenty minutes through a road lined by palm trees until we reached a dilapidated shack with a yellow hammock swinging between two trees.

  A tall, bald man walked out of the shack as Mike turned off the engine. The man stood and did not walk toward us.

  Mike pulled the earbuds out.

  Stay in here and be pretty and don’t leave the car, Mike said.

  The man was so skinny his jeans settled on his hips and a streak of brown skin was exposed between his blue T-shirt and belt. His hip bones stood out and made deep shadows on both sides of his body. He was also barefoot and wore a wide straw hat that was frayed and worn.

  He held a machine gun pointed straight at us.

  What are we doing here? I said to Mike in a whisper as if the man could hear us out there.

  Don’t move.

  What are we doing here?

  Quiet. Quiet.

  Mike got out of the car and held out his hand to the man in a gesture that said stop.

  She’s my sister, Mike said aloud. Hey, don’t worry, man. She’s blind.

  The man looked at me and back at Mike.

  She’s blind. Yes, yes. She was born blind.

  The man lowered his machine gun.

  Mike turned and pointed something at me and I heard the car lock. It was the car’s remote control that not only locked me in the convertible, but also locked the windows.

  Mike and the man went inside the shack.

  There were three black Escalades parked to the right of the shack in the shade of several palm trees. There were also two Rottweilers tied to the fender of one of these SUVs with leather straps. The dogs were panting hard in the heat and their dark red tongues hung out of their mouths.