Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  On the fleshy elongated leaves of a maguey cactus two little-girl dresses dried in the sun. One dress was white and the other was blue.

  As each minute passed it seemed to me that the world became more and more quiet. The hum of insects even disappeared as I began to bake inside the hot, locked car.

  The dresses drying on the maguey cactus made me think of the narrow twig arms of a little girl coming out of the sleeves. The garments were almost dry and they lifted and blew in the heat.

  On the ground beside the cactus there was a toy bucket and a toy broom.

  The Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum had lost its pink, circus cotton-candy flavor.

  My mind wandered in the hot-car-daydream.

  With the motor and the air-conditioning off, and the windows closed shut, all the air was sucked up and used by my body. My thighs were wet through my jeans and I was moist all over. I felt thirsty and dizzy and almost drugged by the heat. I imagined a mirage of white seagulls flying above the shack, the Rottweilers, and the skinny man. In my stifling daydream I thought birds were clouds and I imagined a little girl in a white dress picking up seagull feathers from the ground.

  At some point, I could not tell if I’d been locked in the car for ten minutes or two hours. I was pulled awake when the dogs began to bark as Mike came out of the shack.

  Mike walked toward the car. He took out his car keys from his jeans, pointed the remote control, and I heard the locks flip open under the windows. He walked quickly with his face bent down against the sun. He opened the car door and slid inside.

  What happened? I asked.

  Did you fall asleep?

  Who was that man?

  Roll down the window.

  Mike placed a small plastic bag on the seat between us. He turned on the engine, turned the car around, and we drove back down the dirt road toward the highway.

  Mike beat his fingers on the steering wheel to some hip-hop music in his mind.

  He was sweating and drops fell from his hair down the back of his neck. He held the car’s steering wheel between his knees and pulled off his shirt with a practiced swoop over his head.

  The number 25 was tattooed on his upper arm beside a dark red rose. As I sat beside him, I could smell that flower. I could smell the rose on his arm as if I were leaning over a rose bush and smelling the soft petals.

  So why did they call you Ladydi, anyway? Was it just because your mother liked that princess so much? Mike asked.

  No, Mike.

  I was not going to tell him that my mother named me Ladydi because she hated what Prince Charles had done to Diana.

  Thanks to our television, my mother knew the whole story inside out. She loved any woman to whom a man had been unfaithful. It was a special sisterhood of pain and hatred. She used to say that, if there were a saint for betrayed women, that saint would be Lady Diana. One day, on the Biography Channel, my mother learned that Prince Charles claimed he had never loved her.

  Why didn’t he just lie? my mother said. Why didn’t he just lie?

  I was not named Ladydi after Diana’s beauty and fame. I was named Ladydi because of her shame. My mother said that Lady Diana had lived the true Cinderella story: closets full of broken glass slippers, betrayal, and death.

  For one birthday I was given a plastic Princess Diana doll wearing a tiara. My father had brought it for me from the United States. In fact, over the years he bought me several Princess Diana dolls.

  My name was my mother’s revenge. It was a kind of philosophy to her. She did not value forgiveness. In her revenge philosophy there were all kinds of scenarios. For example, the person you were avenging did not need to know about the acts of revenge as in the case of my father and my name.

  When people who met me were surprised at my name, and said it aloud a few times over very sweetly, I could almost taste grains of sugar in my mouth. I knew that they were comparing my face to Diana’s face and feeling sorry for me. They were measuring my darkness against her fairness.

  On the outskirts of Acapulco Mike had to drive down a long tunnel, which cut through the middle of the last mountain before the bay. I’d been inside this tunnel many times in buses and taxis.

  As we drove out of the dark tunnel, the bright ocean sunlight filled the car.

  Mike’s light blue jeans were splattered with blood.

  Now I knew that blood could smell like roses.

  My mother once saw a documentary on how the Zetas turn people into killers. She said that they tied a man’s hands behind his back and forced him to kneel and eat his own vomit, or eat someone else’s vomit.

  Mike and I drove through the city streets toward the old section of Acapulco where rundown mansions from the 1940s and 1950s had been abandoned. In recent years, people had begun to buy up these properties and fix them. The houses were built into the mountainside, into the rock, above the Caleta and Caletilla beaches. From here there was a view of the bay on the left and Roqueta Island straight ahead. To the right one could see way out to the open ocean.

  You know, Mike said, to this day your father sends my mother money.

  What?

  Yes, to this day your father sends my mother money.

  I don’t believe you. He hasn’t sent us money for years.

  Well, he sends my mother money. Every month.

  Please say this isn’t true. It can’t be.

  Okay. It isn’t true.

  Where does he live? Where does the money come from?

  New York City.

  Mike pulled up to a large house painted in new white paint and dropped me off at the front door.

  Go on, he said. This is the place. Get out.

  He dropped me at the front door and didn’t even get out of the car. One forgets about manners when you’ve killed someone.

  I obeyed. I knew to obey a killer. I obeyed when he gave me the plastic bag he’d carried out of the shack and placed between us in the Mustang. I obeyed when he told me to hold on to it until he needed it. I obeyed and placed it inside my black duffel bag with its broken zipper. I obeyed. I obeyed. I obeyed.

  Mike rolled down his car window.

  I’ll be back to pick that bag up in a few days, he said.

  Okay.

  Don’t steal anything.

  I don’t steal.

  You’re your mother’s daughter.

  Shut up!

  I rang the doorbell. Mike drove off. He did not wait to see if anyone opened the door for me.

  After a minute or two, a servant dressed in a pale pink uniform with a crisp, clean white apron opened the door. Her straight gray hair was braided with green ribbons and pinned up so it rested like a headband or crown above her forehead. She was about seventy years old and had brown-red skin and small, light brown eyes. I thought she looked like a squirrel.

  I was also standing in front of a ghost, or what my mother called “a Mexico ghost.” This is the term my mother used for anything that was ancient. Over the years, my mother and I only had to say “ghost” and we knew exactly what we meant. A ghost could be in a basket, a tree, the taste of a tortilla, and even a song.

  She spoke softly and told me that the family who lived there had been away for over a week. She did not know when they’d be back. Her name was Jacaranda. As I walked behind her into the house, she smelled like coconut oil and oranges.

  Jacaranda explained that the home belonged to the Domingo family, which consisted of Mr. Luis Domingo, Mrs. Rebeca Domingo, and their six-year-old boy, Alexis.

  As Jacaranda walked me through the house I could feel my mother walking beside me. I could almost hear her spit on the white leather sofas with matching white leather throw pillows; spit on the glass tables that had bronze statues of ballerinas balanced on square stands; spit on the cold marble floor; and spit on the white tile kitchen floor and stainless-steel sink.

  I could hear her say, This is all too clean, it hurts. And, as I looked around, I knew she was going to ask me to describe everything. She would want to know
what I could steal and bring back to her. She would have looked at this house and said, We need to say a prayer for some dirt.

  The living-room windows opened on a garden, which was set on a cliff that looked out over the ocean. There was a life-sized bronze statue of a horse under a large bougainvillea tree. To one side of the garden there was a swimming pool made of light blue tiles and carved from the ground in the shape of a turtle.

  Jacaranda opened the glass door and led me out into the garden and down a path toward the servants’ rooms. We each had our own bedroom, but we shared a bathroom.

  My bedroom contained a single bed and a chair and one small window that looked into the garage. The room smelled of a harsh, floral cleaning liquid. I looked out my window and could see a white Mercedes-Benz convertible and a black Escalade parked side by side in the garage.

  Jacaranda told me I would have to wear a uniform also, like hers. She told me to change and instructed me to go to the kitchen once I was settled in so that she could make me some lunch.

  I unpacked my few belongings and hid Paula’s photographs and notebook and Mike’s plastic bag under my mattress. There was no place else to keep them in the small room.

  My cell phone rang. It was my mother.

  I knew she stood at the clearing with her arm held up high in the air, trying to catch a signal. Her upper arm was burning from holding the phone up in the air and the effort of moving it back and forth between both hands.

  It’s terrible there, right? she said.

  Yes. It’s a filthy place.

  Are you serious? What’s it like?

  It’s fine.

  But you do hate it?

  Yes, I hate it.

  The lies went back and forth between us. The truth was I already loved the clean house full of sea breeze and my mother wanted me back home immediately.

  Stick it out, give it a chance, and stay.

  Yes, I’ll try, Mama.

  You can always come home if you don’t like it there.

  The phone went dead. This always happened and meant that you had to dial back again and again. We all knew it was the reason Carlos Slim, the man who owned the phone company, was the richest man in the world. He made sure everyone in Mexico always had to call back.

  What are you going to do? my mother used to say. Stop calling your family? Stop calling the doctor? Stop calling whomever it might be who might, just might, help you find a stolen daughter? Of course we all call back!

  I turned off my phone and went to the kitchen. I walked across the cool white tiled-and-marble floor in my red plastic flip-flops from the jungle.

  Jacaranda was making tortillas filled with cheese and raw green chilies on the stove and told me to sit down at the breakfast table. From the kitchen there was a view of the bay.

  The table was set with three places. There were even three individual salt and pepper shakers next to tall crystal glasses of lemonade filled with slivers of lemon rind.

  Jacaranda took an ice tray out of the freezer and dropped star-shaped ice cubes into our drinks.

  She placed two tortillas on a plate in front of me and sat down. She had to squeeze in between the chair and glass table.

  Once you’ve had babies, she explained, your stomach always wants to go back to that size as if it longs to have the baby back, she said.

  Jacaranda placed her hands on her stomach and said with pride, I had eleven children.

  As I ate she told me that she’d worked at this house for the past eight years. Before that she’d been a cleaning lady in a hotel for over forty years.

  After you’ve worked in a hotel, there’s nothing about human nature you don’t know.

  I listened to her as I ate the tortillas.

  Most people are kind, she explained, and most women are unfaithful to their men.

  I told her that my mother would dispute this information.

  No, Jacaranda insisted. There is only one thing no one understands. Men get caught and women don’t.

  Jacaranda also told me how people steal everything from hotel rooms, even light bulbs.

  I knew this, of course. My mother had stolen light bulbs all the time.

  Jacaranda remembered her very first job was to walk the streets, knock on doors, and ask poor women if they wanted to sell their braids. She would buy each braid for ten pesos back in those days. Sometimes the women would cut off their long braid or ponytail right then and there so Jacaranda always carried sharp scissors with her. Most of the time the braids were in boxes or bags in the women’s closets and drawers.

  This was before everyone was making synthetic hair and bringing it in from China, she explained. This was when women still had long hair.

  Most people don’t have really, really long hair anymore.

  Yes, women used to grow their hair down to their knees. I worked for a woman here in Acapulco who had a small wig company. The hair that was bought from going door-to-door was laid out in three categories: short, medium, and long. Then the hair was disinfected and dyed and made into wigs and hairpieces. These hairpieces were very fashionable and were sold in Mexico City at a shop in the center of town.

  Do you still have any of this hair? I asked.

  No. But I used to imagine the rich ladies in Mexico dancing at parties and wearing the hair of a barefoot Nahua Indian from Guerrero.

  One memorable day Jacaranda bought ten braids from one house alone. These were the braids from five generations of women. The colors ranged from black to gray to white.

  All the braids were as long as my arm, Jacaranda remembered.

  It’s hard to imagine.

  I used to embroider with my own hair. I used it as thread, Jacaranda said.

  My mother still uses her own hair to sew on a button or fix a hem.

  Yes, I used to do that too.

  Does someone else live here? I asked, pointing to the third place set at the table.

  Yes. Julio, the gardener. He didn’t show up today, but will be back tomorrow.

  After lunch Jacaranda gave me a tour of the house.

  As we walked through the rooms, Jacaranda chewed on little pieces of paper. The white pulp appeared between her teeth every now and again. Jacaranda said she developed this habit as a girl as her mother was too poor to buy her chewing gum. She wanted her friends to think she was chewing real gum and it turned into a habit.

  Every room seemed unlived in. The floors were so clean I knew I could drop a slice of an apple or a piece of toast on the floor and just pick it up and eat it. My skin was dirtier than the floor. There was no crumb for an ant and no spider for a scorpion. There were no cobwebs. And there was nothing personal in the house like a jacket hanging over the back of a chair or a rolled-up magazine on a table or photograph displayed in a frame.

  The master bedroom had a king-sized bed that faced a huge window that looked over the garden and out over the ocean. There was a wooden figure of Jesus on the cross hanging on the wall above the bed. The room led off into one large bathroom that had a Jacuzzi in the center of the room and a massage table.

  One door in the bedroom was closed and we didn’t look inside. Jacaranda explained that was the dressing room where they kept their clothes.

  That door is locked, she said.

  Next to the bedroom was the boy’s room.

  He’s little and does not go to school yet, Jacaranda explained. You’ll have to play with him.

  This was the one room that looked lived in. There were toys everywhere, piled on every surface and all over the floor. There were at least thirty stuffed animals thrown on the bed like a pile of pillows. On one chest of drawers there were three large glass jars filled with candy. The red, yellow, and green M&M’s shone in the Acapulco sun.

  The boy’s bed was carved in the shape of a whale.

  The next room Jacaranda showed me was the television room. It had a wall-to-wall television screen so it was like a movie theater. In front of the screen were two sofas, three armchairs, and two large beanbag chairs. One w
all was covered from floor to ceiling with a collection of DVDs.

  This is what they love to do. They watch movies and eat popcorn or hot dogs. They can watch the same movie over and over again, Jacaranda said.

  I had seen the house on television.

  I had never walked on a marble floor before, which was like walking on a piece of ice, but I had seen it. I had never sat down at a perfectly set table, with two forks, two knives, a soup spoon, and an ironed linen napkin, but I had seen it. I had never used a saltshaker or looked at star-shaped ice cubes in my glass, but I had seen it.

  I knew then that I could go to the Pyramids in Egypt and they’d be familiar. I was sure I could ride a horse or drive a Jeep on a safari in Africa. I knew how to cook lasagne and lasso a calf.

  I remembered some of the violence and catastrophes I’d watched on television that had helped to build my television-knowledge.

  When I thought of this, I tasted sour milk in my mouth like milk that sat out on the table in the jungle heat for too long. Yes, a flood could feel familiar. Yes, a car crash could feel familiar. I thought yes, a rape could feel familiar. Yes, I could be dying and even the deathbed would be familiar.

  Then I thought of Mike at that ranch and the blood splattered on his clothes and I knew what had happened even though I had not been inside that broken-down shack.

  I’d seen my life on television.

  The first night in my servant’s room I lay in bed and looked at the tiny window that opened onto the large garage and the cars.

  There was nothing else to look at.

  A smell of gasoline filled my room. It was like sleeping in a Pemex gas station.

  I knew that I didn’t have to worry about insects. The house smelled like rotten lemons from constant fumigations.

  That night there was one question that would not let go of me. I wondered if Maria knew by now. They must have told her that this was the reason God punished her with a harelip. It was the curse for her mother’s infidelity with my father. Someone must have told her the truth and explained why my mother shot her.