Have You Seen Marie?

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Sandra Cisneros
Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Ester Hernández
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Elena Poniatowska for permission to reprint an excerpt from
La Flor de Lis
, copyright © 1998 by Elena Poniatowska. Published by ERA, Mexico DF. Reprinted by permission of Elena Poniatowska.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cisneros, Sandra.
Have you seen Marie? / by Sandra Cisneros; illustrated by Ester Hernández. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-96086-3
I. Hernández, Ester, 1944– II. Title.
PS3553.I78H38 2012813’.54—dc23
                                                                      2012003532

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket illustration by Ester Hernández
Jacket design by Kelly Blair

v3.1

For my brothers,

and…

Para aquellos sin madre, ni padre, ni perro que les ladre
.

For those without a mother, without a father, without even a dog to make a bother.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

First Page

Afterword

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Es entonces cuando te pregunto, mamá, mi madre, mi corazón, mi madre, mi corazón, mi madre, mamá, la tristeza que siento. ¿Ésa dónde la pongo?
¿Dónde, mamá?

It’s then I ask you, mama, my mother, my heart, my mother, my heart, my mother, mama, the sadness I feel. Where do I put it?
Where, mama?

—
ELENA PONIATOWSKA
,
La Flor de Lis

The day Marie and Rosalind
arrived on a visit from Tacoma
was the day Marie ran off.

It had taken three days of driving
to get to San Antonio, and Marie
had cried the whole way.

I felt like crying and taking off, too.
My mother had died a few months
before. I was fifty-three years old and
felt like an orphan.

I
was
an orphan.

Every day I woke up and felt like a
glove left behind at the bus station. I
didn’t know I would feel this way.

Nobody told me.

I’d been hiding in my house since.
Most days I didn’t even comb my
hair, and most days I didn’t care.
The thought of talking to people
made me feel woozy.

And now Rosalind was here, and
Marie was gone, and I was the
only person Rosalind knew in all
of Texas. I put on my shoes and
grabbed my house keys.

  I followed Roz up and down the streets
of my neighborhood and along both banks
of the San Antonio River.

We asked the neighbors.

We put up flyers.  

“Have you seen Marie?”