Prayers for the Stolen (15 page)

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.

Was Maria looking in the mirror and seeing my daddy’s face all over her face?

I wanted to know if what Mike said was true and that my father sent Maria’s mother money. If my mother ever found this out, she would find him. She would. The time of hunger for him would be over.

I thought of all these things as I lay on the mattress where I’d hidden Paula’s photos and her notebook and Mike’s plastic bag with a brick of heroin in it.

A large brick made fifty bags.

The very next morning Julio
, the gardener, walked through the front door and I fell in love.

He walked right into my body.

He climbed up my ribs and into me. I thought to myself, Say a prayer for ladders.

I wanted to smell his neck and place my mouth on his mouth and taste him and hold him. I wanted to smell the smell of garden and grass and palm tree, smell of rose and leaf and lemon flower. I fell in love with the gardener and his name was Julio.

I spent the morning following him around the garden. He trimmed, dug, and cut. He rubbed the leaves of a lemon tree between his fingers and smelled them. He took a few flat silver seeds out of the back pocket of his jeans and pressed them into the dirt. He used long shears to cut the grass.

After an hour, he left and went to get a ladder from the garage so that he could cut the Mexican-pink bougainvillea that grew along one wall and beside the life-sized bronze horse. As he snipped at the overgrown branches,
yellow pollen was shaken into the air and the flowers, like paper flowers, covered the ground.

Julio was in his early twenties. His skin was deeply tanned from working in the sun all day. He had a short Afro that stood up like a black crown above him and light brown eyes.

Julio was kind to the flowers and the leaves. He cupped the roses with his hands as if he was honored to hold them. He twirled vines between his fingers as if they were locks of hair. He walked gently on the grass as if he did not want the small blades to break or even bend under his weight.

Plants in my life had always been something to fight against. Trees were filled with tarantulas. Vines strangled everything. Large red ants lived under roots and snakes hid near the prettiest flowers. I also knew to stay away from the unusual dry brown patches of jungle that were suffocating from the herbicide dropped by the helicopters. That poison would continue to burn through the land for decades. Everyone on my piece of mountain always dreamed of the city and all that cement where no insect survived. We could never imagine why anyone would want a garden.

Because I loved Julio, the cars and trucks outside on the street sounded like rivers. The diesel smoke from passenger buses smelled like flowers and the rotten five-day-old garbage by the front door smelled sweet. Cement walls became mirrors. My small ugly hands turned into starfish.

In those hours that I followed Julio around the garden, he never spoke to me.

After Julio left each day, I sat in my room and prayed. I prayed that the beautiful garden of bougainvillea trees, roses, bowers, lemon and magnolia trees would dry up and that the lawn would become overgrown with weeds. I prayed that Julio would have to come to the house every day to take care of his sick garden.

Very late, after I had fallen asleep, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. She was furious.

I did not know if she was drunk or not but I did know she was standing alone in the dark up on the clearing and screaming into her phone. The connection was poor. I started to yell also as if my voice could reach her across the city streets and over the mountain, down the highway and up into her ear.

Between the bad connection and her screams, I could not understand what she was calling about.

What are you doing all alone up there on Delphi? It’s late. It’s dark. Go home! I cried.

You stole it! You took it and you didn’t even ask my permission!

What did I take?

Don’t give me that! You know what you took!

What?

You get on a bus and bring it back right now!

This conversation went back and forth and finally we were cut off. I never understood what it was she thought I’d stolen. She did not call back.

I closed my eyes and imagined what happened next. My mother cursed and turned off her phone. She plunged down the mountain toward our little house with her toes craned over the front of her flip-flops, hanging onto the plastic soles like a parrot’s talons to a branch. I could see her stumble and slip.

I prayed there was no moon, it was the darkest night ever, she was lost, and a scorpion had stung her hand as she stumbled against a tree. The backward prayer was never backward enough.

When I’d arrived, Jacaranda gave me two uniforms to wear. So, like her, I dressed in a pink dress with a white apron over the uniform.

The next morning when I went into the kitchen Jacaranda was already up and making coffee. She offered me a plate of scrambled eggs with slices of hot dogs in them.

I asked her when our employers were coming back, but she had
no idea. She said they were only supposed to have gone away for the weekend to visit relatives in Nogales, in the state of Sonora.

As the morning unfolded, Jacaranda told me about the family we were working for.

Mr. Domingo owned a ranch in Coahuila, very north, right across from the border at Laredo. The ranch was known for its huge white-tailed bucks. All the animals were harvested on his property.

Last January Jacaranda went to the ranch for the first time. There was a large fenced-in field filled with deer to one side of the ranch house. Behind the house there were cages that contained old lions and tigers that Mr. Domingo would buy from zoos.

Rich people from the United States liked to hunt there, Jacaranda said. A deer cost you two thousand dollars to kill.

It seems so little.

Little? Who knows? The birds were free. The monkeys were free too.

They had monkeys?

Nobody really wanted to kill monkeys, she said.

Oh, really? Why?

Why kill something that’s free?

While she’d been there, a group of businessmen from Texas had hired the ranch for a hunt.

The large living room at the ranch house contained a polar bear rug and dozens of deer heads on the walls. The wide, circular bar stools were made of elephant feet. The lamps were made of deer legs that had been hollowed out with a long drill so that the electrical wires could be threaded through.

Jacaranda said that Mr. Domingo liked to go hunting in Africa once a year and that, while she worked there, two large trunks arrived at the house with dead animals in them that lay flat like clothes and that were later stuffed.

It was Jacaranda’s job to clean the glass eyes of all the animals in the room.

Mr. Domingo likes the eyes to look real and shine, she said.

Twice a week Jacaranda had to fill a bucket with water and bleach and, using a rag and standing on a ladder, she’d clean the glass eyes so that they would shine with life. She said that she would look to see the hole where the bullet had entered the animal, but that the skins were sewn so perfectly, she could never tell.

Jacaranda described Mrs. Domingo as a nice woman from an old family that came from Sonora. She was refined and elegant and her husband was not. Mrs. Domingo hated living in Acapulco and Jacaranda said that she fought with Mr. Domingo all the time about wanting to leave here. Mrs. Domingo spent most of her time watching movies.

She does not like to go shopping or go to the beauty parlor like other women. She just stays home and watches movies and plays with her son, Jacaranda said. In any case, Mr. Domingo does not like them to leave the house.

Mr. Domingo was born in Acapulco and his father, who died a few years ago, owned a small hotel, which was the one that Jacaranda had worked in years ago.

This is how I ended up here. I’d already worked for the family at the hotel cleaning the rooms.

After we finished breakfast, I went out into the garden to wait for Julio’s arrival so I could shadow and watch him work.

From the garden I could look out over the ocean and, on that day, I saw two large cruise ships come into the harbor. Several small boats from one of the docks motored out to the ships to pick up passengers and bring them into Acapulco to go shopping.

When Julio arrived, I followed him around and watched him
work. He was very quiet and accepted my adoration. I didn’t know how to act any other way. I loved him and wanted him and no one had ever prepared me for this devotion.

I longed for an order, for him to say, Bring me a glass of water.

I wished he’d say, Hold my shears while I move the ladder.

I wanted to be given instructions.

I wanted to obey him.

I wanted to kneel.

We walked in the silent garden and fell in love to the sound of things being trimmed and planted.

Every day Jacaranda and I got up, bathed, and dressed in our pink uniforms with the clean, white aprons. She wore white plastic nurse shoes, while I wore my old plastic flip-flops.

Every day we’d groom for the arrival of our employers. Every day we’d clean the clean house and Julio would scoop the leaves out of the swimming pool with a long net.

The money Jacaranda had been given to run the house and buy food was slowly used up. We ate everything in the larder. One day we made a meal of caviar wrapped up in tortillas served with a hot tomato sauce.

We never touched the bottles of champagne or cases of wine.

One day Jacaranda, Julio, and I were sitting in the kitchen drinking lemonade together when Jacaranda said, I have to tell you both something I confirmed yesterday.

What is it? Julio asked.

We have all suspected this, but now I know. No one is ever coming back to this house. They were all killed on a highway outside Nogales months ago.

No one will ever show up again, Julio said.

Was the boy killed too? I asked.

That’s what they said on the news. It took this long to confirm their identities. They had many.

We all knew there were empty houses all over Mexico that no one ever came home to.

I’m going to stay, Jacaranda said, while I look for another job.

Me too, Julio said.

Me too, I answered.

Julio was content to have me follow him around. He still did the gardening because he said he only did it out of respect for the garden anyway. I’d hold his shears for him and it was as if I held his hand. The bags of dead leaves, the ladder, the shears, the rake, and the net for the swimming pool became parts of his body to me.

One day I followed him to the garage. He needed to get some fertilizer to sprinkle under the magnolia tree. The bags of fertilizer were kept in there in stacks beside an enormous tank of gasoline that even had a fuel pump, just like the ones at gas stations.

One match, one small spark, only one match, could blow up the house, Julio said as I followed him into that dark, hot garage.

In the garage, Julio walked into me. The weight of his body pressed me against the door of the Mercedes and I could feel the door handle in the small of my back.

Julio twisted me to one side and opened the car door and pushed me backward until I lay on the car seat with my legs hanging out of the door. The car smelled like leather and perfume. Julio pushed my pink uniform from my thighs up to my waist and then rolled my underwear down my legs. I heard my flip-flops fall off my feet and onto the floor.

After that day, Julio moved into the house. He spent the morning in the garden. He trimmed plants and mowed the lawn or placed chemicals in the swimming pool. In the afternoon we watched movies.

At first we slept in my small servant’s room in my narrow single bed but, after only a few days, we moved up to the master
bedroom where we took baths in the Jacuzzi and slept in the king-sized bed. Jacaranda didn’t mind because by this time she was living in the child’s bedroom and sleeping in the whale-shaped bed.

In the bathroom I liked to look into every drawer of Mrs. Domingo’s vanity table. In one drawer she had at least fifty lipsticks. In another drawer she had over twenty different perfume bottles. I tried everything. I would cover my body with an orchid cream and used one cream on my knees and elbows that was made with gold dust. I also wore her Chanel No. 5 perfume.

Under the sink I found a box of jewelry. It was unlocked and hidden inside a towel. The box had two thick gold necklaces in it, a gold Rolex watch, and a ring with a very large diamond. I placed the jewel on my ring finger and it fit perfectly. I never took it off.