Prayers for the Stolen (16 page)

Now that we were lovers, Julio talked to me and I learned about his life. He had a strange way of talking. He said everything two or three times, but always in a different way. I slowly understood the rhythm of his talk, which I imagined was the way people spoke in the north of Mexico.

I’m just wayward, he said. What can I tell you? I was caught in the river like a rat. A rat-in-the-river-caught kind of man. Yes. I broke the life out of someone. I’m wayward.

He called me Princess Ladydi.

You’re a one-and-only, he said. I’d shine my shoes for you and stand in the rain for five hours for you. Just you, Princess Ladydi.

I decided not to tell him why my mother named me after Lady Diana because I did not want to break my own heart.

I crossed the river but I was caught on the riverbank and the guard who guarded over me and watched me looked away and opened the way for me, Julio said.

Julio killed a US Border Patrol guard. This was why he was a gardener in Acapulco and not a gardener in California.

Julio used to work on Mr. Domingo’s ranch and grew up in Nuevo Laredo. When he killed the border guard he came back to Mexico. Mr. Domingo helped him get out fast and got him as far away from the US border as possible. He gave Julio a job as a gardener in his own house in Acapulco. Julio said that there was nothing Mr. Domingo hated more than the United States Border Patrol.

I needed to live as if I’d drowned in the river; I needed to appear to disappear and fill with water, float out to sea. Every US border guard thinks I drowned in the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, Julio said.

Now I understood why Jacaranda did not interfere with us. Julio had killed someone with his hands. She knew Julio held that border guard’s neck and twisted and tore it like a young tree branch.

For six months we lived in the house together waiting for something to happen. This waiting reminded me of what it felt like when I was sick as a child and days and days went by without knowing when I would go back to school. Once I lay in a hammock with a high fever. For days my mother rocked that hammock and fanned the flies off of my body until her arm must have ached. On my mountain, fanning flies off of someone is one of the kindest, most loving things a person can do for another. It really bothered me when I’d see documentaries on the television where flies were drinking the water from children’s eyes in Africa. No one shooed them away, not even the person filming. That NatGeo camera-person just filmed those flies drinking tears.

Once, when I told Julio I was tired of being locked in the house, he planned a day trip for us.

This was the first time I’d left the house since my arrival. I changed out of my servant’s uniform and into my jeans and a T-shirt. I had not worn these clothes since the day I’d arrived
with Mike. I could feel that my body was different inside my old clothes. It was a combination of walking on marble instead of dirt paths, sleeping in cold air under piles of blankets, and being loved by Julio night after night.

We walked down the hill from the marble house to Caleta beach.

Julio held my hand as we walked. You’re my little girl, he said. Don’t let go of my hand.

He liked to treat me like a child. I expected him to take a tissue out of his pocket and wipe my nose. He acted like he was taking me to the candy store. I loved to be his little baby and so I skipped at his side and forgot that he was a killer.

Julio bought the tickets for our ride across the bay to Roqueta Island in a glass-bottom boat. The truth is he did not want me to see the sand and ocean or the island. He did not want me to see the island’s zoo with the old lion whose roar crossed the bay and could be heard on windless mornings. Julio wanted me to see the bronze statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that was in the water, drowned in the sea. She was called the Virgin of the Sea.

Now you will see the mother of the water, he said. She protects the shipwrecked and fishermen. The drowned too.

The boat sat low in the water as if it were a wide canoe. Julio and I leaned over and looked through the glass that allowed us to see everything that moved under the boat. After a while we saw her shape beneath the waves.

The undersea world looked green through the boat’s tinted glass. The virgin was bottle green in the green light with a crown on her head. She was surrounded by fish. There were sea snails on her shoulders. She was also a wishing well. There were coins around her on the ocean floor that glittered and gleamed silver in the sanctuary.

As we swayed above her, Julio said, We’d better pray. He bowed his head and folded his hands together.

The more I enter the more I find; and the more I find the more I seek, he said aloud. Amen. Amen.

You pray aloud?

Are you going to pray? he asked.

Later that night in the king-sized bed, Julio held me in his arms.

I had to show you that I’m drowned, drowned just like her, like Mary, sleeping in the sea all night long in the dark dark, he said. Everyone thinks I’m at the bottom of the river. My mother thinks so too. It’s too dangerous for me to be alive. I cannot dream at night. There’s a big difference between living in the dark with a candle and living in the dark with a flashlight. I have a flashlight but I want a candle.

Your mother also thinks you’re dead?

Yes. Everyone is praying for me.

Can’t you let her know? She needs to know you’re here.

My family is remembering that I was the fastest runner and the best jumper. I won every race. I was always the winner. I should have outrun that border guard. I didn’t see him or hear him. My mother is saying, Julio would never, ever be caught. He’d rather drown. And I did. You love a drowned man, Princess Ladydi. When you kiss me do you taste the river? There’s a cross for me, a white cross, where I was crossing.

With your name on it? I asked.

For the US police that white wood cross is the best proof that I’m dead. It’s in my FBI file. Imagine that a riverside wood cross with plastic flowers actually proves to the FBI that my family thinks I’m dead.

With your name on it?

My name is not Julio.

From the master bedroom’s bay window in the marble house we could see past the garden and large bronze horse, to the bay glittering with night lights. When I looked out after our day trip, I knew a virgin lived under that blue water.

Since I was a person who had never experienced cold weather, I loved to close the door and windows and turn up the air-conditioning until the room was freezing. My teeth chattered. My teeth seemed almost to break against each other. I had never felt that kind of cold before. I loved it. I even loved the pain.

This room is the North Pole! Julio said.

He never asked me to turn the air-conditioning off.

I would gather up all the blankets I could find from around the house and pile them on the bed. I had never slept in a cold room under blankets.

This is because you grew up in the jungle, Julio said. I grew up close to the desert where it can get very cold.

At night, in our Acapulco igloo, Julio told me his philosophy.

Life is a crazy, out of order, inside out, salt mixed with sugar place where the drowned can be walking on dry land, he said. Like the best outlaws, I know I’m going to die young. I don’t even think about old age. It’s not even in my imagination.

You have tamed me, I answered. I picked up his hand from the pillow and cuffed it around my wrist.

Julio thought people could be divided into day and night people. He said words could be divided this way also. Ugly night words, according to him, were words like
rabies
and
nausea
. Pretty night words were words like
moon
and
milk
and
moth
.

When Julio and I moved around under the blankets sparks of electricity crackled and lit up our bed.

Never had we seen anything like this before, only in the sky.

We would make love in the wool blanket lightning.

My mother’s phone calls always
brought news from our mountain. Estefani and her siblings never returned from Mexico City after their mother Augusta died from AIDS. Sofia, Estefani’s grandmother, who’d run the OXXO by the Pemex gas station, had packed up and left to go and care for her orphaned grandchildren.

My mother told me that Paula and her mother had really disappeared. No one ever heard anything about them again.

I also knew that Maria’s gunshot had healed and that she and her mother were still on our mountain.

I have a case of the misery, my mother said.

Oh, Mama. Please don’t tell me.

I’m all wrong inside.

This meant she missed me, but she’d never say it.

Some mornings Julio and I would go out to the garden and spend the whole day there.

He’d lift me up onto the bronze horse and I would ride it.

Seven months went by
in the empty marble house.

One day my mother called. She was angry. She said she’d been trying to call for days.

Why haven’t you answered your phone? she asked. Damn, I’ve called and called! So you’ve forgotten about me? Is that what you’ve done?

I’m here.

If I had not reached you today, I was going to go straight to Acapulco.

Please, calm down. Why do you exaggerate? We talked a week ago.

Something has happened. Nothing happens here and now something happens, she said.

What?

Listen.

I’m listening, Mama.

Can you hear me?

Yes, I hear you fine.

Mike’s been arrested. He’s being taken to Mexico City.

Why to Mexico City?

They say he killed a man. They say he killed a little girl!

What?

Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

I remembered. A girl’s dresses were drying in the sun on the maguey pads. There were seagull feathers on the ground.

I could not even swallow my saliva, it just sat in my mouth, growing and growing, until I had to spit it out into my hand.

Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

I held the phone in one hand and the gob of my saliva in the cup of my other hand.

You need to come here right away, she said. They want you in Mexico City to give your testimony. Mike says you can clear him. It will be quick. Tell them the truth! He says you know what happened.

I had a dream in that car. I was with Maria, my dear sister who looked just like my father. In my dream I called her sister, little sister. My dream told me she was the one I loved the most. I had not known this before, even when I held her broken, bloody arm in my arms. The word
sister
in my dream woke me up as if I’d been awoken by the sound of a firecracker or bullet in the air. The word cracked me awake. White seagulls flew above the shack and the Rottweiler and the skinny man. Maybe the birds were clouds. Maybe the clouds were birds. A little girl in a white dress picked up the feathers from the ground. Mike’s red-rose tattoo filled the car with rose perfume. I obeyed him when he told me to keep the heroin for him. I obeyed and placed the brick of heroin inside my black bag with its broken zipper. I obeyed.

I can’t hear you anymore, Mama. I’ll call you back.

I hung up the phone.

There was no need for me to pack my bag and get on the bus to Mexico City. I did not have to get on that well-known, well-worn
asphalt sprinkled with scattered garbage, lost gloves, used condoms, and old cigarette packs.

I did not have to take the highway my grandmother tried to cross carrying a jug of milk. I did not have to take the road that has always been a river of blood and white milk mixed with car oil.

I did not have to take the road that has killed at least twenty people since the day I was born as well as dogs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, iguanas, and snakes.

I did not have to take the highway dotted with drops of blood from Maria’s gunshot wound.

No.

I did not mention my mother’s phone call to Julio or Jacaranda.

I felt as if my body were green inside like green logs that cannot burn in a fire. I felt too young to be out in the world.