Prayers for the Stolen (20 page)

The phone rang and she answered.

Thank God I have been a robber all of my life, Ladydi!

It was the first thing she said.

Thank God I have been a robber all of my life, Ladydi!

It was the second thing she said.

I’m going to sell everything. Thank God I’ve been a thief all my life now I can sell it all. Ladydi, listen to this. I have five gold chains, several pairs of earrings, and six silver teaspoons buried in a can of milk at the back of the house. No one would think of looking there! Isn’t that just perfect? Tell me where you are, sweet sugar baby. I’ll be there in two days. Goodbye.

My mother hung up her phone. She had not even waited for me to tell her where I was.

So, is she coming? Luna asked.

Yes. In two days.

My mother would never come for me, Luna said. She’s in Guatemala. She doesn’t even know I’m here. She doesn’t even know her little girl has lost an arm. Of course she won’t care.

She won’t care about your arm?

You don’t know her.

You’re her daughter.

When she sees me she’s going to ask me where I left my arm as if I’d left a sweater or a hat behind and need to go back and get it. She isn’t going to want me around with one arm. She’s going to say I can’t work in the field and that no man will ever want to look at me.

She has to understand.

My mother is going to say, What can you carry?

Oh, really?

I never buried my arm, Luna said. Does one bury parts of oneself?

I don’t know.

I don’t know. I don’t know where it is or what happened to my arm.

Why did you leave Guatemala?

Because I wanted to have dollars. I hated my life in Guatemala, Luna said.

It was bad?

My husband beat me every day. No. He did not beat me. He slapped me across the face. That’s what he did. Slap, slap, slap. All day long. My cheek became a part of his hand.

So you came alone?

Yes, Luna answered. I thought anything was better than that, but I was wrong.

Yes, you were wrong.

All kinds of people are trying to go north, she said. You cannot imagine the things people take across the border to the United States. I saw stacks of dried-out stingrays that looked like sheets of black leather. I saw boxes filled with orchids. The police X-ray the trucks and buses. The X-rays find the white skeletons of immigrants. They see the human bones twisted with rickets and they find pumas and eagles, they see the bird skeletons. One man had two baby toucans in his jacket pocket.

Yes, I said. In Acapulco people steal turtle eggs.

Luna said we had to hurry and give Georgia back her phone. She’ll never lend it again if we don’t quickly give it back. She’s counting the minutes.

We left our cell and went back to the large room where the inmates gathered together. It was late afternoon and some of the prisoners were taking workshops. Classes were offered in collage, painting, computers, reading and writing.

In the room every other inmate was having her hair done. Two
women were sitting in front of a small mirror gluing false eyelashes onto their upper eyelids.

Georgia was sitting at a table with Violeta. I handed her the phone hidden in the chocolate-bar wrapping and thanked her.

No problem, Princess, she said. You’re my princess so you can have it anytime.

Yes, thank you.

She’s getting her birth certificate here, right? Georgia asked Luna. You told her?

Yes, Luna said.

How old are you?

I’m sixteen.

You know you don’t have to be here, right? The law says you’re still a child, Princess.

My mother will be bringing my birth certificate. She knows.

You have to get out before you’re eighteen or you’ll never get out. Isn’t this true?

Violeta nodded her head. That’s what happened to me. I came in at seventeen, but I was sentenced to thirty years when I was eighteen!

Make sure you get out before you’re eighteen! When’s your birthday?

Not until November.

So you have plenty time, Georgia said. But hurry up. Hurry! I’m telling you this because you’re my princess.

Violeta coughed. Her hands were on her hips and her long fingernails curled toward her stomach.

If you stay here you have to imagine that there is nothing else but this. Nothing else exists but this jail and the women in it. If you think that there is anything else, you won’t survive, Violeta said in a hoarse smoker’s voice.

Damn, you don’t need to tell her that! What are you trying to do, break her heart? Georgia said.

Yes. Yes. She needs a broken heart, Violeta said.

That night there was nothing to do in the cell but lie in bed and talk to Luna. Some women had radios in their rooms, but Luna had nothing. There was no light, as she didn’t have money to buy a light bulb for the fixture in the ceiling. She bought toilet paper by the square.

I lay in my bunk bed in the dark above Luna on my cement bed, which had no mattress. The room still smelled acrid from the fumigation. Luna’s sweet voice came to me from the bunk below.

When I look at Georgia I remember my mother once told me that rain falling while the sun is shining causes freckles, she said.

That’s what makes a rainbow.

Yes, but also freckles.

Why is Violeta in here?

She’s killed many men but she’s in here because she killed her father. She does not regret it. She will tell you this over and over again. She has no regrets. She’s happy to be here. Her father killed her mother. Violeta did it for her mother and everyone agrees she did the right thing.

Has she been in here a long time?

Yes. Her father never hugged her but when she killed him, as he died, he held on to her. She says she had to kill him for him to hug her.

She doesn’t seem to like me.

She loves Georgia. She even made a collage for her as a present.

Luna explained that some of the inmates liked to take the collage workshop. It was given by a man, an artist, who had been teaching at the jail for years.

We cut out things from magazines, glue them on cardboard, and tell the stories of our lives. Will you come too? she asked.

Yes. Of course.

When you make a collage, you can really admire yourself.

I could hear Luna swallow and turn in the bunk beneath mine.

And what about Aurora? I asked. Why is she here?

Aurora. Aurora. Aurora. Luna said her name like a sigh.

Why is she here?

Aurora put the rat poison in the coffee.

The next morning
when I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was the word
Tarzan
carved into the wall. It was as if the wall was tattooed to remind me where I was not. There were no birds, or plants, or the scent of overripe fruit.

Luna was already up and I heard her moving around. She sounded like a squirrel beneath me. I could hear her rummaging through plastic bags or dumping them out and scratching through them.

Damn, someone stole it, she said. Damn. Damn.

I didn’t have the energy to ask what she was missing. I lay in silence. I heard a baby crying down the hall and I thought of the list on the blackboard in the administration office. There were seventy-seven children in this jail and in the morning they made a lot of noise.

Yesterday, when we had walked around the jail, Luna had taken me past two small rooms that were the children’s school. Children could be in jail with their mothers until the age of six. The women got pregnant during their conjugal visits, which the jail allowed. Some of them also
got pregnant because they were hired out as prostitutes by the guards at the criminal courts and tribunals. These encounters took place in the bathrooms.

Inside of the jail’s makeshift school a poster of a tree was pinned to the wall. If you are born and have grown up in jail, you have never seen a tree. There were also flashcards taped to a board that showed images of a bus, a flower, and a street. There was a flashcard of the moon.

Damn, Luna said again beneath me. Did you steal my lipstick?

I said, Jesus, Luna, who could want your jailbird lipstick with your jailbird saliva all over it?

The rustling below me stopped.

She did not know that it was my mother who had just spoken out of my mouth.

I climbed down from my bunk, sat on the edge of Luna’s bed, and watched her make up her face.

When she’d finished, she placed her rouge and mascara in a plastic sandwich bag and pushed it under the bed. Then she turned and held my chin with her hand and looked at me.

You will see your mother soon and begin to get out of here. Get through these days, Ladydi. Don’t fall down and scrape your knees yet, she said.

Why are you here? You have not told me. Will you get out soon?

Come to the collage workshop. It’s fun. We all go.

Who?

Well, Aurora, Georgia, and Violeta and a few others of course. Ladydi, let’s go.

I slipped on my flip-flops and followed her down the corridor.

On the plastic worktables were stacks of magazines, pieces of cardboard, kindergarten scissors, and tubs of glue.

The teacher introduced himself and told me to look through the magazines and cut out images that would then make up a
story I wanted to tell. His name was Mr. Roma. He had been giving these workshops at the jail for years. The reason many of the prisoners liked to take his class was that they made collages about their own lives but also because they were fascinated by Mr. Roma. He was a painter. His hands were speckled with white oil paint. He had long, light brown curly hair that he tied into a ponytail. He was about fifty years old.

As Mr. Roma showed me to a worktable and pulled out a stool for me, a few other women came in and sat at other worktables. They were all dressed in blue. Some shook the teacher’s hand and others kissed him on the cheek.

Luna walked over to a cupboard where sheets of cardboard were stacked on shelves and took out her collage. She held the cardboard between her teeth and picked up a pair of scissors and glue. She sat beside me. She managed to get all her materials organized by using one hand and her front teeth.

There was a sudden quiet in the class as one prisoner walked past toward the sunless patio. I had not seen her before, but I knew she was jailed here. Everyone in Mexico knew about her. She was a celebrity. Four or five prisoners surrounded her, guarding her. Her frizzy black hair was combed upward so it looked like a crown. She was tall and wore navy blue, but I could see it was navy-blue velvet; it shimmered like a furry spider. Her wrists were covered with gold bangles and there was a gold ring on every one of her fingers, even on each of her thumbs. The prisoner was Lourdes Rivas. Her nickname was “the nurse.” She was the wife of one of Mexico’s top politicians. She was caught stealing millions of dollars from the Red Cross, which she had run for over twenty years.

Everyone in the class turned to look at her as she walked past.

I remembered hearing about her on the news. Someone had calculated that, thanks to her theft, thousands of ambulances
were not purchased and hundreds of health clinics were not built. Her house was in San Diego, California, and was filmed for a television documentary about corruption in Mexico. My mother and I had watched it. We had even seen her bathroom sinks that were made of gold.

We watched her walk past with the small army of women prisoners that she paid to keep her safe. Everyone hated her. Everyone wanted to kill her. It seemed like every Mexican had a story about an ambulance that had never arrived.

On the table Luna’s collage lay beside my empty piece of cardboard.

From the pages of
Vogue, People, National Geographic
, and soap-opera magazines Luna had cut out dozens of pictures of arms and had glued this collection all over her cardboard. In the middle of this mosaic of limbs, there were two infants with big blue eyes in diapers that looked as if they had been cut out from an infant formula advertisement. In the dimpled chests of both little girls, Luna had pasted red pieces of paper, cut in the shape of drops, falling from the bodies to a pool of cutout drops. They were like cutout Valentine’s Day hearts.

You killed those children? I asked. I wanted to cover my mouth and take the words back into me, but it was too late. The words were there, in the air between us, and Luna swallowed them.

Yes. I killed them. It was snip, snip, snip. Children are so soft. The knife goes right in like cake.

She answered as if she were giving me a recipe.

Were they yours?

Oh, yes, of course, Luna answered. All mine. My two little girls.

Why?

They were always hungry, Luna answered. They always wanted to go to the swings in the park and I didn’t have time for that. There are enough girls anyway. We really don’t need any more.

Prisoners began to arrive for the classes. In other areas of the room knitting and computer classes were being held.

Georgia and Violeta appeared and sat down on the empty stools beside me. Georgia was dressed in a clean and new blue sweater. She was also wearing new tennis shoes and thick, fluffy white socks that were folded over at the ankle and covered the top of her sneakers. She placed a large red box of chocolates on the table and opened it.