Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

Maybe another day, I said.

You remind me of my daughter. You’re a marzipan.

I looked over at Maria who was pale. She mouthed the word asshole .

I squirmed forward in my seat. Then I reached around my back and lifted up my skirt. I peed deep through my underwear and into the black cloth seat of the taxi. I felt the wet heat from my urine surround my bare thighs. My mother had taught me about revenge. I knew this would have made her proud of me.

I turned and held Maria’s arm and tried to stroke her head a little, which was hard because of Maria’s stiff, onion-bun hairdo. I looked at her arm in the plastic supermarket bag but it was not filling up. Maria gave me an intense look and tilted her head toward the side of her body. The blood was not going into the plastic bag. As she was holding her arm, it was being pulled backward and down, through the tie in the plastic supermarket bag, down the side of her body. I could see that the red, short-sleeved blouse above her ribs was drenched.

At this point Maria’s head lolled backward and her eyes closed.

I thought she had died.

Maria, wake up, wake up, I whispered.

The taxi driver turned around and looked at us. Missy, she better die so I can leave you both at the side of the road.

She’s not dead.

If she dies, I’m leaving you both at the side of the road. I hope she dies because I want to get rid of both of you.

When I saw the enormous gray bay surrounded by a wall of hotels and condominiums and smelled the salt, I knew Maria was going to live. She was curled against me, under my arm. I kissed the top of her head, which smelled like greasy coconut hair oil, with love because she was my sister and she was going to know about this very soon. While I still had the secret, I could love her.

When I saw the bay I remembered coming to Acapulco for the first time. My father was still living with us and we’d come to visit him at work. He was a bartender at a small hotel at that time. I remember my mother got dressed up in a white dress that had a halter top so that her back was exposed. She wore high white heels and bright red lipstick. She also dressed me up in a red sundress and combed my hair into two braids.

We’re going to surprise your father and we have to look pretty, like girls, for the surprise, my mother said.

She carried her heels in one hand and walked in her flip-flops down to the highway to catch the bus.

On the bus ride she checked her lipstick in a small mirror that she carried in her purse. Her arms were still slightly red in places, as she’d spent the whole morning plucking the black hair out of her forearms with tweezers.

From the bus station we took a taxi to the hotel where my father worked.

The hotel faced the bay. My father worked at the bar that was outside, beside the swimming pool and under a large thatched roof of palm fronds. The sunlight broke through small spaces in the roofing and made the glass of the liquor bottles shine. I had never seen a swimming pool before. The afternoon sunlight glittered off the water as if it were full of crystals. The sound system was tuned to a local radio station, which filled the air with the sound of cymbals, bongos, and tambourines.

My father was leaning against the bar dressed in white trousers and a pearly-white guayabera shirt. He was smoking a cigarette. The tobacco smoke mixed with the sun and salt.

When he saw us he placed his cigarette in an ashtray and opened his arms to me. He lifted me up. He smelled like lemons and Alberto VO5, which he creamed into his hair every morning to smooth it down.

He put me back down and gave my mother his arm and walked her over to the bar where we sat on stools and looked out at the bay. He made my mother a margarita with a rim of salt around the glass. He stuck a small, red paper umbrella in her drink. My father concocted a fizzy pink drink with ginger ale and orange juice for me and placed a plastic stirrer inside the glass in the shape of a mermaid.

My parents looked handsome in their white clothes, which accentuated their dark skin. I thought that had been the happiest afternoon of my life until my mother and I got back on the bus to go home.

I knew it, she said as she rubbed her lipstick off with a couple of squares of toilet paper. Your father is having an affair with that waitress!

I knew exactly whom she was talking about.

My mother was very skinny. When she described herself she’d hold up her pinkie in the air and say, Skinny like a pinkie.

Her little finger would always be a symbol of her body to me.

The waitress had been wearing very tight clothes so her stomach bulged over her jeans and her thighs rubbed together as she walked. She was a beauty. My father always said a woman needs to be full. No matter how much my mother tried to fatten up, she couldn’t. My father said that holding a skinny woman was like holding gristle and bone. He said that a real man wanted a body of pillows.

He never said, You, Rita, are gristle and bone, or You, Rita, need to fatten up, or You, Rita, are like a chicken wing. He was never that obvious in his cruelty.

The woman was wearing red flip-flops that were made with a plastic, two-inch heel. We would never forget those shoes.

I knew my mother was right. That woman was too nice and that’s a sure sign if there is any perfect sign at all. I was expecting her to pull out a piece of candy at any moment. Of course my father denied it.

As the bus rolled through the dark mountains along the windy road away from the bay and toward our house, I could feel the orange juice burn in my stomach and I began to feel dizzy. When we got off the bus, the high heels from my mother’s shoes sank into the hot black asphalt that was like a lake of chewing gum. She had to lift her legs up high to pull her shoes out of the ooze.

That day marked the beginning of her anger. Her fury was a seed and it had been planted on that afternoon. By the time she shot Maria that seed had grown into a large tree that covered our lives with its shade of bile.

When my father came back home that night, he found that his clothes had been thrown out the front door and lay in a small pile on the damp, warm ground.

I lay in bed listening to them speak to each other in low whispers that were like screams.

You were something, my mother said. I thought she said.

Don’t spill yourself, my father said. I thought he said.

Their angry whispers made broken words and sentences.

I will speak to God, my mother said. I thought she said.

In the morning my father was drinking his coffee by the stove. He was not wearing a shirt because all of his clothes were dumped outside. I knew his clothes would be covered in tiny black ants by now. He would have to shake the insects out and pluck them off.

Good morning, Ladydi, he said.

There was a huge welt on his shoulder surrounded by indentations. It was a human bite.

From then on my mother could no longer listen to love songs. Before that night she’d been a songbird. The radio was on all the time and she’d sway, twirl, and spin to Juan Gabriel or Luis Miguel’s songs as she cleaned the house, cooked, or ironed my father’s white work shirts. From then on the radio was turned off and she just might as well have turned her happiness to off.

Love songs make me feel stupid, she said.

You’re not stupid, Mama, I said.

The songs make me feel like I ate too much candy, Coke, ice cream, and cake. The songs make me feel like I’ve come home from a birthday party.

Once, when we were at Estefani’s house, the radio turned to a love song. The melody filled the rooms. My mother panicked and ran out of the house to get away from the song. She threw up under a small orange tree. She threw up the melody, chords, the waltzes, and drums of love. It was pure green love bile on the green ground. I ran after her and held her hair away from her face as she vomited.