Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

Mother, you didn’t clean up, I said. You let the ants do it?

My mother looked at me with her new face.

I don’t clean up blood, my mother said. It’s not my thing.

After this day, my mother’s neck was always bent to one side with her ear craned upward, listening for something. I knew she was listening for his Made in America cowboy boots to step out of a bus, step onto the boiling highway of asphalt, and swagger up the mountain to our home. He was going to say, You shot my daughter!

My mother sat at the kitchen table and looked at me.

Ladydi, she said, all this just proves that Maria came out of a goddamn Xerox machine!

The next day Mike picked me up on the side of the highway. He acted as if nothing had happened. It was as if my mother had not shot his sister. It was as if he were not picking me up in a red Mustang instead of boarding the bus to take me to my first job as a nanny to a young boy in Acapulco.

We’d made a date for nine in the morning and I thought he’d never get there. Passenger trucks tumbled past, covering me with dust and diesel fumes as an hour went by. Finally he rode up in the new red convertible and reached over, swung the door open, and gestured for me to get inside. He had his iPod earbuds stuck deep into his ears so he just gestured to get in the car.

His music was turned up so loud I could hear a soft beat coming out of the earbuds. We raced down the highway with him bopping his fingers on the steering wheel. At one point he turned and offered some Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum. He held up two fingers to say, Take two. I took two of the pieces, chewed it up hard, and blew small bubbles that crushed and broke open in my mouth as we moved down the road.

Mike steered with his knees as he lit a cigarette. He was wearing a gold ring with a large diamond on his thumb. He had a tattoo of the letter Z on his pointer finger. The letter Z made everything quiet inside of me. Don’t say anything; don’t say anything, I said to myself. Z stands for the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. Everyone knows this.

Mike was not going to talk about what had happened to Maria. He was plugged into his iPod listening to rap and I was staring out the window at herds of goats. As I looked at him, I thought Maria did not belong to him. She did not even look like him. In that car, at that moment, I knew she was the one I loved most. I did not know this before, even when I held her broken arm in my arms.

Don’t come back, my mother had said to me last night when she helped me pack up my few belongings. The woman who helped me pack was my new mother. I was still not exactly sure what form this newness would take. This was my after-she’d-shot-Maria mother. It was going to take some time to get to know each other.

Everyone’s goal was to never come back. It used to be that there was a whole community that lived on this mountain, but that ended when they built the Sun Highway from Mexico City to Acapulco. My mother says that that highway cut our people in two pieces. It was like a machete that cut a body in half. Some people were left on one side of the black oily asphalt and some were left on the other. This meant that everyone had to continually cross the road back and forth. A passenger bus killed my mother’s mother when she tried to cross the road to take her own mother, my great-grandmother, a jug of milk. On that day there was blood and white milk all over the road.

At least twenty people had been killed crossing the highway in the past years. Dogs, horses, chickens, and iguanas were hit too. Carcasses of snakes that had been run over also lined the highway like red and green streamers.

After my grandmother was hit, my mother kept her few belongings. My grandmother’s party shoes are still in a shoebox under my mother’s bed. They don’t fit either of us, our feet are flat and our toes are spread wide from wearing plastic flip-flops our whole lives. The elegant shoes are made of blue satin with a pretty blue bow on the front. A famous actress gave the shoes to my grandmother; she swore it was Elizabeth Taylor. My grandmother worked as a cleaning lady at the Los Flamingos hotel which had belonged to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan. All that is left from that old romantic Acapulco are those blue satin shoes under my mother’s bed.

Ladydi, promise me you’ll keep yourself ugly, my mother had said before I left in the morning.

At our kitchen table, which was an altar to beer, canned tuna fish, ants, potato chips, and prepackaged donuts dusted in icing sugar, I promised her I would never wear lipstick or perfume and that I would not grow out my hair, but keep it short and boyish.

Just keep in the shade, don’t walk in the sun, she said.

Yes, Mama.

I wondered if I should bring Paula’s photos and her notebook with me and finally placed them in my bag. I knew if I left them here the jungle insects would chew them up or the humidity would soon cover them with mold.

The construction of the highway was the beginning of the destruction of our families. People began to leave because they needed jobs and so many people went to the United States. My grandfather and my mother’s two brothers and their families all moved to San Diego. They departed after my grandmother was run over. They never wanted to look over their shoulder and so we never heard from them again. My mother said the drug traffickers finally destroyed our mountain. No community can survive so many tragedies.

All that was left on our mountain were a few women who still knew how to cook an iguana wrapped in avocado leaves.

As Mike drove me down the road toward the Pacific Ocean the air-conditioning felt nice and cool on my face.

As we moved down the highway I looked at the pink stone of our mountain that had been cut to make way for the road. It seemed exposed like scraped, raw skin.

Halfway to Acapulco , Mike turned off the highway and onto a dirt road. I looked at him, but he was so lost inside his iPod I thought he’d forgotten I was with him. I looked out the window and thought of my mother living alone on the mountain drinking beer and watching television and felt so ashamed of myself because I knew that all I wanted to do on this big, round blue planet was find my father.

The speed of the car picked up a dust cloud around us. I thought we were like those television car commercials where the vehicle veers off the road and onto rough terrain to show how it can go anywhere. In the commercial Mike and I would be a couple wearing dark glasses and tight jeans. My frizzy hair would be blown out and cascading down my back.

We drove for about twenty minutes through a road lined by palm trees until we reached a dilapidated shack with a yellow hammock swinging between two trees.

A tall, bald man walked out of the shack as Mike turned off the engine. The man stood and did not walk toward us.

Mike pulled the earbuds out.

Stay in here and be pretty and don’t leave the car, Mike said.

The man was so skinny his jeans settled on his hips and a streak of brown skin was exposed between his blue T-shirt and belt. His hip bones stood out and made deep shadows on both sides of his body. He was also barefoot and wore a wide straw hat that was frayed and worn.