Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

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.