Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

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.

I didn’t even own a pair of shoes.

Three days later there was a knock at the front door.

Julio, Jacaranda, and I were in the kitchen having breakfast.

No one had ever knocked on the door. The person who was outside knocked again and then rang the doorbell. It was not really a ring as whoever had their finger on the small plastic ringer outside did not let up. The sound wailed through the house like a siren.

Julio stood and left the house and went out to the garden. Jacaranda and I walked over to the front door. It was wide open.

At the entrance stood three policemen. Their faces were covered with wool ski masks and they carried machine guns. They had come for me. They wanted to search the house.

Yes, come in, Jacaranda said.

The policemen made us walk with them as they checked all the rooms. When they inspected the master bedroom, they broke into the dressing room we had never been inside.

In the place where I had expected expensive dresses, beautiful blouses and sweaters, and sequined satin or velvet evening gowns was a large storage room. Instead of high-heeled satin shoes and fur coats, it contained hundreds of assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, cartridges of dynamite, grenades, and dozens of bulletproof vests stacked in piles. There were even several guns, cradled like babies, in USA flags.

Julio and I had made love at the edge of carnage.

The first thing one of the policemen did in my small room was lift the mattress up off the bed.

My mother’s words came to me across the hills and down the highway and straight into me, Only an idiot hides things under a mattress!

The policemen took the brick of heroin and Paula’s notebook with the photos and told me to pack my bag.

Julio never said goodbye. He jumped over the garden fence as soon as he realized there were cops at the door. I’m sure he thought they were coming to get him. He, and his delicious rose and magnolia kisses, disappeared forever. He drowned in the river.

Do we shoot the grandma? one policeman asked.

I wonder if she’s bulletproof? one of the other policemen answered and then he shot her.

Jacaranda fell backward on the marble.

Her body lay on the cold marble.

Blood from her head washed into her gray hair on the white marble. Her eyes were open and fixed in a stare like the glass eyes of the stuffed animals from Africa.

One policeman handcuffed me and pushed me into a police car. We drove through the early-morning streets following the signs to the airport. From the car window, I could see the dirty streets and endless rows of T-shirt stores closed tight with metal curtains.

I saw a fisherman walking toward the beach with a pole resting over his shoulder and a small red plastic child’s bucket in one hand.