The doctor explained to Tía and us that sometimes these things happened, that pregnant women had dizzy spells like that all the time, especially in crowded spaces, but not to worry because the baby was fine. He said this casually as he was setting Pequeña’s broken arm and tending to her wounds.
Tía and Mamá gasped and Pequeña stared at the ceiling.
“¿Un bebé?” Tía whispered.
And then the room was silent, except for the gasping of an old man in the next room and a woman moaning somewhere out in the hall, where more patients were lined up waiting to see the doctor.
“Five months?” Tía kept saying later that day, as she and Mamá sat drinking coffee in our kitchen together. “¿Pero, cómo? Under the same roof. I don’t understand. And who’s the father?” Mamá patted Tía’s hand and reassured her. Reminded her they were not old-fashioned viejas and who cared who the father was. It must have been un amor que le fue mal, Lucia. A love that went so bad it just made her want to forget about the guy. Don’t ask her about it, let her come to you when she’s ready. Ay, pobrecita, Mamá said. Poor Pequeña. Let’s focus on the baby instead. We’ll raise it together. Mamá added that Chico and I would be proper tíos. And she and Tía Lucia would both be this baby’s abuelas. And the baby would want for nothing. On and on she went, until what at first had seemed like a disaster to Tía Lucia finally gave way to joy.
Through it all, Pequeña never said a word.
Before long, Mamá and Tía Lucia, best friends since they were niñitas, smiled over the tiny baby clothes they bought. They refurbished an old bassinet. They couldn’t stop talking about how this baby was nothing but a blessing.
But their joy was not contagious. It did not spread to Pequeña, who refused to join Tía Lucia and Mamá’s discussions or contribute even a single name to the long list of possibilities Mamá and Tía Lucia came up with. As the months passed, if it weren’t for Pequeña’s huge belly that made her nickname laughable, you would swear there was no baby on the way. She did not acknowledge the existence of the cravings or the heartburn or the sickness that Mamá and Tía Lucia insisted she must be feeling. Pequeña did not once wince at the weight she carried or her thickened feet.
It was only as another baby conversation between Tía and Mamá trickled out of the kitchen window one day, to the patio where Pequeña and I sat, that I finally saw in her something like acknowledgment.
“We are so small, Pulga,” she said to me. “This world wants us to be small. Forever. We don’t matter to this world.” She hunched forward, and for a moment I thought she was going to fall.
“Nah, we’re okay, Pequeña. And everything will be okay, you’ll see,” I told her, nudging her shoulder and offering her a drink of my Coca-Cola.
She sat with the arm she’d broken, now skinny and pale, propped on her belly, and stared toward the street. Her eyes were dull and far away, and a sense of resigned doom settled around her. All the assurances I’d just given her seemed like empty lies.
“What does your name mean?” she asked me suddenly.
I stared down at the soda in my hand, the red-and-white logo of the bottle. She knew it meant flea. Everyone did. And Pequeña knew the story behind it just as I knew the story behind hers.
“We are small people,” Pequeña said again. “With small names, meant to live small lives.” She looked like she was in a trance. “That’s all we’re allowed to live, that’s all the world wants us to live. But sometimes even that, even that it won’t give us. Instead the world wants to crush us.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong. I wanted to tell her of course we mattered. But the thing is, the way Pequeña was talking, I don’t even think she would have heard me.
“I can’t believe I have to bring a kid into this,” she whispered. It was the only time I’d heard her acknowledge the baby. And it struck me then how tragic this baby was for Pequeña. How much she didn’t want it because of what it would be born into.
“It’ll be okay,” I mumbled.
She laughed. “What do you know?” she said. And looking at her with her bloated belly, I felt embarrassed and stupid. She looked at me. Her gaze softened. “Ay, Pulga, you have to get out of here one day. You know that, right?”
I shrugged. We all need to get out of here. But actually leaving, that’s hard.
She looked down at her belly. “I waited too long,” she whispered. “Now it’s too late. For this baby. And for me.”
And for the first time, I wondered if she really fell out of that bus.
* * *
~~~
Chico and I sit outside on Tía’s patio and I think about that conversation as Pequeña’s labor screams travel through the house and out the door, cutting through the stagnant air to reach us.
A motor rumbles in the distance.
“Pulga,” Chico says, “you ever think about how weird it must be to, like, have a human being inside you? And for it to have to come out of, like, you know . . . there?” Chico gestures between his legs, a terrified look on his face. “Man, I think I’d die. I really do.”
“I don’t really think about stuff like that,” I tell him, staring at the dust settling back to the ground.
“It must be so weird, right? I mean, how’s it even possible?” He looks down at his own stomach, blows it up so it protrudes even more from his shirt. “I mean, can you imagine? Holy hell, I’m so glad I’m not a girl. Right, Pulga? It must be so terrible to be a girl.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He stares into the house as Pequeña yells that she’s going to die. That she can’t do this. That this can’t be happening. I hear her sobbing and Mamá and Tía telling her she has to calm down. I’ve never heard Pequeña cry like this before. The way she sounds scares me and makes me nervous and makes me think again of the women who die and leave tiny pieces of themselves behind. Chico chips away at the already peeling yellow paint on Tía’s doorframe. He sucks his teeth. “Let’s go get a soda, man. I can’t listen to this anymore,” he says, wiping at his eyes.
“You got money?”
He digs a hand into his pocket, counts what he has. “Enough to share something.”
I get up and he follows.
Pequeña’s grunting fades with each step we take. We kick pebbles and rocks around us as we go, feeling bad for her pain. Feeling guilty because we are boys and will never have to know it. Feeling like we’re leaving her behind.
But relieved—for the distance between us and that misery.
Pequeña
The thing inside me, the thing I’ve been ignoring and denying and wishing gone, wants to kill me. It’s terrible and vengeful. I’ve surrounded it in a sac of resentment all these months and now it’s going to make me pay.
Another wave of pain floods my body.
“I can’t,” I tell Mami and Tía Consuelo. “I can’t do it.”
I close my eyes and try to escape, try to ride that pain into another world, let it lead me to a door where I can slip into another existence. I’m aware of this now—the way I can change reality, create new ones, pass through imaginary doors into new worlds—even though I always had it in me.
Where are you? I try to conjure up La Bruja, my angel, who showed me those doors exist. Who takes me through them.
I think back to the first time she appeared to me—when Papi was still around and we’d gone to Río Dulce together as a family for my sixth birthday. Mami and Papi were fighting because Papi was looking at every woman in a swimsuit who passed by. They didn’t notice when I went to the cliff, climbed up those rocks, and walked to the edge. Nobody was around, and I looked up at the sun, closed my eyes, and leaned forward.
I let myself fall, a long fall that made my stomach flutter. I waited for the feel of water, and it came, cold and fast and crushing. Then the world went dim and silent as my head hit something sharp and hard.
I was u
nderwater forever, watching the surface and light slip farther and farther away. And that’s when I saw her coming up from the depths of the water. Her dazzling eyes. Her rippling hair. Her skeleton-like hands. She stared at me, and I could not look away from those eyes. I felt us rising together, her stare lifting me, lifting me, up from the depths of that water, from that darkness. Higher. Faster. Bubbles rushing past us, between us.
I can almost see those bubbles now. I can hear the gurgle of them. In a moment, the darkness will turn blurry and blue and she will be there, rising up to whisk me away from this, too.
“Pequeña,” Mami says. That’s it, just my name. But it cuts through the darkness and I’m back in the small cramped bedroom she and I share: The wardrobe in the corner that held my father’s clothes once—until Mami sold them. The dresser in front of me so I can see Doña Agostina’s hunched back in the mirror on top. Tía Consuelo standing next to her. Mami on the other side of Tía, saying my name.
My body seizes and is gripped by pain. The baby demands to be recognized.
“Push now, Pequeña, a little push, not too hard,” Doña Agostina tells me.
I do what she says. And then again. And again. And again. I push, and push, and push.
Hours pass. The baby doesn’t want to come out. I imagine it holding on to my ribs, refusing to be born. Refusing to dislodge from me. I imagine myself an old woman, my belly large, the child inside swirling around forever, reminding me of its presence. Refusing to let me go.
“Almost,” Doña Agostina says. “Almost.”
I hear Mami’s voice, choked with emotion, saying she sees the baby’s head. And I cry harder because her voice sounds like betrayal to me. I don’t want her to want this child. I want her to not want it as much as I do. Would she love it so much if she knew?
I long for her to ask me where it came from. But I can’t bear for her to ask me. She’s come close a few times. I’ve seen the question in her eyes, I’ve seen it on the tip of her tongue, but I always look away. The words never come.
It’s not that she wouldn’t understand. That’s not it. Mami thinks of herself as una mujer moderna. And she is a modern woman, especially compared to the grandmother who raised her. Mami’s abuela had been so old-fashioned, she lashed her back when she found dried bloodstains on her underwear at age thirteen, assuming it was the loss of her virginity, not her first period. Como sufrí, Pequeña, she’d told me so many times. I never want you to suffer the way I did.
Mami had suffered as a little girl, then as a wife, and then as a mother when I tore her body and was delivered into this world. And now, if the truth were to escape my lips, I would make her suffer more. My words would be like those lashings on her back. My words like my father’s betrayal.
If she knew, Mami would load the gun Papi left us in that wardrobe.
If she knew, she would kill. And that kind of killing only brings more.
We would all be dead. Though maybe that would be better.
“Now, Pequeña! Push with all your strength! Toda tu fuerza,” Doña Agostina tells me. “Keep pushing, keep pushing!”
“Push, Pequeña!” Mami repeats. She’s kneeling next to me, her arms wrapped around my shoulders. She’s smoothing my hair and kissing my forehead. “Eres fuerte, Pequeña. So very strong, hija. And I’m here with you, we’ll do this together. Like everything. Don’t lose your strength now.” She’s holding me tight, as if she’s trying to transfer her own strength to me.
But all I want is to melt into Mami’s arms, all I want is for us to melt into one being and escape out of here, slip from this reality to one where magical witches and angels exist. I want to take her with me. The two of us, together, to where we emerge from water and descend from sky.
“Here it comes!” Doña Agostina’s old voice calls out. “Here it comes!”
I shake my head and sob harder. No! I don’t want it! I don’t want it to almost be here.
But I hear Mami’s voice, her crying voice, as something emerges from between my legs, slippery and warm and wet. And I feel a coldness around me as Mami lets go, as she rushes to that baby.
The baby cries, loud and angry, and Mami and Tía Consuelo hug and laugh, their joy too loud in that small room.
Look at your niño, Doña Agostina tells me. I shake my head and close my eyes as she holds the small red baby to my chest. She puts the wriggling thing there, and his small body feels so warm against mine, but I can’t look at him. I shut my eyes tighter, cry harder. I won’t look at him. I won’t hold him. No matter how much he cries.
Doña Agostina lifts him off my chest.
A boy. I don’t know what’s worse. A boy or a girl.
A name, Pequeña, Mami says. What will we call him? Mami’s voice is higher than usual. The boy lets out more cries, so loud, it drowns out Mami’s voice and she laughs, saying something about how strong he is.
Tía Consuelo comes to my side, squeezes my hand and kisses it. Pequeña, mi amor, you did it! And he’s beautiful. Look, look at him. Your son, she says. What will we call him? Look at him!
Their voices are full, swelling, uncontainable.
I listen to my own thoughts instead as they whisper, We will call him nothing. He is not real.
Mami’s and Tía Consuelo’s voices get louder, trying to keep me in that room, but I am looking for an escape. I look out the window, at the brightness of the sun. I stare into it until my head feels full of light. I close my eyes, and there I find it, the imaginary door, the one that leads me somewhere else, to another world.
I can hear the water—rushing, cascading all around me as I stand on rocks and fling my body into the air, leaping toward beautiful water.
My body is free, and light, and mine. Just mine.
I plunge into that water, clear and cold. Washing away everything—all memory, all blame. All pain.
The child cries. My eyes flutter open, against my will, as if his cries demand I stay here, in this reality.
No, I answer, and I picture the water again, see myself submerged in it, the sun cutting through it, the world a beautiful bright blur.
He cries.
I focus on the water. Only the water.
When I open my eyes again, the water has followed me here. It floods the floor and trickles like sweat from the walls. And I take a breath, sweet and full of relief.
Mami has the child and Tía stands next to her looking down at him in Mami’s arms. They are both oblivious to the water lapping at their ankles. When they open their mouths to speak, to coo at the baby, to laugh, water trickles from their mouths, too, like faucets. In moments, the water reaches their knees. Then their waists. Their skirts billowed out around them like fancy muñequitas.
I feel my bed become dislodged from the floor. I feel it lift and float as the water continues filling the room.
You see, this, too, is a dream. This child. You. Everything. It’s not real, my mind whispers.
How precious, Tía Consuelo says.
Beautiful, says Mami.
A wave comes crashing in through the doorway of the bedroom, and hits the bureau where Mami keeps her belongings. Perfume bottles and talcum powder, needles and thread, a thimble, shiny hair clips and brooches she wears on very special occasions. I watch them as they’re carried away in the water, floating and circling around us.
The water circles around Mami and Tía and the baby, like a gentle whirlpool. It lifts them and swirls them all out of the room.
Someone is gently patting my head, a faraway voice is getting louder in my ears. “Don’t worry, Pequeña,” I hear. And I think maybe it is her, my angel, but then I recognize Doña Agostina’s voice. When I look her way, she is unfazed by the water, unfazed by the sudden disappearance of Mami, Tía, and that baby. She smiles before another wave comes in and pulls her out the door, too.
I float on the bed, like someone lost at sea. The
sound of water becomes louder as it rushes faster out of the walls, drips from the ceiling as though from the skies. My mind begins to swirl, fast, like the water, like the bed, and I become dizzy and nauseated by a smell in that room—the smell of birth, of warm blood, of my body and my insides.
I’m caught in between and I have to get out.
I focus on a crack on the ceiling and concentrate. I watch as it splits open, filling the room with sunlight like the bright yolk of an egg.
The water rushes me upward then, and through the open roof. And then I, too, am carried away on a wave as the water gushes out of the house and onto the dirt road. I’m rushed away, on my floating bed.
I’m laughing as the streets fill with water. I turn back and see Mami on our front patio, waving at me, anxiously calling me back, that baby in her arms.
¡Pequeña!¡Pequeña!
Something startles me back into the bedroom.
When my eyes flutter open this time, Doña Agostina is standing next to me, holding smelling salts under my nose. “You fainted, my love. Drink some water,” she says. She holds a cup to my lips and I take a small sip. The wetness is shockingly cold and I feel myself tethered back to reality as she puts the cup in my hand and begins to massage my stomach, all the while telling me I will be all right, everything will be all right.
Her large hands grind my stomach like she is mixing masa. It hurts, but I don’t care. I just want to feel normal again, not empty and hollowed out. I want to forget that my body ever housed anything.
I concentrate on the cracks in the ceiling, imagine myself being lifted and carried away again. The images of water and sun and rushing through the streets flicker in my mind.
We Are Not from Here Page 2