Disappeared

by Francisco X. Stork

  “Does that make you sad?” Sara puts her hand on top of her mother’s.

  “Yes, but not in a bad way.”

  Sara lets her mother listen to the song, watches the beautiful, peaceful smile on her face. That smile makes Sara remember a conversation with Linda after her mother signed the divorce papers. They were in Sara’s backyard, sitting sideways on a hammock tied between two elm trees.

  “It’s sad, but your mother’s right, you know,” Linda said. “Love’s not enough.”

  Sara leaned away to look at her. “What else is there?”

  “I don’t know what you call it. People have to hope and want similar things.”

  “And Papá and Mami didn’t?”

  Linda shook her head quietly. “Think about everything you’ve told me. All the ways they’re so different.”

  “My dad is outgoing. My mom is shy and quiet. Is that what you mean?”

  “No, it’s not about personality. It’s about what each of them wants out of life. Your mom is happy with what she has. If she has a roof over her head, some beans and tortillas, and her family—what else is there?”

  Sara nodded, understanding her point. “And Papá wants more.”

  “Yes. He had a steady job building houses here, right? But he wanted more than he could ever have in Mexico, and that’s why he went to the United States. There’s nothing wrong with his ambition. Your mom doesn’t fault him for that. She realizes that what makes him happy is not what makes her happy. She’s accepted that it’s okay for the two of them to go their separate ways. They’d be miserable together, just like he was already miserable before he left. Everyone could see that. You did too, admit it.”

  Sara lowered her head. Yes, she knew he was unhappy.

  Linda continued, “He’d blame her for holding him back, and she would fault him for not paying attention to what she thinks is really important.”

  “But he left us,” Sara argued. “He went away and never came back. Doesn’t he have obligations to us?”

  “He’s doing what he can, isn’t he?” Linda said. “He sends money. He’s not rejecting you and Emiliano. That’s not what the divorce is about. If anything, he’s showing you how important it is to do what you really like.”

  Sara thought about it. Linda’s words made sense to her, but she knew her brother was struggling with Papá’s decision. “Emiliano sees it as a rejection.”

  “You have to help him think differently.”

  “How?”

  “By doing what your mami’s doing. Understanding that the divorce is for the better. That there is love, but love is not enough. Then eventually Emiliano will understand.”

  Sara put her arm around Linda’s shoulders. The two girls were quiet for a long time. Two cardinals perched on the branch above them. “You better not poop on us,” Linda warned them.

  “How’d you get to be so wise anyway?” Sara asked her.

  “Telenovelas,” Linda answered.

  Sara smiles, remembering Linda’s words and seeing her mother rock gently to the rhythm of the music. Then a man’s hand stretches out in front of her. “May I have this dance?”

  It is Elias, staggering a little as he speaks. Sara can tell that he’s made several trips to the open bar, in addition to the champagne and wine served at the tables.

  “Elias, I’m a terrible dancer. I would kill your feet. But you’re very kind to ask.” She’s as nice and polite as she can be, especially with the whole table looking at them. The male ego, Elias’s especially, is fragile.

  “Come on. Just one dance, please.” Elias goes down on one knee. “Please.”

  “Okay, okay.” Sara stands up, pulls Elias from the floor and then steadies him with her hand on his waist. She lets go of him when he seems stable enough to walk by himself, and they proceed to the dance floor.

  “You are radiant tonight. Like the sun,” he says as they start dancing.

  “That’s the margaritas speaking,” Sara says, stepping back to create a respectable distance between their bodies. She tries to block out the words of the beautiful love song. There’s something incongruous about the pure kind of love that the lyrics are proclaiming and dancing with Elias.

  “You know what I like the most about you?” His voice has a slight slur to it.

  “Hey,” Sara says, trying to change the subject. “You know that camping trip with the Jiparis next Saturday? I was thinking of getting some pictures of the kids setting up camp and maybe a few of them hiking at night with the stars shining above them. What do you think?”

  “Stop talking shop for a minute. I want to tell you something.”

  Sara is surprised at the brusqueness in Elias’s tone. It’s the alcohol, she reminds herself. Humor. Get through the dance with humor. “Okay, but keep it clean.”

  Elias giggles like he thinks she’s joking. Flirting, maybe. “You’re not going to believe this, but what I like the most about you, what I really, really like about you, is your dedication.”

  Oh, God, Sara thinks. He’s going to get sentimental on me.

  “I mean it,” he continues. “You’re different than all the other women … I know. You … you’re committed to a cause. To those girls who are, who have gone missing. Who turn up dead after a while. There’s not that many women like you.”

  She turns her head slightly so she doesn’t have to smell his breath. “There’s lots of women like me. You just need to look at women a little differently than you usually do.”

  “No, no. I’ve looked. Trust me. In this very room”—he lets go of her hand and makes a circle in the air with his index finger—“I probably looked extremely close at half a dozen women. Including women you’d never guess.”

  “Wonderful.” She exhales and tries to listen to the words of the song.

  “I’m not trying to boast or anything.” Elias takes her hand again and squeezes it. “I’m saying that to show you how I see you is different. You know how I found out that I care for you?”

  Sara stops dancing. “I think I want to sit down.”

  “No, wait. Let me finish what I want to say!”

  The volume of his voice makes people glance in their direction. Sara starts dancing with him again to dispel the attention. “Elias, you’ve had too much to drink,” she says. “You’re my colleague. Don’t say anything that will make it hard for us to work together.”

  “You know what they say, drunks tell the truth. Just let me finish. I knew I had feelings for you when I noticed I was worried about you.”

  “Worried?”

  “Those articles you write. The threats you get. I’ve never been worried about anyone before. You understand? It hit me that I was falling in love with you when I worried that something might happen to you.”

  The song ends, but Sara stands still, looking at Elias. It isn’t his declaration of love that startles her; it’s the way he says that something might happen to her. Up until then his speech has been sweet, dramatic, with the kind of exaggeration peculiar to inebriation. But those last words were cold and totally sober, and they sounded very much like a threat.

  Someone at El Sol is working with Hinojosa. Someone went into Juana’s office and deleted the hotline e-mails. Someone knows that her life has been threatened.

  The band starts playing Ricky Martin’s “La Vida Loca” and people begin shaking and jumping all around them. Sara lets Elias take her in his arms again, and they continue dancing softly. Her mind is spinning, but her reporter instincts tell her one thing: Being close to Elias, as painful as it is, may be an opportunity to gather information, or to convey information to the people who are threatening her. She should go along with him, pretend she knows nothing.

  “What should I do?” she asks. “About the articles I write?”

  “You need to stop. Write about those Boy Scout kids, about all the happy things going on, like Felipe says. There’s nothing you can do about the missing girls. Leave them alone.”

  “I’ve stopped,” she says as convin
cingly as possible. “I’m not doing anything about missing girls. No articles. No investigations. Nothing. I’m done. From now on, happy stuff.”

  “Good.” He pulls her tighter against him. “Please don’t do anything that puts you or your family in danger.”

  She shivers. How does he know about the threat to her family?

  Elias whispers in her ear. “Sara, do you think that you and I—? Do you think there’s any chance …”

  Sara moves away from him and pretends to cough. She’s not good at this kind of game, and she can’t stand being close to him a moment longer. “No,” she says firmly but kindly. “There’s no chance of any relationship between us other than as colleagues who respect each other. I’m flattered you think of me that way, but no. Thank you.”

  She walks back to her table, aware that she has left Elias standing alone on the dance floor. She sits down and tries to smile at the people looking at her. Juana has a strange, disapproving look on her face. Sara wants to tell her what she just realized about Elias, but she can’t without revealing all her other secrets. Mami pushes her glass of water in Sara’s direction, and she empties it in one long swallow.

  Mami leans over and whispers in her ear, “Luisa says we can go whenever you want.”

  “In a little while,” Sara says. She needs a few minutes to recover, and she does not want people to see their departure as related in any way to Elias.

  She sits there quietly, listening to the music and watching people dance. Elias is at the bar getting another drink. Juana has spent most of the evening flirting with the man next to her, an anchor for one of Juárez’s television stations. He’s a handsome man in his forties with a deep, almost musical voice, and he’s there alone, although Sara knows he is married. When the man gets up to talk to one of the young men sitting at Elias’s table, Sara asks her, “Is everything all right?”

  “That’s what I should be asking you,” Juana says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Juana reaches over, grabs a half-full bottle of red wine, and fills her glass. “That little scene with Elias. What was that all about?”

  “Too much tequila,” Sara says.

  “What do you mean? Be specific.”

  Sara stares at her for a moment, wondering if the wine is responsible for Juana’s tone of voice. She hates what alcohol does to people. Emiliano feels the same way. Once when she was ten and Emiliano was eight, Papá came home drunk, and in a voice loud enough to wake them up, proceeded to tell Mami their marriage was a big mistake. Mami waited until the tirade was over and then calmly told him that if he drank again, she would leave him. The next day he went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he never touched another drop of alcohol. He still goes to meetings in the United States and he’s still sober—that’s what he says in his letters. But not everyone has that discipline.

  “He claims he has feelings for me,” Sara says to Juana.

  Juana snorts and drinks the wine in her glass. “And you said?”

  “I was nice. I thanked him. I told him I was flattered—I am flattered. But no. He’s not for me. I’m sure he won’t remember a thing tomorrow.”

  Juana pours the remainder of the wine in the bottle into her glass. She turns her chair in Sara’s direction and takes a deep breath, as if to clear the cobwebs created by the wine. When she speaks again, she sounds totally sober and in control.

  “Do you know why you will never be as good a reporter as me?”

  Sara shakes her head, surprised.

  “You feel too much,” Juana says, without any humor in her voice.

  Sara laughs, relieved. She thought Juana was going to say that Sara wasn’t as courageous as she is, which is true.

  “No, really. I’m serious,” Juana continues. “I can do my job well because I don’t let things get to me. I focus on what needs to be done and I do it. You feel too much. You put too much of yourself into your work. Sometimes the job requires callousness.”

  “You’re not callous.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Juana slurs. “The only thing that matters to me is my work. And my work is, for better or for worse, tied to El Sol. At my age there’s no way I’d get a job anywhere else. And anyway, that paper is my baby. Felipe and I founded it. We kept it going through the worst of times. Two of our reporters got killed. When Felipe was ready to fold, I found the money to keep us open. You don’t think I’m callous? Who do you think fired, I mean laid off, two-thirds of the staff? Who decided to go from a daily to a weekly? Felipe didn’t have the heart or the guts or whatever it is you need to make those kinds of decisions. Who do you think is keeping El Sol going now? Felipe talks a tough line but he’s a softy … like you.” Juana drains the last drop of wine from her glass. Then, looking into the distance, she says, “That job and two stupid cats is all I got.” She raises the empty glass at a passing waiter.

  “Are you all right? We can drive you home,” Sara says.

  “I’ll call a taxi,” Juana says. Then, “Your father lives in the United States?”

  “Yes, Chicago.”

  “So he’s an American citizen?”

  Sara can’t help smiling. Where is that question coming from? “No,” she says patiently, “he’s got a green card. I think he’s waiting for his citizenship papers.”

  “He married again?”

  “Yes. They’re happy, from what he tells me.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He worked in construction for a while, like he did when he lived here, until he saved enough money to start his own business. He sells and fixes air conditioners.”

  “So he’s a good man? You like him.”

  “He has a good heart. He does what he can to help out.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just before Elias asked me to dance I was thinking about my father and my mother, and how Mami accepted him leaving and is okay with it. She can even remember the good times she had with him without any bitterness.” Sara looks at her mother, who’s laughing over something Luisa has said.

  Juana grabs Sara’s arm and leans close to her face. “Why not get your father to help you get your residency or a work visa? Once you’re legit, find a job in El Paso. The El Paso Times loved that article you did on the joint task force—the one between the FBI and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office. Your English is excellent already. You’ll start at the bottom just like you did at El Sol, probably making photocopies or something, but knowing you, that wouldn’t be for long.”

  “Are you firing me?” Sara asks, laughing.

  “I’m thinking of what’s best for you. What did you say in that article about the task force? Remember, ‘the U.S. legal system is not perfect in practice, but it may be as good as it gets’?”

  “Mmm,” Sara says. “I’m very flattered that you think I would be a good reporter in America. But this is my home, and here is my family. Mexico is where I belong, even with all its problems. As much as I admire the laws and the freedom of the United States, I love my Mexico more. I love this stupid city. I don’t know why, but I do.” She stops, a little embarrassed. It sounded like she was making a speech.

  Juana sits there, looking at her. After a while, she speaks in a different, sober tone. “You also have to consider the fact that your life may be very short if you stay here. Especially if you keep investigating that e-mail.”

  The e-mail. So somehow Juana knows that she’s continued looking into it.

  “I want you to leave it alone, Sara. I mean it.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.” Sara catches her breath, tries to explain. “Linda was … is my best friend. I’ll work on it on my own time if you tell me absolutely as my boss that you want me to stop.” Sara waits for her to respond, but all Juana does is glare. She goes on, “You know you’re my role model, don’t you? You know I’m only doing what you taught me to do.”

  “Go ahead, then, get yourself killed. See if I give a damn.”

  Sara knows that Juana do
esn’t mean that. It’s the alcohol speaking. Right?

  Emiliano, lying on his bed, picks up the letter and reads:

  I wanted to talk to you tonight but you didn’t want to come to the phone. I don’t write very good. But I am still your father, even if you don’t think so. Your mother told me about the shoplifting and how you were caught. Why, Emiliano? Because you are angry at me? Why do you want to hurt your mother and sister and your future just because of me? You and me spent a lot of time talking about what is right and wrong. It is the most important thing a father can teach a son. When you came home from school with those binoculars you took from a friend, didn’t we take a bus all the way to his house so you could return them and apologize? Stealing or doing other wrong acts is not about me, Emiliano, or what you think of me. It’s about the kind of person you are. Even if I was the worst person in the world and as bad as you think I am, that would not make it right to be a criminal or even dishonest. I’m not perfect but at least I can say that I’m not a criminal. I want to do well doing honest work. It would have been easy enough for me to make lots of money doing something illegal, trust me on that. I hope you find it in your heart to love me again. You don’t know how much it hurts me that you may think I don’t love you. What I want most of all, with all my heart, is for you to know that I do. I do love you, Emiliano. I hope someday you understand that divorcing your mother was something I believe is best for all of us, including you. Most of all, I have not stopped being your father and I am going to continue to remind you to be a good, honest, kind person, just like I did when I was with you.

  He hears a knock on the door and for a moment he thinks it’s his father. Emiliano puts the letter down.

  “You decent?” It’s Sara. He looks quickly at the digital clock on a stool next to his bed. Three a.m.

  “No.”

  Sara opens the door anyway. He’s fully dressed. He didn’t even bother to take off Paco’s loafers. He got home before Sara and Mami were back from the quinceañera and threw himself on the bed. Then, when he thought that Sara and Mami were asleep, he got up and took a shoe box full of unopened letters from his father out of his closet. He searched for the only one he ever opened and read, and when he found it, he read it again. Now the shoe box is on the floor and the letters are scattered over the bed. He’s been lying there staring at the ceiling.