by Jaquira Díaz
After a whole day out in the sun, Mami was exhausted. She sunbathed, lying on the grass while we flew the kite, ran around after each other, tumbling and laughing and calling out to her, Mami look at me, look at me. She was tired but happy, her face turned up to the sun, her golden hair pulled back, beads of sweat collecting at her hairline.
This is how I want to remember my mother. These are the memories I want to keep: my mother, exhausted but happy, how carefree she was, how beautiful. How for those moments, before we knew that she was sick, the whole world seemed possible. How when I looked at her, I hoped that one day, I would be exactly like her.
After the lifeguards treated Alaina for a Portuguese man-of-war sting, Mami took us back to the motel. For days we wore the same pajamas, hand-washed our underwear in the shower. We ate dry Frosted Flakes and bologna sandwiches. When we ran out of cereal and bologna, we ate mayonnaise sandwiches. Then one morning the housekeeper knocked on our door and told us we needed to check out.
Mami shut the door in her face and sat on one of the beds for several minutes, as if in a trance. Alaina watched Scooby-Doo while I waited for Mami to tell us that we were finally going home. But when she spoke, she didn’t even look at us.
“Your father,” she said, “this is all his fault.” Then she got up and locked herself in the bathroom.
After a few minutes I heard her voice. I turned down the volume on the TV, pressed my ear against the bathroom door. Mami was having a conversation, laughing.
Alaina tiptoed over, whispered, “Who’s she talking to?”
“I don’t know.”
After a while, Mami stopped talking, just laughed and laughed. Alaina and I sat on the floor and waited. Although we looked a bit alike, when you looked closer, you’d see how different we really were. Alaina was darker, shorter. She had loose, thick, black curls. Alaina was the brave one, the kind of kid who didn’t need hand-holding. She was even-tempered, had a strong sense of justice, cared deeply about animals, and about doing the right thing, always. I was the loud, angry one, the one who always got into fights, fought over anything, everything. I cared about books and music and monsters and not much of anything else.
I could tell Alaina was confused. It had been confusing for me, too, when it first started, and afterward, when I realized what it meant. Papi had just left Mami for the last time, in a dramatic scene that spilled out into the street, Mami following Papi down the street as he hailed a cab, Anthony, Alaina, and me running after them. As he got in the backseat he promised to come back for us. Mami promised she’d find out where he was staying and set him on fire in his sleep.
After that, Mami started seeing the man again. He followed her to the bus stop, to the laundromat, to her job as a housekeeper at the Deauville Hotel, to the grocery store. She told me how he stood outside her bedroom window and pressed his face to the glass, always looking for her, always watching her. He’d send her messages through the radio, through the TV. She couldn’t shake him. One night, as she was getting out of the shower, she slid back the shower curtain and found him sitting on the toilet. When I told her I hadn’t seen any man, she exploded, eyes bulging. “I’ve given you everything!” she said. “Everything! And now I have nothing left.”
At the motel, Alaina and I waited on Mami.
“What’s wrong with her?” Alaina asked. “Who’s she talking to?”
I sat on the bed, considering what to tell her. How many times had I asked Papi the same question? He’d always avoided the details, saying simply, “Your mother is sick.” He’d let me discover her drug use on my own. I didn’t know whether my mother’s madness had caused her addiction, or if her addiction had led to her madness. At eleven years old, I preferred to think that the drugs had driven her crazy. Maybe the thought that my mother had done this to herself was less frightening than the idea that madness was something that could just happen to you, as it had to my mother, as it had to Mercy before her, as it had to Mercy’s father, who my mother had called Abuelo, before I was born. Because if that was the case, then it could also happen to me.
When Mami came out of the bathroom, her hair all messed up like she’d been pulling it, she gathered the few things she’d brought with her.
“Get your shoes on,” she said. “We gotta go.”
On the walk back, I gave her the silent treatment. Since we were going home, it was finally okay to hate her for what she’d done. And for what she was. It seemed easier than hating my father for never standing up for us, or myself for letting her take us, or God for letting her be crazy.
Every time we passed a cherry hedge, Alaina and I picked the fruit and speculated about whether or not it was the same bush where they’d found Baby Lollipops. Mami was having a conversation with herself about the pains of giving birth, and how once your children are expelled from your body, they begin to turn against you. They begin to look like their father. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, lit a cigarette, then kept walking.
“Who were you talking to?” Alaina asked her.
She studied Alaina’s face, her eyes narrowing. “What do you mean?”
“Like two minutes ago, and in the hotel bathroom.”
She took a long drag off her cigarette, then exhaled the smoke. “I was talking to Pedro.”
Alaina and I looked at each other. But we said nothing.
When we got home, Papi kissed us each on the forehead and stepped into the hallway to talk to Mami while Alaina and I went into the kitchen with Abuela.
Anthony, who was on the couch watching TV, barely looked up when we walked past him.
Abuela pulled us close, squeezed us tight. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving!” I said.
She pulled two bowls from the cupboard, then started serving me rice and beans. Alaina took her bowl and started serving herself.
“Where were you?” Abuela asked. “Your mother called your father at work, but didn’t say where you were staying.”
“We were in some ratty motel close to the beach,” I said. “Anthony’s lucky Mami didn’t take him, too.”
When Papi came back inside our apartment, he didn’t wrap his arms around us or pick us up or twirl us in the middle of the living room like I’d imagined he would. He just went to the bathroom to get ready for work. I wanted to shake and shake him. Did he know how scared we’d been? How many times had Mami threatened to take us away, to keep us from him? Why hadn’t he tried to find us?
I didn’t say anything, though. I knew Papi—he avoided conflict. Even when they were still married, no matter how many times I’d shown him the bruises from one of Mami’s beatings, he never said a word to her. I realized then that if my mother wanted to take me and Alaina, she could have us, and there was nothing my father would do about it.
While Lázaro’s mother and her partner sat in jail, their stories kept changing. They blamed a babysitter, then the drugs, then they told police they’d left the baby with a rich woman in a restaurant who took a liking to him. It must have been her, they said.
Then they turned on each other. Witnesses came forward with stories about how they’d called the police or the Department of Children and Families countless times. Family services had taken away three older children, had even taken away Lázaro, only to give him back. His torture and death could’ve been prevented, neighbors said, if only someone had listened.
One day after school, I stood in line at the bodega around the corner from my elementary school, listening to the cashier and a stock boy.
The cashier, a middle-aged woman, dusted the shelves behind the register. “That baby would still be alive,” she said, “if only they’d kept him away from those lesbians.”
The stock boy was refilling the candy bar boxes under the register counter.
“What kind of mother sleeps with another woman, then lets her abuse her baby?” the cashier said.
“I hope they kill those fucking dykes,” the stock boy said. “I’d do it myself if they’d let me.”
> I paid for my candy, kept my head down, and left the store. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard people say this, and it wouldn’t be the last. It was all over the neighborhood, how the women needed to be put to death, especially the mother, who was supposed to be the one to protect him, but instead had let some lesbian abuse her son.
People on TV sometimes called her “the lesbian mother,” or talked about her “lesbian lover.” I heard this so often, in so many different ways, sometimes implied, sometimes deliberate, that after a while it seemed as though being a lesbian was part of the crime, something a mother could also be charged with.
After school let out for winter break, the neighborhood kids hung out at the Flamingo Park pool. Sara and I would test the water to make sure it was cold as balls, then pick an unsuspecting boy and push him in. Occasionally, one of them would grab me, then jump into the deep end with me, letting me go as soon as we hit the water. We played chicken, sitting on each other’s shoulders. We raced, freestyling from the shallow end to the deep end and back. We tossed a quarter into the middle of the pool and dove for it, showing off how long we could hold our breaths underwater.
Frankie showed up at the pool one afternoon, sucking his thumb and checking out the girls. I was glad Alaina had stayed home with Anthony and Abuela—the thought of him undressing my little sister with his eyes made me sick.
In the afternoon, when the pool was about to close, I headed downstairs to the girls’ locker room. I was the last one there—all the other girls had gone home. After a quick shower, I wrapped a towel around my naked body, put gel in my hair, put on deodorant. I’d just pulled my panties on underneath the towel when I turned around and saw Frankie.
I jumped, wrapped the towel tighter around my torso. “What are you doing in here? Get out, pervert!”
He stood there sucking his thumb, rubbing the back of his head with the other hand. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.
“What the hell do you think I’m doing?”
“Taking a shower.”
“Get out!” I scrambled to get my T-shirt in the mess I’d left in my locker.
“Show me your tits.”
I reached for my tube of hair gel and flung it at him.
He started laughing. “Come on, just flash ’em real quick.”
“My dad’s gonna kick your ass!” I said.
“Girl, please.” He pulled his thumb out of his mouth and mocked my accent: “‘My dad’s ganna keek your ess.’” He chuckled. “Come on, just one time.”
Maybe it was because Alaina wasn’t around to keep me strong. Or that at eleven, I was already wearing a bra, a B-cup, larger than most of the other girls in my grade, and that it always made me feel self-conscious, especially when boys looked at me, or when they made comments about my breasts, which was often. Or maybe it was the way he said it, like he wasn’t just laughing at my anger or my accent but at what I’d actually said, that my father would kick his ass, and maybe even Frankie could tell it was an empty threat. He probably knew all about me and my crazy ass mother who lived on the streets half the time and talked to herself and insisted there was a man who followed her everywhere and that my father was ruining her life. My mother, who had told me so many times that I should love my body, but then turned around and said the worst thing she could ever imagine was having a daughter who was a puta. Maybe it was the thought of my mother that broke me, made me believe there was no use fighting it.
I opened my towel. Blinked once. Closed it again. “Get out.”
Weeks later Mami came knocking in the middle of the afternoon. She had a new place, she told us, and Alaina and I could come live with her now. As she started tossing our things into a black garbage bag, we cried and clung to Papi. We didn’t want to go, we told him. What if this new apartment wasn’t even real? What if she never brought us back this time, and we never saw him or Abuela again? And how come Anthony didn’t have to go?
Papi just stood there.
I thought about running to Abuela, who was in the kitchen making dinner. She was the one who took care of us anyway—Papi was almost never home. But I knew if I did, my mother would blow up. Anytime we’d ask Abuela’s permission for anything in front of her, Mami would turn bright red, say, “That vieja is not your mother!” This would lead to me screaming at my mother that she needed to respect my abuela’s house, which would lead to my mother slapping me, which would lead to me bursting into tears and threatening to call the cops on her, which would lead to her slapping me again while Abuela watched helplessly, being no match for my mother, which would lead to my father sitting me down when he got home from work and lecturing me on not starting trouble.
Mami tossed the bag at my feet. “Start packing.”
“But we don’t want to live with you,” I said.
She looked me up and down, then stared my father in the eye. “Tell them. Tell them this was only supposed to be temporary.”
I looked at my father, waited for him to admit that he had promised us to our mother.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he said.
Alaina burst into tears, then ran to the kitchen to bury herself in Abuela’s arms.
I stared at my father hard in the face. How easily he had just given us away. I started crying, too. There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot protect us, as much as we want them to, or need them to. There comes a time when we realize that we must save ourselves.
I picked up the bag, and without taking my eyes off my father, said, “I will never forgive you.” Then I packed some of our clothes and schoolbooks and walked out.
I tossed the bag down the building’s front steps and stood on the stoop with my arms crossed, waiting for my mother. I was wiping tears off my face when I spotted Sara, Steven, and their mom coming out of their building. Sara and her mom wore identical floral dresses with yellow sunflowers on them, and Sara’s hair had been curled. Steven wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. I sat down on the top step, trying to make myself invisible as they hustled into their Ford Taurus, which was parked in front of our building. As the car pulled away from the curb, Sara rolled down her window and waved. Steven did, too. Even their mom stuck her hand in the air. I put on a fake smile and waved back as if it weren’t the last time I’d ever see them. Sara, with her perfect mom, who took the kids out to dinner just because, who invited me to winter festivals and Easter pageants at their church.
I missed her already.
They buried Lázaro that December, after a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on Miami Beach. The children from St. Patrick’s school filled the pews, and the children’s choir sang “On Eagle’s Wings.” Small memorials popped up all over Miami Beach: Teddy bears and prayers written on poster boards and crosses and images of baby Jesus. And lollipops. An entire city mourning the loss of a boy no one knew. We carried him with us. And even though he belonged to no one, he belonged to us all.
II.
The spring after they found the body, Mami stashed us in a one bedroom in South Beach, a small place on Bay Road with a mattress on the floor and the stained rattan sectional Mami got in the divorce. We thought it was the same street that had been all over the news, North Bay Road, and for days it was all Alaina and I could talk about: how Mami had taken us against our will, how she’d brought us to live in a place where dead bodies were dumped.
It had happened one morning in early November. Two Florida Power & Light employees were working outside a house on 54th and North Bay Road when one of them discovered the body. It was the beginning of the dry season, and most of the Beach was still recovering from one of its legendary Lincoln Road Halloween street parties: the entire pedestrian mall transformed, every block between Alton Road and Washington Avenue overcrowded, stages with live music, haunted houses, floats with demons and vampires waving at us from the rafters. And everywhere we looked, Freddy Kruegers with their razor gloves, Jasons in their hockey masks, knife-wielding Michael Myerses.
Serial killers were the most popular monsters that year.
When Craig Kriminger and Stewart Silver parked their FPL van in front of the house on North Bay Road to do some repair work on a utility pole, most of the neighborhood kids were already in school. The mourning doves sang as the two men worked, the smell of cat piss all around the block, and something else. Something stronger.
At around 8:30 a.m., Kriminger and Silver made the discovery: under the cherry hedge between the house’s driveway and the garden wall, lying in a pile of grass and leaves, the dead body of the little boy.
In El Caserío Padre Rivera, parents summoned La Llorona, the mythical monster that kept kids from misbehaving. I was obsessed with monsters. I watched novelas about demons and exorcisms, movies about witches who came back from the dead to kill the townspeople who’d burned them at the stake. I loved zombies, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula. I was fascinated by the possibility of killer alligators living in the sewers, a real-life Jaws stalking swimmers in la playa de Humacao, knife-wielding leprechauns running around town looking for their pots of gold.
La Llorona was a boogeywoman, sometimes a pumpkin-headed demon in a tattered wedding dress, sometimes a woman with a goat’s head. She roamed the streets mostly unseen, unless you were so bad that La Llorona was hunting you.