by Jaquira Díaz
Our titis always had La Llorona’s phone number. Our fathers, if they came home from work to disobedient children, would be sure to get their hands on those digits. Our mothers sang us La Llorona lullabies, which were really horror stories about how she would come for you in the night. And when she finally found you, ripped you from the arms of your parents, or took you from your bed while you slept, what awaited you was a fate worse than death: La Llorona ate kids for breakfast.
If you were a troublemaker, if you got into fights, if you didn’t eat what your abuela made for dinner, if you refused to sleep come bedtime, La Llorona rose from the darkness to make you hers.
That year, before Mami took us, we’d been living with Papi, Abuela, and Anthony in an apartment across from Flamingo Park, a small place with paint peeling off the walls, rusty hinges on the doors, a family of mice living in a hole behind our ancient refrigerator.
We’d find the mice in our shoes, in the kitchen cabinets, under the bathroom vanity, fast little fuckers that darted across the linoleum while Alaina and I screamed and ran for our lives, Anthony laughing his ass off.
Anthony was thirteen that November and thought he was our watchdog, so he beat us up when we didn’t listen, or when we gave him lip, or when he was pissed at something we did or didn’t do. He’d terrorize us with stories about mice building nests in our curly hair, chewing off the tips of our fingers while we slept, sucking the liquid out of our eyeballs. One day he got Abuela’s cast iron skillet and whacked one, brain and blood and guts splattered on the kitchen floor, picked it up by the tail and flung it at us, me and Alaina ducking out of the way, screaming, Oh my God, what is wrong with you?
It would be months before a boy down the street threw a rock that sent Alaina to the hospital with a bloody eye, before I ran away from home, went joyriding in a stolen van, and took off for the Florida Keys with some older boys, before I swallowed my mother’s pills, the first time, the second. Would be years before Anthony started using steroids, before he tried to strangle me, before I stabbed him with a steak knife. These were the days before juvie hall, before blunts laced with scutter and bottles of Cisco and quarts of Olde English, before school counselors and teachers and friends’ parents and juvenile probation officers tried to save me, pulling me aside and looking into my eyes, saying, Don’t you know how dangerous this is? Don’t you know?
Before all that, there was a second mouse, a third, a fourth. And then it was the dead ones that started showing up in our shoes, our backpacks.
Once, while we waited for a hurricane to land on Miami Beach, the rain pelting our windows like pebbles, Anthony punched me so hard in the ear that he sent me tumbling across the bedroom we shared, my whole head ringing. Later, an audiologist would show me the results of my hearing test, look into my eyes, say, It’s pretty bad.
Once, while running wild through the cañaverales behind El Caserío, Anthony pushed me face-first into the sugarcane, sliced a gash down my left thumb almost to the bone. Sometimes the scar itches. Sometimes, I can make out the sweet-brown burnt sugar smell of those summer mornings.
Once, that same summer, I watched my titi Tanisha take a sharp blade to the inside of her forearm. She was still a child herself—just four years older than me. Three years before, Anthony had slammed a door on her hand so hard it severed her pinky. They weren’t able to reattach it.
In our family, the story of the severed pinky became the stuff of family legend, like a monster story. Told over drunken New Year’s Eve parties and barbecues, each one of us claiming to remember it like it happened yesterday—the rush to the hospital, the severed pinky in a cup of ice. All that blood. All that screaming. All those years of resentment.
Even after they buried him, people in Miami Beach still told the story. The diaper wrapped in packing tape, the lollipop T-shirt. The severed limb of an entire community.
As the years passed, we could all remember where we’d been when we heard the news, how old we were when they found him. How we watched it all unfold, how we waited each day for developments, how we speculated about the parents, passed strangers in the park and wondered, Is it her? Is it him or him or him? And then later, how we learned his name, his mother’s, that he did belong to someone. That he had not been, as we’d come to think of him, ours.
Anthony didn’t go with us to the apartment on Bay Road. He simply refused, and Mami didn’t bother trying to make him. He stayed behind with Papi and Abuela. Alaina and I had to survive living with Mami on our own. She’d just been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was on a cocktail of antipsychotics, anxiety pills, sleeping pills. Sometimes she snorted lines of scutter off our kitchen counter, off a hand mirror on her nightstand, off the cover of a Cosmopolitan. Other times she smoked crack from makeshift pipes made from tinfoil, a soda can. Sometimes she used an actual pipe. She’d be passed out on the couch for sixteen hours one day, and the next, she’d be manic, running around the apartment talking to herself, throwing things, laughing at nothing, at everything.
Papi came by a couple times a week, gave us a couple dollars apiece, and we’d stash it away for days when there was no food, keeping it a secret from Mami so she wouldn’t steal it. When we were hungry, we’d hoof it to 7-Eleven for ninety-nine-cent hotdogs.
Alaina and I spent most weekends plotting our escape, resenting Papi because he let Mami take us, resenting Anthony because he had it so good not having to deal with Mami and eating actual meals made by Abuela.
Living with Mami meant we could never have friends over, could never have birthday parties or sleepovers like all those normal, ordinary girls. We were afraid our friends would find out about her madness, her drug use, her violent outbursts. So we kept it to ourselves, our secret shame, hiding bruises from teachers and classmates.
Sometimes we snuck out of the apartment on Bay Road, made a run for it, tried to make it to Papi’s place before Mami caught up with us. But when our mother was high on coke, fast-talking and paranoid and enraged, she was like an Olympic runner. She’d take off after us in the night, barefoot and wide-eyed and angry, and she always caught us. Always.
Alaina and I didn’t believe in monsters, not really. We weren’t scared of the dark, or Freddy Krueger, or Pennywise the clown in Stephen King’s It. And even though she was the youngest, Alaina was always the bravest. Nothing scared her. But I was a different story. My greatest fear, the thing that scared me the most in the world, was my mother. It wasn’t the drugs, or her threats that one day she’d take us so far away we’d never see Papi or Abuela again, or even her violent streaks. I was afraid that, eventually, I would turn out just like her.
The first mouse was the hardest: the chaos in the kitchen, Anthony shoving me out of the way. How he trapped it, garbage can on one side, Papi’s toolbox on the other. How he closed it in with a cardboard box. How, out of nowhere, he handed me the skillet. How afterward, I would lie, say it wasn’t me who did it, but my brother. How in a different apartment years later, my brother coming after me and all I can do is breathe, brace myself, chest rising, falling, I open a drawer, pull out a steak knife.
One Saturday at the beach, the summer after she took us to the apartment on Bay Road, Mami met a man. He was younger than her, maybe twenty, and looked like he couldn’t care less, with dirt under his fingernails, his sun-bleached T-shirt sporting a quarter-sized hole on the shoulder. He’d walked up to her while Alaina and I were swimming, struck up a conversation.
When we got out of the water, I found him lying on my towel, smoking a joint and getting sand all over my sneakers.
We looked at him hard.
“That’s my towel,” I said, my mouth a fist.
He smiled, ignoring me, and handed my mother the joint. “Your kids are tough.”
By then, Mami had already schooled us in the ways of men: what they wanted, what they needed, how they let you down, abandoned you, made promises they’d never keep, how they hurt you then made you think you deserved it. Men were not to be trusted, not ev
en our father. And especially not men you’d just met. But she decided to take this guy home anyway.
When we were ready to leave, Alaina and I wrapped in our towels, our curls frizzy from the saltwater, Mami announced that he was coming home with us. Just for a little while, she said.
During our walk home, Alaina and I argued with her, told her that we didn’t even know this guy who could turn out to be some monster, a murderer or rapist looking for single mothers with girls. We told the guy straight up that we didn’t want him in our apartment and there was no way in hell he was going there and that we would call our father and then our uncles and then the cops. But we didn’t have a phone, and our threats didn’t bother Mami. “Just ignore them,” she told the guy. And he did.
When we got to the apartment on Bay Road, Mami and the man locked us out of the bedroom, left us in the living room, waiting. I thought about taking Alaina to the payphone at the Chevron station two blocks away, or walking over to Papi’s job, but I couldn’t leave my mother alone with some guy who could still turn out to be a murderer.
We sat out there most of the night—Alaina on one side of the rattan sectional, me on the other, both of us still in our bathing suits. Alaina in her purple one-piece with a ruffle skirt, red hearts on the bodice, her skinny arms dark brown, her cheeks and nose a reddish copper-brown. My little sister looked like me, except she was smaller, browner, with darker hair. If I stayed out of the sun, I got pale. But Alaina always looked brown.
I knocked on the bedroom door several times, reminding Mami that we needed showers, that we needed dinner. We were anxious to wash the saltwater off our bodies, condition and detangle our hair. We wanted to get to our secret cash—we’d stashed enough for two hotdogs and a Slurpee, maybe a bag of chips. We fell asleep waiting.
Later, every time I told this story, I’d say I was not afraid, just angry. I was mad at my mother for locking herself in the bedroom and leaving us to fend for ourselves with no food, for bringing some stranger into our apartment, into our lives. I would say that this is when it happened, in the middle of the night, when I woke to the sound of my little sister’s snoring, asleep on an empty stomach, and decided that we didn’t need a mother, that we could take care of each other. I would not say that when I woke, wearing nothing but my pink and black bikini with the zipper on the front, handed down to me by Tanisha, the man my mother brought home was standing in front of me in the middle of the living room, naked, holding his dick. How when I opened my eyes and saw him standing there, I pretended I was not surprised, pretended I was not scared, and said something like, Get away from me, you asshole, even though what I really wanted was to scream for my mother. Or how he laughed at the sound of my voice. Or how afterward, when we were finally allowed back into our bedroom, Alaina and I found our secret stash of money gone, how Mami admitted that he hadn’t stolen it, that she’d let him have it. Because, she said, he needed cab fare.
It was his mother who killed him. Or that’s what everybody said, every news station broadcasting the story, every day her picture in the papers, even after the case had been closed.
Once, months later, eating cereal in front of the TV, I watched the news on Channel 10, turned up the volume when they showed how the two women were transferred from the Miami Beach Police Station to Dade County Jail. I balanced the cereal bowl on my lap as the two handcuffed women were escorted by Miami Beach Police detectives, a crowd of locals, reporters, photographers, and camera crews waiting.
I put down my spoon, my frosted flakes getting soggy as each woman was walked past the crowd toward the police cruiser, the onlookers erupting, spitting at them, calling them “asesinas,” “baby killers,” “monsters.”
After we got kicked out of the apartment on Bay Road, one of the many times we got evicted, Mami took us to stay with Mercy. We showed up at her one-bedroom apartment on a Saturday afternoon, all our clothes and shoes spilling out of black garbage bags. Alaina and I hadn’t had anything to eat since our school lunches the day before. I’d stopped talking to Mami since she’d gotten us evicted, and because she wouldn’t let us go back home with Papi, Abuela, and Anthony, where Alaina and I wanted to be.
Mercy opened the door, and my mother explained that we needed a place to stay for a while.
“Why isn’t their father taking care of you?” Mercy asked. “Doesn’t he know that his children are in the streets like stray dogs?”
My mother dropped her bags on the floor. “He doesn’t care if his kids starve,” she said. “He spends all his money on women.”
“That’s a lie!” I blurted out. “Papi brings us money every week.” Then, on purpose, I spilled all my mother’s secrets: how my father paid child support, but Mami spent it all on cocaine and beer; how we never had food in the house unless my father bought us groceries; how Alaina and I had to hide money from Mami so we could buy hotdogs at 7-Eleven; how she lied and told Papi that someone broke into our apartment and stole the rent money, when she’d spent it on a three-day binge with some scutterhead from the neighborhood; how they’d locked themselves in the bedroom, and when the guy finally took off, he left behind dozens of empty cans of Budweiser.
My mother slapped me in the face, told me to shut up.
Alaina got between me and Mami, even if it meant that Mami would slap her, too. We spent most of our childhood that way, me and Alaina, dodging chancletas and belts, always feeling like all we had was each other.
Mercy didn’t pay me or Alaina any mind. “You need to be out in a week,” she said. “And I’m not taking care of any kids. I already raised my girls.”
My face was on fire. I was on fire. I hated my mother, hated Mercy, and I wanted to punish them. I looked Mercy dead in the eye, recalling all the times she’d talked about Abuela, called her “negra,” made up stories about how she was doing voodoo in her kitchen to ruin my mother’s life. How she always blamed my father for my mother’s illness, saying my father drove my mother crazy, my father made her do drugs, my father, ese negro, who ruined her life.
I took a breath, said, “You didn’t even raise your kids. You gave them away.”
And then Mercy slapped me, too.
In 1994, four years after they found Lázaro’s body, a tearful South Carolina mother, Susan Smith, would get on TV with a fake story about an armed black man, a carjacking, a kidnapping. She would look into the cameras, beg the so-called carjacker to return her sons safely. Her two little boys, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, would be found shortly after, inside their mother’s car, still strapped to their car seats, drowned at the bottom of John D. Long Lake.
After Smith’s confession, after she admitted she had made up the story, had made up the armed black man and the carjacking and the kidnapping, she gave police all the details about dressing her children, strapping them to their car seats, driving the car to the lake, and parking it on the boat ramp. How she released the emergency brake, stepped out of the car. How she let the car roll into the lake, let it take her children.
Two years after police pulled their bodies from the lake, seven people—four of them children—accidentally drowned while visiting the memorial erected there for Michael and Alexander. They had been driving one night, parked their SUV on the same ramp, letting their headlights shine on the two marble stone pieces.
They had been drawn there, people said, wanting to see the place where it had all happened.
The lake, they said, had become like a legend, attracting visitors from all over the world. A mythical place.
In El Caserío, I spent hours awake in bed, listening for the sounds of La Llorona. I waited for crying, wailing, a woman’s voice in the distance calling for her children—one boy, one girl—whose names I didn’t know.
The stories say that La Llorona killed her children after being rejected by a lover. She had taken her two babies from their beds one night, had walked with them through the woods down to the river, held their bodies underwater until they both drowned. Then, when she realized
what she’d done, with their lifeless bodies in her arms, she walked into the river and let it take her, too.
And so, the legend says, La Llorona wails in the dead of night, haunting rivers and beaches and lakes where children swim, parks and playgrounds where they play, calling out for her ghost children.
Five years after they found Lázaro’s body, when I was sixteen, I sat in a holding cell at the Miami Beach Police Station. It was my sixth or seventh arrest, this time for stabbing my brother. The fight had started weeks earlier, after Alaina and I moved back with Papi, me and Anthony screaming at each other like our parents used to.
“You ain’t my father,” I said. “You ain’t shit!”
“Count your fucking blessings,” my brother said. “I woulda sent your ass away a long time ago.”
He’d snitched to Papi about how I’d walked in stumbling drunk at 3:00 a.m., and I’d snitched about how I’d found syringes and vials of Depo-Testosterone in his backpack, both of us desperate for our father’s attention. Anthony was already eighteen, and by then Papi was too tired or too busy or too high to be bothered.
“What kind of girl . . . ” my brother often said, pulling out pages he’d read and then ripped out of my diary, holding them up for scrutiny, hard evidence of the monster I was, definitely not the girl I was supposed to be, the girl Abuela had tried to raise. “What kind of girl are you?”
That afternoon, the fighting had escalated to us wanting to kill each other: during one of Anthony’s ’roid rages, after I’d flung his T-shirts, sneakers, and duffel bag off our eighth-floor balcony, after he’d slapped me and I’d slapped him back, he landed a punch on the side of my head that knocked me face-down on the floor. When I got back up, he tried to strangle me. Somehow, Alaina got him off me.
Then I went to the kitchen for the knife.
And when they arrested me, the knife on the living room floor, someone on the phone, Alaina crying and crying, the cops asking, Was it a stabbing motion or a slicing motion? How was she holding the knife? How my father, his forehead beaded with sweat, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy, kept asking, Que hiciste? Que hiciste? What did you do?