Marta breathed again, so deeply her chest looked bigger than her ass.
“Open your eyes then, nena. Why are you crying?” she said as she gripped me with both hands. Though her hands were warm, I kept my eyes sealed. I wondered: Is Florensia cold down there in the earth—so unlike swimming, so unlike being formed long ago in that woman’s warm belly?
Florensia’s mother wouldn’t let go. This time, the earth didn’t make her shudder. She didn’t even notice the muck under my nails.
“She’ll come visit once she’s back, I’m sure she will.”
“Go easy, Marta. You won’t have to look after her anymore. Florensia was always such a beautiful girl. God loves her.”
I walked Marta to the gate in my bare feet and stood around barefoot killing time, glancing down at the bottles stashed in the plants. Some had been there a while and were slowly becoming buried, rooted, their letters and names and phone numbers soiled by water and by time, which blotted out everything but the pain of the person who’d brought them there and the need—all gone but one—to know where they were.
I didn’t know about the house. But the earth, underneath everything, was mine.
That night, I dreamed of Señorita Ana. I don’t know if it was the first time or if I’d forgotten other dreams. But I never forgot her.
Though years had passed and I had shot up, Señorita Ana looked way taller than me that night, just as she’d always been. She asked me from up high about the other girls in my grade. I told her I’d bumped into so-and-so in the grocery store or shared a story I’d heard from Walter; I didn’t see them anymore myself. We ate toasted sunflower seeds and Señorita Ana asked me about each of them, one by one, except for Florensia. She knew. I told her I’d seen Candela and that she was knocked up, that Sofi had moved in around the corner with a guy who drove about on a moped for work.
“My brother said they’re expecting,” I said, and Señorita Ana fell into a deep silence.
She passed me some more seeds and I tossed them in my mouth, spitting out the shells. She wasn’t impressed. She hadn’t been impressed before, either: she was always saying we made a big old mess of those sunflower seeds.
“I would’ve like to,” Señorita Ana said then.
“See ’em?” I asked.
She stared into the distance. Filled her lungs with air and then let out:
“I would’ve liked to get pregnant, too. Have a baby girl. Like all of you.”
She looked at me and I avoided her eyes.
“Not me, hell no. Girls go missing,” I said, quickly stuffing my mouth with seeds.
Señorita Ana stared at me. Like the bag of sunflower seeds, I thought, something in her was running out too.
After that, we stopped talking.
I woke up thirsty for beer.
The joke was straightforward, but not even those I got.
Walter said:
“I’ve got twenty lice on me. Gonna have to wash my hair with kerosene.”
And I’d sit there wondering how my brother knew there were twenty bugs in his hair.
Then, he and his friends would laugh and say they had twenty beers, and I’d count the ones they brought in. Sometimes five, ten, or around fifteen, but never twenty. At some point I realized he wasn’t saying “twenty” but “plenty,” though not even that made me laugh.
I was thinking about that joke when I opened the outer gate and saw that another bottle had been snuck onto our land. I carried a bag on my arm with some bread, two cans of beer, and the sausages Walter liked. I was hurrying home from the grocery store ’cause I wanted to cook up the sausages before he got back from the shop.
As I locked the gate, I thought of how I had zero interest in finding another bottle. Of how I couldn’t leave it there in case the few neighbors who still didn’t know about me saw it or started picturing—as I was right then—a hand slipping through the gate and the desperate face of the person who’d brought the bottle. Anyway, even if I did pick it up, I didn’t want to eat earth that day, end of story. As far as I was concerned, there’d been “twenty” bottles for a while. So many I couldn’t even count them, so many they got on my nerves.
If you boil the sausages too long, they burst and end up like bland, blown-up chorizos. We ate them anyway on hot dog buns doused in mayo, but neither of us enjoyed it. That’s how my head felt that day: like meat ready to burst.
As I walked toward the bottle, I made an effort not to read the message and to persuade myself it was written in Chinese. I prayed it hadn’t come with a photo. The bottle was blue, broad, filled halfway with dirt. Crouching, I touched it. The feel of the glass stung the palm of my hand. I picked it up with the same arm that held the bag slung near my elbow.
Sometimes I could feel the weight of every single bottle turning my house into something I’d always despised: a graveyard crawling with strangers, a container of earth that spoke of bodies I’d never laid eyes on. Meanwhile, Mamá was all alone in the place where folks claimed the dead were laid to rest. I never visited her. I don’t know about Walter. There were times when I wanted to go but didn’t. I hadn’t been back since she was taken away from me as a little girl.
I walked to the house with the bottle. I stared at it, not knowing if I liked it or not, if I’d open it or not, if I’d charge the person who’d left it or just not call them. All I wanted was for it to be me and my brother eating sausages on the living room sofa, my only worry making sure they didn’t overcook, and that Walter didn’t get ketchup and mayo all over himself.
The house key was in my shorts pocket. I wouldn’t bring the bottle into the house that day, or call anyone, or scarf earth. Anyway, nobody was watching. I rounded the house thinking, as usual, of how I needed to tend to the plants but would just end up eating something yummy with my hands instead. That way there’d be no plates to wash. Then, I’d bum around with Walter.
I knelt down among the plants, parted the massive leaves, and put the bottle next to the others for company. There were plenty of blue ones. No blue was the same and no earth tasted alike. No child, sibling, mother, or friend was missed like another. Side by side, they were like glimmering tombs. At first, I used to count them and arrange them tenderly, sometimes stroking one until it let me savor the earth inside it. That was how I usually felt. But right then, I despised them. They weighed on me more than ever. Altogether, they exhausted me. I felt the bottles piling up on me. The world must be much larger than I’d imagined for so many people to have disappeared in it.
I retraced my steps and entered the house. I put on music, went to the kitchen, and turned on the burner. I looked for the kettle and filled it with water, trying not to think of how the person inside that bottle might die at any moment. I shoved the sausages to the bottom of the pot, one by one, till they were buried in water. I left them on the burner.
Walter arrived a few minutes later.
We ate the hot dogs, practically slopped over with mayonnaise, our fingers smeared, cold beers in hands, just the way it should be. My brother was happy; it was contagious. I didn’t ask why. We shot the breeze. Walter did nearly all the talking, sometimes with his mouth full, chomping like an oaf. I listened and laughed with him.
Later, he kissed me on the cheek and went back to the shop. He wouldn’t be home till later that night.
When he closed the door, I let my body drop on the living room sofa, where the day after and the next one and in the twenty days that followed, I would attend to people and scarf their earth and ask whether this person or that was alive or breathing and for how long and why had their lungs stopped or who had taken them. For now, all I wanted to do was sleep.
He stood against the gate. He looked real sad for someone so young. His hair was tidy and his clothes perfect, like in a cigarette ad.
I’d heard someone knock and, not awake yet, had taken my time to go outside.
He wasn’t knocking anymore. Either he’d gotten tired or given up. He was waiting.
Spying me, he pee
led himself off the gate. I stared at him in silence and didn’t say half a word.
He’d come to the door that morning, he said. He’d actually been coming for days but hadn’t been able to get himself out of the car.
Then he fell quiet and I looked him over.
He’d waited, he said, because he was looking for someone.
I didn’t know what to say. All I wanted was more sleep. I didn’t even know if Walter was home or if he’d left for the shop.
“I need help,” he said, as a woman passed us on the sidewalk. Her shopping cart screeched to a stop and she looked at me: a woman from the barrio.
I opened the door, turned around, and when I felt him walk in after me, said:
“Shut the door.”
I didn’t want anyone seeing him, much less folk talking shit about me. I hadn’t even brushed my hair. I must look like a zombie.
I wasn’t scared of him. Sitting there on the living room sofa, he was the one who seemed scared. As though he’d slept badly, like me.
“I didn’t get any sleep,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking for somebody,” he said again, his eyes turned down and fixed on his hand.
He looked around ten years older than Walter, but in a button-down shirt, shoes, expensive clothes.
In the sadness of his face, he was like my brother and me. Also, in the slow way he had of speaking, like he was struggling to get his words out.
“Who’re you looking for?” I said suppressing a yawn, my eyes teary from sleepiness.
He was quiet. It was still morning but I was thirsty for beer and wanted to go back to sleep.
“What’s the point? Her name won’t mean anything to you,” he said, looking me head-on.
“I don’t usually see people at this hour, but if you give me five minutes I’ll hear you out.”
I opened the fridge. Practically empty. Cold leftovers of some chicken Walter had brought home the day before. I breathed audibly. Nuh-uh, I was in no shape to eat earth. I closed it and went for the kettle, filled it with water, turned on the burner. I prepped the mate while the water boiled. Would he drink mate? I didn’t know ’cause I didn’t care. If he told me his story now, I wouldn’t sleep easy all day. How could I stop him?
The water was ready. I turned off the fire, brought out the kettle and the mate, and set them in front of the sofa. He still looked like a weary man to me, a man worn out ahead of time.
“Do you drink mate?”
“Of course.”
I stirred the leaves just a tad with the bombilla, then poured a stream of hot water into the hole in the middle. I handed him the mate and he drank it. Done, he held the empty mate in his hand and started to tell his story. He said his aunt, his mother’s sister, had come to visit him, that although they hadn’t seen one another in a long time, she had raised him.
“My real mother worked all day and went straight to sleep when she got home. Then, there was my aunt. I almost didn’t recognize her.”
He reached out, handing me the mate. I filled it up for me.
“I had to do a double take before I realized it was her. She didn’t visit me at home, but at the precinct.”
At the word “precinct,” I choked on my mate. What was I getting myself into? He asked if I was all right, and I dodged the question. I’m not sure if he noticed, but he didn’t comment. He had to wait for me to nod before going on.
“It was hard to get my aunt to calm down and tell me what’d happened. My cousin María had been missing for six days. She’d left nursing school and never made it home. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say.”
The man fell quiet for a moment. He looked at me like he wanted an answer, but I didn’t say a thing.
He said his aunt started laying into his colleagues. She said the cops and the commissioner hadn’t lifted a finger, that they weren’t looking for the girl. But he wasn’t really listening. He was thinking of his cousin María, who he barely knew and hadn’t seen since she was a girl, a little kid, a distant cousin he’d fallen out of touch with. But his aunt’s pleading, the way she was bent on getting help any way she could, had brought back the memory of his cousin. María had wanted to be a nurse. He was going to help.
I listened to him talk but had nothing to say. It bugged me that it was blood that pushed him to look for her, not the girl. Any girl. He was the law, that was his job.
He said he started looking as soon as his aunt left the precinct.
“I thought it’d be easy, as a cop,” he said, “but a lot happened.”
I passed him another mate. I felt like he’d talked too much. I was done listening, but then he added:
“I realized I was on my own on this one.”
He pulled a photo from his jacket. He wanted me to take it, but I told him to hold on to it and show it to me from where he sat.
I felt sorry for him, but that’s just how it was. Everybody looked on their own.
I studied the photo in his hands, then I studied him. Something in the girl’s smile and in his body made me think that this time things could be different, that I might get there early for once. I didn’t want another Florensia. I was the one who chose to lie to Florensia’s mom, her eyes trained on me. And the guilt was mine to carry. Maybe things could be different with this guy.
I pictured the other yokes telling him: “She’ll be back, probably off with her boyfriend,” and I got furious at him, at all of them.
I watched him handling the photo and thought of charging him a load of money to get him off my back, but then I remembered the girl.
“It’ll cost you,” I said without blinking.
Yokes got paid to look and do fuck-all. Why shouldn’t I?
He gazed at me in silence. A shadow of cruelty seemed to cloud his face.
“I’ll bring the cash tomorrow, if that’s all right, then we’ll head over to my aunt’s.”
“I’m not getting into no patrol car,” I answered.
He laughed. I liked the look of his white, even teeth. But the face he pulled reminded me of all the little tykes in my neighborhood, and I kept a stern look on my face.
“I’ll bike.”
He shook his head no. So I said:
“This is what we’ll do. We meet again tomorrow, but you only talk about her. Not a word about the precinct.”
He smiled, nodded, and said:
“I’ll come fetch you tomorrow, I’ll bring my car. My name’s Ezequiel.”
The yoke gone, I went to the bathroom. Even though there was no one home, I closed the door so I could get a good look at myself in the mirror. I had changed too. I knew the next few days would be crazy. I wanted to remember my face as it was now, in case it somehow got lost in the coming madness and changed altogether. I switched off the light, walked out of the bathroom, collapsed on my bed, and went on sleeping.
I’ll come fetch you tomorrow, I’ll bring my car,” was the first thought that crossed my mind when I woke up.
It spells trouble, getting into a car with a cuff. I got up and tripped over some combat boots on the way to the bathroom. Walter had brought a girl home. His door was shut and I couldn’t tell if he’d left for the shop or if he was still in bed. Better busy than not, seeing as I hadn’t mentioned I wouldn’t be around. I righted the boots and set one foot beside them. They fit. I’d never had combat boots like those before.
The girl wouldn’t have left without her shoes. She must still be hanging in my brother’s room.
I used the same foot to nudge the boots off to the side and continued to the bathroom. While I peed, I checked to see if Walter had showered, if he’d shaved or whatever. Nothing. The last thing I needed was for one of them to turn up when the yoke finally showed. I scrubbed my face and teeth. The towel was gone: that was on my brother.
I shook my hands dry and ran them through my hair. Back in my room, I tried to change without making a racket. I’d wait for the yoke at the gate, so he wouldn’t have to come in. Where were my p
ants? I couldn’t go out wearing shorts. I checked my dresser, nothing: a pair of leggings, more shorts. The floor was covered in dirty laundry. I’d have to do a wash soon. Maybe there were pants by the sofa. That’s where I fell asleep most of the time, music sounding on the PlayStation. I hated when Walter cut the music. Still, he either turned it down or off when he got home. Then, I’d wake up at three or four a.m. and not fall asleep again till sunrise. Or later, if the cats were scrapping on the roof. The only way I could sleep through the night was with music.
I found a pair of jeans under the living room sofa. They were pretty clean. There was an empty beer bottle, too, and I left it where it was. I grabbed the pants, shook them out, and slipped them on. I found my kicks, my cell, my backpack. I was hungry but there was no time for food.
I walked outside. The sun shone real nice, making everything seem greener. I was into it. For a while, I forgot I was hungry. There was a scent not only of earth but of plants. I took deep breaths as I walked so that my body would soak up the smell. The last step to waking up. I went up to the gate. I’m not sure why I peered outside, I didn’t know what kind of car he drove. I turned around and leaned against the gate. The lock stabbed into my back and forced me to stand upright. I stared at my house so hard I realized I found it difficult to leave that place. Unclear why. It’s not like I was headed to the moon. Just to the house with the missing girl, and back.
“María’s gone, María’s missing,” I said aloud then turned around.
The sun struck the path. A cat dashed across the fence and two dogs chased behind it tongues lolling.
“Slobbery idiots. Git!”
The dogs ran on and the cat, for a change, fled onto the roof. The dogs snuffled the trash on the corner.
It must be time. I put the key in the lock, opened the gate, and went out. I locked up again and stashed the keys in my backpack.
Minutes later, he arrived.
I climbed into his gray, new-smelling car and he drove off. Ezequiel, he said his name was. As I watched him drive, I had trouble picturing it. As far as I was concerned, he was just a yoke. Now and then he looked at me too, which was awkward ’cause he clearly didn’t know what to say. Outside, the sun shone full. On a corner, a nipper tried to skip over a ditch but misjudged and landed with both feet in the scummy water. The mother, not far behind him, conked him on the head and the brat burst into tears. As I watched them, I thought of the boy’s head stinging from the blow, his feet wet from dirty water, of how pissed he must feel about bungling his leap. That’s how I felt in that car.
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