by Bill Clegg
Lupita lifts the doll from the towel it has been wrapped in. She runs her thumb along the dark brown braids, reties the red-and-white checkered fabric bows at each end, and arranges them in front of the doll’s stiff arms made from a single lilac branch that is now visible beneath the dried husk that had deteriorated under the tightly knotted jute. As she would smooth wrinkles on her own blouse, she strokes her fingertips across the front of the brittle garment, a poor replica of a simple spring dress once worn by the girl the doll was modeled after. She gently flicks a smudge of dirt from the hem and sends a small cloud of dust particles floating out and up around the doll’s face. She picks the tiny specks that fall along the hairline and notices the strict part down the middle of the narrow head made of sock and spoon, the braids so tight they have not come loose in more than half a century. She runs her fingers over the husks, the yarn, the dingy gray cloth where the mouth should be. Lupita wonders what the doll would say if she could speak, how she would answer the thousands of prayers she’d whispered to her. Involuntarily, like an air bubble popping to the water’s surface after a long, slow ascent, her sister’s name sounds from the back of her throat, Ada.
* * *
When they were young and in Florida, before moving to New York and Connecticut, Ada was the closest thing Lupita had to a best friend. Their father worked long hours on a crew that built roads, and their mother cleaned houses and babysat in the evenings, so the two girls were often on their own after school and on the weekends. In the first year, they spent most of their time in the apartment—making forts out of sofa cushions, dressing up in their mother’s blouses and pretending to be everything from police officers to princesses. They listened to the radio and tried to make sense of and mimic the English-speaking DJs and sing Elvis Presley songs. Occasionally, they’d venture outside to blow bubbles with water and dish soap, using the small plastic wands they’d kept from the pink bottles with colored bubble solution their father had given them when they’d first arrived. There were other children in the apartment complex where they first lived, but they were mainly from Cuba, and while they didn’t pick on Ada and Lupita, they kept to themselves and communicated clearly with rolled eyes and turned backs that they didn’t want to have anything to do with them.
Lupita was four and Ada was eleven when they came from Mexico with their mother. Their father’s first job in Florida had been on a farm that grew ferns people potted and put in their houses. As her mother had described it, he and his friend were part of a program that allowed Mexicans to work in America without being citizens. They had a contract with the fern farmer and lived in a camp with other Mexican workers. When Lupita was older and had asked why their family had not left Mexico together, her mother responded by saying that there were no children allowed then, and that the camp where he’d lived had been like a jail. Later, when he started building roads and making a little more money, enough to rent a small apartment and pay for their journey to Florida, they joined him. Before then, they lived with their grandmother in the same three-room concrete house in Catemaco her mother had grown up in. It sat between other houses that looked exactly like it in a crowded neighborhood between a freshwater lake and the Gulf of Mexico.
Lupita’s memories of her grandmother are spotty and impossible to fully distinguish from her sister’s. It was Ada who’d told her she’d been a partera, a midwife, and a curandera, a healer, but when Lupita lived with her she did not know why people came to their door at all hours and waited for her to grab her large brown bag and come with them. She would sometimes be gone for days and then reappear, exhausted, and sleep late, sometimes all day. When she wasn’t assisting in childbirth she sat in a chair in front of the house and people came to her with their problems. She sometimes prayed with them, often with her hands on their head or face or body, other times she chanted or sang and made them tea. Lupita remembers her grandmother’s hands as large and rough, with long warm fingers, and when she was curled in her lap, they stroked her forehead, her cheek, and brushed the hair away from her eyes.
Lupita has no memory of saying goodbye to her grandmother when she was four years old, but she thinks she remembers the sound her grandmother made. It’s not attached to an image of her face or her tears, or where she was standing or sitting, just the sound itself—a high, ragged keening she knows is the saddest, most suffering sound she’s ever heard. She and Ada and her mother took a bus later that day from Catemaco to Reynosa but she does not remember it. What she remembers is her mother squeezing her hand so hard it hurt and whispering sharply at her to stay silent as a man she did not know picked her up and carried her over water. She remembers darkness and not being able to tell which way was up or down. The memory ends with the sound of water swooshing between legs, and the feeling of something terrible about to happen. She has never remembered what followed—crossing the Rio Grande in a small raft, walking and being carried in the dark through fields and along back roads to the bus station in McAllen, Texas, and waiting there until morning to take the bus to San Antonio, Houston, out through Louisiana, across the Florida panhandle, and finally down to Belle Glade, Florida, where their father was waiting. Because Ada had told her, she knew that this was how they came to the United States; that this is what happened, and that these were the places they’d passed through. Her mother never spoke about that night, the river, or the bus rides the next day, and Lupita understood without being told why that she was not supposed to bring it up.
Though the journey to Florida is mostly blank, Lupita remembers being frightened by almost everything after they arrived. First and foremost, by her father, who’d left Mexico when she was one and a half, whom her mother and grandmother and Ada talked about all the time, but whom she had no memory of. Until then, she’d only lived with women and she wasn’t used to having a man around. The swift change in atmosphere, and in her mother’s mood, when her father came home after work confused and terrified her.
The apartment her father had rented them was on the first floor of a three-story apartment complex. Lupita had never lived anywhere but her grandmother’s house, had never slept even one night in a building that had a second floor, so the voices and footfalls above sounded to her like wild animals, or monsters. Ada comforted her with stories of their grandmother, and where they came from. Catemaco, she explained, was where witches and sorcerers gathered. Lupita loved hearing her describe how their grandmother was a good witch who brought babies into the world, healed the sick, and how, before they left home, she protected them with a powerful spell that would for all their lives keep them from harm.
Many years later, Lupita would look online and research the town she’d come from to find out that Catemaco actually had been a famous hub of withcraft, a place where many Mexicans, Americans and Europeans traveled to be healed or have curses placed on enemies. Of course there was nothing about her grandmother in any of the articles—she didn’t expect there to be—but she was still disappointed.
Lupita never tired of Ada’s stories about their grandmother. She had little more than a few vivid but fleeting impressions, so she badgered Ada to share what she remembered which she was mostly willing to do, unlike their mother who would order Lupita to take out the trash or hang laundry at the mere mention of her mother. She will never stop missing her, Ada told her. Their grandmother didn’t have a phone and she wasn’t much of a writer, so beyond a handful of signed generic birthday and holiday cards, their contact was scant. Still, Lupita believed that her protective incantation would keep them safe. She clung to that belief through the five years they were in Belle Glade, living in two apartments, three shared houses, and occasionally motels in between. She clung to it when she started kindergarten and didn’t know more than a few words in English, and through the next two years of learning the language that came more easily to her than it did to Ada and her parents. But she clung hardest at nine years old when her mother told her that their family would be moving to New York City.
When Lupita was o
lder she would understand the story better, how one of the men her father worked with knew the caretaker of an estate owned by a wealthy family who spent part of their winters in Palm Beach. The caretaker needed help removing trees that had fallen on the property during a storm and had asked his friend to recruit a few capable men to help. When Lupita’s father heard about the job, he swiftly volunteered. The caretaker, a man Lupita would come to know as Miguel Esparza, was impressed by how hard and well he worked and called on him from time to time over the years when there were larger jobs to do. In the few months out of the year that the estate owners were in Palm Beach, Lupita’s mother was hired to help with meals and cleaning. This is when she got to know Mrs. Goss who, she’d told her daughters, took a quick shine to her. She’d even bragged that Mrs. Goss already preferred her to Miguel Esparza’s lazy wife, Frida. Two winters later, Lupita overheard her mother speaking very quickly and with obvious excitement to Ada. She was telling her that Mrs. Goss needed a caretaker for their country house up north and a housekeeper for their apartment in Manhattan. Less than a month after that, her mother sat her down on their couch to tell her they were moving.
When Lupita asked her mother if there was room for all of them in the Gosses’ apartment, she explained, as if such an arrangement were perfectly normal, that she and Ada would be the ones to live and work in the city and that Lupita would live with her father in the countryside where he’d be the caretaker of the family’s large house. She described an apartment above the garage there big enough for all of them and she promised they’d be together every weekend, on holidays and in the summers. Lupita was immediately seized with panic at the prospect of being separated from Ada and her mother, whom she’d never spent a night apart from. She pleaded with her mother to change her mind, but she explained that the job was a godsend, that the family would be sponsoring not only hers and her father’s green cards but Ada’s and Lupita’s as well, and that if things worked out, and they stayed with the family long enough, they would help them all become permanent citizens. For this reason alone, she said, they had no choice. At nine years old, Lupita only had a vague idea about the meaning of green cards and citizenship but she knew they were important and especially to families like theirs who’d come to the United States from Mexico.
In the months before they left Florida, Lupita noticed her mother becoming more energetic, less somber and exhausted, which had been her usual way. In that short period of time she was almost cheerful, which made knowing they’d soon be living apart even more painful. Her mother tried to make her understand how wonderful their new future would be. She’d made it clear that the security of being sponsored was by far the most important, but to this she added that growing up in a small, safe town, with nice houses and good schools, was far better than anything a big city like New York or swampy Belle Glade could offer; and, most practically, how working for the Gosses meant they would not have to pay rent anywhere and therefore be able to save up for Lupita’s college education.
Going to college was something Lupita’s mother had often talked about, and in the first few years in Florida, she told both girls that they needed to work hard at school in order to go to college and get good jobs. But after a few years of Ada struggling with English and getting poor grades, their mother stopped encouraging her and shifted her focus to Lupita, who she frequently reminded was the family’s best chance. For what specifically she never said but it was clear that it meant graduating somehow into a life that did not involve cleaning bathrooms and babysitting other people’s children.
The year before they moved to New York, Ada dropped out of high school. At the time, Lupita saw her as the lucky one, the one who didn’t have to go to school, and even luckier once they moved to New York, where she didn’t have to live with their volatile father, but instead got to stay with their mother in a beautiful apartment in New York City. But Ada didn’t act like she felt lucky. After she quit school and started working with her mother cleaning houses, she became distant and impatient with Lupita; and in the weeks before they left Florida she stopped speaking to her altogether and when she did it was only to huff at her to shut up or stop singing or get out of the way.
On the drive north to New York, Lupita tried to connect with her sister by asking her to imagine with her what the Gosses’ apartment and house would look like, but Ada wouldn’t engage. Lupita persisted by asking her questions about the family who she’d worked for a few times with their mother in Palm Beach. Lupita was especially interested in anything there was to find out about their daughter who was, her mother had told her, only a year older than she was. But Ada cut her questions short, They’re rich and they have dirty dishes. You’re the only one in this family who won’t have to wash them.
On the day they arrived at Edgeweather, Lupita begged Ada to convince their mother to let her come with them to New York City. She responded by grabbing her small shoulders and shaking her violently, something she’d never done before. She said through tears that she never wanted to hear her complain again because everything she and their parents had done, and were doing—being apart for years, moving to Florida, getting work in New York and Connecticut, making beds, building roads, mowing lawns, babysitting, cleaning houses—all of it was for her. This is not for me, do you understand? Not for them, either. None of it. This is for you. Her sister looked like an angry stranger, and nothing had ever frightened Lupita as much, or made her feel as lonely. And so she ran—across the empty road, past the stables and fenced fields, and into the darkest woods she’d ever seen. With each hard footfall she felt her grandmother’s magic weaken.
Three months later, when her grandmother died, it felt to Lupita like God was punishing her family. Her father explained that no one would be able to attend the funeral. That it would be years before they would be able to travel back to Mexico, if ever. Lupita remembered the night they’d left; her mother’s tight hand and desperate whisper. She tried to picture Ada, and the stranger who carried her, but the strongest memory she had was of her mother’s fear, and her own. She felt that same fear return when her father told her she would never see her grandmother again. Her family had already been divided, but it suddenly felt newly exposed. With her grandmother no longer in the world, Lupita believed they were now truly on their own.
The idea for the doll came to her from a dream she thought might also be a real memory of her grandmother. In the dream, she’s holding a doll. When Lupita asked her about it, her grandmother explained that after having had two sons she’d wanted a baby girl, but worried she might be too old. She believed the best way forward was to show God what it was she wanted, and so she made the doll. With it, she prayed every morning and night, and eventually her prayers were answered. Tu madre vino a nosotros.
Soon after Lupita and her father moved in above the garage at Edgeweather, she set about making a doll that looked like Ada. She took dark brown yarn from an old wool scarf she found hanging from a hook in the garage. She stowed it under her bed and unraveled it at night after her father went to sleep. It was lighter than Ada’s hair, but it was the best she could do. She stole the wooden spoon from the kitchen she and her father shared and scoured the boxes and closets in the garage for the rest. Before the end of summer, her doll was complete. Her mother would have wrinkled her nose at the uneven hem of the dress, but would have approved of the hair, which was thick and even and pulled into two perfect braids. It was as close to a replica of her sister as she could make. It reminded her of the nights they slept side by side on floors and pullout couches and old mattresses as they moved from place to place in Florida. Ada, more than her mother, soothed Lupita when she woke in the night from a bad dream. After Lupita described what had tormented her, usually a scenario involving a giant bird plucking her from the sky or an unseen ocean creature pulling her to the bottom of the sea, Ada would hold her hand and tell her it was safe to go back to sleep. Los monstruos no son reales, she would say, more a straight reporting of the fact than a tender coddlin
g. Still, in those first months above the garage in Wells, Lupita wanted nothing more than to wake up and find Ada next to her, to hear her sure, sturdy voice reminding her that what she had dreamed was not real and that nothing in the world could harm her.
As her grandmother had done, she made a replica of what she wanted most. She showed it to God each morning and night and told him her heart’s desire: for Ada to come back. Not just from New York where she was living, but as the sister she’d known before, the one who made her feel safe.
* * *
It’s long past midnight now and Lupita has swept the small brick terrace that surrounds the fire pit behind her house. Normally, the fire pit is alive with jasmine, plumeria, hibiscus and mint marigold, along with succulents arranged in ceramic pots and teak boxes. But tonight, she’s hauled away the small jungle of leaves and buds and curling vines and filled the pit with sticks and driftwood she’s gathered from the beach and stacked on top of cardboard boxes ripped into small panels, egg cartons she’d saved for recycling, and dozens of crumpled paper shopping bags. To make sure it burns, she soaks it all in lighter fluid.
The doll is tucked under her arm when she drops the lit match onto the flammable pile. She watches the fire catch—first the slick of fluid, immediately followed by the paper and cardboard, then the sticks and twigs, and from those the flames lick and twist upward into the windy night. She throws on thicker branches and boards and soon the fire crackles and roars and the air around the pit shimmers. It looks like a dragon’s mouth spewing an old hate. Startled, she steps back. She reminds herself where she is and when—home, her backyard, now—and lets the heat on her face and arms calm her. She remembers the doll. She passes it from one hand to the other, pinches its sloppy hem between her thumb and ring finger, and leans closer to the fire. She dangles her failed magic above the flames, and then does the one and only thing she’s ever done perfectly. She lets go.