She tried the small door on the side of the long church, then the double doors in front. Every entrance was locked. No wide blue door slanted open, no welcoming golden candle flames. Serafina glanced back at the car, which was like an animal grazing peacefully in the leaves, and she went around to the other side.
Far across the huge lawn, the woman stood.
White stone. She had no blue veil or golden robe or dark eyes. But her hands were held out in supplication, Serafina saw when she drew close. She was a santo.
The statue’s face was paled by passing headlights, and Serafina stood on the base, close to the hard lips, and touched their icy coolness. The eyes were blank circles, but Serafina whispered, “Help me. Tell me what to do, and I will do it.”
She lowered her face to the hands, breathing in their chalky scent, laying her cheek against one wrist. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me she will have enough to eat if we go back.”
She heard a short whirl of sound, and the stone blushed. The white skin was suffused with red light, the lips and cheeks translucent, pulsing. She heard her own language, soft and humming, when she reached to touch the robe now flashing blue, like the Virgen’s.
“Home,” she heard then. “Go home.”
Footsteps landed on the concrete behind her, and a man’s voice said, “Hey, time to go home.” His flashlight was in her face, the blue lights twirling into the stone eyes. She turned and ran.
The policeman tackled her on the grass and lifted her by the elbow, and she dropped her shoulder and began to run again. Her tongue rose in her throat, and she gasped for air when he caught her again.
Another policeman watched while the first held her skull between his hands and said, “ID? ID? You got ID?”
“Mydotter! Mydotter!” She screamed the words, felt their strange shape pull the cords in her throat. “My! My dotter!”
“Okay, okay, you need a doctor. In Mexico. Get a doctor in Mexico.” He held her wrist with one hand and pulled her up slowly. She hit him in the shoulder. She hit him in the face. She had to run back to the car, around the corner, to the dark lot where Elvia waited.
But he pushed her down gently onto the sidewalk until her cheek rubbed the rough cement. “Damn,” he said when she twisted against the handcuffs, kicking him as they carried her across the street to the flashing car.
Serafina screamed. She couldn’t see the car. They were taking her away. “Elvia! Náā, Elvia, mommy, my dotter . . .” The words spilled wrong all across their forearms until one policeman shifted his sleeve over her lips.
“No habla español,” he said softly, shaking his head like a father. She understood those words. But she screamed again into the fabric until the harsh red light circled close to her eyes, pumping like blood from a deep cut when they laid her in the dark back seat.
The police car began to move. She screamed into the vinyl as her body floated away from her daughter who was sleeping, her head cushioned by braids. Serafina struggled to raise herself, to see, but she saw only the red light glaring, draining her, flashing in the same rhythm as her heart.
Moths dove in and out of the streetlight beam, banging against the window near her, then veering away in bursts of blurry white.
Branches and leaves covered the windshield, pressed tight like a blanket of black knives. Elvia wasn’t to touch knives. Her mother used knives to take the spines off the green cactus pads. They could eat the cactus then. Her father had gotten angry when he saw the cactus today. Once Elvia had gotten spines embedded in her finger, and her mother had pulled out the tiny red needles with her teeth.
Elvia studied the red circle of burn on her wrist. Her mother had kissed the burn. Elvia licked it herself. Her mother would lick and cool it again when she came back.
The crickets resumed their shrill scraping in the black leaves all around the car. Elvia had awakened in the front seat. Her mother was gone. The keys were gone. Her father had thrown the keys, flying with silver wings and landing on her mother’s chest.
Ndéchi náā? Where was her mother?
Ndéchi Barbie? Where was her Barbie? That was what the kids next door said to her through the silver fence. Cap’n Crunch Barbie Dandelion Stupid Beaner Mescan Hey Crickets Shut Up Ice Cream Truck Bye.
Her father had brought her the Barbie. Then he had gone back outside to the blue truck that roared behind a silver nose. She loved to steer the blue truck. She touched the dashboard knobs now. She had been inside this car only a few times. Her mother drove up and down the driveway. Barbie was on the ground, next to the hedge by the old lady with dandelion-puff hair. But Elvia didn’t cry. They were only riding up and down the driveway.
Tonight the car had bounced over bumps and made Elvia scream and laugh. It rocked and pitched like a huge, low-slung animal raising its back over the humps and then drawing in all its bones with a jarring tremble when they were over. Like a wild horsie ride her father had let her ride at the store. One time. Today?
Where was her mother?
The silver knob had turned fire-red and her mother had taken it away. Ñuhun. Her mother’s lips were red as the glowing circle. As though pomegranate juice stained her mouth. Chīhló—with sour red jewels inside. And her mother’s eyes were covered with blue sky.
The moths bumped harder against the glass, and Elvia peered out the window to see them dancing crazily in the light, dipping in and out of darkness. She saw the parking lot, empty and gray as if she were inside a cloud. Vico nuhu, her mother always said, pointing up at the clouds.
Her mother. Elvia was afraid now, and she ducked down into the cave under the dashboard. The well of space was warm, just the right size when she drew her legs to her chest. The floor felt like evening sidewalk against her legs. She twisted her braid into a pillow for her head. She could smell her mother’s cinnamon.
Something pale bumped the other window, harder, harder, and she looked up. The sky was light. The moths were gone.
A pair of white hands pressed like a snail’s underside against the glass, around a wide face bright as the moon. Elvia screamed and screamed when the man opened the door. She screamed while he pulled her out and carried her away.
Then she was quiet, and she didn’t open her mouth for months. “Where is your mother?” the man kept asking. Then a woman asked, “Where is your mother? Your father?” Behind her glasses, the woman’s eyes were huge and dark as plums. Her hair was a nest of yellow. She touched Elvia’s hair and said, “Pretty braid.” Elvia pulled away. She said inside her head, Lasú. The woman touched her fingers and said, “Little hands.” Elvia put them under her legs. She said inside her head, Ndaha. The woman put her in a car.
At the first house, the mother was big. All Elvia could see was the hem of her flowing shift. The rest of her was so wide and full of loose curves that she seemed to take up the whole front room where they stayed, day after day. Elvia watched the edge of material sweep past her on the floor where she sat. It collected carpet strands and lint and crumbs and bits of paper. The dusty, furred hem of the dress looked like the bottom of her mother’s broom after she swept the kitchen. Elvia used to sit on the floor then, too, her face close to the sweet-smelling straw as it traveled near her, teasingly close to her bare feet. She would look up at her mother, who pretended she didn’t see Elvia’s feet, gliding the tickly points of straw just past the soles.
Elvia waited for her mother. She didn’t move from the floor. She didn’t speak. The woman talked all the time. Another boy came. He had a bruise red as a chīhló on his cheek and a thick white sock on his wrist. But it wasn’t a sock. When the big woman went to the kitchen, he hit Elvia across the back with the sock, hard like a stone wrapped around his bones. She didn’t move. He threw a truck at her. She didn’t move. The big woman tried to feed him. He ran from the chair to the television to the couch to Elvia, touching each one with his good hand stiff and flat, running to the next.
>
She said nothing at the house where the mother had tongue-colored hair, where the many children pinched one another over individual Cheerios and fought about every hot dog.
She never answered at the house where everyone had braids except the father, who had a silver stripe in his black hair. The braids made her cry. The boys and girls had brown skin. The father talked gently to her, repeating, “Habla español,” but she couldn’t stop crying.
She was silent at the house where the woman washed everyone’s hair in the bathtub and Elvia’s long black hair swirled around the others’ legs like wet roots. She said nothing when the woman cut off her braid the next day. The black braid lay like a glistening snake in the white bottom of the kitchen sink.
She remembered her fingers wrapped around her mother’s braid while her mother carried her on her hip. She remembered the smell of cinnamon and corn. She touched her bare neck.
The woman kept staring at Elvia’s eyes, frowning at her brown skin, the scissors rasping. Elvia closed her eyes, remembering her father. His eyes were green, like faded palm fronds. Like hers. He used to say, “My kid” to his friends in the yard. Her father had yellow hair like dry grass, tied in a ponytail. Not a braid.
The woman threw Elvia’s braid in the trash. Elvia looked at the picture of Jesus on the wall. Her father looked like Jesus, if Jesus wore his hair in a ponytail and cut off the sides of his beard so only a yellow paintbrush hung from his chin, if Jesus took off his shirt and got mad.
Every night, in every house, Elvia waited until the woman or man put on the porch light. The moths gathered around the glass-paneled brass lamps or bare bulbs, and Elvia stayed on the porch as long as she could, watching the blurry white bodies circle and pause and hover. If she sat still enough, they would brush past her cheek or shoulder. She was quiet, listening to the hum and quiver of the moths, waiting for her mother to come back.
tourmaline
Elvia parted her hair down the center and braided it tightly, to keep it off her neck and to piss off her father and his girlfriend. She would run in the desert, even if she fainted again and woke up with sand-coated cheeks and eyes full of black mist. If she ran long enough, sweat pouring from her skin, August heat coursing through her veins, maybe she could melt away the baby.
If there was a baby. She was dizzy, her head ached, she felt too hot, as if her blood ran faster than she did. But she felt nothing in her belly, and she wouldn’t look down. She wouldn’t even touch her skin near the navel, because what if there was a baby and it felt her fingertips? Thought she loved it?
But she didn’t; there wasn’t anything to love. She was dizzy because it was 110 degrees today in Tourmaline and she’d been washing clothes in the bathtub. Her father’s girlfriend, Callie, had said, “We can’t walk to the laundrymat in this heat, and anyhow we ain’t got the money.”
She had seen a pregnancy test in the medicine cabinet. Callie must have used the other one. Elvia wasn’t going to pee on a stick. There was no baby.
She was tired because yesterday she’d run five miles to the arroyo where Michael Torres used to live in the plywood shelter. She had been looking for him for four months, ever since he’d disappeared in April. She’d heard he and a guy named Hector Perez had been arrested. Grand theft auto. Last week she’d seen smoke rising from the tamarisk-branch roof. But only Hector had come outside, and she didn’t know him. She’d been too scared to ask where Michael was now.
This morning was so hot she sat in the cottonwood shade, head aching. Babies made you tired and weak. She wasn’t having a baby. She wasn’t going to have it and then leave it someday, like her mother had left her, under a dusty windshield with only the sound of moth wings against the glass.
She remembered strange fragments: her mother’s candles and bowls, her hands always moving like trapped birds, the crescent grin of white at her brown heels. Useless things. She couldn’t even imagine a mother. She wasn’t going to be a mother when she couldn’t even make one up for herself.
Her father wouldn’t tell her anything. “Why talk about somebody when she’s gone?”
“You told somebody she was Indian.”
“I did?”
“I heard you. Talking in the yard. Explaining to Dually how your kid got your eyes in a brown face. Dually hates Mexicans, remember?”
“Ellie. You’re just tanned.”
Her father never called her Elvia. Never. “You said she wasn’t even regular Mexican. She didn’t even speak Spanish. You said she talked some kind of cavewoman words.”
Her father had gotten mad then. “And you’re not a regular kid. Always askin about things that don’t matter. She’s a gone Indian, okay? That kind. I’m a right-here dad. Lot of kids don’t get that. You’re lucky.”
She guessed she was lucky, compared to most kids in the desert. Her father always brought food home, he had never hit or even touched her, and he hadn’t disappeared.
My mother disappeared. She left me at a church. Like some old Bible story about a baby wrapped in a blanket and stuck in a basket headed down the river. Except I was in a car with no license plates in the parking lot. Too damn embarrassing to explain. I’m not even supposed to know, it’s so pathetic.
She knew from overhearing a foster mother talking on the phone, years ago, about the pitiful new kid. “Green eyes, but brown as a berry, and you know she might not even speak no English. I can’t tell, cause she won’t talk at all.”
She listened to everything, and except for the parking lot story she learned nothing else about her mother. She had nothing to say, so she hadn’t talked for months. She remembered floors and counters. The broomlike hem swishing over speckled linoleum, the angry orange worms of someone’s shag carpet, the fiercely polished wood cool against her legs when she lay in a hallway. Then Sandy Narlette’s Formica counter. White with gold freckles. Every day, Sandy Narlette had sat Elvia on the counter and talked to her while she mixed things in a green bowl. But Elvia said nothing. The social worker had taken her away after a year, left her at the skunk man’s house. Four years later, she’d brought Elvia back to Sandy Narlette’s, and Sandy put Elvia on the counter again. She had said, “Some people think dumb kids don’t talk. But I think smart kids don’t talk until they have something important to say.” She would measure salt like sparkling sand in her palm and motion Elvia to watch it disappear into the flour. Over and over, she let Elvia drizzle honey from a spoon back into the jar, and Elvia stared at the golden thread spool into itself, distinct for a moment, then melting into nothing. Chīhló, she would say to herself, looking at the bowl of pomegranates on the counter. Yoo, she would whisper, watching the moon rise in the laundry room window. Nunī, she finally murmured to Sandy Narlette, pointing to the canned corn.
She had stayed at Sandy Narlette’s house for four years. She had moved from so many foster homes that at first she wouldn’t let herself like the bedroom of girls, each with her own pillowcase, slippers, toothbrush, placemat, and napkin. Elvia’s were blue. She wouldn’t let herself like Sandy, her brown ponytail and blue eyes and chapped lips. But Sandy waited, patient and not falsely cheerful, never pinching in places social workers didn’t see or portioning out food with vengeance or as a reward or with pity.
Sandy had given her a birthday, since she didn’t know hers. Elvia picked August, since nothing was celebrated then, and Sandy said, “Smart move. All the attention for you. Who wants to share with hearts or fireworks or witches?” So now she was fifteen, according to the made-up date she’d gotten used to, along with everything else, before her father found her.
He’d shown up at Sandy Narlette’s house three years ago, when she was twelve, a total stranger with dust-covered boots and a dragon tattoo. He said he’d been looking for her for a long time. Elvia turned her back on him, but Sandy Narlette said, “Just give him a chance.”
“How did you find me?” she finally asked him on Sandy’s porc
h during a visit.
Her father looked at the foothills and said, “I got un-lost. After you and your mom bailed, I took off. Texas, Wyoming. Drivin trucks, layin pipe. I thought she took you back to Mexico in the Nova. Then last year, some guy saw my car in a police tow lot. I had stickers on the back. Bad to the Bone. Highway to Hell.” Her father stroked his yellow goatee. “I thought if the car was in Rio Seco, you might be, too. I went downtown to social services and started asking. It took a long time.”
When he finally came to pick her up from Sandy’s house to bring her to the desert, she’d stared at herself in the side mirror. He didn’t even know her birthday. He said, “I was gone then, too. Colorado. Gas lines.” He turned down the radio and said, “When is it?”
She made another one up right then. “Next week. April 20.” And he grinned. He bought her a Walkman and some CDs to keep her company while he was at work on the golf courses, hauling pipe.
He wouldn’t tell her anything else. And Elvia couldn’t remember enough for even a face. Michael had said if she wanted to dream about her mother she had to empty her mind and then drink the special medicine he was going to brew from a plant. “Then you get another level of dreams,” he’d said, back in the spring. “What do you remember about her?”
Elvia hadn’t wanted to give away the few things she recalled: the moths whirling above her like tiny, furious angels, the glowing circle of dashboard light, her mother’s blue eyelids.
What kind of Indian was she, then? When Elvia ran, her long braids pounded against her back like those of a Tarahumara running along the mountain paths in Mexico, near a cave where her mother made tortillas. She’d seen a TV show about Tarahumara Indians when she was eight and living in a foster home. The other kids asked her, “What are you, with them spooky eyes and you’re brown?” In the crowded living room, she pointed to the TV and imagined herself in the cave. Clap, clap with her palms. Her mother showed her how to lay the tortillas over the fire.
Highwire Moon Page 2