A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  Sonia hands the baby to Hank so she can show Rena the bottles she has left prepared in the kitchen. She yanks on the door of the rusted refrigerator, points to a plastic bin labeled with her room number. “I mixed three bottles. He’ll probably need one around two and then at six and ten. There’s a pot on the stove. I just boil the water and set the bottle in the pot for a minute or two to take off the chill. If you have any problems, knock. We’ll be there.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s like riding a bike. It’s all coming back.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” Sonia has begun to cry. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her robe. “I’m just so tired,” she whispers. “I’m scared I’ll go out of my mind and do something awful.”

  Back in her room, Rena bathes the baby. Holding Carlos over the sink, she sponges him with warm water, first his face, then inside the folds in his neck, then his chest, back, bottom, legs and feet. Spreading a towel on Leonard’s bed, she dries and diapers him, letting him lie and kick while she changes into her own nightclothes.

  When she sees Carlos yawn, she cradles him in her arms and walks in small circles, singing softly to him until his breathing grows slow and deep. She sets him on the inside of her bed against the wall and curls around him.

  Sleep, she instructs herself. You’ll have to be up in a couple of hours. But she cannot stop thinking about Bernardo. About Prankle’s implication that his body has been stashed in a basement these past fourteen years. That there was an American official somewhere who’d given that the nod. It makes her objections to the work at Muskowitz & Kerrigan seem trivial. Like complaining that radioactive apples are hard to digest.

  AT FIVE, PRANKLE IS WAITING. He introduces the photographer, Jean, who is rifling through a camera bag next to him on the backseat of the Morris Minor. Jean glances up just long enough to avoid seeming rude.

  They park behind the bus terminal and walk a few blocks south to what looks like an abandoned construction lot. Everywhere there are children, running, banging, stretched out asleep.

  “Rubble never cleared after the earthquake,” Prankle says. The stench is terrible, and Rena has to refrain from covering her nose. Prankle drizzles Tootsie Rolls into the hands of the children, who flock around them. Jean moves quickly, giving out more candy in exchange for the children letting him photograph them. The older children follow him, watching as he switches back and forth between the three cameras dangling from his neck. The younger children stay crouched in the dirt, digging with their hands through the rubble. A boy who looks like he can’t be more than four years old is bare-bottomed. His stomach sticks out from under his T-shirt, hard like a filled balloon.

  “Parasites,” Prankle says. “They run around butt-naked over garbage and the worms climb right in.”

  Rena stays at the edge of the rubble while Prankle makes his way over boards and cinder blocks to catch up with Jean. Together they head toward the shanties in back. Corrugated boxes, sheets of tin, a discarded curtain. A pickup truck stops, and an Indian man dressed in western clothes goes inside one of the shanties. A few minutes later, he returns with two children. A boy and a girl. The man touches their backs with the flat of his hand as they climb into the truck.

  After the pickup pulls away, Rena unclasps her bag and takes out a clump of bills. She walks over to a group of children and hands them each a bill: five, ten and twenty quetzals. The older ones glance back at the shanties before burying the bills in their clothing. The younger ones stare at them longingly, as though they might be food itself.

  Nowhere an adult to be seen. Like a children’s playground in hell.

  Prankle approaches. Glass breaks under his boots. Backlit by shards of light darting off the tin roofs of the shanties, he appears preternaturally large. The children touch the tape deck he holds in his hand. He talks to them in Spanish and then plays back the conversation. They listen in silence, not one of them giggling at the sound of their own voice.

  “Let’s go. I’ve shown Jean what to shoot. He’ll be here another hour or so.”

  In the car, Prankle cups her knee. “It’s stupid to give them money. The big ones shake down the little ones. They take whatever money they find and use it for glue.”

  “They sniff glue?”

  “Cheapest way to get high. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. The bigger kids, nine, ten, eleven, work for pimps, mostly around the bus station and the Central Market. A night’s work gets them two containers of glue and a couple of sandwiches. They control the younger ones, who beg outside the hotels. There’s no fooling around. If the older kids don’t turn over every quetzal, they can end up stuffed in a garbage can. The younger ones get thrown out of El Hoyo, which, hideous as it seems, is still their home.”

  Prankle starts the car and slowly backs away from the bus terminal.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “All over. The Guatemalans treasure children. Most adults spend their whole lives trying to provide for their children. But there’s a war going on. Here, in the city, you can easily forget that. Out in the countryside, everyone feels it. A little girl I talked to last week told me that she hid under a crate while uniformed men set her house on fire with her parents and two older brothers bound inside. Afterwards, she just started walking and eventually ended up here. Another girl said she’d run away from the finca on the coast where her family had gone to work because she was being beaten with a horse crop by the foreman for not picking bananas fast enough.”

  Prankle glances at Rena. “You could use a drink. The Sheraton’s around the corner. An Ugly American scene, but the bartender keeps a stash of good tequila.”

  RENA SURVEYS THE familiar atrium: the tight-seated chairs, the potted philodendron, the electronic pings of doors opening, elevators arriving, registers ringing. A woman standing in the doorway of one of the boutiques waves a bottle of Worth perfume. Her bracelets flash. “Cuanto cuesta esto?” she asks. The salesclerk behind the counter looks up from her magazine. “Eighty,” she says in English.

  Inside the bar, disco music plays over the sound system and the walls are decorated with American movie posters. Prankle leads her to a banquette beneath a Casablanca poster: Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart on an airplane runway. A cocktail waitress brings a bowl of tomato-flecked guacamole surrounded by tortilla chips. Prankle presses a five into her hand. “Para Renaldo. Dos margaritas. Dile que es para Prankle.”

  When the drinks arrive, Prankle clinks Rena’s glass with his own. “To Bernardo Santiago. Whatever happened to him, may he rest in peace.”

  The salt stings Rena’s lips, and she feels the tequila going straight to her head. Prankle puts an arm around her and then starts kissing her hair. She thinks about the brown incisor, about not being able to look Leonard in the eye, and unwraps his arm.

  “I’ll make you dinner. My famous mole sauce. You can stretch out on the couch and watch a video. My brother sends me Saturday Night Live without the commercials.”

  He’d planned it out. The visit to El Hoyo, then to bed. What a degraded idea of foreplay, she thinks, showing me children living in rubble. But she holds back a caustic comment because she suddenly feels nervous. Nervous because he seems to know everyone.

  “I’ll have to take a rain check. I signed on again to baby-sit.”

  Prankle runs a finger down her arm. She removes his hand and edges a few inches away on the banquette.

  “I hope your friend’s little bundle of joy is legit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Baby parts brokers. It’s big business here—stealing or buying babies and then selling their body parts. It’s all mixed up with the adoption racket. The mothers think the babies are going to rich families from Philadelphia. Or the brokers get a baby and it’s not healthy, so they turn it over to a lawyer for adoption.” Prankle licks the edge of his glass, his tongue red from the salt. “There’s big bucks in it, especially in India and Kuwait. For a male heir, some of those princes will pay a couple hundred K for a baby’s
liver.”

  “They kill the children for organs?”

  “Depends on the part. Sometimes they sew them up and send them back.”

  She pushes her drink away, queasy and clammy all at once.

  “The brokers, they’re like ambulance chasers. They comb the Highland villages for pregnant girls. Seventeen-year-olds with two babies and another on the way and not enough food for even themselves. For two hundred quetzals, some of these girls will agree to give up a child at birth. Of course, they think it’s for adoption. I’ve seen girls who were shown, no joke, pictures cut out of a magazine. One of those ads with the family who bought the Dodge minivan or the Mass Mutual Life Insurance. Fucking newsprint right on the back. Here, in the city, half the time the mother never even sees the money. The baby is stolen by a brother or uncle who handles the deal.”

  She excuses herself. In the back of her throat, she can taste the morning’s bitter coffee. Doubled over the toilet, she heaves, an awful sound like the earth quaking.

  Afterwards, she splashes water on her cheeks and rinses out her mouth. A woman in a starched apron hands her a paper towel. The woman holds up a finger. “Un momentito.” She lifts a folding chair out of the supply closet, motioning for Rena to sit. Rena lowers herself into the chair and closes her eyes. She feels the woman placing a cool towel on her forehead.

  “Bebé?”

  “What?”

  “Bebé?” The woman arches her back so her middle sticks out. She pats her stomach.

  “No. No.”

  The woman smiles as though in disbelief. Rena wills herself not to cry.

  “No, no baby.”

  Returning to the table, she leans over Prankle. She touches his shoulder. Next to him is an empty shot glass. She whispers into his ear: “La turista, you’ll have to excuse me.”

  He starts to rise.

  “You stay. Please.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No. Really. It will make me feel worse to ruin your night as well.” The cocktail waitress arrives with another shot. Prankle looks over at the bartender, giving him a mock salute. “I’ll get you a cab.”

  Rena places a hand over her stomach. “I’m just going to run. The concierge—it’s already arranged.” She takes her sweater from the banquette. Kiss him on the cheek, she thinks. One kiss and you’re free. She brushes her lips on his scratchy skin and turns.

  AT FOUR, SHE AWAKENS to a baby’s cries. The high-pitched relentless cries she remembers from Gene, who’d had colic his first three months. A night when Joe was on the road and her mother shook her awake: “I can’t take the sound. I’m afraid I’m going to put his head in the toilet.” From her mother’s room, Gene’s two-week-old shrieks. The kitchen door banging as her mother ran out into the street. Bending over the crib, she found Gene red and blotchy from screaming. His skin hot. She held him firmly against her breastbone the way the neighbor had shown her. For an hour, she walked him through the house, bouncing him up and down, singing over his cries. Slowly his breathing calmed and the cries turned to whimpers. She laid him back in his crib and slept on the floor beside him.

  After that, she’d not gone back to school. Her boyfriend Rusty would visit, and if the baby was sleeping and Eleanor was sufficiently alert, they’d drive to Stinson Beach, where she’d watch while he joined the other low-tide surfers. With Gene’s birth, she’d lost all interest in learning more about what she privately called this sex thing. She was just tired, she told Rusty. Things would change when Gene started sleeping through the night. Or perhaps, she’d thought but not said, it was sadness at losing the little piece of her mother she’d still had before Gene’s birth—afternoons when Eleanor would set a stack of forty-fives on the record changer and they’d dance together to the Beach Boys and Herman’s Hermits, nights when Joe would be gone on an overnight haul and they would bring snacks into bed and watch Green Acres and I Dream of Jeannie.

  Her second week home, she left a message with the school secretary that she had pneumonia and would be out for a while. When a concerned teacher called, she coughed into the receiver and said she was still pretty sick. As time passed, it became clear that her mother had erased the thought of Rena ever returning to school. In Eleanor’s mind, she and Rena were the caretakers of the baby. It was only natural that Rena would be home with her, changing diapers and sterilizing bottles.

  In a way, Rena didn’t mind. The classes were boring, mostly busywork; she could easily keep up by reading the textbooks and doing the homework. As for the rest, the intrigues of the cliques and romances played out in the parking lot, bathrooms and cafeteria, her goal had always been simply to avoid notice or humiliation—to get by in whatever clothes she could pull together without drawing attention to her too-big breasts or lack of money. She’d been grateful to have a best friend, Cheryl, amazed when Rusty had picked her out of study hall.

  In the end, it was an accident that intervened: Joe forgetting his wallet one morning and returning to find Eleanor in bed and Rena at the kitchen sink giving Gene a bath. “What the hell is going on here?” he yelled as he yanked Eleanor to her feet and grabbed Gene from the sink, all of which led to his taking Eleanor to the mental health clinic, where they began an antidepressant and arranged for a home aide to come weekdays.

  Back at school, no one would catch her eye. Finally, a tearful Cheryl broke it to her that Rusty had been seen more than once driving MaryAnn home. To Rena, it made perfect sense. She’d wanted to say to him, it’s fine, you can have sex with her, just keep taking me with you to the ocean. Keep letting me watch you cut the curves as you wend down to Stinson Beach. Keep grinning at me as you turn to hoist your board onto your shoulder and walk into the sea. Instead, she wrote him a note on lined paper torn from her history notebook: “It seems that things have changed. I’d appreciate your not calling me anymore.”

  By Easter, Eleanor had adjusted sufficiently to the antidepressant to completely take over caring for Gene. She’d gained some weight, but it seemed a small price to pay for the great improvement in her mood. By fall, she’d ballooned to one hundred seventy pounds and her skin had erupted in blemishes. Joe took to making nasty comments about Eleanor’s appearance and once, drunk on beer, overturned a bag of cheese twists on her head.

  SHE WAKES TO THE manager knocking on her door. When Leonard was here, the manager had seemed not to understand English, but he now speaks in a surprisingly clear British accent: “There is a Señor Prankle on the telephone.”

  “Please ask him to leave a phone number where I can call him back.”

  In the shower, Rena fantasizes about having Prankle talk with Sonia and Hank. They will listen to him. They will nod their heads sympathetically. Yes, they’ve heard about these things, but in their case they have used a lawyer of impeccable reputation who insisted they meet personally with the birth mother. Sonia will pull out pictures of the birth mother holding the baby, pictures they will save to show Carlos when he is old enough to understand.

  Rena sits in the courtyard with a packet of postcards. She does not say to herself I am waiting for Sonia, though when Sonia’s door swings open and Sonia wrapped in her yellow robe rushes barefoot out to the courtyard with Carlos on her shoulder, she realizes that this is what she has been doing.

  “Can you hold him while I get a bottle?”

  Rena reaches for the crying baby. She rocks him to distract him from his hunger pangs. Outside, she can hear the morning traffic, the screech of brakes, horns honking, as the day’s commerce begins.

  Sonia gives Rena the warmed bottle and goes to get a second chair. Rena rests the baby’s head in the crook of her arm and brings the nipple to his mouth. He closes his eyes as he sucks, little gasping sounds.

  “I can take him,” Sonia says once she’s settled in the chair.

  “That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

  Sonia stretches out her freckled legs and folds her arms over her chest. “Each time, it’s as if he’s never been fed before.” Her chin tips up as sh
e looks at the sky. “Have you ever seen such a hideous sky? Like a stained tablecloth.”

  They sit quietly, Sonia staring up at the sky, Rena’s heart beating too fast. When Carlos stops sucking, Rena slides the nipple from his mouth and lifts him onto her shoulder. Immediately, he burps.

  Sonia laughs. “Yes, coo-coo. My little barbarian.” She kisses the bottom of Carlos’ foot.

  Rena moves Carlos back into her arms. Sated, he sucks languorously, enjoying the warm liquid on his tongue.

  “Did you get to meet the birth mother?” she asks. The question sounds abrupt even to her own ears.

  Sonia peers at her. “No. She was from a tiny village somewhere in the Highlands. She’d never been to the city. The lawyer and his wife brought the baby to us.”

  Rena thinks about Prankle’s stories of babies sold by greedy uncles for the few hundred quetzals an adoption lawyer will pay. Of illiterate girls escorted to hospitals to have their babies and then handed forms to sign that they learn only later are adoption consents.

  “But you have her name? If you ever wanted to contact her?”

  A startled expression passes over Sonia’s face. “Wait a minute. Where are you coming from?”

  Sonia stands. She reaches for Carlos.

  Rena clutches the baby. The bottle falls and Carlos screams. Sonia’s hands are on Carlos’ arms. She’s pulling him.

  Rena relinquishes the baby. She leans down to get the bottle, gives it to Sonia.

  Holding Carlos, Sonia steps back. She cleans the nipple by putting it in her mouth, puckered now like something charred. “He’s mine. My baby.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER SHE graduated from high school, Rena moved out. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Eleanor and Joe had taken Gene to the beach. She packed her clothes in two shopping bags, took the five twenties her mother had given her as a graduation gift, left a note that she’d call once she was settled and walked to the highway.

  She remembers hitching a ride with a salesman headed to San Rafael who drank from a silver flask he kept in the glove compartment and scared her by calling her chicky. She remembers taking the bus from San Rafael to San Francisco and getting off at Market Street. She remembers buying a bottle of black hair dye (for reasons unclear other than that she no longer wanted to look like herself) from a Woolworth’s clerk with a cherry birthmark on her cheek. She remembers walking down Sixth Street and seeing the Alta Hotel: ROOMS—HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH. YOU CHOOSE.