At one point, the birthday girl (Melissa? María?) came up to her. “If we stand under the drainpipe together,” she whispered, “and sing a song to Candy Bird, he’ll come visit us.” So they stood by the jacaranda bushes, arms linked and faces turned upward, singing the same verse over and over: “Candy Bird, Candy Bird, come see me.” And then, as if by magic, candy started raining down from the sky. It hit them on the forehead and cheekbones: coffee-flavored caramels and Milo malt balls, Jet chocolate bars and Bon Bon Bum lollipops, purple packets of Sparkies and dark green Bombón Supercocos. At the sight of the candy everyone started screaming and ran over, scrambling and diving in the grass, clods of dirt flying. It was like a piñata but better—you couldn’t see where it was coming from. She hadn’t hesitated to join in, elbowing others out of the way and scooping up, with grim-faced determination, as much candy as she could carry.
She knows now, of course, that it must have been one of the maids, or maybe the gardeners or chauffeurs, ordered to hide behind a curtain upstairs and throw candy out the window for the guests’ amusement. How long had they waited? Standing there and watching the children scream and fight for sweets.
She reaches for her computer cord on the floor, the battery icon now a thin red line. By keeping her eyes fixed on the screen, she avoids the possibility of glimpsing the orange suitcase, still resting on top of the armoire.
No matter how many times she zooms in on Google Earth, though, the house remains a blur. All she can see are the fuzzy smears of the mango trees on the other side of the wall and the light glinting off the jagged glass.
—
She’s been waiting for twenty minutes when Paco finally arrives. He’s on foot this time, wearing a ragged orange shirt with a diamond-shape sweat stain on his chest, the faint shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. They’ve never stood this close to each other before. Under the fluorescent parking-lot lights, she sees for the first time how pockmarked his skin is, a mess of lines and cracks, as though someone had cut up his face with a pair of blunt scissors and glued it messily back together. She keeps her eyes lowered as she hands over the money.
“Actually,” she says after he passes her the envelope, “just wondering. Any chance that you—”
As soon as he nods, she excuses herself to run to the ATM again. Would you like to view your current account balance before proceeding? the machine asks, and she jams her thumb against the NO button again and again until she gets to the withdrawal screen.
“Sorry I was late,” he says, handing over a second envelope. “I had a football game.”
“Don’t you mean soccer?” Her voice echoes off the concrete parking lot ceiling. He raises his eyebrows as she sticks both envelopes in her purse.
“Have a good night, mija.”
She’s still struggling to get the zipper shut as he walks away. When she finally looks up, she catches a glimpse of herself in a nearby car window, mouth twisting as if tasting something bitter.
—
For number eleven, she uses a sieve to separate out the dry white cracker crumbs. Number twelve requires the tweezers again, to pick out the thin blades of grass. Somewhere in the apartment, her cellphone buzzes with an incoming text message, but she doesn’t look up. Her two front teeth keep scraping nervously across her lower lip, peeling off the dead skin.
“Damn Communists,” she says in her grandmother’s voice, knocking her forehead against the laptop screen as she leans in too close. “Why forgive? Why forget?” Google’s image search shows rows of eucalyptus trees, fields of sugarcane stretching like the sea (that rotten egg smell from the fertilizer!). Message boards describe visits tourists can take to coca laboratories hidden in the jungle; Wikipedia lists the departments where most of the cultivation takes place: Putumayo and Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare. YouTube has a documentary about how to set up your own lab. Key ingredients are gasoline and hydrochloric acid; helpful materials include yellow plastic gloves, metal buckets, and black garbage bags full of coca leaves, dark and light green like limes, not a single one brown or withered.
Hours later, she finally checks the phone: “How’s it going? XO.” The number isn’t saved in her contacts. It takes her a second to remember the Charlie Brown sweater, yellow with a thick jagged black line wrapping around a stomach. She lets the phone fall with a loud clatter, and the protective pink case bounces along the floor.
Charred kernels of grilled corn, burnt black and stiff. Squishy papaya seeds, moist and fresh. The time she told her grandmother, “The fish are all assassinated,” assuming it was synonymous with dead, thanks to the newspapers and TV. The cracked sidewalks. The men puckering their lips and making wet kissing sounds. The accordion music blasting from the maids’ rooms at the back of the house. “Hurry up,” she says to the servants setting the tables, bringing out the boiled eggs spread over toast for breakfast. “What’s a paramilitary?” she asks on the playground, arms aching as she hangs from the swing set. “Don’t say ‘war,’ ” she lectures the orange suitcase, which eyes her nervously. “Say ‘situation.’ Say ‘insecurity.’ Don’t say ‘kidnapped’—say ‘forcibly detained.’ ”
She keeps Googling, clicking, one news article after another. The statistic for forced disappearances is estimated at over fifty thousand—no, sixty thousand—some articles say over seventy thousand. The articles have titles like “A Nightmare with No End”; “Colombia’s Unknown Tragedies”; “In Search of Justice.” Environmental activists, labor unionists, indigenous leaders, young men. Even teenage girls, straight out of their own homes. It makes her think of fables the maids used to tell her: the paisa farmer who went to heaven, la patasola and la llorona. Ghosts who would come knocking on your door, ringing on your bell, long dead souls with scarred faces, wandering the country with no name and no past. If you unlocked the door for them, they would wrap their hands around your wrist and lead you away, make you vanish into thin air, disappear without a trace. If you were unlucky, no one would even remember your name: your real one, the one that everyone called you.
—
The seventeenth one she shoves into Tony’s hand on the dance floor, not even bothering with the tiny square of toilet paper. She leans against the wall as she waits for him to come back, pulling strands of hair into her mouth as the DJ starts playing a remix of an English Shakira song. She fingers the clumps of rabbit fur in her purse, dragged out of the baggie in long white strands, thick and knotted as if they’ve been tangled in cage wire for days. She sucks on the tip of her ponytail, brushing it against her lips, a strangely familiar gesture—familiar of what? What does this remind her of; what is she trying to remember?
Just then a hand reaches out and yanks the hair out of her mouth. Saliva streaks across her cheek as though dabbed there by a sloppy paintbrush. Before she can cry out or even protest, Tony speaks close to her ear. “Don’t do that,” he says. “It’s gross.”
Her face freezes into what she hopes is a smile. “What?”
He places a hand on the small of her back. “It’s really gross,” he repeats, “when you do that.”
She can’t move, can’t turn her head, the spit on her face growing cold. Tony has to guide her into the dancing crowd, pulling her by the wrist. Under the flashing strobe lights, his cheeks glow blue, as smooth as a skating rink.
“So,” he shouts, loud enough to be sure she can hear him over the booming music, “did your family, like, know Pablo Escobar?”
—
She stuffs the last yellow envelope into the trash, cramming it down as deep as it will go, the paper crinkling like an accordion. Cradling the last few baggies in her arms, she heads to the bathroom. Leaning over the toilet bowl, she hesitates. Presses her forehead against the ceramic lid.
She heads back to her bedroom instead, where she grabs her purses off the floor. Her eyes flick to the top of the armoire.
She yanks the orange suitcase down with a clatter. Its plastic surface is dotted with holes made by a customs agent’s drill at JFK,
fifteen years ago. She was too young for the strip search, but old enough to be taken aside into the interrogation room. (“So, do your parents like to party?” the agents asked. “Ever help them out?”) The first latch is a little creaky, but the second flips open with no problem. She knows that the can of ChocoListo cocoa powder won’t be there (they poured it out on the table, combing through it with their rubber gloves), nor the pair of Nike soccer cleats (they cut off the rubber tops, searching for hidden compartments).
Everything else, though—it’s still there. The wallet made out of a milk carton, a gift from her bodyguard, thrust into her hands before she climbed into the car to be driven away to the airport, clutching her grandmother’s purses in her lap. The wooden toucan that used to sit in the middle of the dining room table, covered in long white scratches. She pulls out the pink striped alpaca poncho, the folder of papers the lawyers gave her, full of instructions on how to access her trust fund. American books, foreign books, stories about anywhere else: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, A Day in the Life of the Siberian Tiger. Pink and purple envelopes, pen pal letters covered in glittery Lisa Frank stickers: Dear Flaca: I miss you already! How’s the big city? Did you know Betsy is moving to Washington, D.C.? When are you coming back to visit?
When there’s only one item left, she pauses. There’s no sign of them—no candy cane pants, no purple silk ribbon, no droopy ears smelling of mothballs. Her hand trembling, she reaches for the battered brown square cardboard box sitting in the middle of the suitcase’s gaping orange mouth. Third-grade geography class. When she holds it close to her ear and shakes it, she can hear the pieces rattling around inside.
She pours them out onto the floor and gets to work. They are so flattened that there’s no satisfying “click” when they connect. The wrinkled cardboard reminds her of her grandmother’s hands, the way they squeezed her shoulders before gently pushing her toward the departure gate. She builds the central mountain ranges first, then the bordering coast, the northern desert, the southern jungle, the eastern plains. Slowly but surely, the shape becomes clear. The snout of Guajira, sniffing the Caribbean; the square tail of Amazonas, poking into Brazil. Cities make up the organs: the Bogotá heart, the lungs of Medellín and Bucaramanga, the kidneys of Cali and Popayán. Andean mountains ripple like fur, rivers and highways run like veins.
In the end, though, one of the biggest pieces is missing—the department of Meta. The creature is left with a hole at the center of its body, an open wound exposing the floor tiles beneath. She settles back on her heels and looks down.
She’d completely forgotten that more than half of Colombia was jungle.
“Come here, you,” she says. “Sweet little things. I won’t hurt you—I promise!”
They nuzzle close, warm and soft in her hands as she brings them toward her face. The plastic crinkles when she squeezes them too tightly, so instead she holds them carefully, delicately. She lies down, cradling them against her cheek, smelling their sweet familiar scent, as recognizable and comforting as mothballs. Never mind how much her eyes burn, or her nose itches, or the back of her throat goes numb. She curls up into a fetal position, the wooden toucan poking into her thigh, the puzzle pieces pressing against her arm, the purses softly bunched up under her head. The unfinished country is underneath her as she pulls them close, holding them tenderly, whispering sweet nothings. She starts with English—sweetie pie, candy bird, honey bunny—before moving on to half-remembered Spanish: corazón, querida, mija.
She closes her eyes.
It’s not the world’s most comfortable nest.
But it’s a start.
CAUCA
Who’s coming to the Montoyas’ party? A lot of people; it’s going to be a big success: the Mendozas and the Vasquezes, the Lorenzos and the Smiths. The maids drag the white plastic chairs into the yard, forming half circles beneath the mango tree and around the barbecue pit. The gardeners carry out the big wooden table, a security guard following closely behind with a ruler to scrape off the white globs of dried candle wax, accumulated in thick layers from weeks of blackouts. The dogs yip excitedly, nipping at people’s ankles, and behind the safety of their chicken wire cage the rabbits shuffle anxiously, scandalized by the noise. Inside the kitchen, staring out the window, one of the cooks says, “We really need to lock them up. Can you imagine Lola rolling in her poo and then licking Mrs. Smith’s hand?”
The caterers have arrived; they’re setting up. They’re carrying wide metal trays filled with whitefish soaked in lemon juice, red peppers for the grill, raw bloody steaks and chicken breasts stabbed by forks. Nothing is extravagant, nothing is over-the-top, except for maybe the lobster claws on ice, the tins of caviar, and the oysters that the cooks are busily prying open with their special metal knives. Extravagance is not his style.
Here he comes. Folding the cuffs of his black shirt above his wrists so that a strip of pale skin shows, like a patch of exposed land on a jungle hillside. The skin on his face is smooth, not a trace of the plastic surgeon’s knife. People rarely notice, but the three middle fingers of his right hand are little more than pink stumps, neatly aligned with the humble pinkie. “Looking good,” he says to the blinking white Christmas lights hanging from the branches of the grapefruit tree. “Excellent,” he says while strolling past the arts and crafts supplies set out for the children by the pool: crayons and candles and paper plates. “Go along now,” he says to one of the many cats sitting on the drainpipe above the jacaranda bush, a distasteful expression behind its droopy whiskers. Who knows how many pets they have at this point? Just the other week he saw a turtle lumbering under the sofa in the living room, but when he got down on his knees to check there was nothing there, not even dust balls or coffee-flavored candy wrappers.
He wanders inside the house through the swinging patio door, scratching the back of his neck. The maids have done a good job. The bookshelves have been dusted, the broken electric piano cleared away (a lizard got electrocuted deep inside its mechanical guts years ago and ever since it’s refused to make a sound, not even when the cats frantically chase one another across the black and white keys). Considering that they only come out to this country ranch every few months, for Easter or holiday weekends, the house still feels fairly lived in: the living room fresh-smelling with the sharp scent of laundry powder, the lampshades shiny without a single dead moth smear, no cobwebs around the chandelier or shelves of VHS tapes.
“How’s it going?” he says, knocking on the door to his daughter’s room at the same time that he pushes it open. The room is deserted—the only sign of her presence is a stack of CD cases spilled all over the bed, next to some shredded packets of plantain chips. It’s hard to restrain himself, this rare opportunity to intrude into her bedroom—normally the door is firmly locked, American bands screaming their angst-filled rage from her stereo on the other side. So he now finds his eyes flickering greedily, taking in one new poster after another hanging on the walls. The one of a mournful-eyed American singer with shaggy blond hair holding an acoustic guitar, that’s definitely new; Snoopy dancing with a balloon, that’s been up since she was in kindergarten and received it as a present at one of the epic birthday parties she hosted here for all her classmates. The closet doors are half-open; he can glimpse the shelves lined with stuffed animals that couldn’t fit into the storage trunk in the hallway, Care Bears and shabby dogs and other beasts that were never loved enough to be guaranteed a spot at their main house in Cali. There are rows of plastic toys based on countless American cartoon shows, Transformers and ThunderCats and The Real Ghostbusters, stiff plastic bodies randomly positioned in a messy parade, silently poised with their daggers and ray guns, ready to leap into battle with invisible enemies at a moment’s notice. Everything slowly gathering dust.
From where he’s standing he can clearly see that the empty packets of plantain chips have been licked clean. Shaking his head, he picks them up between two fingers and drops them from the bed onto the floor where it’ll
be easier for a maid to sweep them up. That’s when he sees it—the small ziplock baggie lying on a pillow, half-filled with bright red Jell-O powder—the kind of treat you can purchase from street children at traffic lights. He picks it up and shakes it, the powder accumulating at the bottom, except for the wet clumps clinging near the baggie’s thin lips. He can already picture the garish stains across her front teeth and mouth, the demon-red color of her tongue flashing at the guests as she utters a sullen hello, the sticky finger smears on her shirt, running up and down the fabric as though a tiny animal with miniature bloody paws had danced all over her body. Ave Maria, the maids will say when they see her, closing their eyes in supplication. Mariela, what were you thinking? What will your father say when you show up looking like that for his party?
The automatic gate rumbles at the same time that he hears car wheels crunching on the gravel driveway. He puts the Jell-O baggie in his back pocket, tucked neatly beside his cellphone. After closing the door behind him, he pulls his right shirtsleeve down as far as it’ll go, almost completely covering the wispy white scars snaking over the backs of his hands.
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