Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over

by Belinda Acosta

“Oh! She doesn’t want to hear about the past!” Beatriz exclaimed. Ana wondered if her friend had lost her mind. Beatriz suddenly jumped up. “Vamos, y’all. I’ve got a charge card in my purse, and I’m not afraid to use it!”

  Ana sighed. “Let me call my kids and let them know.”

  She barely had time to finish her call before Beatriz hustled everyone into her car. They traveled the long, curvaceous street of the neighborhood and then suddenly they were on the highway. Celeste had no idea of where they were going but was excited by the cars zooming by. Beatriz drove faster than Celeste thought possible, careening in and out of traffic until they entered the parking lot in a huge shopping center. Celeste had been to shopping centers before, but the ones she was used to had stores like the Dollar General, a heavily gated Radio Shack, a Cash-Now pawn shop, a nail salon that reeked of acetone, and a family-owned drycleaner with the doors flung open to let the heat escape. Walking by that open door, Celeste remembered how snatches of Spanish could be heard among the women working inside, all of them small and dark, resembling Celeste and her mother, their T-shirts and jeans covered by thin cotton smocks that tied at the waist. They tended to fluffy gowns or were engulfed in clouds of steam as they busily pressed suits and other clothes that looked like they belonged to very important people, maybe movie stars or rich businessmen—no one who had to wear a smock to make a living.

  The shopping mall Beatriz took them to was huge, with giant, shiny department stores at the end of each broad passageway. The floors were buffed as slick as ice. Everywhere Celeste looked, there was highly polished glass and chrome, signs lit from behind, and piles and piles of merchandise. It excited her, but at the same time it made her feel exceptionally small, even in the company of these two women who she knew were trying to make her feel welcome. To them, all of this was ordinary and expected.

  Beatriz wanted to go everywhere at once. She rushed into a store that sold hair clips, headbands, ribbons, combs, picks, and other trinkets. Before Celeste or Ana had even walked past the first display, Beatriz bought forty-five dollars’ worth of hair jewelry and handed the bright violet bag full of goodies to an astonished Celeste. Across the mall she noticed a candy store and insisted they go there, where she bought a huge sack of jelly beans, bubble gum, and fat pralines. On the way to another shop, Beatriz tried to figure out Celeste’s size—Celeste could have told her if Beatriz had stopped long enough to ask and listen to the response—but got distracted when she saw a shoe store on the other side of the mall. She instantly wanted to go there.

  They scuttled to the shoe store as Celeste wondered what was wrong with the shoes she had on now: sporty pink and brown Mary Janes she’d chosen herself. She remembered squealing with delight when she saw them and felt good buying them because she thought the rubber soles would last a long time. Cute and practical? It was too good to dream for. The shoes were the first purchase Celeste had made for herself, by herself, without any adult supervision. She thought she had done a good thing.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Ana finally called out, forcing Beatriz to pause and face her. “You’re flying from place to place como la loca. What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know!” Beatriz said breathlessly. “Everything! She needs everything! Something nice that she can meet everyone in. I don’t know. Jeans? New shoes for sure.”

  Celeste looked down at her shoes and suddenly felt as if they were old and shabby instead of “qué cute”! She looked at Beatriz’s feet. Her sandals were elegant and strappy, her feet smooth, with perfectly shaped and polished toenails that looked like bright red jelly beans.

  “Her shoes are fine!” Ana said, pulling Beatriz away from the store. “When is everybody coming?”

  “But there is so much she needs,” Beatriz said frantically.

  “Ay, mujer!” Ana whispered to her friend. “We have to do it all today?” She turned to look at Celeste. “Mi’ja, is there anything that we have to get today? Something that can’t wait?”

  “Anything! Anything, mi’ja!” Beatriz said to her niece, the urgency in her voice causing Ana to shake her head.

  “I—I just need to go to the bathroom,” Celeste finally eked out.

  “Okay, mira. Here’s the food court, and over there is the bathroom,” Beatriz spoke as if talking to a kindergarten class. “Let’s all go! Vamos.”

  “No, no, I don’t have to go—and neither do you,” Ana said pointedly to Beatriz. “You can go alone, right, mi’ja?”

  Celeste nodded her head anxiously.

  “Do you need money for the machine?” Ana asked.

  “I have some change, thank you,” Celeste said, rapidly walking to the restroom.

  “We’ll be right here!” Beatriz called after her. She meant to be reassuring, but to Celeste it sounded more like a warning.

  As soon as the girl was gone, Ana abruptly turned to face Beatriz. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing!” Beatriz said in a voice a full octave higher than usual. “I’m just excited is all! There’s so much to do, so much to—I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well, you don’t have to do it all in one day,” Ana said. “Cálmate! You’re making her a nervous wreck. You’re making me a nervous wreck! What happened when the two of you went upstairs? Things were going fine before you were alone with her, and now they seem—”

  “I, I… I don’t know,” Beatriz said. “All I know is that she hates me.”

  “She said that?”

  “She didn’t have to. She hates me, and I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to change her mind. And the worst thing is, I probably deserve it.”

  Ana was not used to seeing Beatriz unmoored. She was the one who was always pulled together. Nothing ever rattled her. She was always the calm one in the middle of a storm.

  “Ay, mujer, ven’ acá.” Ana made Beatriz sit at a table in the food court where they could see Celeste when she returned from the ladies’ room. “What happened back at the house when the two of you went upstairs?”

  Beatriz took a deep breath. “I pulled her hair.”

  “What?!”

  “Look, all I know is she hates me!”

  “Okay, okay, you said that before,” Ana said calmly. “Tell me exactly what happened. What did you say to each other?”

  Beatriz rubbed her temples and tried to recall what had happened.

  “I asked her if she knew her father, and she said no. Then I told her we could have come and got her, and I told her—I don’t know! I told her all sorts of things, and then I pulled her hair!”

  Though she was trying to make a joke, Beatriz was clearly upset. Ana thought she understood what had happened.

  “Oh…”

  “Oh, what? Tell me!” Beatriz’s voice took on a hysterical edge.

  “Well,” Ana said very slowly, trying to model the behavior she wanted Beatriz to follow. “It sounds like there was a lot of telling and not a whole lot of listening.”

  Beatriz allowed the words to sink in and then finally understood what her friend meant. She sat back in her chair and groaned. “I should be good at this!” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Okay, so look,” Ana said. “Let’s do this another way. Right now, you don’t really know what she’s thinking or feeling. Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re thinking and feeling?”

  Beatriz hung her head back and stared up at the fluorescent lights, closing her eyes against the glare. “I want to make it all better. I want Celeste to want to be with me. I want her to need me. I want her to trust me. I want—I want my sister back, but since I can’t have that, I want Celeste to, I don’t know, help me start over.”

  “Wow,” Ana said after a long pause. “That’s an awful lot of stuff to expect from one girl who just lost her mother and God knows what else.”

  Beatriz pulled her head up to look at a passing swarm of teenage girls, all chomping on wads of gum and laughing at something only they understood.

  �
��You can’t buy her affection,” Ana said. “What you need and want from her will only come with time. And I hate to tell you this, but you can’t make her feel anything.”

  “But what about what she needs and wants from me?” Beatriz asked.

  “I think you need to be quiet so you can hear her and find out,” Ana said. “It might not all come in words. You know that, right?”

  Ana’s advice began to make sense, but Beatriz was still driven by her anxieties.

  “I just feel like—all these years have gone by and I have so much to make up to her, and to my sister. I want to do it right this time.” Beatriz thought about the last time she saw Perla. She thought about telling Ana about it, how she would have done things differently, but reliving that moment filled her with shame.

  Ana knew her friend like her own reflection in a mirror and sensed that something was still unspoken. Whatever happened had injured Beatriz deeply, leaving her uncharacteristically frantic. Ana affectionately stroked Beatriz’s hand. “Mira, you need to go slow. Go. Slow,” Ana said. “Have you even found out what happened over there? How Perla died?”

  Beatriz shook her head no, her eyes welling with tears at the thought of her baby sister being gone, really gone. “I… I can’t. I’m sure it’s in the packet of papers she brought. I just can’t deal with it,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Okay, okay,” Ana said, patting her friend’s hand. “Take it slow. You want Celeste to meet the family? Let her meet the family, but don’t make it a circus. Make it as casual and easy as possible. You don’t know what she’s been through and what she has to say about it. Give her some time.”

  “Okay,” Beatriz said, getting her bearings back. “Okay. But I feel like there is so much I should do, so much I should know. Like why were you asking her about needing money? What was that all about?”

  “She started her period.”

  “What? How did you know? How come I didn’t know?” Beatriz exclaimed.

  “Ay, mujer!” Ana said. “Listen! You need to listen! Take a breath, step back. Stop treating her like a novelty. Just let her be.”

  Celeste came out of the restroom and walked toward the women, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her hoodie, the hem of it pulled down over her backside.

  “ ’Sta bien?” Beatriz asked. Celeste nodded. Beatriz took a deep breath. “Okay. We have a new plan,” she announced, working hard to speak calmly and clearly. “We’re going to get a few things and go back to the house. Qué necessitas the most?”

  Celeste looked at Ana anxiously.

  “Tell her, mi’ja.”

  “Di’me. Anything, anything,” Beatriz interjected. Ana shot her a “calm the hell down” look. After a long moment, Celeste finally spoke.

  “Chones, por favor. Nada mas,” Celeste said. She was worried that the request would catapult them to a new store where Beatriz would buy her a pair of underwear for every hour of the day, for every day of the week. Instead, Beatriz remembered Ana’s advice and calmly said, “I know just where to go.”

  SEVEN

  Although it seemed as if she should be able to sleep standing up, Josie Mendoza couldn’t summon sleep—peaceful, restful, uninterrupted sleep—any more than she could will the sun to go down. Ten, twenty minutes, sometimes up to an hour, was the most she could hope for. Her body would go limp, but her mind was still alive, like the wick of a candle just blown out—the fire extinguished, but the scarlet bud on the tip lingering. It was not that Josie didn’t want to sleep. She was dying to sleep. But she hadn’t slept—really slept—since Perla died.

  It had taken Josie only a few years to build her writing credentials with some targeted assignments in a few small publications that led to bigger, more prestigious magazines. So she was ready when she was asked to write the book Women of Juarez: Then and Now. She was more than prepared to pull all her resources, all her skills, all her energy, into this one project. Like a long-distance runner, she felt like she’d been training to write this book all her life. So she was taken aback in a big way when the project turned out to be more demanding than she imagined. It wasn’t just the obscene violence, the wounded families, and the astonishing facts behind the long and tragic story; it was that she had broken the cardinal rule all good journalists knew not to break: She became emotionally involved.

  In the beginning, she had to work hard to earn Perla’s trust. She knew interviewing Perla was a huge “get,” because no one else had written about her. She thought it was because no one else knew about her, when in reality, Perla was desperate to guard her privacy. Josie had researched Perla’s labor-organizing efforts in the electronics factory where she worked in Juarez and the relief work she was doing in El Paso for the families whose mothers, daughters, and sisters had become some of the murdered. Everyone called Perla “fierce” and “brave.” A few even called her “la chingona,” which Josie translated to something like “the ass-kicker” (but with the utmost respect). They meant she was a fighter, a survivor, and, more important, she knew how to get things done. Josie was determined to interview her. After weeks of painstaking cajoling, coaxing, and pleading her case through an intermediary, Perla finally agreed to talk to Josie. They met at a taco cart Perla suggested. Josie came fully prepared with her notebook and her recorder and her list of carefully prepared questions. She sat under a sun-bleached umbrella, lazily perched over a rickety folding table the vendor had erected near the cart, keeping an eye out for Perla as the lunch rush peaked and then subsided. After an hour past their agreed meeting time, Josie started to wonder what her plan B should be, when someone approached her from behind.

  “You can put all that away. We’re not ready for that yet,” Perla said. When Josie turned around, she was shocked. Based on the way Perla Sánchez had been described to her, Josie was expecting an Amazon woman, not the petite figure that stood before her. Perla was dressed simply in blue jeans, her T-shirt neatly tucked in at her small waist. Her long, black hair was slicked back from her dark, round face in a ponytail that hung behind her head, exploding into a frothy bouquet of curls.

  “Okay. I’m here,” Perla said, as she moved to stand across the table from Josie. “What do you want?”

  Josie reared back. “I want to talk to you.” She could see Perla was completely no-nonsense, ready for work, with no tolerance for chitchat. She could also see that she was the one being interviewed.

  “Why? What do you get out of it?” Perla asked.

  “Me?”

  “How do I know you’re not going to, you know, sensentualize what’s going on here?”

  Perla misspoke, and Josie knew she needed to correct her without making her feel foolish. “I have no intention of sensationalizing anything.”

  “All I know is people come here all the time to pick the meat off our bones and write stories for their shiny magazines. Then they go back to their nice lives while things for las mujeres here stay the same. How do I know you’re not going to do that?” Perla demanded.

  Now Josie understood why people called Perla “la chingona.” But she could feel her own inner chingona coming to life, too.

  “You don’t,” Josie said flatly. “But I can tell you this: I’ve known what’s been happening here for a long time. I want justice to be served just as much as you do. You do it your way. I do it mine. The more people know what’s happening here, the more chance there is that things can change.”

  Perla stared past Josie for a long time before the taco vendor struck up a conversation with her. She obviously knew Perla and wanted to treat her well. Perla politely waved off the offer of free food to the vendor’s heartfelt objections, then graciously accepted, making the vendor beam with pleasure. The women were so immersed in their small talk Josie thought the interrogation was over. She began to pack her things, when Perla suddenly returned, seating herself across from Josie.

  “Ándale, then. I don’t have a lot of time. I hope you’re prepared.”

  After that afternoon at the taco cart, she an
d Perla began to meet regularly. As much as Josie tried, Perla never wanted to talk about herself. She always stayed focused on the women—the murdered, the missing, their families, and the justice that they were still owed. She changed the subject when Josie innocently asked, “Where are you from?” Perla dropped a few clues here and there but would never answer Josie directly. It wasn’t until Perla discovered that Josie also had a daughter that the distance she kept between them began to shrink.

  “Qué milagro!” Perla said, as she looked at the small photo Josie had carefully trimmed and pressed into a locket she always wore under her blouse. “What do you call her?”

  “Paciencia. Paz for short.”

  “Qué chula!” Perla declared. When she let her guard down, she was as delightful as a babbling stream. “Where is she?”

  “With mi madre, en Austin.”

  “Ay, qué bueno,” Perla said with a sigh. “Then she’s safe.” She thought a moment before she asked the next question. “And her daddy?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ay, perdón.”

  “No importa,” Josie said. “He was never part of our lives, if you know what I mean.”

  Perla did know what Josie meant and left it at that.

  “I miss her terribly,” Josie added. “I haven’t seen her in weeks, but I have to work, and my work takes me away for a long time, and I—”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Perla said. “We all do what we have to do.”

  Josie was grateful that Perla didn’t offer any verdicts about Josie being separated from her child, or any unsolicited advice about how it was a shame her career overrode her role as a mother, or any other critical commentary that Josie had already tortured herself with. Although they were very different from one another—Perla in her T-shirt and jeans, Josie in her regulation black slacks, white blouse, and always close-cropped hair—they understood each other in that small moment. And maybe that was the reason Perla shared with Josie the book she kept with notes for her daughter Celeste’s quinceañera.