The Queen of Water

by Laura Resau

  Her nose wrinkles. I sniff the air, wondering if she’s angry that the house smells like pee. But her face twists up into a laugh. “Ha! My son’s a little longuito!” She laughs so hard tears come to her eyes. “A longuito baby!”

  I cringe. Once Mamita comes, I’ll tell the Doctorita one of my rules. Rule one: Never use the word longuito. Or longuita or longa or longo. Ever.

  Later, after the Doctorita shows me how to fold the baby’s diaper mestizo style, Niño Carlitos comes home. Over a lunch of fried steak and cucumber-tomato salad she tells him the story, and again her face screws up and her laughter rises like a hyena’s into those piercing words: “Dressed like a longuito! A longuito baby!”

  Niño Carlitos doesn’t find it as funny as she does. Instead, he gives me a sympathetic look, and says, “Things feel very different here, don’t they?”

  I nod.

  “Well, I think you’re doing a fine job, hija.”

  My eyes dance a little in response, and I feel a twinge of sadness that most likely, after Mamita comes for me, I won’t ever see this nice man again. This man who calls me daughter.

  It’s midafternoon now and I squint into the bright sunshine of the cement patio, washing dishes, finishing the last plate. One, two, three rinses. The water has turned my fingers wrinkled and pink.

  The Doctorita comes outside with a big basket of dirty diapers. “Wash these,” she huffs, and then disappears up the stairs.

  I remember the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos telling my parents that all I’d have to do was take care of the baby. I don’t remember anything about washing dishes and clothes. I plug up the basin with a rag, sprinkle in detergent, dump in the smelly diapers, and start scrubbing. But no matter how much I scrub, the caca stains won’t come out. I scrub and scrub, but the diapers refuse to turn pure white. So I rinse them and start hanging them up, their spots of yellow glaring in the sunshine like decorations for a party.

  The Doctorita teeters down the stairs on her pointy heels, the fabric of her skirt clinging to rolls of flesh. “What’s taking so long?” She spots the diapers hanging to dry. “What’s this?” she shrieks. “They’re still dirty! Jaimito will get sick if he wears these.” She tears them off the line and hurls them back into the basket. “¡Longa sucia! Dirty Indian!” Bits of saliva spray off her words. Her fists pound my head.

  I shut my eyes tight, and my arms fly up to shield my face. Pain sears through me, and I think, Stop, stop, stop, but she punches and slaps until my head is a ball of aching, screaming fire. Just when my legs feel like they’re about to collapse, she steps back.

  “Next time I come out,” she says, “these had better be white. Or else you’ll scrub them with your teeth and eat the caca right off them.”

  She leaves. I fill the sink with soapy water again. My head throbs. The world shifts in and out of focus. My shaking hands move of their own accord, scrubbing the diapers, adding more and more soap. The bubbles grow and multiply, thin, trembling balls of rainbows. My thoughts disappear except for these fragile bubbles and the four words that play over and over in my head. Mamita, come get me. Mamita, come get me. Mamita, come get me. Something inside me repeats this like a mantra, like a drumbeat along with my heart and pulse and throbbing head.

  Hours later, with my raw hands still submerged in the harsh bubbles, it finally hits me like a punch in the stomach: My mother is not coming to get me.

  chapter 4

  “I WANT TO GO HOME,” I tell Niño Carlitos at dinner that night, biting my tongue to keep in the tears so that he won’t think I’m a crybaby. My accent is so thick I hope he understands the words.

  “Oh, m’hija,” he says with a kind, bland smile. “I know things seem strange now, but trust me, soon you’ll get used to our life.”

  I offer Jaimito another spoonful of mashed potatoes, eyeing their plates heaped with rice and meat and rolls, this fancy food I’ve spent my life craving. I don’t want any of it. There are too many tears stuck in my throat to think about eating.

  But I refuse to let myself cry. I refuse to show them weakness. Instead, I’ll be clever, make a plan. I’ll stay quiet and obedient until my visit home in a month. Once I’m home, I’ll refuse to leave. When the Doctorita tries to grab me, Cheetah will lift her fierce hooves in warning, maahing and maahing, and if the Doctorita comes any closer, my beautiful goat will bash in her head.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, I discover that Niño Carlitos, unlike the Doctorita, never hurts me. While the Doctorita shouts and smacks my face or whacks my head whenever I make a mistake, Niño Carlitos never beats me, never yells, never calls me a longa. He calls me only m’hija, my daughter. “Oh, m’hija,” he says at every meal. “This is rrriquísimo, really delicious!”

  One night, they’re sitting at the table, sipping the soup I cooked for dinner, while I feed Jaimito, who’s in his high chair. He’s refusing to eat, only interested in throwing handfuls of rice off the edge of his tray. I’m hoping the Doctorita won’t notice. Somehow, his messes are always my fault.

  Niño Carlitos leans toward the Doctorita and whispers, “Could you tell la Virginia not to use so much salt next time?”

  The Doctorita slams down her fork. “Carlos, I’m sick of it. You always criticize me, but never that longa. Only, m’hija this, m’hija that. Oh, how delicious, m’hija. And I’m always the bad guy. Why is this longa my burden?” Her chin jiggles wildly, her face turning red as a bloody steak.

  I try to focus on feeding Jaimito, slipping a few spoonfuls of lentils into his mouth, which he promptly spits into his hand and rubs all over his face.

  Once the Doctorita stops yelling, Niño Carlitos gives me a secret look, as if to say, You and I are normal, Virginia. My wife is an evil hyena. Then he says, “Negra, you need to teach Virginia how to do things. You can’t expect her to know everything. She’s a little girl.”

  I wipe the green lentils from Jaimito’s pudgy face and flick a piece of rice from the tip of his nose. It lands on the Doctorita’s lap. I suck in a breath, but luckily she hasn’t noticed.

  She wrinkles up her face and narrows her eyes. “Ay, this fool longa can’t learn anything.” Her fist pounds the table. “You’re the man of the house, Carlos. Why don’t you ever discipline her?”

  “I would never hurt la Virginia,” Niño Carlitos says evenly. “I would never hit anyone.”

  I sneak another spoonful of lentils into Jaimito’s mouth and press my lips together to keep from smiling. The Doctorita throws down her napkin and storms away.

  Niño Carlitos offers me a flat smile. “Really, I think this meal is rrriquísimo, very good, Virginia.”

  I can hold it in no longer; I let my own smile escape. Seeing me smile, Jaimito smiles too, banging his tiny fists into his food, sending bits of rice happily sailing.

  More weeks pass, without a mention of my visit home. I think of running away, but I’m not allowed outside. The Doctorita locks the door when she leaves me with Jaimito. The only pieces of the sky I see are flecks through the small, high windows, and a patch above the courtyard where I wash clothes, surrounded by walls. It feels like forever since I’ve seen the whole big sky, or run down a hill, or climbed a tree.

  Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita say nothing about paying me my monthly salary of a thousand sucres. Sometimes I walk into the room where the Doctorita is lying on the sofa, grading papers, and Niño Carlitos is reclined in his chair, reading his textbook, scribbling on a notepad. With Jaimito on my hip, playing with my hair, I stare at them, waiting for them to say, Oh, we almost forgot. It’s been a month and we need to pay you. Here are your thousand sucres. And yes, we need to take you to visit your family. But mostly they ignore me. Once in a while, the Doctorita will look up and say, “What are you staring at, longa?” Or Niño Carlitos will say, “What’s wrong, m’hija?”

  And I try to form the words, Where is my money? When will you take me home? Then the tears start welling up and I bury my face into Jaimito’s hair and go into
the kitchen so that they won’t see me cry.

  At nights, on the sheepskin Cheetah rug under the turquoise and orange blanket, I think of how to run away. But I wouldn’t know where exactly to run, only toward the mountain Imbabura, whose peak I’ve glimpsed through the high-up windows.

  So I wait. Surely Niño Carlitos will have to visit his parents again sometime soon. And when they go, I’ll go with them, even if I have to sneak onto the back of the truck and hide under a blanket.

  In the meantime, I have to gain their trust so that they suspect nothing. One day they will leave the door unlocked by accident. One day they will have to take me outside the house. And then, I will escape.

  About two months after my arrival, I’m playing blocks with Jaimito on the floor—building towers that he knocks over, squealing with delight—when the Doctorita says, “Let’s go, longa.”

  For a moment, I’m speechless. “Where?”

  “The store.” She grabs her purse and Jaimito’s stroller, and ticks off more rules. “Don’t talk to anyone. Just greet them and then shut your mouth.” We walk down the bright cobblestoned street, past other apartments and children playing soccer, and stores selling ripe fruit and raw meat and shiny cookware and colorful cans of food. Over the roofs, I can see the tips of mountains way in the distance. I recognize the far-off shapes of the mist-shrouded Imbabura, the man mountain, and Cotacachi, his wife, who is covered in diamond frost that he has given her as a gift.

  But that is all that seems familiar. On the street, the colors dazzle and confuse me after so much time inside. And even though the Doctorita is the one who has imprisoned me, I feel grateful that she has decided to take me out. Thank you thank you thank you, I tell the world that is so much bigger and brighter than the doily-filled apartment.

  I peek down the cobbled side streets. They stretch for a couple of blocks in either direction, then turn into dirt roads, then into wavy fields that rise into mountains. There are patchworks of orchards and crops, all shades of green, spotted with cows and farmhouses. The town is bigger than my home of Yana Urku, but much smaller than Otavalo, where Mamita sometimes took me to the Saturday market. From time to time a donkey or horse or truck passes us, but most people are on foot. In Otavalo, there are indígenas everywhere, and in the market there is booth after booth of gold beads and dark anacos and shiny white blouses. But here, I’m the only one dressed in an anaco and puffy blouse. No one looks like me.

  Almost everyone who passes us stares at me with curiosity, then makes smiley baby faces at Jaimito, then greets the Doctorita with respect, “Buenos días, Doctorita.” It must be true, what she’s told me—that she is an important person in town. She says that people from nearby communities come to her for dental work, since she is the best dentist for kilometers. “La Negra’s the only dentist for kilometers,” Niño Carlitos jokes, but you can tell that secretly he’s proud of her. She snorts and says that it’s out of the kindness of her heart that she lives in this backwater town and helps these country people and that one day she’ll reap her just reward.

  I glance at her now, walking beside me, as I push the stroller, struggling to keep up. Her face is calm at the moment, her chin lifted high, her breasts and chin and belly jiggling as her feet hit the hard ground. I search her baggy eyes for bits of the kindness she claims she has. I can’t find a shred of it. Only echoes of her fists flying at me and her thin lips lined with old lipstick spitting out “filthy longa.” Nearly every day, she finds some reason to lash out at me—punching my head for burning toast, hitting me with a mop for using dish soap to clean the floor, smacking a wooden spoon against my face for adding too much water to the rice. No, if there’s any kindness in her, she keeps it well hidden from me.

  I follow her into a corner store, helping her lift Jaimito’s stroller up the two steps. It’s dark and shadowy inside, with cool blue-green walls. Pineapples and papayas and strawberries overflow from wooden crates. The air is thick with the odor of overripe fruit. It’s thrilling to be in the midst of these new smells and sights, and a little scary without the apartment walls around me. It’s been so long since I’ve been in the wide world.

  The owner, an older lady, greets the Doctorita and coos over Jaimito, who’s babbling in his baby language. The lady’s lips are like two shriveled worms, pale and dried-up and barely moving as she talks. “Oh, Doctorita, how good that you have this girl. What a pretty little thing she is. How long will she stay with you?”

  The Doctorita picks out bananas, one bunch ripe and one bunch still green. “Oh, she’s going to live with us for good.”

  I stare at her. What? I wonder if I’ve misunderstood.

  The lady weighs the bananas on a rusted scale, nodding. “Oh, that’s the nice thing about these longuitas, isn’t it? They can stay with you forever.”

  “Yes, forever.”

  Forever? My head grows hot and my throat dry and suddenly the voices sound far away and blackness starts at the edges of my eyes and moves inward, swallowing everything, until there is only a pinpoint of light, as though I’m looking down a long, dark tunnel. Forever?

  I stagger outside into the sunshine, blinking and blinking in the harsh light.

  Soon the Doctorita comes outside, struggling to bring Jaimito’s stroller down the steps by herself. Annoyed, she shoves the bag of bananas in my arms. “Come, Virginia,” she says, as though I’m her pet, as though she owns me now. Forever. But unlike a pet, I have to work all day. And people pay money for a pet, yet for me she paid nothing … at least, as far as I know.

  I gaze into the distance at Imbabura, the mountain that towers over the potato fields and sheep pastures of my home. With a sudden, deep ache, I understand that the Doctorita has no intention of taking me there. From here, the giant peak looks terribly far away, something small and feeble and half hidden by clouds.

  And then I understand something else. I may be a fast runner, but really, I’m just a little girl who could never run all the way back to Yana Urku.

  * * *

  Most nights, my thoughts slip back to my village, to Mamita and my brother and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins and the animals and the way the grass felt on my cheek during naps and the smell of kitchen smoke and how big the sky stretched above me and how I could climb trees and play market and run around in the pasture all day long.

  Other nights, as I remember Yana Urku, I run my fingers over my calves, over the long stripes of scars Papito gave me. After he drank lots of puro, he would turn into a fiery monster and beat me and Mamita and Manuelito and Hermelinda. But worse than his whip and fists were Mamita’s words. I can’t stop remembering her words. I’d be happy if one day you left and never came back. Her words cut into me sharper and deeper than any whip. I wonder if words can make scars on your heart. And if they will ever fade.

  Whatever path my thoughts take—to the good memories or the bad—at least Cheetah my goat-rug is always here to lick away my tears.

  chapter 5

  THE DOCTORITA IS STANDING in her bathrobe by the door, sniffling and coughing, a wadded-up tissue in her fist. Her nose is red, her eyes watery, and she’s looking at me as though I’ve already done something wrong. “I’m sending you alone on an errand,” she says in a stuffed-up voice. “I’m too sick to go out.” She blows her nose with the falling-apart tissue. “Don’t even think about running away. Your parents will just sell you to another family. A family who doesn’t treat you as well as we do. Your parents don’t want you anymore. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Doctorita.” I try to contain my excitement, to not fidget or bounce too much. In the past few months, I’ve gone on errands with the Doctorita and walks with the family, but never been outside alone.

  “Run there, ask for milk, pay for it, and run right back. Don’t talk to anyone.”

  “Yes, Doctorita.”

  “Five minutes. You’d better be back in five minutes. I’m watching the clock.” She narrows her puffy eyes into a warning.

  “Yes, Doctori
ta.”

  She hands me a bill and I’m off running, down the stairs, up the street, as fast as I can. I run down the main street, toward the crossroad where I’ve noticed buses coming up and down on the way to bigger places. I need to find out more about those buses. I can’t run all the way to Yana Urku, but maybe I can take a bus.

  I pass the intersection, and by the time I reach the store, I’m breathing so hard that when Doña Mercedes greets me and asks what I need, I can barely say “milk.”

  She counts out my change. “Your name is Virginia, right?”

  I nod. She’s seen me here with the Doctorita before, and asked me questions then, but I was too scared to answer because of the Doctorita’s rules.

  “So, how do you like living here?” Doña Mercedes asks, smiling gently.

  I hesitate. If I say something, will the Doctorita find out? I don’t want to give her another excuse to beat me, like she did in the diaper incident. Almost every week I do a new chore wrong and her fists come flying at me.

  Doña Mercedes is waiting for my answer with kind eyes. She wears a soft cream sweater that makes me think of a baby lamb, and her hair falls loose and wavy over her shoulders.

  “Fine,” I lie.

  “You know, I have two girls about your age. Marina and Marlenny.” She hands me the milk in a plastic bag along with some coins. “You could play with them sometime.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper. I feel the coins in my hand and wonder if they’re enough to get to my village. I look into her eyes, which are hazy brown with the tiniest hint of green. “Do you know which bus could take a person to Yana Urku?”

  “Yana Urku?” She looks at me sadly. “I’m sorry, Virginia. I’ve never heard of that place. Is it very small? Where is it? Is that where you’re from?”

  Before the tears come, I dash out of the shop, down the street, past the bus turnoff, past our neighbors’ houses and up the stairs. My lungs burning, I bang on the door, praying I’ve made it in time. The Doctorita opens the door and takes the milk and the coins from me without a word. She doesn’t yell at me, so I guess I’ve made it under five minutes. I breathe out in relief. She’ll trust me to run errands alone again, and when she does, I’ll keep my eyes and ears alert and find a way to escape.