Prayers for the Stolen

by Jennifer Clement

  Was Maria looking in the mirror and seeing my daddy’s face all over her face?

  I wanted to know if what Mike said was true and that my father sent Maria’s mother money. If my mother ever found this out, she would find him. She would. The time of hunger for him would be over.

  I thought of all these things as I lay on the mattress where I’d hidden Paula’s photos and her notebook and Mike’s plastic bag with a brick of heroin in it.

  A large brick made fifty bags.

  The very next morning Julio, the gardener, walked through the front door and I fell in love.

  He walked right into my body.

  He climbed up my ribs and into me. I thought to myself, Say a prayer for ladders.

  I wanted to smell his neck and place my mouth on his mouth and taste him and hold him. I wanted to smell the smell of garden and grass and palm tree, smell of rose and leaf and lemon flower. I fell in love with the gardener and his name was Julio.

  I spent the morning following him around the garden. He trimmed, dug, and cut. He rubbed the leaves of a lemon tree between his fingers and smelled them. He took a few flat silver seeds out of the back pocket of his jeans and pressed them into the dirt. He used long shears to cut the grass.

  After an hour, he left and went to get a ladder from the garage so that he could cut the Mexican-pink bougainvillea that grew along one wall and beside the life-sized bronze horse. As he snipped at the overgrown branches, yellow pollen was shaken into the air and the flowers, like paper flowers, covered the ground.

  Julio was in his early twenties. His skin was deeply tanned from working in the sun all day. He had a short Afro that stood up like a black crown above him and light brown eyes.

  Julio was kind to the flowers and the leaves. He cupped the roses with his hands as if he was honored to hold them. He twirled vines between his fingers as if they were locks of hair. He walked gently on the grass as if he did not want the small blades to break or even bend under his weight.

  Plants in my life had always been something to fight against. Trees were filled with tarantulas. Vines strangled everything. Large red ants lived under roots and snakes hid near the prettiest flowers. I also knew to stay away from the unusual dry brown patches of jungle that were suffocating from the herbicide dropped by the helicopters. That poison would continue to burn through the land for decades. Everyone on my piece of mountain always dreamed of the city and all that cement where no insect survived. We could never imagine why anyone would want a garden.

  Because I loved Julio, the cars and trucks outside on the street sounded like rivers. The diesel smoke from passenger buses smelled like flowers and the rotten five-day-old garbage by the front door smelled sweet. Cement walls became mirrors. My small ugly hands turned into starfish.

  In those hours that I followed Julio around the garden, he never spoke to me.

  After Julio left each day, I sat in my room and prayed. I prayed that the beautiful garden of bougainvillea trees, roses, bowers, lemon and magnolia trees would dry up and that the lawn would become overgrown with weeds. I prayed that Julio would have to come to the house every day to take care of his sick garden.

  Very late, after I had fallen asleep, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. She was furious.

  I did not know if she was drunk or not but I did know she was standing alone in the dark up on the clearing and screaming into her phone. The connection was poor. I started to yell also as if my voice could reach her across the city streets and over the mountain, down the highway and up into her ear.

  Between the bad connection and her screams, I could not understand what she was calling about.

  What are you doing all alone up there on Delphi? It’s late. It’s dark. Go home! I cried.

  You stole it! You took it and you didn’t even ask my permission!

  What did I take?

  Don’t give me that! You know what you took!

  What?

  You get on a bus and bring it back right now!

  This conversation went back and forth and finally we were cut off. I never understood what it was she thought I’d stolen. She did not call back.

  I closed my eyes and imagined what happened next. My mother cursed and turned off her phone. She plunged down the mountain toward our little house with her toes craned over the front of her flip-flops, hanging onto the plastic soles like a parrot’s talons to a branch. I could see her stumble and slip.

  I prayed there was no moon, it was the darkest night ever, she was lost, and a scorpion had stung her hand as she stumbled against a tree. The backward prayer was never backward enough.

  When I’d arrived, Jacaranda gave me two uniforms to wear. So, like her, I dressed in a pink dress with a white apron over the uniform.

  The next morning when I went into the kitchen Jacaranda was already up and making coffee. She offered me a plate of scrambled eggs with slices of hot dogs in them.

  I asked her when our employers were coming back, but she had no idea. She said they were only supposed to have gone away for the weekend to visit relatives in Nogales, in the state of Sonora.

  As the morning unfolded, Jacaranda told me about the family we were working for.

  Mr. Domingo owned a ranch in Coahuila, very north, right across from the border at Laredo. The ranch was known for its huge white-tailed bucks. All the animals were harvested on his property.

  Last January Jacaranda went to the ranch for the first time. There was a large fenced-in field filled with deer to one side of the ranch house. Behind the house there were cages that contained old lions and tigers that Mr. Domingo would buy from zoos.

  Rich people from the United States liked to hunt there, Jacaranda said. A deer cost you two thousand dollars to kill.

  It seems so little.

  Little? Who knows? The birds were free. The monkeys were free too.

  They had monkeys?

  Nobody really wanted to kill monkeys, she said.

  Oh, really? Why?

  Why kill something that’s free?

  While she’d been there, a group of businessmen from Texas had hired the ranch for a hunt.

  The large living room at the ranch house contained a polar bear rug and dozens of deer heads on the walls. The wide, circular bar stools were made of elephant feet. The lamps were made of deer legs that had been hollowed out with a long drill so that the electrical wires could be threaded through.

  Jacaranda said that Mr. Domingo liked to go hunting in Africa once a year and that, while she worked there, two large trunks arrived at the house with dead animals in them that lay flat like clothes and that were later stuffed.

  It was Jacaranda’s job to clean the glass eyes of all the animals in the room.

  Mr. Domingo likes the eyes to look real and shine, she said.

  Twice a week Jacaranda had to fill a bucket with water and bleach and, using a rag and standing on a ladder, she’d clean the glass eyes so that they would shine with life. She said that she would look to see the hole where the bullet had entered the animal, but that the skins were sewn so perfectly, she could never tell.

  Jacaranda described Mrs. Domingo as a nice woman from an old family that came from Sonora. She was refined and elegant and her husband was not. Mrs. Domingo hated living in Acapulco and Jacaranda said that she fought with Mr. Domingo all the time about wanting to leave here. Mrs. Domingo spent most of her time watching movies.

  She does not like to go shopping or go to the beauty parlor like other women. She just stays home and watches movies and plays with her son, Jacaranda said. In any case, Mr. Domingo does not like them to leave the house.

  Mr. Domingo was born in Acapulco and his father, who died a few years ago, owned a small hotel, which was the one that Jacaranda had worked in years ago.

  This is how I ended up here. I’d already worked for the family at the hotel cleaning the rooms.

  After we finished breakfast, I went out into the garden to wait for Julio’s arrival so I could shadow and watch him work.


  From the garden I could look out over the ocean and, on that day, I saw two large cruise ships come into the harbor. Several small boats from one of the docks motored out to the ships to pick up passengers and bring them into Acapulco to go shopping.

  When Julio arrived, I followed him around and watched him work. He was very quiet and accepted my adoration. I didn’t know how to act any other way. I loved him and wanted him and no one had ever prepared me for this devotion.

  I longed for an order, for him to say, Bring me a glass of water.

  I wished he’d say, Hold my shears while I move the ladder.

  I wanted to be given instructions.

  I wanted to obey him.

  I wanted to kneel.

  We walked in the silent garden and fell in love to the sound of things being trimmed and planted.

  Every day Jacaranda and I got up, bathed, and dressed in our pink uniforms with the clean, white aprons. She wore white plastic nurse shoes, while I wore my old plastic flip-flops.

  Every day we’d groom for the arrival of our employers. Every day we’d clean the clean house and Julio would scoop the leaves out of the swimming pool with a long net.

  The money Jacaranda had been given to run the house and buy food was slowly used up. We ate everything in the larder. One day we made a meal of caviar wrapped up in tortillas served with a hot tomato sauce.

  We never touched the bottles of champagne or cases of wine.

  One day Jacaranda, Julio, and I were sitting in the kitchen drinking lemonade together when Jacaranda said, I have to tell you both something I confirmed yesterday.

  What is it? Julio asked.

  We have all suspected this, but now I know. No one is ever coming back to this house. They were all killed on a highway outside Nogales months ago.

  No one will ever show up again, Julio said.

  Was the boy killed too? I asked.

  That’s what they said on the news. It took this long to confirm their identities. They had many.

  We all knew there were empty houses all over Mexico that no one ever came home to.

  I’m going to stay, Jacaranda said, while I look for another job.

  Me too, Julio said.

  Me too, I answered.

  Julio was content to have me follow him around. He still did the gardening because he said he only did it out of respect for the garden anyway. I’d hold his shears for him and it was as if I held his hand. The bags of dead leaves, the ladder, the shears, the rake, and the net for the swimming pool became parts of his body to me.

  One day I followed him to the garage. He needed to get some fertilizer to sprinkle under the magnolia tree. The bags of fertilizer were kept in there in stacks beside an enormous tank of gasoline that even had a fuel pump, just like the ones at gas stations.

  One match, one small spark, only one match, could blow up the house, Julio said as I followed him into that dark, hot garage.

  In the garage, Julio walked into me. The weight of his body pressed me against the door of the Mercedes and I could feel the door handle in the small of my back.

  Julio twisted me to one side and opened the car door and pushed me backward until I lay on the car seat with my legs hanging out of the door. The car smelled like leather and perfume. Julio pushed my pink uniform from my thighs up to my waist and then rolled my underwear down my legs. I heard my flip-flops fall off my feet and onto the floor.

  After that day, Julio moved into the house. He spent the morning in the garden. He trimmed plants and mowed the lawn or placed chemicals in the swimming pool. In the afternoon we watched movies.

  At first we slept in my small servant’s room in my narrow single bed but, after only a few days, we moved up to the master bedroom where we took baths in the Jacuzzi and slept in the king-sized bed. Jacaranda didn’t mind because by this time she was living in the child’s bedroom and sleeping in the whale-shaped bed.

  In the bathroom I liked to look into every drawer of Mrs. Domingo’s vanity table. In one drawer she had at least fifty lipsticks. In another drawer she had over twenty different perfume bottles. I tried everything. I would cover my body with an orchid cream and used one cream on my knees and elbows that was made with gold dust. I also wore her Chanel No. 5 perfume.

  Under the sink I found a box of jewelry. It was unlocked and hidden inside a towel. The box had two thick gold necklaces in it, a gold Rolex watch, and a ring with a very large diamond. I placed the jewel on my ring finger and it fit perfectly. I never took it off.

  Now that we were lovers, Julio talked to me and I learned about his life. He had a strange way of talking. He said everything two or three times, but always in a different way. I slowly understood the rhythm of his talk, which I imagined was the way people spoke in the north of Mexico.

  I’m just wayward, he said. What can I tell you? I was caught in the river like a rat. A rat-in-the-river-caught kind of man. Yes. I broke the life out of someone. I’m wayward.

  He called me Princess Ladydi.

  You’re a one-and-only, he said. I’d shine my shoes for you and stand in the rain for five hours for you. Just you, Princess Ladydi.

  I decided not to tell him why my mother named me after Lady Diana because I did not want to break my own heart.

  I crossed the river but I was caught on the riverbank and the guard who guarded over me and watched me looked away and opened the way for me, Julio said.

  Julio killed a US Border Patrol guard. This was why he was a gardener in Acapulco and not a gardener in California.

  Julio used to work on Mr. Domingo’s ranch and grew up in Nuevo Laredo. When he killed the border guard he came back to Mexico. Mr. Domingo helped him get out fast and got him as far away from the US border as possible. He gave Julio a job as a gardener in his own house in Acapulco. Julio said that there was nothing Mr. Domingo hated more than the United States Border Patrol.

  I needed to live as if I’d drowned in the river; I needed to appear to disappear and fill with water, float out to sea. Every US border guard thinks I drowned in the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, Julio said.

  Now I understood why Jacaranda did not interfere with us. Julio had killed someone with his hands. She knew Julio held that border guard’s neck and twisted and tore it like a young tree branch.

  For six months we lived in the house together waiting for something to happen. This waiting reminded me of what it felt like when I was sick as a child and days and days went by without knowing when I would go back to school. Once I lay in a hammock with a high fever. For days my mother rocked that hammock and fanned the flies off of my body until her arm must have ached. On my mountain, fanning flies off of someone is one of the kindest, most loving things a person can do for another. It really bothered me when I’d see documentaries on the television where flies were drinking the water from children’s eyes in Africa. No one shooed them away, not even the person filming. That NatGeo camera-person just filmed those flies drinking tears.

  Once, when I told Julio I was tired of being locked in the house, he planned a day trip for us.

  This was the first time I’d left the house since my arrival. I changed out of my servant’s uniform and into my jeans and a T-shirt. I had not worn these clothes since the day I’d arrived with Mike. I could feel that my body was different inside my old clothes. It was a combination of walking on marble instead of dirt paths, sleeping in cold air under piles of blankets, and being loved by Julio night after night.

  We walked down the hill from the marble house to Caleta beach.

  Julio held my hand as we walked. You’re my little girl, he said. Don’t let go of my hand.

  He liked to treat me like a child. I expected him to take a tissue out of his pocket and wipe my nose. He acted like he was taking me to the candy store. I loved to be his little baby and so I skipped at his side and forgot that he was a killer.

  Julio bought the tickets for our ride across the bay to Roqueta Island in a glass-bottom boat. The truth is he did not want me to see the sand a
nd ocean or the island. He did not want me to see the island’s zoo with the old lion whose roar crossed the bay and could be heard on windless mornings. Julio wanted me to see the bronze statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that was in the water, drowned in the sea. She was called the Virgin of the Sea.

  Now you will see the mother of the water, he said. She protects the shipwrecked and fishermen. The drowned too.

  The boat sat low in the water as if it were a wide canoe. Julio and I leaned over and looked through the glass that allowed us to see everything that moved under the boat. After a while we saw her shape beneath the waves.

  The undersea world looked green through the boat’s tinted glass. The virgin was bottle green in the green light with a crown on her head. She was surrounded by fish. There were sea snails on her shoulders. She was also a wishing well. There were coins around her on the ocean floor that glittered and gleamed silver in the sanctuary.

  As we swayed above her, Julio said, We’d better pray. He bowed his head and folded his hands together.

  The more I enter the more I find; and the more I find the more I seek, he said aloud. Amen. Amen.

  You pray aloud?

  Are you going to pray? he asked.

  Later that night in the king-sized bed, Julio held me in his arms.

  I had to show you that I’m drowned, drowned just like her, like Mary, sleeping in the sea all night long in the dark dark, he said. Everyone thinks I’m at the bottom of the river. My mother thinks so too. It’s too dangerous for me to be alive. I cannot dream at night. There’s a big difference between living in the dark with a candle and living in the dark with a flashlight. I have a flashlight but I want a candle.

  Your mother also thinks you’re dead?

  Yes. Everyone is praying for me.

  Can’t you let her know? She needs to know you’re here.

  My family is remembering that I was the fastest runner and the best jumper. I won every race. I was always the winner. I should have outrun that border guard. I didn’t see him or hear him. My mother is saying, Julio would never, ever be caught. He’d rather drown. And I did. You love a drowned man, Princess Ladydi. When you kiss me do you taste the river? There’s a cross for me, a white cross, where I was crossing.