Barbara Samuel (30 page)

Maggie’s diary

23 Septiembre 2001,
San Jeronimo

Dear Whoever Is Listening,
Tonight I went to see the
bruja.
I was very scared, walking home from school, thinking about it, but my mom is not getting better. She’s getting worse. I don’t think she’s been awake more than two hours since last Sunday. That’s scary, you know? And I’m so lonely. The doctors keep giving her more and more drugs, but they’re making her more fuzzy, not more clear. I want my mom back.

So I went home after school, checked on her and found her asleep. I kissed her head and she hardly
woke up at all, just said there was some stuff in the freezer. I ate an apple I bought at the Kwikway on the way home, then went upstairs and changed into a skirt, which I thought the old lady would like better than my jeans, and I put a rosary around my neck for protection—the special one made of amber beads with little things caught inside them that my dad brought me back from a trip to Mexico he had to make for work once—and then I looked around for something I could take to her. I don’t have any money, and anyway, I think you’re not supposed to use real money, only trade. There wasn’t much in my room that would be any good to an old woman. I wished for some of my mom’s chokecherry jelly to take, the pretty little jars with orange fruit on the lids that my mom makes every year but not this year, but it was all gone. I had my candles and clothes and stuff, but nothing
good.

Then I remembered this barrette I have. It’s abalone and silver, shaped like a butterfly. I bought it at a flea market once, from an Indian, and it’s pretty. I thought the
bruja
might like it—she has pretty hair. I put it in the pocket of my skirt, then I set out walking, staying on the sidewalks till they gave out, then keeping to the edge of the road by the acequia. Dragonflies, all bright blue and black, zoomed by and they made me feel happier. The mosquitoes were sleeping, thank heaven, because they eat me like I’m a cheesecake, bringing all their friends to munch me up from head to toe.

At the old lady’s house, I got scared again, and stopped because I was out of breath from climbing the hill. It didn’t look like anybody was home. The truck the grandson drives was gone, along with a Lowrider that was there last time, a pretty one with sparkly purple paint. The whole house looked totally quiet, and I was disappointed, because I was pretty sure it would
be days before I could get my courage up to do it again.

But I was there, so I went to the door, my heart pounding like crazy, and knocked. A dog barked inside, and I remembered the big tan dog that was there last time. He sounded mean now, though, like he could attack, and I felt sweat break out on my neck. I jumped when the door opened.

Mrs. Ramirez was standing there, looking not like a witch at all this time, but just a really, really old lady. Her hair, white and black, hung down around her shoulders and I took out the barrette and shoved it at her. “It’s all I have,” I told her. “Please help me.”

She looked at the barrette for a long, long minute, then she turned around, saying over her shoulder
“Vamos,”
which means come on in Spanish. So I followed her.

In the daytime, the house looked totally different. Sun buttered the floors and showed how clean and easy things were. In the kitchen, I smelled meat cooking, and the old lady pointed to the table, where there was already a bowl of beans and meat and a tortilla holder with a lid, dark blue painted with yellow flowers. “Sit,” she said to me in English and went to the stove. She put something in another bowl, and I started to tell her I was sorry for interrupting her meal, and to get up and go, but she came back to the table and put her hand on my shoulder, not mean, but kinda nice, and said, “Eat.” She put the bowl in front of me. Pintos and meat, in this gravy that smelled so good, like everything my mom used to cook and doesn’t anymore. I could see onions and little pieces of green chile floating around, and my stomach growled all loud.

But I didn’t want to eat here. “I’m not hungry,” I told her. “I just need your help.”

She sat down in the other chair, so tiny her feet almost didn’t touch the floor.
“Coma pr’imero,”
she said in Spanish. Then, like I might not understand, she said it in English, in a whisper. “Eat first, eh?”

I didn’t know what to do. She tapped my hand, the one holding the barrette, and I turned it over, opening it up to show the abalone wings. She didn’t take it, though, just went back to eating and told me again that I should eat.

And here’s the thing—I was scared to. If I ate, maybe I’d get sick, or be under her spell forever, or something. But if I didn’t, I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to listen to me. And then I thought she must cook for her grandson, and he seemed okay, so maybe it would be all right.

But I gotta tell you, it was the smell of that soup that was making me crazy. I picked up my spoon and I wanted to cry for wanting to eat it so much and not wanting to eat it so much. I put one hand on my rosary beneath my shirt, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Mother to protect me and put some food in my mouth.

And it was so, so, so, so, so good. Hot, but kind of sweet-hot that makes you know it was jalapeños, not serranos, that she used to spice it up. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a million years, and after that first bite, I just ate like crazy. Mrs. Ramirez opened the tortilla cover and I took some of those out, too, homemade, but perfectly even because she’s been making them of course for a hundred years.

You just don’t know how good that can be, homemade bean soup with homemade tortillas. It made me think of my dad and mom and the way things used to be, and it filled this empty place inside of me and it wasn’t till I was all the way to the bottom of the empty
bowl, wiping it out with one more piece of tortilla that I realized that if the
bruja
was going to bewitch me, I was done for. I wiped my hands on a paper napkin.

“Will you help my mother? Please.” I put the barrette down and pushed it across the table to her.

She asked in English if I spoke Spanish. I told her I did and she said everything else in Spanish, but I’ll write it in English for you, especially because I don’t spell Spanish so good. She said, “Your mama is heartsick. Her heart is so sad without your papa. I can’t do nothing for her,
h’ita.”

“No spell, a tea, something like that?”

She crossed herself, shuddering. “No, no, nothing like that.”

“But you’re a witch! Everybody says so, and they say you can do anything. You made that charm for my mom, and all those teas.”

She looked at me for a long minute, and I thought she didn’t understand, so I started to say it again, in English to make it better, but thunder was gathering on her forehead, and I got scared and shut up. Those claw hands folded tight, then she exploded. Not yelling, which is what I expected. Laughing. Her shoulders started to shake, and then her loose bosoms, and she rocked back and forth, laughing and laughing and laughing. She even slapped her hands on the table. I stared at her, half in horror, half in amazement, until she finally stopped. She gave me a big old grin. “So that’s what they say, huh? I’m a witch?”

“You aren’t?”

She shook her head sadly.

“What am I going to do then? She’s gonna die and I’m gonna be all alone!”

“Never alone,
h’ita.
What would your papa tell you? We always have the Blessed Mother, eh?”

“I guess.” I touched the rosary under my blouse. But Mary isn’t exactly helping me out here, either.

Right then, the grandson banged into the kitchen, all sweaty from work, and I thought again that he was okay for an old guy. He went to the fridge and got out a pitcher of something and poured a big glassful, then drank it all at once. I didn’t realize I was staring at him till he says to me, “How’re you doing, kiddo? How’s your mom?”

I blushed. He was so nice! And he remembered that I was there with my mom before, which is a good sign, because maybe he noticed my mom, who really is pretty when she fixes herself up. “She’s okay,” I told him. “Working.” Which was a lie, but I didn’t want him to think she was all pathetic. I remembered, right then, that she had been complaining about something. “She’s been looking for somebody to do yard work for her, though. It’s totally out of control over there.”

He was already someplace in his mind, I could tell, but he said he had a name we could call. I was hoping he’d say he’d come over himself and help her out, and they maybe would start talking, and—well, he didn’t, that’s all. But you could kinda tell he was worried about something. He picked up the phone and started stabbing numbers in it.

I got up, ready to go. “Thank you for the soup,” I told her, and pushed the barrette over to her side of the table. “You could keep it. I never wear it and you have lots of hair.”

Then I walked to the door and nobody stopped me until I got all the way there and then
Abuela
said,
“H’ita.
Remember what I said.” She picked up a rosary made of wood and rattled it in the air at me. “You’re
never alone.” I just nodded my head. But outside, it was all I could do to keep from crying. In fact I did cry, I won’t lie. Cried all the way down the road to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I didn’t know why my dad had to die and why I had to deal with all this when I really wasn’t old enough and I need help and nobody’s around to give it to me. And I just didn’t know what to do.

And then, the weirdest thing happened. This piece of paper blew on my foot. I jumped, scared, thinking at first it was a snake, but then I looked down at it, and got chills from my head to my toes, because it was a magazine cover.
Rolling Stone.
And the person on the cover was Tupac Shakur. A headline said, 1971-1996 TUPAC
SHAKUR
,
THE
STRANGE
AND
TERRIBLE
SAGA.

My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding when I looked at that, because I’d been feeling almost as bad as when I got that dollar the day of my dad’s funeral, the day I got the dollar bill, and it was like a sign. I decided right there, to find out everything I could about Tupac and whether or not he was still alive. Maybe he’s communicating with me, hanging out with me. Maybe I’m not really alone and I can be tough like him, get through even though it’s hard, like a rose growing in concrete, which is what his one and only book is called.

My dad used to say there was always help if you looked for it, and I think this is my help. I don’t know how it’ll all help saving my mom, but all I can do right now is just follow the clues wherever they go and hope something makes sense.

Now I’m gonna go read some of the stuff I just checked out.

Maggie

Friday morning, Thomas stood in the hot September sun, smelling the wind, feeling a thickness gathering in the still air. The crew was building an adobe wall for a movie star’s estate, incorporating natural flaws and bits of tin and rusted old western nostalgia. It was turning out very well, he thought, pleased especially by some of the blue pottery one of his men had tossed in, here and there. The shards gleamed like hidden treasure in the finished bricks.

There was nothing that should have caused his sudden distraction; the same rhythm of every workday flowed around him, some of the crew carrying the heavy rectangular bricks to the wall, where others placed them. Still others formed new bricks on-site, packing reddish mud and straw into wooden forms. Thomas squatted in the sun, putting his hands in the heavy mud, trying to sense what was awry all of a sudden.

He could see nothing wrong, nothing to indicate the
weather was changing. The sky stretched toward the mountains, arching over the valley in a deep blue bowl, steady and endless. No wind tossed the trees.

Running alongside the road, irrigation water flowed with little chuckles through a ditch, and the silence was so deep he even heard the soft chittering of a squirrel far above. Restively, he gathered mud into his hands and patted it smooth. The weight and suppleness pleased him, and he curved his palm over it distractedly, thinking of Luna’s body against his hands last night and the night before. Little shocks of memory traveled down his spine, popping in the small of his back, shivering over the inside of his thighs. Her colors were like the day around him, hair like the light gilding leaves suddenly gone yellow overnight, her eyes as dark as the fur of a bear, her skin—his palm curved around mud, weighed it, smoothed it—the same smooth light brown of adobe. His fingers pinched out the shape of a nipple, and he held a replica of her breast in his hand, wondering if now he’d think of her when he saw adobe, forever.

“Cabrón!” The shout was sudden and startled Thomas. He looked up from his reverie to see Tiny leaping toward John Young, a gangly boy with more back than sense who baited Tiny with no sense of consequences. A fight had been brewing between them for a long time, and Thomas leapt up, shame making him smash the breast between his hands. He buried the mud, his ears hot at what he’d shaped, and whistled loudly. Neither man heeded him. They were flying at each other, Tiny’s sharpness no match for the brute fist of the younger man …

Until the rage kicked in.

Like Thomas, other members of the crew had seen Tiny’s volcanic temper and they dropped what they were
doing to race toward the pair, yelling his name. “Tiny!” Thomas yelled. “Let it go. John, back off!”