Red Glass (15 page)

Heavy Things, Sharp Things, Blood

At sunset, Pablo and I walked through the empty streets toward the village chapel. It was perched on the top of a hill, a forty-five-degree incline that left me breathless. Pablo darted back and forth between me and the turkeys pecking at the roadside. He had a special bond with all fowl, it turned out. Somehow he could distinguish one turkey from another, even though they all looked alike to me.

“Do you know how lucky you were to end up with a family in downtown Tucson who has chickens?” I asked.

He nodded.

“It’s a sign,” I said. Mom had told me not to pressure him. So I just repeated, looking straight at him, “It’s a sign, Pablito.” We reached the top of the hill, paused to catch our breath. Abuelita used to come here every morning at dawn to pray for Pablo. Now Pablo had asked me to come with him to pray for Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel. Pablo wanted to pray to the Virgin, too—talk to his mother and father through her. I liked the idea.
Closure
, wasn’t that what it was called? To say goodbye and move on with life.

We stepped into the church’s cool shadows and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. In an alcove near the altar was
la Virgen de Nieves
—the Virgin of Snows—which was a strange name because it never snowed here. She wore a white lacy dress shaped like an upside-down cone, and a sky blue veil with silver glitter in flower patterns. The aunts said that this church was built on top of a sacred Mixtec site for Cociyo, the god of the waters. I imagined people trekking up the hill to thank him for rain and ask for more rain, until sometime after the Spaniards came, when the god was forgotten, his water freezing into tiny crystals of snow. Now the Virgin of Snows had replaced him, and maybe someday she would transform and become water again. The substance was the same, the form different.

The church was empty except for one woman praying in the third pew. Pablo and I tried to walk quietly, but our footsteps echoed off the stone walls. The eyes of the statues of saints seemed to follow us. Each had its collection of candles, firelight flickering over their faces, animating their eyes.

Pablo held a little paper bag of candles we’d bought.

“Go ahead,” I whispered. “Light one, Pablito.”

“This one’s for Mamá and this one’s for Papá,” Pablo said solemnly in Spanish. “Now, this one’s for Ángel and this one for Mr. Lorenzo.” With the flames of other candles, he lit his candles, melted their bases, and placed them in the pools of wax, his mouth half open in concentration. Then he knelt again and folded his hands in front of his chest.

I said a vague, silent prayer for Ángel to be safe and come back to me. I had never prayed to a Virgin before. But Virgins and spirits were important to Pablo and Ángel. The midwife who delivered Ángel had told him that if you need something done fast, the best strategy is to pray to the Virgin. She tells her Son what to do, and Jesus does it. That’s the chain of command; mothers have the real power. I imagined the Holy Mother hearing my prayer and nagging Jesus about it over dinner in heaven:
Have you been protecting Ángel? You’d better get on that, Son.

I sat on a bench two rows behind the woman. Pablo was still kneeling in front of the Virgin, his lips moving, his hands crossing his forehead, his chest, his mouth. When he finished, we left the darkness of the church through huge wooden doors.

The sky had gone from pale golden to the hues of blackberry and cherry and mango, all melting into one another. Pablo had stored-up energy to burn after being quiet in a church for fifteen minutes. He ran into the weedy graveyard and raced around the gravestones decorated with plastic soda bottles cut in half and filled with red carnations. Turkeys meandered around the wooden crosses, pecking at offerings of food that had been left there. He wove in and out of their paths while they eyed him cautiously at first, then went about their business. Finally, he circled back to me.

“Sophie, guess what?”

“What?”

“I telled my mother the poem.”

“What poem?”

“I tell her, Mamá, I’m carry you heart in my heart.” Then he switched to Spanish. “
¡Mira!
Watch how fast I can run, Sophie.” He ran down the hill, his little legs moving impossibly fast, his arms flailing over his head, his mouth in a wide-open smile, calling out, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” until his voice faded and he was a faraway splotch of red.

They were supposed to be back Monday morning. One week, that’s what they’d said. On Sunday, I washed all my clothes in the cement basin outside. On Monday, I put on the white cotton sundress and the coconut necklace and bracelet. I brushed my hair and braided it carefully in two braids.

By sunset, they still hadn’t come. Dirt smudges and salsa stains flecked my dress. I’d been preparing for the idea that Ángel wouldn’t come back. But I thought at least Mr. Lorenzo would.

Unless they’d found Ángel’s mother.

“Oh,
mi amor
! How I miss him! How worried I am!” Dika moaned in Spanish over coffee and sweet rolls Monday night.

“Something probably held them up,” I said, unconvinced. “I’m sure they’ll be here tomorrow.”

Dika nodded. “Perhaps they missed the bus.”

Before bed, I washed the white dress. As I hung it on the clothesline to dry for the next day, Pablo came out with his toothbrush and toothpaste. He neatly squeezed out the toothpaste—the all-natural stuff that Mom always got—and began brushing.

His mouth overflowing with foam, he asked, “Are you sad again, Sophie?” He spoke in Spanish.

“Yup.” I tried to ruffle his hair, but he squirmed away. Lately, he seemed to be getting vain about his hair. Some of his cousins wore hair gel already, and they weren’t much older than Pablo. “You know,
principito
, you should be speaking English to keep in practice for school.”

He shrugged and asked me in Spanish, “Why are you sad?”

“Because I miss Ángel. And I don’t know if he’s coming back.”

“Why don’t you go get him?”

Toothpaste was dribbling from his chin onto his shirt, but he looked so serious I didn’t mention it. “I can’t.”

He spit out his toothpaste and scooped a cupful of water from the cistern. I’d tried to make him use purified water, but he’d insisted this was how he’d always done it. He swished it in his mouth and spit onto the mud, then wiped his sleeve over his face. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to see me. And it’s far away. And I’ve never gone somewhere like that alone.” I twisted my ring around my finger. The moonstone in silver that Mom and Juan had given me for my fifteenth birthday, along with my e. e. cummings book of poetry. That night I’d underlined “and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant,” and I thought, Someday I’ll discover the one to tell this to.

Pablo looked thoughtful, as though he was considering all angles of my answer. Finally he said, “But you’re a big person.”

“Well, sort of.”

“So you can do anything.”

Tuesday morning and afternoon passed, without even a phone call. Dika was fretting. She was sure something must have happened. That a thief had hijacked their bus and killed them. That they’d gotten in an accident or been kidnapped.

That night, I climbed up the trail in my dirty dress, past the outhouse, and stood next to the Queen of the Night. It smelled strong; something about the darkness released a mysterious, sweet scent. I let myself cry for a while.

When I was little and felt sad, Juan would put his arm around me and tell me one of his tales. It always made me feel better hearing how the scrawny heroine gets swallowed by some creature—like an elephant or wolf or whale—and then, right when she thinks all is lost, she discovers that the creature’s gut is actually a passage to another world. Instead of dying in the belly of the whale, she’s reborn. And this time there’s nothing scrawny about her.

I took another whiff of the flower, then walked down the path to wash my dress again in the dark.

Wednesday morning I still clung to some hope. I put on the sundress, now clean and white again, and braided my hair.

Embarrassingly, Dika was primping herself, too. She had grown louder in her panic as I had grown quieter.
“¿Donde están?”
she screeched at breakfast on Wednesday. Where are they? She threw her spoon on the table. “I have had it! I am going to Guatemala to find them.”

“Tranquila, comadre,”
Abuelita murmured.

But Dika did not get tranquil. You could almost see smoke shooting out of her ears. “I am going to get them!”

“But, Dika,” I said. “They said it was dangerous, remember?”

“Danger! Don’t talk to me about danger. I have been in danger. And now I am scared of nothing!” She ripped into a roll with her teeth.

“Dika, listen.” There was no easy way to say this. “Maybe they don’t want to see us. Maybe they want to stay.”

“Ha!” she snorted. “You know very little of men.”

But she was quiet after that. Only the crackle of the hearth fire in the corner, the muffled squawking of chickens outside. There was an insecurity in her eyes. And she didn’t start packing.

Wednesday night I couldn’t sleep. Dika couldn’t either. Neither could Abuelita, probably because of all our turning over, sighing, adjusting the covers. Even Ñola was murmuring more than usual in her sleep.

I whispered across the room to Dika, “Maybe you’re right. I mean, they at least would have called us. Maybe something happened.”

“I ask to my
comadre
,” she said, propping up on her elbow. “Psst,
comadre
,” she called, her face a few inches from Abuelita’s.

Abuelita opened her eyes. She didn’t seem startled to see Dika’s face looming so close.
“¿Qué pasa, comadre?”

“We are worried about
mi amor
and his son.”

Abuelita heaved herself off the mattress and turned on the bare lightbulb. She buried her head in a crate of fabric scraps and clothes and came up with a small box, smaller than Ángel’s, and made of old dented tin. She cleared the wooden table and spread out a white cloth, just as she had done for the
limpia.

“Bring the chairs around,” she said.

She lit candles inside glasses and put them on the table and turned off the light. She opened the box and poured out a tiny heap of dried corn kernels. She looked at them with reverence. “The corn will tell me why the men aren’t back yet.”

She scattered the kernels, praying, moving her lips in the flickering candlelight. She studied the corn as though it were a book.

Dika whispered to me, “See how smart is this lady. My
comadre
.”

“Shhh!” I told her.

“Hmph!”

Abuelita was silent now, watching the kernels. Finally, she spoke in a grave voice. “Glass, there is green glass, brown glass.”

“The jewels,” Dika said. “Maybe they found them.”

“There is wood. And metal, too. Heavy things, sharp things, blood.”

“Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“Anything essential is invisible to the eyes,” the little prince repeated, in order to remember.

—T
HE
L
ITTLE
P
RINCE

Unforeseen Journey

Three more times, Abuelita threw the corn, and each time, it said the same. Always blood, sharp things, heavy things.

Dika pushed it. “But what kind of things,
comadre
? Is it Mr. Lorenzo or Ángel? Was it an accident? Are they coming back?”

Abuelita said the corn gave her no more details. Only the glass, the wood, the metal, the blood.

“Abuelita,” I said. I hugged my knees and shivered in my cotton nightgown. “Can you ask the corn another question? Can you ask if Ángel found his mother?” I tried not to look at Dika, but I felt her eyes on me.

Dika said to me in English, in a low, hurt voice, “You think this is reason they don’t come?”

“I don’t know, Dika. Maybe. I mean, they never found her body.”

Dika put her hand over her heaving chest, took a deep breath, and said to Abuelita, “
Comadre
, please throw the corn again.”

Abuelita chanted a few minutes with her eyes closed and finally tossed the corn onto the table. She examined it, moving her fingers over it lightly, and then looked at us, her face solemn. “Ángel has not found his mother yet. But he will.”

A moment of shock. Dika pressed her lips together. In Spanish, she whispered, “If his wife is alive, he should be with his wife.” Then she lay down on her mattress and stared at the ceiling. After Abuelita put away her tin of corn and copal, she settled next to Dika and stroked her forehead. I wished someone were stroking my forehead.

Just before sunrise, Abuelita and Dika had finally fallen asleep. Next to Ñola, I was trying to breathe deeply so that sleep would come.

Suddenly, Ñola said my name. “Sophie.”

Maybe I’d imagined it. Did she know my name? I stared at her small, wrinkled face on the pillow, her white braids spread out like wings. Her mouth moved. “Sophie.”

Then she said the same phrase she’d said while handing me the Queen of the Night flower.
“Cuaá nanducuvé.”

“I don’t understand Mixteco, Ñola.”

“Cuaá nanducuvé,”
she said again.

“Cuaá nanducuvé,”
I repeated.

She nodded and laughed—
“heeheeheeheehee”
—and then, just as suddenly, fell back asleep. I repeated the phrase like a mantra in my head until finally, I slept.

I woke up to Pablo bouncing on the mattress. “Sophie, wake up!”

I opened my eyes. Light streamed through the flowered curtains. Ñola was gone, probably lying outside somewhere. Abuelita and Dika’s mattress was empty.

“What, Pablo?” I groaned.

“Wake up!”

“Why?” A rush of excitement. “Is Ángel here?”

“No. But it’s breakfast time. You slept late!”

I propped myself onto my elbows and held his hands, which were already grimy from playing outside.

“Hey,
principito.
What does this mean?
Cuaá nanducuvé.
”

“I don’t know Mixteco.”

“You understand it. Abuelita and Ñola speak Mixteco to you sometimes. Come on, what does
Cuaá nanducuvé
mean?”

“
Bueno
.
Cuaá nanducuvé.
It’s like when my dad was in the field and it was time for lunch and Abuelita says
Cuaá nanducuvé
, then I have to go tell him to come back.”

“So what does it mean, Pablo?”

“Go. Go find him.”

All morning long, the words echoed in my head.
Cuaá nanducuvé. Go find him.

The phone call came that evening, when the sun had nearly sunk from sight.

Dika and I were washing dishes outside, and my hands were red and raw from the harsh soap, cold in the evening air.
Go find him
, I heard in the lyrics of every song. Over the loudspeaker, the music stopped and a voice came on: phone call for
Señora
Dika and
Señorita
Sofía. We dropped the dishes and without even rinsing the soap off our hands, we ran. Dika could run only about five paces before gasping for breath and doubling over, clutching her belly. I ran ahead, taking long strides in my sandals, my feet pounding the ground.

When I was nearly there, a scream rose over the music. “Sophie!” It was Dika. Something was wrong. I sprinted back along the path, and found her struggling to stand.

I knelt beside her. “Are you okay?”

“My leg,” she muttered. “I trip this damn tree root.”

“Is it broken?” The skin on her ankle was scraped pink and bleeding. It was the same ankle she’d hurt climbing out of the pool the day she seduced Mr. Lorenzo.

“We see,” she said. “Now help me to stand. We must to talk with my boyfriend.”

I held my arms around her waist as she limped down the path. A few minutes later, breathless, we reached the shop with the phone.

“He’ll call back in ten minutes,” the lady said.

Dika plopped onto the bench, huffing and rubbing her ankle, while I paced the wooden floor, watching the phone.

When it rang, I snatched it up.
“¿Bueno?”

“Sophie,” Mr. Lorenzo said.

“Where are you?”

“
Buenas tardes
, Sophie,” Mr. Lorenzo said. “Ah, can I speak with your aunt?”

“What’s going on? Are you coming back?” I tried to make my voice calm. “Please, just tell me.”

“
M’hija
, something happened to Ángel.”

My legs grew weak. I waited.
Heavy things, sharp things, blood.

Mr. Lorenzo’s voice shook. “You know that there is much anger in our
tierra
since the war. People saw terrible things and the anger stayed in their hearts, and some of them—”

“Mr. Lorenzo, please. What happened to Ángel?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dika, tears in her eyes.

“
Bueno
, he is alive.” He cleared his throat and still his voice shook. “That is the important thing.”

My knees were about to collapse. I sat down on the bench beside Dika. She put her hand on my shoulder.

“He has been in the hospital for three days, Sophie,” Mr. Lorenzo said. “I couldn’t call you sooner because he was unconscious and I wanted to be there when he woke up.” He was quiet for a moment, making little sniffling noises.

I clutched the phone. “What happened?”

“A gang attacked him one night, stole everything from him. They took his mother’s jewels. They beat him and cut him badly. Knives, they had. Broken bottles. Beams of wood. They had too much anger in their hearts.”

“But what—”

“I’m sorry,
m’hija
, but I only have enough money to talk for a minute. Listen, the gang stole our money and passports. We can’t cross back into Mexico without them. We need you to get our visas and the photocopies of our passports—they’re in my bag. Can you send them here?”

“Is that safe? To send that through the mail?”

“We have no choice, Sophie. Do you have a pen?”

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the pen the shopkeeper had given me. I wrote the address of the hospital, and then the bank where I was supposed to wire them money. “Mr. Lorenzo,” I said. “Will Ángel—”

“
M’hija
, listen, the time’s nearly up—”

“Mr. Lorenzo?”

No answer. The line was dead.

We waited two hours for Mr. Lorenzo to call back, then shuffled home in the dark, very slowly, Dika limping at my side. She talked nonstop, moaning and asking me questions.
How long they will be there, Sophie? Where he is hurt? They will to catch the bad guys, no? Mr. Lorenzo’s wife, she lives?

My answer was a numb shrug. Nothing mattered except Ángel.

Back at the house, Abuelita sliced open some fresh aloe leaves, revealing clear slime that she rubbed over Dika’s wounds. After examining the ankle, now purple and swollen, Abuelita announced it was only a bad bruise and deep scrape. She said it should heal fine if Dika stayed off it for the next few days. Pablo moved his chair next to Dika during our evening coffee and traced the blue veins of her thighs with his fingers. Sugar from his jam-filled pastry coated his chin like an old man’s beard.

He must have sensed something was wrong, because he asked in a small, hesitant voice, “Where’s Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo?”

“Oh, they’ll just be back later than expected,” I said, forcing a smile.

“Will Ángel bring me the slingshot?”

“Yes.” My voice cracked. “He will. I just need to send them some papers is all.” Dika and I had decided that the next day I’d go to Huajuapan with one of the aunts, and stop by the post office and the bank. But the aunts seemed doubtful the mail would arrive safely, especially since the documents were worth a lot on the black market.

I left the flickering firelight of the kitchen and went into the bedroom to find the visa and photocopies and extra money to send to Mr. Lorenzo. The room was still and dark except for moonlight spilling through the window. For a long time, I sat on the mattress and stared at Ángel’s visa photo. It was a good picture. He looked just on the verge of breaking into a smile, with that faint dimple on his left cheek.

How hurt was he? Was he still unconscious? How were they paying for food if they barely had enough to make a phone call? What if the documents got lost in the mail? They wouldn’t be able to pick up the wired money without picture IDs. They’d be stuck in Guatemala without money.

I unfolded the map and traced the route with my finger. Could I bring the documents and money there myself? I’d have to travel alone—Dika wasn’t in any shape to travel with her swollen ankle. I could leave the next morning and then have lunch and get food for the ride and take the overnight bus there. Just like Mr. Lorenzo’s plan. He had said the trip was safe in the daylight. More or less. And once I got there, we could go to the embassy to get new passports or whatever we had to do, and then come back together. Hopefully all three of us.

I stared at the dimple on Ángel’s left cheek. This wasn’t just about getting the visas to them. At the heart of things, Ángel needed me, I could feel it. His dreams had taken a beating along with his body. And I was the only one who understood all that he’d lost. I closed Ángel’s visa with my fingertips toughened by stripping corn and making tortillas. I wondered how strong I was, wondered what Sophie
la Fuerte
could do.

That night I slept little, listening to Dika’s distinctive snore and Abuelita’s gentle breath and Ñola’s murmuring. Did I want to be an old lady like Ñola, never having followed the moon? I closed my eyes and slipped into memories, heard snatches of
cumbia
music, saw a full orange moon through the windshield, felt sparks in the van’s darkness…things that touched the core of me…which was not rusted scrap metal after all, but something deep and mysterious as the ocean.

A rooster crowed. I got up quietly and slung my backpack over my shoulder. I tiptoed into the room where Pablo and the cousins slept. I bent down and touched my lips to Pablo’s cheek, right on the kiss-shaped birthmark. On the way out, I stood over Dika and Abuelita for a moment. A thin line of glistening drool leaked from the corner of Dika’s mouth. I felt like hugging her. Beside her, Abuelita looked as though she was in the middle of a wild dream, her eyes darting under their lids.

I might not see these odd women again. I let the gravity of this settle in. For the first time in my life, I was taking a real risk. And yes, I felt fear, but it wasn’t the endless loop of worries I’d grown used to. My thoughts shone clear and sharp as cut crystal.
This is the path I am taking. This is what I need to do.
I wrote a short note and laid it between their heads. Then I whispered goodbye to Ñola.

Her eyes opened.

I jumped. She looked like a ghost, her white hair loose from her braids, feathery wisps fanned out on the pillow.
“Cuaá nanducuvé,”
she said.

I nodded. “I know,” I whispered. “I’m going to find him.”

She reached up and took my hands, which were no longer
manos tiernas.
She pressed them to her cheek.
“Heeheeheehee,”
she laughed. She moved her fingers over me, making little crosses, blessing me. She took off one of her necklaces—a square piece of leather imprinted with the Virgin of Juquila, the same Virgin on Ángel’s pendant, the very miraculous one. Ñola put it over my head, adjusted it on my chest, pressed it over my heart.