The Guardians (31 page)

“Yes, that's him,” I said and then I felt the diputada's arm go around my shoulder to lead me out of the room because my feet weren't moving on their own.

Mrs. Martínez gave me a book about the Change that she'd ordered online. (Mrs. Martínez and I were kept on at the school. Some of the newer staff weren't so lucky.) It talks all about women's anxieties, the rational and the crazy stuff. The book says that while the Change takes away your short-term memory, you might start remembering events from a long time ago. That explained some things. The other day I bought some oil for my troca. The next day I bought another can of oil. I forgot all about the first can. Until I went to put it in. Who put oil in it? I asked myself. A ghost? Then I found the receipt. Things like that keep happening around here. Then one night I started remembering all of Junior's letters from the army that I'd lost way back. My mamá had taken them. Who else? It was just her way. She wanted to keep me from tormenting myself. The harshness was her way of saying, Don't expect too much from life.

Every night now, I sit down and write out each of mine and Junior's letters to each other word for word. Or at least I think it's word for word. I could be making it all up. “Preciosa Paloma,” he'd begin each one. I
called him “precious dove,” too. As kids on my abuelo Metatron's rancho, we had started the Secret Order of the Holy Dove. “While I am off to battle,” he wrote, “I leave you to care for all the innocent creatures.” Walking home from the chile plant where I worked that year, I pretended all the pajaritos, dogs, cats, horses, roosters—any animals I passed—were in my charge. I'd throw migas around and leave scraps of food out for them. When he came home we were going to study to be veterinarians. That's what we told ourselves. We were just kids. No dream is too big when you're that young.

“No dream is too big when you're young,” I said to Miguel. He called and called. He wants to pick up where we left off, he says, on my answering machine. How can you do that? You can pick up something but not what you left behind. One day I answered the phone. “Regina,” he said. I think he was crying. Maybe not. “Regina,” he said again.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

There are a lot of things I can talk about. Like whether or not my garden is gonna come up this year. I can take orders for the Martha Stewart look-alike shawls I'm knitting and selling to people in town.

But I cannot say my boy's name. Not yet. That's the door I can't walk through. If I start talking, there's no turning back. But what am I afraid of now?

Gabriel Campos y Rocas.

Aire y Mar.

“We are the people of the earth,” Miguel says. Not all of us.

I look up at the stars. What do I know of stars? He is one of them, my Gabo.

There's nothing left to do now but to say it.

The little house off the road was dark when we all got there. Like nobody was around. Sirens and bullhorns and police jumping out. I saw el cura's car. I told la diputada, “That's el Padre Juan Bosco's car. Be careful, please. They must be inside.” La policía were rushing about. I couldn't make things out. Someone was shouting something over a speaker.

“Gabo!” I called out. The diputada told me to hush with her mano going down.

“Gabo!” I called out again.

The screen door pushed open. Someone came out. “Put your hands up,” the police speaker voice said. “Put your hands up.”

“Gabo,” I said, not shouting this time. It wasn't Gabo. It was the priest. He put his hands up. “No disparen,” he called. I didn't see Miguel. Later, he emerged carrying a woman in his arms. It was Crucita more dead, or wanting to be dead, than alive. But right at that moment, I don't know what was happening. Then I saw the red spiky hair. “Mi'jo!” I called. “Mi'jo, put your hands up,” I said, practically under my breath. I know he didn't hear me. I'm sure of it.

Before I knew it guns were going off. This way and that way. From all directions. Not from Gabo. I found Gabo's gun one day. It was buried in the garden.

But my Gabo went down anyway. Even in the dark I knew he'd gone down. The red hair wasn't there no more, behind el cura.

I believe María Dolores when she says she loved my sobrino. What was there not to love? “I know he didn't think much of me,” she told me, chain-smoking, the first time I went to see her. “Man, you should have seen him that day in the cafeteria. His eyes were shooting fire at me, like I was the lowest of the low. Or at least that's how I felt. He made my girls laugh at me. But I loved him with my heart and soul.” She started crying. She didn't stop, even when I got up to leave.

“I'll come back tomorrow,” I said.

All the girl does is cry. Her makeup smears. Her teeth are going brown from all the nicotine. Her right hand don't open no more from how bad she cut it. She was clutching the shard of glass when they got her. Tiny says she still don't remember anything from that night. She was put in detox before she went to the regular jail.

Sometimes I bring her child. Sometimes she asks me not to. She don't want the baby to remember her mother that way. I don't know what the baby will remember.

The little girl didn't even have a name. Tiny gave birth to her in a bathroom at a gas station. She only called her “Mini Me.”

María Dolores Jiménez, known to everyone as Tiny Tears. A seventeen-year-old mother who is going to trial as an adult. That wasn't my decision. That's the decision of the court system. My decision is to care for the child. Tiny Tears don't want it. Her own mother didn't want it, neither. The toddler was about to go to foster care. I wasn't raised like that. My mother may have been harsh but she wasn't like that. She always said, “There are always enough frijoles in the pot to feed everyone.”

So I visit Tiny Tears and leave her a little commissary money for things she needs—tampons, cigarettes to trade, lo que sea.

One day at the main office at school, I said, “Buenos días,” to Mrs. Martínez and the staff like I always do. Instead of a good-morning back, my longtime co-worker came around the counter and, standing right in front of me, she slapped me. She slapped me hard, too. I just stood there. My cheek was burning. My eyes were burning. We just stared at each other. “How can you go see that little monster?” she asked, gritting her teeth. She was talking about Tiny Tears.

The next day, when I went to sign in for work, I hesitated to say good morning. But again, as soon as Mrs. Martínez saw me, she came around the counter. This time I stepped back. Instead of striking me again, she put her hands on my shoulders. “My oldest was killed on the street twelve years ago,” she said. “He was coming home from school and got shot by a drive-by He wasn't even in no gang.” What oldest? She had never talked about an oldest before. She pulled out a school picture. “That day. I remember it so clearly. He stopped by the office here first. ‘Bye, Mom,’ he said. That's all. Just ‘Bye, Mom.’ ”

Gabo's favorite book of all was Matthew. I practically had it memorized myself he quoted so much from it. Father Juan Bosco tells me he has his doubts about Matthew. He thinks Matthew might have made up some things about Jesus. That's all of el cura's intelligence talking. I read Matthew to find Gabo. Sometimes I just like to feel the pages like I'm reading Braille. I feel my sobrino there. Maybe it don't make sense to no one else. But it does to me. Gabo talking to me through Matthew. “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”

Easier said than done.

Father Juan Bosco asked me to take Mini Me to church one day. I figured it couldn't hurt la baby to throw some holy water on her. We baptized her “Gabriela.” My goddaughter, Gabriela, has three new teeth coming in all at once. Sometimes I freeze a piece of cloth soaked in manzanilla and give it to her to suck on but she likes frozen fruit best from el Shur Sav, especially strawberries. She surely didn't like the gingerroot I rubbed on her gums. She might have her mother's temper.

But Tiny Tears's rage, like everything else about the monster girl that no one loved, was out of control in that house in Tornillo. Being raped every day. No food, just poison in her veins. The public defender says the girl herself is a victim.

Victim
is not a word in my vocabulary.

She pushed that shard of glass into my muchacho's flesh. That's how she did it. It punctured his kidney.

She was standing right behind him as he was coming out of the house. I never saw her. She was like the moon in the daytime.

It was enough, the first time. It should have been enough. But it wasn't.

After she punctured my boy's lung, catching him by so much surprise, I am sure, him collapsing into her arms, she pulled it out and pushed that same sharp and very pointed glass from a broken window straight into his corazón.

The thing about those bad videos they make about our lives out here is that you can rewind. Like, you can rewind to just before someone beautiful dies.

And press stop.

You can't do that in real life.