PART TWO

12


The next day Mike picked me up on the side of the highway. He acted as if nothing had happened. It was as if my mother had not shot his sister. It was as if he were not picking me up in a red Mustang instead of boarding the bus to take me to my first job as a nanny to a young boy in Acapulco.

We’d made a date for nine in the morning and I thought he’d never get there. Passenger trucks tumbled past, covering me with dust and diesel fumes as an hour went by. Finally he rode up in the new red convertible and reached over, swung the door open, and gestured for me to get inside. He had his iPod earbuds stuck deep into his ears so he just gestured to get in the car.

His music was turned up so loud I could hear a soft beat coming out of the earbuds. We raced down the highway with him bopping his fingers on the steering wheel. At one point he turned and offered some Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum. He held up two fingers to say, Take two. I took two of the pieces, chewed it up hard, and blew small bubbles that crushed and broke open in my mouth as we moved down the road.

Mike steered with his knees as he lit a cigarette. He was wearing a gold ring with a large diamond on his thumb. He had a tattoo of the letter Z on his pointer finger. The letter Z made everything quiet inside of me. Don’t say anything; don’t say anything, I said to myself. Z stands for the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico. Everyone knows this.

Mike was not going to talk about what had happened to Maria. He was plugged into his iPod listening to rap and I was staring out the window at herds of goats. As I looked at him, I thought Maria did not belong to him. She did not even look like him. In that car, at that moment, I knew she was the one I loved most. I did not know this before, even when I held her broken arm in my arms.

Don’t come back, my mother had said to me last night when she helped me pack up my few belongings. The woman who helped me pack was my new mother. I was still not exactly sure what form this newness would take. This was my after-she’d-shot-Maria mother. It was going to take some time to get to know each other.

Everyone’s goal was to never come back. It used to be that there was a whole community that lived on this mountain, but that ended when they built the Sun Highway from Mexico City to Acapulco. My mother says that that highway cut our people in two pieces. It was like a machete that cut a body in half. Some people were left on one side of the black oily asphalt and some were left on the other. This meant that everyone had to continually cross the road back and forth. A passenger bus killed my mother’s mother when she tried to cross the road to take her own mother, my great-grandmother, a jug of milk. On that day there was blood and white milk all over the road.

At least twenty people had been killed crossing the highway in the past years. Dogs, horses, chickens, and iguanas were hit too. Carcasses of snakes that had been run over also lined the highway like red and green streamers.

After my grandmother was hit, my mother kept her few belongings. My grandmother’s party shoes are still in a shoebox under my mother’s bed. They don’t fit either of us, our feet are flat and our toes are spread wide from wearing plastic flip-flops our whole lives. The elegant shoes are made of blue satin with a pretty blue bow on the front. A famous actress gave the shoes to my grandmother; she swore it was Elizabeth Taylor. My grandmother worked as a cleaning lady at the Los Flamingos hotel which had belonged to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan. All that is left from that old romantic Acapulco are those blue satin shoes under my mother’s bed.

Ladydi, promise me you’ll keep yourself ugly, my mother had said before I left in the morning.

At our kitchen table, which was an altar to beer, canned tuna fish, ants, potato chips, and prepackaged donuts dusted in icing sugar, I promised her I would never wear lipstick or perfume and that I would not grow out my hair, but keep it short and boyish.

Just keep in the shade, don’t walk in the sun, she said.

Yes, Mama.

I wondered if I should bring Paula’s photos and her notebook with me and finally placed them in my bag. I knew if I left them here the jungle insects would chew them up or the humidity would soon cover them with mold.

The construction of the highway was the beginning of the destruction of our families. People began to leave because they needed jobs and so many people went to the United States. My grandfather and my mother’s two brothers and their families all moved to San Diego. They departed after my grandmother was run over. They never wanted to look over their shoulder and so we never heard from them again. My mother said the drug traffickers finally destroyed our mountain. No community can survive so many tragedies.

All that was left on our mountain were a few women who still knew how to cook an iguana wrapped in avocado leaves.

As Mike drove me down the road toward the Pacific Ocean the air-conditioning felt nice and cool on my face.

As we moved down the highway I looked at the pink stone of our mountain that had been cut to make way for the road. It seemed exposed like scraped, raw skin.

13


Halfway to Acapulco, Mike turned off the highway and onto a dirt road. I looked at him, but he was so lost inside his iPod I thought he’d forgotten I was with him. I looked out the window and thought of my mother living alone on the mountain drinking beer and watching television and felt so ashamed of myself because I knew that all I wanted to do on this big, round blue planet was find my father.

The speed of the car picked up a dust cloud around us. I thought we were like those television car commercials where the vehicle veers off the road and onto rough terrain to show how it can go anywhere. In the commercial Mike and I would be a couple wearing dark glasses and tight jeans. My frizzy hair would be blown out and cascading down my back.

We drove for about twenty minutes through a road lined by palm trees until we reached a dilapidated shack with a yellow hammock swinging between two trees.

A tall, bald man walked out of the shack as Mike turned off the engine. The man stood and did not walk toward us.

Mike pulled the earbuds out.

Stay in here and be pretty and don’t leave the car, Mike said.

The man was so skinny his jeans settled on his hips and a streak of brown skin was exposed between his blue T-shirt and belt. His hip bones stood out and made deep shadows on both sides of his body. He was also barefoot and wore a wide straw hat that was frayed and worn.

He held a machine gun pointed straight at us.

What are we doing here? I said to Mike in a whisper as if the man could hear us out there.

Don’t move.

What are we doing here?

Quiet. Quiet.

Mike got out of the car and held out his hand to the man in a gesture that said stop.

She’s my sister, Mike said aloud. Hey, don’t worry, man. She’s blind.

The man looked at me and back at Mike.

She’s blind. Yes, yes. She was born blind.

The man lowered his machine gun.

Mike turned and pointed something at me and I heard the car lock. It was the car’s remote control that not only locked me in the convertible, but also locked the windows.

Mike and the man went inside the shack.

There were three black Escalades parked to the right of the shack in the shade of several palm trees. There were also two Rottweilers tied to the fender of one of these SUVs with leather straps. The dogs were panting hard in the heat and their dark red tongues hung out of their mouths.

On the fleshy elongated leaves of a maguey cactus two little-girl dresses dried in the sun. One dress was white and the other was blue.

As each minute passed it seemed to me that the world became more and more quiet. The hum of insects even disappeared as I began to bake inside the hot, locked car.

The dresses drying on the maguey cactus made me think of the narrow twig arms of a little girl coming out of the sleeves. The garments were almost dry and they lifted and blew in the heat.

On the ground beside the cactus there was a toy bucket and a toy broom.

The Trident Cool Bubble chewing gum had lost its pink, circus cotton-candy flavor.

My mind wandered in the hot-car-daydream.

With the motor and the air-conditioning off, and the windows closed shut, all the air was sucked up and used by my body. My thighs were wet through my jeans and I was moist all over. I felt thirsty and dizzy and almost drugged by the heat. I imagined a mirage of white seagulls flying above the shack, the Rottweilers, and the skinny man. In my stifling daydream I thought birds were clouds and I imagined a little girl in a white dress picking up seagull feathers from the ground.

At some point, I could not tell if I’d been locked in the car for ten minutes or two hours. I was pulled awake when the dogs began to bark as Mike came out of the shack.

Mike walked toward the car. He took out his car keys from his jeans, pointed the remote control, and I heard the locks flip open under the windows. He walked quickly with his face bent down against the sun. He opened the car door and slid inside.

What happened? I asked.

Did you fall asleep?

Who was that man?

Roll down the window.

Mike placed a small plastic bag on the seat between us. He turned on the engine, turned the car around, and we drove back down the dirt road toward the highway.

Mike beat his fingers on the steering wheel to some hip-hop music in his mind.

He was sweating and drops fell from his hair down the back of his neck. He held the car’s steering wheel between his knees and pulled off his shirt with a practiced swoop over his head.

The number 25 was tattooed on his upper arm beside a dark red rose. As I sat beside him, I could smell that flower. I could smell the rose on his arm as if I were leaning over a rose bush and smelling the soft petals.

So why did they call you Ladydi, anyway? Was it just because your mother liked that princess so much? Mike asked.

No, Mike.

I was not going to tell him that my mother named me Ladydi because she hated what Prince Charles had done to Diana.

Thanks to our television, my mother knew the whole story inside out. She loved any woman to whom a man had been unfaithful. It was a special sisterhood of pain and hatred. She used to say that, if there were a saint for betrayed women, that saint would be Lady Diana. One day, on the Biography Channel, my mother learned that Prince Charles claimed he had never loved her.

Why didn’t he just lie? my mother said. Why didn’t he just lie?

I was not named Ladydi after Diana’s beauty and fame. I was named Ladydi because of her shame. My mother said that Lady Diana had lived the true Cinderella story: closets full of broken glass slippers, betrayal, and death.

For one birthday I was given a plastic Princess Diana doll wearing a tiara. My father had brought it for me from the United States. In fact, over the years he bought me several Princess Diana dolls.

My name was my mother’s revenge. It was a kind of philosophy to her. She did not value forgiveness. In her revenge philosophy there were all kinds of scenarios. For example, the person you were avenging did not need to know about the acts of revenge as in the case of my father and my name.

When people who met me were surprised at my name, and said it aloud a few times over very sweetly, I could almost taste grains of sugar in my mouth. I knew that they were comparing my face to Diana’s face and feeling sorry for me. They were measuring my darkness against her fairness.

On the outskirts of Acapulco Mike had to drive down a long tunnel, which cut through the middle of the last mountain before the bay. I’d been inside this tunnel many times in buses and taxis.

As we drove out of the dark tunnel, the bright ocean sunlight filled the car.

Mike’s light blue jeans were splattered with blood.

Now I knew that blood could smell like roses.

My mother once saw a documentary on how the Zetas turn people into killers. She said that they tied a man’s hands behind his back and forced him to kneel and eat his own vomit, or eat someone else’s vomit.

Mike and I drove through the city streets toward the old section of Acapulco where rundown mansions from the 1940s and 1950s had been abandoned. In recent years, people had begun to buy up these properties and fix them. The houses were built into the mountainside, into the rock, above the Caleta and Caletilla beaches. From here there was a view of the bay on the left and Roqueta Island straight ahead. To the right one could see way out to the open ocean.

You know, Mike said, to this day your father sends my mother money.

What?

Yes, to this day your father sends my mother money.

I don’t believe you. He hasn’t sent us money for years.

Well, he sends my mother money. Every month.

Please say this isn’t true. It can’t be.

Okay. It isn’t true.

Where does he live? Where does the money come from?

New York City.

Mike pulled up to a large house painted in new white paint and dropped me off at the front door.

Go on, he said. This is the place. Get out.

He dropped me at the front door and didn’t even get out of the car. One forgets about manners when you’ve killed someone.

I obeyed. I knew to obey a killer. I obeyed when he gave me the plastic bag he’d carried out of the shack and placed between us in the Mustang. I obeyed when he told me to hold on to it until he needed it. I obeyed and placed it inside my black duffel bag with its broken zipper. I obeyed. I obeyed. I obeyed.

Mike rolled down his car window.

I’ll be back to pick that bag up in a few days, he said.

Okay.

Don’t steal anything.

I don’t steal.

You’re your mother’s daughter.

Shut up!

I rang the doorbell. Mike drove off. He did not wait to see if anyone opened the door for me.

After a minute or two, a servant dressed in a pale pink uniform with a crisp, clean white apron opened the door. Her straight gray hair was braided with green ribbons and pinned up so it rested like a headband or crown above her forehead. She was about seventy years old and had brown-red skin and small, light brown eyes. I thought she looked like a squirrel.

I was also standing in front of a ghost, or what my mother called “a Mexico ghost.” This is the term my mother used for anything that was ancient. Over the years, my mother and I only had to say “ghost” and we knew exactly what we meant. A ghost could be in a basket, a tree, the taste of a tortilla, and even a song.

She spoke softly and told me that the family who lived there had been away for over a week. She did not know when they’d be back. Her name was Jacaranda. As I walked behind her into the house, she smelled like coconut oil and oranges.

Jacaranda explained that the home belonged to the Domingo family, which consisted of Mr. Luis Domingo, Mrs. Rebeca Domingo, and their six-year-old boy, Alexis.

As Jacaranda walked me through the house I could feel my mother walking beside me. I could almost hear her spit on the white leather sofas with matching white leather throw pillows; spit on the glass tables that had bronze statues of ballerinas balanced on square stands; spit on the cold marble floor; and spit on the white tile kitchen floor and stainless-steel sink.

I could hear her say, This is all too clean, it hurts. And, as I looked around, I knew she was going to ask me to describe everything. She would want to know what I could steal and bring back to her. She would have looked at this house and said, We need to say a prayer for some dirt.

The living-room windows opened on a garden, which was set on a cliff that looked out over the ocean. There was a life-sized bronze statue of a horse under a large bougainvillea tree. To one side of the garden there was a swimming pool made of light blue tiles and carved from the ground in the shape of a turtle.

Jacaranda opened the glass door and led me out into the garden and down a path toward the servants’ rooms. We each had our own bedroom, but we shared a bathroom.

My bedroom contained a single bed and a chair and one small window that looked into the garage. The room smelled of a harsh, floral cleaning liquid. I looked out my window and could see a white Mercedes-Benz convertible and a black Escalade parked side by side in the garage.

Jacaranda told me I would have to wear a uniform also, like hers. She told me to change and instructed me to go to the kitchen once I was settled in so that she could make me some lunch.

I unpacked my few belongings and hid Paula’s photographs and notebook and Mike’s plastic bag under my mattress. There was no place else to keep them in the small room.

My cell phone rang. It was my mother.

I knew she stood at the clearing with her arm held up high in the air, trying to catch a signal. Her upper arm was burning from holding the phone up in the air and the effort of moving it back and forth between both hands.

It’s terrible there, right? she said.

Yes. It’s a filthy place.

Are you serious? What’s it like?

It’s fine.

But you do hate it?

Yes, I hate it.

The lies went back and forth between us. The truth was I already loved the clean house full of sea breeze and my mother wanted me back home immediately.

Stick it out, give it a chance, and stay.

Yes, I’ll try, Mama.

You can always come home if you don’t like it there.

The phone went dead. This always happened and meant that you had to dial back again and again. We all knew it was the reason Carlos Slim, the man who owned the phone company, was the richest man in the world. He made sure everyone in Mexico always had to call back.

What are you going to do? my mother used to say. Stop calling your family? Stop calling the doctor? Stop calling whomever it might be who might, just might, help you find a stolen daughter? Of course we all call back!

I turned off my phone and went to the kitchen. I walked across the cool white tiled-and-marble floor in my red plastic flip-flops from the jungle.

Jacaranda was making tortillas filled with cheese and raw green chilies on the stove and told me to sit down at the breakfast table. From the kitchen there was a view of the bay.

The table was set with three places. There were even three individual salt and pepper shakers next to tall crystal glasses of lemonade filled with slivers of lemon rind.

Jacaranda took an ice tray out of the freezer and dropped star-shaped ice cubes into our drinks.

She placed two tortillas on a plate in front of me and sat down. She had to squeeze in between the chair and glass table.

Once you’ve had babies, she explained, your stomach always wants to go back to that size as if it longs to have the baby back, she said.

Jacaranda placed her hands on her stomach and said with pride, I had eleven children.

As I ate she told me that she’d worked at this house for the past eight years. Before that she’d been a cleaning lady in a hotel for over forty years.

After you’ve worked in a hotel, there’s nothing about human nature you don’t know.

I listened to her as I ate the tortillas.

Most people are kind, she explained, and most women are unfaithful to their men.

I told her that my mother would dispute this information.

No, Jacaranda insisted. There is only one thing no one understands. Men get caught and women don’t.

Jacaranda also told me how people steal everything from hotel rooms, even light bulbs.

I knew this, of course. My mother had stolen light bulbs all the time.

Jacaranda remembered her very first job was to walk the streets, knock on doors, and ask poor women if they wanted to sell their braids. She would buy each braid for ten pesos back in those days. Sometimes the women would cut off their long braid or ponytail right then and there so Jacaranda always carried sharp scissors with her. Most of the time the braids were in boxes or bags in the women’s closets and drawers.

This was before everyone was making synthetic hair and bringing it in from China, she explained. This was when women still had long hair.

Most people don’t have really, really long hair anymore.

Yes, women used to grow their hair down to their knees. I worked for a woman here in Acapulco who had a small wig company. The hair that was bought from going door-to-door was laid out in three categories: short, medium, and long. Then the hair was disinfected and dyed and made into wigs and hairpieces. These hairpieces were very fashionable and were sold in Mexico City at a shop in the center of town.

Do you still have any of this hair? I asked.

No. But I used to imagine the rich ladies in Mexico dancing at parties and wearing the hair of a barefoot Nahua Indian from Guerrero.

One memorable day Jacaranda bought ten braids from one house alone. These were the braids from five generations of women. The colors ranged from black to gray to white.

All the braids were as long as my arm, Jacaranda remembered.

It’s hard to imagine.

I used to embroider with my own hair. I used it as thread, Jacaranda said.

My mother still uses her own hair to sew on a button or fix a hem.

Yes, I used to do that too.

Does someone else live here? I asked, pointing to the third place set at the table.

Yes. Julio, the gardener. He didn’t show up today, but will be back tomorrow.

After lunch Jacaranda gave me a tour of the house.

As we walked through the rooms, Jacaranda chewed on little pieces of paper. The white pulp appeared between her teeth every now and again. Jacaranda said she developed this habit as a girl as her mother was too poor to buy her chewing gum. She wanted her friends to think she was chewing real gum and it turned into a habit.

Every room seemed unlived in. The floors were so clean I knew I could drop a slice of an apple or a piece of toast on the floor and just pick it up and eat it. My skin was dirtier than the floor. There was no crumb for an ant and no spider for a scorpion. There were no cobwebs. And there was nothing personal in the house like a jacket hanging over the back of a chair or a rolled-up magazine on a table or photograph displayed in a frame.

The master bedroom had a king-sized bed that faced a huge window that looked over the garden and out over the ocean. There was a wooden figure of Jesus on the cross hanging on the wall above the bed. The room led off into one large bathroom that had a Jacuzzi in the center of the room and a massage table.

One door in the bedroom was closed and we didn’t look inside. Jacaranda explained that was the dressing room where they kept their clothes.

That door is locked, she said.

Next to the bedroom was the boy’s room.

He’s little and does not go to school yet, Jacaranda explained. You’ll have to play with him.

This was the one room that looked lived in. There were toys everywhere, piled on every surface and all over the floor. There were at least thirty stuffed animals thrown on the bed like a pile of pillows. On one chest of drawers there were three large glass jars filled with candy. The red, yellow, and green M&M’s shone in the Acapulco sun.

The boy’s bed was carved in the shape of a whale.

The next room Jacaranda showed me was the television room. It had a wall-to-wall television screen so it was like a movie theater. In front of the screen were two sofas, three armchairs, and two large beanbag chairs. One wall was covered from floor to ceiling with a collection of DVDs.

This is what they love to do. They watch movies and eat popcorn or hot dogs. They can watch the same movie over and over again, Jacaranda said.

I had seen the house on television.

I had never walked on a marble floor before, which was like walking on a piece of ice, but I had seen it. I had never sat down at a perfectly set table, with two forks, two knives, a soup spoon, and an ironed linen napkin, but I had seen it. I had never used a saltshaker or looked at star-shaped ice cubes in my glass, but I had seen it.

I knew then that I could go to the Pyramids in Egypt and they’d be familiar. I was sure I could ride a horse or drive a Jeep on a safari in Africa. I knew how to cook lasagne and lasso a calf.

I remembered some of the violence and catastrophes I’d watched on television that had helped to build my television-knowledge.

When I thought of this, I tasted sour milk in my mouth like milk that sat out on the table in the jungle heat for too long. Yes, a flood could feel familiar. Yes, a car crash could feel familiar. I thought yes, a rape could feel familiar. Yes, I could be dying and even the deathbed would be familiar.

Then I thought of Mike at that ranch and the blood splattered on his clothes and I knew what had happened even though I had not been inside that broken-down shack.

I’d seen my life on television.

14


The first night in my servant’s room I lay in bed and looked at the tiny window that opened onto the large garage and the cars.

There was nothing else to look at.

A smell of gasoline filled my room. It was like sleeping in a Pemex gas station.

I knew that I didn’t have to worry about insects. The house smelled like rotten lemons from constant fumigations.

That night there was one question that would not let go of me. I wondered if Maria knew by now. They must have told her that this was the reason God punished her with a harelip. It was the curse for her mother’s infidelity with my father. Someone must have told her the truth and explained why my mother shot her.

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.

15


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 and 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.

With your name on it? I asked.

For the US police that white wood cross is the best proof that I’m dead. It’s in my FBI file. Imagine that a riverside wood cross with plastic flowers actually proves to the FBI that my family thinks I’m dead.

With your name on it?

My name is not Julio.

From the master bedroom’s bay window in the marble house we could see past the garden and large bronze horse, to the bay glittering with night lights. When I looked out after our day trip, I knew a virgin lived under that blue water.

Since I was a person who had never experienced cold weather, I loved to close the door and windows and turn up the air-conditioning until the room was freezing. My teeth chattered. My teeth seemed almost to break against each other. I had never felt that kind of cold before. I loved it. I even loved the pain.

This room is the North Pole! Julio said.

He never asked me to turn the air-conditioning off.

I would gather up all the blankets I could find from around the house and pile them on the bed. I had never slept in a cold room under blankets.

This is because you grew up in the jungle, Julio said. I grew up close to the desert where it can get very cold.

At night, in our Acapulco igloo, Julio told me his philosophy.

Life is a crazy, out of order, inside out, salt mixed with sugar place where the drowned can be walking on dry land, he said. Like the best outlaws, I know I’m going to die young. I don’t even think about old age. It’s not even in my imagination.

You have tamed me, I answered. I picked up his hand from the pillow and cuffed it around my wrist.

Julio thought people could be divided into day and night people. He said words could be divided this way also. Ugly night words, according to him, were words like rabies and nausea. Pretty night words were words like moon and milk and moth.

When Julio and I moved around under the blankets sparks of electricity crackled and lit up our bed.

Never had we seen anything like this before, only in the sky.

We would make love in the wool blanket lightning.

16


My mother’s phone calls always brought news from our mountain. Estefani and her siblings never returned from Mexico City after their mother Augusta died from AIDS. Sofia, Estefani’s grandmother, who’d run the OXXO by the Pemex gas station, had packed up and left to go and care for her orphaned grandchildren.

My mother told me that Paula and her mother had really disappeared. No one ever heard anything about them again.

I also knew that Maria’s gunshot had healed and that she and her mother were still on our mountain.

I have a case of the misery, my mother said.

Oh, Mama. Please don’t tell me.

I’m all wrong inside.

This meant she missed me, but she’d never say it.

Some mornings Julio and I would go out to the garden and spend the whole day there.

He’d lift me up onto the bronze horse and I would ride it.

17


Seven months went by in the empty marble house.

One day my mother called. She was angry. She said she’d been trying to call for days.

Why haven’t you answered your phone? she asked. Damn, I’ve called and called! So you’ve forgotten about me? Is that what you’ve done?

I’m here.

If I had not reached you today, I was going to go straight to Acapulco.

Please, calm down. Why do you exaggerate? We talked a week ago.

Something has happened. Nothing happens here and now something happens, she said.

What?

Listen.

I’m listening, Mama.

Can you hear me?

Yes, I hear you fine.

Mike’s been arrested. He’s being taken to Mexico City.

Why to Mexico City?

They say he killed a man. They say he killed a little girl!

What?

Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

I remembered. A girl’s dresses were drying in the sun on the maguey pads. There were seagull feathers on the ground.

I could not even swallow my saliva, it just sat in my mouth, growing and growing, until I had to spit it out into my hand.

Mike says that you were with him. You were on a bus.

I held the phone in one hand and the gob of my saliva in the cup of my other hand.

You need to come here right away, she said. They want you in Mexico City to give your testimony. Mike says you can clear him. It will be quick. Tell them the truth! He says you know what happened.

I had a dream in that car. I was with Maria, my dear sister who looked just like my father. In my dream I called her sister, little sister. My dream told me she was the one I loved the most. I had not known this before, even when I held her broken, bloody arm in my arms. The word sister in my dream woke me up as if I’d been awoken by the sound of a firecracker or bullet in the air. The word cracked me awake. White seagulls flew above the shack and the Rottweiler and the skinny man. Maybe the birds were clouds. Maybe the clouds were birds. A little girl in a white dress picked up the feathers from the ground. Mike’s red-rose tattoo filled the car with rose perfume. I obeyed him when he told me to keep the heroin for him. I obeyed and placed the brick of heroin inside my black bag with its broken zipper. I obeyed.

I can’t hear you anymore, Mama. I’ll call you back.

I hung up the phone.

There was no need for me to pack my bag and get on the bus to Mexico City. I did not have to get on that well-known, well-worn asphalt sprinkled with scattered garbage, lost gloves, used condoms, and old cigarette packs.

I did not have to take the highway my grandmother tried to cross carrying a jug of milk. I did not have to take the road that has always been a river of blood and white milk mixed with car oil.

I did not have to take the road that has killed at least twenty people since the day I was born as well as dogs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, iguanas, and snakes.

I did not have to take the highway dotted with drops of blood from Maria’s gunshot wound.

No.

I did not mention my mother’s phone call to Julio or Jacaranda.

I felt as if my body were green inside like green logs that cannot burn in a fire. I felt too young to be out in the world.

I didn’t even own a pair of shoes.

Three days later there was a knock at the front door.

Julio, Jacaranda, and I were in the kitchen having breakfast.

No one had ever knocked on the door. The person who was outside knocked again and then rang the doorbell. It was not really a ring as whoever had their finger on the small plastic ringer outside did not let up. The sound wailed through the house like a siren.

Julio stood and left the house and went out to the garden. Jacaranda and I walked over to the front door. It was wide open.

At the entrance stood three policemen. Their faces were covered with wool ski masks and they carried machine guns. They had come for me. They wanted to search the house.

Yes, come in, Jacaranda said.

The policemen made us walk with them as they checked all the rooms. When they inspected the master bedroom, they broke into the dressing room we had never been inside.

In the place where I had expected expensive dresses, beautiful blouses and sweaters, and sequined satin or velvet evening gowns was a large storage room. Instead of high-heeled satin shoes and fur coats, it contained hundreds of assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, cartridges of dynamite, grenades, and dozens of bulletproof vests stacked in piles. There were even several guns, cradled like babies, in USA flags.

Julio and I had made love at the edge of carnage.

The first thing one of the policemen did in my small room was lift the mattress up off the bed.

My mother’s words came to me across the hills and down the highway and straight into me, Only an idiot hides things under a mattress!

The policemen took the brick of heroin and Paula’s notebook with the photos and told me to pack my bag.

Julio never said goodbye. He jumped over the garden fence as soon as he realized there were cops at the door. I’m sure he thought they were coming to get him. He, and his delicious rose and magnolia kisses, disappeared forever. He drowned in the river.

Do we shoot the grandma? one policeman asked.

I wonder if she’s bulletproof? one of the other policemen answered and then he shot her.

Jacaranda fell backward on the marble.

Her body lay on the cold marble.

Blood from her head washed into her gray hair on the white marble. Her eyes were open and fixed in a stare like the glass eyes of the stuffed animals from Africa.

One policeman handcuffed me and pushed me into a police car. We drove through the early-morning streets following the signs to the airport. From the car window, I could see the dirty streets and endless rows of T-shirt stores closed tight with metal curtains.

I saw a fisherman walking toward the beach with a pole resting over his shoulder and a small red plastic child’s bucket in one hand.

I looked toward the Pacific Ocean to the place where I knew the Virgin Mary was drowning under the waves.

Mrs. Domingo’s diamond ring was still on my hand. I turned the diamond inward, toward my palm, so that it looked as if I were only wearing a gold wedding band.

I knew an army helicopter would take me to Mexico City. My crime was too important to be handled by the state of Guerrero. Thanks to television, I had done all this before. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

I knew I was going to go straight to the women’s jail because I was a witness and an accomplice to the murder of a girl who was the daughter of one of Mexico’s most important drug traffickers. This was the crime that had captured the nation.

If I had not stopped watching television at the marble house, I would have known that the brutal killing of a girl shocked the world. I would have known that a teacher from a rural community claimed it was vultures that led him to the shack. He told one reporter that there were over twenty vultures above and they looked like a cloud of black feathers swimming in the air.

In the helicopter I sat with my back to the pilot. Only one policeman got in and sat straight in front of me. I had to lean forward on my seat since my hands were still handcuffed behind my back.

As we lifted off and rose above the port of Acapulco, the helicopter turned and headed toward Mexico City. I looked out the window and down on the jungle below. My feet began to feel cold in the plastic flip-flops as we reached a higher altitude.

There were two canisters stored between the two seats in front of me. They were labeled with the skull and crossbones symbol for poison. In large black letters I read the word Paraquat.

18

I didn’t bother to look out the window when the helicopter flew over Mexico City. I’d always thought I’d visit the city’s parks, museums, and the famous Chapultepec zoo and castle, but now I knew it would never happen.

The guard sitting across from me was still wearing the wool ski mask. The sweat from his scalp dripped down his neck and the front of his shirt. He was so sweaty that even his hand resting on the machine gun glistened. His eyes peered through the holes in the wool and looked into my eyes.

You’re all a bunch of stupid girls, he said.

I looked away from him and out the window at the Popocatepetl volcano with the long plume of smoke blowing from its crater.

He shook his head back and forth.

All you stupid bitches care about is money.

My hands were handcuffed behind my back and I felt the diamond in my palm.

Long ago, my mother taught me how to protect myself against a man. She said to take my index finger and poke out the man’s eyes, to just scoop them out like clams out of their shells. She did not teach me what to do if I were in handcuffs.

I never want to have a daughter, he said.

He took out a piece of gum and pushed it through the hole in the mask and into his mouth. His mouth moved under the wool, under the small round opening, as he chewed.

If I had a daughter, he said, I’d spit.

19


In Mexico City, before I was formally booked and taken to jail, I was paraded for the press in a room at the airport.

I was made to stand behind a long table that was covered with several dozen rifles, pistols, and ammunition. This was the cache of weapons that had been found at the house in Acapulco. The reporters screamed out questions at me and television cameras filmed my face.

Who killed her, you or Mike?

Why did you have to shoot her in the face like that?

Why? Why did you kill an innocent little girl?

What happened at that ranch?

Are you Mike’s girlfriend?

As the reporters called out questions, I bowed my head, pressed my chin to my chest, and looked down toward my heart so they could not photograph my face. But then I remembered something. I looked up.

If I looked up, and let myself be filmed, my eyes would pierce right through the camera. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down into the bowl of the white satellite dish antenna my father had bought. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down straight into the television screen and right into my two-room home on our mountain. I knew that if I looked up into the camera, I would see my mother as she sat in front of the TV with a beer in her hand and a yellow plastic flyswatter across her knee. I looked into the camera and deep into my mother’s eyes and she looked back.

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