Prayers for the Stolen (12 page)

When I saw the bay I remembered coming to Acapulco for the first time. My father was still living with us and we’d come to visit him at work. He was a bartender at a small hotel at that time. I remember my mother got dressed up in a white dress that had a halter top so that her back was exposed. She wore high white
heels and bright red lipstick. She also dressed me up in a red sundress and combed my hair into two braids.

We’re going to surprise your father and we have to look pretty, like girls, for the surprise, my mother said.

She carried her heels in one hand and walked in her flip-flops down to the highway to catch the bus.

On the bus ride she checked her lipstick in a small mirror that she carried in her purse. Her arms were still slightly red in places, as she’d spent the whole morning plucking the black hair out of her forearms with tweezers.

From the bus station we took a taxi to the hotel where my father worked.

The hotel faced the bay. My father worked at the bar that was outside, beside the swimming pool and under a large thatched roof of palm fronds. The sunlight broke through small spaces in the roofing and made the glass of the liquor bottles shine. I had never seen a swimming pool before. The afternoon sunlight glittered off the water as if it were full of crystals. The sound system was tuned to a local radio station, which filled the air with the sound of cymbals, bongos, and tambourines.

My father was leaning against the bar dressed in white trousers and a pearly-white guayabera shirt. He was smoking a cigarette. The tobacco smoke mixed with the sun and salt.

When he saw us he placed his cigarette in an ashtray and opened his arms to me. He lifted me up. He smelled like lemons and Alberto VO5, which he creamed into his hair every morning to smooth it down.

He put me back down and gave my mother his arm and walked her over to the bar where we sat on stools and looked out at the bay. He made my mother a margarita with a rim of salt around the glass. He stuck a small, red paper umbrella in her drink. My father concocted a fizzy pink drink with ginger ale and orange
juice for me and placed a plastic stirrer inside the glass in the shape of a mermaid.

My parents looked handsome in their white clothes, which accentuated their dark skin. I thought that had been the happiest afternoon of my life until my mother and I got back on the bus to go home.

I knew it, she said as she rubbed her lipstick off with a couple of squares of toilet paper. Your father is having an affair with that waitress!

I knew exactly whom she was talking about.

My mother was very skinny. When she described herself she’d hold up her pinkie in the air and say, Skinny like a pinkie.

Her little finger would always be a symbol of her body to me.

The waitress had been wearing very tight clothes so her stomach bulged over her jeans and her thighs rubbed together as she walked. She was a beauty. My father always said a woman needs to be full. No matter how much my mother tried to fatten up, she couldn’t. My father said that holding a skinny woman was like holding gristle and bone. He said that a real man wanted a body of pillows.

He never said, You, Rita, are gristle and bone, or You, Rita, need to fatten up, or You, Rita, are like a chicken wing. He was never that obvious in his cruelty.

The woman was wearing red flip-flops that were made with a plastic, two-inch heel. We would never forget those shoes.

I knew my mother was right. That woman was too nice and that’s a sure sign if there is any perfect sign at all. I was expecting her to pull out a piece of candy at any moment. Of course my father denied it.

As the bus rolled through the dark mountains along the windy road away from the bay and toward our house, I could feel the orange juice burn in my stomach and I began to feel dizzy. When we
got off the bus, the high heels from my mother’s shoes sank into the hot black asphalt that was like a lake of chewing gum. She had to lift her legs up high to pull her shoes out of the ooze.

That day marked the beginning of her anger. Her fury was a seed and it had been planted on that afternoon. By the time she shot Maria that seed had grown into a large tree that covered our lives with its shade of bile.

When my father came back home that night, he found that his clothes had been thrown out the front door and lay in a small pile on the damp, warm ground.

I lay in bed listening to them speak to each other in low whispers that were like screams.

You were something, my mother said. I thought she said.

Don’t spill yourself, my father said. I thought he said.

Their angry whispers made broken words and sentences.

I will speak to God, my mother said. I thought she said.

In the morning my father was drinking his coffee by the stove. He was not wearing a shirt because all of his clothes were dumped outside. I knew his clothes would be covered in tiny black ants by now. He would have to shake the insects out and pluck them off.

Good morning, Ladydi, he said.

There was a huge welt on his shoulder surrounded by indentations. It was a human bite.

From then on my mother could no longer listen to love songs. Before that night she’d been a songbird. The radio was on all the time and she’d sway, twirl, and spin to Juan Gabriel or Luis Miguel’s songs as she cleaned the house, cooked, or ironed my father’s white work shirts. From then on the radio was turned off and she just might as well have turned her happiness to off.

Love songs make me feel stupid, she said.

You’re not stupid, Mama, I said.

The songs make me feel like I ate too much candy, Coke, ice
cream, and cake. The songs make me feel like I’ve come home from a birthday party.

Once, when we were at Estefani’s house, the radio turned to a love song. The melody filled the rooms. My mother panicked and ran out of the house to get away from the song. She threw up under a small orange tree. She threw up the melody, chords, the waltzes, and drums of love. It was pure green love bile on the green ground. I ran after her and held her hair away from her face as she vomited.

Your father killed the music for me, she said.

Being in Acapulco also made me think of the fortune-teller who told my mother the wrong fortune. Did her fortune include this event? Did the teller let her know she was going to shoot her daughter’s sister?

I looked out the taxi window as we moved through the crowded streets toward the hospital. I looked out on T-shirt shops, taco stands, and restaurants.

Acapulco also reminded me of the time we had my mother’s wedding band cut off by a locksmith. Most people in Guerrero did not wear rings. Hands and fingers swelled in the heat and, once a ring was on, it might never slip off.

After my father left us, my mother did not take her slim, gold wedding band off. It grew into her and became part of her finger, lost in the swollen flesh. On cool evenings, I could sometimes see the glimmer of gold in the lumpy skin as she cut up tomatoes or onions.

One day I watched as she spent most of the morning trying to remove the ring. She tried soap and cooking oil to make her finger slippery, but nothing worked.

After a few hours she said, We’re going to go to Acapulco and get this damn ring cut off.

Yes, Mama.

If they can’t cut it off, I’m cutting off my finger and that’s that.

It wasn’t until we were on the bus heading to Acapulco that I found out why she’d made this decision. Her biblical logic didn’t surprise me. She’d had a dream.

My mother listened to her dreams as if she were Moses. She said most problems people had these days were because they did not listen and act on their dreams. If she’d had a dream that locusts were coming we’d have moved off of the mountain years ago. It’s too bad that dream never came to her.

I’ve had a dream about my ring, she said again.

The dream contained an important revelation.

If I don’t get my wedding band off my finger, the birds will stop singing, she said. In the dream she was standing in the dark and parrots, canaries, and sparrows were standing on the branches of one orange tree. They all had their beaks wide open, but no sound emerged as the birds strained their necks back and looked up to heaven.

The locksmith cut the ring off of my mother’s hand with a sharp file. It only took a second.

I’ve done this thousands of times, the locksmith said as he placed the ring, now cut into two pieces, in the palm of my mother’s hand.

She looked down at the two commas of gold.

What the hell am I supposed to do with this? she said.

That locksmith did not know he had saved the songbirds of Mexico.

At the emergency room Maria’s arm was sewn up and bandaged. The doctor said she’d been very lucky. The bullet had only fractured her arm.

It was my mother’s unlucky lucky day.

As the doctors were taking care of Maria, her mother, Luz, arrived. This could only mean that my mother had told her.

I could not look at Luz.

I stared at the linoleum hospital floor.

I knew this was retribution. Luz was not going to press charges against my mother. Luz had it coming. How dare she fool around with her friend’s husband? It was payback time and Luz was lucky her daughter was alive.

In the movies, my mother would have had a huge realization after shooting Maria, which would have made her quit drinking. In the movies, she would have dedicated her life to helping alcoholics or battered women. In the movies, God would have smiled at her repentance. But this was not the movies.

At home my mother was
lying in bed under a cotton sheet. The television was off. For the first time in years, I heard the deep, loud jungle silence. I heard crickets and I heard the mosquito swarms buzz around the house.

Her form under the white cloth looked like a boulder. On the floor, beside the bed, were three empty beer bottles. The brown glass of the empty containers looked like gold awash in the band of moonlight that came in from a window.

I sat at the edge of the bed.

I thought it was your father, my mother whimpered from inside her sheet-cave.

Go to sleep, Mama.

I really, really thought it was your father, she said again.

In the silent room I wanted to reach out and pick up the remote control and turn the television on.

I did not know what to do with this kind of quiet.

The sound of the TV had made me feel like we were having a party or it felt like we had a large family. The
sound of the television was aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.

The silence of a mother and daughter alone on a mountain where a crime has been committed was the silence of the last two people on Earth.

I left my mother and went to my small room. I took off my T-shirt. It had Maria’s blood on it. I took off my skirt and underwear that were stiff from dried urine and lay on my bed.

The notebook I’d taken, along with Paula’s photographs, was still in the back pocket of my jeans that were laid out at the foot of my bed. I reached for it and sat on the bed and began to read. The handwriting belonged to Paula.

The notebook contained lists of things written with a blunt pencil. The first pages had lists of animals and animal parts. The rows itemized: two tigers, three lions, and one panther.

The next few pages had lists of women’s names. Some of the names had last names and some did not. The list read: Mercedes, Aurora, Rebeca, Emilia, Juana, Juana Arrondo, Linda Gonzalez, Lola, Leona, and Julia Mendez.

The rest of the notebook was blank except for the last page where Paula’s address was written: Chulavista, Guerrero, outside Chilpancingo, house of Concha.

I closed the notebook and placed it under my mattress with the photographs. Then I lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

The sound of the television woke me up. A bullfight was being broadcast from the great bullring in Mexico City.

I lay in bed listening. I could not understand why my mother was watching a bullfight as she’d sworn them off years ago. She’d seen a documentary where she learned that horses have their vocal cords severed and that is why they do not neigh, nicker, or scream during a bullfight. On our large, flat-screen television, we also could see that the bulls cry. On our mountain we saw their
tears roll out of their eyes and fall on the sand that was stained with blood and sequins.

I stretched and walked out to the kitchen. My mother was at the kitchen table drinking a beer. She had a plate of toasted peanuts and garlic dusted with orange chili powder in front of her.

She looked up at me. I was afraid. I wanted to see the change. What was it going to be like? Who were we? Yellow beer tears stained her cheeks.

Paula was gone. Estefani was moving to Mexico City so her mother could get better medical care. Maria would never speak to me again. Ruth had been stolen forever. My father was over there.

That morning the mountain was empty.

I closed my hands into fists so that I would not start to count up the amount of people we had lost on my fingers.

My mother looked at me and took a swig of her beer. She looked different. If I could have sucked on her finger, as I used to do as a baby, it would not have tasted like mangoes and honey. Her finger would have tasted like those chicken wishbones turned from white bone to purple, which she used to place in a glass jar of vinegar so I could see how the brittle bone turned into rubber.