I can see someone, off in the white distance. It’s my daughter! I see her as she is now. She’s so gorgeous. Her brown hair is long, reaching down to her lower back. She’s aging like me, Dios mio. I don’t miss her father’s nose. She’s wearing nice jeans and a green sweater. Ay, she’s always wearing the wrong thing! It’s summer! Ay, mija, why do you always wear a sweater in the summer? Pues, I guess it doesn’t matter. She’s here! Mi vida, she’s here! She seems to be talking to people. I’m going to walk up to her and surprise her. Mija! It’s me! Tu mamá, la unica qué tienes, mi vida! Dígame! Tell me everything. Oh, how I’ve missed you. Digame todo. Qué pasa? What are you doing now? Where do you work? Where do you live? Are you seeing anyone? You’re not married, are you? And your studies? Hey, por que... why are you looking at me like that? That’s no way to look at your only mother. Twelve years and this is how we start? No me mires asi. Mija, where are you going? Where have you been? Please, mija. Don’t go. If I reach out to you, will you hold me? I’m trying to hug you, mija, but you only go farther away. Please stop looking at me like that. Please stop going away. I can’t take it. No seas cruel, mija. I can’t see your face. I can’t. I can’t—
Someone bangs at the trailer door. Xitlali opens her eyes and finds herself lying on the floor, on the blankets.
“Señora Zaragoza! Is everything okay?”
“Yes!” How long was I out? Holy shit, that was strong. Xitlali sits up and rubs the tears from her face. She sees the egg lying where she dropped it, on the blanket next to her. Whoever did this really wanted this family gone.
She takes a pair of tweezers from her bag and uses them to remove the tiny doll from the vial on her necklace. She places the doll on top of the egg, says a bendición, and gives the doll time to absorb the egg’s energy. Then she burns sage near the doll and egg. The smoke surrounds the egg but doesn’t touch it, pushed away by dark energy. Xitlali waits a bit, then uses the tweezers to pick up the doll and hold it near the burning sage. Like the egg, the doll repels the smoke. The energy transfer was a success.
She puts the doll back into the vial. She puts the egg in a black pouch with sage, rosemary, and hierba santa. She blesses both, egg and doll.
As Xitlali steps out of the trailer, she thinks about advising Señora Ruiz to leave. But she knows that if the woman could do so, she would’ve already. There’s no use telling her the obvious. There’s only so much we can come to terms with. Así es...
Instead, she says, “Someone cursed an egg and placed it near your beds, Señora Ruiz. It was a strong curse, done by someone either inexperienced or evil. Your daughter must have slept too close to it tonight, causing her nightmares. I got rid of it, but someone put it there. I don’t want to say it’s your husband, but that’s the only person I can think of. He may have paid someone to place the curse. I don’t know. What I’m saying is, it’s gone for now, but he might do it again. You need to talk to him and tell him he’s hurting your daughters.”
“Thank you, Señora Zaragoza. Gracias, gracias, gracias,” Petra cries.
“Claro, señora. Bueno, let’s all get in a circle.” The family gathers and Xitlali has them clasp hands. Do they know any of this? Is it better for the little ones to not know? Perhaps if you don’t believe in these things, they have less power over you. Maybe it’s best if my kind die out. Ay, mija... maybe you were right.
Xitlali recites the prayer: “May God bless this house, la Virgen ayúdanos, porfa, forever and always, con safos, safos, safos.” She tells Señora Ruiz how to purify the trailer with sage, hierba santa, and rosemary, every day, for as long as they have to live there.
Señora Ruiz signs the standard form for purification services and pays the bill in cash. “Gracias, gracias, curandera. If it weren’t so late, I’d invite you in for café.”
“’Sta bien. Take care of your hijas. Their fear only provides more dark energy for evil spirits. Love them. Dales todo.”
“Claro que sí.”
In her car, Xitlali watches the Ruiz family walk back into the trailer, one by one. She wonders if they will be safe.
Her gente, spreading into spaces where they weren’t allowed before. Opening new traumas and wounds that will take years and lifetimes and generations to even diagnose. New manifestations of spirits, dark energy, and evil entering into our reality, evolving within these transitions. Then comes the work of accepting past truths. Reconciliation. She will always have work. There will always be a need for her services.
I’m so tired.
Xitlali drives back into the city on the great spine of the freeway that connects the suburbs, where people like her work and clean, to the skyscrapers, where people like her work and clean. The drive feels like a dream, the passing billboards and landscapes acting as newsreels for the imagination. Over yonder, the light from the sleepless metropolis fights with the darkness of the cosmos above.
Xitlali will drive these freeways many times over the coming years. She will take her daughter’s picture from the glove box and tape it, again, to her dashboard. It would behoove her to come to peace with herself, her past, with what she’s done. That’s another story. For now, Xitlali Zaragoza, curandera, will rest as much as she can until her next assignment.
Photo Album
by Sarah Cortez
Downtown
There’s a place I remember perfectly without a photo. A hotel lobby, with its shabby wingbacks and dirty octagonal floor tiles just inside the wide doors. Dust motes circling in hot afternoon air. The smell of chlorine on my skin as I walked from the car through the broiling downtown sidewalks’ reflected heat. The stolen keys in my pocket. Hot metal grazing my thigh at each step. I was crazy with longing, crazy to feel his quick rise. He wasn’t there anymore. That’s what the old clerk at the front desk said, his eyes going too bright, going down to where they shouldn’t. Okay, I said. Okay. I wasn’t going to die.
This picture is the new house Dad bought us, close to the airport, near his work. A bare yard with no trees, scattered grass; a neighborhood with almost no people. My small tan-and-white dog dead of a broken heart. Old English. A clean pad of concrete for a circular patio in the back. A built-in vanity for Mom with two shades of brown tiles shaped like leaves. Daddy also bought Mom a new car. For her long commute — too long to ride the bus anymore, as she’d always done. She didn’t even try to plant flowers in the flowerbeds this time.
He wouldn’t let me take a photograph of him. Once I even brought my Instamatic upstairs to his room. Late-afternoon sun across the short golden hairs of his belly. Sparks of the sun’s fire in each lower curlicue. His blue eyes blazing with a light I couldn’t define and didn’t need to. Sheets pushed off the foot of the bed, onto a dismal braided rug. Strong, tanned fingers girding my pelvis. Wordless time spent with a man who didn’t need words to convince me to be with him. I remembered him from before, when he’d worked for my dad doing yardwork, then at the airport hangar. You gotta give people a chance, Dad liked to say. Everybody deserves a chance.
Oh, that’s Frankie Petras, the boy I had such a crush on back in grade school. We were both so shy. He had blue eyes too. He never would’ve asked me to steal. I think the only conversation we had in twelve years of grade school was the day Kennedy was shot. We talked by the bike racks after school, where we’d prayed for hours for a miracle. We prayed until they pronounced him dead — the man we’d seen the day before at Rice. Frankie started crying — a thirteen-year-old boy crying in public — as we stood holding our bikes. I stood mute, watching fat tears squeeze from under eyelids he tried to shutter with a thumb and crooked index finger. A few moments later, he turned without a word, undid his bike lock, and pedaled away without once looking back. His body, a slender torch burning, consumed by grief and betrayal. At home that night, none of us could speak of it. And what would’ve been the point? There were no answers to the whys. Nothing beyond our sadness and loss.