He pointed at something outside, on his end of the car. I craned my neck to read the sign: GRILLED MEAT PASTA FRIES. Leaning over, I caught a whiff of a scent that went straight to my head. I don’t know if it was the deodorant he wore or some hair product, but I liked it so much it made me smile. I sat back down.
“You do your job and we’ll come here after. There’s no rush.” Ezequiel smiled too.
He started the car. My feet didn’t feel wet anymore.
María’s house was pretty. Way prettier than mine, anyhow. I didn’t know where we were and didn’t care to ask. Ezequiel and his aunt looked my way like they were expecting me to say something and I, not knowing what to say, peered out the window at the grass, at the earth.
Then, the woman told me her daughter used to take her mate outside while she read over photocopies from nursing school. The woman nearly burst into tears. I told Ezequiel to stay there with his aunt and walked out. The door was ajar and I only had to push open the screen door, which was heavier than it looked.
Their property was smaller than mine, but nothing grew freely there. The grass was mown and weedless. The plants, small in their pots and flowerbeds, barely grazed my knees. I started round the house, questing for something, I’m not sure what.
I felt the screen door open and close, then saw Ezequiel and his aunt headed my way.
“Come, I’ll show you,” she said. And then: “Here. This is where my little girl used to study and drink mate.”
She pointed at a spot on the property not unlike the rest, save for a chopped tree trunk hemmed by taller grass. I shifted the trunk, uncovering a couple of pill bugs and a centipede that scuttered away. The trunk was upturned; once against the earth, its damp side now faced the sun. There were a few live critters there too, unmoving, stunned by the unexpected light.
Beneath, stripped of green, was earth.
I asked them to leave, and waited. No one would ever watch me eat dirt again. I stood motionless till I heard the screen door close shut. Alone, I could slip off my shoes, sit down, rake my hand through the earth and feel it on my legs; for a moment, returning my body to its own. I didn’t shut my eyes but conjured the photo Ezequiel had shown me of María. A lovely, black-haired girl. Beautiful when she smiled. I thought of her patients, glad to be touched by a girl like that.
The earth is always cold at first. But in my hand and, later, in my mouth, it grows hot.
I set some aside, gathered it up. Brought it to my mouth and swallowed. I shut my eyes, feeling the earth warm up and scorch me inside, then ate some more. Earth was the poison that would carry me to María’s body, where I needed to be.
I lay on the ground, eyes shut. I had learned darkness could birth forms. I tried to make them out, to think of nothing else, not even the pain radiating from my stomach. Nothing but a glimmer where I focused my gaze till it turned into two black eyes. And gradually, as if crafted by the night, I saw María’s face, her shoulders, hair born of the deepest darkness I had ever seen.
Thankfully, the earth didn’t hug her body. She wore a pale dress over her skin, which made her look younger. She lay somewhere. Alive.
But there was something else, too: confinement. Light didn’t enter freely where she was. María breathed, fearfully. No part of her smiled. The dress, which started at her shoulders, was lost in a clutch of blankets that appeared to trap her.
María gazed at me. Her face, a keen of sadness. Pain radiated from her black eyes.
As I watched her, I remembered my aching stomach. But I wasn’t ready to return to my body. I concentrated on her and tried to stay, to figure out where she was. But there was only darkness. On the back wall behind the bed where María stared out at me were words I couldn’t read. Could I read at all? Not in dreams. The letters went strange. Restless. By the time I grasped one word, the next had changed. It was almost impossible to read in dreams.
I crashed head-on into her body, which put me in a shitty mood. I couldn’t move beyond that room to the place where her open eyes were, with a dread that hurt like a kicking. The pain came back, and my body returned to where it wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t stay, it was agonizing, airless. I was so close to María, but it was no use.
Whenever I felt like leaving, I’d crash into her again. I wanted to move away, to look at her, feel her. Knowing she was alive, the pain mattered less. I gathered up all my strength so that I could break loose. I stopped looking her in the eyes so that I could move backward, farther, toward the wall and the words that, this time, I made no effort to read. Instead, I pretended to snap a photo of them with my cell phone. That’s when I saw the phrase CARRY YOUR CROSS. A door instantly creaked open. I felt an intense fear. That was the last of it.
I opened my eyes.
I left the vision feeling breathless, as though I’d been locked up with her for days.
I struggled up. I was thirsty. My throat and mouth, parched. I felt dizzy. The thirst made me dumb.
“Water,” I croaked as I saw Ezequiel walking toward me.
The woman strode behind him.
“Water,” I said again. Then, mouth dying of thirst: “She’s alive.”
They led me to the bathroom. I shut the door on them. I guzzled down water with the same compulsion as I had during recess back when Señorita Ana used to look after us and tap water was the tastiest thing in the world.
I sought my reflection in the mirror and in it found something I already knew: I’m like her, I said to myself. I know her name and I know she’s alive. I want to find her. I look like María. My lips, my hair. There’s earth in the color of my skin, and some of María too: eyes like a knife wound in flesh. I won’t leave her there, alive, forgotten among shadows.
Fries, lots of them. And a milanesa. Got any?”
I ordered my favorite food, the same meal I had every birthday. Back in the day, I used get out of bed and put shoes on so no one would scold me, then leave my room to look for my old lady.
The faucet would be on all the way, the water crashing down on a dark mountain of potatoes. The water turned the dirt to mud and then into a clouded river that flowed toward the kitchen drain. I used to be a pro at peeling potatoes with nothing but a Tramontina knife, but I never touched them on my birthday. “I’ll do it,” my old lady would say, nudging me out of the way with her arm. But seconds later there I would be again. I liked to see the potatoes all chopped up, to watch them frying. To smell them.
Milanesas, one each. Sometimes, when our old man wasn’t home in time for dinner, Mamá would set his milanesa aside on a plate between two squares of paper towel. Not the fries, though. “Screw him,” she’d say, and Walter and I would split our sides laughing. Those were the best birthdays ever.
Ezequiel ordered some sort of meat with a side of salad. Salad? That cracked me up. They sold all kinds of things in that joint and this john orders lettuce.
“To drink?” asked a straight-haired girl a year or so older than me as she took our order down in a notepad, not looking at us.
Ezequiel ordered a beer I’d never heard of. A dark beer from a weird brewery. They brought it stat, chilled. I loved everything about being there, about washing away the sadness of the earth in my body with beer and fries.