Others didn’t have the guts to come through the gate and instead would leave their loved one’s earth in bottles. They’d leave a card, too, and slung around the bottleneck, a name. I took the bottles and arranged them in the plants. The sun glinted off them. Whenever it rained too heavily, the water crept inside and overflowed, mixing their earth with mine.
Every bottle was a morsel of earth that could speak.
Marta, Florensia’s mother, did come past the gate. It’d been years since I’d seen her. She barged in like she owned the place. She wanted to pay for “the appointment,” she said.
“No, Marta. I can’t take your money.”
As we stepped into my house, I didn’t mention to Marta—who thought she was all that ’cause she and Florensia went to church on Sundays, her girl blonde and promising as a red paper wasp—that I had missed her daughter after she stopped letting her come over.
The thing is, I saw Marta’s eyes. Pure dark circles from crying.
We went in so that I could sit down and she could park her fat ass on the tiny sofa of my “suite,” and so that I could eat the earth she had brought with her out of the palm of her hand and so that she could ask, always nosing around, always in a rush:
“What do you see? What do you see?”
A car drove past blaring corazón de seda, que no lo tiene cualquiera and I thought of Florensia’s clothes, which weren’t as tattered as her skin, and of Florensia, down there, like the roots of our land’s plants and the stubborn ants marching down their tunnels.
Marta wouldn’t shut up. She was starting to get on my nerves. She thought she was better than everybody ’cause the only blonde head in the barrio belonged to her Florensia and—in church, made of plaster—to baby Jesus.
“What do you see? What do you see?”
I had to gather strength to open my eyes and say:
“Settle down, Marta. I see a lot of light.”
I had never cried with eyes shut. I saw Florensia, maggot-ridden like a sickly heart, her hair a spiderweb peeling off her skull.
“Settle down, Marta, seeing hurts my eyes. She’s fine. Her hair looks like it’s catching the sun.”
Marta breathed again, so deeply her chest looked bigger than her ass.
“Open your eyes then, nena. Why are you crying?” she said as she gripped me with both hands. Though her hands were warm, I kept my eyes sealed. I wondered: Is Florensia cold down there in the earth—so unlike swimming, so unlike being formed long ago in that woman’s warm belly?
Florensia’s mother wouldn’t let go. This time, the earth didn’t make her shudder. She didn’t even notice the muck under my nails.
“She’ll come visit once she’s back, I’m sure she will.”
“Go easy, Marta. You won’t have to look after her anymore. Florensia was always such a beautiful girl. God loves her.”
I walked Marta to the gate in my bare feet and stood around barefoot killing time, glancing down at the bottles stashed in the plants. Some had been there a while and were slowly becoming buried, rooted, their letters and names and phone numbers soiled by water and by time, which blotted out everything but the pain of the person who’d brought them there and the need—all gone but one—to know where they were.
I didn’t know about the house. But the earth, underneath everything, was mine.
That night, I dreamed of Señorita Ana. I don’t know if it was the first time or if I’d forgotten other dreams. But I never forgot her.
Though years had passed and I had shot up, Señorita Ana looked way taller than me that night, just as she’d always been. She asked me from up high about the other girls in my grade. I told her I’d bumped into so-and-so in the grocery store or shared a story I’d heard from Walter; I didn’t see them anymore myself. We ate toasted sunflower seeds and Señorita Ana asked me about each of them, one by one, except for Florensia. She knew. I told her I’d seen Candela and that she was knocked up, that Sofi had moved in around the corner with a guy who drove about on a moped for work.
“My brother said they’re expecting,” I said, and Señorita Ana fell into a deep silence.
She passed me some more seeds and I tossed them in my mouth, spitting out the shells. She wasn’t impressed. She hadn’t been impressed before, either: she was always saying we made a big old mess of those sunflower seeds.
“I would’ve like to,” Señorita Ana said then.
“See ’em?” I asked.
She stared into the distance. Filled her lungs with air and then let out:
“I would’ve liked to get pregnant, too. Have a baby girl. Like all of you.”
She looked at me and I avoided her eyes.
“Not me, hell no. Girls go missing,” I said, quickly stuffing my mouth with seeds.
Señorita Ana stared at me. Like the bag of sunflower seeds, I thought, something in her was running out too.
After that, we stopped talking.
I woke up thirsty for beer.
The joke was straightforward, but not even those I got.
Walter said:
“I’ve got twenty lice on me. Gonna have to wash my hair with kerosene.”
And I’d sit there wondering how my brother knew there were twenty bugs in his hair.
Then, he and his friends would laugh and say they had twenty beers, and I’d count the ones they brought in. Sometimes five, ten, or around fifteen, but never twenty. At some point I realized he wasn’t saying “twenty” but “plenty,” though not even that made me laugh.
I was thinking about that joke when I opened the outer gate and saw that another bottle had been snuck onto our land. I carried a bag on my arm with some bread, two cans of beer, and the sausages Walter liked. I was hurrying home from the grocery store ’cause I wanted to cook up the sausages before he got back from the shop.
As I locked the gate, I thought of how I had zero interest in finding another bottle. Of how I couldn’t leave it there in case the few neighbors who still didn’t know about me saw it or started picturing—as I was right then—a hand slipping through the gate and the desperate face of the person who’d brought the bottle. Anyway, even if I did pick it up, I didn’t want to eat earth that day, end of story. As far as I was concerned, there’d been “twenty” bottles for a while. So many I couldn’t even count them, so many they got on my nerves.
If you boil the sausages too long, they burst and end up like bland, blown-up chorizos. We ate them anyway on hot dog buns doused in mayo, but neither of us enjoyed it. That’s how my head felt that day: like meat ready to burst.
As I walked toward the bottle, I made an effort not to read the message and to persuade myself it was written in Chinese. I prayed it hadn’t come with a photo. The bottle was blue, broad, filled halfway with dirt. Crouching, I touched it. The feel of the glass stung the palm of my hand. I picked it up with the same arm that held the bag slung near my elbow.
Sometimes I could feel the weight of every single bottle turning my house into something I’d always despised: a graveyard crawling with strangers, a container of earth that spoke of bodies I’d never laid eyes on. Meanwhile, Mamá was all alone in the place where folks claimed the dead were laid to rest. I never visited her. I don’t know about Walter. There were times when I wanted to go but didn’t. I hadn’t been back since she was taken away from me as a little girl.