I walked to the house with the bottle. I stared at it, not knowing if I liked it or not, if I’d open it or not, if I’d charge the person who’d left it or just not call them. All I wanted was for it to be me and my brother eating sausages on the living room sofa, my only worry making sure they didn’t overcook, and that Walter didn’t get ketchup and mayo all over himself.
The house key was in my shorts pocket. I wouldn’t bring the bottle into the house that day, or call anyone, or scarf earth. Anyway, nobody was watching. I rounded the house thinking, as usual, of how I needed to tend to the plants but would just end up eating something yummy with my hands instead. That way there’d be no plates to wash. Then, I’d bum around with Walter.
I knelt down among the plants, parted the massive leaves, and put the bottle next to the others for company. There were plenty of blue ones. No blue was the same and no earth tasted alike. No child, sibling, mother, or friend was missed like another. Side by side, they were like glimmering tombs. At first, I used to count them and arrange them tenderly, sometimes stroking one until it let me savor the earth inside it. That was how I usually felt. But right then, I despised them. They weighed on me more than ever. Altogether, they exhausted me. I felt the bottles piling up on me. The world must be much larger than I’d imagined for so many people to have disappeared in it.
I retraced my steps and entered the house. I put on music, went to the kitchen, and turned on the burner. I looked for the kettle and filled it with water, trying not to think of how the person inside that bottle might die at any moment. I shoved the sausages to the bottom of the pot, one by one, till they were buried in water. I left them on the burner.
Walter arrived a few minutes later.
We ate the hot dogs, practically slopped over with mayonnaise, our fingers smeared, cold beers in hands, just the way it should be. My brother was happy; it was contagious. I didn’t ask why. We shot the breeze. Walter did nearly all the talking, sometimes with his mouth full, chomping like an oaf. I listened and laughed with him.
Later, he kissed me on the cheek and went back to the shop. He wouldn’t be home till later that night.
When he closed the door, I let my body drop on the living room sofa, where the day after and the next one and in the twenty days that followed, I would attend to people and scarf their earth and ask whether this person or that was alive or breathing and for how long and why had their lungs stopped or who had taken them. For now, all I wanted to do was sleep.
He stood against the gate. He looked real sad for someone so young. His hair was tidy and his clothes perfect, like in a cigarette ad.
I’d heard someone knock and, not awake yet, had taken my time to go outside.
He wasn’t knocking anymore. Either he’d gotten tired or given up. He was waiting.
Spying me, he peeled himself off the gate. I stared at him in silence and didn’t say half a word.
He’d come to the door that morning, he said. He’d actually been coming for days but hadn’t been able to get himself out of the car.
Then he fell quiet and I looked him over.
He’d waited, he said, because he was looking for someone.
I didn’t know what to say. All I wanted was more sleep. I didn’t even know if Walter was home or if he’d left for the shop.
“I need help,” he said, as a woman passed us on the sidewalk. Her shopping cart screeched to a stop and she looked at me: a woman from the barrio.
I opened the door, turned around, and when I felt him walk in after me, said:
“Shut the door.”
I didn’t want anyone seeing him, much less folk talking shit about me. I hadn’t even brushed my hair. I must look like a zombie.
I wasn’t scared of him. Sitting there on the living room sofa, he was the one who seemed scared. As though he’d slept badly, like me.
“I didn’t get any sleep,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I’m looking for somebody,” he said again, his eyes turned down and fixed on his hand.
He looked around ten years older than Walter, but in a button-down shirt, shoes, expensive clothes.
In the sadness of his face, he was like my brother and me. Also, in the slow way he had of speaking, like he was struggling to get his words out.
“Who’re you looking for?” I said suppressing a yawn, my eyes teary from sleepiness.
He was quiet. It was still morning but I was thirsty for beer and wanted to go back to sleep.
“What’s the point? Her name won’t mean anything to you,” he said, looking me head-on.
“I don’t usually see people at this hour, but if you give me five minutes I’ll hear you out.”
I opened the fridge. Practically empty. Cold leftovers of some chicken Walter had brought home the day before. I breathed audibly. Nuh-uh, I was in no shape to eat earth. I closed it and went for the kettle, filled it with water, turned on the burner. I prepped the mate while the water boiled. Would he drink mate? I didn’t know ’cause I didn’t care. If he told me his story now, I wouldn’t sleep easy all day. How could I stop him?
The water was ready. I turned off the fire, brought out the kettle and the mate, and set them in front of the sofa. He still looked like a weary man to me, a man worn out ahead of time.
“Do you drink mate?”
“Of course.”
I stirred the leaves just a tad with the bombilla, then poured a stream of hot water into the hole in the middle. I handed him the mate and he drank it. Done, he held the empty mate in his hand and started to tell his story. He said his aunt, his mother’s sister, had come to visit him, that although they hadn’t seen one another in a long time, she had raised him.
“My real mother worked all day and went straight to sleep when she got home. Then, there was my aunt. I almost didn’t recognize her.”
He reached out, handing me the mate. I filled it up for me.
“I had to do a double take before I realized it was her. She didn’t visit me at home, but at the precinct.”
At the word “precinct,” I choked on my mate. What was I getting myself into? He asked if I was all right, and I dodged the question. I’m not sure if he noticed, but he didn’t comment. He had to wait for me to nod before going on.
“It was hard to get my aunt to calm down and tell me what’d happened. My cousin María had been missing for six days. She’d left nursing school and never made it home. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say.”
The man fell quiet for a moment. He looked at me like he wanted an answer, but I didn’t say a thing.
He said his aunt started laying into his colleagues. She said the cops and the commissioner hadn’t lifted a finger, that they weren’t looking for the girl. But he wasn’t really listening. He was thinking of his cousin María, who he barely knew and hadn’t seen since she was a girl, a little kid, a distant cousin he’d fallen out of touch with. But his aunt’s pleading, the way she was bent on getting help any way she could, had brought back the memory of his cousin. María had wanted to be a nurse. He was going to help.
I listened to him talk but had nothing to say. It bugged me that it was blood that pushed him to look for her, not the girl. Any girl. He was the law, that was his job.
He said he started looking as soon as his aunt left the precinct.