Prologue.
The Night Water,
the Bridge
April 24th
Keep driving. Breathe deeply. Bianca prayed the words Mama taught her to pray.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Everything ached. But she had to make it to Matty.
She sucked in sharply at the thought of Matty. What would he say?
Off the road, tumbleweeds swept the dry arroyo beds. Stalks of alfalfa swayed in the Anza-Borrego night, their shadows dusting the earth. Mound after sage-smudged mound, like burial plots as far as the basin stretched in every direction, a pelvic bone, a sopa bowl scraped clean.
Monsoon season, the channels would swell, the quick rise and fall gathering mud and mosquitoes. Floodwaters would return. But this season of Lent, the embankment cradled rocks. Carrizo Creek and Alma Wash lay arid beside the mud caves, silent as salt-creek pupfish led astray, unable to find their way before sand swallowed water.
Blessed art thou among women.
Along the toxic Salton Sea, figs fell from palms and plopped to the brined beach. Black mission figs Bianca had peeled countless times with her teeth, sucking the pulp-pink flesh in the dirt lots behind her girlhood house. Summers, she had gathered the purple bulbs into the folds of her T-shirt then chucked their bulbous little heads off the mesa down toward the New River, watching the wine-colored skin splatter against the gorge.
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
Slip-faced dunes tilting their horns toward a brittle sky nodded solemnly as Bianca passed Seco del Diablo and Canyon Sin Nombre. Of the devil and without a name. The moon above had a name, La Luna Blanca. She’d sung to Bianca when Mama could not.
At the highway’s edge, the Painted Rocks hunched restless as sleeping beasts at the mountain pass, signaling the way toward Palm Desert. Their tattooed bellies, their colorful graffiti, “Victoria & Angel 4-ever” and “Cynthia was here” and “Tres Locas,” hushed by dark.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, payer for us sinners.
Bianca wiped her swollen face on her sleeve. She’d been crying again, her cheeks and the tender skin around her eyelids rawed with salt and rubbing. Her vision blurred with dehydration and exhaustion and the ceaseless fucking tears she couldn’t stop. She should’ve asked Lily to drive her, despite the awful things her friend had said. Bianca was so exhausted she would have endured even the corrugated tin of Lily’s snark to stay awake. Bianca turned the radio to a loud cumbia rock station and rubbed her eyes again, clearing the salt and haze, refocusing on the road. It was too late to turn back. Anyway, she didn’t need her eyes. Not on this drive. She knew the landscape by heart. She didn’t need to see it, filling the car with an ache. It was a rearview mirror she wished she could break. Years of floodplain evolution, the basin come to this: A woman driving home. A woman driving away from home.
Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
She checked the back seat. Her boxer curled in a brown ball of fur, snoring in piglike grunts beside the rear-facing car seat. She couldn’t see Jubilee. But she could imagine the steady swell and sink of chest, the pair of butterflied lungs, small wings flapping, steady compression of a fire bellow stoking the flame. Bianca let out the breath she’d been holding. “We’re almost there, baby girl,” she whispered as she thumbed the steering wheel like rosary beads, then recited the prayer again. And again.
Where Highway 86 met the 60, she left the Imperial Valley behind, its story stitched into her ribs, leaving her thighs and breasts and belly sore, a blood-soaked pad pressed against her crotch.
Left with the fork, past Beaumont, past mountain switchbacks and Chino’s cow shit, toward Orange County, toward Matty. He’d know what to do.
The sky gathered a milky haze, La Luna Blanca playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. In girldom, hiding was Bianca’s favorite game. She would slink into a laundry closet or the accordion-doored pantry where Mama kept her one bottle of brandy (for blessing the house, she’d said the time Bianca had caught her with it). And wherever she’d hidden, she’d wait. Girlchild tucked into a storage basket or flat-fished at the bottom of an empty bathtub in a dark bathroom, stifling the urge to giggle, the need to breathe. She wasn’t even sure she’d told anyone they were playing. She would just climb in among the soft piles of linen or cans of stewed tomatoes and wait for salvation. She was so sure someone would find her.
She merged onto the 57S, toward Santa Ana, the radio threading static through the hills. By day, the cattle grazed like some postcard pastoral smack dab in the congested intestines where Orange and Los Angeles counties crossed. But tonight, shadows and darker shadows walled the asphalt beyond the metallic gleam of guardrail. It would only take one turn too sharp, too steep. One nudge of the foot, and off the edge she’d soar.
How had she ended up a twenty-year-old driving home to her family? She should’ve been a junior on a university scholarship. She should’ve been a writer working on her first collection of poems. Or, at the very least, in a coffeehouse somewhere beside some scraggly goateed undergrad or supportive Lily-alternative (insert college version of girlhood best friend here), snapping instead of clapping after each alliterated slam rendition of Slay, Queen! She should not have been bleeding. Not yet. Not this much.
In the city, light pollution made the stars impossible to see, but Bianca took comfort in the glowing haze above the chiaroscuro of buildings and houses: a nightlight in the sky whose dim bulb reminded her of the bedroom she’d shared with Matty at Bisabuela’s house.
Matty didn’t know she was coming.
Later Dr. Norris would ask what she’d imagined would happen when she got to Matty’s. When Mama heard she was home, she would cross herself and praise the Lord her daughter was back for chocolate eggs and three-cheese broccoli casserole at Abuela’s with the family. She’d be the prodigal daughter returned for Easter ham. Mama would insist she attend Mass. She could practically hear the aunts whispering, Mija looks like caca. Pobrecita. What happened to her?
Something was wrong. Deep down she knew it. But she couldn’t think about that. Not if she wanted to keep driving, keep breathing. Even at two in the morning, the city kept an eye open. It yawned. It blinked bright red and yellow and orange. Gas stations and twenty-four-hour drive-throughs flickered as benign as white flies circling streetlamps in the Valley.
She exited at Main, where Santa Ana bordered the rest of Orange County. Matty and his partner, Handro, had bought a house and fixed it up, near the courthouse in the historical district, a few blocks from the public library where Bianca had gone the year before to hear Sandra Cisneros. She’d signed Bianca’s copy of Loose Woman, a dog-eared, well-worn book of poems blessed by the living author herself: ¡Write on, chica!
A few blocks later, Bianca turned right at the stoplight past the carnicería, the market with a squat merry-go-round outside the glass doors. At the edge of the parking lot, a cheery-looking Payday Loans with its green dollar symbols spray-painted onto the windows.