Mama peeled off Bianca’s sweater, fingertips pressing the wet stains across her breasts, below each nipple. “Why didn’t I drag you away from there, mijita? He hurt you, didn’t he?” Mama gave guilt a voice. It hurt Bianca to hear.
She wanted to tell Mama to stop pressing into her stomach, stop prodding her; she tried moaning, but Mama only kept pressing her backbone, her abdomen, her thighs. Each kneading of Mama’s hands into her skin throbbed, but not in the healing way of a sobradora giving a massage to get the blood flowing or cupping at the lungs to break up a phlegmy cough. No, Mama’s hands were like knives now. Everything hurt. When Mama reached Bianca’s buttocks, Mama called to God in Spanish. And Bianca knew. Mama had found the blood.
“Pick your sister up, mijo. We need to take her to the hospital.”
“Mom, we shouldn’t have left her there . . .” Matty’s voice shook as he lifted Bianca off the couch. It scared her.
While her family carried her, wherever they carried her, she dreamt.
She hovered on a bridge, dirt-covered and crossing a concrete canal. Dippy Duck, the baseball-capped mascot to the irrigation district, stood at the other side calling: “Play it safe. Be cool, swim in a pool. Stay out, stay alive.” She had swum in canals though, as a girlchild, used her blue-ribbon swim-team skills in the precarious ditches in the countryside.
Water rushed through the canal. Instead of carrying twigs and leaves, tiny corpses. Dozens of them. Tiny faces mired in scum, sealed in the ditchwater, swallowed by its rushing force. She lingered, transfixed by the mud caked in their hair, their toothless gums. Green, grimy liquid pruning their fingers.
From the bridge, she sat motionless in the truck. Gabe’s pine-green truck on the bank between the ditch and stacks of sweet-smelling hay. They were a depression in the brown earth.
He reached across the center console and caressed her thighs, as she sat cross-legged in jersey-knit sweats. She recited John Donne.
Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hopes the world can show
A fitter love for me.
He buried his face in her hair and began sobbing. She called him a sissy la-la for all the times he’d told her to stop crying.
She was a stick. Lying in the mud. Beside tiny bodies. Drowned.
Mama had never told Bianca the story of La Llorona. She’d never sent her to bed frightened on purpose. Instead, they’d said their bedtime prayer together: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Guard me Jesus through the night, and wake me with the morning light. Mama had omitted the most insidious parts of the prayer. She’d protected Bianca that way, deleting the dangers.
Bianca didn’t learn until later: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Gabe had taught her that, like La Llorona. Gabe and his mama, Esme.
Her stomach growled. She was waking, or coming back.
When Bianca was a girlchild, Mama had read her the gospels. A child comes back to life there too—through the miracle of belief. How crystal a thing, belief. How shimmering.
Bianca thought of Jubilee.
She opened her eyes. Hospital room. Clock on a wall. Wires and machines. A small salmon-colored pitcher on a tray.
“Mama?”
A monitor beeped.
“Mama? Matty?”
She pulled herself into a sitting position. She was dizzy and dehydrated still, that cotton on her tongue and lining her throat, but less fuzzy. Less prickly. She could keep her eyes open and focus on the objects around her. Balloons and a bouquet of white daisies. A card with a ballerina bear. She wore a hospital gown.
She tried her still-numb feet, pressing them against the linoleum floor. It was cold, but the jolts of pain were gone. It was like waking from a dream, unable to tell the difference between the dream and reality—how a young woman awakes believing for a moment she can fly. It isn’t until the sleep crust wears away that the wings retract into the shoulder blades.
Mama told her later she’d been unconscious for two days, three hours, and twenty-seven minutes. Bianca had asked how many rosaries Mama had prayed. Mama hadn’t kept track.
The urge to pee stung her bladder. The catheter pinched. Instead of pushing the red call button for a nurse, she called to Mama, but before Mama came into the room, Bianca remembered Jubilee. She needed her baby.
“Mijita? Baby girl?” Mama hassled through the doorway, a portrait of concern, and Bianca thought of the Bible verse Mama had taught her, how an angel had troubled the water. And how whoever stepped first into the troubled water was made whole.
In the room, Mama’s gaze landed on Bianca sitting up in bed, and her face relaxed. She sighed and pressed her hand to the rosary around her neck, whispering, “Gracias a Dios.” Mama had lost more weight since Bianca last saw her. She looked good, but tired. Her jet-black hair streaked golden around her face, covering any gray. But her face was Oil-of-Olay smooth. If she had wrinkles, they were well-concealed. So different was this thin, angular woman from the round giantess Bianca had grown up with.
“You’re awake,” Mama said, and she thanked God.
But her arms were empty.
“Where’s Jubilee?” she asked. Bone tired. Bianca was still bone tired. And troubled. The water was still troubled.
“Who?” Mama’s forehead creased. There they were. The wrinkles.
“Jubilee. My baby.” Bianca felt cold. Wings retracted too soon. Or, cut off. She wanted to return to the place between wake and sleep.
Mama pursed her lips, tilted her head. The expression that flickered across her face was inexplicably sad. She looked at Bianca and said, carefully, “You didn’t bring your baby.”
Bianca scanned Mama’s face, waiting for the punch. “Yes, I did. I was holding her when I got to Matty’s. Where is she?” She stood now, stepped away from the bed and faltered, her legs buckling. A humming in her ears. Someone was singing. Or a memory of a song. “Matty?” Come away to the water.
Mama reached out, supporting Bianca’s weight. “Let me help you.”
Down by the water.
“Help me find Jubilee. Matty had her.”
The milk of Mama’s eyes juddered sharply, muddying at the center. Like Bianca was a girlchild again and had done something terribly wrong. But Bianca couldn’t focus on that.
“Matty?” Bianca called again, louder than was normal for a hospital. She didn’t care. Down by the banks of the hanky panky where a bullfrog jumped from bank to bank. A nurse rushed in, ordering Bianca back to bed, checking her monitors, catheter, IV drip. Bianca wasn’t pacified. “Matty!”