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  “We aren’t idiots,” I would say to Élida. “My mami and papi are as close as I want them to be.”

  At first, I hadn’t really known where to find Papi. All I had was his photo and the rich brown color of Mago’s skin, which was the color of rain-soaked earth, like his. But one day, as we were walking to the store, Mago stopped outside a house to listen to “Escuché las Golondrinas,” which was playing on the radio, and said, “Papi loved that song.” That is how I learned I could find him in the voice of Vicente Fernández. Another time, as we were walking to the tortilla mill, a man passed by us on his bicycle and we caught a whiff of something spicy, like cinnamon, and Mago said, “That’s how Papi smelled!” So I would find him in the empty bottle of Old Spice we were lucky enough to discover in a trash heap.

  It was easier to find Mami. She was in the smell of the apple-scented shampoo we asked Tía Emperatriz to buy for us. I found her in the scent of her favorite Avon perfumes I smelled on her old clients when Mago and I stood in line with them at the tortilla mill. I found the color of her lips in the flowers of the bougainvillea climbing up Abuela Evila’s house. I heard her in the lyrics of her favorite songs from Los Dandys: “Eres la gema que Dios convirtiera en mujer para bien de mi vida …” And when Abuelita Chinta came to visit us every other week, I saw Mami in her eyes.

  Whenever I would go into the little shack where I was born, I’d trace a circle around the spot where my umbilical cord was buried and think about the special cord that connected me to Mami.

  Every two weeks, when they called, I would find my parents in my grandmother’s phone. But always, those precious two minutes Abuela Evila allowed us on the phone went by too quickly. Two minutes to tell them everything we felt. So many things to say to them, but one night in August we said nothing at all. It was Mami who talked, who gave Mago the worst news of all.

  She was going to have a baby.

  “They’re replacing us,” Mago said after handing the phone back to Abuela Evila. Élida smirked at hearing the news. We went to our room, and since only a thin curtain separated the room from the rest of the house, I could hear my grandmother telling my parents how tough things were and could they please send more money. “Your children need shoes and clothes …” Abuelita Evila said.

  “They’ll leave us here and forget all about us,” Mago said as she lay on the bed. We had been at my grandmother’s for eight long months. What had sustained us through that time was the belief that our mother would be back within the year. Now, with this new baby on the way, Mami’s plans had changed. Why would she come back to Mexico to have her baby, when she could stay on that side of the border and give birth to an American citizen?

  “She promised,” Mago said. Carlos and I tried to make her feel better, yet no matter what we said, Mago was inconsolable. Almost every night, I heard her crying, and all I could do was wrap my arms around my sister and cry with her. I felt so angry at my parents. I couldn’t understand why they asked God for another child as if we three weren’t enough. I put a finger on my belly button and reminded myself about the cord that tied me to Mami. I told myself that as long as that cord existed, she wouldn’t forget me, no matter how many other children she had. But Papi, what connected me to him? What would keep him from forgetting me? In his sleep Carlos couldn’t hide his sadness, and some times in the middle of the night I’d feel something warm seeping into my dress.

  The day after the telephone call, Mago refused to go to school, and Carlos had to walk there by himself. Mago spent all day in the room we shared with my grandfather. She grabbed one of Élida’s old history books and flipped through the pages until she found a map. She kept tracing a line between two dots, and because I couldn’t read yet, I couldn’t make out what the letters said. When I asked her what she was doing, she showed me the map. “This is Iguala. And this is Los Angeles, and this,” she said as she made her finger go from one dot to the other, “this is the distance between us and our parents.”

  I touched my belly button and said, “But we’re connected.”

  She shrugged and said there was no such bond. “I just made that up to make you feel better.”

  “You’re lying!” I said. I kicked her on the calf and ran out of the room with a finger on my belly button. I hid in the shack where I was born and traced a circle around the spot on the dirt floor where my umbilical cord was buried.

  Someone shouted my grandmother’s name from the gate, and I went out and saw Doña Paula had arrived. We didn’t have running water, so Doña Paula would come every three days to deliver water to Abuela Evila from the community well. Her donkey carried two large containers on either side. Her two little boys would ride on the donkey while she walked alongside it, pulling on the reins. The older was my age and the younger was three.

  “Buenas tardes,” she said to Abuela Evila as she led the donkey through the gate.

  As always, she pecked each of her sons on the mouth as she helped them get off the donkey one by one. I tried not to look, but my eyes were glued to Doña Paula, to the way her lips pressed against the soft flesh of her sons’ cheeks, the mark they left. I thought of my mother, of the kiss she had given me the day she left, of the fact that her lipstick had rubbed off all too quickly. I tried to recall what my mother’s kiss had felt like, but I could not.

  “Look at those little jotos,” Mago said from behind me. “Being kissed by their mami.” She went back into the house, murmuring something about them being a bunch of sissies and mama’s boys.

  I stood there watching Doña Paula’s sons, thinking that there had once been a time when my own mother had kissed me, but now she would soon be leaving the imprint of her lips on another child.

  “Jotos,” I whispered under my breath. And making sure that their mother wasn’t looking, I stuck my tongue out at them.

  “Regina, tell your sister to go buy Doña Paula a Fanta,” Abuela Evila told me as I stood there by the patio. I nodded and did as she said.

  “Why doesn’t she go get her the soda?” Mago said. “It’s not like we get any of that water.” The water Doña Paula brought was dumped into the tank and used for washing dishes and for Élida, my grandmother, my aunt, and my grandfather to bathe with. If we wanted to bathe, we had to go to the community well to get our own water and bring it back in buckets. One time Mago slipped and almost fell into the well, but while she held desperately onto the rope and dangled in the air, Carlos and I grabbed her feet to get her back to the edge. We only bathed once or twice a week because it was a hassle getting the water, and since no one told us to bathe, we only did it when we felt like it. That meant we were nearly always covered in dirt and our clothes looked as if we had mopped the floor with them. You wouldn’t have known by looking at us that we had two parents working in El Otro Lado. If our grandmother hadn’t kept the money my parents sent for us, perhaps we would have been like Élida, who was always flaunting all the pretty clothes and shoes she bought with the money her mother sent from El Otro Lado, and no one would have dared to call us orphans.

  We ran to the store with an empty bottle to exchange for a new soda. When we got back, Mago handed Doña Paula the Fanta, then we watched her drink it. She had the strangest way of drinking soda I’ve ever seen. She would raise the bottle two inches from her lips and would tilt it just enough for the liquid to cascade down into her mouth. She never touched her lips to the brim of the bottle, saying that since the bottles were used again and again by the soda company, other mouths had touched the glass. She would drink half of it and then hand the bottle to her boys, who’d finish it off while she unloaded the containers and dumped the water into the tank.

  After drinking the soda, Doña Paula told her sons to go play with us while she visited with my grandmother. We loved playing in the backyard, but Mago didn’t want to play with Doña Paula’s sons that day, and I didn’t either. So they went off on their own to the backyard, and we went to the north side of the house where the alley was, and there, right by the rock corral enc
ircling Abuela Evila’s property, was a big pile of caca. We could tell whoever had pooped there had recently eaten black beans because we could see little pieces of bean skin peeking out from the caca.

  Mago yanked my arm and said, “Nena, go get me two tortillas.”

  “What for?”

  “Just do it, and heat them up.”

  I sneaked into the kitchen, being careful not to get caught. I didn’t know what Mago was up to. I ran back to Mago and gave her the hot tortillas. She jumped over the corral and scooped up some caca with a stick and buttered the tortillas with it. Then she rolled them up and went to find Doña Paula’s boys. Realizing what she was about to do, I pulled on her arm and begged her not to. She pushed me away so hard, I fell to the ground. She looked at me, and for a second, my little mother was there, worried that she had hurt me. But then the anger came back into her eyes, and she walked away and left me there on the ground. I got up and ran after her. It was one thing to call them names, but a completely different thing to feed them poop.

  “You boys hungry?” she asked. The boys said they weren’t, but Mago forced them to take the tacos.

  “We don’t want any,” they said, eyeing the tacos with distrust, as if they knew Mago was up to no good.

  She held her hand up and curled it into a fist. “If you don’t eat them, I’m going to beat you up,” she said. “I mean it.”

  “Mago, cut it out,” I said, but Mago pushed me away again. I watched in horror as she bullied those boys into taking a bite out of the tacos.

  Their eyes widened with disgust as they chewed. “What’s in them?”

  “They’re just bean tacos,” Mago said.

  “We don’t want them,” they said, tossing the tacos before running back to their mother.

  We watched Doña Paula do her usual routine—first she picked up the older boy, kissed him on the mouth, and put him on the donkey, then she bent down and picked up the other one. But this time when she kissed him, she made a face. She sniffed and sniffed and then wiped something off the corner of his mouth.

  “You smell like caca, mijo,” she said. She sniffed the finger she used to wipe his mouth and then said, “It is caca. Why do you have it on your mouth?” The little boy pointed at us and told her we had given them bean tacos. “You stupid brats, why did you feed caca to my sons?”

  We didn’t wait to hear what Abuela Evila said to her. We raced to the backyard and climbed up the guamúchil tree and didn’t come down when our grandmother called us. She stood below us waving a branch. “Malditas chamacas, you better get down right now!” But we didn’t come down. She finally tired of yelling and went back into the house. “You’ll come down soon enough when you’re hungry,” she said.

  We were there for so long Élida and Carlos came home from school. Carlos couldn’t get us to come down either. So instead, he climbed up the tree and sat with us. “Élida was right all along,” Mago said. “Mami won’t be coming back. Neither is Papi. They’re going to have new children over there and leave us here for good.”

  “No, they won’t, Mago,” I said.

  “They’ll come back,” Carlos said.

  “Why would they want us now, when they’re going to have American children?”

  Even though I was little then, I knew what she’d meant. Every time someone mentioned El Otro Lado, there was a reverence in their voice, as if they were talking about something holy, like God. Anything that came from over there was coveted, whether it was a toy, or a pair of shoes, or a Walkman, like the one Élida had gotten the month before from her mother. She was the envy of the whole colonia. Wouldn’t it be the same for my mother then, if she had a baby who was made in that special place?

  Carlos tried to make Mago laugh by telling us his favorite jokes about a boy named Pepito. He said, “One day, Pepito’s brother, Jesús, took Pepito’s leather sandals. When Pepito woke up, he didn’t have any shoes to wear to school. Pepito went from street to street trying to find his brother Jesús and get his huaraches back. As he was passing by a church, he heard the priest chant, ‘Jesús is ascending to Heaven.’ Then Pepito burst into the church, screaming, ‘Stop him! Stop him! He’s stealing my sandals!’”

  Carlos and I laughed. Mago cracked a hint of a smile, but when Carlos started on his next joke, Mago told him to shut up. The sun went down and soon the fireflies were out and about. Mosquitoes buzzed around and bit us, but it was too hard to see them and scare them off. Our bottoms were numb from sitting on the hard branch of the guamúchil tree. From up there, we saw Tía Emperatriz come home. We called out her name.

  “Ay, Dios mio, niños. What are you doing up there in that tree at this hour?” We told her what we did, and even though she tried to stop Abuela Evila from giving us a beating, she didn’t succeed.

  Abuela Evila made us each cut a branch from the guamúchil tree. She hit us one by one, beginning with Mago because she was the instigator. Mago bit her lips and didn’t cry when the branch whistled through the air and hit her on the legs, back, and arms. Carlos did cry—first, because he didn’t do anything and, second, out of humiliation because Abuela Evila made him pull down his pants, saying that if she hit him with pants on, he wouldn’t learn his lesson. As the branch whipped my legs and butt, I wailed like La Llorona herself and called out for my missing mother.

  5

  Mago cutting her and Reyna’s birthday cake

  A MONTH LATER on September 7, just as the rainy season was coming to an end, I turned five, but my birthday came and went without notice. Since Mago’s birthday is in late October, Abuela Evila said our birthdays would be celebrated together. That meant I had to wait a month and two weeks. That whole time I was angry at Mago because it was easier to take it out on her than to rebel against my grandmother’s decision. Why did Mago have to be a hot-blooded Scorpio and not an easygoing Virgo, like me? Why couldn’t it be she who celebrated her birthday early, instead of me celebrating mine late?

  Finally, one Saturday morning, my grandmother reluctantly handed Tía Emperatriz the money my parents had sent to buy us a cake. My aunt did more than that. She came home with a roasted chicken, two cans of peas and carrots, which she used for a salad, and small presents for me and Mago: shiny ties and barrettes for our hair. This was the third birthday I celebrated without Papi being there. The first without Mami.

  The cake was beautiful. It was white and had pink sugar flowers all around. My grandmother’s oldest daughter brought her children to the house, not because she cared about our birthdays, but who could resist getting a free meal and a slice of cake? Even Élida put her pride aside and asked for seconds. Not once did she try to ruin our special moment with one of her usual remarks about us being orphans. That’s what a fancy store-bought cake does to people.

  Tía Emperatriz took pictures of us cutting the cake to send to my parents. We rarely had our photographs taken, and the thought of these pictures making their way to El Otro Lado—to Papi and Mami—was exciting. I thought those pictures would remind them of us, and that way they wouldn’t forget they still had three children waiting for them back home. I smiled the biggest smile I could manage because I wanted them to know I appreciated the money they’d sent for the cake. Carlos smiled halfway. He was very self-conscious about his teeth. Back then, not only were his teeth crooked, but there was also a tiny little tooth wedged between his two front teeth. Since he didn’t want anyone to see them, he would purse his lips and smile without showing any teeth. He looked as if he were constipated.

  Mago didn’t smile. She said that if she looked sad, then maybe our parents would see how much she truly missed them, and they would come back. From that point on, she continued to look sad in almost every picture we took.

  Her tactic didn’t work. The pictures were sent, the months went by, and still our parents did not return.

  The one who did come back, however, was Élida’s mother.

  We had been at Abuela Evila’s house for over a year when Élida turned fifteen. She officially becam
e a señorita, and Tía María Félix came to Iguala to throw a big quinceañera for Élida. She arrived loaded with so many suitcases she hired two taxis to take her from the bus station to Abuela Evila’s house. While everyone greeted her and made a big fuss about her arrival, we eyed the suitcases, wondering if our parents had sent us something.

  Élida’s little brother, Javier, was six years old. He held on to Tía María Félix and when Élida tried to hug my aunt, Javier pushed Élida away and said, “No, she’s my mommy.” Tía María Félix laughed and said it was cute. Abuela Evila scolded him and said that Élida was his sister, and Tía María Félix was Élida’s mother, too. But he wouldn’t let go of his mom.

  Mago would have taken advantage of this opportunity to say something mean to Élida. But the news Tía María Félix gave us sent us to our room, where we spent the night crying. “Your mother just had a little girl,” she said. “Elizabeth, I think, is what your mom named her.”

  We lay on our bed, huddled so close together our limbs were entangled. At night, barking dogs serenaded la colonia as they wandered through the dark streets. We listened to them, watching their shadows streaming in through the small window. What’s her name? I wondered. Elisabé? I’d never heard this name before.

  “A baby girl,” Mago said, breaking the silence. And it suddenly hit me: I was no longer the youngest. Some other girl I did not know had replaced me.

  The next day all my cousins showed up to see what Tía María Félix had brought for them from El Otro Lado. We didn’t see our cousins often, but now they were all there, having come as soon as they heard Tía María Félix had arrived. We watched as she gave our cousins presents—a shirt, a pair of shoes, a toy. We waited our turn, and when the suitcases were empty, Tía María Félix turned to us with a sad look on her face and said, “Your parents sent you something, but unfortunately I lost that suitcase at the airport.”