Woman of Light (41)

The curanderas lived in a crumbling violet house with a lopsided spiked fence. Against the night, the home seemed like an extension of the clouds. Diego opened the front gate and followed Eleanor Anne as she pushed her bike to an empty area on the lawn. They shared a look before a Virgen de Guadalupe shrine. I love you, Diego mouthed and Eleanor Anne smiled, swiping her hands along his shoulders.

Inside was a dollhouse of rooms, filled with those in need of healing. They walked past a young couple in the kitchen seeking counseling on how to conceive, a day laborer in the sitting room, speaking to a young curandera about his foot warts. A rumored prostitute, Diego noted, was in the hallway, discussing something in hushed tones. The curandera Eleanor Anne had somehow found was an abuela, white-haired and patient. The home smelled of menudo, burnt cedar, incense, and church. A heavy woman of middle age with sparkling skin that looked very soft seated the young couple in a dim bedroom with a connected bathroom. She wore a huipil, the flowers embroidered in purples and golds.

“How far along?” she asked in Spanish. She bit a piece of copal between her lips, placed the amber chunk into a sahumador. Sprinkling dried cedar over charcoal, she lit the pile with a skinny match. The room blossomed in smoke. Diego translated for Eleanor Anne, who said, “Just a month or two.”

“Sí,” said the curandera. Her teeth glinted with gold caps. Along her wrists, bracelets of shells pushed into her flesh. From a high shelf, beside white votives and a San Miguel candle, she pulled down a stone metate and placed it on the ground, between her clean, round feet. The woman removed several packets of herbs from a leather pouch around her neck. Like the copal, she bit these into pieces, placing them on the stone’s flat surface. She ground the leaves into a fine brown dust. The woman stepped into the other room. Diego looked to Eleanor Anne, who seemed very scared.

When the woman returned, she had a steaming blue cup and a slim spoon. “A scoop for every missed moon.”

Diego translated for Eleanor Anne. She nodded, said she understood. She told him this twice. With a slight tremble, she poured three spoonfuls into the cup. The curandera made a drinking motion with both hands, gliding her fingers down her own throat and over her belly. When they had finished, Diego offered the woman cigarettes, two gold necklaces, and rose quartz.



* * *



—

Diego walked with Eleanor Anne to the border of her neighborhood at the edge of Park Hill. Her bicycle made turning, rickety sounds as they passed the stone mansions and vast library, the roads of Park Hill illuminated by streetlamps. They were quiet for some time. Bats flickered above them, cascaded through the air, dropped from the sky to eat mosquitoes. Reina and Corporal, Diego thought, would have enjoyed the sight. In the stark nighttime, Eleanor Anne allowed her hands to touch Diego’s side. When they rounded the corner from one block to the next, she leaned in and kissed his ear, the sound a starburst of lips. “Don’t be sad,” she whispered. “It was all we could do.”

Diego wanted to say that no, it wasn’t. He was willing to marry her, to raise their child and live in another city, a bigger town, go west to California where he’d make money from his show, could quit the factory, buy a little bungalow, and teach their daughter to dance with snakes. It was a little girl—he was sure of it. Diego was shocked at how he was already speaking of the baby as something that once was. How he wished that Eleanor Anne didn’t come from such a hateful and bigoted people. How he wished they could have their life together in the light instead of like this, alone, side by side, in the night.

“Diego,” Eleanor Anne said, “I feel strange.”

“You probably just need rest,” he said, guiding her by the small of her back.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, pausing with the bicycle handlebars in each hand. “Something’s wrong.” She let out a cry, touched her lower stomach, and bent over.

Diego took the bike from her hands, kicked up its stand. He reached for Eleanor Anne and asked was what wrong.

“My insides hurt.”

“Baby,” he said cringing at the sight of her pain. “It’s supposed to hurt. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I think I took too much. I took extra, to make sure it worked.”

Eleanor Anne shook her head with her red bob. She started to cry, thrusting herself forward from Diego’s grip, falling over the sidewalk and onto the wet grass. Diego kneeled beside her and grabbed her face with his hands. She had fainted, her eyelids fluttering between the waking world and the place she had gone. Diego called her name and lightly slapped her cheek. He hollered louder, pleaded with her to wake up, shook her arms and legs. It was then that he noticed the blood at her center. Diego lifted her dress and saw that she was bleeding badly between her legs. He wiped her blood on the grass. He lifted her head and pulled her torso up from the ground. As he began to hoist her body over his shoulder, Diego turned and saw a line of three Anglo men on the sidewalk two houses away. They were dressed nicely in black suits, drunkenly holding conversation, headed for a parked automobile. When they reached the Ford, jostled the engine, and turned on the headlights, Diego’s heart sank. It was all over.

“What are you doing over there?” they hollered. “My god,” said another one. “Look at her dress. What have you done to her?”

Diego eased Eleanor Anne down from his shoulder, sliding her body onto the grass. “I’m so sorry, mi sirena,” he said and kissed her mouth before running toward the alley, lightless and long, back to Hornet Moon.