The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 9

9

If you hate it, we don’t have to stay for long,” Marta says to Nena. “But Alejandro was nice enough to set this visit up, and we don’t want to disappoint him.”

“We must never disappoint the great Dr. Torres,” Nena says.

“No, we mustn’t,” Marta says, feeling disloyal even as she laughs with Nena. Marta is looking forward to her date with Alejandro in the morning.

At Los Pi?ones, Marta and Nena are greeted by the director, who hands them a key and a map with the path to the open casita traced in yellow highlighter. What deal did Alejandro make to get them this special treatment? Marta finds herself oddly turned on by his show of power and privilege—it was Alejandro’s confidence that first attracted her to him—but she’s also irritated on Nena’s behalf by his presumption.

Alejandro certainly wouldn’t want to live here. The hallways are too brightly lit, and the place smells like a hospital, with an odor of bleach and beef broth. A plastic Christmas wreath hangs in the hallway, either six months too late or too early. The art on the walls could be that of a primary school—painted paper plates, origami cranes strung on fishing line.

On the way to the casita, they walk past the rec room, where music is pumping, a disco ball swirling bubbles of light through the glass wall and out into the hallway. Nena stops, staring into the room. Women dance, wearing sparkly hats, a fedora glittering with rhinestones, a baseball cap bejeweled in electric-blue plastic crystals. A woman leaning on a walker sports a hat with cartoon cats outlined in glitter glue. A towering woman in a hip-length fur wears a cowboy hat decorated with the Texas flag.

“I wanted to talk to you about Rosa again,” Marta says. Earlier, at the office, she’d called a friend in social services, who’d had some ideas about where to begin looking for old records. Marta’s glad to be alone with Nena to broach the topic.

“Luna loved dancing so much,” Nena says. “You’ve heard the story about the broken leg and the cast, haven’t you?”

“Once or twice,” Marta says. “What was Rosa’s date of birth?”

“Let’s go in. I want to dance.”

“Did you hear me?” Marta asks, not understanding why Nena was so insistent on talking about Rosa but is now suddenly clamming up. It hurts Marta’s feelings, and it makes her want to win Nena’s confidence back.

“Luna sent us a sign from the other side,” Nena says, gesturing at the dancers.

Marta hates talk of signs. “What’s she telling us?” Marta asks.

“That we need to dance,” Nena says, going into the room.

“You both need hats,” the teacher says to Marta and Nena, hurrying over to a box on the table next to the punch, returning with a glittery red beret for Nena and a gold baseball cap for Marta. And then before Marta can get her bearings, the teacher has started the music again, “The Electric Slide” blaring through the speakers. Marta has trouble keeping up with the instructions, surprised that though the other women have at least twenty-five years on her, they can all do some version of the steps, and far more gracefully than she can.

They stay for the Hustle, the Macarena, the Chicken Dance, the Cupid Shuffle, and Marta’s surprised to find that she’s having fun. Nena, her face fixed with determination, wheels around, leans back, kicks out her leg a few inches off the floor. The class ends with a honky-tonk song accompanied by a routine that Marta suspects you’d do in a roadhouse. The woman in the fur whoops and smacks her butt.

“Punch and cookies on the table,” the teacher says when the song is over.

“I got warm from the dancing,” Nena says, fanning herself with her hand, glowing. Marta’s hot, too. She’s glad Nena suggested they go in. Luna would have been ecstatic to know that Marta was dancing; Luna used to always tell Marta that she didn’t need to be so serious, like that was something Marta could change about herself. Anyhow, Marta could be serious and fun, couldn’t she?

“If you lived here, I’d come to this class every week with you,” Marta says. It seems that it’s only since Olga and Luna have gone that she feels like she can really get to know Nena. She wonders if Nena has been holding back on sharing her witchy side with Marta again until her sisters were gone, and she was safe from the threat of being put back in an institution. Marta’s not yet convinced that the sisters didn’t have reason to hospitalize Nena.

The woman in the fur has appointed herself the server of the punch, and she hands Nena and Marta paper cups.

“I wear my coyote because it gets so cold in the refrigerated air,” the woman says with a thick Southern accent, theatrically closing the front of her fur coat and shivering.

“And who are you, honey?” the woman asks Nena. “Did you just move in?”

“This is my great-aunt Nena. She’s just visiting,” Marta says.

“Well, we’d love to have y’all join us here. We keep ourselves real busy,” the woman says, waving her hand at a bulletin board with an oversized calendar of the month’s activities pinned to it. Tai chi. Cookie class. Daily prayer group, one Catholic and one Christian, which Marta considers an odd distinction. Bridge twice a week.

“I’ll tell you what I would never do,” Nena tells Marta. “The quilting circle.”

“Why?”

“I hate sewing,” Nena says quietly to Marta, in stronger tones than Marta would have expected. There’s a story there. Nena has a million stories. But the one Marta’s interested in most now has to do with her daughter.

“About Rosa—” Marta starts again.

“Let’s go see the casita,” Nena says. “So that we can say we did it.”

Walking down the hallway, Nena grabs Marta’s forearm, clamping on to it. As they progress, Nena eyes the floor like she’s on the lookout for the wax. They leave the main building, heading down the pathway that leads to the casitas.

It’s hot and very dry outside. Sconces on the walls and lights planted in the dirt shine brightly on the concrete path. Cactuses and creosote bushes in beds of rock line the walkway, straight lines only, no steps up or down into the houses, the doors wide enough for wheelchairs. Los Pi?ones is high enough up the mountain that the setting sun seems to be hovering directly across from where they are, painting everything in between a rosy red: western El Paso, the Rio Grande, the ramshackle houses of Juárez, and the Sierra Nevada of Chihuahua. It’s a beautiful night, and when Nena squeezes Marta’s arm, they don’t have to say anything to understand each other.

The casita is less inspiring. The main room stinks of paint, the walls an off-white color Marta finds depressing, physically depressing, like there’s a giant hand squashing her down. The Formica in the kitchenette is fake granite, plasticky and cheap. There’s a two-burner cooktop, but no oven. A sink, a small refrigerator, and a narrow dishwasher round out the amenities in the kitchen. The most you’d want to attempt would be scrambled eggs. The tiny living room area isn’t furnished, but you could fit in a petite love seat and a coffee table.

Nena walks past Marta and into the bathroom. Marta follows her. There’s a walk-in shower with a safety bar on the wall. Next to the toilet is a bar, too. Nena flushes the toilet. She turns the lights on and off, runs the tap.

“I’ve always liked the smell of fresh paint,” she says.

“Oh, Nena,” Marta says, Nena’s tone reminding her of Rafa on his first day of kindergarten, how he’d straightened his back and said, “It’s OK, Mama, you can leave me now.” Marta doesn’t want Nena to have to be brave for her. Outside, she hears the yip yip of coyotes echoing in the hills, a lonely sound, the sound of hunger.

“Nena, why don’t you want to talk about Rosa?”

“You aren’t ready yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why don’t you let me help you for once?”

“With what?”

“Soto Pecans,” Nena says.

“How do you know about the Soto case?”

“I looked at the papers on your desk.”

“You really shouldn’t do that, Nena, there are privacy issues. I could get sanctioned by the bar for something like that.”

“How would anyone know? Olga won’t tell.”

“Olga?”

“You know she always knew everything about everybody, how they were related and all that stuff that I wasn’t interested in. What’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Olga the ghost? Olga of Nena’s memory? “You called her up on the phone?”

“You’re making a joke, but you know that’s not how I talk to my sisters.”

Marta talks to them, too, but not in the way that Nena means. Marta imagines Luna walking into the kitchen now, in high heels and a tight red dress that slinks down her narrow hips, shaking a long cigarette out of her leather case and flicking open her gold lighter, bending into the flame. Marta sees Olga right behind her in a suit, a string of fake pearls, pantyhose. Marta imagines her shaking her head at Marta, No, don’t do it, don’t encourage Nena . The eight-year-old in Marta’s brain pushes her way to the front.

“What did Olga say about Soto?” the girl asks.

“There’s always been a connection between the families. Papá grew up with Sotos. Our families even knew each other way back when they settled the Do?a Ana Bend land grant. Up by Mesilla.”

“Settled?” That word! And Marta doesn’t like to think about being connected to Soto by family or friendship. Nena’s recitation of who’s related to whom sounds much more like Olga than Nena, and Marta is again struck by a discordant trill in her body, her rational side bucking at the thought that this could be possible, the other part of her leaning in to hear what Nena has to say.

“A long time ago, when the tíos Agripino and Hernán finally died, the Sotos bought Montoya Brothers trucking. It became Soto Trucking. Your grandfather serviced the Soto trucks in his garage. A lot of his work was with Montoya Brothers trucking, both before and after it was sold.”

Marta tries to remember her family history. When her grandfather came back from the war, Olga found him a job with her uncles’ trucking company, which—and this is the new bit for Marta—was later bought by Benjamin Soto’s father. Soto’s money comes from this company, now called Soto Logistics, not from the pecans. Soto’s trucks work in a pretty narrow niche, transporting industrial goods from the maquiladoras in Greater Juárez and then across the border, either to the train station or to other trucking companies that then move the cargo throughout the rest of the US. It’s a big business, giving Soto the funds he needs to buy influence, to evade justice, to play whatever dirty tricks he wants to play.

“So, Grandpa worked for the Sotos? How bizarre is that?” Marta says.

“You know how things are in El Paso. Everyone is connected somehow.”

“Right, everyone is connected,” Marta says, imagining the lines drawn between Rosa and Soto.

“Your grandma was friends with Silvia Colón. They were classmates at Bowie High. Silvia married into the Soto family. The family eran conocidos, people knew who the Sotos were. They had a big house in Sunset Heights. It must have been a big change for Silvia, and lucky for her. If a family has money, then they can help their children, and their children can help their children even more, and it means that each next generation is richer, like your generation.”

Nena’s mention of Silvia Soto flips a switch in Marta’s brain. She remembers stopping at a farm stand, a little wooden barn on the side of the road south of town on the way toward San Elizario. Marta remembers Se?ora Soto wore a skirt suit like Olga’s. She perched behind the cash register, reigning over the simple room, making a show of throwing in a bonus with Olga’s purchase, a bag of candied pecans that Marta and Juan shared on the car ride home. Somehow Marta hadn’t made the connection.

“Did Olga have anything to say that could help my lawsuit?” Marta asks. “Or did she just want to chew the fat about old times?”

“You don’t believe I talked to her,” Nena says, her voice shaking with what sounds like anger. Marta shouldn’t have said chewing the fat. She wasn’t making fun of Nena. Now she’s landed herself where she was before, with Nena not trusting her.

“It’s not that I don’t want to believe you, it’s that I can’t. It’s not in my constitution.”

“Like you have a contract with yourself?”

“I wasn’t thinking that kind of constitution, but sure,” Marta says, tickled. But she’s also still offended that Nena won’t talk about Rosa. “What did you mean when you said I wasn’t ready?”

“Rosa can’t be found in the way that you’re talking about. If you really want to help, you have to admit that La Vista is in you now. You have to let La Vista show you the path.”

“How would I do that?” Marta asks, surprised by the equal measures of fear and eagerness within her as she waits for Nena’s answer. Marta wants to be the sort of person who is ready for everything. Hasn’t she lived long enough and done enough that she is prepared to handle hard things? She wishes she hadn’t said the thing about her constitution. It’s more complicated than that. Marta is skeptical. And she’s curious. Marta isn’t na?ve enough to think that she knows everything. But Marta sees clearer than ever what happens to people like Nena. They are disbelieved, institutionalized, made to live on the margins of society. Marta doesn’t want any of these things for herself, no matter how strongly she feels drawn to Nena and her special way of living. Marta’s warm, her skin buzzing.

“Do you remember when we had that talk at Luna’s Christmas party?” Nena asks.

“There were lots of Christmas parties at Luna’s.”

“You’re right. So many parties. That was her life. Do you remember the bonbons her maid used to make?”

“Now, those I remember,” Marta says, along with all the other Christmas treats bought and made, the sopapillas and the little round almond tea cakes dusted in powdered sugar, the tamales of cheese and rajas, the gorditas made by the nuns at the Loretto convent and school. She remembers the tall silver foil Christmas tree and the luminarias that lined the granite walls of the neighborhood, glowing in the dark, meant to light the way for the magi to find Jesus, but what they really lit was a path to a family party, a house full of cousins and their cousins, a wealth of family that Marta didn’t have in California. Marta remembers all that, but not any particular conversation with Nena.

“Think back to when you were thirteen.”

“I’d rather not,” Marta says, cringing.

“Please try,” Nena says. “It snowed that night. Your brother Juan slipped and broke his wrist.”

“Oh,” Marta says, and then there she is, back in that magical time of year in El Paso, the huge star on the side of the Franklin Mountains lit up, the air chilly, scented with woodsmoke, Luna’s house loud with music, the kitchen hazy from Luna’s cigarettes, the women trading chisme, laughing, the men in the other room, drinking beer, the cousins and uncles of Marta’s mother’s generation acting like teenage boys, boasting about killing rattlesnakes in the irrigation ditch, sneaking over to Juárez to watch the bullfights, teasing Chuy about the time he lost control of his Impala and it ended up balanced on the low wall on Scenic Drive, miraculously not tumbling down the cliff, how did you manage to do that, pendejo? Marta had needed to pee, and the powder room and the bathroom off Luna’s room were occupied. Marta found her way to the back of the house, to the guest room, where Nena sat on the edge of the bed.

Marta had the impression that Nena had been waiting for her.

“I sat next to you, and you took my hand. You held it like you were taking my pulse,” Marta says, and she can feel the hum of her blood now, the slow and steady beating of her heart as she reaches back into the snowbank of memory. “Your eyes were closed, and when you opened them, you looked up at me and said, ‘Yes.’?”

“That’s right. And then what happened?”

“I got scared. You weren’t there. Behind your eyes, you were gone. I ran out of the room. What did you mean when you said yes?”

“I saw Rosa that night, too,” Nena says slowly. “Not like the other day. It was just a flash that night. Right after I saw her, you came into the room. I held your hand to see if I could feel La Vista in you.”

“And could you?” Marta’s pulse is beating erratically now, like she’s swimming at a meet. She doesn’t know what she wants Nena’s answer to be.

“The two times Rosa came to me, you were there, too. I know it in my heart that you are the one who will help me see Rosa again before I die. You’re one of the Montoya women who has the gift. The curse. Whatever this is that makes us who we are.”

Marta’s breath catches, but she steadies herself. She has to be reasonable.

“I know who I am, Nena. Whatever it is that you have that takes you out of yourself and lets you see something different, I don’t have it,” Marta says, thinking whether she wants this thing that Nena claims she has. Not really. The vacant look Nena had that Christmas had scared her because it seemed like Nena was gone in a way that meant she wasn’t coming back. This kind of look must have compelled Luna and Olga to put Nena in the hospital. Marta doesn’t want this for herself. “This conversation makes me worried.”

“I understand. I’ve been trying to get you to move too fast,” Nena says. “But soon La Vista will make itself known in a way that you won’t be able to ignore.”