The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 13

13

And you’re saying she looked you in the eyes,” Nena states, not quite a question.

The sock sits on the kitchen island between them, the tooth next to it, shiny, yellowish.

“She? Yes, the coyote, it looked right at me,” Marta says. She’s shaking from a mix of anxiety and excitement. She hasn’t slept. This morning, she had Alejandro drive the boys to science camp, and now finally she’s alone with Nena. She called in sick to work, something she’s never done.

“That isn’t a coyote’s tooth,” Nena says.

“What kind of tooth is it?”

“A person’s.”

“Oh, Nena, that is so gross. Why in the hell would a coyote deliver a human tooth to me in the middle of the night?”

“A long time ago, before any of us were born, I coughed up a coyote’s tooth in the convent.”

“What?”

“Madre Inocenta mixed it with herbs. When I drank it, I received the encanto we needed to make the brebaje.”

“What convent are you talking about?”

“Do you know why women went into convents?” Nena asks.

“No,” Marta says, not sure where this conversation is heading. She’s not sure about anything, not able to get her head around what happened last night. She’s achy and sick-feeling from lack of sleep, but her brain is feverish, alive, trying to make connections.

“Women from poor families couldn’t become nuns.”

“Sure,” Marta says, not wanting to talk about nuns. What she’s interested in is how she said hoo hoo hoo to herself and then the coyote arrived. She knows the sequence of events, but she can’t quite get herself to believe that she was the cause. If she made this happen, what else might she be capable of? Even the question makes her afraid. She doesn’t want to call any more wild animals to her. She has her family to keep safe. But she can’t help but feel a little excited by the possibilities.

“Families had to pay a dowry so that their daughters could enter a convent. Some convents grew very rich from these dowries, and they invested in ranches and vineyards. The really wealthy ones owned mines. Silver. Tin. Inside the walls of the convent, the women were in charge, but their power came at a high price. Once the women took their vows, they were completely cut off from their families. They lived in the convents the rest of their lives. The only time they left was when their coffins were taken to the graveyard.”

“Don’t nuns take care of the poor? Teach in parochial schools, that sort of thing?”

“You’re right. Today the nuns live completely different lives. I’m talking about the convents from the last part of the Spanish Empire. 1792 to be exact.”

“And how would you know about this?”

“I was in a convent in 1792.”

“I see,” Marta says. She doesn’t. “Nena, that’s not possible.”

“Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

“That’s the exact definition of impossible.”

“I was a girl. I was suffering. I called for help, and the witches came. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had Rosa, but I also wouldn’t have lost her. Everything that happened was because of my call.”

Marta has to be the rational one here. For the world to function, we have to agree on certain things, one being that time works in a certain way. It moves forward, never backward; it passes at a constant speed, even if an hour at the school play is much longer than an hour in the courtroom. But it’s not possible to move backward in time. Of this, anyway, Marta is sure.

“What you’re describing is magical thinking, believing that what you imagine is manifested in the real world,” Marta says.

“Yes, that’s what I’m talking about, magical thinking.”

“I mean it’s a logical fallacy.”

“Not true at all,” Nena says. “Before I was taken back to that time, I’d been hearing a hum for months. Only when I arrived in the past did I understand that the hum was the singing of the aquelarre, and that the song had been passing through the open door.”

“Sorry, I don’t know that word. Aquelarre?”

“It’s from the Basque language originally. When I got home from El Paso del Norte, I looked it up in the Spanish-English dictionary. It means the witches’ sabbath. The aquelarre was the field where the women met with the black goat. The word in English is coven. I joined a coven.”

“In 1792,” Marta says.

“That’s right.”

“But if you were in a convent, how in the world were you able to have a baby?”

“I got pregnant outside the convent.”

“Did you have Rosa when you were in the mental hospital?” Marta asks.

Nena shakes her head.

“You had her in the eighteenth century? That’s what you’re telling me?” Marta asks. It’s too hard to believe, even if the thing with the coyote and the tooth had happened, which it did.

“Luna and Olga didn’t understand either. They were ashamed of me. To them it didn’t matter how I became pregnant, only that I was unwed.”

“That can’t be why they put you in the hospital.”

“It wasn’t because I was pregnant, but because I told them the truth. I shouldn’t have told them anything. Even when I was young, they didn’t know what to do with me. They didn’t believe that La Vista sent me information. They didn’t like that I saw things that no one else did, and they didn’t understand that trying not to see or hear took a lot of energy. I wasn’t smart in school. I wasn’t a cheerleader or on the speech team or in choir because it took all I had to stay where I was, to not be taken away in my mind by La Vista’s messages. I had to try to push it all away so I could be like everyone else. But sometimes the voices came through anyway, and I told people what I heard. So when I said I’d had a baby in another time, Luna and Olga saw that as proof of what they’d always suspected, that I was a real loca.

“In the hospital, they gave me injections. I slept all the time. When I woke, they gave me more shots. I wore my nightgown every day because I wasn’t allowed to have any other clothes. I was in that hospital so long that nightgown wore itself down to rags, and then it fell off me. When it was gone, I was naked. For weeks. Maybe more. I ate my dinner off a metal tray they put on the floor. I remember it all.

“I know where and when I was when I had Rosa. A mother remembers such things. And I left her there,” Nena says, the pride and guilt and hurt in her eyes a challenge to Marta.

Marta takes this all in, and it changes how she sees Nena. As a young person, Nena went through terrible trials. It’s cost Nena a great deal to tell Marta this. But even though Nena may be convinced she’s telling the truth, that doesn’t mean everything she’s said is grounded in reality. Marta has to figure out how Nena’s past explains her present, and what this has to do with the tooth, with her.

“What else can you tell me about Rosa? Do you have any documents for her?”

“There’s no birth certificate, or anything like that, if that’s what you’re asking for. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.”

“What happened after you gave birth?”

“Sister Benedicta sent me away, and she kept Rosa for herself. She always hated me. She finally had her revenge.”

“Benedicta was one of the nuns? That’s who you saw with Rosa after the fire?”

“Yes, and Sister Benedicta is why Rosa couldn’t come through the wall, she was holding her back. That’s why I need your help. The only way to pull her through is to get the encanto for the brebaje. Even then it won’t be easy to go through the door. It’s nearly impossible to move a body through time and space.”

“I would think so,” Marta says. “Even if matter and energy are the same thing.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“The theory of relativity. Einstein.”

“Hmm. He must have been a brujo.”

“I don’t know about that.” Einstein being a witch is a funny thought. “What’s brebaje?”

“When I sang the encanto for the brebaje the first time, the animals heard me. They came to their deaths willingly. We ate them and then we possessed their power.”

“What did you do with the power?”

“Do? We were the power. I understand that now. That’s why Madre Inocenta was addicted to eating it. There are no doors when you and La Vista are the same thing, and when there are no doors, you can be everywhere and everything at the same time.”

“If you know the secret to bringing Rosa here, why haven’t you made the stuff?”

“Because I can’t. Not anymore. Not since I was in El Paso del Norte. When you’re young, you’re blind to what you’re capable of. It’s only when you’re older that you can look back and see how you could have used what you had to make the impossible happen.”

“I hear you, Nena, I truly do.”

“No, you don’t. You still believe in your own limits. Remember, the coyote brought the tooth to you, not me.” Nena looks around the kitchen, then back at Marta. She stands up, quick, clapping her hands together. “Let’s go to Juárez.”

“What? Now?”

“The Cuauhtémoc Market was built on the site of the convent. The encantos of the aquelarre still vibrate underneath it. We’ll take the tooth with us, and we’ll pray for La Vista to come and show us the path,” Nena says. She slips the tooth into a Ziploc snack bag and thrusts it at Marta.

On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso.

Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, and women from Juárez would knock on Olga’s door, looking for work. The women crossed the railway bridges, or they waded through the water of the river, finding a hole in the fence, walking across the highway. They went door to door, asking to do the ironing, to scrub the kitchen floor, to wash the windows. Olga never denied them, and the women would leave the house with food, with bills pressed into their hands as she whispered a quick prayer, dios la bendiga.

The clinic Marta’s parents ran in California served migrant workers, people who picked fruits and vegetables, moved irrigation pipes, drove tractors. For them the crossing was way harder, the cost enormous, the journey brutal. It wasn’t something to be done often or easily.

In El Paso, the situation was different. It was almost like the border wasn’t there, como que no existe, people used to say. Nobody thought anything about driving to Juárez for lunch and back. Marta remembers arriving at the US border on the way back from lunch at the old market. Luna would say “American citizen” to the guards, and they’d wave her through, without even glancing at her driver’s license. Things have changed, especially after 9/11, when the checkpoints were fortified, the lines of cars and people grew longer, and passports were scanned by computers only to be scrutinized again by unsmiling ICE agents. It was the drive back home that made the journey to Juárez not worth it for Marta most of the time, though more recently, it’s been fear. It hasn’t seemed safe or smart to go, even if many other people do it every day.

Today, Marta’s calculations have changed. “There is no such thing as safe,” Nena said to Marta on the day of the fire. Marta understands better why Nena would think that. She was orphaned as a child, she lost her daughter and then she lost her freedom.

Marta’s taking Nena to Juárez because she has the overwhelming sense that if she doesn’t, something bad will happen to her own family. What this bad thing is, she doesn’t know, but the fear is real, bitter in her mouth. There’s no way to use reason to take that fear away. Logic died when the coyote brought the tooth. Marta doesn’t know the rules of this new world she’s entered. She’s not sure Nena does either, but Nena’s all she’s got by way of a guide.

At the end of the bridge, Marta turns toward the old plaza, making her way to Avenida Benito Juárez, a clean street lined with quartz-embedded sidewalks that glitter under the bright summer sun. The buildings are low, none over two stories tall, almost all of them painted a blinding white, so that the whole street appears lit from the inside. They drive past the old casinos, the jewelry stores, the pharmacies, the Kentucky Bar, where the margarita was supposedly invented, where Marilyn Monroe once bought a round of drinks to celebrate her divorce from Arthur Miller, and where Marta threw up on her shoes one night, when she and her friends from the tutoring program went out.

Even in the heat, people are walking in and out of the stores, making the center of Juárez busy and social in a way that El Paso hardly ever seems to be. It’s odd to think that people have been kidnapped right here, shot in the street. At the city’s lowest point, those with the money moved north of the border, as far away from the violence of the cartels as possible. Not that violence is the beginning and end of the story of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Cristina’s family lives on both sides of the border, and for them the crossing is more inconvenience than deterrent. For both individuals and businesses, the border creates opportunity.

Soto Logistics only exists because there’s a border, and Soto makes his money because his company knows how to deal with the complicated rules of shipping from Mexico to El Paso. Marta wouldn’t at all be surprised if he pays bribes in Mexico, or worse, so that he makes as much money as he can. Soto can afford to hire the best attorney in El Paso, get her case dismissed with a flick of his wrist. This is what money and influence buys, the ability to evade justice.

If Marta had access to the pure power that Nena claims the nuns had, she would use it to get at Soto. She’d cast a spell to make Soto liquidate his companies, divide the money among the women he’s hurt.

“Are there spells that can make someone do something?” Marta asks.

“I know what you’re asking, mija.”

“You do?” Marta asks, surprised.

“You could leave him,” Nena says.

“Leave who?”

“Alejandro.”

“Nena, why would you say a thing like that?” The last thing Marta wants to do is leave Alejandro, and she doesn’t need to cast a love spell on him.

“For too much of life we’re asleep. Don’t you give me that look. I’m not criticizing. You do good work, helping people. You have a beautiful house. You have two handsome and smart boys. But being comfortable isn’t the same as being happy.”

“I don’t disagree with you there.”

“The problem is that no matter what you do, magic always complicates. You try to make one thing go in a certain direction, but the energy goes where it wants. It’s like when Se?or León went to Se?ora Beatriz to try to get Daisy to fall in love with him. Se?or León ended up dead, with his pants down and his thing out, sprawled out on the floor of his store.”

“Where to even start with that!”

“You must understand, Marta. La Vista isn’t a tool, it’s a force. An energy that enters you and uses you, not the other way around. If you’re an artist or a musician, and you accept the energy of La Vista, you can end up with a painting or piece of music. But if you fight the energy, try to push it in another direction, then bad things happen. You start drinking too much, or you hurt yourself in other ways, and all of a sudden, La Vista stops visiting you, poof! You’re left with nothing. La Vista is pure energy, not good or bad, not love or hate. It’s creation and destruction in both, half-and-halfsy. If you’re a volcano in the ocean, then La Vista might make you erupt, throwing lava and ash everywhere, killing people and fish. But even as you’re causing destruction, you’re also giving birth to a new island. This kind of energy is too wild to be used to control anyone or to change their mind. That I learned the hard way.”

“Nena, just to be clear, I wasn’t asking about love spells. There’s no one I’m interested in. It’s Alejandro or nothing for me, and we’re good. Better than good. Sorry I asked.”

“I’m glad you understand,” Nena says, leaning forward, looking out the windshield and narrowing her eyes, scanning the street.

“What are you looking for?” Marta asks.

“The old El Paso del Norte. There are still a few buildings standing from that time.”

“What was it like?” Marta asks, curious, even if she still doesn’t fully believe Nena traveled in time. A coyote is one thing. There are lots of coyotes in the hills. And La Vista in Nena’s definition sounds like nature. Marta believes in the power of nature. Time travel is something else entirely. Marta knows what impossible means, even if Nena doesn’t.

“The acequias, you know, irrigation ditches, brought water from the Rio Bravo into town. Trees grew in the courtyards and streets, making the pueblo shady and cool, an oasis in the desert. The de Galvez family had brass candlesticks, a dozen iron pots, platters from China, steel knives from Spain. You probably learned this in school, but there was a law that kept iron things from being made in Mexico or the other Spanish colonies. All iron goods had to be imported directly from Spain.”

“I didn’t learn anything like that in school. We hardly learned about Mexico, even though California used to be part of Mexico, same as Texas. The victors really do write the history books, don’t they?”

“When I came home, I spent time in the library trying to learn and understand where I had been. Families had one pot, maybe a lock for a single chest if they were lucky. Furniture was built without nails. Cloth and thread and needles were hard to find, too. I didn’t realize any of that when I was in the convent. It wasn’t until I was outside that I learned that some people were so poor that at remote estancias, they would run away when visitors came, embarrassed because they were naked, their only set of clothes worn to dust. When I lived in the convent and in the de Galvez house, I was the richest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and when I’m back in Ciudad Juárez, I remember all of that. I would have loved to live here for the rest of my life. With Rosa. With her father. That was the life I wanted.”

“Oh, Nena. I don’t know what to say. That breaks my heart.”

“I’m just telling you the truth.”

“In the mental hospital, you said your clothes fell apart. You were naked.”

“That’s right. What are you asking?”

“Nothing,” Marta says. But she’s disturbed. Here’s another story that could be interpreted in more than one way, the rational explanation jerking Marta back to the path of reason. The problem is that path now seems too narrow. “Where should I park?”

“By the cathedral. Let’s get something to eat. It helps to have a full stomach when La Vista comes. We’ll have burritos upstairs at the Cuauhtémoc Market.”

The mere mention of burritos makes Marta’s stomach grumble. She skipped breakfast after her sleepless night, and now it’s coming on lunchtime. In Juárez, the burritos aren’t the massive, overstuffed logs like the ones in San Francisco, they’re made with small, soft white tortillas, and the perfect amount of filling, just a few spoonfuls of beans and beef and cheese. She could eat one, wash it down with fizzy water in a glass bottle.

“There. Pull in there,” Nena says. “I don’t mind walking a few blocks. It’s good for me to move my legs.”

Marta turns off the car and steps outside. Her skin, chilled from the AC, prickles in the heat. It’s like she’s being defrosted, warmed to the center of her body. The California of Marta’s youth was cold, with cloudy skies, gusts of sea-chilled air. Every time she got off the plane in El Paso, walking onto the jetway, the air-conditioning too weak to combat the heat seeping in through the cracks, Marta felt like she could relax, finally as hot as she longed to be. She has a similar feeling when she crosses to Juárez, the air distinct in a deeply comforting way, the buildings, the colors, the light all Mexican. It’s miraculous how total the change is across a border that, like all borders, is an imaginary line.

Nena walks slowly but steadily, Marta at her side, past the Calle Mariscal, where the brothels were in the olden days, and maybe still are—Marta won’t be asking anyone—and into the square, crossing behind the cathedral, past the Palacio Municipal.

Marta has already sweated through her clothes when they reach the market. It’s a handsome building, if worn, with white stucco walls, arched windows, and a tile roof. Marta and Nena enter through the wide doors, past the stalls. Heaped piles of green medicinal herbs lie on tables, making the narrow passages feel like a hedge maze. The ladies at the stalls sell a variety of products, including aerosol spray cans with baffling names, like “Double Fast Luck” and “Scent of the Black Chicken.” A red can features a drawing of a snarling dog, with the words “Arrasa Con Todo” circling the top. “Get Rid of Everything.” How’s that supposed to work? Marta wonders. Do you spray yourself? Or the things you want to get rid of?

At the end of the passage, a big stall features Santa Muerte?related items. Saint Death. Not Marta’s favorite. The Santa Muerte skeletons hold scythes, shawls draped over their skulls and cascading to their ankle bones, like spooky Virgen de Guadalupes. Many of Marta’s clients keep little altars in their houses, and some pray to Santa Muerte. She tries to wrap her head around the impulse to worship death. She thinks about the Santa Muerte prayer card that fell out of Sofia’s purse. She pictures Sofia in front of an altar in the yard, sacrificing a chicken to Santa Muerte, sending a curse to punish Marta for supposedly ruining her life.

“Why are you wasting time looking at those?” Nena asks, tugging at Marta’s sleeve. “C’mon.”

Marta and Nena pass tables piled with marigolds, boxes of loose roots and seed pods, potted plants with delicate green leaves and tiny yellow flowers, candles for love and remembrance, teas, vegetable compounds for the “nervous system,” cheap guitars hanging from pegs. Shoved underneath a folding table, Marta spots a cardboard box overflowing with hairy roots, the word “peyote” scrawled in marker on the side. Some stalls sell the piedra blanca that Nena kept piled in the brass bowl in her dining room.

Rarámuri women from the Sierra Madre Occidental sit on stools, dressed in bright skirts and headdresses, as they sell really witchy things: dried skate wings and—Marta notes with alarm—skunk skeletons, their black-and-white tails still attached.

Eye of newt , Marta thinks, gawking at these fantastical items for sale in modern Mexico. A whole market devoted to the occult! In El Paso there are little botánicos in strip malls, but no equivalent of this sprawling and macabre market exists on the American side of the border. That this place is here because the convent occupied the same corner can’t be a coincidence. Is that how Nena came up with her story?

Nena has stopped and is in conversation with one of the vendors, a woman with white hair and shockingly blue eyes. Nena holds two bundles of herbs in her hand. She shakes the one in her right hand, and then holds it up to her ear. She does the same thing with the herbs in her left hand. Nena digs out a dollar bill to give to the stall-keeper, and then she hands the herbs to Marta, saying, “It’s hard to find these. Let’s go upstairs.”

Marta stuffs the bundles of creosote and sage in her bag, their leafy scent catching at the back of her throat. As she shifts things around, she glimpses the tooth in its plastic bag. Like it’s a magnet, Marta’s finger shoots out, touching the tooth through the plastic, stroking it. Weird, Marta, weird. She snaps her bag shut.

On the second floor, she follows Nena to a restaurant stall overlooking the square. After they sit down on plastic chairs, the waiter approaches, setting two menus down on the plastic table.

“Dos. Con carne y queso. Y dos Cocas,” Nena says.

The food arrives impossibly fast, the waiter already back to the table, holding two plates in one hand, two Coke bottles between the fingers of the other.

“Eat,” Nena says, attacking her burrito with neat little bites, and before Marta’s had the chance to swallow a single mouthful, Nena has finished with hers, licking the juice from her fingers. Marta’s hunger from earlier is gone, replaced with a suspicion that if she tried to eat, she’d immediately hurl. What’s going on?

Marta looks down at her plate, where the grease from the beef and the cheese has started to congeal. The burrito quivers, and the meat makes a noise, not mooing exactly, but giving her the picture of a cow in her mind’s eye. The humming image spreads, and Marta feels something—La Vista?—gently touching every part of her body from the inside, pulling her senses out the window and on down to the street. She hears the vendors calling out, she hears the honking of horns, she smells elote cooking on charcoal. She’s pulled thin, a taffy of sensation, stretched so tight that she feels she might snap. She hears the whinny of a horse, she smells raw sewage and burning mesquite, she shivers in the crisp air of winter. How is it possible that she’s cold? Marta sees buildings of raw adobe, yellow-brown, not plastered or painted, a city of mud bricks. She hears a man laughing, a baby crying.

Marta watches as Nena tips her bottle into her mouth, swallowing the rest of her Coke, then claps the bottle down on the table. She burps. Or rather, the ninety-something-year-old Nena burps. At the same time, Marta is peering at a young woman with black hair and dark eyes, her skin unlined, her lips full. Her nose is too big, her cheekbones prominent, and her face has an asymmetry distinct from the soft prettiness of Olga’s or the sophisticated sharpness of Luna’s. She looks dangerous in the way that only the very young can, unaware of what they can do to themselves and to others.

Marta holds on to the arms of her chair.

“I’m feeling funny, Nena. Worse than funny. I’m seeing old adobe buildings.”

Nena leans in. “You are? What else?”

“Am I going to faint?”

“Not if you eat the burrito.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

Marta forces herself to take a bite, and she comes back into her body, slopping into it, aware that it’s a bag of flesh and bones. She takes another bite of her burrito, trying not to choke. When she swallows, her vision clears. Her butt is on the plastic chair, her feet on the ground. She’s herself again, but barely.

“What the hell was that?”

“Vibrations.”

“Of what?”

“Different times. I wish there was a different word. Vibrations sounds so woo-woo, so New Age, como I’m a woman who wears crystals.”

“I thought you liked crystals?”

“Yes, but only because they’re pretty. I don’t use them in my work. The better word is singing. Everything sings. The water in that cup, the ring on your hand, the paving stones in the square. Rocks have a very slow heartbeat, so it’s a lot harder to hear their songs. The singing has gone on forever and will never end, and if La Vista lets you, you can hear the echoes of the vibrations from the past and the future, though they can’t tell you everything,” Nena says.

Either Marta’s gone insane, or what’s happened is as Nena said—La Vista has allowed her to hear the vibrations of other times. Marta longed for something like this as a child, and then she forgot that longing, buried it under the day-to-day of work and family. Marta may not have been asleep, but she wasn’t fully awake either. “Is this what you expected would happen by coming here?”

“I have something to confess to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I want to see my daughter again.”

“Yes, Nena, I know that.”

“I mean that I would do anything to see her.”

“Of course you would.”

“I’m sorry I brought you. I don’t want to hurt you. You’re as important as Rosa is.”

“I’m confused, what’s changed? I really do want to help however I can,” Marta says, which is true, and true in a new way. Nena has been proven right, and Marta wants to see what else La Vista can show her. It was an odd feeling to be outside of her body like that, but strange as it was, she wouldn’t mind doing it again. Maybe more than that. She needs to do that again.

“If you saw the real power of La Vista, the millions of eyes and the feathers and fur and teeth of it, you’d be very afraid. You’d understand what I’m saying. I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

“I’m listening. I’ve been listening.”

“I would sell you to the devil to see Rosa again.”

“Nena!”

“I’m being very serious. I don’t like it. I’ve been too hasty again. I wanted to fix something that can’t be fixed, and now I’m afraid that I’ve made things worse for you. I should have been happy with what’s here and what’s to come.”

“To me it seems like we’ve crossed more than one bridge today. If La Vista is so dangerous that it should be avoided, well, it’s too late. La Vista has found me, and now there’s no hiding.”

“Yes,” Nena says, shaking her head. “Yes, I saw La Vista on your face. You’re right. I wanted to give you a chance to back out, but I waited too long. God help us and protect us. I need to be there for you and your family.”

“You know I like to make plans, but I’m working in the dark here. I need you to tell me what happens next.”

“Let me think,” Nena says, reaching for Marta’s Coke. She takes a generous swig, then thunks the bottle back down on the table. “Get the tooth out of your purse.”

Marta digs into her bag and finds the Ziploc.

“Hold it in your hand.”

Marta doesn’t like to touch the thing, light and smooth, with a line of yellow plaque along the top edges.

“Tell me if you see anything.”

“I see a tooth,” Marta says.

“Don’t be smart. What else do you see?”

“Nothing, Nena, I really—”

And then Marta’s snatched away again. She’s in the desert under dark skies, rain clouds above, a strong wind moving across the mesa, making the bushes shiver. Lightning flashes down in yellow zigzags, like in a child’s drawing. Rain falls in sheets. There’s grit in Marta’s eyes, sand and salt on her tongue. The rain falls harder, pushing her out of the desert, and back to the market.

When Marta looks down at her hand, the tooth is gone.

“Where did it go, Nena?” she says, bending down to look under the table.

“La Vista came to me again, and strong,” Nena says in an excited voice. “What did you see?”

“The desert.”

“And rain?”

“Yes, it looked funny. Cartoony. Flat.”

“That was Tlaloc. The rain god. One of the pictographs at the Hueco Tanks. We’ll go there.”

“And?” Marta asks. “What’ll happen there?”

“Rosa will come to us.”

“You want to go now?”

“Right now.”

Marta’s phone pings. She takes it out of her pocket to see a message from the science camp. Today was only a half-day session, and Marta’s late to pick up the boys.