The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 21

21

A flash of lightning brightens the kitchen, a clap of thunder following right after, making Marta jump. Through the glass doors at the back of the house, she watches giant raindrops strafe the surface of the pool. That’s a relief anyway. Marta hadn’t realized that she’d been waiting for the storm to start.

This storm is vastly larger than the one she saw in the courtroom earlier in the day. When Marta moved the little cloud and it rained on Judge Sullivan, he ruled in her favor. At Sofia’s house, she made a threat, vague, but very much intended, and Sofia’s tongue turned into a hunk of silver. Now Sofia has promised to give Marta evidence that could make Soto settle. If La Vista has given Marta these powers, she’s curious what else she can do. She’ll get on the phone to donors to the law firm, sure, but there are quite a few other things Marta would like to fix in the world, bigger things than funding for her nonprofit.

“Can I have a snack?” Pablo asks from the big table, where he’s drawing with Rafa and Nena.

“I’ll help you make quesadillas,” Marta says. Her children don’t care that she’s a powerful lawyer witch. That’s OK. Everything’s OK right now, except for how buzzy she feels, electricity running between her skin and her muscles.

Pablo scoots a stool up to the counter, banging the old box grater down on the cutting board. He pushes the whole giant block of Monterey Jack against the side.

Rafa comes into the kitchen and sits on a stool next to his brother. He starts kicking the cabinet, hard, thump, thump, thump. Marta always hates it when he does that, but with La Vista’s currents running through her, the thumping makes her heart jump in time.

“If you don’t stop doing that, you won’t be allowed to watch a TV program after dinner,” Marta says.

Rafa stares at her, considering. Thump.

“I’m going to make a flan for dessert,” Nena says, getting up from the table.

“Do I like flan?” Rafa asks.

“It has a caramel sauce.”

“I’ll help you,” he says, sliding off his stool. Marta won’t tell him that flan is slithery, a texture he hates.

Pablo lines up the tortillas, carefully mounding cheese in the center of each. Nena moves around the kitchen, assembling the ingredients for the flan.

Marta oils the comal, putting it on the stove to heat up. When Marta cooks the quesadillas, she takes care to make some of the tortillas crispy around the edges the way Pablo likes them, while keeping others soft, the way Rafa prefers his.

“Dedos,” Pablo commands as Marta takes the first batch off the comal. Marta cuts the quesadillas into strips. “Dedos” is the word that her mom used, fingers. Olga, too. Marta slides the dedos onto a blue platter, then takes one for herself.

Pablo licks the grease off his own fingers. “Tell the joke about the ear.”

“Again?” Marta asks.

“Tell the joke. And I want some milk,” Pablo says.

“Say please.”

“Please. Tell the joke.”

Marta pours milk into plastic cups, setting one in front of each boy.

“There was once a lawyer who was defending a man accused of biting off another man’s ear in a bar fight,” Marta says.

“What’s a bar fight?” Rafa asks.

“A fight.”

“But it was in a bar? Were people drinking beer?”

“The important thing,” Marta says, “is that the lawyer was a very young man, very inexperienced. He’s sure he’s going to win, and he starts cross-examining the witness for the prosecution.

“?‘Did you see my client fight the alleged victim?’ he asks.

“?‘No.’

“?‘Did you see my client bite the victim?’

“?‘No.’

“And then, sure that he’s cornered the witness, he asks, ‘Then how do you know he bit his ear off?’

“?‘I saw him spit it out.’?”

Milk shoots out of Pablo’s nose. Marta mops the milk up with a dishrag. The corners of Rafa’s mouth twitch up before he pulls them back down again; he’s not going to give Marta the satisfaction of a smile.

“That’s funny,” Nena says. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“The lesson here is that in court, you don’t ask questions you don’t know the answer to,” Marta says. This is something most lawyers have learned the hard way, Marta included. Information is power, and the way to get information is to do your homework. This is how Marta has organized her work life, to be super prepared. Or it has been up until now. Now with La Vista, it seems all Marta has to do is think about what she wants, and then the world shifts to meet her needs. She could worry that it’s been too easy, but maybe what’s been happening is water flowing down a hill, nature following its path.

Quesadillas and cut-up carrots and celery are dinner, easy, quick. Marta retreats into her office while Nena and the boys slurp flan and watch TV together. It’s nice that Nena’s there to keep an eye on the boys. She even puts them to bed.

Alejandro arrives late, takes a shower, and when Marta goes into their bedroom to check on him, he’s in bed, glasses on, eyes closed, a book about sailing facedown across his chest. Marta removes his glasses, slides an envelope in the book to mark his place, and turns out his light. She looks at his small, dark mouth, his bushy eyebrows. She wants to put her hand on his cheek, run her fingers through his hair, down his neck, and then—Marta shakes her head. She can wait until the morning.

Marta changes into her bathing suit. The water of the pool glows green, and it’s quiet out, the air freshened by the rain, velvety with its retained heat. Marta swims a handful of laps, slow and easy.

When Marta swam on teams in childhood and all through high school, her hair was always brownish-green and hay-like, the pool a second home. In college, she wasn’t good enough to compete, but most mornings, she woke in the dark and hurried to the gym under the low skies of winters in western Massachusetts, past naked trees, through the snow and cold, to open the door to the pool and be hit with the smell of chlorine, the warmth of the humid air. After her swim and shower, Marta would race back to the dorm, the strands of wet hair falling out of her wool cap, freezing as she ran to her breakfast of oatmeal and burnt coffee. It was on those cold mornings that Marta longed for El Paso the most, dreaming of heat and blue sky and sun, remembering what Nena had told her when she was eight, that she would end up living in El Paso in a house with a pool, with kids, a husband. And now here she is, in that pool.

El Paso has always been magical for Marta, even without La Vista. In El Paso, Marta was allowed to play with water guns. In El Paso, she went on black widow spider hunts, Marta and Juan stealing matches and napkins from Olga’s kitchen, smuggling them out to the horse shed at the back of the lot, trapping the spiders under glass jars, burning them alive. The taste for smoke still hovered inside her now; there were so many spiders in her life that she wished to trap.

They had picked burrs off tumbleweeds and cracked them open like oysters, eating the tiny seeds. At Chico’s Tacos, the tacos came three to an order, crispy tortillas rolled around mashed up beef, placed on top of a puddle of a spicy red tomato sauce, covered with little squiggles of grated orange cheese. After mass, they’d go to Luby’s, a cafeteria very different from anything called that name in California. Marta loved moving through the food line, picking up the flatware that came rolled in a smooth cloth napkin, watching the man in a tall paper chef’s hat cut thick slices of prime rib sitting under an orange heat lamp. Marta always had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans, even though she hated having to choke down the slimy things before being allowed to eat dessert, selected from the tiers at the end of the food line, the bottom level of the rack featuring puddings and bowls of red Jell-O cubes topped with whipped cream, the top, slices of cherry, apple, and pecan pie. In El Paso it snowed in the winter, and in the summer, it burned.

El Paso was magical because it was where Marta’s mother was from, and where she and her cousins had fled, like characters in a fairy tale leaving to seek their fortunes. They went to the best schools they could get into, becoming doctors and lawyers and teachers and social workers. In the El Paso they grew up in, there were signs in store windows that read “No Dogs or Mexicans.” Once in the first grade, when Chuy spoke Spanish in class, his teacher taped his mouth shut. Anglos held all of the elected positions until not that long ago. That was the word used, Anglos, meaning not Hispanos, an old word that used to have meaning. Since then, things have changed in El Paso, and the old prejudices, though still there, are only part of the mix of cultures. Everyone speaks a little Spanish, and there are lots of completely bilingual people, nobody is just one thing, and this mix is why Marta lives here. Marta is a mix herself, the witchy bit of her only just now stirred in, the thing she’s been missing. She’s in love with Nena and Alejandro and the boys and El Paso, the place that has brought her to La Vista.

Rafa and Pablo open the sliding glass door from the living room, dressed in their bathing suits.

“What are you doing out of bed? Get back to your room right now, you two.”

“We heard you swimming. We wanted to get in the pool with you,” Rafa says, and before she can tell him no, he jumps in, swimming toward her. He doesn’t have a bad stroke, but his arms are too cramped, his movements jerky. He needs to learn how to open up, stretch out. When Marta was on the swim team, she never imagined, couldn’t have imagined, that she’d be where she is now and that she’d have a son like Rafa. Pablo enters the water more gingerly, walking down the stairs, paddling over to her.

When Pablo reaches her, he winds his arms around her neck.

“Mamá, I need to tell you something.”

“Yes?” Marta asks, guessing he has some small sin to confess.

“I saw the old lady in black.”

“What old lady?”

“She said she was Nena’s sister.”

“Where did you see this person?”

“In our room. She said she had a message for you.”

“Tell me,” Marta says, putting her arms around Pablo, squeezing him, moving her legs to keep them both afloat.

“She said it in Spanish. ‘Ven aquí.’ That means come here,” Pablo says.

Imperative. Informal you. Come here. A command, not a request.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She sang a song,” Pablo says.

“He’s making it up,” Rafa says, swimming next to Marta. “The other day we heard you and Nena talking about nuns. He’s so dumb that he doesn’t even know that sister means nun,” Rafa says. His face is twisted in anger.

“Out of the pool,” Marta says, taking an arm of each boy, practically dragging them out. She wraps a beach towel around them both, rubbing the towel up and down their arms.

“Ow,” Rafa says.

Nena warned Marta that La Vista was dangerous. Marta didn’t think to be afraid of this, that Sister Benedicta would come for Pablo. Marta will kill Sister Benedicta if she comes anywhere near her son again. How dare she use Pablo as a messenger.

Come here.

Marta could ignore Sister Benedicta’s call. Marta doesn’t have to tell Nena any of this. Marta could stay right where she is, happier than she’s ever been.

A ladybug lands on Pablo’s shoulder.

“If a bug walks on you, it’s peeing on your skin,” Rafa says.

“Get it off me!” Pablo yelps.

As Marta reaches up to brush it off, it disappears into thin air.

“Sing it to me,” Marta says to Pablo, and he brings his mouth to her ear.