The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 26

26

When they come to, the first thing Marta notices is the gap in her mouth.

“What happened to your tooth?” Nena asks.

Marta walks to the mirror in the front hallway. Pulling up her lip, she sees a scabby hole where her right canine should be. She must have lost the tooth on the journey home. Marta pictures the coyote holding the sock in its mouth the night of the fundraiser. The tooth traveled from one time to another, but Marta doesn’t care to spend any time thinking more about this mystery. It’s not just her tooth that’s missing. La Vista is gone, no longer in her or around her.

Back in the kitchen, Nena’s spooning the burnt insect stew into a plastic container, snapping the lid in place.

“What are you going to do with that?” Marta asks.

“I’ll keep it with my things, so nobody accidentally eats it.”

“Is somebody going to intentionally eat it?” Marta asks, though she knows the answer. If eating it would bring back La Vista, Marta would down the whole container.

“This kitchen is very dirty,” Nena says, but she sounds cheerful, annoyingly so. Marta thought she’d be more broken up about leaving Rosa for a second time.

“The first time you made the brebaje, didn’t you have a song to put things back in place? The song that made you fly? Why can’t we do that?” Marta asks.

“You must feel it, the aquelarre is closed now,” Nena says, and of course Marta feels it. That’s the problem. Nena used Marta, just like she said she would. Nena must have known that once they made their journey to see Rosa, La Vista would be taken from Marta. Sister Benedicta had warned Marta not to think she could control La Vista. The cruel joke is that there’s no longer anything for Marta to try to control.

“Alejandro and the boys will be home soon, and we’ve got to get this place cleaned up,” Marta says, her skin prickling with anxiety and anger. She pulls cleaning supplies from the pantry. The cabinets, walls, and floor are covered in insect gunk, and it smells like rotten eggs in the kitchen. The big cutting board is so charred it’s completely ruined. Marta picks it up, anger helping her heave the thing close to her body. She carries it out to the garbage bin on the side of the house, where it lands at the bottom with a dull clunk.

“Good morning, dear,” Marta hears. Mrs. Price from next door is in her side yard, smoking, one hand encased in a yellow dishwashing glove, the other holding a teacup that she drops ashes in. “You were having a choir practice last night?”

“Excuse me?”

“I heard the singing. What would you call that kind of music?”

“A waste of time.”

“Oh my,” Mrs. Price says, stubbing out her cigarette. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Marta doesn’t care if Mrs. Price thinks her rude for walking away without responding. When Marta comes back inside, she closes the doors and windows to the outside, turns on the air-conditioning.

“Children who are adopted think that they’ve been abandoned. They think they’re unwanted,” Nena says, answering a question Marta hasn’t asked. “I had to see Rosa to tell her I loved her. To tell her that I didn’t leave her on purpose. And Sister Benedicta was right, I couldn’t stay there, I belong here with you. I need to—”

“You did everything you could to get to her,” Marta says, not wanting to hear Nena’s justifications.

Nena opens her eyes wide, the bitterness of Marta’s tone hanging in the air between them. In a strained silence, Marta and Nena scrub the insect tracks from the floors and the fronts of cabinets. All the surfaces in the kitchen are covered in a layer of ooze, and it’s satisfying to get down to clean wood, tile, stone, even as the kitchen reeks of ammonia, so heavy in the air that Marta’s eyes burn.

“I’m glad of one thing,” Nena says, breaking the silence. “Sister Benedicta wasn’t out to hurt Pablo. All that worry for nothing.”

But it wasn’t for nothing. If Marta hadn’t been so worried about Pablo, she wouldn’t have sent Alejandro and the boys away, she wouldn’t have sung the encanto, Nena would never have seen Rosa again, but Marta would still be in La Vista. The midday sun spills in through the windows, the summer heat beating its fist on the glass.

“I don’t think Sister Benedicta’s the monster you made her out to be,” Marta says, wanting to provoke Nena.

“She’s not. She spoke the truth when she said I had to come back here. And I know she did what she had to, to keep us all safe. She never wanted me there, and for good reason. When I was a girl, I prayed for something to take me away from the pains of my life, and Madre Inocenta heard me. She sent Sister Benedicta to bring me to El Paso del Norte so I would make the brebaje. Once Madre Inocenta had it, she didn’t care what happened to me. I paid the price for her greed and mine. I thought I could mold the power of La Vista to my will. I was a fool then.”

“But isn’t that how you had Rosa? By using your magic?”

“And I am glad for it.” Nena smiles. “But I know now that La Vista was guiding me all along, not the other way around. I’m not saying you should close yourself off to La Vista, Marta. You know as well as I do that it will find you. I’m saying the opposite.

“When I got back from the convent, I grieved the life I had lost, I grieved Emiliano and Rosa, I grieved Carmela, I even grieved Eugenia and Sister Benedicta. I vowed to close myself off from La Vista forever. I tried to shut my mind to it with drink and men. But this was an illusion, too. I had to learn to live in the wilderness of La Vista.”

“But aren’t you curious how it works? Like how La Vista was passed down through the generations? Why it came to you when it did?” What Marta really wants to ask about is herself. How things turn out the way they do. Why she lives in El Paso, why Alejandro. Why not New York, some other man, some other life? How did she receive this inheritance of La Vista and why, and where has it gone? She longs to know if it will ever come back. For a little while, everything felt possible.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. About how La Vista is passed down. I need to apologize to you, mija,” Nena says. “When I told you I’d do anything to see Rosa again, I wasn’t lying. I saw at the Cuauhtémoc Market what was happening to you, but I still made you go to the Hueco Tanks, and once we had the song of the aquelarre, I didn’t say a word even then. I made you sing the encanto for the brebaje, and I made you eat it.”

“You knew La Vista would leave me.”

“No, I’m telling you, it hasn’t. It’s always there, whether you feel it or not. You had a few days where you were in it completely. But everything ends, and everything begins, over and over forever,” Nena says.

But Marta isn’t interested in platitudes. She wants La Vista back. She’s grateful when she hears the whirr of the garage door, the slamming of car doors, the door into the front hallway being flung open.

“We saw a snake,” Rafa shouts as he runs in. He slips his backpack off his shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.

“A real rattlesnake, with a rattle,” Pablo says, following Rafa into the kitchen. A rubber bat falls out of his pocket.

“It stinks in here. Nena, come look at the things we got from the gift shop at Carlsbad Caverns. We bought you a sweatshirt. It has a drawing of stalagmites on it,” Rafa says.

Marta picks up the bat, setting it on the counter. The boys fly out of the kitchen, and Nena follows them at her own pace. The door to the boys’ room slams shut. Alejandro comes in, a duffel bag hoisted over his shoulder.

“What the—” Alejandro says, his eyes widening as he drops the duffel on the floor. “What happened to your mouth?”

“I lost a tooth,” Marta says.

“Where is it? We should push it back in.”

“It’s too late for that, and anyway, I don’t have it,” Marta says.

Alejandro moves across the kitchen quickly. He grasps her face with his hands, firmly, easing open her jaw to peer into her mouth. He walks his hands down her arms, her torso, like he’s checking for broken bones. He fishes a penlight out from the junk drawer and looks into Marta’s eyes. She likes how Alejandro touches her, with skill and care, the certainty of his training in the quality of his touch. She wishes he could lend her some of that professional certainty. Marta doesn’t think she can win the Soto case without the help of La Vista.

“There’s nothing wrong with me other than the missing tooth,” Marta says.

“I know you better than that,” Alejandro says, holding her arms and searching her eyes.

“The best I can calculate, I lost the tooth when we were coming back.”

“From where?”

Marta doesn’t know how to say she’s afraid that with La Vista gone, she and Alejandro will go back to the way they were, too busy, not connected. She wishes that she’d told him about La Vista earlier. Now there’s no way for Marta to explain anything to him. She can’t sing him any encantos, not even the song of the aquelarre. That’s left her, too.

“What I mean is I slipped while getting out of the pool. I landed on my mouth and knocked the tooth out. I didn’t think to push the thing back in. I just threw it away.”

“Oh,” Alejandro says, shaking his head, like he’s as dazed as Marta feels, like he’s also trying to shake off the hangover of La Vista. “Beth took over my rounds yesterday, but I have to run to the hospital tonight. I’d say you should come with me, but the ER will just tell you to go to a dentist. I’ll probably be home late. No need to wait for me for dinner.”

At dinner, the boys notice the missing tooth. Marta explains that it fell out, which they accept. They’ve lost many teeth.

“I think you should probably keep your mouth closed until it grows back,” Pablo suggests.

The first thing the next day, Marta swings by her dentist’s office right as it’s opening. The dentist takes pity on her, fashioning a temporary flipper that attaches with metal clasps to the teeth on either side of it. In the hand mirror the dentist gives her, Marta’s smile appears more or less normal.

Walking back to work, Marta’s surprised to see Jacqui in front of the office building, sucking on a vape pen. She waves at Marta, exhaling a white plume that smells of toilet cleaner.

“I was hoping to find you here,” Jacqui says. “I thought I’d thank you for changing your mind about Benjamin Soto.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s giving a big donation to the hospital. He says it’s because of you. Six figures,” Jacqui says. “A naming opportunity. Not enough money for a wing of the hospital, but we can make it work for the room where she received chemo. What do you think, the Silvia Soto Suite? Something like that. I’ll buy you a drink in San Diego to celebrate.”

Marta rides the elevator up to the office, seething as the floors flick by. She knows Soto is trying to get under her skin, the way she got under his. He’s throwing his weight around in the way only a man sure of his position can.

“Nena called me and told me what happened,” Cristina says, right when Marta gets off the elevator. “Same thing happened to Hugo’s tooth. He was such a quejoso about it for so long that he had a choice, he could get it checked out, or I’d go stay with my sister, and good thing, because his molar was cracked, all the way down to the root! They yanked it out right then and there.”

“Yes, same, cracked to the root,” Marta says distractedly. “Where’s Linda?”

Linda comes out of Jerome’s office. When she sees Marta, she stops, motioning her in.

“I still haven’t received a text of the recordings from Sofia. Did she send anything to you?” Marta asks Linda as she follows her into Jerome’s office.

“We did receive one recording,” Linda starts, her eyes darting to Jerome and then back to Marta.

“Oh, good,” Marta says, but she is unsettled by the air in the room.

Jerome leans forward. “The recording is of you.”

“Me?”

“Saying that you’ll lift a curse. I don’t understand, Marta, that doesn’t sound like you. You can’t threaten clients like that. Even if you’re joking, it sounds bad.”

Marta’s scalp tingles, her face hot with shame. She’s never been more embarrassed in her life.

“You’re lucky Sofia didn’t go to Soto or his lawyers. You’d be facing an ethics complaint with the bar now. She came to Linda instead, and from what Linda says, boy was she freaked out, even more afraid of you than Soto. Soto gave her money, but he’s been threatening her and her family. Sofia’s smart. She knows Soto won’t stop. She said she’d rejoin the case as long as the silver tongue didn’t come back, whatever that means.”

The collar of Marta’s shirt is tight around her neck. She’d thought she had La Vista’s number, her string of victories at work proof that she had aligned herself in the correct way. She’d been drunk from the gifts that La Vista brought. This is what Sister Benedicta was warning her about. She had thought La Vista would keep on being her friend; she did not understand La Vista’s uncaring nature, its endlessness. Marta hadn’t understood her own capacity for cruelty.

“I wasn’t myself when I threatened Sofia. I promise you, it won’t ever happen again,” she says.

“Good. Because I’m retiring at the end of the year, and you’re my pick to take over the firm.”

“I didn’t think it was possible for you to retire.”

“The boss told me I had to,” Jerome says. “Patricia wants to move closer to the grandkids. And what can I say? I’m tired, Marta. I’ve had a good run, but now ay te wacho.”

Jerome has been Marta’s boss for eighteen years. She’s been with him more waking hours than she has with Alejandro. This is everything she’s wanted for the past few years, and yet she can’t imagine the practice without Jerome, her friend. She thought she’d be happy when this day came.