David looked at Luz. He turned his face to the side, balanced in sunlight. “It’s not the same, now is it?”
“Fingers are fingers.”
“You’re too young, Luz.”
“I’ll be eighteen in a few months.”
David said her name once more, this time longer and with the tone of pity. “Luz.”
“And something else,” Luz said. “I can help you. Imagine if you spoke some Spanish. You could get more clients that way.”
David hesitated. He swallowed and glanced around the market.
Luz lowered her voice. “Since Diego’s been gone, we’re struggling. I don’t want to be evicted. I don’t want to come home and find our things in piles.”
“I don’t want that, either,” he said. “But I need someone who knows what they’re doing.”
Luz then thought to lie, recalling a memory she had once seen in a dream, the reason he had to say yes. She was surprised and not ashamed when she actually did. “My auntie told me to ask you.”
David’s expression changed, cheeks twisted, jaw crunched—relent made visible across a face.
THIRTEEN
La Llorona
Denver, 1922
When Maria Josie first came to Denver, she stayed in a women-only boardinghouse on Market Street where the bed came down from a slab in the kitchenette and all night long her head was beside a hissing radiator painted gold. The room was dark without a lamp, and Maria Josie watched train lights crawl for hours across the walls. The boardinghouse had many rules, no laundry in the sinks among them. By the week’s end, everything she owned was filthy—her floral dress and trousers and all her heavy underclothes.
Maria Josie stood in the fourth-floor hallway at an open window as wide as she was tall. She squinted across the city, searching for a creek. There had to be something more manageable than the Platte, where the rapids tipped white over leveled boulders. The city’s grid was quilt-like with squares of slim-necked factories that coughed smog into the horizon. Some streets were paved while others were plains of dirt. Trolleys and wagons and brand-new automobiles rolled over Curtis Street. Maria Josie pointed to an area where the city almost vanished into a haze. The sky was changeable, sunlight streaking in abundant columns through gray and pewter clouds. Maria Josie made her right hand into the shape of a pistol and surprised herself as she shot. There, she said, a cool breeze pressing against her face.
Through sidewalks and alleys, Maria Josie walked in her black nightgown with her satchel slung behind her. Her floppy hat was pushed high on her forehead. The creek weaved through a low section of the city, toward the edge of a Westside neighborhood, in a meadow called Sunken Gardens. It reminded Maria Josie of an enormous bedded grave. Cottonwood trees grew along the banks in a solid arrangement, their leaves upturned like the hands of beggars, open to the sky and waiting for rain. The clouds blackened at the eastern edge of the city, uphill and upwind, a long way off. She’d have time. It could be hours before the storm hit.
As she neared the creek, the air thickened with moisture. Larks and magpies stepped over sticks while others flew overhead, arrowed in black. Maria Josie headed for the water, walking in tall grass. The soil moved and shifted from a heavy dirt into a fine sandy floor. She pushed through low-hanging branches, and the creek revealed its glinting and dark path. Water ran quickly, making a sound like wide-skirted ladies shuffling in rows. The creek was speckled in patches of sunlight and shadowy spots and under the rapids lay a tossed street sign and the wedge of a dismantled wooden fence. The banks were small, steep, and covered in chokecherry trees. The air smelled of motor oil and dying leaves. Maria Josie searched out an area where the water pooled. She’d need to wash her dress and underclothes first, hang them to dry, change, and then move on to her nightgown.
She came to the underbelly of a stone bridge. It looked as though it had been built at the turn of the last century, whole blocks of stone were missing like gapped teeth. The bridge had a high sloping arch and what appeared to be a flat, rail-less surface. It was a transport bridge, from one neighborhood to another. An adolescent boy and his father stood above Maria Josie on the bridge’s western edge, casting their fishing lines in slow lashes. They spoke a language Maria Josie didn’t know. It didn’t sound like Spanish or English or the Indian languages she was used to in the Lost Territory. Since coming to Denver weeks earlier, she’d heard Italian and French. Maybe it was Greek. That could be it. Then, with further consideration, she decided it was Greek.
Sunlight polished grassless sand behind Maria Josie. The best I can do, she decided, dropping her satchel onto the ground. Beneath the bridge, foaming water lapped into an alcove of sandstone boulders while a thicket of cottonwood seeds clung together in the stream like spider eggs. Smacking the water with her floral dress, Maria Josie pushed hard into the cold liquid, pleading that the man and his son wouldn’t see her washing like a pauper in a creek. Shame. She had rarely felt it before. Now shame controlled her entire life.
Maria Josie leaned over the creek and gazed at her rippled reflection in the water. She hated her curled brown hair, her full breasts and dull black eyes. She took stock of her body, the unfamiliar meaty thing it had become. The pain in her womb had eased, but her breasts ached as if they had been gutted and stuffed with stones. Her body disgusted her. Why couldn’t she separate from it? Maria Josie then thought of the man she’d once loved, their last dinner together. He was a German named Hauenstein. He sat across from her at the long oak table with his knife and fork gracefully working red potatoes. He was much older than Maria Josie, and when he’d first shown interest in her at the market on Sundays, she’d brushed it off as politeness, a certain type of kindness shown by Anglo men toward pretty Mexican and Indian girls. But months stretched on, and Hauenstein cornered her with compliments, firm hands resting against her back, brushing her skin as he reached for jars of molasses, sacks of flour. He’d slipped vials of gardenia perfume into her dress pockets and rolled coins into her satchel, until, finally, she swam to him across the river dividing his section of Saguarita from hers. “He didn’t want to marry me,” she told a kind stranger years later, “when I told him about the baby. He put something in my food, a poison.”
Above Maria Josie, on the bridge, the man and his son continued to speak their language. It seemed they were in an argument. The young man was mouthing off, smoking tobacco and allowing his legs to dangle over the bridge. His fishing line trembled. Careful, La Llorona will get you. As a child, Maria Josie was terrified of the Weeping Woman, who flew through moonlight along rivers and lakes, snatching naughty children and drunk, cheating men. Once, during a long summer, as she swam the river Maria Josie thought she glimpsed the water witch, all in black, a Spanish veil shielding her face. She was hunched over, climbing the side of the rock wall like a broken insect. Impossible, Maria Josie thought, and swam faster, so hard it seemed her heart would stop beating.
Maria Josie worked her dress with a bar of Ivory soap. Her arms hardened and deadened in the freezing water. She imagined she was a machine, thrusting water back and forth, nothing inside her to ache—only gears to rust, trivets to repair. She finished the dress, laying it flat across a sun-worked rock. The creek made an enormous sound, echoed between the banks. The water was brackish and reflected the evening sun. There were many white gnats. Maria Josie could clearly see the man and his son on the bridge. The father had gathered their tin pails and poles and carried these things to the creek’s banks. The son walked sullenly behind, his chin tucked toward his chest. Leaning onto her elbows, Maria Josie pivoted her legs, one tucked behind the other, and watched. The stone lining the creek was a smooth gray-blue, pretty like shadows. The father and son were happy in the new spot, and a cottonwood tree released seeds like snow.