Llorona's Heir

The crying started at 2:17 a.m., right when the city was supposed to be asleep. I had just clocked out of Mrs. Delgado's house in Boyle Heights. Twelve hours of turning her in bed so the sores wouldn't open, of crushing pills into applesauce, of pretending I didn't hear her talk to her dead husband in the bathroom mirror. My scrubs smelled like Vicks and old coffee. My shoes squeaked on the wet sidewalk. I should have gone straight to my car. I didn't. The LA River was three blocks over, behind the chain-link and the concrete slope everybody pretended wasn't a river at all. Just a scar. A ditch with graffiti and shopping carts. Abuela used to say, No te acerques al río de noche, mija. El agua recuerda. The water remembers. I told myself I was cutting through to save time. That was a lie I was good at. The truth was simpler: I heard a woman crying, and nobody else on that empty street stopped. It wasn't loud. That was what made it horrible. It was thin and tired, like someone who had been crying for so long she had almost forgotten how to make a sound. It came up through the storm drain first. Then from the fence line. Then from everywhere the concrete was damp. “Hello?” I called. My voice bounced. “Are you okay? Do you need help?” The crying stopped. Silence in East LA is never really silence. There's always a siren two neighborhoods over, a dog, a lowrider testing bass. That night there was nothing. Even the freeway hum cut out, like the city was holding its breath with me. Then, from down in the channel, a woman whispered my name. “Elena.” Not Lena. Nobody called me Elena except Abuela when I was in trouble and the government on paperwork. I froze with one hand on the fence. The metal was cold enough to burn. “Elena Reyes.” It was not a call for help anymore. It was recognition. I ran. I didn't look down into the water. I want to be clear about that, because later Diego would ask me three times if I looked, and three times I would say no, and the third time I would be lying. That first night, I truly didn't look. I ran in my squeaky shoes all the way to Whittier Boulevard, where the taqueria lights were still on and a man was hosing down the sidewalk, and I stood there shaking while normal water ran clear over concrete and into the gutter. The man didn't ask if I was okay. In my neighborhood, a woman running at 2 a.m. was not a question you asked out loud. * * * I should explain about Mrs. Delgado, because she was where that night first went wrong, long before the river. She was eighty-three, bed-bound since the fall, and she talked to her dead husband the way other people talk to someone in the next room doing dishes. “Ernesto, the girl is here. Ernesto, don't let her put the blue cup where I can't reach it.” Most nights I played along. Playing along was half the job. You fed the living their medicine and the dead their courtesies, and everybody got through the night. That night she hadn't played along back. “Your shoes are wet,” she told me at midnight, clear as a bell, when I came in to turn her. They were dry. I had checked them against the mat myself, the way I always did, because wet shoes on her tile could kill a girl carrying a water pitcher. I said so, smiling, professional. “You walked in wet, mija,” she said, and her eyes were not on my face. They were on the floor behind me. “And you left prints all the way from the door.” There was nothing on the floor. I looked. I want that on the record too — there was nothing on the floor then. Then she reached out with a hand that hadn't gripped anything stronger than a spoon in months and caught my sleeve hard enough to pull me down close, into the smell of menthol and bedsore powder and old woman's breath. “Don't answer her tonight,” Mrs. Delgado whispered. “Whoever cries on your way home. We used to know — in my mother's time, we knew. A woman crying where there's no woman is not asking for help. She is asking for a witness. And a witness can be made to take the stand.” I laughed it off in the room. Home health aides learn one hundred kind ways to laugh off the things the dying say, because the dying say true things in the wrong order and terrible things right on time, and you cannot chart either kind. I charted: Patient restless, talking to family. That was the lie I filed. On my way out her hand shot up one last time, pointing at the window that looked toward the river. “She's been practicing in the drains all week,” Mrs. Delgado said conversationally, to Ernesto, who wasn't there. “Listen. Even the pipes are tired of carrying her.” I heard the faucet drip then. It was the only sound in the room, and it dripped in a rhythm — two short, one long, a breath that caught — that I would spend the rest of that winter trying not to hear in my own house. I clocked out at 2:17. My time sheet said the visit had been uneventful. I drove home with the radio loud — cumbias, news, static, anything. Tía Rosa had left the porch light on and a glass of water by the front door, the way she always did. Para las ánimas, she said. For the souls who wander. I had laughed about it since I was fourteen. That night I didn't laugh. I picked up the glass. The water inside was cloudy. Upstairs, in the bathroom, I splashed my face until my skin went numb. When I looked up, my reflection was still looking down. It lasted only a second. A blink too long. Then we were together again, me and the girl in the mirror with wet hair stuck to her neck that I did not remember getting wet. I slept in my scrubs on top of the covers with every light in my room on. And I dreamed of standing water.