The Weeper

I.    YOUR NAME

I got in my car and started heading south on 35, past the Mrs. Baird’s factory and the mall where my mom used to work, past Southtown Ford and the Budweiser brewery, the T&A Lounge and the Oil Derrick too. Signs I’d been staring at my whole life. With my eyes closed I could have pointed out each and every one, but all I could think was: this means nothing to me. Nothing at all. I’m the pearl that builds itself around a bit of grit, and that’s all you’ll ever be to me. The pebble in my shoe. I’m not going to keep your name like a secret or shout it from the rooftops. I’ll spit it out the same way I spit him out, like a bad taste in my mouth. My heart was as busted as my car, but at least my radio worked. “Rid of Me” came on as I hit the city limits, and I turned the volume all the way up. I didn’t know where I was going, I just had to get away—far away from this town and from you too, Angelica Francine DeMarco. 

Okay, I had to say it once.

II.    VIRGENCITA

Angie was the pretty one, but the boys liked me better. It’s not that hard to understand. Boys always like what they know they can get. Around Angie they’d go all knock-kneed and tongue-tied, like she hurt to look at. Sometimes I felt that way too. Me, I was the easy one. I’d had boyfriends, it was nothing new to me. Each time I was waiting for fireworks, for violins to swell, for it to happen like in the movies. It never did, but I kept on believing it might. Angie was different, though. Angie was pure as the Virgencita plastered all over her house. Her mom thought I was a bad influence. In the end, I guess she was right. 

My mom used to tell me that men can’t be trusted, they only want one thing. She took off when I was in ninth grade—kissed me on the forehead early one morning, said “Bye-bye, honey pie,” and then bounced. I couldn’t blame her for being tired, for wanting to run away. She’d been a mom since she was just a kid herself. As for my dad, he slept all day and worked nights at the plant, so I was pretty much on my own. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. In my neighborhood, I was one of the lucky ones. 

Most nights I’d end up having dinner at Angie’s. Her mom would make fideo or arroz con pollo the way her dad liked, and after we did the dishes we’d go to her room, turn the lights out and fold ourselves into her twin bed. Her body soft and warm and her fingers in my hair while she told me about La Llorona, the weeper who went mad with grief and threw away something she could never get back. If you said her name three times in the dark, she would come and carry you away like one of her lost children. The thought made us shiver with delight. We wanted to be scared, we wanted to be sad, we wanted to be overwhelmed. We wanted feelings that came from outside of us, because those feelings were temporary. But the fear that comes from inside, that’s nestled in with the things that made and sustain you? The sadness you can’t even name? When do those feelings end? 

We talked about how we couldn’t wait to get out of this town, this velvet coffin. We didn’t know how that was going to happen, but we thought it must involve a man. That was what we were waiting for, some man to come along and set our real lives in motion. We were seventeen years old. It could happen any day.

III.    ELOY

He was the new boy in school that August. A tight pair of Wranglers, baby blue eyes and a shit-eating grin. My heart left my body, like something straight out of Looney Tunes, when he flashed me his crooked smile. Pure trouble, no doubt about it. You could see it coming a mile away. 

He wasn’t like the other boys, with their puny mustaches and Adam’s apples jutting out like they’d swallowed a sharp rock. He looked at you like he knew something you didn’t. His dad was in the army, so they moved around a lot. He’d lived all over—Germany, the Philippines, a little island in Japan where he sat on the shore and watched sea turtles dig holes for their eggs. He told me these things later, while he was unhooking my bra. Naked in front of him I felt like a miracle, like he saw something in me no one had known to look for. A bright star surfacing from a long way down. 

“I think I’d like to live on an island like that,” I said, and he promised he’d take me. “Mi cielito,” he called me. My little heaven. Then I found out what my body was for.

IV.    CHOSEN

I fell hard, the way you only fall once. Covered every available surface with my name and his: Emmy + Eloy. It felt like destiny, like poetry, that they began and ended the same way. His name meant “chosen one,” but I knew it was me who’d been chosen. I didn’t believe in God, but I thanked him every night. I knew Eloy would get bored eventually. But the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen wanted me. I would carry that inside me always, like a lucky penny that never lost its shine.

When Angie started acting squirrely, I figured she was jealous. Could I blame her? We barely hung out anymore. In the mirror I saw myself getting skinnier all the time. Bruises everywhere—my wrists, my knees, my thighs. My face looked sharper, more delicate and dangerous. I was all hard edges, brittle as glass. I thought he had initiated me. That I had shed my old body like a snake sheds its skin.

The day before Christmas break, I slept through my alarm. I showed up halfway through second period, and the whole class snickered. Angie’s desk was empty and Eloy’s was too. I finally got the story off Nikole in PE. Mrs. Thompson heard noises, caught them in the fourth floor janitor’s closet. Angie’s mom picked her up and dragged her off by the hair. 

Behind the portables I fell to my knees and emptied my stomach. Felt the cold, hard earth digging into my palms.

V.    DARKNESS

Her mom answered the door when I knocked. “I always knew you were trouble,” she muttered. “Angie was such a good girl. Pos, ya ves.” I asked if I could see Angie, but she said that wasn’t happening. I wanted to tell Angie she was trash, that I expected better—not from him, never from him, but from her. But I couldn’t even do that.

So I got in my car and started heading south on 35, past the Mrs. Baird’s factory and the mall where my mom used to work, past Southtown Ford and the Budweiser brewery, the T&A Lounge and the Oil Derrick too. I drove until it got dark and I kept on driving. The fist in my stomach pushed its way toward my throat. I stomped on the gas and felt the steering wheel tremble. I was running on empty, way out in the country. I got off the highway, followed the Texaco sign down a lonesome back road. 

Before long the trees formed a canopy overhead. Darkness covered the road like ink from a brush. I couldn’t see past my headlights. My ears rang in the prickling silence, and I realized my radio had gone dead.

I slammed on the brakes when I saw her, still as a statue in the middle of the road. Her eyes were gone, black tears like leeches streaming down her hollow cheeks. Even then, I knew her. You can’t help knowing the body that made you, that gave you your first home. “Mama,” I murmured as she turned and reached out to me, spindly fingers beckoning. I cut the engine and threw open the door. Flung myself into the bony enclosure of her wasted arms. Smell of dust and decay, and deep down, the sweet rosewater tang of her skin.

“Mama, you came back,” I whispered.

“Of course, honey pie.” Her voice was chalky, disintegrating. “I always come back for what’s mine.”

She threw her head back, lifting her ruined face to where the moon might have been. The wail she let out was like no sound I’d heard before. A sound that was inside me, all around me, as it swallowed the world.