ADRIANNA SANCHEZ-LOPEZ

Remnants

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1. Desiree and Marina are too afraid to utter their fear that mom was never real. So the girls take turns being mom, holding one another, kissing one another where the hair spirals at the tops of their heads, whispering suspended particles of memory: sana sana colita de rana. They lay side-by-side on mom’s bed, offering stories, what they remember about being daughters. When the stories leave their lips, they squeeze their eyes tightly, hope their memories drip through the pipes, ball into dust mites, linger in the walls, the bedclothes, the carpet. 

2. Every morning, the girls wake with hungry bellies and dry lips. They whisper gratitude to a great-grandfather they never knew for digging the well enclosed in chicken wire and cement behind the house. Despite the gritty taste of dirt in their water, they will not go thirsty. Before another ration of Malt-O-Meal, Desiree and Marina sketch Blanca’s white peaks, a record of time ‘till mom returns. 

3. Desiree and Marina crack open their ceramic pig with a hammer, gather every coin to pay Belén, the woman with the crooked spine and twisted hands, to help them find mom. Belén’s eyes look like marbles as she hums stories of mom as a girl. The stories feel like embers, like confirmation. She feeds them three bowls of menudo each, tells them they can stay as long as they need. But Desiree’s stubborn, lifts her chin and says they only need the reading. Belén studies their leaves and tells them if mom doesn’t return by the time the snow melts and the winds still, the girls will never see her again. 

4. When summer halts and Blanca turns white overnight, Marina proclaims her duty as the eldest, almost 15. She walks ten miles, beyond cracked clay, across the tracks, until the houses loom, and the lawns look like a movie. She knocks on doors. Hello, I’m here to clean. Her knees ache after kneeling, scrubbing, head down and eyes to the ground. She tells everyone mom’s working near the ocean, the farthest place she can imagine. She tells them one day mom will take her and her sister to the ocean too. Marina limps into their house, shins bloody, ankles and hips throbbing. She tells her sister a story about their house, how it once belonged to their grandparents and their great-grandparents before them. This will always be our house, she says. As Marina talks, Desiree blots her sister’s reddened shins, responds with a story about summers and bikes and scraped knees, about the burn of Bactine.

5. When Desiree turns 13, she tells everyone she’s 16. She works as a candy striper at the local nursing home, accepting her payment of a few small bills tucked in a white envelope each week. Enough to buy boxes of instant cereal, dried beans, oil, and flour. She learns how to read a blood pressure cuff, empty a bedpan, spread new sheets on an unoccupied bed. When the woman who had forgotten her own name in Room 6 dies, she learns the word ephemeral from the woman’s daughter, repeats it like a chant. 

6. Spring returns, winds heighten until the cottonwood in Belén’s yard snaps, branches crashing to dehydrated earth. Power lines collapse, debris shatters mom’s bedroom window. Desiree and Marina cut their hands duct taping plastic grocery bags atop the broken window. They run cool water over their wounds, take turns pouring a dusty bottle of whisky into gaping flesh. They stop the bloody ooze with gauze. Marina remembers what mom used to say, sana sana colita de rana. They wrap their bodies in blankets, make up stories about the ephemeral: frogs and fairies and mom and life before they were alone.  

7. Marina falls in love in February, nearly four springs after mom disappeared. Before the first wind of the season, the boy stops visiting. Marina sits on the toilet, a white stick with two pink lines in its window. She whimpers, telling her sister all moms are fables, a cruel curse. 

8. In August heat, Marina wakes to a hooting owl. She sits upright in darkness, in awe of her body’s rapture. If motherhood is a myth, then what is this feeling she has for her baby?

9. When Blanca whitens, looks like a watermark in the morning sky, Desiree grips Marina’s shoulders and tells her sister the pinche doctor’s not coming, his wife doesn’t want him to visit patients on the other side of the tracks. But we don’t need him. She spreads brown and pink towels across the bed. Water boils and sisters hold hands, breathing through the throbbing. Tears slide down Marina’s swollen belly as she hangs her head. The aching wraps around her hips, radiates down her legs. She can smell the heat, there’s no stopping what’s begun. When pangs reach Marina’s insides, she screams, please, Desiree, please. We can’t do this alone. Marina worries her baby will die, worries the cord will wrap around the newborn’s neck, worries the lumps of her butt will try to come first, worries there’s no time to save her baby. Marina asks her sister to call someone, call the woman with the crooked spine and the twisted hands, what’s her name? She delivers babies, right? 

10. But Belén is too old. Her eyesight gone, she sits in her dark house and whispers stories to slats of light between the blinds. 

11. When the pressure becomes too much, Desiree stacks pillows behind her sister’s back, whispers that everything will be okay. She forces Marina to look at her, tells her a story about mom, about a time when they pretended to smoke cigarettes, pressing toothpicks and sticks of gum and finally their fingers against the hot coils of the cigarette lighter in mom’s car. When they showed mom the burns, she broke a thick green leaf from the aloe plant and applied the sticky insides to their fingers, kissed the top of their heads, and what’s that she said?

12. Two sisters remember, screaming, hands clasped as one until the blood gives way to a small cry, until Desiree lifts a baby girl to Marina’s bare chest, and they both lean in, kiss the spirals of hair above the baby’s soft spot, whisper a faint memory of their mother: sana sana colita de rana. They can almost hear the pebbles of warmth in her voice, feel girlish giggles in their throats at the utterance of mom’s nonsensical words, moved by the magic.

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