The Taking

They came in the dry season, when the dust stood in the road and you could hear an engine a long way off. I have tried to put a date to it and I cannot. That is a thing they take before they take you, the day itself, so that afterward you can never say to anyone, here, this is the morning it happened to me. I can tell you the corn was still low. I can tell you my grandmother had sent me down for salt.

You think you would fight. I thought so too. I had imagined it the way girls do, the brave thing I would do if a bad man ever came. But the body has its own plans and it does not ask you first. When the truck slowed beside me my heart went so hard I felt it in my teeth, and my legs did not run, they locked, and the whole of me became a held breath waiting to be told this was a mistake. It was not a mistake. They knew exactly what I was worth. They had driven up the mountain to collect it.

I screamed. I want that here, because later there is a long stretch where I could not, and you should know the voice was whole once and that I spent it. I screamed for my grandmother and I screamed the names of the saints, all of them, in the order she had taught me, the way you throw everything you own at a fire to put it out. A man put his hand over my mouth and the scream went hot and trapped against his palm, and that is the last clean sound I remember making for a long time. They see faces, not names. I learned in that moment that I had been a name my whole life only because the people around me agreed to it, and that the agreement could be broken by a stranger with a truck.

My grandmother was not there to see it, and I have decided that is the one mercy God gave me that morning. She did not have to watch. For a while I told myself she would think I had wandered off, and then I made myself stop, because Mamá Ximena was a curandera and she knew what the trucks were and she knew what a silence over a girl’s name meant. She knew. She lit a candle for me that night, I am certain of it, the way she lit them, like setting a place at the table for someone she was expecting. She set my place. I just was not coming.

In the back of the truck I prayed. Out loud still, though quieter now, because there were others in the dark with me and we were all at it, a low sound like bees, each in her own words. I still believed it then. That is the thing about the start. I believed this was a wrong that Heaven could see and would not let stand, that someone was already coming, that the prayer went up and landed somewhere and a hand was reaching down. I pressed my forehead to the cold metal the way I used to press it to the cool of the church floor, and I asked, and I waited to be answered the way I had always been answered.

Hold onto her for me. The girl in the dark who still thought the answer was coming. We are going to watch her learn, very slowly, in a way no child should learn anything, that the silence after a prayer is sometimes only silence. But not that morning. That morning she still had the whole of her faith and the whole of her voice, and she spent both of them on a road no one was driving up to save her, and I am not ashamed of her for it. She did the one true thing there was to do. She called for help, out loud, and she meant it.