FLOWERS FOR PRISONERS by Allegra Hyde
In San Miguel de Allende, long-necked poinsettia peer from walled patios, blossoms painted pimentón red.
Behind massive mahogany doors – iron-studded, Spanish colonial – geraniums riot pink and peppery, frail petals blowing back into cobble-stoned streets, settling in the dust, the barrios.
Yellow marigolds. Crimson gladioli. The white teeth of lime trees coming into bloom. They lance their stems through metal grates, over the cracked glass razoring wall edges, as bougainvillea – dark-knuckled and rangy – cling to the turn of padlocks.
Lucia has a key.
Lucia has a key to the first gate, the heavy chain; the second gate, the metal door; the third gate, the house door.
She opens them all. The house is quiet. Always, in moments like this, she wonders if the owner is dead.
She has come across them dead before. Muertos. Tucked in bed, still as stone, or broken at the bottom of the stairs. Or sometimes she finds them halfway gone. Calling for help from the shower, pink and puckered and like newborn mice; eyes fearful.
Mostly, though, they are alive and waiting for her. The retirees. The snowbirds. Los Norte Americanos. Gringos. They mention the spilled coffee grounds in the kitchen. The cat hair and the linens. Sometimes, they try the scraps of Spanish that stick in their fading minds. Haaasta looaygo! Aaadeeos! They are always going places: to book club, salsa class, theater showings, shuffleboard, tea. They come to San Miguel for the climate; for the “culture,” they call it. They are usually nice.
Ms. Vivian is not home. Her cat yawns, arches its back, rubs its tail against Lucia’s leg. The cat’s food bowl is empty, the water too. There are no pesos piled on the kitchen counter. Ms. Vivian must have forgotten. She sometimes does. She must be out.
There is nothing that should make Lucia worried, and yet she feels pins in her belly – the prick of impending calamity – or perhaps they are always there these days, those pins.
Lucia cleans the bathroom first, then the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen.
She locks the doors behind her.
San Miguel – a cobble-stoned city, licked with color – on the side of a hill once rich with silver, dazzling the conquistadors, and later, the revolutionaries, the GIs and poets. Liquor, running through the gutters. Prayers in the air. La Parroquia at the top of the city like a proud nesting bird – feathered pink – and chiming all hours of the day.
Lucia finds Hugo at home.
Did you hear? He is covered in dust, is sweat-soaked. His grin makes Lucia nearly drop her grocery bags: the tortillas and chicken, the Coca-Cola.
For three weeks she has waited for news of her brother, Arturo, waited to hear –
Hugo motions towards their television set, the leap and lunge of football players, an airborne embrace.
Lucia’s heart sinks. This is not the news she wanted: news of a phone call from the States. The words: Soy vivo. I am alive.
Giving the TV a little nod, Lucia brings her basket to the kitchen. She should know that Hugo will not likely speak of Arturo anytime soon. That boy. Her half-brother really, a decade younger than she, they’d raised him like a son. That’s what Hugo used to call him. Mi hijo.
Now Hugo won’t even say her brother’s name.
Lucia fries chicken tortillas, cooks squash blossom soup. She and Hugo drink the Coca-Cola. Through their walls they hear the neighbors’ TVs all tuned to the same channel: football in every house.
Hugo is in his finest mood. He squeezes her backside, kisses her cheek. Like her, he has a broad face, nut-brown skin, a growing paunch. Unlike her, he was born outside San Miguel. Once he’d farmed in Oaxaca, but now he makes more money selling hats to tourists. Straw hats, stacked thirty high on his head as he circles the square outside La Parroquia. The sun, he likes to say, it used to bring me corn. Now it brings me gringo sunburns.
Shouldn’t we have heard from Arturo by now? Lucia cannot help asking.
Hugo’s face darkens. His chewing slows. He does not speak, but Lucia hears his answer anyway: it’s Arturo’s own fault if he’s dead in the Chihuahuan, vultures circling. After all we’ve done.
Lucia’s husband, he is not a cruel man. But he is also not a man who finds his own feelings easy to face.
Does she dare look at hers?
Lucia clears away their dishes. A neighbor stops by for a smoke. Then her cousins, Francis and Francesca, for gossip. Outside, evening soaks the streets, jasmine in the air. The roof dogs howl. In this part of town, doorways glow open and warm.
The cartel? The cartel. It seemed so much a part of Mexico, you couldn’t tell the two apart. Who was kidnapping, embezzling, killing? La Policía o los Narcos? Along the highways, you pass pickup trucks carrying men, machine guns; you pass the graves.
Sinaloa. La Familia. Tijuana. Los Zetas. Gulf. Beltrán Leyva. Juárez.
San Miguel is safe, though. It’s where the cartel’s grandmothers live – or that’s what people say, half joking, half not. It’s where the gringos go.
Lucia returns to Ms. Vivian’s two days later. Sunflowers bob on the patio, black-eyed and fringed in yellow. Inside, the house is spotless. The cat follows Lucia around, mewing as if to apologize. Lucia looks for a note. She is sure she would have seen one the first time, but still she looks: opening drawers, lifting woven rugs, fluttering the pages of books. What would Ms. Vivian think if she suddenly returned? That Lucia was snooping. Stealing? There would be a fuss, no doubt. Ms. Vivian’s pink mouth crinkling closed. Her grey curls coiled as if preparing to spring. A fuss, but then the two of them would find an understanding. They’d laugh. Lucia liked the old woman, despite herself.
There is no note. Lucia begins cleaning the house, though it does not need to be cleaned again. She wipes down the mahogany frames from Oxal. Mosaics from Dolores Hidalgo. The paper maché chicken from San Miguel’s own market. Then there are the American things. The photograph of two pale daughters. The silver watch. A bureau full of sweaters and beige slacks. A box of Cheerios.
Lucia picks up the watch, lays the cool metal across her wrist.
Is this what her brother wanted?
Arturo. He was seventeen, thick without being fat. Serious, even as a little boy. He had a handsome face, she’d always believed, though Arturo had never seemed interested in chasing girls. Never much interested in school, either, though his grades were fine. A waste of time, he’d said. He’d wanted something else.
What else? What else? What else?
You could get you a job here, she’d told him. Hugo could arrange it.
For the gringos? The old farts? Arturo had grimaced. He looked north, as if he could see Texas from their window.
You would work for the gringos there too, Lucia had said.
Arturo shook his head. No, it will be different.
Maybe, Lucia had told herself, it would be different. Maybe Arturo would find a better life. Up there. Still, she had not wanted to see her family splinter, separated by so much distance, so she told Hugo of Arturo’s plans, hoping her husband would convince her brother otherwise.
Instead Hugo answered: Let him go, he thinks he’s so tough.
What had Lucia said? Nada. She’d been afraid to upset either man.
He should go – Hugo’s words – if that’s what he thinks it means to be brave.
And Arturo had gone.
Of course it hurt her. It hurt them both, though Hugo hid his grief with anger. But at whom was he angry, really? Lucia wonders now. At himself for having never tried the crossing? For being afraid? For spending his days circling La Parroquia, selling stacked hats and posing for tourist photos?
She herself had never considered leaving. She had too many roots dug deep in San Miguel. There were her sisters and cousins and friends. Her life was ground into the stones of this place, bubbling up in the Izcuinapan springs.
People did leave, though. They left all the time. The more gringos in San Miguel, the higher the price of gasoline, of meat. Most locals lived on the outskirts now, walking to town for work or Mass. They all wonder how much farther they’ll be pushed before the walk becomes too far.
But going north? There were so many dangers. The trigger-happy border patrol. Rattlesnakes. Death of thirst. Corrupt coyotes. The cartel.
The cartel.
Lucia pauses polishing Ms. Vivian’s ceramic vases. She had nearly forgotten the old woman, her employer’s unexplained absence. What if Ms. Vivian had taken a trip – to Michoacán maybe – hadn’t she mentioned wanting to see the Yacata pyramids? Was it so impossible that she could have been kidnapped? On one hand, the gringos triple-locked their houses, but in Mexico they often also turned a little wild. Wild enough to move here. What was it they wanted? To make their lives a little richer before they left this world? The local doctor knew. He’d told Lucia, shaking his head as he whispered: gonorrhea. Septuagenarians, octogenarians: they aren’t careful at that age. What do they have to lose? Lucia remembers Ms. Vivian talking about how dating could be difficult, because men her age were scarce. Todos murieron primero. They all died sooner.
The old woman always spoke in past tense when muddling through Spanish. Most gringos did. It was the only way they knew the language.
And Arturo? He’d always used the future: Voy a ser grande. I will be great.
The thought makes Lucia drop her dusting rag, steady herself against a shelf of cornhusk dolls. Each figurine in a dress – hand-painted turquoise, magenta, emerald – and tied with ribbons. Each face forever blank. The dolls, their quietness, make Lucia want to scream. She wants to tear these tiny women limb by limb. She wants them gone from sight.
She grabs one, its waist squeezed in her fist. The husk-doll is light. Air, mostly.
Lucia hesitates, then squeezes a little harder. This doll, so like the kind her grandmother once made from the leftovers of tamales, probably cost more than a week’s wages.
Lucia stares into the blank face. She wills the doll to speak. She wills it to admit that it does not belong on this shelf like some silver-plated treasure – that it does not even belong in this house – that it belongs, instead, in the hands of a little girl: a girl playing in a straw-strewn alley, making castles from empty crates, feather beds from the molting blossoms of purple jacaranda trees.
The doll stays quiet.
Swiftly, before Lucia can stop herself, she tucks the doll into the folds of her skirt.
Of all things to steal, why this?
Lucia cannot answer her own question. She moves instead to the door. She knows she should tell someone about Ms. Vivian’s absence – she should report it to the woman’s neighbors, the police – but what if the absence means nothing? Suppose Ms. Vivian had told Lucia she was leaving and Lucia had forgotten, her mind distracted by Arturo? It wouldn’t be Lucia’s first mistake.
But that cat, left alone?
Lucia has another house to clean – there are wages to earn, bills to pay – and yet she cannot bring herself to go. The day is getting hot, shadows melting into tiled eaves. San Miguel’s streets stutter full with green taxicabs, pickup trucks loaded with chicken crates. An unhappy donkey pulls an ice cream cart. Lucia leaves Ms. Vivian’s house and hurries along the sloping sidewalks – past the outdoor restaurants, umbrellas blooming, gringo patrons dazed on mezcal – all the while the corn husk doll hides in her skirt. A garbage boy runs alongside her ringing his cowbell and calling for trash. She sees her cousins, Francis and Francesca. They wave to her but she ducks into the market alley, around raw slabs of meat, through sizzling and mesquite smoke. She hurries past La Parroquia – its rosy towers, chiming bells – careful also to avoid Hugo, who is here somewhere, selling hats. She hurries until she reaches a smaller church, braced against a wall. Oratorio de San Felipe Neri. Its vast wooden doors cracked open. She slides in, grateful for the cool interior. All around: a dim gold light filtering in from skylights, oil paintings depicting a saint’s painful ordeal. This church – built by mulattos for mulattos, years ago – is now open to everyone, though at this time of day it is nearly empty.
Lucia finds a seat and closes her eyes. She thinks of all the people going north while the gringos go south. Bodies in a two-way flood. A confused river. It’s strange, really. Both groups seem to be looking for the same thing.
Lucia tries to pray, to ask for protection for her brother and Ms. Vivian. For mercy. She feels she should also ask for mercy for herself, but for what she isn’t sure. The stolen doll? Not that, no. She does not feel sorry. She does not feel anything: her mind is drained of words. She can only see and she sees the worst possibilities: Arturo on his knees, his mouth tied, face swollen. He’d never agree to be a drug mule. She sees Ms. Vivian too, that frail woman, white skin scorched, earlobes leaking blood where her earrings were ripped out. Lucia knows what is done, even to old women. To boys.
Lucia sees the dark nostrils of a double-barrel rifle. Her breath quickens. Is it impossible, yet possible, that these two might be together? Given what they’d wanted – what else? what else? what else? – something different, something better than they had. She pictures the pair kneeling, side-by-side, on a sun-baked patch of desert earth.
She waits for pain but feels, instead, the husk-doll nestled at her side: a body light as air, heavy as memory.
Out beyond, in that desert, stumpy cacti are beginning to blossom. Red flares clustered among spiring thorns. Petaled crowns of naked white. Everything opening, opening now, under a sky unflinching and blue.
Allegra Hyde’s stories and essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, New England Review, Southwest Review, North American Review and Denver Quarterly.