smuggled in a bottle of rum she stole from somewhere, and Elena drank some of it, but not very much because she was pregnant and didn’t want to hurt the baby. Edwin promised to drive them home and left it alone. Penny and Albert poured some into their Cokes.
After the movie, Elena was very sick to her stomach and curled up in the back seat. Albert, who worshipped Edwin, sat in the front passenger seat, scorning his seat belt. Isobel and Penny got in the back with Elena.
Twenty years later, on a bright January day, Elena and her mother drove down the narrow road toward the site. It wasn’t hard to find. It was on a narrow strip of road leading east from Espanola into the mountains, curving and dangerous and utterly ordinary. She drove beneath the long stands of cottonwoods that grew along the road, bare now, but in the summer, this was a deep tunnel of shade. The trees were nourished by the water in the acequia that ran along the road, carrying irrigation water to the farmers who grew melons and chiles and tomatoes in the sunny fields.
There was a small café at a junction, and Elena parked the rental car there. A dog trotted along on an errand, skinny and cheerful, and overhead, a magpie squawked, then lifted off, showing off his black and white splendor.
Elena turned off the car. Mama, holding Henry on her lap, said, “You go. I’ll stay right here and wait.”
Elena nodded. Zipping up her jacket, she got out. The quiet stunned her. The only sound was a thin finger of wind rattling leaves from last season that clung to the bare branches of cottonwood trees.
She headed up the road a little way. It wasn’t far. Four crosses marked it, two very well tended, one less so, one nearly completely faded now. Clusters of pink plastic carnations were twisted around the base of one wooden cross, painted white. Names had been varnished into each one, with dates and other little markers. Elena stepped between the prongs of the barbed-wire fence alongside the acequia, then gathered her aching parts and jumped over the ditch to an enormous, old cottonwood tree.
At shoulder height, a deep gouge in the shape of an uneven star showed in the creasing of bark, and she put her fingers to it. Her palm fit it exactly. Here the car had hit and come apart, exploding like a rocket into a dozen pieces. Her brother had told Elena it took days to find all the pieces.
So many years, so many many many years, she had blocked this moment. Now she reached back trying to bring it forth. Beneath her hand the tree was a living being, pulsing with sap drawn from the earth. It had memories. Surely it could give forth the violence of that single, horrific moment so many years ago.
But the air remained undisturbed. Elena’s memory offered nothing but the same things she’d thought of a thousand times, that single, clear moment when they went airborne, when they sailed as if in an airplane, high into the night sky. She saw stars and held on to the edge of the seat. There wasn’t time to be horrified, only curious, and slightly protective. She clung to the door handle, watching the sky and branches entwine, and then there was a huge explosion of noise.
There was the gap. She was flung from the car and landed in the ditch. The next thing she could remember was the depth of silence, the only sound the tick-tick-tick of cooling metal. Her body and mind were strangely separate, as if her head was in some entirely different location than her arms and legs. She could feel, far away, the cold on her feet, and across her belly was the sinuous movement of water, but she couldn’t seem to communicate with any part of her body to change the circumstances. She drifted. She thought perhaps she might be dead.
And yet, there was a woman singing to her, brushing her hair from her face—La Llorona, the weeping woman, tending Elena until someone could come.
And after a time, there was Isobel, sitting next to her. “I couldn’t find you at first,” she said, and took Elena’s hand. “There’s a man coming. Hang on. He had to go back and call an ambulance.”
Elena tried to speak and could not. La Llorona stroked her forehead and hummed. She patted cool mud into the bleeding cuts on her back