In my head.
In reality, nothing happened. It was as if my brain had been severed from the rest of me. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs, or my tongue or my toes. But I could hear. Sweet Jesus, I could hear, even if it was only the sound of my heart racing like it was about to burst right out of me. Each frantic beat amplified the pain in my head, as if all of my nerve endings ended there, in a thumping pool of blood.
You can hear.
You can breathe.
Maybe you’ve lost your sight, but you’re alive.
No.
No!!!!!
I’d rather be dead than at his mercy.
What the fuck has he done to me?
Where the fuck am I?
I had braced myself for his bullet, but there was a moment of silence after I’d said my prayer. He picked up a strand of my hair and stroked it gently, almost reverently. Then he whipped me with the butt of his gun, a sharp whack that felt like he had split my skull. The San Diego skyline tilted and started disappearing in big, black blotches.
“I didn’t give you permission to speak,” he said, as I keeled over from the blow. My face hit the deck, hard and fast, but it seemed like everything was happening in excruciatingly slow motion.
I caught a glimpse of his shoes before my eyes closed.
Soft, hand-tooled Italian leather.
I knew shoes, and there weren’t too many of those around.
Why didn’t he pull the trigger? I thought, as I blacked out.
I didn’t know how long I was unconscious, only that the question still sat with me, like a dragon at the mouth of a cave, refusing to budge, ready to unleash the fire of all the monstrous possibilities that were worse than death.
Why didn’t he pull the trigger?
Maybe he planned to keep me blind and drugged and tethered to his side.
Maybe he wanted to cut out parts of me and sell them.
Maybe he’d already scooped up my insides and it was just a matter of time before the anesthesia wore off.
Maybe he thought he’d killed me and had buried me alive.
With each passing thought, pain transformed into Terror, and let me tell you, Terror is a bigger bitch than Panic. Terror swallows you whole.
I felt myself sliding deep inside her belly.
I smelled Terror.
I breathed Terror.
Terror was eating me up raw.
I knew my captor had given me something, but I didn’t know if the paralysis was temporary or permanent.
I didn’t know if I’d been raped or beaten or hideously mutilated.
I didn’t know if I wanted to find out.
I didn’t know if he was coming back.
And if he did, I didn’t know if this, whatever hellish state I was in, was better, safer, easier.
Terror continued stalking me through the labyrinth of my mind, but there was one place she could never get me, one place I knew I’d always be safe. I turned into that corner in my head and shut myself off to everything but MaMaLu’s lullaby.
It wasn’t really a lullaby. It was a song about armed bandits and fear and danger. But the way MaMaLu sang it—soft and dreamy—always soothed me. She sang it in Spanish, but I remembered the meaning more than the words.
Down from the Sierra Morena mountains,
Cielito lindo, they come A pair of black eyes,
Cielito lindo, they’re contraband. . .
I saw myself in a hammock, blue sky above me, Esteban giving me an occasional absentminded push, while MaMaLu sang as she hung clothes up to dry. Those afternoon naps in the gardens of Casa Paloma, with my nanny and her son, were my earliest memories. Hummingbirds buzzed over red and yellow hibiscus, and bougainvillea spilled from fat, unkempt hedges.
Ay, yai, yai, yai,
Sing and do not cry,
Because singing cheers us up,
Cielito lindo, our hearts. . .
MaMaLu sang when Esteban or I got hurt. She sang when we couldn’t sleep. She sang when she was happy, and she sang when she was sad.
Canta y no llores
Sing and do not cry . . .