IN THE LARGEST CEMETERY in Juárez, people were gathering at the gates. The vendors’ carts were loaded down with cempa-súchil, candied skeletons made of pure white sugar, and copal for burning on the graves and invoking the gods. It was a good day for buying flowers, a good day for burning incense. The November sky was clear and warm, the cloud of pollution blown away by a cool wind that had come in the night as fast and as sudden as the sword of St. Michael had come down on the devil. A circle of people hiding behind skull masks danced around a grave. A child licked a candied coffin as she watched the feet of the dancers.
Diego, Luz, and Maria Elena had risen early to visit the graves of their dead at Concordia Cemetery. Diego carried a hoe and a rake to clean the gravesites. Together, they went from grave to grave, from Mary’s to Mundo’s to Rose’s. Diego raked the trash around each gravesite, intent and deliberate in his task. When Diego had finished raking, he pointed at a wall that encircled some nearby graves. “Chinese,” he wrote on his pad and handed it to his sister. “Even in death,” Maria Elena thought, “even in death, they separate them.” She looked around the cemetery and noticed all the walled-in sections. Walls and walls and walls. She laughed. She remembered what Luz had told Lizzie: “We die like we live.”
After the work of cleaning, they placed flowers on the graves and knelt in respect for the dead. Luz prayed fervently for their souls. Maria Elena simply thanked her God for their lives. Diego tried to empty his heart of the anger he still felt at losing them. Today, he would not blame. Maria Elena smiled at the thought that went through her head: “I am in love with my rituals, in love with the people who created them, the people who handed them to me.” No one attempted to speak. No one wept. They had not come here to mourn.
The house was empty for the afternoon. Everyone—Maria Elena, Diego, Jake, Eddie, Luz, and the baby—everyone had gone to the park because an autumn cool front had come in and the weather was perfect, the heat banished at last. “I’m not feeling well,” Lizzie had told Maria Elena, though she had never felt better in her life. It was a small lie, she said to herself, everyone’s entitled to a few small lies. When the residents of the house left, she walked slowly to her room, locked her door, looked out the window, and leapt out of her body as if she were a hungry leopard about to pounce on its prey. She felt as graceful as any animal, as any dancer, as graceful as her mother on her deathbed, graceful as Jake’s heron in flight.
She traveled to Juárez to watch the people buy flowers for their dead. Hundreds and hundreds of people buying hundreds of bouquets of cempasúchil, the orange flowers as bright as summer desert sunsets. The burning copal filled her with something that almost resembled faith. She remembered the first time she’d smelled that incense—in a dream—in a dream she had once had, a dream where she had not had a body. She laughed into the air, and it did not matter that there was no sound. It was a laugh, a laugh that made her feel as bright as the flowers the people were bringing for their dead. The next time I come here, it will be on foot. She crossed back over the border—slowly, slowly—wanting to remember every single sight of the early November day. She found herself in front of her favorite tree—a tree where sparrows gathered for some unknown reason, hundreds and hundreds of them, sparrows who, having gathered, did nothing other than sing. They sing and sing, out of joy or sorrow, the reason not mattering since the beauty of the song was the same. There is so much to sing about, Lizzie thought. She entered the tree, the singing of the sparrows all around her. It was the music of the desert, she thought, a music she would miss. Lizzie had found this place when she had arrived, and it had given her comfort to be around the language of these birds. It had never mattered to her that she understood very little of what the birds were singing. The hearing of the song had been enough. She would miss coming here. In the distance she could see the statue of Mount Cristo Rey. Maria Elena had said it was a place of miracles, and so it was. She followed the path of the river for a while until she came to the place where some workers were at the beginning stages of building a stone wall. She stared at the working bodies of the men as they labored on the wall. She wondered why they were allowing themselves to be used like this, but she knew the answer. They needed to eat, needed to eat because their bodies demanded it of them. For the longest time Lizzie had not known whether she wanted to have a body or not. But now, a body was all she wanted. Her mother had been right: her body was her friend.
She willed herself to go back to her room, back to the house where she had found a place, a home. She rose from her bed, and walked out into the backyard. The ground beneath her feet was firm and solid and good. Lizzie sensed the cooling of the wind on her face. It was a lovely thing to have a face. The coolness was good. Winter was coming. Let it come, she thought. Winters were not so harsh in the desert, and she welcomed a change of seasons.