Issue 11 Contributor Spotlight: Fiction by Marie Holmes

La Patriota

Her name was Yanirah. Or Janirah. She spelled it both ways.

Yanirah Isabel Monterroso Peña read the writing underneath the picture on her cédula. It wasn’t something she thought about.

She knew how to read. She’d never read a book, although she imagined she could if she put her mind to it.

Her parents sent her to school through the third year of primary. After that she took care of her younger siblings while her parents worked.

One day Carolina had choked on a piece of mango, and Yanirah had pounded her back and then held her upside down by her feet and shook her like a dusty rug until the bit of fruit popped out.

“I saved your life once,” Yanirah would remind her when they were grown and she needed Caro to do her a favor.

“And for what?” Caro would say, eyes right in her. Yanirah always looked away first.

Yanirah was the first child, the terrible memory of her birth passed down to all the siblings that came after.

“It was like your face was turned inside out,” her mother said. “They thought maybe you were all twisted around on the insides, too, and wouldn’t live long.”

Her father had wanted to keep her indoors, away from the neighbors, but her mother insisted on taking her to the clinic a few towns south on the dirt road that passed for a highway. She carried Yanirah in her arms and covered her tiny face with a sheet, but everyone stared all the same.

Her mother said she had a feeling that Yanirah’s face, with its ugly hollow scooped between her nose and mouth, tugging one of her nostrils down so that her nose appeared flattened and uneven, was a test from God.

“A test of what?” Yanirah asked once, a teenager by then.

Her mother didn’t miss a beat. “Of strength,” she said.

“For you,” Yanirah said. “Testing your strength. But what about me?”

“That,” her mother whispered sagely, “is for God to know and you to wonder.”

Yanirah shook her head and rolled her eyes. Declaring something a mystery, she thought, didn’t qualify as an explanation—divine or otherwise. As she got older, she grew to trust the card readers, the dark-skinned women selling candles and herbs, and let go of trying to understand her mother’s unquestioning faith. The instructions these women gave, the tea leaves, the blood of a goat—they were things you could hold in your hands.

The doctors told her parents that it was a fairly common birth defect and she wasn’t going to die. Some French surgeons in the next town were operating on children like her for free.

The French doctors promised they would fix her face, asking only that they bring her back for another picture the year following, to hold up against her pre-surgery photo, documenting their success.

“I think they bring those white doctors down here to practice on us,” Yanirah’s mother said.

There remained a thick scar of lightened skin on her upper lip. Her nose and mouth were still uneven, one side not quite a reflection of the other. It was the first thing people saw when they met her.

“You’re lucky,” one of the older women told Yanirah’s mother. “You’ll always have someone to take care of you.”

Yanirah had the rest of her body, but it wasn’t much. Square shoulders and hips, no taller than a ten year old boy. And the flat, triangular folds of her breasts. Her sisters called them the little mice.

She wore her mother’s tent-like dresses around the yard as she collected eggs, cooked the rice, wiped the children’s noses clean with the wet palm of her hand.

She was eighteen when Jefferson started stopping by the house in the afternoons on his way home. He always brought her an ice-cold soda in a glass bottle.

“For me?” she asked the first time, wary. Did he expect her to give him money for it?

Jefferson laughed. “My god, has nobody given you a present before?”

After a few weeks, he kissed her in the dark threshold of the chicken house, where the children wouldn’t see. Later, he led her into the bushes.

He did all sorts of things, most of which she’d never even heard of. There was the baby-making act, which she was sure they had done because the first time she bled. After, it hurt less. He did things to her that made her make animal noises, made her want to devour his body and the view of the sky through the leaves—the whole world shuddered with her, it seemed, before she was through. She bounced on her toes in the afternoons, waiting to see him come down the road with her soda.

They were lying half-clothed in the bushes when he asked her to marry him. She raised her hand to her lip. “Me?”

Jefferson smiled. “Who else?” he said, laughing.

“You could have any girl,” Yanirah continued. Her voice trembled, like it had the first time they had spoken. “A pretty one.”

Jefferson sighed. “I don’t want the prettiest girl.” He placed his hand over hers and moved it, exposing her mouth. “I want the best one.”

They saved for the wedding. A new dress, food for everyone, drinks—it would be years. It was almost all she could think about, though. That, and when a baby would come.

It should have happened already, after so many months. Be patient, her mother said.

Caro already had a baby. A son.

“He looks like his daddy,” Yanirah said, by which she meant he was dark-skinned. Caro pretended not to hear.

Yanirah prayed to the virgin and the saints. She burned herbs and candles she purchased from the wise women.

Jefferson said he didn’t mind waiting, for a son.

Still, he gave her money for the agua de hijo that the old, dark-skinned woman sold behind the market stalls on Tuesdays. And although the old woman promised her the first time she’d wake up pregnant, she was happy to take Yanirah’s money month after month.

It wasn’t until she’d burned down all the candles and stopped repeating the prayers, past the whole next rainy season, that she felt sick. She vomited onto the cracked earth of the dusty yard and sat tracing lines in the dirt with her fingers, crying and laughing, clutching her stomach and saying Thank you, Thank you, to a God in whom she had sworn she longer believed.

She had been right, though.

It wasn’t six months later when the pains began. She was lying next to Jefferson, on the mattress they shared behind the house, their only privacy provided by tall sticks holding up a couple of sheets that she had stitched together.

Maybe it was the juice her mother had made, or the milk that she used even after it’d been sitting out in the sun all afternoon.

But that wasn’t where it hurt. The pain came in waves, and each time it stopped she would think, There, that’s it. It’s over. And she would try to go back to sleep, leaning her head against Jefferson’s warm, damp back. Finally she moved her arm to feel, and even without a light to see she knew that the warm, wet liquid on her hand was blood.

She pressed her face into the mattress, muffling her cries.

Jefferson thought a doctor might be able to save the baby. He went down to Don Oscar’s house, to ask to borrow the truck.

It felt like she was being sawed in two. She bit down on the edge of the sheet, giving a gritty scream through her teeth. She looked out into the hazy dawn, to the back of the property, at the bloated boab tree and the pale, crusty earth. Could she make it to the mountain?

It wasn’t really a mountain, just the first hill on the road that would take you into the interior, where the real mountains were if you stayed on it long enough. Ten hours to the capital, Jefferson said.

But she didn’t need to get that far, she reasoned. Just to the first incline, near the stream. Just far enough.

As soon as the pain subsided, she ran, her bare feet slapping the ground, leaving splatters of blood in the dust behind her.

She ran between pains, and during them she crouched, screaming, breathing in the dust and the metallic smell of her bloodied legs.

One, two. Seven? She lost count. They grew closer together, and it seemed like she was only running a few steps in between. She could see the stream, she was so close. Then the fire began. It felt like real flames lapping at her. The babies slipped out quickly and without a sound.

Twins. A boy and a girl. Had she known? No, it hadn’t once occurred to her that there could be two. It made sense, though. This whole time she had been looking down at her stomach, talking to Jefferson’s son, wondering if she had really been saying all those things to her daughter, and now to find out both had been true.

She sat curled like a protective petal over them as their tiny, animal bodies grew still and cold. They remained tethered to her by blue ropes that looked like the intestines of a pig.

It might’ve been hours before Jefferson found her. Or only minutes. She batted him away. They were hers and she fully intended to lie down and die with them.

But he forced her into the truck, pinning down her arms and legs in order to shut the passenger door.

The first thing the doctor at the clinic did was give her an injection. “This will calm her down,” he said. And after that no one else could hear her screaming.

Grief enveloped her like sickness. It was all she was. For weeks she didn’t move from the bed. Didn’t speak. Ingested only hot broth. And still, she didn’t die.

“We have to move onward,” Jefferson said.

He wanted to go ahead with the wedding, even a small one, as soon as she was feeling better.

She wasn’t feeling better, though, not past the day the twins should have been born, or the day they would have first smiled. She counted the weeks of their lives that weren’t, tracking milestones and sizes her little ghosts would never reach.

She moved from broth to rice, and then coffee and aguardiente. She had never been a drinker before, couldn’t handle more than a small sip of the firewater that felt like it was freezing and burning your throat all at once. But pain was different to her after the babies, and she drank Jefferson’s stashed bottle in eager gulps. One night she found his pocketknife in his pants. She sliced open the inside of her arms between her wrists and elbows. It felt like the first cut she made when gutting a fish. She awoke to Jefferson clumsily wrapping her wounds with a clean pair of socks.

“You needed to be in the water,” Caro said when she came to visit after. “You did it wrong.”

“There was no bathtub.”

“And this?” Caro flung one arm in the direction of the ocean.

A change of scene, Jefferson thought, would help her heal. He heard of a lady in the city looking for a house girl. The job would mean money for the wedding. As soon as Jefferson found work, he would come join her.

And so Yanirah found herself looking out the window of a bus winding its way past the hill where the babies had died, and up into the clouds beyond, towards the capital. In one small bag were all her clothes and personal belongings: soap, cream, a razor, a compact mirror. In another was a live chicken she brought as a gift of thanks.

“It’s alive!” The señora said when Yanirah opened the top of the bag. She laughed. “What the devil am I going to do with it?”

Yanirah nodded, unable to comprehend the señora’s confusion.

Her room was a small, cement box with one narrow rectangular window, attached to the kitchen and the outdoor area for laundry where she spent most of her time. Each bedroom upstairs had a basket for dirty clothes, and each day Yanirah ascended the steps to collect them. She liked washing things that were flat, like the little girl’s dresses. She ran the bar of detergent up and down the fabric in water that jumped across the washing stone like fish in a river. She used a plastic scrub brush to rub through the stains. Her fingers grew numb in the ice-cold mountain water, red and raw in the foam. She pinned everything up to dry on the clothesline that stretched across the yard, hanging like curtains in front of her room, and ironed outdoors in the evening before the light went away.

The little boy had looked away and darted off in a hurry when he first noticed the scars on her forearms. She’d had her sleeves rolled up to do the wash, momentarily revealing the purplish lines.

People told Yanirah that her grief would fade over time, but so far all that she had felt was a sideways shifting. The work distracted her and she was more able to contain her cries.

The children made fun of her lip. The little boy would pull his own lip and speak in a cruel, exaggerated tone that made her think of a goose honking. And they complained about her food. “This fish is too salty,” one of them said, “like it never left the ocean.” They said that she didn’t cut the bad parts out of the papaya. The señora showed her how the children liked their fruit cut, how much salt to use. How to fold the corners so the sheets always looked tight and new, how to scour the stove with lemon juice after cooking. She put on the same voice she’d use with a very small child, or even an animal.

Yanirah could’ve tried to say something other than Yes, ma’am, to show that she wasn’t as dumb as she looked. But she was too tired and too numb to compose anything in her mind. Over and over she saw the babies, the beach, the wedding, the house she would never have.

A few months later, Jefferson arrived, with another chicken. “Yes, professor,” she heard him saying to the husband. “Thank you, professor.”

“Such a marvelous opportunity.”

There was less oxygen, they said, so high in the mountains. It didn’t bother Yanirah. She was less alive, and didn’t need as much air as she used to.

But Jefferson suffered, with all the lifting of bricks his construction work required. He came home breathless from the uphill walk and slept for hours. Everything hurt, he said.

She bathed him with a sponge and kneaded the knots in his shoulders. Even in her grief, she wanted him inside of her.

See, Jefferson said, there was going to be another baby. But Yanirah had watched months become years waiting that first time, and she could so clearly see this waiting stretching on forever.

Then Caro sent her a letter, first saying how sorry she was about the tragedy, how hard it was for her to see her own sister in such pain. And that she was so understanding, a saint, really, to forgive Jefferson what he had done, after all that had happened.

That night he came home late, wobbling, the aguardiente’s heat on his lips. She helped guide him to the mattress on the floor and unbuckled his pants. She placed her hands on his bony hips, her body hovering over his groin.

“What’d you do back home while I was away?” she asked.

He sniffed, shrugged his shoulders. “The truth is, this.” He gestured at his head, chest, stomach. “Whenever I had money, I, you know, as they say, drank away the pain.”

“Who?” Yanirah asked, the heels of her hands pressing more firmly against his bones.

“Federico, Jorge—same as always,” he said. He looked right at her, blank-eyed, either afraid or fearless, she couldn’t tell.

“No, I mean who.”

He continued staring into her eyes, as though it were a competition that was his to win.

“Who was she?”

Jefferson shook his head. He held his stare.

“Who!”

“Jesus Christ, Yanirah, it was nothing.”

“You son of a bitch!” She leapt at him like a howler monkey. “I buried your children.”

She pounded her head and her fists into his chest. He staggered against her weight and fell back against the concrete wall.

“Calm yourself!” He whisper-yelled. “They’ll hear us.”

“I don’t care!”

“You’ll lose your job—”

“It doesn’t matter!”

She reached up as though for his neck, and he swung. She stumbled and found her balance holding on to the cement wall.

“Leave,” she said, her voice softer than her rapid breathing.

Jefferson held his fist in his other hand. He could get the stuttering sounds no further than his throat.

“Leave,” she whispered again.

She stood still, eyes fixed on the floor as the blood and saliva rolled from her mouth like a string unspooling.

Yanirah was no stranger to hiding behind her hair, but it didn’t take long for the señora to notice. She looked at her, with pity, and then looked away.

Yanirah was rubbing the blue bar of soap against the washing stone, rubbing her knuckles raw, when he walked back into the yard. She saw his shoes before he lifted a pillowcase from the line to reveal his face.

She looked up into the cold sunlight of the morning sky and shook her hair away from her face, forcing him to see everything, the shades of yellow and purple mottling her cheek. It had been her good side.

She saw him wince, and it gave her a wave of courage to avoid his gaze as he walked past her and into their room.

She brought a plate of food back to the room for him that night. She saved the head of the fried fish, with its panicked, hollow eyes. He liked the tender meat in their cheeks.

“Thank you,” he said, hungrily pulling the plate of rice towards him.

“Don’t let it happen again,” she said, already stepping back out to work.

He nodded. He had curled his head in towards his chest, as though to appear more fragile, as though there were any force in her words.

The next time, it started when she asked him how much he had spent drinking that night. He told her it was none of her business, and slapped her before she had a chance to argue. Her arm flew out to hit back, but he caught it. She tried to twist free but he held strong, burning her skin as though his hands were a loop of rope.

The aguardiente set alight his anger, sent it bubbling and popping to the surface. She wasn’t what he had wanted, what he thought he was getting. She was supposed to have been a safe bet for the mother of his children. How would she stick horns on him, with that face?

It was so bad one night, the Professor came down from the bedroom. “If I hear anything else, I’m calling the police,” he shouted at them from the kitchen door. Yanirah’s mouth was full of blood, again.

Jefferson grabbed his wallet, with most of their money, and took off, out the gate, past the cement wall that ringed the yard, topped in a thousand shards of glass.

She didn’t hear from him for weeks. It was Caro, of course, who sent the letter. She was so sorry, but, she couldn’t stand by and not offer her advice. He was sad and skinny and drunk every night back home, she told Yanirah. He was still hurting. If she wanted another chance, she’d best come back soon.

So Yanirah told the señora she could no longer take the cold of the mountains, and got back on the bus towards the coast, with her small bag of things, including a hair clip the señora had given her. “Try to draw the attention up,” she said, “towards your eyes.”

She wore it when she went to see him, holding a bottle of aguardiente. They made love again, and she stared up into the darkness afterwards, throwing her hope for another baby into the black emptiness of the night.

He kept coming home drunk, smelling of aguardiente and his own vomit. And something else, sometimes, something sweet and cheap. She could have asked whose smell it was. But she said nothing. She unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his shirt, and helped him into bed. Her wrist knocked the hard metal of his knife in his pocket. He didn’t stir when she slipped it out and held it in her hand. The steel was still warm from being next to his body. She flipped it open and ran her fingertip over its shiny, sharp edge. It was the same knife she had used before.

The next time he came back smelling of that trash perfume, she felt for his knife instinctively, as he stumbled past her, towards their makeshift outdoor bedroom. He lay with his shirt unbuttoned, the few black hairs he had on his chest painted out to one side with his sweat. He was long and skinny, like always, his fingers still taut like they were the first time he’d handed her a soda. His eyes were closed, and he was making those little twitching motions, dreaming that he was falling. It was his innocent, sleeping face that pulled back her hand. She didn’t start out aiming so low.

That night, she ran the same path, towards the hill and the river. She didn’t look back. She sat awake beside the stream all night, trembling, wondering if it might have only been a dream. But when she gave in to her hunger and returned to the house, there was a policeman waiting.

At the hospital, they removed his spleen and had to give him a stranger’s blood via transfusion. He was lucky, the doctor said. They sometimes didn’t have blood to give.

The judge cited the trauma of the babies’ death in his decision. Ten years. He didn’t believe, the judge said, that there had been intent to murder.

“You had this in you all along,” Caro said. “I never imagined.”

They sent her to the jail in the capital. The señora could’ve come to visit if she knew. She had her own room, a little cement bunker with a raised platform for a bed. It was less drafty than her old housegirl’s quarters.

She came out for lunch the first day with her bag of rice, asking the other girls if she could borrow a pot, maybe a pinch of salt. She had spent all her money on toilet paper at the overpriced commissary.

An old woman with a wrinkled, leathery face and a voice like tumbling gravel asked, “So what’d you do, Baby?”

“I stabbed him.” Yanirah measured a cup of rice into her pot and held it under the faucet, swishing the grains in a circle.

“Your lover?”

“My husband.” Yanirah held the lid of the pot against the rim, opening just enough of a crack to drain all of the water and none of the grains of rice. “I had to defend my dignity.”

“No, no,” said the woman with the turtle skin face. “You did it for us all. A patriot is what you are.”

About the Author

Marie Holmes’ work has appeared in the Linden Review, the Los Angeles Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She has received awards from Gival Press and the Bronx Writers Center, and was an emerging writer fellow at the Center for Fiction.