American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [36]
“Marisi! Georgie!” I heard a woman’s voice call out from our garden. It was Claudia, the cook; she was circling the house looking for us. Anxiously, I stepped forward and took the heavy hair. The witch’s eyes were mantled with clouds, and I wondered if she could even see me. But she wasted no time in telling me what she saw.
“A root is stirring under your house,” she whispered. “It is thick and black, with branches that grow while the condor sleeps. You will think the leaves pretty. You will pay it no heed. You will wake every day like the condor and fly. But, chica, someday that vine will reach your window. It will fly inside and grab you by the throat. Prepare yourself.”
For days after that, the bruja’s words played in my head. What could they mean? A vine? Under my house? The image crept into my dreams. I found myself reaching for my neck in alarm. I imagined black snakes, as fat and tense as a witch’s braid, making their way up our pristine walls in the cover of dark, reappearing each night infinitesimally longer, imperceptibly thicker. Up, with no one believing it but me. Up, with everyone draped on their beds in slumber. Up, and there, before an open window, the sorry wretch of a girl, clenching the covers, gaping at shadows, fighting off sleep to keep the thing back.
Eventually, I had to tell. My mother seemed to take the news in stride. She listened thoughtfully to what I had to say, opening her eyes wide to ingest every word. None of this is true, she told me quietly, after all of it was out. None of it. No such thing will ever happen to you.
But that night I heard her pace my parents’ bedroom and shout the whole thing out to my father. These people this! she said. Those people that! Those people were demented, sick, obsessed. Wasn’t it enough to pass their brujerías on to one another? Why did they have to go around poisoning her children as well? Mother had sent my big sister’s ama packing some months before when Vicki had recounted some of the stories the young woman had been spinning. Mother reminded my father of that now. “You remember what she was telling Vicki? That spirits of the dead crawl through the earth! That they enter the trunks of trees! That they slither through branches to grab at the living! She was saying it to our little girl!”
“Ah, bueno,” my father responded, plumping the pillow and readying himself for sleep. “You fired that ama, all right, but you can’t very well fire a street vendor.”
“We’ll see about that,” my mother said, with a voice that made me shrink from the keyhole and slink to my bed in dismay. Getting rid of the witch wouldn’t help me at all. Not at all. What I needed was someone to get rid of the vine.
The next morning, I slipped into the garden and scoured the perimeter of the house for anything that looked like a creeper. Pretty or not, I pulled it up, tore it to pieces, and threw it onto a wheelbarrow. George helped me, giving long opinions on whether or not a flower or a weed might pose a danger. Our house stood on concrete stilts, giving us good opportunity to crawl beneath and check the situation thoroughly. Apart from candy wrappers we had put there ourselves, there was nothing suspicious. Certainly nothing headed for my window.
At noon, Mother emerged from the house, walked resolutely through the gate, and headed for the witch herself. George and I lurked behind the side walls, peeking through the gate to see our mother’s blond head bob up and down in a rich display of anger. The neighborhood cooks and gardeners shuffled