Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Page B

harelip faded, she looked exactly like my father. If he’d seen her, he would have thought he was looking in a mirror.
    My mother noticed it too. She would stare at Maria in a quiet way, studying her face. She was struggling between wanting to take Maria into her arms and kiss her and wanting to slap her hard across the face.
    I loved Maria. Out of everyone in that godforsaken-godforgotten-hottest-hell-on-earth place, as my mother liked to call our mountain, she was the kindest person of all. She would walk around a big red fire ant before she’d step on one.
    The year that José Rosa was our teacher I remember as a series of events.
    The first event was the day of his arrival, combinedwith the visit at my house when I showed him our beer cemetery. The second event that stands out is the day that Paula was rained on with herbicide.
    That year was also measured by watching my mother’s blond hair grow out. By the time the school year was over, her black roots reached almost to her ears. She never dyed it over black, touched it up blond again, or even trimmed it, because Ruth’s beauty salon had closed. And this, the closing of Ruth’s salon, was the third event of that year.
    No one saw a thing. No one heard a thing. Nothing was left behind.
    We never heard from Ruth again.
    Estefani’s grandmother, Sofia, who ran the OXXO convenience store down the block from Ruth’s salon, had risen earlier than usual to go and open her place. It was December tenth. Sofia was expecting the swarms of pilgrims that would pass by her store, and march down all of Mexico’s dirt roads and highways, to get to Mexico City for the Virgin of Guadalupe’s day, on December twelfth.
    Sofia walked past the beauty salon as she did every day. The door made of corrugated transparent green plastic was swinging wide open into the street. She peered inside and called Ruth’s name, but there was no answer.
    Later she would explain that she could never tell if those bright red spots on the floor were blood or drops of red nail polish.
    Nobody did anything as stupid as calling the police. Instead we waited.
    When we walked past the beauty parlor that still had its sign
The Illusion
over the front door, we’d peer in and hope to still see her there. Instead, we only saw two standing hairdryers that our mothers used to sit under and the two empty sinks where Ruth used to wash our hair. The menorah on the windowsill was still there in front of the window that was starred with bullet holes.
    We all knew she was stolen.
    There are so many dead people out there we’re never going to find them alive, my mother said.
    José Rosa was so disturbed by the disappearance of Ruth that he spent two months trying to get someone to come from Mexico City to investigate.
    There was only one place on that mountain where our cell phones could get a signal from a tower that was twelve kilometers away. This was in a small clearing on the way to school. There was always someone there either talking on their phone or waiting to get a call from a relative in the United States. The clearing was our link to the world. It was here that good news and bad news reached us. My mother named the place Delphi, after a documentary she’d seen on Greek history.
    The sounds of the jungle mixed with the noise from the cell phones. The sound of beeps, rings, songs, and bells that filled the humid air were accompanied by the high-pitch timbre of women’s voices.
    At this clearing there were always women waiting to hear from their husbands and male children. Some sat there for days that became weeks, months, and years, and their cell phones never rang.
    Once my mother was talking to my father, before he left us for good, and I heard her say, I could swallow this telephone I want you so badly.
    It was strange to have a man hanging out there. The presence of José Rosa made everyone a little shy. We listened with fascination as he spoke to lawyers, policemen, and judges, and tried to get