The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse Page A

homes in such a starry multitude that I was confident there was one for me, and in that home there’d be enough space for my small life, and the hopes I’d bring back with me.

2

The Blossoms of Los Feliz
    S pring is here and it makes my joints ache. All those jacaranda blossoms on the walk outside to sweep up. Jacaranda trees thrive in Los Angeles, like blondes and Mexicans. There’s no getting away from them, not even in my dreams. They’ve haunted me from childhood, when I believed a jacaranda tree would save me. Can you imagine such a thing, a tree saving a life? A silly girl thought so once.
    I’d been sent to my grandmother’s home in Chavez Ravine by a mother whose face I didn’t remember and whose cruelty Abuelita wouldn’t let me forget. The dirt road outside my
abuelita
’s house led to an outdoor
mercado
and was covered with an amethyst sea of pulpy jacaranda that felt like old skin and calico under your bare feet. I’d collect sprays of young jacaranda, then run down the road with them, petals raining from my arms.
    When the white men came to build a baseball stadium for playing their games, they smoothed the land out like a sheet of paper to bring in their trucks and bulldozers that would destroy our homes. But there was a problem. The land was uncooperative and petty, swallowing contractors’ flatbed trucks and, I prayed, the workers
themselves into sinkholes and collapsing earth atop surveyors’ flags. The jacaranda trees gave them the most trouble. They felled the mightiest bulldozers, which couldn’t tear them down without themselves being damaged. I thought that if I grew a jacaranda tree in my room, it would anchor our home to the land and we wouldn’t have to leave.
    I found a thin branch with several young sprays and set it in an old wooden
batea
. We had no running water, and the rainstorms that fled across the ravine didn’t give the dry, cracked ground a chance to soak up what poured out of the sky, so at night I’d slip out of my window barefoot to steal water from a neighbor’s well.
    I planted the
batea
in our swept-smooth dirt floor and waited for the spray to bear seeds whose roots would burrow deep into our ground. Two of the buds matured, plopping atop the water’s surface before they could open, but the rest weren’t growing fast enough and the sounds of the bulldozers kept getting closer and closer. I poured heavy gulps of water into the
batea
to get the other buds to bloom. I didn’t want to hurt them. I wanted to give them more of what I thought they needed.
    That night, a bad dream crept to my bed like a relative with filthy thoughts. I was a jacaranda blossom struggling to stay alive but whose violet color was dripping off my petals into a standing pool of water. But I was also me, laughing as I held the dying blossom by its bud under the water. I reached up with as much strength as I pushed my body down, drowning both my selves. There was the
drop drop drop
of running water, then a hard patter, then a shrieking roar, a scream pouring out of my mouth as I awoke coughing strands of spit on the side of the bed I shared with my
abuelita.
It was a vivid nightmare, one that revisits me, a persistent yet incurable sickness.
    Fumbling to the
batea
through the rough darkness, I saw that the other buds had shriveled up. Two jacaranda flowers were submerged underwater. I cradled them out of the vase to dry them, but their milk and seeds popped out as the flowers tore apart in my hands. My
abuelita
heard me crying and without asking where the water had come from told me that a drowning flower moves toward the water, not away from it. Its stem may be strong enough to stand on its own, but when its petals grow wet and heavy, they drag the flower back into the water and that causes it to die.
    Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a