La Llorona: an excerpt
At home, I learned later, it was a maelstrom of quiet chaos. When I disappeared, they didn’t know where to look. The white adobe house by the river became a prison for my mom and brother. They wept and grieved and tried to look for me wherever they could. But the means weren’t there for a large-scale search, and they suffered silently because of my stepdad, who wouldn’t allow them to search further. Every time my mom would want to search for me, he would say, “He’s not here. You won’t find him. It’s time to let him go.” His dreams of me not being around had come true. He didn’t care that I was gone. That my mom and brother cried every day meant nothing to him. My brother ached inside and suffered because he thought it was his fault that I was gone. “I told him to hurry – he didn’t listen. I just don’t know where he went,” he would say to my mom as they cried together silently. I try to imagine, now, what I would do if one of my kids was missing. I would go to the ends of the earth