“I was dying, likely dead, even. Can’t really remember all too well, too busy dying and all that, you know?” replied Esperanza all too nonchalantly. She used to feel wistful about dying when she was freshly summoned to Ephemera, but the months that had passed since then helped her come to terms with it, to the point that she was comfortable joking about it presently. “Come to think of it, I did vaguely recall hearing the doorbell ring back then, and something that sounded like someone shouting for me… were you at my place when you were summoned here?”
“Right, me and Ethan went to visit you since we were worried about you, and met Joshua along the way. We were worried about you since you’ve been absent for a while back then, and Joshua was made to check on you as the class president,” replied Alissa automatically. “Wait! Don’t go change the topic like that! What was that about you dying!?”
“Exactly what I said, honestly,” replied Esperanza with a shrug, clearly far less bothered with the discussion of her own death than Alissa was. “Around the time you rang my place’s doorbell and shouted for me, I was lying in the bathtub, with my wrists slit and submerged in the running water,” she added with just as much nonchalance. “Had you been a day or two later, the cops would probably have gotten there ahead of you, I think.”
“Oh, Zaza,” lamented Alissa quietly, her hands covering her mouth in surprise. Esperanza had always known her to be a rather sensitive and sympathetic girl, so Alissa’s reaction to the revelation was not that surprising to her. Neither was her follow-up query on the situation. “How… Did that happen? What made you do such a drastic thing!?”
“It’s a bit of a long story, but sure,” replied Esperanza as she sat more leisurely on her chair, leaning against its back and angling her body to a more relaxed position. “To begin with, though, how much do you know about my family’s situation, Allie?”
“Not that much, to be honest,” admitted Alissa with a shake of her head. “I know you and your mother came from the south, I remember you telling us about it once. Other than that… let’s see… your mother died when you were like ten, I think? And since then you have been living under your stepfather’s guardianship? I did hear my dad say some rather unpleasant rumors about him, but I didn’t ask at the time. Is this related to him?”
“Sí,” said Esperanza with a serious look on her face at last. “That filthy madero is a real hijo de puta. He plasters on a pretty mask when he’s out of the house, plays the model citizen, cop, and father and all that, but all I remember of the pendejo was how he laid hands on my mother since I was old enough to remember. When Mamá died in that car accident I wasn’t even sure whether it was his doing or truly an accident.”
“Oh, sure, he was clever about it and only hit her in places where people wouldn’t see the bruises as long as she’s clothed, and he knew all too well that we could only stay in the states because we were with him, and the puto cabron made full use of that knowledge, too,” she continued before Alissa could get a word in. “It wasn’t just mom either. A lot of the bruises you probably saw on me wasn’t from the bullying at school. It was from him.”
“My God… I’m so sorry, Zaza… I never knew…” muttered Alissa partly in shock at the revelation. “Couldn’t you and your mother have just… gone elsewhere? Seek asylum, maybe? Or even return to the south where you were from? Did he have something on you that forced you two to stay with him despite the abuse?”
“Go to where? Remember that the pinche madero’s a copper! He got the other coppers on his side too, so if we tried to run away while staying nearby they would’ve just rounded us up and sent us back to him!” said Esperanza with some noticeable vehemence in her voice. “As for going back down south… That was never an option… though I guess that’s a story I’ve never told you before. Only heard of it from Mamá a couple months before she died myself.”
“If you don’t mind, I would like to hear it,” said Alissa sympathetically. “They say that sharing the pain helps make it lighter. It’d be the least I could do for you.”
“Well, keep in mind that all this is just what I heard from Mamá, and I never got to verify anything, though I believe her. She told me that we used to live just fine back there. Abuelo was even a cop, a respected, clean one, but that ended up being our family’s undoing,” Esperanza narrated. “Abuelo was too stubborn and refused to let off a criminal, and that pissed off one of the big narcos.”
“Did you know that the narcos gives no fucks when they set their mind to something down there? They directly sent their men to our family house and gunned everyone down. Mamá and Papá happened to be out with me that night, so we escaped the massacre by chance and managed to go on the run,” she continued, ending her sentence with a wistful sigh. “Mamá said that Papá played the bait to buy time for her to escape and that she never saw him ever again since. I don’t even know what he looked like.”
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“How did the two of you get… to the states, then?” Alissa asked curiously. She might not speak Spanish, but she could very well guess just who – or rather, what – sort of enemy Esperanza’s family had provoked.
“As ironic as it may sound, Mamá and I owed our lives to another group of narcos back then. One that was rivals with the one who went after us. They basically shipped us over the border just to spite their rivals, could you believe it?” replied Esperanza with some rather forced-sounding laughter. “Of course, that ends up just sending us to a different hell, but we did at least live a good while longer. The pinche madero’s one of their men in the states. If you’ve seen anyone doing drugs in town back then, it likely went through him at some point.”
“Cabron’s always been good at playing the model copper, nobody even suspected him for being the narcos’ stooge in town. Ironic, ain’t it?” said Esperanza as her laugh took on a higher, stressed pitch. “The one supposed to arrest the drug dealers turned out to be the boss of the ones supplying them in the first place.”
“So that’s why…” noted Alissa quietly as she understood the implication behind Esperanza’s words. “You couldn’t have gone back because both cartels would’ve gone after you if you did that…”
“Pretty much. If that was just it, I could’ve probably just bear with it. It’s just beating, not even that much worse than bullying at school. If anything, Mamá had it so much worse than I do, having to play the pendejo’s wife to everyone she ran into… I think if I wasn’t there, Mamá might well have taken her chances and ran away again, but that would have to remain hypothetical, wouldn’t it?”
“But nah, you were asking what drove me to take such drastic measures, didn’t you?” said Esperanza eventually, coming to the point of what Alissa asked her about.
Alissa nodded from across the table, though not without a small measure of worry and dread that she could still notice even through [Weather the Storm]’s dampening effect, as the skill mostly asserted itself only when the emotions would have impaired her rationality. It was very helpful in allowing her to keep her calm so far, at the very least.
“Well, the puta madre couldn’t keep his hands to himself after Mamá died and I got old enough. That was what drove me to do it,” stated Esperanza with the same nonchalance she used when talking about her death earlier. “You could probably guess what happened next. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t like I was so depressed by it that I killed myself or something, none of that.”
“What… did you do then?”
“Fucking cabron was cutting up some cheese before I came home, apparently, and he left the knife right by the table,” recited Esperanza with a deathly calm to her voice, as if it was something that didn’t happen to herself. “I managed to get my hand on it while he was to busy and engrossed with his fun, then I knifed him right at the kidney, as deep as that fucker would go in.”
“I must have stabbed him like another dozen times or two, even chopped off his bloody verga y cojones while I’m at it, then stabbed him some more after he flopped to the floor on that fat belly of his. Pendejo squealed like the madero he was all the time he was bleeding out down there, to say the least. It was quite… relaxing to hear.”
Alissa was mildly horrified by what Esperanza told her, not of the murder itself, which she felt quite warranted and understandable given the circumstances, but about the nonchalant, detached way Esperanza recited the tale, as if it was merely something she watched on the television rather than had happen to herself.
She was lost for words for a while, as she could only offer a sympathizing look towards her old friend, uncertain what she could even say. She sort of understood why Esperanza did what she did. Alissa knew that Esperanza likely felt as if there was no way out for her, and that she’d be damned no matter what she did, which was why she chose to take her own life in the end.
So that she could at least go out on her own terms.
“All that probably happened not too long before you came over, honestly. I recall not staying by the puta madre’s carcass for long after I was sure he was as dead as can be, and just went to the bathtub and soaked myself there, even if I felt as if I would never be clean again after that. I had the knife in my hand all that time. Must’ve been too stressed to let it drop all that while, heh.”
“That probably gave me the idea to just end it all, honestly. What else do I have to look forward to anyway? If I stay, they’ll just toss me in jail and some of the people the narcos got in their pockets in there would make sure to get rid of me, likely in some very unpleasant way. If I try to run away, either I’d get caught or the narcos themselves might send more of their people directly after me. It’d be the same ending either way. At least I could go out on my own terms, I thought. Sorry if that got a bit too morbid for you.”
Alissa was left speechless by the story she just listened to. She never had any idea of her friend’s situation, with part of her practically screaming in her mind – or it would have, if not for her skill’s effect kicking in – that she should have noticed things before it came to such a point, that she should have done something to help her friend before it was all too late.
Still at a loss for words, Alissa instead did the best thing she could offer in the situation. She slowly stood up from her chair, walked around the table to Esperanza’s side, then enveloped her friend in a warm, gentle hug. It was the best thing Alissa had to offer, and Esperanza seemed to understand the intent, as she allowed Alissa to embrace her, before hugging her friend back just as gently.
The two remained that way for a timeless while, each one silent and pondering what they should say in their minds while they simply lent comfort to each other.