Drowning Tucson (32 page)

The image of the little girl’s ravaged body burned itself permanently into their memories. When they’d recovered enough to speak, the search committee radioed dispatch and told them to send homicide and the coroner, and then the members of the team sat in a circle to wait for the arrival of the others and took turns praying for the girl’s soul so that it might rest peacefully and forget the violent death it had endured.

The coroner arrived shortly after the call came in and couldn’t bear to look, forced to turn away as he snapped pictures from every possible angle, hoping he had gotten close enough to document the ragged hole in her abdomen where her entrails had been eaten away by vultures or coyotes or other desert creatures—or so he hoped. He told the officers to cut the bungee cords and bag them for evidence, then rope off the scene and place the girl facedown in a bodybag so he could photograph the gouges that riddled her arms and neck and back and legs. The coroner grieved silently as he snapped the pictures, then zipped the bag and carefully lifted it into the hearse and drove slowly down the mountain toward the Tucson Medical Center, where he and his assistants would perform a full autopsy on the remains.

It wasn’t until the next day that the Santiagos were notified that a body had been found up on A Mountain that fit the age and general description of their missing daughter. Alejandro trembled as he put down the phone and turned to face his wife in bed to tell her the news.

They think they might have found Samantha’s body. Carmella shook her head and turned away. Morena, we have to go see. She pulled a pillow over her head to shut out her husband’s words. We have to go. We must know. Carmella. Mi corazón. Come with me. Don’t make me go
alone. Alejandro placed his arms around her shoulders and scrunched his eyes closed and relaxed every muscle in his body to absorb the heaving of his hysterically sobbing wife. He held her while she wept and told her not to worry. It probably isn’t her, but we have to go check. After many hours her weeping subsided, turned to shudders, then finally dwindled to the occasional twitch.

During the entire drive down to the Tucson Medical Center, Carmella stared out the window and forced Alejandro to slow the car each time she saw a girl with black hair on the street. Slow down, Alejandro. What if it’s her? Could you forgive yourself if our baby is just lost and we drove right past her to go look at some dead girl in a morgue? COULD YOU? Well, I couldn’t. No. And I’ll never forgive you if you don’t at least slow enough to LOOK at a girl who just might be ours. She has to be SOMEWHERE. Carmella said all of this with her face to the window while Alejandro shook his head and bit the inside of his cheek to keep from bursting into tears. He slowed for his wife when she asked, not even bothering to look at the girl in question because it was bad enough that one of them was keeping their hopes up. He slowed each time she demanded it and clenched the steering wheel in tight fists, waiting to hear the sigh of resignation when his wife had verified that yet another girl with black hair was not their Samantha.

Less than a mile from the medical center, Alejandro was steeling himself to view the body of a dead girl who might be his daughter. But how do you prepare for such things, he wondered. How does a parent ready himself to look upon the corpse of his child and wrap his mind around the idea that the child lying lifeless in front of him was just yesterday playing in the backyard with her friends? How do I, if it’s really her, look at our daughter for the last time? And how do we go home and clean out her room and destroy all the cards she ever made us? What do we do with all her clothes and her stuffed animals and her Disney posters? Do we really have to pretend she never existed to get used to the idea that she won’t be coming home again and asking for an after-school snack?

He tried to imagine all the possible questions that would rise to the surface of his mind, tried to guess how it might be if his little girl was truly gone forever, when his wife screamed and began pounding on her
window and kicking her legs trying to get the car door open, suddenly remembering the lock and bursting through the passenger door before Alejandro could stop the car. She tumbled out into the street and was back on her feet and running toward the public library screaming IT’S HER, IT’S OUR SAMANTHA, before Alejandro slammed the car into park in the middle of the road and switched on the hazards and ran after her with all the hope and desperation he could muster to pin on this last little girl. Carmella screamed after the child, yelling for her to stop, PLEASE STOP, BABY, and the girl turned and saw the woman running frantically toward her, and she dropped the books she was carrying and bolted toward the library entrance, running between parked cars, barely able to breathe when she tripped over her untied shoelaces and fell to the ground, skinning her knee on the parking lot asphalt. She immediately began to cry, terrified of the woman coming after her and in pain from the gravel buried in her knee, yelling MOMMY, HELP, MOMMY. Carmella heard the girl’s cries and found her sitting on the ground holding her injured knee up to her chest, and she collapsed beside the girl and hugged her and told her it’s alright, Samantha, Mommy’s here. We found you. Mommy and Daddy did. You can come home now. You can come back to your house, baby. She held the little girl close to her and rubbed her head and kissed her knee and was muttering words of love and encouragement when Alejandro reached the two of them and stopped running. He stood panting for breath, unable to believe their good fortune at having found their little girl. He wept and laughed as he stepped forward to hug them. He reached out to touch his daughter’s head, to feel her beautiful cornsilk hair once again, but stopped mid-stride when an electric shock shot through his back and into his kidney, paralyzing him, and as he fell to his knees he saw a woman charge past him and shove a stungun into his wife’s neck and his wife’s body went limp and lay still in the library parking lot, her lips covered in blood from the little girl’s scraped knee that she had been kissing.

The woman stepped over his wife and, with the rage of a mother’s protective instincts in her eyes, she spit on Carmella’s face and said this is MY girl, you witch. Bruja. Whore. You’re so lucky my husband isn’t here or he would’ve crushed both of your child-snatching skulls.
Carmella’s leg twitched, but she lay still, curled into a ball with tears streaming down her cheeks onto the asphalt where they sizzled and dried up immediately.

Alejandro rose to his knees and reached out toward the woman and whispered Samantha, please come back, Samantha. The woman turned around and pushed her daughter behind her, protecting the girl from the two crazed predators. She is NOT Samantha. Her name is Erica and she’s MY daughter. The mother reached back into her purse for her stungun and held it out in Alejandro’s direction and pushed the button. The stungun hissed and popped in the woman’s hand. She took a step toward Alejandro and then, in a voice so sweet it almost broke his heart, the child grabbed her mother’s arm and said don’t, Mommy. Please don’t. And the exhausted mother relented, allowing her daughter to lead her away.

Alejandro gathered his wife’s limp body off the ground and carried her back to the car waiting in the middle of the road with its flashers blinking, a line of traffic behind it honking at the abandoned vehicle.

In the morgue the Santiagos waited with thirteen other couples. Some were certain their child wasn’t lying dead in the other room and had only come because there was nothing else to do while awaiting the call from the police telling them their child had been found and could be picked up at the downtown precinct. Others had given up on seeing their child alive again but hoped that she was still alive somewhere. Maybe lost in a mall or asleep under a bush scared and waiting to be found. Still others were aware that their child was most likely dead. They had accepted this fate and only needed proof. A body. A finger bone. A tooth. A strand of hair. Anything they could place in a pine box and bury so they could get on with their lives and just maybe the nightmares would finally go away.

The Santiagos were among the first group. Parents who had yet to give up hope. They were both certain Samantha was still alive somewhere and weren’t expecting the morgue visit to help anything. Nobody looked at one another. The air in the room was thick with despair and no one wanted to look at a couple exiting the examination room and see the relief of two parents who had just seen the corpse, trying to contain
their happiness because it hadn’t been their child lying dead on the table, but ashamed to show any joy in front of the other people whose child might be lying mutilated beneath the sterile and impersonal lights of the morgue.

Six couples entered and left. The Santiagos still waited. Alejandro didn’t have to look up to know the child in the other room didn’t belong to any of the people who had gone so far. He could sense the relief pouring from them as they walked back through the waiting room and out the door. Besides, the coroner would quit calling off names if the body had been identified. And he hadn’t stopped calling.

Finally, the Santiagos were called. Carmella, unable to bear the strain—even if it wasn’t Samantha—buried her face in her husband’s neck as they entered the examination room. The coroner’s assistant led them to the farthest table in the room, past more than a dozen covered bodies, to a table with a bright lamp shining down on it. The assistant asked them to hang on a second, and the coroner entered the room and walked to the head of the table, tucking his clipboard beneath his right arm. He avoided looking directly at the Santiagos, letting his eyes dart about the room—floor to ceiling, left to right—as Alejandro stood by his wife at the foot of the shiny metal table. The tips of two tiny feet stuck out from beneath the gray plastic sheet. Hanging from the big toe of the child’s right foot was an identification tag. The coroner spoke, warning Alejandro and Carmella of the severity of injuries to the child’s body, attempting to tactfully explain the cause of death without going into any details that might potentially drive the parents to madness. But Alejandro ignored the words and lightly shrugged his wife’s head off his shoulder. She turned away from the table. Alejandro looked at the tiny foot. The way the pinky toe curved under and the toenail seemed to slide down the side was exactly like Samantha’s. The coroner kept speaking, preparing the parents for the viewing, but his words went unheard. Alejandro raised the tag where it hung from the child’s body and read the words scribbled on it. No name or age. Sex: F. Height: 47 inches. Weight: 35 pounds. Alejandro was relieved. He turned to his wife and placed his hand on her shoulder and told her Carmella, it’s not her. It’s not Samantha.

She turned to face her husband. How do you know? Did you see her face? Alejandro shook his head. But look here at this tag. It says this
girl’s thirty-five pounds. Samantha is more like forty-eight pounds, right? Right? Carmella hugged her husband, overcome with relief.

The coroner shook his head and spoke again. Mr. and Mrs. Santiago, this girl weighs thirty-five pounds
now.
But she weighed more when she was alive. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. All you need to do is come up here and look at her face. That’s all I’m asking. Just look at her face.

Alejandro didn’t move. Carmella squeezed her husband’s arm tighter.

The coroner spoke again. Please. Just once. Look and look away.

Alejandro grabbed his wife’s hand and led her to the table. The coroner pulled the sheet down to the girl’s shoulders and asked is this your girl? Take your time. When you’re sure, let me know.

But he didn’t need to hear an answer. He’d seen the look so many times. The look of denial when a relative sees the face of death clouding the once-recognizable features of a loved one. The way they blink their eyes and bring their hands up to their mouths to hold back the cry of recognition that wants to leap out and make itself heard. The way they look a second time, their brains denying the truth while their eyes seek to confirm it. It’s an awful look, and the Santiagos had it all over them. The coroner put down his clipboard. Is this your daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Santiago?

Carmella shook her head and said no, no. No. It’s someone else’s baby. Our girl is brown, not purple, and she smiles. She has little smile wrinkles in the corners of her mouth and a dimple high in her left cheek, so this cannot be Samantha.

She bucked and then collapsed into her husband’s arms because as she spoke those words her brain and eyes finally connected with one another and verified the undeniable fact that it was indeed
their
baby on the table whose purple and sun-dried face was practically unrecognizable. Alejandro knew it from the first glance and was glad his wife didn’t seem to be aware, but when she collapsed in his arms he knew that she knew and he wanted only to leave the death-infested basement of the medical center, but he could only seem to stand there, still, holding his wife until the intercom paged a doctor to come to trauma two stat, and then he broke from his trance and pulled his wife to him to lead her out
of the morgue before the reality of Samantha’s death registered in her mind and she snapped.