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I didn’t bother to look out the window when the helicopter flew over Mexico City. I’d always thought I’d visit the city’s parks, museums, and the famous Chapultepec zoo and castle, but now I knew it would never happen.

The guard sitting across from me was still wearing the wool ski mask. The sweat from his scalp dripped down his neck and the front of his shirt. He was so sweaty that even his hand resting on the machine gun glistened. His eyes peered through the holes in the wool and looked into my eyes.

You’re all a bunch of stupid girls, he said.

I looked away from him and out the window at the Popocatepetl volcano with the long plume of smoke blowing from its crater.

He shook his head back and forth.

All you stupid bitches care about is money.

My hands were handcuffed behind my back and I felt the diamond in my palm.

Long ago, my mother taught me how to protect myself against a man. She said to take my index finger and poke out the man’s eyes, to just scoop them out like clams out of their shells. She did not teach me what to do if I were in handcuffs.

I never want to have a daughter, he said.

He took out a piece of gum and pushed it through the hole in the mask and into his mouth. His mouth moved under the wool, under the small round opening, as he chewed.

If I had a daughter, he said, I’d spit.

In Mexico City, before I was formally booked and taken to jail, I was paraded for the press in a room at the airport.

I was made to stand behind a long table that was covered with several dozen rifles, pistols, and ammunition. This was the cache of weapons that had been found at the house in Acapulco. The reporters screamed out questions at me and television cameras filmed my face.

Who killed her, you or Mike?

Why did you have to shoot her in the face like that?

Why? Why did you kill an innocent little girl?

What happened at that ranch?

Are you Mike’s girlfriend?

As the reporters called out questions, I bowed my head, pressed my chin to my chest, and looked down toward my heart so they could not photograph my face. But then I remembered something. I looked up.

If I looked up, and let myself be filmed, my eyes would pierce right through the camera. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down into the bowl of the white satellite dish antenna my father had bought. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down straight into the television screen and right into my two-room home on our mountain. I knew that if I looked up into the camera, I would see my mother as she sat in front of the TV with a beer in her hand and a yellow plastic flyswatter across her knee. I looked into the camera and deep into my mother’s eyes and she looked back.

PART THREE

The Santa Marta Jail in the south of Mexico City was the biggest beauty parlor in the world. The bitter and citric scent of hair dyes, hair sprays, and nail polish permeated the rooms and passageways of the building.

The odors took me back to the day that Maria had her harelip fixed. It was the day a kettle of vultures circled above our home. And it was also the day my mother was angry with the Acapulco fortune-teller because the woman never predicted that my mother would have to bury someone.

Did that fortune-teller tell my mother that her daughter was going to go to jail?

In the prison office where I was booked there was a blackboard on the wall. A scrawl of white chalk kept track of the foreign inmates and children. In the jail there were seventy-seven children who were all under the age of six. There were three inmates from Colombia; three from Holland; six from Venezuela; three from France; one from Guatemala, one from the United Kingdom, two from Costa Rica, one from Argentina, and one from the United States.

After I was booked in and my photograph and fingerprints were taken, I was given a pair of clean beige sweatpants and a beige sweatshirt and told to change. The clothes were worn so thin I could see my skin beneath the weave. How many women had placed their arms in these sleeves before me?

The jail was a chessboard of beige and navy-blue squares. The women in beige were awaiting trial and the women in blue had been sentenced. In jail I learned that everyone would get hungry for yellow or green, as if colors had turned into food.

No one gave me a pair of shoes or sneakers.

I walked through the jail in my red plastic flip-flops with traces of Acapulco beach sand between my toes.

A female prison guard pushed me through the octagonal maze of corridors toward my cell. Instead of windows, long rectangular openings in the cement walls, like slashes from a knife, looked out on the main yard where a few women in navy blue kicked a ball around.

On the other side of the building, across the yard, was the men’s prison. It was close enough to hear shrieks and cries coming from over the wall. The men and women prisoners could wave to each other from certain points.

My cell contained a bunk bed. When you are charged with killing the daughter of one of the country’s most important drug traffickers you get special treatment. You get to share a cell with only one other prisoner. Most of the inmates had to share rooms with at least four people, two to a bed. I was placed in a cell with a foreigner because this makes it harder to be killed by orders from outside. I knew this. The person who killed that little girl had no chance of living, not for long.

The woman who shared my cell was also dressed in beige and was so small her sweatpants were rolled up around her ankles so she wouldn’t trip. Her hair was pulled into a long black braid down her back and, when she turned toward me, I could see her left sleeve hung loose and empty, falling from her shoulder as if it were a flag on a day without wind.

Since the moment I had been taken from the house in Acapulco and brought to the jail, I could not hear my mother’s voice. It had almost been forty-eight hours of silence. I heard the rush of my own blood through my body and it was the sound of Acapulco’s ocean.

When I looked at the tiny, childlike woman, my mother’s voice came back. Her words crossed the jungle, soared above the pineapple and palm trees, traveled over the mountains of the Sierra Madre, past the Popocatepetl volcano, down into the valley of Mexico City, and moved through the treeless streets straight into me.

So what the hell happened to your arm? I heard her ask.

Chop, chop, chop, the woman answered.

In a few moments I figured out that everything the woman said was plunk plunk this and splash splash that and clonk clonk, quack quack, bang bang.

I could hear my mother again. Right inside of my head she said, Well, well, well, look who’s here! It’s Miss Onomatopoeia herself!

Miss Onomatopoeia’s name was Luna and she was from Guatemala. She pointed up at the top bunk with the pointer finger of her right hand, her only hand, and told me the top bunk bed was for me. She had long and square fake acrylic fingernails pasted onto her real nails and each nail was painted black and white in a zebra pattern.

One woman from El Salvador was up there, but she left yesterday. I hope it’s clean, Luna said.

I am sure it’s fine.

Nothing in here is fine. All that woman ever said was God. She said God all day long as if the word were her heart beating.

A woman dressed in blue appeared and stood within the door frame. She was so large she blocked out much of the light from the corridor. She had short black hair and long fingernails that were painted yellow. She’d been sentenced. If you wore blue, you had no hope. If you wore beige you had hope.

So you killed the baby, she said. It was you.

I shook my head.

Touch the floor.

I paused for a second and she said it again, Touch the floor!

I crouched and touched the ground with my fingers.

You’re in jail, she said. I tell everyone who comes here to touch the ground as soon as they get here so they know exactly where they are. Now you have to decide if you left your pussy outside or if you brought it in here with you!

The woman moved to one side and the light from behind her body filled my cell. She smelled like blood and ink. She smelled like red and black. I was still crouched, touching the floor when she left.

Violeta, that’s Violeta. She’s killed two, no, three, no, four, no, many men. Bang bang, but with a knife, slice, slice, stab, stab. How many men?

Many. She tattoos everyone and loves jail because there’s so much skin in here.

The sunlight that fell through the narrow slat of the room’s window was cold.

I never knew the sun could be cold.

Luna explained there was no place to keep anything but that I could store my belongings in a space under her bottom bunk bed.

I have no belongings.

You will in time.

No. This is a mistake.

Did you kill her? You did, right?

I looked into Luna’s black eyes.

She was a small, dark brown Mayan Indian from Guatemala with straight black hair. I was a medium-sized, dark brown mix of Spanish and Aztec blood from Guerrero, Mexico, with frizzy, curly hair, which proved I also had some African slave blood. We were just two pages from the continent’s history books. You could tear us out and roll us into a ball and throw us in the trash.

What do you think? I asked.

What?

Think I killed that girl?

Of course not, she answered. They say here that it was an AK-47. You can’t know how to use one of those.

My mother’s voice echoed through me. I heard her say, This Guatemalan Indian is a piece of candy.

Luna said I could borrow any of her things except her toothbrush.

Even though it was only midday, I climbed up into the bed and lay down. The beauty parlor smell of the prison was concentrated up there. It smelled like acetone nail polish remover mixed with lemon hair spray. The unpainted concrete ceiling was a foot away from my face. If I turned over and lay on my side, I could scrape my shoulder and hip against the rough cement.

In jail everyone is missing something, Luna said.

I curled up and tried to forget I was cold. I didn’t have a blanket. If I wanted a blanket or pillow I had to buy it. Everything in jail had to be bought.

There was some graffiti written in black ink on the wall, exactly at my eye level and at the eye level of hundreds of women who had lain in the top bunk bed before me. Most of the graffiti consisted of lovers’ hearts with initials in them. Also, carved into the cement was the word Tarzan.

I closed my eyes. I could hear my mother say, So you had to go to jail and share a room with a one-armed Indian woman from Guatemala!

I also knew that even though we were proud to be the angriest and meanest people in Mexico, my mother could not stop crying because her daughter was in jail. The flies were drinking her tears.

When I thought of my house, I also knew that the drug trafficker’s blue plastic asthma inhaler was still lying in the green grass under the papaya tree. I knew it would lie there for hundreds of years.

I slept for the rest of the day and all through the night. The dawn light awoke me along with the new sound of traffic. It was the first time I had risen without hearing birds. It was raining outside, which made the cement walls and floor seem like walls and floors of ice.

During the night Luna had covered me with a blanket and a couple of towels. Small acts of kindness could turn me inside out. I never would have believed that someone who had shot a child in a break-and-entry robbery, killed twelve old ladies for their wedding rings, or murdered two husbands could loan me a sweater, give me a cookie, or hold my hand.

Luna had also placed my feet inside plastic supermarket bags so they would not get cold in the night.

Julio had said, Life is a crazy place where the drowned can be walking on dry land.

Now I knew he was right. It only took me one day to figure out that being in jail was like wearing a dress inside out, a misbuttoned sweater, or a shoe on the wrong foot. My skin was on the inside and all my veins and bones were on the outside. I thought, I better not bump into anyone.

I was tied to a train, the migrant train that goes from the south of Mexico to the US border, tied with a blue plastic clothesline, Luna said.

I could see her blood move through her veins and down her left arm and stop at the small stump, which was all that remained of her arm, like a tree limb that has been badly pruned with a dull saw.

I knew what Luna was talking about because Julio had told me that in Mexico there were two borders that cut the country into pieces. The horizontal border is the one between the United States and Mexico. The vertical border leads from Central America, through Mexico, and to the United States. Mostly men take the train from Central America to the border. It’s much cheaper. Women prefer taking the bus because it is safer. Julio, like everyone else, called the train The Beast.

You took The Beast?

We tied ourselves to the train because you fall asleep, Luna explained. You can’t help it. Imagine falling asleep in that speed. I was tied outside to a handrail. I went to sleep and slipped and fell beside the track and the train tore off my arm and I lost my arm and I almost died.

She said all of this and did not take a breath.

Luna said she liked being in jail because she could urinate whenever she needed to.

You don’t want to get off to urinate when the train stops for a few minutes and the men get off because they’ll watch you, make fun of you as you squat by the tracks, or rape you. All the women, all of us hold it in. It hurts. You don’t want to drink and if you don’t drink, well, you know, you die.

Did you leave Guatemala by yourself?

The train tore off my arm and I almost died and they still wanted to deport me. The migration police didn’t believe me when I said I was Mexican. They told me to sing the Mexican national anthem if I was a Mexican.

Do you know it?

Luna shook her head.

This reminded me of the day I sat under a papaya tree with Paula and Maria going over the words of the national anthem. Paula and I learned it all so easily as if it was senseless sounds, but Maria took the actual words very seriously. What does that mean, exactly? she said. Why are we singing about Mexico going to war? Why does the inside of the world tremble?

I didn’t kill that girl. I could never do that. I was in the car, locked in a car.

Luna unrolled a piece of toilet paper and handed it to me so I could blow my nose.

I’m not crying, I said.

Yes, you are.

No, I’m not.

Luna explained that, even though my mother was supposed to be notified, as I gave the administrators who booked me in her number, they probably would not call her.

They’re slow, slow, slow about everything here if you don’t have money. Money is a car race. Money is speed.

I could feel Mrs. Domingo’s diamond on the inside of my palm, closed in my fist.