The Distance Between Us: Book One: Prologue–Chapter 6

We stood at the threshold of the little house we had been renting from a man named Don Rubén and looked around us one last time.

The year before, the peso was devalued 45 percent to the US dollar. It was the beginning of the worst recession Mexico had seen in fifty years.

We didn’t live far from my grandmother’s adobe house, and as soon as we rounded the corner, it came into view.

My grandmother’s property was the length of four houses and was surrounded by a corral.

I knew Abuela Evila was home because my eyes burned from the pungent scent of roasting guajillo chiles drifting from the kitchen.

Perhaps because she lived through the Revolution, when over a million people died and the ones who lived had to toughen up to survive, my grandmother was not prone to being emotional.

Had she known that without her strength and unwavering love, I would not have survived what was to come?

The light that streamed through the only window was too weak to make the room less somber.

It took me a moment to realize she was calling me, since Regina isn’t my name. My grandmother thought it should have been because I was born on September 7, the day of Santa Regina. When my mother went to city hall to obtain my birth certificate, she had been angry at my grandmother for constantly criticizing her cooking or the way she cleaned, so in an act of small defiance, my mother registered me as Reyna.

They glared at me the moment they saw me.

The smell was overpowering, and I had to struggle not to scratch my scalp, which was throbbing from the sting of the kerosene.

The overwhelming smell of the kerosene made it almost impossible to breathe.

Even though her scalp was irritated and blistered, the lice were all dead.

My grandmother’s house was in a neighborhood known as La Guadalupe, on the outskirts of the city, although no one would call it the outskirts anymore.

It’s the new neighborhoods encroaching upon the foothills where the poorest people now live.

We only ventured outside when my grandmother and Élida left for el centro on Saturday mornings.

We had been at my grandmother’s for eight long months. What had sustained us through that time was the belief that our mother would be back within the year.

Carlos and I tried to make her feel better, yet no matter what we said, Mago was inconsolable.

If our grandmother hadn’t kept the money my parents sent for us, perhaps we would have been like Élida, who was always flaunting all the pretty clothes and shoes she bought with the money her mother sent from El Otro Lado, and no one would have dared to call us orphans.

She would raise the bottle two inches from her lips and would tilt it just enough for the liquid to cascade down into her mouth.

Every time someone mentioned El Otro Lado, there was a reverence in their voice, as if they were talking about something holy, like God.

Anything that came from over there was coveted, whether it was a toy, or a pair of shoes, or a Walkman, like the one Élida had gotten the month before from her mother.

She hit us one by one, beginning with Mago because she was the instigator.

She said that if she looked sad, then maybe our parents would see how much she truly missed them, and they would come back. From that point on, she continued to look sad in almost every picture we took.
Her tactic didn’t work.

“You insolent child,” Abuela Evila said. “I’m going to teach you to respect your elders.”

Then her mother, our grandmother, and Tía Emperatriz helped her put on the crinoline, the girdle, and the beautiful pink dress made with layers of satin and tulle.

Mago loved plucking chickens. She threw herself into it with a frenzy, and she plucked, plucked away, plucking so hard sometimes the chicken skin would come off along with the feathers, and I wondered what the poor chickens had done to her to deserve such fury.

Abuela Evila didn’t send me to kindergarten because she said it was too expensive to have all four grandkids in school, as if my parents hadn’t been sending money to pay for uniforms, school supplies, and the monthly school tuition.

The uniform for the rest of the week was made of a checkered print in white and green.

As the flag passed by me, I stood straighter and maintained my hand firmly pressed against my chest in salutation as I sang the Mexican anthem as loud as I could.

Even though it was a disease that crippled her, I lived with the constant fear of waking up one day with a shriveled left hand. It was ironic that it was Abuela Evila who ended up shriveling when osteoporosis set in several years later.

But just as Mago couldn’t ignore Élida’s taunts about her scars, I couldn’t ignore Abuela Evila’s or my teacher’s.

The smell of the chile guajillo sauce, fresh cheese, and onion wafted toward us, and I asked my brother and sister why we weren’t getting in line to buy food.

Sometimes the clouds take too long to drink water and that’s when the grass withers, the flowers die, the water in the canal narrows to a trickle and almost disappears.

I didn’t want to see el maestro looking at me and making me feel ashamed, making me feel as if I were evil. I didn’t want him to hit me again and have my classmates jeer and laugh.