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The rainy season brought more mosquitoes than usual. They swarmed around us, biting us. Abuelita Chinta had a mosquito net hanging around our bed, but it was old and peppered with holes, so the mosquitoes could get in and bite us all night long. Luckily, the rains also brought an explosion of frogs, hundreds of them hopping from place to place, croaking and eating the mosquitoes swarming around. We chased the frogs and tried to push them back to the canal, where they wouldn’t bother anyone with their constant croaking that echoed throughout the neighborhood. In the evenings, the fireflies came out, and we caught them and put them in a jar. We brought them into the house and set them on the table to light up the house. Dragonflies swirled around us, and Carlos and his friends chased them around with their slingshots and had a competition going for the one who could kill the most dragonflies. I hated them for that. Dragonflies are beautiful, and I didn’t want to look at Carlos’s outstretched hand, proudly displaying a dead dragonfly on his palm, the still wings shining in the sun like stained glass.

I loved the summer rains. I loved it when the rains were gentle, and I could smell the sweet scent of wet earth. Everything was green around me, wildflowers grew along the train tracks, and the clouds gathered at the peaks of the mountains like soft, cushy pillows. But halfway through the summer, the heavens burst wide open.

For days and days the rain poured on us with no end in sight. Thunder shook the bamboo sticks. We didn’t have enough pots and buckets to catch the rain dripping through the roof. Then one day it didn’t matter.

We woke up in the middle of the night to discover the shack had flooded. Soon, our bed was underwater. The only one who didn’t get wet was Tío Crece, who slept on a hammock hanging from the rafters. He slept there all night long, while Carlos, Mago, Betty, Abuelita
Chinta, and I sat on the small dining table and waited for morning. Mago held Betty in her arms and kept her warm while the rest of us shivered and leaned against one another as we drifted in and out of sleep.

We spent the whole morning getting the water out of the house in buckets. Our sandals got stuck to the muddy floor and sometimes we would fall into the water. We hung our clothes on top of bushes and on the rocks by the train tracks to dry. The mattresses steamed under the sun. The neighbors put a few of their belongings out to dry, too, although their houses hadn’t flooded as much. Their homes were made of concrete and brick, whereas Abuelita’s house, with its flimsy walls made from bamboo sticks, was like a sieve.

When we finally got all the water out of the house, we took our buckets to the train tracks and filled them up with gravel. We went back and forth from the train tracks to the house, throwing handfuls of gravel on the floor as if we were planting corn for next year’s crops. Finally, the dirt floor was firm enough and no longer muddy.

Throughout the week, we heard news about the damage the floods had done. The river that ran parallel to the train tracks had flooded, the water spilling onto the bridge and making it impossible for cars or people to get across to go to el mercado, the bus station, or el centro. The neighborhood next to ours was completely underwater. It was built on lower ground, and the people who lived there had to stay on the roofs of their houses. People navigated through the streets in makeshift canoes, and the corpses of their chickens, pigs, dogs, and cats floated in the water. Luckily, not many people had died, but the rainy season wasn’t yet over and you never knew what other tragedies it would bring.

Early one morning, someone knocked on our door and called out to my grandmother. “Doña Jacinta, Doña Jacinta!”

Abuelita Chinta crossed herself at her altar before opening it. I did the same, hoping it wasn’t any more bad news. Abuelita Chinta opened the door and we stood behind her, wondering what other havoc the floods had caused.

“¿Qué pasa?” Abuelita Chinta asked. It was the son of one of Tío
Gary’s neighbors. He bent over to catch his breath. He was barefoot, and not only did his legs look as if they were dipped in chocolate, but his hands and arms as well. I wondered how many times he’d slipped as he ran over here. “Catalina,” he said. “The river.”

“Ave María Purísima,” Abuelita said, crossing herself.

Tío Gary lived across from the train station in a shack similar to our own. The river raged just thirty feet behind his shack. Catalina was his five-year-old daughter. When we got to Tío Gary’s house, all his neighbors were outside, whispering to one another, crossing themselves again and again. Abuelita Chinta didn’t go into the shack. She hurried to the river’s edge. The waters had receded enough to be contained within the river bank, but the current was still swift and strong, dragging with it branches, broken chairs, clothes, pieces of wood. Farther down the river I saw several men who were holding on to a rope they’d tied to a tree to keep the current from dragging them away.

“The current is still too strong,” Abuelita Chinta said.

Catalina’s mother, Tía Lupe, shuddered in pain. Her tears rolled down her cheeks nonstop, as if the river itself had gotten inside her body and was spilling out. Tía Lupe said, “There’s still hope. Catalina might have survived. She might have gotten hold of something to float on. She might have been saved by someone down the river.” No one contradicted her.

I listened to the neighbors whisper the details to every newcomer that arrived. They said my five-year-old cousin had wandered off that morning and went to play by the river. Catalina’s legs got so muddy she decided to wash them in the river, but the bank was slippery, and she fell in and was whisked away by the current. The neighbor’s child went to get help, but when help came she was nowhere to be seen. Tío Gary, who worked at the train station unloading the freight cars, came home as soon as he heard what had happened.

“They’ve been out there all day,” the neighbors said. “And so far have found nothing.”

In the evening, we made our way home. Only the four of us went. Abuelita chose to stay and lead prayers all night long.

That night Mago and I couldn’t sleep. “Tell me a story,” I said to Mago.

“Which one?” she asked.

“Whichever one you want,” I said. I just didn’t want to think about Catalina. I didn’t want to think about the river. I didn’t want to think about her mother’s tears.

“Once upon a time there were three little pigs …” Mago began.

As I listened to the story, I thought about Papi’s dream house. Maybe it wasn’t so foolish to want to live in such a house. Look at the little pigs. The ones who got eaten were the two who lived in shacks of sticks and straw. And the one who survived the big, bad wolf had a brick and concrete home, just like the one Papi wanted to build for us. Maybe that’s why Papi had wanted such a house, to protect us, to shelter us from the horrors waiting just outside our door. I fell asleep with a prayer on my lips for Papi to finish his dream house one day. Then he could finally come back, take us there, and keep us safe.

The next day, Tío Gary and his friends made their way down the river again. We stood by the bank and watched them get smaller and smaller. Inside Tío Gary’s house, all the women were back to praying. Mago, Carlos, Betty, and I stayed outside with the rest of the kids and found ways to entertain ourselves. We made mud tortillas. We wrote our names on the wet dirt with a stick. But our eyes always returned to the river.

Then the men finally came. Their heads hung low, their backs bent over. They dragged their feet over the muddy dirt path that paralleled the river. And in Tío Gary’s arms we saw her, Catalina. Her limp arms hung at her sides. Everything became a blur. I wiped my eyes again and again, but the tears never stopped. Nobody touched Catalina except her mother and Abuelita Chinta, who pulled dried leaves and twigs out of Catalina’s wet hair. Tío Gary said she was tangled up in the branches of a fallen tree.

They hung Catalina by her feet so that the river would drain out of her. We all kneeled and prayed, and not once did I take my eyes off my cousin’s bloated body, and I shuddered at seeing her like
that, hanging by her feet, like the chickens at the meat section in el mercado, just as cold and lifeless. I was gripped with a fear so great, it made my stomach churn.
What if something happened to me, Mago, Carlos, or Betty? What if, by the time Papi finishes his dream house, there’s no one left for him to keep safe? Or what if he never finishes it, what if he never returns, and we are left here to face the wolf all on our own?

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