( melissa barrera. cis female. she/her. ) / LETICIA VILLALOBOS ORTIZ has been with the group for one week and is currently doing their part in the community as a scout. while here, thirty year old has created the reputation of being irreverent & capricious, but can also be known as solicitous & coquettish. in a sticky situation, they will resort to flight mode and their current weapon is a ka-bar.
trigger/content warnings: parental death, murder, traumatic birth, drug use ( brief mention ), abuse.
everyone calls her a miracle as if somehow being born from the body of a dead mother is a celebration more than it is a tragedy. she is called miracle so often that she thinks it’s her name until the age of five when she goes to school and no one calls her name at attendance. thank god her mother had written out her name--leticia--plainly in the baby book she was saving, or maybe her grandmother really would’ve named her that–miracle, milagros.
leticia sounds like another girl’s name. a girl whose mother is alive and well. a girl whose mother tucks her in at night with stories and songs and goes to sleep in a bed with a father instead of lying six feet underground in a cold box of wood trying to outlast the worms and moles. leticia has a grandmother who puts silk ribbons in her hair and makes her pozole on cold, winter nights. she buys her love with pretty dresses and a doll each time she makes an appearance on the latest tv special with her grandmother. it takes years before she learns this is not a normal way to grieve. there are so many vhs tapes of interviews on oprah and specials on court tv in abuela’s closet that they trump the years she’s been alive on earth. yolanda ortiz makes a monopoly, a dynasty, atop her daughter’s suffering.
it’s not until leticia is twelve that she learns the full story. she’s made so many appearances on television that she’s practically a celebrity–a child star–but she has grown up knowing only that she sprung from her mother’s dead belly like pegasus from the slain body of medusa. so strange, it was almost immaculate. her grandmother had always compared her sweet mother to santa maria. it only lived to serve that in childbirth, she shared that magic. instead, leticia learns that her mother had answered an ad in the paper for free baby clothes and supplies. so clever in its innocuous offer, even the most cynical of her mother’s loved ones would have fallen into that sweet trap–flies to honey.
this is what she learned.
the canonized gabriela ortiz went to 241 nw westbrook dr at 1100 on a tuesday in september. she parked her car in the visitor space of the apartment block and went upstairs to meet ana hernandez and was greeted with a hug and the scent of fresh coffee when she entered the apartment. the two sipped their coffees and talked about the challenges of pregnancy and, for gabriela, impending single motherhood ( oh, but she had her mother to help ). for ana, her husband was anxiously awaiting the birth of a son–if that’s what they ended up having. neither woman knew what she was expecting.
when gabriela told ana that she had an appointment to keep, the generous woman left the kitchen to grab the things she’d promised her–things, she explained, that were doubles of hand me downs from her sisters. ana hernandez returned, not with a box of baby things, but with a knife. leticia shuts the tape off then and does not revisit it until the age of fourteen, where she learns two things. one, that her mother was a fighter. and two, that she was cut from her mother’s stomach with the clumsy skill of a woman who’d never deigned to carve her own turkey. it explains the scar that runs through her hairline, just above her ear. it explains her grandmother’s obsession with tragedy. it tells her nothing about herself and she refuses any more interviews or appearances. she refuses any of her grandmother’s plans for her future. she learns, like her mother, to put her trust in people who are as clever as they are unworthy.
the only thing that makes leticia villalobos feel like she can breathe is running and getting high. she doesn’t give a shit about organized sports, but she loves the feeling of the wind blowing the salt of sweat and rain off of her face. she falls in love several times. she gets her heart broken several more. every person is an opportunity to find some piece of herself. every person is an opportunity to be loved for some other reason than being a miracle. girls like leticia are symbols. like the virgin she represents hope; like the virgin, she is given no identity of her own.
tired of her antics and disobedience, her grandmother sends her to live with some cousins out of state. leticia thinks that her grandmother will have a much easier time controlling her narrative without the burden of a teenage girl. their cousins don’t have a lot, but they at least have their own business–one that’s not built on immortalizing her mother’s death. there are so many kids there already, that everyone just seems to act like she’s always been there. she misses her alone time sparingly, more than overjoyed to have found unconditional love in a house that is always full.
high school is an easy place to make the same pitfalls and mistakes, but leticia survives it. she helps out at the family store and avoids her grandmother’s calls. there’s no real desire or funding for college--though she could go on her grandmother’s dime if she wanted to drown in so much blood money. instead she makes her own way, working at the local gym until she can afford to pay for yoga and personal trainer certifications. she runs everyday and gets her own apartment. life is, despite her propensity for betting on the wrong horse and searching so desperately for love, pretty great.
until she gets the call.
yolanda is much older than she remembers upon her trip back to the hospital. she is not the intimidating matriarch that once rapped her nails on leticia’s shoulder during interviews to prompt a correct answer to a question that was meaningless to a little girl. instead, she lies in a hospital bed like a husk or a ghost and it’s almost enough to make leticia regret leaving until she goes to the house and sees the shrines to gabriela ortiz and not a single shred of evidence that gabriela’s miracle ever lived at all.
she packs up the house, making it ready to sell as yolanda’s remaining days lesson. she doesn’t take calls from her loved ones or turn on the tv after she passes. her grief, as different from her grandmothers as the sun and moon, necessitates solitude. she doesn’t touch the phone, tv, or internet for three days and, when she does, it’s too call 911 in response to the sound of someone breaking in. there is no one on the other end.
leticia survives by doing what she loves best. she runs. she spends days running and sometimes it feels as if that is all she does. by the time she reaches the woodbridge safe zone, she has been running for years. running away, running for her life, running to feel like a person again. now she runs for a new kind of home. and, she wonders, if it will ever feel as full of love as her cousins’ house once did. she thinks, perhaps, those things are long gone.
