The Weeping Woman

© 2003 Susan Buckner
All rights reserved.

Mariam rose shakily from her knees and looked about her. The foul drain of the Los Angeles river flood channel spread away from her, a long concrete chute designed to flush away the waste of the city. Trash littered the dry bottom; the only water that flowed ran in the narrow bottom channel, fetid with oil and nameless bits of refuse.

"I'm sure they're here," she whispered, clutching her arms around her body. "They must be here..." She suppressed the wail that rose in her throat. The children weren't here. They weren't anywhere.

Mariam crept away from the river channel, her throat vibrating with screams she dared not utter. The drainage channel was utterly silent but for the soughing Santa Ana wind blowing trash along the concrete. Only a low moan, from time to time, forced its way past her clenched teeth. She had been looking for so long. She had searched the river channel, scouring the sandy, garbage-laden banks, looking for the babies. Her babies. At the top of the channel she stopped and fell to her knees again. The wail of agony escaped her, and she howled on the riverbank like an anguished coyote. And then, like a thin echo of her cry, a baby's voice rose on the wind.

A baby? Who would leave a baby out on a night like this? Who could leave a baby out at all? Mariam jumped to her feet and ran towards the source of the baby's cry. She found herself crying "Baby, baby, talk to me," as she ran, begging the infant to tell her where it was.

A hundred yards down the storm channel, Mariam nearly fell over a small, tightly wrapped bundle of rags and plastic. It looked like a bundle of trash, but Mariam lifted it with shaking hands. A flap of cloth fell aside, revealing the tiny, round face of a day-old baby. Mariam unwrapped the rest of the baby, and saw it was a girl. A little girl, with her cord still attached, not crying now that comforting arms held her. Mariam wrapped the infant in her shawl and cuddled her close.

And then the sweet baby-smell turned to carrion and smoke in her nostrils, and she held up the bundle, shaking, horrified as the plump sweet face turned to strips of skin on bone; and she screamed, flinging the dreadful thing away from her. The night had turned hot, and a shrill buzz took the place of the soft blowing of the wind.

Mariam jumped awake, hearing the loud buzz of her alarm clock through the ringing in her head. She reached out and slapped a sweat-damp hand down on the "snooze" button. Her legs were tangled in the sheets, and perspiration drenched her long hair.

She tried to remember the dream, but it was already fading. Something about babies and skeletons, two things she tried not to think about together. Mariam unwound the sheet from around her calves and stumbled into the bathroom. She was already running late. But as she turned on the shower, and let soothing hot water flow over her head and shoulders, some part of the dream returned. A dream of something found and lost again. A feeling of peace.

Working at Planned Parenthood wasn't an easy job. Mariam sometimes wondered why she'd chosen such a difficult, usually unrewarding, always stressful career. She could just as easily have been a nurse in a private practice, or even in an emergency ward. And yet, when she'd been offered those jobs out of nursing school, she'd just smiled and shaken her head; and gone to work with Dr. Singh at the Planned Parenthood in downtown L.A. And she didn't even think abortion was a good thing.

"I don't think people should throw unwanted babies into garbage dumpsters, either," she snapped to a demonstrator, as she waded past trash and day-old flyers on the front porch when she came to open. "A woman should have all the options available to her when she makes that kind of decision."

The demonstrator sneered and waved her tired placard showing an aborted fetus. But Mariam paid no mind, because it was only Ruth, a wrinkled street-woman who looked like she'd been on the receiving end of a few abortions herself. Ruth had made it her holy chore in life to sit at the door of the downtown office and harangue women who came in.

Mariam sat at her computer and transcribed the night's messages, ignoring the hate-calls despite their viciousness. Dr. Singh had taught her how to screen out the really threatening ones, and there weren't very many of those.

Dr. Singh herself came in about thirty minutes later, pausing on the stoop to speak kindly to Ruth. Ruth turned her head and waved her sign. Dr. Singh was always polite to the demonstrators, remarking that she came to this country because it was free, not because it was safe. "Good morning, Mariam," she said in her cheerful, clipped accent. "Anything on the tapes?"

"No, not this morning," Mariam said. "How are you today?"

"Good, good," Dr. Singh replied. "Let me know when the first ones arrive."

Their clinic wasn't a full-service Planned Parenthood. Dr. Singh scheduled abortions, usually never more than two or three a day, and performed them up at her hospital. She and Mariam between them handled the real goal of Planned Parenthood: family planning. Mariam always tried to discourage abortions because of her own bad memories. Every girl that came in with a swollen belly and a tearful expression reminded her of her own furtive journey to an abortion clinic when she was fifteen.

It was a slow day. Mariam sat at her desk pretending to do some paperwork, actually staring absently out at the overbright, windblown day. Newspapers and McDonald's cups hurtled about in the icy Santa Ana wind, and the sky was a hard unrelenting blue, cleared of all its smog cover. Mariam rubbed at her eyes, itchy from the dried grit puffing through the seams in the building.

"Mariam, can you watch the shop for a few minutes?" Dr. Singh popped her head into Mariam's cubbyhole of an office. "I've got to run up to the hospital."

"Sure, go ahead."

Mariam went out to the waiting room and, to her surprise, saw a young girl huddled onto one of the seats. She wondered why they hadn't heard the doorbell. The girl was very young, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a woolen shawl pulled over her head as though she was an peasant woman from the old days. She must be just over the border, Mariam thought.

"Won't you come on back to the office?"

As soon as Mariam led her into the examination room, the girl held out a small, wrapped bundle. Bewildered, Mariam took it, and looked down into the full, sleeping face of a tiny baby.

"Please, you must take him. My father mustn't know."

"What's this?"

"He was born this morning. My girlfriend helped me. But my father doesn't know I was pregnant, and before it was light, I went to take him to the river."

Mariam swallowed. She knew what that meant. "But you brought him here."

"I saw her."

"Who?"

"La Llorona. The weeping woman." The girl rushed on. "She was kneeling by the riverside, crying for her babies. Crying and crying."

Dr. Singh had come to the door, and stood quietly listening. Mariam said gently, "Who is the weeping woman?"

"A woman from long ago. It's just—I thought it was just a story. Then I saw her. My mother told me she drowned her babies and then flung herself in the river when she realized what she'd done. I thought, I might end up like La Llorona. So I brought my baby here."

"Of course, we'll take your baby," Dr. Singh said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "And we won't tell a soul. You won't be another La Llorona."

After the girl had gone, Dr. Singh took the baby in her arms, and tickled his chin. "Had you heard that story before?" Mariam shook her head. "It came north with the immigrants from Mexico, and from the Aztecs before that. A very old story."

"Then who did she see?"

Dr. Singh shrugged a little, smiling. "A homeless woman. A shadow by the river." She clucked to the baby. "I must take him to the safe haven. Can you handle things for a while? I won't be long."

Mariam put up the "Closed" sign and went back into her office to do her day's paperwork. The story the girl had told her kept replaying itself in her mind. A woman kneeling by the river, sobbing for her lost babies. The nightmare flickered in her mind. Hadn't she been looking for her own lost baby? Her baby who had ended up in a sewer or storm drain or land fill?

She knew this wasn't true. Her baby had been a three-week cluster of undifferentiated cells when she had gone to the abortion clinic. They had been cold and efficient about removing it, and brushed aside her questions about what would happen to the blob of tissue extracted from her womb. But Dr. Singh, many years later, had told her usually babies were cremated, and Mariam had to hope that was true.

The thought of La Llorona flitted through her head. If there were a ghost woman haunting the L.A. river basin, she might be like that girl who came today, small and bewildered, hunting through the dark night for her babies. But La Llorona wouldn't give up her infant so easily. Mariam wondered if she would give up her baby again, knowing what she knew now. She wondered, as always, if she could have been strong enough to take the shame and scorn and her parents' fury to have her baby.

Mariam went out to the front waiting room and tidied up the single, almost uncleanable room. She restocked the flyer rack and went over to lock the slider on the door. Then she stopped dead, staring in frozen shock, as a tiny woman, her head covered with a shawl, passed by the glass door.

Of course it wasn't the same woman, Mariam told herself, even as she hurried to the door to peer after her. Of course it wasn't La Llorona on her way to the river basin. Of course it was insane to open the door, as Mariam found herself doing, and follow the shawled woman down the street, hearing her soft wails: "My babies, my babies."

Mariam followed the apparition down the street, buffeted by the storm winds shaking the city, barely able to see her in the gathering darkness. The woman's cries came clearly down the wind. She was sobbing, repeating over and over, like a mantra, "My babies, my children."

She led Mariam down to the concrete riverbank and into the open sewer that was the river. She crouched down by the gutter in the center of the channel, pressed her head to her knees, and wailed aloud, an inhuman banshee screech that froze Mariam in her footprints.

But somehow Mariam found herself moving closer, feeling as though she were dreaming, her feet not touching the concrete. She reached out her hand and touched the woman on her shoulder.

And found herself gazing into the face of La Llorona: a skull-bare face with immense fiery eyes and bared teeth. La Llorona shrilled again and Mariam echoed the cry, with no more than a breath between her lips.

"Where are my babies?" the woman said. "Where have you taken my babies?"

"I don't know!" Mariam tried to move away, but a skeletal hand came down on her wrist. "Please, I don't know what happened to them. Please let me help you."

La Llorona let go and looked away. She seemed to shrink and solidify, and when she looked back, she was a young girl, maybe fifteen, as old as Mariam had been when her baby had been lost. She spoke softly. "Please help me find my baby."

Her head spinning, Mariam knelt beside the girl and put an arm around her shoulders. That heart-stopping moment evaporated into reality. The reality was a young mother, whose baby had cruelly been taken away from her, and who needed help. "Why do you think your baby is here?"

"He took her this morning. He said he would raise no baby of mine." The girl sobbed. "Please, help me find my baby."

"Honey, we can't find your baby," Mariam said, as gently as she could. "She must be gone by now."

The young woman moaned and pulled her shawl tighter about her face. "No...no. She must be here. I hear her crying."

"That's just the wind." But thinly, in the howling gusts that buffeted the steep concrete walls, Mariam imagined she heard the tiny wails of a dying infant.

Startled, Mariam stood up. The cries came louder, a baby, crying for warmth and comfort. The woman stood up beside her, her face alight. She began running "downstream", along the gutter of the river, her arms outstretched.

The moon sailed out through a rift in the storm clouds, bathing the concrete in white light, making the fetid basin look silver. Mariam raced after the woman, who was running, running towards the sound of her baby crying. The moon darkened again, and when Mariam's eyes adjusted to the lower light, she saw the shape of the woman, kneeling beside a small bundle on the very edge of the channel.

"My babies," the woman said, and Mariam's heart seemed to stop. It was the banshee screech of La Llorona, and the babies she gathered into her arms were tiny skeletons, their heads moon-pale and glowing in their own unnatural light.

La Llorona, cradling the remains of her babies, now came step upon slow step towards Mariam. Terror rooted Mariam to the ground, as the skull-faced woman made her way over the moon-silvered concrete. Bare teeth grinned at Mariam from a foot away.

"My babies," she said. "You helped me find my babies."

Mariam merely stared, aware her mouth was gaping open, her throat desert-dry, unable to make any sounds, or tear her eyes away from the gruesome apparition.

"You must find the babies now," La Llorona said. She held out the mewling skeletons, and Mariam mutely took them into her arms. La Llorona took off her shawl, and draped the decaying cloth over Mariam's head. Then she took the babies back into her bony arms. When Mariam released the babies, her arms dropped away as though relieved of a heavy weight. "Find the babies."

Mariam watched La Llorona vanish into the whipping dark, skeletal babies cuddled close to her chalky breast. A terrible feeling of loss and sorrow descended upon Mariam. Something had been taken from her, something she had no words to name. The pain built in her throat, until she wailed aloud, horrified but not surprised to hear herself make the eerie shriek of La Llorona.

"My babies, where are my babies?" Mariam sobbed, gazing up and down the river basin. "Please help me find my babies." Pulling her shawl closer to her head, La Llorona trudged slowly away peering anxiously into the night for her now-vanished babies.

Back to top of page