Who better but La Llorona could the spirit of Esperanza have found, come to think of it, if not a woman who had been given a bad rap by every generation of her people since the beginning of time and yet, to Esperanza’s spirit-mind, La Llorona in the beginning (before men got in the way of it all) may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess. So it was she whom Esperanza sent to deliver the news to her dear mother in Tome, knowing by then that La Llorona was on a first-name basis with her little sister who had always hung out by the acequia. And everyone knows, if you want to find La Llorona, go hang out down by the río, or its nearest equivalent, especially when no one else is around. At night.

Which was where, after that, that Esperanza was also occasionally seen. Yes, seen, not only by La Loca, but also by Domingo who saw her from the front window, although he didn’t dare go out and call to his transparent daughter. The first time he saw Esperanza down by the acequia conversing with Loca and another equally dubious figure in a long white dress, his fingers, holding the Venetian blinds apart at eye level, froze, and Sofi found him a half-hour later, as still as a statue in that position and dry-mouthed.

Sofi also saw Esperanza down there. And once, although she had thought at first it was a dream, Esperanza came and lay down next to her mother, cuddled up as she had when she was a little girl and had had a nightmare and went to be near her mother for comfort.

And of course, la Caridad over in the trailer complex in the South Valley by then was having long discussions, even if mostly one-sided, with Esperanza about the war, about the president’s misguided policies, about how the public was being fooled about a lot of the things that were going on behind that whole war business, how people could get some results by taking such measures as refusing to pay taxes. But Caridad really didn’t understand politics and she had a hard time following her sister, so Caridad usually just nodded her head so as not to offend Esperanza by acting as if she didn’t care.

They talked while Caridad “meditated” in her room. Doña Felicia, from the doorway, only saw Caridad’s lips move occasionally while her eyes were fixed on a jar of water. “Why doesn’t your sister come to talk to me?” doña Felicia asked Caridad one morning over breakfast. “What a know-it-all that sister of yours was … and still is! Dios sabra, how much I could tell her about all the wars and injustices I witnessed!”