LILIBETH ESMERALDA GARCIA — Revelations

I The image glints in the sunlight, as though to call for our attention, and draws us both at once. I watch as my mother lifts it slowly from the pile of photographs. In it, she is sitting on a floral couch in the Southeast LA apartment where I would soon be born, her soft black curls framing a face that, at twenty-three, is plump with hope. (She often says of these days, “What did I know? I was just a girl”). Beaming down at the thin, yellow hardcover book she holds over her belly, which is round and vibrating with life, she reads to her womb: to me and to herself. This is one of her favorite photos of us, she says; she would read to me every night, praying that the lessons would stay with me deep into my lifetime. But she speaks this not with the brightness of the young woman in the picture. Her face is sunken and mournful. Fine lines form around her eyes as she studies it, trying to decide if she cursed me instead. The words on the book’s front cover are stamped in a typeface that looks like red ribbon: My Book of Bible Stories. I peer at the photo and try to imagine what it must’ve been like sleeping in my mother’s womb, dreaming of the sugary lullabies being read to me. In the dream, an epic plays on a stage: the eternal, divine Good sparring the mortal, earthbound Evil. Who will prevail? I see Bible stories weaving around me as my eyes and toes and strands of hair materialize. I see how I absorbed those words—embedding them one by one into the helixes braiding inside each of my cells—just as I absorbed everything my mother ate and drank. How could I forget any of it? Long suppressed memories rise to the surface, and I remember that yellow book like a flame that once lit up every moment of my life. II We’d long since moved out of Southeast LA to the arid valley at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was October, and the ranges circling the horizon loomed behind clouds of gray-brown. That night, Santa Ana winds flew through the canyons and passes, gaining momentum as they hit the hills—spinning debris and smog, rousing embers and smoke. I’d been dreaming of a snake. Though I couldn’t see it, I could hear its rattle sidling across the room, creeping closer until it trembled beside my ear, jolting me awake. The rattling sound became the blinds crashing against the window above my bed, lifting and slamming against the glass, letting in flashes of moonlight and a sweeping, gritty air. The window had been left agape. In my half-sleep, I willed my arm to close it, but my limb did not move. Nor could my head. I tried the other arm, to kick my legs, but each time I was held down by an oppressive gravity. My breathing thinned beneath the weight. I opened my mouth to call for help, and the words snagged in my throat. I began to choke. Dizziness set in. Then panic—all while I lay flat and heavy as stone. Finally, it was over. I could lift my torso, and I sensed only a few minutes had passed. I heaved and gasped, like breaking through the surface of the ocean in the midst of drowning, and called for my mother with my first full breath. The nighttime air soon morphed into her face. “What happened? Are you okay?” she asked, wildly and half dreaming herself—she’d just woken up. I needed to close the window. The sweat coating my skin began to chill, and I shivered. Recognizing fear, she ran out of the room and returned with water. “It’s okay,” she whispered, soothing my damp head as I drank. “When you’re ready, tell me what happened from the beginning.” I told her everything: the nightmare, the rattling blinds, the way my body had been constricted, how I’d struggled to breathe. Then came another gust—the sound of an ocean wave crashing. She shut the window with a hard thump, and the room grew very dark, quiet, and still. “That doesn’t sound like a nightmare to me,” she said at last. I couldn’t see her face as she continued, “No, that was something else.” She placed the palm of her hand on my chest, where my heart pulsed visibly, but her attention had turned inward. “I think I’m feeling a little better,” I murmured. It was only half true, but something in her voice made me want her gone, to face the lingering anxiety on my own. Outside, the winds picked up, howling in and out of passages. A patio chair smacked against a wall, a terracotta pot tumbled from a table and shattered, a branch creaked before it snapped from a tree. I followed these sounds listlessly. “I think I know what happened,” she said, taking a deep breath, exhaling, and rising from the bed where we both sat. “I have suspected, for some time, that there are demons in this house.” Her voice: more than fear, more than pain, there was insult in it. “I don’t understand,” I said soberly. “You do understand, because you have brought demons into this home!” “How?” The night’s events now seemed comical and distant. “Those books you’ve been reading—what are they about?” She recalled the long summer, how I did little else but rest my eyes upon pages fanned open, even as I walked from one room to the next. III There were a few late nights when she would wake up, notice the bright light outlining my door at the end of the hallway, and enter abruptly. “What are you doing?” “Just reading,” I would reply without looking away from the page, afraid to meet her eyes. “I have to read it for school,” I lied. She would cut me with a suspicious glare, then twist the knife with disappointment, “Why do I never see you read the Watchtower or any Biblical literature?” “I read it all the time.” IV “Tell me what those books are about,” she demanded, but even with the window closed, I couldn’t pull my attention from the chaos on the other side of the wall. Car alarms shooting off. A cat scrambling across an awning. Glass bottles bursting in the distance, which on any other night could’ve been mistaken for an angry drunk. “If you don’t want to tell me what they’re about,” she snapped, “I’ll find out for myself.” She yanked the pull switch dangling from the ceiling, and the room flared with light. She slid open the closet doors and found my books arranged in stacks. Some had been bought at book fairs, but most were borrowed from the school or city library. After flipping frantically through several paperbacks, she froze and looked hard at a certain cover. Her eyes darkened: Of course. She had finally found the culprit: a YA novel with the word Enchanted in its title. That printed word was all she needed to confirm her worst fear—that I had become enchanted—possessed. It explained my aloofness during meetings at the Kingdom Hall, my hesitation surrounding door-to-door preaching, even my inability to form friendships with the brothers and sisters from the congregation. And now this: a demonic apparition in her God-serving home. To her, my books were like cracks in the house, through which a demon, perhaps many, had snuck in. And her daughter was their willing host. She held up the cover and turned it to face me. On it, a beautiful young woman with long brown hair gazed into a magic mirror. “This is Satanic.” Her throat and eyes burned with anger, repulsion. “Do you know what this word—enchanted—means? It means witchcraft!” The Spanish word she used for witchcraft, brujería, had a more sinister ring than its English counterpart—the word bore razing teeth. “I haven’t even read it,” I said, trying to restrain tears. “I just got it at the library this week.” “What do you think Jehovah thinks of this?” she asked, shaking the book. “I should burn it.” She let it go as though it were made of fire, and it fell on my bed. The library wouldn’t get it back, she decided. She left my room and returned with a black garbage bag, then proceeded to toss all of my books—several dozen—into it. “Get up and dump these in the trash bin outside.” V “Will you have blood on your hands?” an elder would ask from the podium after he spoke on the importance of preaching the “good news”—las buenas nuevas—or the coming Kingdom of God. Any day now, Armageddon’s raging fires would fall upon the world “like a thief in the night,” cleansing the earth of sin, but if we followed all the rules and converted enough people, he reminded us, we might have a chance at surviving. We might one day enter the Paradise born in the ashes, free of death and suffering. It would be heaven on earth. My mother always said she would plant a mango grove next to a river, tend a garden with every plant God ever created. VI By the time I walked outside with the trash bag, it was midnight, and the near-full moon shone like a flashlight over the earth. The winds whipped my hair across my eyes and into my mouth, and I saw that a palm tree, lying across the road, had been uprooted. That’s when the irony, the cruel weight of my loss, sank in. The book my mother believed was proof of my corrupted soul was one I’d shown little interest in, abandoned after only a few pages. It’d been recommended by a sympathetic librarian after seeing me in the library all week. Halloween was around the corner, and anytime a holiday activity took place in school, I was herded there by an administrator. But fantasy bored me. What I really wanted wasn’t magic, but to consume every book that simply described the world regular people lived in, especially children and teens. The rituals of ordinary life—blowing out candles on birthday cakes, carving faces into pumpkins, kissing a loved one when the short hand on a clock hit midnight—held a mystifying quality for me. They felt more forbidden, more otherworldly than any witchcraft-laden narrative, because I knew they couldn’t be. Not even in play or pretend. They could live only in the side of my imagination that surfaced at night, in dreams. Throwing them away felt like getting rid of the only thing that was ever mine. I hauled the heavy bag down to the sidewalk and heaved it into a bin that smelled like Satan himself—back into his mouth. Then I was alone with God, who watched me silently beyond the stars, and I stood suspended in this space, feeling untethered from earth, when I saw a golden line forming on the distant mountains—a wildfire was burning somewhere. When I returned to the house, I found my mother sitting on the living room couch, holding a Bible now and praying quietly, her head bowed. The silver edges of the Bible glistened in the darkness. She mouthed Amen, then opened her eyes and looked up at me. Her head tilted slightly, and in a sullen tone, she asked, “Have I taught you nothing? Have the meetings taught you nothing?” Something inside me rose up and burned my cheeks. I felt like I was glowing, like I had been keeping a secret too big to contain, and now it was trying to ooze out of my pores. But I didn’t know what it was because I had done nothing wrong, had nothing to hide. I followed every rule as best as I could. Like a planet fixed in its orbit around a star, I did not stray. VII There was a secret. To pass the time at the Kingdom Hall, I read the Bible. As if it were any ordinary book, I’d start from the beginning until I lost interest around Numbers, then skip to Psalms. When the elders pushed and condemned and my chest began to tighten and my throat began to close, I looked down at the book before me and listened to King David:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Poetry was where I understood God—where God and I stood close together, alone in boundless space, without hierarchies and rules to separate us. Could I tell my mother what I thought about Psalms? How it made me want to write poetry, like David? A ridiculous thought! All the poetry was “finished.” After the Bible, God didn’t need more writers. In Paradise, a new Bible would be written, the poets would be called then, and they would probably be men. For now, God only wanted people to write Watchtowers, and women weren’t allowed to write in that way. To want to write—especially for the world—was “worldly.” Reading David’s divine art made my heart flush and my thoughts soar, but that wasn’t the secret. When I wrote, about anything at all, something else entirely happened: gravity eased, and I no longer rotated rigidly in a perfect ellipse. Instead of being a planet, I became the sun, a drop in a milky river of stars, and God became the universe—expanding and warm. I could move my head, my arms, my legs. I could breathe. I could finally speak. VIII Those feelings had planted inside me like seeds, and now they were budding and burning within. But I had no words to explain them to her at that moment. “Please, listen to your mother,” she said, clutching her Bible. “If you love to read so much, then read God’s word, so we can enter Paradise together.” Her eyes glossed. After a while I said, “I’m sorry,” and walked away, floating. Back in my room, I turned off the light and crawled into bed. I closed my eyes and saw a recurring vision: a realm where time arched like a rainbow, and each month contained a unique feeling or color that peaked in the joy-explosion of the December holidays. Holidays saturated with art and music and festivity, I realized, made the dull transitionary periods worth the wait. If the world “worldly” kids inhabited was like a swing that ascended into the endless sky, fell down, then rose again—with hope for renewal at the end of each cycle—my life felt like hiking up a mountain through a windstorm with no summit in sight. It was all a transitory period, I thought, waiting for heaven to appear. Still, I knew it was real—just not the way the elders painted it. I had felt its presence, and through books, I could go back to that place at any time. Through poetry, I could be in the Kingdom Hall, wearing a dress tied tightly around my waist, with a Bible heavy on my lap, and I could be anyone, anywhere. Thinking of this “cheat code” sent electricity through my body, a feeling that made me radiate with excitement. But then, a foreboding cloud stretched across my mind: what if the moments that made my books burst in color and light—those moments made me feel real, human, whole—were actually distractions from what was important? Would I really have blood on my hands? No, I wouldn't, I felt strongly, because my favorite books made me feel the same way Psalms did, and I couldn't disentangle the feeling. It was the same large sensation of rising on the swing—of looking out at God's expanding universe. Maybe I could write poetry to save people. Save them from what?—a thought strode in like a sudden gust. You’re damned, it hissed. I remembered then: among the books I had thrown away, rotting in the trash, was My Book of Bible Stories. I had dropped it in quickly before stepping out. Maybe I want to die in Armageddon, I surrendered, facing this voice inside me—my whole body radiating again like one long lapping flame. If I couldn’t save people from the apocalypse, maybe I could save them from something else. I could save people like me. The winds quieted to a soft rustle, then vanished, and my muscles sighed into a deep sleep. IX Things settled down after that, through a silent truce. I got better at hiding my love of literature as I planned my escape, determined to become a writer someday—despite being unsure of what that would look like. My mother, to prove to me (and perhaps also to herself) that all the literature you ever need is the Bible, read it more fiercely than ever. A year had passed since the night I was forced to throw away my books, and I had steadily (and more stealthily) replenished my stash. It was another dry day, but this was the tolerable dryness of winter. Thin light poured into the kitchen in streams shimmering with dust motes as my mother sat at the kitchen table, where six Bibles of various sizes and translations were spread open. She rested her eyes on a vintage Reina Valera turned to Psalms. The rest revealed the gospels. My mother had questions that tugged at her at all hours of the day, but the answers from the meetings slipped through her fingers like sand (I saw this in her face). Still, she had full faith in the Bible—the key, for her, was to use other translations and texts. Only then did her Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation begin to spark with meaning and the truth disseminate like smoke. I didn’t remind her that using other translations was discouraged. This was her loophole—her way of staying in while going out. But I was a fiery, arrogant teenager, fully buried in my own books, and seeing her filled me with frustration. How could she be so close-minded—so ignorant—so blinded by religious fervor? Her world felt small and ridiculous to me. Revisiting this memory fifteen years later, however, I see an existential hunger for wonder. I see her Bible as heroes’ journeys, archetypes, Shakespearian family feuds, tortured philosophical puzzles, humans doubting God at every turn, and humans failing—even God’s favorites—at being anything but tragically imperfect. This was her own secret library. “God is my favorite author,” she said with sparkling eyes, finally looking up at me. “Because He is the author of Life.” She no longer appeared anxious or nervous. There was peace in her voice. Love. She was always telling me stories—about someone funny at the grocery store, mischievous sisters from the Hall, the vecina down the road with an interesting past. About her childhood in El Mango, which was just her and her extended family living on the eastern edge of El Salvador, where dramas took on the scale of Greek myths. That day, she had another story to tell. She began by saying how, at first, she didn’t understand why she had to leave her village. It wasn’t until her journey began that she understood why. From the window of the coyote’s car, charred, bloodied bodies streamed past—little boys, mothers, elderly men, teen girls, mangled on the sides of roads. The war had been raging for a decade, and it hadn’t reached her village of a hundred people, which was so remote and small, it never would. It wasn’t her choice. She was being sent for by an estranged mother who had left ten years before and spent each day saving up to bring her children north. If it had been up to her, she would’ve stayed in her home of mango groves, fresh river water, farm animals, and an adoring grandmother. But if she focused on the future, she could blur out the present. She would finally get an education. “My goal was to get a job that would allow me to eat out every day, because I loved to eat,” she said. She could be like one of those professional women she saw on TV or on trips to the city, who always wore clean, high-heeled shoes and freshly painted nails. She could be a teacher or a nurse. She drifted into this reverie as they tore through the Mexican wilderness. She turned eighteen on a long car ride through the darkened North American desert. When she finally arrived in Los Angeles and saw the glittering skyline, a swell of joy washed over her. She could be anyone here, she thought. But after an awkward introduction with the woman who was her mother, the future she’d envisioned collapsed in on itself. “My mom says to me, laughing, ‘You’re an adult now. You can’t go to school. You think I’m going to pay for that? Who is going to pay for the coyote?’” She worked briefly at a sweatshop off Skid Row, where they didn’t ask for paperwork and paid in cash, but it was far from her apartment in Huntington Park, and her middle-aged boss had started to make passes. She wanted to go to school instead. My grandmother tried to offer consolation. There was hope, she explained. She had just joined a congregation that was welcoming to Salvadorans, and they would offer her a real education. Plus, there was no point in building toward a future when they lived in “the last days.” “‘The world is ending, or are you not paying attention? Por eso tenemos que leer la Biblia,’ she would say to me. That’s why I started reading the Bible, because it was my only comfort. It wasn’t my choice to come here, or even to become a Jehovah’s Witness, but it’s all I had left,” she nodded, affirming her younger self. “When the Jehovah’s Witnesses spoke of the end coming, I finally understood why all these terrible things kept happening, and why they were only getting worse, and when I read the Bible, I finally felt safe.” She concluded by saying that her favorite story was the one about the Son of God. Jesus, too, had left his home to immerse himself in the darkness of human existence. He reminded her not to be afraid, for there was a kingdom on earth waiting for her. Someday, she would return home like Jesus. X Staring at the photograph in her hands, that’s when I knew. I knew with my whole warm-blooded being that through the words she read from My Book of Bible Stories, and the words I later read on my own—all of the words!—I had fallen in love not with any one faith, but with God’s favorite tool for revealing the divine: story itself. The hero who journeys where he does not want to go, grows until he becomes whole, and then finds his way home. The so-called Word of God: that kindling light that often rose within me and moved me to read—to write! My mother did not curse me; she blessed me. I’m musing on this when it hits me how nice it is to be home. We’re both a little drowsy in the early spring afternoon, sitting on a swinging bench in the backyard, beneath a flourishing canopy of honeysuckle vines. The leaves cast kaleidoscopic shadows across the floor and our faces. The day is warm, clear, and still, except for the faint buzzing of bees feasting on the dewy pink and lilac flowers and the distant cooing of mourning doves. We’re looking at old photos, but some new ones too. In the past year, we celebrated our first-ever birthday parties in my mother’s garden—as well as our first Easter, Mother’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. As a child, I always imagined Paradise would feel this way, surrounded by her fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees, and succulents. She hasn’t attended a Jehovah's Witness meeting in years. The 2020 pandemic made all meetings remote and canceled all preaching, allowing her (and thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses) to free themselves from its constraints and live normal lives. But she still reads the Bible, now with a renewed appetite, because no one can tell her how to read it. Right now, she’s also reading The Alchemist in Spanish. She’s writing down all of her dreams, trying to unravel who she is after decades of wandering in the haze of Witnessing. She tells me that sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and talks to the moon, just as her grandmother used to do. As for me, I read and wrote as I promised to myself I would. But today, I’m tearing up on my mother’s shoulder like a little girl, mourning an eight-year relationship that ended suddenly. I recently moved back in like the prodigal son, and I feel skinned and raw from heartbreak. My mother shifts, stands, and says she’ll be right back. She returns with a Bible and sits down beside me. Holding it in her lap like an oracle, she says that sometimes, when she needs guidance, she opens it to a random page and lets her eyes fall on the right words. “Can I try that?” she asks softly, and I nod. She whispers a short prayer, audible only to her, and opens the book. A small gasp leaves her lips, and her eyes widen at the scripture she’s just read. She mouths it a couple times before asking if she can read it aloud. “This is Acts 9:33 and 34,” she says and takes a breath. “‘There he found a man named Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years and was paralyzed. Peter said to him, ‘Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.’” She pauses. “‘Immediately, Aeneas got up.’” She is stunned. My relationship lasted for eight years, and she believes this is a clear sign that God is about to relieve me of my heartbreak. “This is it! This is the sign that God is protecting you! Oh, he loves you! Look!” The lines on her face soften, and she beams full of hope. But as I look at her, I’m struck by something else—though just as light, just as freeing. “I can feel it,” I say to her. I’m thinking of the night I had sleep paralysis. I’m thinking of the enchanted book on her lap—its pages bright and warm in the perfect sun. And I get up. Lilibeth Esmeralda Garcia is an arts and science writer and editor in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Literary Journalism from UC Irvine, where she was recognized with the Neil Bibler Award in Journalism.