Sor Asuncion comes right out and says your older sister has been caught sneaking out of school. Then, before I can even put that in my head, she asks me if our Tio Mon, who lives in La Vega, is ill, yes or no. I take one look at Minerva's sick-looking face and I nod yes, our Tio Mon is ill, and then I invent with sarampion [measles], last I heard.

Now, after thirty-four years, the commemorations and interviews and presentations of posthumous [after death] honors have almost stopped, so that for months at a time, [the sister] is able to take up her own life again. But she's long since resigned herself to Novembers. Every year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up.

A young man was staring down at me, his face alluring in the same animal way as his feet. . . . Underneath his thin guayabera, I could see the muscles of his broad shoulders shifting as he reached down and gave me a wad of bills to put in the poor box as his donation. . . . I had seen the next best thing to Jesus, my earthly groom.

But [the rabbit] wouldn't budge! She was used to her little pen. I kept slapping her, harder each time, until she started whimpering like a scared child. I was the one hurting her, insisting she be free. Silly bunny, I thought. You're nothing at all like me.

They all wanted to give me something of the girls' last moments. Each visitor would break my heart all over again, but I would sit on this very rocker and listen for as long as they had something to say. It was the least I could do, being the one saved.

“Bug Eye stood before me, holding a rod with a little switch. When he touched me with it, my whole body jumped with exquisite pain. I felt my spirit snapping loose, soaring above my body and looking down at the scene. 1 was about to float off in a haze of brightness when Leandro cried out, I'll do it, I'll do it!”

“And here it was late November, a year later, and we were riding over the pass in a rented Jeep to visit our husbands in prison. . . . I made myself look down the side of the mountain at the gleaming rocks below. The dangerous possibilities, the fumes from the bad muffler, the bumpiness of the road—I felt a queasiness in my stomach. ‘Give me one of those Chiclets, after all,’ I asked Mate.”

[The sister] took the chimney off the lamp, and with a trembling hand, fed the letter to the flame. The paper lit up. Ashes fluttered like moths . . . Looking at the mirror, she was surprised by the wild look on her face.

“I'm not going to sit back and watch my babies die, Lord, even if that's what You in Your great wisdom decide.”

“Right then, I told Sinita everything I knew about bleeding and having babies between your legs. She was pretty shocked, and beholden. She offered to trade me back the secret of Trujillo.”

[Trujillo] yanks me by the wrist, thrusting his pelvis at me in a vulgar way, and I can see my hand in an endless slow motion rise—a mind all its own—and come down on the astonished, made-up face.

I don't want to be babied anymore. I want to be worthy of Palomino [Leandro]. Suddenly, all the boys I've known with soft hands and easy lives seem like the pretty dolls I've outgrown . . .

“‘Swear you'll keep your distance from [your sisters]!’ When he got upset, he would just raise his voice. But that night, he grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her on the bed, only—he said later—to make her come to her senses.”

That moment, I understood her hatred. My family had not been personally hurt by Trujillo, just as before losing my baby, Jesus had not taken anything away from me. But others had been suffering great losses.