I have a long history in scouting, I was a Girl Scout for 13 years and sometimes went on trips with my brothers’ Boy Scout troop, even teaching them archery on occasion. I’ve got mixed feelings about my time in scouts, in part because of the groups themselves but also because scout activities always seemed to get me into trouble.
This story happened during Girl Scout cookie season. To be honest, I’m pretty jealous of scouts now, getting to use apps to sell Thin Mints and Caramel Delights. I feel like an old person yelling “Back in my day!” but it’s true. Back in my day (late 90s-early 2010s), if we weren’t selling at booths outside grocery stores, we were going door to door, order forms in hand.
I dreaded this method, talking to people let alone strangers was never my strong suit but year after year, my mom made sure I at least made the rounds in my local neighborhood. At first it wasn’t too hard to get a long list of orders but as I got older, trading pigtails for braces, I was no longer too cute to say no to. The recession probably didn’t help either.
The year I turned twelve, my mom said I could go door to door unsupervised. The residential streets of suburbia felt safe enough and I had already been walking home from school alone for years. My parents had taken away my cell phone as well (their favored punishment) so it wasn’t like I could call my friends to go hang out. To make sure I actually did knock on doors instead of just pretending, my mom told me not to come back until I had gotten at least fifteen orders.
So I set off, wearing my blue green sash with clipboard in hand. It was one of those warmer days that tricked you into thinking Spring had already arrived and within half a block, I was already a little sweaty.
No one answered the first few doors I knocked on. Any No Solicitors signs made me both relieved I wouldn’t have to even try and nervous that it’d take me all day to get the orders I needed. A block over, someone finally answered, happy to order from this awkward preteen. Four boxes of Peanut Butter Patties. Disgusting. (I’m a Trefoils fan)
An hour passed and I was a number of orders in when I came to the Estrada house. Señora Estrada had always made sure to buy one box from me every year, lamenting how she wished her daughter had stuck with Girl Scouts like me. Cecilia was much older than myself and had been really into sports, her gear always littering the front porch until she had gone off to college on a sports scholarship.
I eagerly walked up to the door, flowers just blooming along the walkway, dots of color against the green. I prepared my best sales smile and rang the door bell.
No answer.
Again I rang and again, no answer. I knocked firmly on the door and to my surprise, it swung open. The familiar porcelain cross on the wall faced me, hanging next to the family photo and a mirror which only reflected the blank hallway.
“Hello? Señora Estrada? It’s Eliana, the Girl Scout? I’m here for your cookie order.”
I waited. Silence.
“Señora, your door was open. Are you home?” Now I leaned in, holding my breath, listening.
A low moan sounded from somewhere inside.
I froze, that horrible sound locking every one of my joints. I could just close the door, leave and forget about it. But what if it was Señora Estrada, hurt and in need of help? I was, after all, a Girl Scout certified in first aid. I stood there, heart hammering, trying to collect myself enough to decide what to do.
I stepped inside. The front hallway wasn’t much cooler than the porch but I was still grateful to be out of the sun. I spied a row of shoes by the door and slipped off my own, years of habit dictating my actions.
“Señora Estrada?” I called again, my voice muted, quavering in the stillness.
The low moan sounded again.
I slowly walked forward, tiptoeing. It was then that the smell wafted over me. A hint of something like burnt garbage, still rotting. My stomach felt like a rock had dropped into it. A flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and I turned.
It was only my reflection in the mirror.
I let out a breath and continued, going down the left side hallway instead of the right. This led me to a cozy living room. Colorful blankets draped over the couch and a few photos hung on the wall. A couple were first communion photos of Cecilia and her brother alongside graduation celebrations, their mother smiling proudly from the frames. The smell was worse here, a sickening odor that almost made me turn back. But the woman herself was nowhere in the room and so I had to keep going.
A doorway on the other side led to what I presumed would be a dining area or kitchen so I headed in that direction, my ears straining to hear anything.
Movement, like something dragging on the ground, and that same low moan.
I moved quicker, now more certain that something bad had happened to her. I stepped out of the living room into a dining area. I gagged at the smell now, all the more worse for how unique it was, something I had never smelled before, something that screamed danger to my brain. I held my uniform sash over my mouth and nose, looking around the room. I saw papers in disarray on the table besides stacks of dirty dishes. The chairs had been knocked over and worst of all…
A dark fluid smeared on the floor, going through the doorway to the kitchen.
“Señora Estrada?” I said again, rushing forward, the carpet turning to tile beneath my feet. I felt my socks soak up the liquid on the floor, inescapable as what I saw in that kitchen.
Señora Estrada lay on the floor, having dragged her body from the dining room, leaving behind what looked like bits and pieces of her as she went. There was blood, yes, but something had happened to her body beyond that, the skin mottled and decayed in between the missing stripes of flesh. Her usually full head of hair was falling out in clumps, sticking to the gobs of viscous liquid on the floor. Flashes of bone shone through flaps of muscle.
Bile rose in my throat but I swallowed it back down, my mind reeling. I must have collapsed because one moment I was upright and the next I was on the ground, my legs and arms shaking. I grabbed a drawer handle with one hand, pulling myself up again, anything to get out of that pool of putrefaction.
I had fallen by her feet, her body laid out, stretching in the direction of the phone on the far wall, beside the other kitchen doorway. Every atom in my body screamed at me to run and yet I found myself leaning forward to look at her face.
Her eyes locked on mine and I saw her blink once, twice. She was still alive.
“Señora.” I gasped. “What happened to you?”
Another blink. She was alive and needed help. I was a Girl Scout and was supposed to give help. I was supposed to know what to do or find someone who did. Find someone who did. I looked to the kitchen phone. Of course, of course, 911 would know what to do.
I walked over to it, careful not to slip. I dialed, but when the operator answered, I couldn’t speak. I tried, I swear to you, I tried. But all I could do was open my mouth and let out a sob. I stood that way for a few minutes while the operator tried to coax information out of me, anything to help, but it was no good. I couldn’t do the one thing I knew I had to do.
The only benefit of staying on the line so long was that they could figure out the address of Señora Estrada’s landline. When they told me people were on the way, I dropped the phone, watching it bounce then spin on its spiral cord.
I turned back to Señora Estrada, the woman who had bought cookies from me every year, offering me a Chupa Chup whenever I finally delivered her order. I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see her eyes blink as a sign of life. I needed her to be alive, to stay alive long enough for help to come.
I knelt beside her. “On their way.” I croaked but there was no response. No blink, no moan. I felt my heart beat faster. My hands hovered over her, shaking, searching for a way to help. To take back whatever had happened. I thought maybe I could apply pressure to some wound or stabilize a break but her body was beyond my pitiful first aid certification. She was gone.
As I stared at her body, I heard footsteps approaching.
“Mamá, I hope you’ve had time to think. I finished mixing your ointment.” the voice cut off the same time the footsteps stopped in the doorway beside the kitchen phone. I wrenched my gaze upwards.
There stood Cecilia, older than the photos I’d seen in the living room but still fairly young. Her eyes narrowed at me, I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I could say anything.
“What are you doing here?” Something in her body language shifted, it felt like she was filling the doorway, directing all of her poisonous attention on me. It was then she heard the faint sound of the 911 operator checking in, trying to see if I was okay. She calmly bent down, never taking her eyes off of me, and hung up the phone.
“You must be the fucking Girl Scout my mother loves so much.” She inhaled deeply, then let it all out again. “And now they’ll be here before I can put her back together, so what am I gonna do with you.”
It was a statement, not a question. I could tell she knew exactly what she was going to do with me, to me. Blood pounded in my ears, hands and feet turning to ice. I willed myself to move, to speak, to do anything.
I felt the smallest nudge on my knee and I glanced down. Señora Estrada’s hand leaned against me. I had been wrong, she was alive. Alive and looking back up at me, releasing one last gasp of sound. “Uuuuunnnnnnn.”
Run.
The word released me from my paralysis. I ran, turning on the slick floor to get away from Cecilia. She lunged after me, years of sports on her side. Of course, she wasn’t the only one who littered their front porch with cleats and shinguards. I knew how to sprint as if my life depended on it.
Through the kitchen doorway, the dining room, the living room. There, there was the front door, just within reach. Cecilia tackled me from behind and we both crashed to the ground. Her fingernails tore at my skin but I managed to kick her shoulder. She let out a grunt and I slipped from her hold, scrambling up, propelling myself as hard as I could to the outside, to freedom.
I couldn’t see the ambulance, couldn’t see any hope of salvation so I kept running, not stopping until I made it to my own front door. Once inside, I collapsed, unable to respond to my mother’s shaking and questions “What happened? Who did this to you? Where are your shoes?”
Later that night, after a trip to urgent care, the phone rang. I hadn’t said a word all day but I still got up to answer it, savoring the routine motions. The vaguest sense of normalcy.
“Is this the XXXXXX residence? I’d like to speak to Eliana.” I simply stood there, barely breathing at the sound of that voice. “Must be you. Don’t tell anyone unless you want your mother to look like mine.” A click and the call was over. My mom asked who it was and it was then that I found my voice. “Wrong number.”
Eventually there was a funeral, closed casket. My parents never connected the date of Señora Estrada’s death with what had happened to me. They thought I had been beaten up by some shitty teen boys or hit by a driver who wasn’t paying attention. As a result, I was off the hook for door to door cookie sales. Apparently danger did lurk in suburbia.
I thought about not going to the funeral service but a part of me felt that wouldn’t be right. I had to, for her. Señora Estrada deserved that much. I managed to hold it together until Cecilia got up to speak.
“I prepared some words but they all seem so meaningless now. I want to speak from my heart but…” She looked up, her eyes glittering with tears. “My heart is broken. Mi mamá… I want to remember her as she really was, not what I saw when I came home to visit. The memories you’ve all been sharing with me and Matías, it’s like you’re all giving me pieces of my mother back. But these pieces can never make her whole again.” When her gaze fell on me, I thought I saw her smirk. She dabbed her eyes and gave a small laugh. “Right now she’d say ‘¡Ay, Dios mío! mija, you make me sound so sad, get to the good parts.’” The mourners laughed at that too. I stood up from my pew in the back. “So I’ll share a story about her. I think you all knew how much loved her garden…”
The rest of her words faded as I left the church, unable to stomach it any longer.
Time passed. I didn’t relax exactly but you know how memory is. We bury what we don’t want to think about. Until soccer season rolled around again and I found myself digging through the pile of gear on the porch. There, placed carefully side by side were the sneakers I’d taken off in the Estrada house.
A reminder. A promise.