My grandmother would not let us near the river after dark. When we asked her why, she told us about La Llorona, and her voice went flat and careful in the way it only got when she was telling us something true.
She was a beautiful woman, La Llorona. That is always where the story begins — with beauty, with the specific curse of it. She loved a man who did not love her back with equal force, or who loved her first and then loved someone else, or who loved her children less than she had hoped. The versions vary. The end does not vary.
She took her children to the river. The stories say she wept the entire time. The stories say she drowned them one by one and then, standing at the water's edge in the dark, understood what she had done. She died there too — threw herself in, or fell, or simply ceased from grief, no one is certain. God would not take her. She could not rest.
Now she walks the rivers. She wears white. Her hair is wet. She weeps constantly, a sound that the old people say you can hear from a great distance — not a crying exactly, but a keening, a sound that bypasses the ear and lands directly in the chest, in the place where you keep old losses.
She is looking for her children. She cannot find them. Some say they crossed to the other side and she cannot follow. Some say they are lost in the river still and she is looking in the water, in the dark water, calling their names.
My grandmother said: she will take other children if she cannot find her own. She will hear a child near the water after dark and she will come, because grief makes its own kind of logic. She will gather the child up thinking she has finally found them.
She will not realize her mistake until she reaches the water.
My cousin went to the river once, on a dare, when we were twelve. He came back white-faced and would not say what he had heard. He moved far inland when he was grown. He has three children of his own. He does not let them near any water after dark, and when his eldest daughter asked him why, he told her a story in a flat, careful voice.
I have heard La Llorona myself. Once. I was nineteen and foolish and walking the creek road home from a party after midnight. The sound came from the tree line — not a human sound, not an animal sound, something that sat between them and belonged to neither.
I walked faster. I did not look back. I was home before I knew I was running.
My grandmother was still awake. She looked at my face when I came through the door and she did not ask where I had been. She simply put a hand on my cheek and said, quietly: "Stay away from rivers at night."
I have. Every night since. I have.