Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep - Joey Quintero, Via Quintero

Olivia Quintero has seen a lot of dead people. 
She never got a chance to see her mother’s body. As soon as they heard what had happened, Joey had bundled them all into the car and they’d run as fast and as far as possible before someone decided they were a loose end.
But she’s seen a lot of them since.
People died in the transient camps all the time, for one reason or another. Age, illness, violent fights, overdoses. She’d been the first to find two of them. It hadn’t really scared her, not like it scared some of the other kids.
She was pretty sure one day, it would be her. When the seizures kept getting worse, and the doctor in the camp kept turning up only half-sober, with shaking hands he couldn’t even be bothered to wash properly and coughing at the end of every sentence. 
But even after they got across the border, got Via into a good hospital, it hadn’t meant the end of death following her. She’d seen patients wheeled out of the building with white cloth over them. She’d watched the girl in the bed next to her in the pediatric ward lose her own battle with her failing body. 
And now, she’s looking at her own sister’s lifeless face in a coffin in a dingy cemetery. Her black dress itches her neck where the collar touches, and she already popped the button off one of the sleeve cuffs, but she feels oddly numb in spite of it all.
Maybe because Joey doesn’t look dead. 
Tía says it’s just what they do at the funeral homes to make people look nice for their families, but Via knows what people look like when cars hit them. She watched a boy playing soccer in one of the camps dart into the road after his battered ball and get run over by someone speeding by. They hadn’t even stopped or turned back to see if he was still alive. 
She can’t see any bruises on Joey’s face or hands at all. There’s a thick layer of makeup on her face that Joey would have hated in life, but Ramona across the hall covers up the times her boyfriend hits her the same way, and Via can always see the purple and yellow underneath. 
Joey just looks like she’s asleep. Almost peaceful, aside from the way her lips curl a little, like they’re pulling back from her teeth. 
Via chews on her own lip. She can taste the vanilla chapstick Tía is always smearing on too thickly, and the saltiness of blood from the spot where she peeled away a bit of the skin. She wonders if that will remind her of Joey now, the way the taste of ripe papaya makes her think of Mami, because it was what Via was eating when the phone rang and Joey went all stiff like she was the one having a seizure and then told them Mami was never coming home. 
Mauri presses something into her hand. Via looks down at it. The faded colors and crumpled edges of the picture of their family that Joey carried with them all the way from home. The only way Via still knows what Mami looked like.
She and Mauri both agreed, Joey should keep it. Maybe she’ll be able to look at it in heaven and think of them. Maybe it’ll help her find Mami if she’s forgotten her as much as Via and Mauri have. 
Via reaches into the coffin and tucks the photo in between Joey’s hands and the lining of the worn leather jacket she always wore when she went out at night. The edge of the photo sticks on a tear in the fabric, and Via pushes a little harder. 
Her hand brushes up against Joey’s. Joey’s skin is cool, makeup smoothing out the roughness in her chapped fingers and her chipped nails, now painted an overly garish red, scraping against Via’s thumb. She pulls back, blood welling up from the tiny gash, a single drop falling onto the corner of the photo, and shoves her finger into her mouth, sucking on the cut. 
Via doesn’t cry when they close the lid on the coffin.
She doesn’t cry when the men from the funeral parlor lower the whole thing into the ground, or when she and Mauri and Tía throw in handfuls of dirt on top, Tía sniffling into her black lace handkerchief the whole time and Mauri’s lip quivering.
She doesn’t cry when people flood their tiny apartment, bringing food and empty words and emptier cards, when the room is filled with so many voices it makes her head hurt.
She wakes up at five in the morning, when the last guests have finally gone, when the smell of spilled tequila has faded, when the moonlight slanting through her window turns everything a pale blue.
Somewhere, out in the darkness, the sound that woke her echoes back again.
A woman’s scream.
Via normally sleeps through those sounds. They’re as common in this neighborhood as barking dogs and crashing pans and breaking glass and angry arguments. But there was something high and harsh and terrified in this one that woke her.
She rubs her fingers against her thumb, slipping one blunt nail under the edge of the forming scab on her cut, and tugs it away again. 
Another drop of blood wells up, glimmers in the moonlight, and falls to her stained blanket. 
Out in the night, something howls. Clearer and sharper than a coyote, but just as mournful. Just as haunted. Via buries her head under her pillow, and lets the sob she’s been clinging to all day tear through her.