“Not that I’m a nobody who writes for a trashy crime blog?” I tried to joke, but my tone was sharp. “I don’t know, Duke. I guess I’m hoping she’ll see that I really do want to hear her side.”
“Well,” he said with a grin, “if anyone can convince her, it’s you, Cass. When are you planning to get in touch with her?”
“That’s the thing.” I grinned back. “That detective? He tracked down Fabian’s case file for me. I’m going to Laredo tomorrow.”
Lore, 1983
Time passes in waves, one song flowing into the next before stopping so that bride and groom can cut the cake, plates delivered to tables as the music starts again. Andres leads effortlessly, Lore his graceful shadow, their bodies linked hand to hand, hip to hip. Lore’s hair keeps slipping from its bobby pins, and she pulls out the rest, dropping them on the nearest table while Andres goes to the bar for fresh drinks.
While she waits, dabbing at her moist cheeks with the knuckles of her thumbs, she briefly imagines an alternate reality, one in which Fabian were here. Would they be dancing like this, sweating and breathless? Or would they still be sitting at their table, she hunched resentfully toward him as he talked of the recession, the store, the uncertainty that’s tearing him apart before her eyes? The answers fill her with quiet, unassailable sadness.
When Andres returns, his starched shirt is wilting from the heat of his skin. He hands her the drink and says, with a mischievous smile, “I need to cool down. Do you feel like taking a walk?”
And because Lore’s mind was so freshly on Fabian, on the grim, heavy state of their marriage, to which she will be returning tomorrow, she smiles back and says, “I’d love to.”
Outside, the Zócalo is mostly quiet. The Mexican flag ripples in the breeze, and the Cathedral and Federal District buildings glow gold against the black sky, the edges of the clouds even now smeared orange with smog.
“Where are we going?” Lore asks, as Andres takes her hand to cross the street. The touch feels gallant, as though he wants to ensure she won’t trip on her gown. But when they reach the other side, his fingers remain entwined with hers. Lore’s stomach clenches, yet she doesn’t pull away.
“When you need to take a breath, there’s only one place to go.” Andres reaches down to the peg of a motorcycle and hands her a helmet. “The lungs of the city.”
Lore stares, helmet dangling from her hand.
“Haven’t you ever seen a helmet before?” he teases.
“I thought we were going for a walk.”
Andres laughs. “It would be a long walk to the Bosque de Chapultepec. Only a fifteen-minute ride, though. But only if you want?”
Lore stares at the bike—its slim black lines, the narrow seat rising up over the rear tire, too small, surely, for her to sit on, and what about her gown?
“Have you ever ridden before?” Andres asks.
Lore says the first thing that comes to mind: “My mother would kill me.” Then she laughs, imagining Mami’s face. Her mother—a stoic, commanding presence in the home, whom no one, even Lore’s father, ever dares cross—is a woman of extreme phobias in the outside world. She hyperventilates in crowds; she has never boarded an airplane and would throw herself in front of a bus before climbing on a motorcycle.
“Don’t be afraid,” Andres says. “It’s—”
“I’m not afraid,” Lore interrupts, and she isn’t, she is greedy for all the world she has not tasted. She lowers the helmet onto her head, fumbles with the strap below her chin before letting Andres fasten it for her.
“Go ahead.” Andres holds the bike by the handlebars. “Slide to the back.”
Lore hikes her red silk gown up to her thighs, swings a leg over. Her perch feels high and precarious, impossible to maintain.
Before Andres climbs on, he says, “When I turn, don’t resist it—lean with me. If you get scared, tap me and I’ll slow down. Okay?”
Lore nods, keenly aware she’s on a kind of adventure. (Don’t resist it.) Only once, briefly, before the bike growls to life, does she realize nobody knows where she is, she’s riding off with a man whose last name she doesn’t even know, though what good would a last name do if he meant to hurt her? Then Andres pulls away from the curb and Lore squeals, a small echoing cry inside her helmet. With one hand, Andres joins her hands at his sternum, holding them there for a moment before returning his hand to the handlebar.
Then they’re off.
Lore falls in love with riding in seconds. It’s the immediacy of it, nothing separating her skin from the city. The rushing pavement is a shocking reminder that life is fragile, separated from death by only a gossamer veil, and somehow this closeness to the beyond heightens every sense: the smells of gasoline and cigarette smoke punctuated by pockets of mysterious sweetness; the roar of the engine and wind in her ears; the taste of wine on her tongue, the feel of her body wrapped around Andres, her limbs performing silent measurements—his waist narrower than Fabian’s, his legs longer. His eyes, when she catches his occasional glances in the side-view mirror, are more lined in the corners, his hair losing its black-tie restraint and flying back to whip her helmet. She’s forgotten they have a destination. She could ride with him all night, learning a new language of pointing and squeezing and patting. People waste so much time talking when talk so often conceals more than it reveals.
Sharply, she thinks, You shouldn’t be with him at all—what are you doing?
Before she can answer herself, they arrive.
The Bosque de Chapultepec, more than fifteen hundred acres of history and nature. Andres bypasses the first, oldest section, where, on Lore’s last trip, she’d lingered in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, gazing at artifacts from the Aztec, Maya, Toltec, and Olmec, wondering at the hands that made them, the empires that fell. She’d meant to rent a pedal boat on the lake and eat lunch in the shadows of the castle at the peak of Chapultepec Hill, but before she knew it, it was time to head to the airport.
Andres passes the second section, where a roller coaster’s sinuous curves rise above the treetops. Finally, he stops at the third, least developed area. Lore’s ears ring in the sudden silence.
Andres climbs off first, holding the handlebars again as Lore stiffly swings her right leg back onto the ground. Her body is shaking. She hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been holding him.
“So?” Andres grins as Lore unstraps her helmet. “What did you think of your first ride?”
Her cheeks are sore from smiling. “Not bad,” she says, and they both laugh.
Tomorrow, the park will be bright with picnic blankets and soccer balls. Tonight, the quiet is dense. A canopy of feathery leaves blocks the sky, and the trail absorbs their footfalls. It’s like they’re in a tunnel, surrounded and concealed. She looks up, stumbles. She’s never seen trees so tall. Andres catches her by the elbow.
“They make me dizzy too,” he confesses, and she laughs, charmed. “You know some of these ahuehuetes are more than a thousand years old? The name means ‘old man of the water.’”
Lore grazes her fingers along a rust-colored trunk so wide it would take twenty people to bracelet their arms around it. “Do you think they’re disappointed there’s no water in sight?”
“DF rests on the clay of the old Lake Texcoco,” he says. “The clay is constantly collapsing because of the overextraction of groundwater. DF has sunk as much as nine meters since the start of the twentieth century. So I guess you could say we’re never far from water.”
Lore stops, looking at the path. How can something that seems so steady be so fragile, so impermanent?
They walk on, and in the silence, as her mind and body begin to come down from the wine, the dancing, the ride, Lore realizes how little she knows about him.
“So,” she says. “You’re a professor. What do you teach again?”
“Philosophy.” Andres glances down at her. “Mostly second-level courses right now—Ethics, Logic and Reasoning, The Nature of Reality, stuff like that.”
“The Nature of Reality?” Lore bumps him with her shoulder. “Come on. That’s not a real class.”