Mateo and Gabriel. Their hot-dirt scent and thick dark hair and long-lashed eyes. She remembers holding their naked newborn bodies to her chest, stricken by how close this kind of love—wild, primal, consuming—felt to terror, like standing at the edge of an abyss, one foot dangling. Yet, somehow, Mateo and Gabriel are not enough for her. Being a mother is not enough for her, which is why she returned to work despite Fabian’s earnest urgings to stay home. And maybe this was the first rift between them, the way he didn’t understand what the job meant to her, and if he didn’t understand that, how could she think he understood her?
She wonders sometimes if Fabian, too, has a secret side, a more alive side, but any attempt to peel him back these days ends with irritation. It’s as though her desire to know him better—to know him differently—is another extravagance they can’t afford.
She doesn’t tell Andres, of course, about Fabian or the cuates, but what she reveals feels so raw, so true, that it eclipses the fundamental untruth of her omissions.
They share little things, too, each tiny artifact of memory standing in for something larger. She doesn’t know how long he was married, or when he divorced, or why, but she knows he has two kids, and that his fifteen-year-old daughter recently joked about who would start dating first, she or him, and this joke tells her that his kids are comfortable with him, that he is a good father. She doesn’t know where exactly in DF he lives, but she knows he collects sand from every beach he visits, lining the small jars along his bathroom windowsill—and this tells her he is a dreamer.
“Do you want children?” he asks her at one point.
Her opportunity, one of so many, flickers before her like a candle’s flame; she blows it out. “I’m not sure,” she says, and the answer feels honest because she changed the question in her mind to Do you want more children? In this way she lets herself think she’s being as truthful as he seems to be.
“They’re like bombs,” Andres says, with an understanding laugh. “They blow up every familiar thing in your life. But then you look around and realize that somehow things are better this way—that only what matters remains.”
Lore kicks off her strappy sandals, letting them dangle from a fingertip. The hem of her dress, which she bought at Sanborns for thirty dollars, back when people still shopped, will be ruined. She doesn’t care. When she looks up at Andres, she recognizes the look in his eyes, a look she’s seen only once before, at the Plaza Theatre in 1967, just as Benjamin arrives at the church, screaming Elaine’s name, in The Graduate. Her first kiss with Fabian.
Her heart catches as Andres leans lower, and she can smell the wine on his breath as he murmurs, “Mexico City, the constantly sinking land. Even now, we’re sinking. Do you feel it?” His hand moves to the nape of her neck.
“I feel it,” she whispers.
His mouth is a velvet box, opening beneath hers. The seed of wildness, long neglected, breaks open and takes root, and she winds her fingers through his hair, presses her hips against his. He’s hard against the thin fabric of her gown as he runs a heavy hand from her hip to her breasts. She stumbles a little as he guides her backward, until the rough bark of a tree chafes her bare shoulders. When he begins to raise her dress, it takes every weakened reserve of willpower to push him away, breathless.
“I’m sorry—” Lore gestures to the tree, the path, the sinking land that will take them with it. Shaking, she smooths her dress over her thighs. “I can’t—”
“No, no.” Andres steps back, shoving a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually—”
“I think we should get back to the hotel.”
“Of course.” His eyes, from what Lore can see in the darkness, are clouded with desire, and she feels a throb of lust, to be looked at that way. Andres holds out a hand, says, “I’ll be a gentleman, I promise,” and Lore gives a shuddering little sigh as she laces her fingers between his.
On the bike, Lore wraps every part of herself around Andres. She’ll never see him again after tonight. Thank God. But for now, she wants him to feel her heartbeat against his back and know something real about her.
Cassie, 2017
The drive from Austin to Laredo was about four hours down I-35, the same highway I followed from Enid when I was seventeen years old.
Enid was a place people stayed. You saw it every Sunday, three or four generations gathering for their usual diner lunch, a church on every corner to accommodate the weekend worshippers who, like my parents, went home to their secret lives. It would have been so easy to stay—in-state tuition at OU, move back home afterward to save money, that old trick of the “temporary.” But my plans, my dreams, would have died there. I could feel it, the way paper curls away from a flame before its edges blacken with burn.
So, despite the one person holding me there—Andrew—I left.
I glanced at my phone as it jostled in the cupholder. I still needed to call him back after our brief text exchange at the farm. When was the last time we actually talked? Guilt sat like a boulder on my chest. It was hard to imagine, now, the intimacy that held us together the summer after my mother died—the way, with the weight of his body anchoring mine, I finally didn’t feel alone. I’d whispered so many promises to him in the dark, imagining them landing on his skin like bubbles, diaphanous membranes bursting at the touch. But in the end, he had to stay, and I wouldn’t give up my future, not even for him.
Later, I told myself. I’d call him later. When I could give him my full attention. Not when I was entering San Antonio, traffic bloating the highway, the air conditioner of my old Corolla weakening to streams of lukewarm air every time I slowed down.
This morning Duke had hugged me as if I were heading off to war. “Be careful,” he said. “Laredo used to be on the news all the time. Kidnappings, murder, goddamn decapitations. Don’t go anywhere near the border. Promise.”
I bit back my irritation. It seemed like such an ignorant, white-person thing to say, to assume, that “bad hombres” were lying in wait at the river. Last night, I’d stayed up until 3 A.M. researching. Across the bridge, in Nuevo Laredo, the Zetas cartel had split into warring factions. Videos filmed there showed armored tanks speeding by parked cars, behind which civilians hid. Recently, the bodies of five women and four men had been dumped on the sidewalk outside a Nuevo Laredo home, along with a handwritten note: This is not a joke, nephew. In a YouTube video taken at an outlet mall on the U.S. side, the woman filming uttered a stream of Spanish as artillery fire rang out in the near distance, as if she were a soldier in the Middle East instead of a shopper looking for a good deal on a Coach purse. Still, despite Laredo’s bad rap because of its proximity to Nuevo Laredo, the FBI ranked it as one of the safer cities in Texas.
“I’ll be fine,” I told Duke.
As I drove farther south, flat sepia ranchland replaced the green Hill Country. Signs for grass sales and exotic whitetail hunts, blown tires curled like black snakes on the highway, pastures freckled with cattle and the spiny, mysterious silhouettes of oil drilling equipment. On the median, trunkless mesquite trees surged from the earth like half-buried bodies, and cactus lined the railroad tracks where graffitied freight trains bore their heavy cargo north. A plastic bag caught on a fence post waved like a wedding veil in hot gusts from passing traffic.
An hour south of San Antonio, signs warned, PRISON AREA: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. I slowed to sixty as I passed the sprawling gray mass. The sun glared white-hot against hundreds of small square windows. There was something disturbing about how evenly spaced out they were, how utterly identical in shape and size. This was where Fabian Rivera was serving his thirty-five years.
If Dolores agreed to speak to me, I would need to request an interview with Fabian at some point. But one thing at a time.