“What about you?” Andres asks, a smile in his voice. “Do you play games?”
Lore doesn’t know how to answer. She’s playing games now, isn’t she? Pretending to be someone Andres can call without guilt or reservation. But is this who she is? A pretender?
She and Fabian met on a double date. Her childhood friend Jenny had set it up; it was Jenny’s second date with Fabian, and she asked him to bring a friend for Lore. Arturo, another Martin football player, had the shadow of a mustache on his otherwise baby face, and used his pizza crusts to beat a rhythm on the table at Wizard Wicks. Jenny kept sneaking bright-eyed glances at Lore, nudging her beneath the table with one of the patchwork boots she’d bought on their last trip to Payless. But it was Fabian who had Lore’s attention. Broad-shouldered and quiet, with quick flashing brown eyes that made Lore wonder what he was thinking and—to her chagrin—how much he really liked Jenny.
The four of them went out two or three more times. It happened subtly, the way Fabian and Lore took opportunities to be alone together. “You get the tickets, I’ll get the snacks,” Lore might say to Arturo, and Fabian would press a five-dollar bill into Jenny’s hand for the tickets and say, “Popcorn?” They would disagree on this later, but Lore remembers Fabian saying, in this same concession line at the Plaza, “I think I’m going to break up with Jenny.” He was looking straight ahead, and for a moment, Lore thought she’d misheard him. Then he glanced down at her, a question in his eyes. She said, “Well, I’m going to break up with Arturo,” though “break up” was too strong a phrase for what they were, still two strangers, really, thrown together like broken magnets, easily pulled apart.
And, yes—this does not make her teenage self a great friend. But she didn’t pretend. When Fabian smiled at her, she smiled back. And when Jenny called her crying, after the breakup, Lore didn’t deny it when she demanded, “He likes you, doesn’t he? And you like him.” Lore only said she was sorry, and when Jenny called her a puta and hung up, she quietly accepted that their friendship, which began in CCD classes before their First Holy Communion, was probably over. So she was selfish, perhaps. But she hadn’t pretended to be otherwise, and there was integrity in that, wasn’t there? So this, now—what she’s doing, or not doing—isn’t who she is.
“No,” she says to Andres. “I don’t play games.”
They talk for almost twenty more minutes. The call must be costing Andres a fortune, though he shows no desire to hang up. They laugh at how they spoke Spanish at the wedding and now English because he is calling her in the U.S.; they recognize they are different in each language, more limited in expression in their second one, so Andres switches back to Spanish and Lore feels a shiver of recognition, as if a song has struck a memory, and when he asks her why she’s quiet, she says she’s thinking of the Bosque de Chapultepec. Andres sighs, and she swears she can feel his breath in her ear.
“I loved kissing you,” he says, his voice lower, intimate.
A slow, delicious burn in Lore’s chest. “Me too,” she whispers. Her office, suddenly, feels charged with unfamiliarity. The wood-and-metal clock on the wall, the plastic mat beneath her chair, the dot matrix printer with its reams of continuous paper—all slightly foreign now, tilted, with the illicit thrill of this shared memory.
The question hangs, though: What now? What happens when two people, for one night, close a great distance, and want to do it again? What happens when one of them is already committed to another?
Lore glances at her watch, crashing back to reality. Time to pick up the cuates.
“Andres, I have to go. But . . . I’m glad you called.”
“Can I call you again?” he asks hurriedly. “On Friday, maybe, if I can? I have office hours . . .”
What if she’d said no? What if she’d closed this door that is barely open? All three of them—Lore, Andres, and Fabian—might be happy, blind to the dark fates they’d eluded. All three of them might still be alive.
But there is no alternate future. There is only the one Lore creates with one word: “Yes.”
Cassie, 2017
I hadn’t planned on staying at the motel where Andres Russo was murdered. I’d only wanted to see it. But even after failing miserably with Dolores, I couldn’t make myself go home. I’d brought an overnight bag just in case, and at sixty-five dollars a night, Hotel Botanica was cheaper than most other options in town. If I was going to stay anywhere, I might as well stay here. After all, there was still a chance she’d change her mind—I’d left my contact information beneath a rock on her front porch.
Hotel Botanica was set apart from the string of Motel Sixes and La Quintas along I-35 by what seemed to be an appeal to families. Yellowed waist-high trellises separated the aluminum-sided room doors, all of which faced a central courtyard. In the small, leafy pool area, three children splashed around a broken waterfall feature, the red plastic rocks dry and cracked. A little girl performed clumsy, elaborate jumps into the pool, limbs starfished, a slap of water on her belly. “?Mira, mami, mira!” she yelled, water streaming from her pink polka-dotted bikini as she stared toward the caba?a, where two couples drank beer from plastic cups and occasionally waved back toward the pool. Tejano music played. A sign on the bar advertised two-dollar tacos.
My sunburned arms stung as I followed the cement walkway toward my door. This goddamn heat. If anything, it was worse at five than it had been at noon. I understood now why the Laredo Morning Times article had specifically mentioned the 117-degree day. Lesser things drove people to acts of madness.
I dumped my bags and the cardboard box on the coverlet of the queen-size bed, which matched the rust-orange zigzag carpeting. The mattress was set on a faded, scratched wooden platform base. Two barstools were tucked beneath an empty shelf that did double duty as a breakfast table and desk. The only other piece of furniture was a long mahogany buffet table beneath the wall-mounted flat-screen, flanked by two large fake ferns.
When I’d first read the Laredo Morning Times article, I’d imagined the shot ringing out in a quiet hotel—adjoining walls, carpeted hallways—and wondered how no one had heard it, but here, on a night like this, it wouldn’t get dark until after nine. Maybe the music had been blasting, all accordion and bass, the pool filled with people drinking and splashing. Maybe an eighteen-wheeler had bleated its horn at the same time. Maybe everyone had assumed someone else would call the police.
Meanwhile, Andres Russo had bled out in his room.
As much as I’d read and written about murder over the years, this was the closest I’d been to an exact spot where someone’s life had been taken. A familiar, morbid draw overcame me, the kind of reverent zeal I’d felt reading about Ted Bundy’s kills for the first time. Those sorority girls, asleep in their beds. The way you might close your eyes on an ordinary day and end up beaten to death, shards of skull and teeth flung like gruesome confetti around the same room where you’d once studied, giggled, tried on lipsticks and personalities, had sex, and dreamed of where your life might go. A chiaroscuro of the macabre and mundane, the nearness of the two transforming me into a rabid voyeur of that final experience.
I wondered in which room it had happened, how many people had brushed against Andres’s ghost without feeling it. I closed my eyes, imagined him lying on the floor—blurred and featureless though still somehow distinct in my mind, that sweater from the photo in “Her Secret Lives” drenched in blood.