“Okay,” I said. “Deal.”
The space between us trembled.
Finally: “You know where I live.”
Part II
Lore, 2017
Tenía mucha energía nerviosa as I waited for the gringa reporter to arrive. I scurried around wiping the granite countertops, hiding mail in the bulging junk drawer, and giving the floors a quick pasadita with the Swiffer to pick up any of Crusoe’s stiff black fur, which he shook off every time he came inside.
Crusoe had been an impulse decision. I’d bought him on the side of McPherson near H-E-B three years ago. He was the wildest puppy in the litter, with a bounce like his legs were pogo sticks. I’d never wanted a dog, didn’t even know why I’d pulled over, but after holding him to my chest, I couldn’t imagine going home without him. “Tiene mucha energía,” the woman selling him had warned. I’d smiled tightly and said, “Pues, qué bueno, yo también.”
His tiny claws were sharp on my chest as I drove to Petco to buy dog bowls and chew toys, apologizing when he peed in three different aisles with his shaky little squat. At the register, I paused at a machine that would stamp a tag with your pet’s name. I stared into his cocoa eyes and thought of the café de olla Andres used to make, and the name just came to me: he was Crusoe.
The thing about a spontaneous act is that the consequences are long-lasting. The puppy chews the furniture, destroys the bougainvillea, becomes a dog. The dance becomes an affair, which becomes a marriage, which becomes a murder.
Which becomes a pact.
I thought of the gringa reporter, the way she’d tried to win my trust by telling me about her family. She wasn’t the first one to approach me after the LMT article. The first was another gringo, a fast talker with a New York accent. He was in his fifties, according to Wikipedia, and he’d written three true crime books, one of which was a bestseller. But when I told him I wasn’t interested, he said, “I’d prefer your cooperation, but I don’t need it.” ?Qué descarado! Imagine writing a book about someone who didn’t want to be written about! Apparently, these crime writers did it all the time by using other sources, like the guy from LMT.
That one’s call had been so out of the blue. It was like being hit on the back of the head, waking up to find your purse gone, your car stolen. Things taken from you purely because someone else wanted them.
Yesterday, through a gap in the curtains, I had watched Cassie Bowman leave a note on the front porch. She went back to her car and waited, like a hunter sitting in a blind, except I wasn’t some dumb animal, and I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of taking the bait.
Ten minutes after she left, I scuttled outside and plucked up the note, a breathless feeling in my chest, stupid. It was only her name and number. Please call me. I tossed the piece of paper on top of the other mail on the island. Then, just in case, I stuck it to the fridge with a magnetic pig.
I reheated flautas for lunch, bone dry. It was too hot to garden, so I busied myself cleaning the hall bathroom, the one I thought of as belonging to my grandsons, with the fuzzy bathmat and Mickey Mouse potty, the faint scent of urine and Johnson & Johnson shampoo, the same kind I’d used on Gabriel and Mateo. How history repeats itself, si la dejas.
At six, I considered the half-empty bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. What I really wanted though, for the first time in years, was Bucanas. I pulled a dusty bottle from the liquor cabinet, gave it a sniff. Age was supposed to be a good thing, right? I poured two fingers into a heavy crystal highball and went out to the back porch.
At dusk, the heat was finally contained, like fire in a lantern. The air smelled like jasmine and potting soil and the occasional pungent whiff of dog turd. I sat on one of the wicker chairs and tucked my feet beneath Crusoe, his belly bathwater-hot against my skin.
I took a sip of Bucanas, pictured it forging a path through me like the ants in that ant farm Mateo had begged me for when he was eight, rivulets through the sand. That ugly word from the LMT article—psychopath—hissed through my brain. Penelope, thinking I was a monster. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d written a letter the first time Fabian was up for parole. Talking about the impact of Andres’s death on her and Carlitos—the drugs and alcohol, Carlitos’s own arrests for petty crimes. She argued that Fabian should remain in prison, but it was me she wanted to punish. And I deserved it.
The sky darkened and I finished my drink, slapping at zancudos. Somehow, without even realizing it, I had made up my mind.
I called Gabriel once I was in bed, hair soaking through the shoulders of my bata.
“Mom.” His voice in my ear was irritated, as if I’d interrupted something important, which, fine, maybe I had—it was a Friday night. “What is it? Everything okay?”
“Sí, sí,” I said. “Todo bien. ?Y tú?”
“Fine.” Then, “I’ll be right there!” he called, no doubt to his wife, Brenda. “Sorry. We’re about to eat.”
I looked at the clock on my nightstand—nine thirty. “?Tan tarde?”
“Joseph isn’t sleeping again. We just got him down. Anyway, what’s going on? Is that pinche writer from New York still bothering you?”
“No.” I smiled, satisfied. “I’m going to talk to someone else.”
“Wait,” Gabriel said. “What? Mom, you should have talked to us first! ?Qué piensas?”
“Oye,” I said sharply. “Soy tu madre, no tu hija. You don’t scold me, and I don’t ask for permission. That’s how it works.”
“Obviously.” Gabriel’s voice was bitter. “Okay, explain, then.”
“She wants to tell my side of the story.” One secret-keeping woman to another. She had no idea.
“Ay, Mom, don’t be naive! She’s a reporter. She—”
“Just listen!” I snapped. “She’s young. Not a lot of experience.” I didn’t tell him about that blog, all white and bright pink like it was regular celebrity chisme instead of people killing each other con machetes y quién sabe qué. I also didn’t tell him about her story in Texas Monthly about the fiftieth anniversary of the UT sniper. It was good. It made me cry. “If I talk to her, that other writer has nothing. Who would publish his book, without my perspective, if someone else has it? He’d have no reason to keep snooping around.”
Gabriel was quiet. Considering. “Okay. So it gets him off our backs and it might not even go anywhere if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
For some reason this bothered me, how easy it was for him to dismiss Cassie Bowman, aunque this had been my reasoning, too.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “But at least I can try to control what she writes.”
“Forget about controlling it, how about stopping it?” Gabriel’s voice rose, and I imagined him pacing in front of that obscenely big TV that took up practically a whole living room wall. “Look—I’m coming!” he called again to Brenda. He was going to wake Joseph if he kept that up. He lowered his voice, presumably so Brenda wouldn’t hear. “I just don’t want everything with Dad and—”
“Ya sé, ya sé,” I soothed, the way I did when the cuates were little and constantly scraping off their top layer of skin, blood blooming to the surface. Ya sé, ya sé, I know it hurts, I would say, before wiping their cuts with alcohol, knowing it was about to hurt even more before it felt better. “Don’t worry, mijo—I know what I’m doing.”
It crept back into me then, this long-slumbering part, sniffing itself awake. The part of myself I’d discovered with Andres and buried since his death. The part that only came alive—powerfully, desperately, impossibly alive—when I risked everything I loved.
So I’d called Cassie Bowman.
And now I waited.
Cassie, 2017