Lore listened with her whole body. A sheen of tears made her eyes burn copper. Was this how she had pulled it off? A sleight of hand, the magic of making you believe in the intimacy of your connection because you were the one made vulnerable? Now that I’d told the story, one I’d kept to myself for so many years, I felt raw, embarrassed, ashamed. I glanced at the recorder. I wouldn’t transcribe this part. I wished it could be that easy to erase it from Lore’s memory, to reclaim the power I’d given her. At the same time, I felt light and dizzy, as if I’d been untethered from something anchoring me in place for a long time.
“And how is your brother doing now?” Lore asked. No judgment. All warmth. “How old is he?”
I cleared my throat, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “Twelve. He always says things are fine.”
But then there was his recent late-night call, at the farm. The one I had yet to return. And besides, since when had our family’s silence meant anything other than secrets?
“Guilt is a terrible bedfellow,” Lore said quietly. “I couldn’t look at mine, either.”
Lore, 1983
Andres calls Lore on Friday, and then the following Wednesday, then Friday again. Lore asks him to describe his office, so she can imagine him as they talk, and it becomes a kind of game—they describe everything to each other.
They describe their childhood bedrooms, Lore’s with the two twin beds pressed against the walls, a wooden dresser between them, where her older sister, Marta, claimed the top two drawers and Lore the bottom, the closet where Lore tried on all of Marta’s clothes while her sister was in class at Laredo Junior College. And Andres’s bedroom, unshared because his parents had struggled to conceive him, and after he was born, his mom had four more miscarriages before they did whatever parents do to stop having babies. His mom always told him he was the light of her life, her miracle, and what teenage boy wants to know he matters that much to his mother? “Now that she’s gone, I wish I’d treated her better,” Andres says, his regret sharp through the line.
They describe their current homes, his a tenth-floor apartment in Tlatelolco, a massive housing complex about fifteen minutes away from the Centro Histórico. The name recalls some long-forgotten day of her adolescence, Mami and Papi sitting in front of their staticky TV, snapping, “Ya cállense, we’re trying to hear,” to the kids.
“The massacre,” Andres says, “before the sixty-eight Olympics.”
“Yes,” Lore breathes. She remembers now—the horror of the Mexican army and police opening fire on thousands of unarmed protesters, students, claiming they’d been provoked, at which point Papi, who’d served in World War II, had shouted, “?Pinches mentirosos!” and left the room. An estimated three hundred had died. “Were you there?”
“No,” Andres says. “I’ve only been here four years, since the divorce.”
His fifteen-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son—the same age as Gabriel and Mateo, and she can’t help wondering, briefly, dizzyingly, if they’d be friends—have their own rooms in his apartment, he tells her. They stay with Andres every other weekend, alternating holidays, and two weeks in the summer. Lore is surprised at how American their custody arrangement seems, and with the first tinge of bitterness, Andres says his ex-wife likes rules. Her name is Rosana, and she, too, teaches at the UNAM. They married young, at twenty-four, only a year after meeting and a year before their daughter, Penelope, would be born. Lore nearly blurts, You think twenty-four is young? Try twenty. She stops herself in time.
When Lore describes her home, she doesn’t tell him about the JanSport backpacks dumped on the living room floor during the cuates’ daily race to the television. She doesn’t tell him about their bedroom—the crumpled grass-stained shorts, the forgotten glasses of Coke fermenting to sticky sweetness in the sun, the football-patterned wallpaper border right at the seam of the ceiling.
And, of course, in her telling, the T-shirts and plaid button-downs and worn jeans on Fabian’s side of the closet disappear. Their bed smells only like dryer sheets and her shampoo. No Gillette razor at the sink or dark hair flecking the drain. His creased leather cowboy boots by the front door, gone. No venison in the freezer, no blue-and-white Chevy truck in the driveway. The home she describes is sterile and lonely, with none of the comfortable mess of family life.
It’s a sneaky, ugly feeling, this systematic erasing of her family. Like tempting fate, whispering to the universe that she wants them gone. Which isn’t true at all.
For months after Lore gave birth, she spent her sleepless hours weeping silently as she stared at her newborn sons, asleep in their bassinets, imagining their possible deaths one by one. She killed them so many times in her mind, convinced she had to conjure every excruciating detail, endure every horror completely in imagination to protect them in reality.
One night, she fell asleep with Mateo breastfeeding beside her in bed. Gabriel’s shriek awoke her, and she saw that Fabian, still snoring, had stretched a heavy arm across Mateo’s face. Mateo’s mottled red legs kicked. Lore gasped, shoved Fabian’s arm away, and drew Mateo to her chest, too shocked to even cry. Later she stroked the soft spot on Gabriel’s head, letting him pummel her breast with his jerky little fist, whispering, “You saved him.” She didn’t know how he knew to scream right then, but he knew. It wasn’t a coincidence.
She forced herself to stop imagining their deaths after that, sure she had invoked this danger. She feels similarly now, erasing her family with Andres—the fear of invocation.
But the calls are short, and the rest of the time there’s no escaping her family’s realness. In fact, there’s only room for thoughts of Andres in the edges of her days: idling behind other mothers (always mothers) in the school drop-off and pickup lines; during her evening shower, rushed because the cuates have used all the hot water; and her favorite, before dozing off to sleep, when time belongs to her alone.
And how quickly memory turns to fantasy. Sometimes she imagines them riding the caged elevator at the Gran Hotel. She curls her hands around the bars of the iron car, stares down at the dancing wedding guests as Andres lifts the red silk of her dress and slides his fingers inside her. She imagines the crowd below suddenly stopping, tilting their heads up, watching.
Everyone fantasizes, she tells herself. Men sneak their Playboys and Hustlers, obsessing over women whose allure could never survive the relentless banality of marriage, motherhood. Imagine those parted lips pursed grimly at the sink, hands scrubbing burned milanesa off the pan; those endless legs unshaved for weeks; heaving breasts smashed tight in a sports bra during the rare, clumsy half hour of home aerobics, every movement a second behind the neon-leotarded women on the screen. It doesn’t work. Fantasy never holds against the assault of reality. That’s why it’s so important. A safe outlet. An escape hatch to nowhere.
But women have no such magazines, nor do they have dedicated spaces to act out their desires, should it come to that. La “zona de tolerancia,” a walled compound of brothels, strip clubs, and cantinas only three miles south of the border, is nicknamed Boy’s Town for a reason. Women have only the potent force of their imagination. And that’s all Andres is to Lore. Despite the phone calls, he is, essentially, a figment. The memory of kissing him as unreal as the idea of making love with him.
Fabian had three girlfriends before he met Lore and slept with one of them. Lore had only ever kissed one boy before him, in a truck that smelled like dirty socks and stale Whataburger fries.