“Well, now it’s normal,” Duke said. “It’s just you.”
Duke’s answer, though it was the one I’d thought I wanted, teased open a maw of sadness. Lore had described those Sunday lunches with her family in such detail, with such love. It made me ache for something I’d never really had. Or had briefly before losing it. At least I had those memories, though, of my mother and father and me, back when I’d thought we were happy. Not Andrew. He’d never been a part of that family. He only had my father, and I didn’t truly know anything about their life together.
I’d spent that first Thanksgiving and Christmas after leaving Enid at my new roommate’s house, blushing with pleasure when, on Christmas morning, there were gifts for me under the tree, too. I didn’t see Andrew again until summer. I ran to him, arms outstretched. He wrapped himself around our father’s leg and hid his face. Those three months we spent together scrubbed from his memory like the vernix I’d scrubbed from his skin. It felt like another death.
Later that summer, though, once Andrew had warmed to me again, I took over his evening bath routine. Every night, I examined his chubby pale arms, the soft pouch of his belly, the backs of his knees and nape of his neck. I looked for marks that couldn’t be explained by stumbles I’d seen. I never found any. So, when August came, I left again. I still thought of his unmarked baby body when I needed to reassure myself that he was okay, as if that flimsy long-ago “proof” mattered even one day, one hour, one minute after I drove away.
“Hey.” Duke cupped my cheek, discovering my tears with his thumbs at the same time I realized I was crying. “What’s wrong?”
I wanted to laugh. I wouldn’t even know where to begin—except I had begun, with Lore, and maybe that’s why the past felt so close. It was easier with strangers. Easier to bend toward that sweet-tender lure of intimacy. There’s nothing to lose by exposing yourself. With Duke, I had everything to lose.
“I . . . miss Andrew,” I tried. “I’m such a terrible sister. He called me at the farm, and I still haven’t called him back.”
Duke stroked my hair, kissed the corner of my mouth. “It’s hard to be close when there’s such a big age difference, that’s all.”
“Yeah.” I felt the churn of more tears coming, and I fought them back.
Duke’s lips found mine in the darkness, and I let them part automatically, dulled by a disappointment I didn’t fully understand.
Over the next six weeks, my conversations with Lore slipped into a comfortable, familiar rhythm. Sometimes we talked for hours. Occasionally I interrupted to clarify a timeline or ask how she felt about a particular moment—both at the time and in hindsight—or for physical detail. Her memory was uncanny, conjuring settings and conversations with such photographic detail that I wondered if she restored the fuzzy spots with imagined re-creations: maybe a little better than the originals, or a little worse, for effect.
Lore continued asking blunt, intrusive questions of her own: How often did Duke and I have sex (about three times a week, usually drowsy, after he returned home from the food truck and pressed against me in bed, a dreamlike quality to it that contrasted with my pleasant soreness in the morning, so real and concrete, a secret my body carried through the day); had I ever been unfaithful (no); when I’d last seen my father (two years ago, when I’d spent a secretive hour checking all his old hiding spots for booze, feeling twelve years old again). Our mutual interrogation was becoming its own kind of addiction, an experiment in how far we could push, how much honesty—or at least the perception of honesty—we could demand. How much we could give.
On a Wednesday in early September, I was halfway through a new blog post—a man who had killed a couple for unfriending his daughter on Facebook—when Mateo Rivera called me.
I had left a message for him at his veterinary clinic weeks earlier, around the same time I’d sent Gabriel a Facebook message. Lore was painting a vivid picture of her marriage to Fabian, one of love and also loneliness. But plenty of women were lonely in their marriages without having an affair or marrying someone else at the same time. I wondered, especially in the context of Fabian later killing Andres, whether she was leaving anything out. Other than Lore, who would know that better than Gabriel and Mateo? I wondered how they’d found out the truth about their mother, how they made sense of what their parents had done. How their parents’ actions had altered the landscape of their lives, who they blamed, and to what extent. What did Gabriel tell his children about why their grandfather was in prison? How did this kind of legacy get folded into a family’s identity?
But Mateo hadn’t returned my call, and Gabriel had written in all caps, NOT INTERESTED, as if I were selling magazine subscriptions. When I tried again, he responded, Read the room—fuck off! The aggression was startling at first, and then I laughed. I had pegged him as a yeller.
Now Mateo wanted to talk. “How about Chuy’s, near Schertz?” he asked. “Seven o’clock?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”
I phoned it in for the remaining blog posts, typical it’s-always-the-husband murders, so I could focus on my questions for Mateo. I was grabbing my laptop bag to head out the door when he called again: A couple’s dog had just been hit by a car. They would need to say their goodbyes. Could I come to him instead?
The sixty-mile drive south took more than two hours through the slog of rush hour traffic. It was after seven when I reached Mateo’s clinic, located in northeast San Antonio among older strip malls with Mexican restaurants and car service places. At the Catholic church next door, two towering conifers flanked a bronze fountain where water fell in glimmering sheets.
Inside, the clinic smelled like fur and shampoo and the stale-fries odor of pet food. The walls were eighties wood paneling, covered in bright canvas paintings of French bulldogs and Siamese cats. In an aquarium along the back wall, clown fish flitted in and out of half-open treasure chests. Invisible dogs barked, a disorienting, distant cacophony.
“We board pets here, too,” explained the girl behind the semicircular front desk. Her blond hair, woven into a loose side braid, glowed beneath the fluorescent lights. She’d introduced herself as Maggie.
“How do you like working for Dr. Rivera?” I asked, taking a seat. “What’s he like?”
“Oh, he’s great!” Maggie blushed. I looked at her more closely. She clearly had a crush on Mateo. At least a crush, depending on whether Mateo was the type of man who could resist a woman twenty years his junior. In photos, he didn’t wear a wedding ring. “He’s so good with the animals,” Maggie continued. “Even the real scaredy-cats that shiver and shed all over the place end up loving him. Honestly, that’s become one of my mottos in life: If my dog doesn’t like you, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you know?”
Before I could respond, a back door opened, and Mateo Rivera emerged. He was dressed in blue scrubs and held the door for a couple in their fifties. The man wore dusty jeans and steel-toed work boots, and the woman clutched her brown leather handbag to her chest. The man cradled a towel-wrapped form in his arms. One black paw hung out, and the woman tried to tuck it back in, crying.
Mateo touched the covered form. “He was lucky to have you two.”
The husband nodded gruffly and shook Mateo’s hand before pushing through the front doors. The woman wiped her nose, fumbling with her purse as she approached Maggie at the counter.
“No, no.” Mateo touched her shoulder. “Váyase a casa.”
A fresh film of tears glassed the woman’s eyes. “?Está seguro?”
Mateo nodded, his expression gentle. “Claro que sí.”