“Oh, so you’re a feminist now, too?” Gabriel rolled his eyes.
Brenda smacked his shoulder. “We should all be feminists.”
“Ustedes dos,” I said to the cuates. “Look at me.”
They did. They were men, yes. But I was their mother. They would listen to me. They had no other choice.
“Just remember,” I said, recalling something Cassie had told me about her mother, “whoever tells the story has the power.”
“There’s power in withholding as well,” Brenda said, pinche devil’s advocate.
?Tú qué sabes? I wanted to ask her. But I let my gaze slide over her, back to the cuates.
Gabriel took a reckless swig of wine. “What, you’re saying to talk to her? No. No way.”
“Solo estoy diciendo,” I continued, “I haven’t talked about any of this, either. But maybe it’s time.”
Gabriel stopped short of slamming a palm down on the table. “What, like this was all something that happened to you, something you need to ‘process’? Must be nice to be treated like a victim instead of—”
“I have never made myself out to be a victim,” I said, each word crystalline sharp, blown glass. “?Me oyen? And I am not starting now.”
Cassie, 2017
A few days after my conversation with Mateo Rivera, I opened Facebook, searching for Gabriel. It had become a habit, as perversely comforting as my favorite subreddit. Gabriel and Brenda refused to speak to me, and yet they’d show their home and children and inner lives to complete strangers on the internet. Sometimes they posted from the same park or restaurant, and I saw the world from both their eyes simultaneously. Brenda preferred filters that heightened contrast, making the world seem hyper-real, almost harsh. Gabriel often used black-and-white or sepia on his sons, captioning them with things like “Everything I learned about being a dad, I learned from my dad,” and “There is no love like a father’s love. Thanks for everything, Dad.” Sweet, although I doubted Fabian had access to Facebook in prison.
Fabian’s case file included half a dozen videotaped interviews. I had rented a VCR online for two dollars a day, far cheaper than any option I’d found to convert them. On Duke’s night off, I held the first tape aloft.
“Police tape and chill?” I asked.
Duke glanced up from his Fantasy Football group chat. He looked bewildered for a second, then comprehended. He made a face. “You know that’s not really my thing, Cass.”
“Oh, come on.” I fed the tape into the VCR, and the click and whir spun me back to a million moments in my childhood. “It’ll be fun.” The word fun was clanging and out of place, but I wanted to make him understand why I cared, to see this part of me. So I opened a bottle of wine and even, with a curdle of shame, made popcorn. Finally, he shrugged and set his phone aside. We settled in together, our butter-slick fingers sliding against each other in the stainless steel bowl.
The footage was instantly familiar: the gray-box room, the two-way mirror, the clattering metal chairs. How many rooms like this had I seen on TV over the years, starting with those Friday nights with my mother? There is such comfort in feeling that soon you’ll know everything; that for an hour, certainty exists. Though this was different—raw, unedited, unpackaged—I felt a Pavlovian sense of pleasure as the interview began.
In the tape, Detective Ben Cortez was skinny, with a Tom Selleck mustache. The other detective, Manuel Zamora, was soft-spoken, with a gray ponytail and white sleeves rolled right below the elbow. Zamora was clearly the lead. He had a presence.
Then there was Fabian, brought to life before my eyes. “He’s so young,” I murmured, glancing at Duke, with his boyish mop of blond curls. Duke and video-Fabian were only a few years apart. How would Duke react if a stranger knocked on the door, claimed to be my husband? If he actually was my husband?
The interview began with Zamora establishing names, dates, and Fabian’s relationship to Lore. When he got to Andres, the tone shifted.
“I can tell you’re a smart guy,” Zamora said. “You must have known about the affair. Dime, when did you find out?”
Fabian rubbed his black beard, slightly unkempt. “Friday.”
“When Russo knocked on the door,” Zamora supplied.
Fabian nodded.
“That’d be around what time?”
“I don’t know. Four. Five. I wasn’t keeping track.”
“Easy to lose track without a job, right?” Zamora said sympathetically. “This fucking recession, te digo.”
Fabian crossed and uncrossed his arms.
“All right.” Zamora leaned in. “So Russo knocked on the door around four or five on Friday. But that’s not when you found out, right?”
“Yes. It is.” Fabian turned to look at Cortez, who was pacing cagily behind him. “Look, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.”
Cortez shook his head. “Puro pedo, güey.”
“?Tú crees?” Zamora said.
“What are they saying?” Duke asked.
“You think I speak Spanish all of a sudden?” I said with a laugh. “But they obviously think it’s bullshit.”
“I mean, it is kind of unlikely he wasn’t even a little suspicious,” Duke said. “Don’t you think?” He looked at me with something like hope.
“Probably,” I said, aching a little. I pressed pause. “What would you do?” I blurted.
Duke’s arm brushed mine as he reached for his wineglass. “If you were secretly married to someone else?”
“Yeah.”
“Might explain why we haven’t planned anything for the wedding.” He was teasing, though I still felt the barb, the question, beneath his words. I swatted his shoulder.
“Seriously.”
“Seriously?” He took a sip of wine. “Well, I don’t think I would kill anyone, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But how would you feel?” I pressed, searching for something, though I couldn’t say what.
Duke set his glass back on the coffee table and shifted on the love seat so one knee pressed against mine. “How do you think I’d feel, Cass? If you could keep something like that from me—do something like that? I’d feel like you’d torn out my fucking heart.”
I nodded. I guess I’d just needed to know it would hurt.
Then I thought of something. “Let’s say I did, though. And you found out like Fabian did. Who would you be angrier at—me or the other guy, who clearly didn’t know about you, either?”
“Assuming you’re not trying to tell me something here . . .” Duke trailed off. “You. But maybe it would be easier to take it out on him. Someone I didn’t love. You know?”
“That makes sense.” Andres as a surrogate for Lore. I intertwined my fingers with Duke’s and squeezed, then pressed play.
“Come on,” Cortez said to Zamora, as if they were arguing about a football play. “?Cuántos a?os has estado casado?”
“Veintitrés,” Zamora said.
“Me, last year,” Cortez said. Back to Fabian, “So here we are, this guy with twenty-three years of marriage, me with one, both ends of the spectrum, and”—to Zamora—“can you imagine not knowing if your vieja was taking up with someone else? And I’m just talking cheating. Not even the rest of it.”
Zamora shrugged. “Women,” he said to Fabian, “are much craftier than men, ?verdad? They run circles around us.”
Fabian said nothing.
“Tu esposa es bien inteligente, ?verdad? Must’ve been nice having her paycheck to count on in these times.”
“Ouch,” Duke said.
“Pero all that travel,” Zamora said. “That never got to you?”
“Of course it did,” Fabian snapped. “Like losing my business got to me. Like not being able to find work got to me. That doesn’t mean I killed someone.”
“No, no,” Zamora said with a laugh, pushing back into his chair. “No one’s saying that. We’re just trying to figure out what happened here.”