Then it’s back home to the whispered phone calls, Andres telling her where he’d like to touch her, where to put her own hands; the daytime fantasies, the places Lore can retreat to inside herself when the cuates are fighting over the TV control or dribbling a basketball inside the house, leaving black scuff marks on the floor she’s just mopped.
But also, every six weeks: the slam of Fabian’s truck door on a Friday night. Ranch days, the four of them with Marta and Sergio, taking turns shooting the .22 at cans of Schaefer Light—Chafa Light, Sergio calls them, only good for target practice, and yet the adults all drink them anyway—the cuates passing out slumped and pliant as toddlers on the way home. Lore and Fabian holding hands, the truck smelling like mesquite, their skin covered in dust fine as powdered sugar.
Inevitably, the lies become uglier and more complicated. She tells Andres her parents died in a car crash and that she and her siblings don’t get along; it’s hard to even force out the words, and she knocks on every piece of wood in Andres’s bedroom when he goes to take a shower. She can’t spend Easter with Andres and the kids, she says, because she has to work that Saturday and Monday. It’s too much to spend on a plane ticket for one day. Really, the whole family goes out to the ranch, a day of water balloons and four-wheeler rides and cascarones, coming home with their sweaty skin polka-dotted with confetti dye.
When Andres suggests coming to visit her, she tells him to save his money. There’s nothing for them to do in Laredo. She’d rather stay longer in DF next time, spend a dizzying afternoon at Merced, or maybe play tourists (which she is, of course) and take Penelope and Carlitos on a trajinera at Xochimilco. Lore has only been on a boat once, at Lake Casa Blanca, and she’s hungry to float through the canal system in a part of Mexico that supposedly most resembles its precolonized past. Lore is hungry for so much, an appetite that seems to yawn and yawn and never be filled.
Andres says, “It’s not about what we do. I just want to see where you’re from. Meet your friends. Or are you embarrassed of me?” he teases.
What friends? she wants to say. She has plenty of friendly acquaintances, but the last twelve years have been so consumed with family and working that that’s all there is: family and work. Marta is her best friend and Sergio is Fabian’s. Their social lives revolve around children’s birthdays and Sunday lunches at Mami and Papi’s house. But she’s supposed to be a single thirty-three-year-old, and what single thirty-three-year-old doesn’t have friends?
“More like embarrassed of them,” Lore jokes. Then, more seriously, “You will meet them. But trust me. Everyone is so stressed out right now, myself included. I’d rather be over there with you all. Okay?”
Even through the phone line, she can feel Andres’s smile. “Okay.”
Eventually, if this continues, she’ll have to figure out a way he can come. The bank recently repossessed a condo it’s now using as occasional corporate housing. That’s probably the best option. She can say a customer from DF is visiting to evaluate a potential site. She’ll ask Marta and Sergio to watch the cuates for another DF trip. Then she’ll cart over an armful of throw pillows, her bedsheets, which smell like her, and as many of her clothes as she can fit in the tiny trunk of her Escort. She’ll fill H-E-B bags with canned corn and spinach and asparagus, things from the pantry the cuates won’t miss, grab a few trinkets and childhood photo albums. Then, when Andres is here, she’ll come down with food poisoning, something that will keep them in the condo all weekend, no chance of bumping into anyone Lore knows. She wants to laugh, thinking of how incomprehensible such a scheme would have been to her only six months ago, but now she can hardly remember a time before, when there was only one family.
Still, until Día de los Muertos, she almost convinces herself no one will get hurt.
That day, Rosana has the kids, and Andres suggests that he and Lore go to Mixquic to honor their parents—his, buried in Buenos Aires, and hers, as far as he knows, in Laredo. So they take the bike, an hour plunging toward darkness as the sun sets in miniature in the mirror.
Ever since their first ride together, the bike has been magic, the only way Lore knows to be both exquisitely, impossibly present, and also outside herself, with the serene understanding that she is as close to death as ever. Andres was surprised by how much she loved it. At best, she gathers, Rosana had tolerated it, but never completely shirked her resentment that, even with two children, Andres took such unnecessary risk, no matter how safe he was while riding. And he is safe. He needs to be. On the bike, Andres must account not only for himself but for every other Mexican who might veer into his lane without checking their blind spot, who might stomp on the brakes to piss off the driver behind them, who believes it is their right of way, always. When it became clear Lore would ride with him, he bought her a helmet, a perforated leather jacket, and riding pants and ankle boots reinforced with Kevlar. Holding their form, they’re like armor in her otherwise sparse half of his closet.
Their first trip outside the city was to the Sierra Gorda. Before they left, he repeated to her: “Remember, lean with me—don’t resist the curves.” And she wanted to say she’d been leaning with him, she hadn’t resisted a single curve yet, had she? Instead, she wrapped her body around his, armor to armor, as the highway to Jalpan de Serra eventually cleared and the views cracked open to prehistoric hulking mountains hewn in rough brushstrokes of jade and rust, and there were those curves. Low in her helmet, Lore said, “Whoa,” as if calming a spooked horse, while Andres lowered them to the rushing road, then lifted again. In Lore’s helmet, the wind compressed into a distant roar, reminding her of holding a conch shell to the cuates’ ears when they were little, asking if they could hear the ocean. The wind flooded the space between her and Andres, pushing and pulling, and she could nearly feel the disequilibrium of tires losing traction, the slide, the roll, the fall. It reminded her of standing on the tracks as a girl, waiting and waiting until she could almost feel the hot breath of the train like a dragon’s roar, and thinking maybe this was the secret to fully inhabiting a life. And if you could do that, if you could be the fullest version of yourself, then surely you had more of yourself to give. When she thought that way, the guilt—a constant presence, an extra limb—unfurled behind her like a cape.
She can smell the incense even before they reach San Andres Apóstol. They buy buckets of marigolds from a street vendor, wander into the cemetery hand in hand. Floating candles and golden smiles soften the winter darkness. Children with serapes over their shoulders, graves draped with marigolds and roses, green apples and sugar skulls. Chocolate and aniseed sweeten the air as they lay marigolds on undecorated graves.
“Bringing back memories?” Lore asks, with a small, private smile. Reminding Andres of their early days, how he’d told her about retreating to La Recoleta’s cemetery as a boy, hiding from his mother’s love in the shadows of mausoleums.
He smiles back, squeezing her hand. “I was alone then.”
The church bells ring, solemn and triumphant. Eight o’clock, and the Alumbrada is beginning. Lore can sense the souls of the dead, their joyful rise. She can feel their ephemeral sweep as they search for their loved ones.
“My parents would have loved you,” Andres says.
“Even though I’m Mexican?” Lore teases.
He grins back. “We could have worked on your accent.”
Someone nearby is playing a guitar. Lore and Andres stop for a moment, listen, sway. In the golden darkness, Andres’s eyes shine. He sets his bucket down and gestures for her to do the same. Then he takes both her hands.
Something is coming. The spirits pause, waiting. Whatever it is, she wants to stop it.