“Lore,” he says, “I never thought I would feel this way again. I never have felt this way. You are everything I never dared to think I could have, after—” He shakes his head, as if bewildered by this clumsy reminder of his failures as a husband and father.
The panic in her chest is like wild hoofbeats, a stampede of animals kicking up dust in retreat. She wants to be back on the bike, where all they ever have is the single wordless moment they’re in. It’s all she can give him. But Andres continues, his eyes soft.
“Lore,” he says, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If you’ll let me.”
As he opens a small crimson box, Lore is twenty years old again—Fabian’s face open and earnest in the twilit blind, his hands shaking, I was going to wait. I’m sorry, the box is all dusty now. I should have waited, but Lore, will you marry me? She had shrieked, and the monte had shivered, birds startled to flight. She’d thrown her arms around him and cried into his neck, and they’d both been laughing and talking over each other when Fabian slipped the gold band with the tiny diamond onto her finger. Yes, she’d said a few minutes later. I forgot to say yes!
“Lore?” Andres is smiling at her, though his eyes are questioning. She feels frozen, as if she might be found a thousand years from now still in this graveyard.
Finally, she crashes back into herself. “Oh, Andres.” She reaches a tentative finger for the box, touches the emerald. “It’s so beautiful. But I—I can’t.”
A family edges past them, sidelong looks and arms laden with candles and pan de muerto. Andres stares at her as though he’s misheard.
“I love you.” Lore clutches his elbows, urgent. “And I want to be with you. It’s just—how would it even work? My job—the recession. And I would never ask you to move to Laredo and leave the kids. It’s just—it seems—”
“You’re not ready.” Andres’s voice is flat, disappointed.
“I don’t know. But I love you. You know I love you. Can’t that be enough for now?”
Andres looks toward San Andres Apóstol. A low, thick fog of incense obscures the monastery’s ancient stone. A baby cries, disembodied, and strangely, Lore feels a needle-sharp prickle behind her nipples, the way her body used to respond, leaking warm sweet milk, when one of the cuates cried. How far she has come since those days when her dreams, her ambitions, her desires were all subsumed, stamped out like a campfire in the morning.
Andres is still holding the box. The emerald glows, candlelit. Without looking at it, he snaps the box shut and slips it back inside his jacket.
“That’s the thing about love,” he says, with a wry, sad smile. “It’s irreducible. I can never know what your love for me feels like to you and you can never know what my love for you feels like to me. I suppose this”—with a touch to his jacket—“was an attempt to show you, which is irrational, and also not fair of me to assume—”
“No,” Lore interrupts, taking his hand. “It was fair to assume.” She can imagine their life together, a life filled with books and conversation and adventure. Café de olla in bed, ears ringing with the wind. Penelope and Carlitos.
Then, as it so often happens, a wave of nausea nearly sweeps her sideways. Fabian still working twelve-hour days in Austin, desperate to keep the store alive; how he surprised her two weeks ago, coming home and immediately taking her to the Tack Room, a steak dinner she didn’t dare say they couldn’t afford. Gabriel and Mateo, how their faces have recently taken on the quality of a magic trick: now you see me—childish roundness, echoes of the babies they once were—now you don’t, transforming in her peripheral vision to the faces of men she doesn’t yet recognize. She has a life.
But that life is better now that she’s with Andres. It’s better because she is better. When Fabian told her at the Tack Room—more than a year after he first left for Austin—that he wouldn’t be moving home anytime soon, she could accept his decision without resentment, because she knew it was for their family, yes, but also for Fabian himself, for his idea of himself as a man; even if he’s biding time before the inevitable, working is necessary for his survival, and she can give that to him now. Her love for him has become more expansive and generous, and he can feel it. In the small, dim restaurant north of the river, she’d said she understood, and he’d stroked the lines of her palm, making her shiver.
And she is a better mother, too. When the cuates were babies, she’d been forced to become an efficiency expert. She learned to feed one while changing the other’s diaper, one-handed; managed to shower, dress, and pee in under five minutes; timed grocery shopping with their naps, Crock-Pot dinners she could start at noon and not touch again until six. As they grew older, she became a kind of drill sergeant: Time to wake up! Time for dinner! Time for baths! And older still: Have you finished your homework? Gabriel, Mateo, in the car, now, we’re going to be late! Fabian a benign background presence, a reliable copilot who has long since ceded control of the plane. Without her at the helm, it would crash.
Only it won’t. She can see this now that she’s away one week a month, and she can see, too, that while her regimenting was once necessary, perhaps it isn’t anymore, at least not to the same extent. And more, it’s keeping her from simply enjoying her boys, the way she can enjoy Penelope and Carlitos. And so, thirteen years after their birth, she is beginning to squirm loose of the bindings that once felt so essential—that once were essential—but now only trap her in a role she despises.
Sometimes she wishes Gabriel and Mateo could see her, leather and Kevlar on the back of a motorcycle, pointing at cloud-studded sierras, hidden waterfalls, the phantasmagoric midflight blur of a macaw. She wishes they could see her and know she is more than who they’ve always known her to be. Maybe one day, when they’re older, but for now she can stop nagging them, allow them to make their own mistakes, grab the Atari controller and let them teach her how to play.
Could she give up Andres and this life, here, and still be the wife and mother she wants to be there? Could she continue to explore the parts of herself—adventurous, curious, relaxed, open—she’s discovered, or would they eventually shrink within her again, obliterated by the unyielding demands of one life? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.
“I want to marry you,” she says softly. “But it’s not the right time.”
Around them, the cemetery pulses and flickers with collective grief, collective hope. She sees herself sitting at a spinning wheel, turning straw into gold—something as ugly and ordinary as an affair into something precious. But is she the imp, demanding more and more in exchange for the magic, or is she the girl trapped in a room, making promises she can’t keep to save her own life?
As always, she is both.
Cassie, 2017
“Andres’s proposal meant things couldn’t go on indefinitely,” I said to Lore on the phone. Mid-September, the evening humid and heavy as I sat at our small iron patio table out back. Iron reminded me of Fabian now. “How long did you think you could sustain the affair?”
On FaceTime, Lore winced. She didn’t like that word, I could see.
“The constantly sinking land,” she murmured.
“Sorry?”
“That’s what Andres called DF that night in Chapultepec. Because it was built on an ancient lake bed, and just the way we can’t feel the Earth rotating, you can’t feel the city falling deeper into the ground. That’s how it was for me. I didn’t recognize the shifts as they happened. It was probably six months before I even admitted to myself that I was having an affair, como tú dices.” She did one-handed air quotes around the word.
“How did it feel to admit that?”
“How do you think it felt?” Lore snapped. “Do you think I was proud?”
“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”