I had come to enjoy these beats of tension, moments of pushing up against a door Lore didn’t want to open. Behind those doors, that’s where the true story was hiding.
“You know,” Lore said, “in other cultures, other times, a person—a woman—wouldn’t be demonized for loving two men at once. Only a tiny percentage of mammals practice monogamy, and we’re the only ones who try to regulate it through marriage.”
“But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?” I asked. “We’re not talking about three adults consenting to a polyamorous relationship. We’re talking about one person deciding for all three. One person thinking she could have it all.”
“I didn’t think that way,” Lore said. “I just knew I loved them both.”
“But something had to give.” I thought about what Oscar had told me about Andres bothering Lore. What did that mean?
“It did,” Lore said. “With the temblor.”
The next day, Lore called me right as I was leaving Andres’s daughter, Penelope, another voicemail. I’d sent Carlos another message on Facebook, too. Maybe they would know if, toward the end, Andres and Lore’s relationship wasn’t as ideal as she made it sound—perhaps as ideal as it would become in her memory.
“Lore, hi.” I looked at the time on my laptop: one thirty. “I wasn’t expecting your call. Everything—"
“Turn on the news!” Lore interrupted. “Apúrate!”
“Why, what’s happened?” I dug for the remote between the love seat’s saggy cushions. “What channel?”
“Any channel!”
I flipped to CNN. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake had rocked Puebla, near Mexico City. Newscasters spoke over a chaotic montage of cell phone videos—people shouting in the streets, buildings collapsed, dust billowing. Police, fire trucks, ambulances. Long lines of men climbing like ants on the ragged hilltops of toppled apartment complexes, women with their arms around dusty open-mouthed children. Enrique Pe?a Nieto in a somber gray suit, reminding Mexicans they’d been here before, they’d come together in a spirit of solidarity and they would do so again in this tough time.
“Oh my God,” I murmured. I put us on speaker, began recording on my laptop.
“It’s thirty-two years to the day since the one in 1985.” She sounded as unraveled as I’d ever heard her. “All this talk about the past. Es como . . . es como que . . . we’ve brought it back to life! All that dust.” Her voice was strangled. “It feels like it’s choking you.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms. She had started telling me about the earthquake only yesterday. On September 19, 1985, nearly a year after Andres’s first proposal, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake had devastated Mexico City. The number of dead was estimated between five and thirty thousand, depending on the source; a third of the living space in the city destroyed, much of it in Tlatelolco—where Andres had lived and where they’d both been when the earth cracked open. For a moment, it seemed possible we had that kind of power, to exhume the past and reanimate it.
We watched the news together for the next two hours, as Lore overlaid the devastating images with her own memories. It was as if she had a foot in each world, thirty-two years apart, and might disintegrate any second, her body turning to dust, more dust. While we talked, I pulled up old photos and news clips of the 1985 quake. I read about the “Miracle Babies” of Hospital Juárez, who had survived for seven days without milk, formula, human contact. I pictured Andrew the day he was born. Eyes swollen and disconcertingly alert, his wrinkled crimson limbs twitching in the plastic bassinet. I imagined the horror of the hospital collapsing around him, a mausoleum of babies squalling for mothers who would never come.
At 2 A.M., the curve of Duke’s back beside me was like a boulder in the darkness. I watched his shoulder rise and fall as he snored. I wanted to shake him. Instead, I put on my headphones and listened to a podcast by an investigative reporter who’d spent more than a decade trying to find answers about a string of missing girls he believed were connected. They’d lived in rural America, where “things like this don’t happen,” and yet once the reporter dug deeper, he discovered a scourge of domestic violence the girls had endured inside their own homes. I wasn’t prepared to hear the 911 call from a screaming six-year-old begging for help as her stepfather beat her mom and siblings in the background. I ripped out my headphones, breathing hard. Just like that, I was nine again, crotch of my purple jeans soaked with urine, only I hadn’t made a sound. I never made a sound. Never called for help. I only ran to my room, where I wouldn’t have to see it.
I opened my texts. How’s it going, buddy? I messaged Andrew. FaceTime soon?
He responded with a thumbs-up. Like a loser, I sent a heart emoji, which he didn’t acknowledge. For the last few months, his messages had been particularly short. Andrew was twelve, though. Duke was right—with so many years between us, what did we have in common? What did we have to say to each other? My body reverberated with sadness, loss.
At three, I popped some Tylenol PM and opened Gabriel’s Facebook page. I scrolled aimlessly, stopping at a photo of Mateo with his nephew Joseph on his third birthday. Mateo was helping Joseph swing a stick into a pi?ata shaped like a car, both taking a batter’s stance with near-identical looks of concentration. Think of my nephews, Mateo had said. It had been a couple of weeks since we’d met. I thought of his attempted bribe. His kindness with the euthanasia. How he’d managed to forgive Lore and maintain a relationship, despite everything she’d done. And my desire, however fleeting, to match his pain with my own. The conviction that we weren’t all that different.
Maybe he’d be willing to talk to me again.
I opened an email draft on my phone. By the time of the earthquake, Lore had been with Andres for two years. Soon, they would be married. Less than a year later, he would be dead. What had the twins noticed about her during this midway point?
Hi Mateo,
I know you said you’re not interested in being interviewed for your mother’s book, but I was hoping you’d reconsider. I spoke with her today about the earthquake in 1985. It sounds completely terrifying. What do you remember about that time?
To my surprise, I received a response within minutes: You’re burning the midnight oil.
A grin tickled my lips. There was that unexpected humor again.
Someone has to, I wrote back. Maybe Lore had softened him to the project. Or maybe he’d felt a similar connection with me. So, where were you when you found out about it?
School, he said. My dad heard about it on the news in Austin. He couldn’t get ahold of her, so he drove straight down and took Gabriel and me out early.
Did you know right away that something was wrong? I asked.
No. We were excited at first. But then we saw his face in the office. He looked so bad we knew it was about her. We thought she was dead, even before we heard about the earthquake.
I imagined the boys, only two years older than Andrew was now. Only a few years younger than I was when my mother died. I could still feel that punch of shock, the strange numbness in my hands and feet, the magical thinking, willing to strike any sort of bargain if it would turn back time.
What happened next? I asked.
Duke’s snore caught and dragged. I turned my back to him, curling around the phone.
Dad told us about the earthquake and said no one had heard from her. Which made sense—the phone lines were down. But still, we were all thinking the worst. My dad was a wreck. He took us home and we were basically glued to the news.
Now that he was talking, it was a gamble, what I was about to ask. But it felt important, even necessary, to hear his voice as he told the story.
Mateo, can I call you? I wrote. It can be off the record if you want . . .
Nothing. I bit my lip.
Now? he wrote.
Unless you have something better to do? I sent the message without thinking, then flushed. God, that sounded inappropriate. One minute passed. Two. Then: