Okay. He included his cell number.
I slunk from bed, closed the door quietly behind me. Leaving the room was only a formality. There was no such thing as privacy in seven hundred square feet. Of course, I wasn’t doing anything I needed to hide.
“Hi,” Mateo answered, low, as if he, too, were trying not to wake someone. He was divorced, I knew from Lore, but maybe there was someone in his bed.
“Hi.” I felt suddenly awkward, almost shy.
“So,” we said at the same time, then laughed a little.
“You were saying,” I started, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Your dad was a wreck. Can you tell me more about his reaction?” I wanted a sense of how Fabian acted under pressure. Was his instinct to be methodical, to plan? Or did he boil over?
“He’s one of those people who has to take action,” Mateo said. “The only thing he could do was call people. The bank, my tía Marta, anyone who might somehow know what had happened to my mom’s hotel—because we figured she’d probably been there, just after seven in the morning. The news kept showing the St. Regis, destroyed, and I remember thinking if it could happen somewhere that fancy, it could happen wherever she was staying. I kept imagining her buried and burning at the same time. But instead.” He cut off.
“She was with Andres,” I finished.
He didn’t respond.
“While your dad was in Austin and your mom was traveling frequently to Mexico, did you notice anything different about her?” All the secrets Lore was keeping. Surely something must have slipped through the cracks.
“You want to know if she’s a master manipulator. Like that article implied.”
“Actually, I think very few people are,” I said. “When we’re shocked someone isn’t who we thought they were, it’s usually not because they hid it so well—more like, the closer we are to a person, the less clearly we see them.”
“Speaking from experience?” Mateo asked.
It felt like an invitation, a test. He was not dissimilar from Lore in that way. I swallowed. “My parents weren’t who I thought they were, either.”
A soft, companionable silence.
“Do you talk about it?” he asked. “Maybe with your husband?”
What an unexpected, intimate question. And husband. The word gave me a frisson of—something. Had I mentioned Duke that day at Mateo’s clinic? He must have noticed my ring.
“We’re not married yet,” I said. “But no.”
I thought he was going to use it against me, ask me again how I got off on demanding other people’s stories when I couldn’t even divulge mine to the person closest to me. Instead he said, “Word of advice?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not easy to live with someone who keeps secrets.”
He could have been talking about Lore, though something told me he wasn’t. I imagined his ex-wife asking him questions about his father, imprisoned for murder. “You can talk to me,” she’d say, stroking his arm. And Mateo kissing her forehead and saying, “There’s nothing to talk about.” He’d say it wishing it were true, while the weight of the past buckled his knees, a weight he’d grown so accustomed to that he might fall without it.
Lore, 1985
Years later, Lore won’t remember exactly what she and Andres were talking about in the kitchen on the morning of September 19, 1985. She’ll remember earlier, in bed. She’d taken to selecting one of his classes and reading along with the syllabus. Kant and Nietzsche, Otto and Kierkegaard. They’d been talking, lately, of Otto’s concept of the numinous, a word Lore loved for sounding exactly like what it meant.
“It’s wholly other,” Andres says in bed. Even this early, the apartment is honeyed with summer. They lie naked on a mostly naked bed, any unnecessary fabric hurled to the corner of the room. Through the open windows, music and yelling and the blare of honking horns float up from the Paseo de la Reforma.
“Wholly other,” Lore repeats, her fingertips grazing his chest, his hips, his inner thighs, stroking him.
“Unlike”—Andres struggles to speak, hard in her hand—“anything we experience in our day-to-day lives.”
“Anything?” she murmurs against his neck.
“Mmm.” He closes his eyes.
She removes her hand. “Go on, Doctor.”
He groans. “Lore . . .”
“Tell me.”
“You know. You’ve read,” he says, but he continues, brisk, hurrying through. “It’s the experience that is meant to underlie all religion. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Mysterium is the mystery, the unknown, the impossible-to-know. When you feel it, the only possible reaction is silence.”
“Silence,” Lore says, and it sounds like a command. So they’re silent, eye to eye, and when they do this, when they look into each other, Lore wills herself open, nothing hidden, nothing untrue. She wills him to see her.
“The numinous provokes awe,” Andres says, not breaking their gaze, “but also terror, because of its overwhelming power.”
Lore has been trying to get through Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which Andres’s Philosophy of Religion class is reading. The whole book explores the story of Abraham, whom God commanded to sacrifice his son as a demonstration of his faith. Lore has always hated that story, God so petty and cruel, so desperate for human affirmation he would inflict upon a parent the greatest suffering one could endure—and Abraham? What kind of father raises a knife to his son before sacrificing himself? Kierkegaard calls Abraham a “knight of faith” for being able to hold such a contradiction in his heart—that the God who would ask such a terrible sacrifice was also a God who loved him, that this is the essence of faith, but when Andres asked her what she would do in that circumstance, she was indignant: “I would never sacrifice my child. Not for anything. And any God who asked me to can go fuck himself.” Andres looked startled, and she understood why: she sounded like a mother.
“But the numinous is also merciful,” Lore prompts him.
“Yes,” Andres says. “Fascinans. Merciful and gracious.”
She closes the small distance between them, her warm mouth to his, and soon they are so slick with sweat they need to take a second shower.
So in the kitchen afterward, maybe they’re still discussing the numinous. The foundation of Abraham’s terrible faith. Or maybe they’re talking about nothing at all. Not every conversation between them is important.
This is what she’ll remember: Perching on the countertop beside the stove, drinking her café de olla as Andres scrambles eggs. Hoy mismo on the little living room TV. Wilted chives on the cutting board. She’ll remember that if they didn’t eat quickly, they’d be late, or at least Andres would be for his eight o’clock class. Lore has until nine to meet with Mr. de la Garza, the customer she won the night she and Andres went to La Opera Bar. She’s still wearing only one of Andres’s T-shirts. That will be impossible to forget.
The first tremors come hard and fast—Lore is on the counter and then she’s on the linoleum, sharp, shooting pain in her tailbone. Andres stumbles backward, knocking over a dining chair. The pot flies from the stove, spilling half-scrambled eggs at their feet, the hot metal missing Lore’s ankle by inches. On Hoy mismo, the light fixtures shake, and then the cameras. The anchorwoman tries to laugh. Then the floor is bucking, swelling, like a ship on a violent ocean. Lore screams, reaches for Andres, grasps his fingers before she is thrown back again. The walls shriek as wood splits apart. A monstrous crack shoulders its way through one of the living room windows, and then the window explodes. Lore screams again and Andres grabs her arm and wrenches her with him to the door. They’re both barefoot.
“Wait, shouldn’t we—” And what is she about to say, that they should hide below the breakfast table, clutch the bedroom doorframe? This is a fucking earthquake. Lore doesn’t know what to do.