Gabriel, on the other hand, was a seasoned and prolific Facebook poster. He was a bull-necked high school basketball coach, with a black goatee and a gold class ring on one hand, a wedding band on the other. In clips of his games, he flung out his arms, eyes cast to the rafters, when players missed a free throw. With the volume off, the gesture looked almost rapturous. I could imagine his voice in the locker room afterward, though, bouncing off the dull, slatted metal doors: Is this what we practice for? To lose the points that are handed to us? Something about him—the predatory way he paced by the bench, the expansiveness of his gestures—made him seem like a yeller.
Then again, there were the photos of him with his sons. I stared at one in particular for a long time. Joseph and Michael were three and five. Gabriel was kneeling in patchy grass, his arms around them, the sons each wearing a neon green Velcro mitt. Over the skinny shoulder of the older one, Gabriel’s eyes were closed. His smile was painfully tender. His wife, Brenda, had posted the photo tagging Gabriel, with the caption Mi corazón. For some reason, I took a screenshot.
Gabriel and Brenda, a “leadership consultant,” whatever that meant, still lived in Laredo. They liked fried sushi rolls stuffed with cream cheese and jalape?os and had once won a radio contest to eat barbecue with the Eli Young Band at Rudy’s and recently finished construction on a fortresslike stucco house in a subdivision called Alexander Estates. According to Google Maps, the neighborhood was right beside the high school where Gabriel coached. In a video Gabriel posted, he zoomed in on the edge of the cement driveway, which bore four handprints in a row, from large to tiny.
I scrolled through hundreds of photos on Facebook and Instagram, watching Gabriel’s and Brenda’s lives flow backward until they diverged and their future together was only one possibility out of millions. What a foolhardy thing, splaying yourself out like this for anyone to see, evidence of that very human desire to be known. Well, here I was, coming to know them like a tracker comes to know an animal through its scuffs in the dirt, its scent on the wind.
Startled, I realized Duke was no longer snoring. The room was silent. For a moment I swore I could feel his gaze raking over my back as I did exactly what I’d promised not to do on this trip. I turned around slowly, preparing for the shake of his head, the disappointed slant of his mouth. But he was asleep. Or at least pretending to be.
I scrolled forward again through Gabriel’s photos, quick, deliberate. And there she was—Dolores Rivera. Rarely in the foreground and yet seemingly always there, part of the scaffolding of Gabriel’s and Brenda’s lives. She was proud in a gold gown in the first pew of a church for their wedding. Her hands covered in mushy orange baby food as she fed Joseph at a high chair two years ago. Standing at a basketball game, palms cupped into a megaphone around her mouth. Picking up strewn wrapping paper at a kid’s birthday party. That photo, in particular, made my breath catch. It reminded me of a day I tried not to think about, one that had defined my entire existence.
The point was this: despite the wreckage her choices left behind, Dolores hadn’t lost her sons. Somehow, it seemed they’d been able to forgive her. How had they done that? How had she earned it?
I’d never been able to forgive my own mother. What would she think of a woman like Dolores, someone who’d wanted more than the life she had, or a different life, and spun one into existence?
Again, I looked at the brief, italicized sentence right below the article: Dolores Rivera declined to be interviewed.
Well, now that the story was out, maybe she would be ready to tell her side.
Lore, 1983
Outside the Aeropuerto Internacional, Lore Rivera shrugs out of her dark blazer and slips the pack of Marlboros—a dollar a pack, nearly twice what they cost three years ago, when things were good—from the zippered compartment of her tote. In Mexico, she smokes. Fabian would be shocked if he knew, and pissed at the unnecessary extravagance. This is part of the pleasure.
Mexico City is all pleasure to her. The wild swerving rush of taxis, the buses on their labyrinthine, timetabled missions, the orange canopy of smog suspended between the city and the clouds. She adores the three-minute walk through gasoline-soaked air to the Terminal Aérea, where she will take the metro to the Pantitlán station before changing lines, then walking the last ten minutes through the Centro Histórico to her hotel—a forty-five-minute trip, all forward thrust, shoulder to shoulder with more people than she’d see in a week in Laredo, whose entire population could be contained in just one of the shantytowns outside DF, thousands of shacks pimpling the hillsides, staggered against one another like drunks at the end of the night.
Her first few trips here, she was glad to be traveling with Oscar, another international banking officer. She’d never been anywhere bigger than San Antonio, never been swept along a human wave into a city that instantly inhaled her into its hot mouth of teeth and tongue. She’d never had to navigate a subway system or memorize maps in advance lest she mark herself a tourist. She was glad, then, to have Oscar to follow, to study. Now her aloneness in a city this size is intoxicating. Nobody knows her. She could be anyone. She could become anyone.
As Lore boards the metro, exhaling her own contribution to the smog, she is also exhaling the burdens of home: specifically, the sourness of Fabian’s panic and his growing resentment that she will not panic with him.
Last night, she turned toward him in their dark bedroom. The cuates were asleep, finally, after Gabriel had thrown a fit because he was sick of fideo, couldn’t they order a pizza, and a bedtime that extended past ten because Mateo, always anxious at the start of the school year, kept coming back out to double—no, triple—check that he’d put his homework in his backpack.
Lore had indulged in two fingers of Bucanas before bed, and she was loose-limbed and yearning as she slid against Fabian’s back. She kissed his shoulder and closed her fingers around him, trying to ignore how his body tensed. She murmured, as if she could perform his desire for him.
“Lore.” He peeled her hand away. “Stop.”
“Why?” She kissed the nape of his neck, which needed a shave. Maybe she’d do it for him before she left tomorrow morning. “The cuates are asleep. And it’s been so long—”
“I hate when you say that.” Heat, the wrong kind, rose from his skin. “It’s been a long day.”
Lore sighed. “It’s always a long day.”
Fabian yanked the Tiffany lamp’s brass cord. His black hair had already swirled into a pillow cowlick, the same one he’d been taming with Brylcreem since they were seventeen.
“How can you act like everything is normal?” His dark eyes were sunken, his beard unable to mask the downward pull of his lips as he sat against the oak headboard. “I’m going to have to lay off Juan tomorrow, and he’s been with us almost since the beginning!”
“I know.” The recession was all Fabian had talked about for months, the confluence of crises that had led to the peso’s shocking devaluation from 23 to the dollar in 1980 to 150 to the dollar today—imagine, a peso worth less than a penny!—with predictions it would get ten, even twenty times worse before it got better. “You don’t have a choice, though,” Lore said, the way she always said at this point.
“I know that,” Fabian snapped, then lowered his voice. “Did I tell you his mother’s sick?”
Lore sighed. “Cancer, right?”
Fabian nodded.
“Everyone’s getting cancer these days.”
Fabian squeezed the back of his neck with one big hand, the hand that used to be rough as caliche from his ironwork. She used to love seeing him hunched over a furnace, dripping sweat as he curved what was once unbendable into elegant scrolls. Transforming it. Before the store opened five years ago, their small backyard was a jumbled, metallic playground, the cuates passing through gates leading nowhere, knocking on doors that leaned up against trees, as if they might open to another world.
Everyone needs doors, Fabian had said in the Laredo Morning Times article about the ribbon cutting. Doors are a symbol of civilization. They separate the domestic from the wild. They protect what you love most.
Fabian’s passion, his poetry, had surprised her. She’d sparked with pride, framing the article and hanging it—naturally—in their entryway.