His tone was teasing, all wrong, and I felt choked with rage I knew Duke didn’t deserve. He couldn’t know what I’d never told him. For the first time, I understood the blinders Lore had forced herself to wear as time marched toward its inevitable reveal.
“Maybe.” My drink arrived, and I took a deep, burning gulp. “I’ll think about it.”
“Let’s just do it.” Duke had his phone in his hands, opening the calendar app. “We were going to close the truck anyway and—”
“Duke!” I snapped. “I said I’d think about it! Jesus.”
Duke gave me a long, unsettled gaze as he set his phone down, and I knew—the way Lore must have known—I couldn’t keep my secrets much longer.
Lore, 1985
Rosana lives in a second-floor apartment of a century-old Art Nouveau building in La Roma. The colonia was modeled after Parisian neighborhoods, with broad tree-lined boulevards, plazas, and parks. The first time they went, Andres told Lore she should have seen it before the commercial developers descended in the sixties, tearing down or gutting hundred-year-old mansions; before General Gas and Woolworth moved in and office buildings went up, and before the new road system connected La Roma more easily to the rest of the city, making it less isolated and exclusive. There was a total lack of urban planning or zoning regulations, Andres had griped. It was an epidemic in DF. But Lore didn’t care. She loved the graceful plaster facades of the old mansions, the classic brownstones, the jewel-tone apartments like Rosana’s. She fantasized about living here.
Now she clutches Andres’s arm. Her right foot throbs like a heartbeat. “Andres,” she manages. La Roma is ravaged. Old mansions crumbled, new apartments wrenched off their foundations, ancient trees draping thick roots across the roads.
“Fucking Christ,” Andres says, and then, “Lore, get on my back, hurry.”
He turns, offering himself to her. She says, “I can run.”
So they run, shoving through the crowd gathered around the circular fountain in the Plaza Río de Janeiro, women in robes, men in underwear, the intimacy of morning routines made public. Rescue workers are arriving now, men in hard hats, the Red Cross. Finally, they’re in front of Rosana’s building, and a ragged cry escapes from Andres’s throat: the roof looks askew, like a hat on sideways. Windows broken, plaster cracked. But the building stands. And outside it, mere feet away, are the kids, standing with Rosana and her husband, Pedro.
Penelope sees them first, cries out, “Papi! Lore!” and runs to them. Carlitos follows, and they laugh and cry, touching each other’s faces and saying “Gracias a Dios” and “Are you okay, are you hurt, who’s bleeding?” Lore sobs into Carlitos’s untamable curls, and suddenly, fiercely, she wants her own sons in her arms, and that makes her cry harder. Has Fabian heard by now? Has he tried calling her at the hotel where she’d told him she was staying? Is the hotel even still standing? The thought of Fabian in Laredo, not knowing whether she is dead or alive, tears at Lore’s heart.
After the initial reunion, reality descends: The street looks like the photos of the Beirut bombings two years earlier. The air thick with dust, buildings gutted, their incomprehensible innards exposed. People sit on chunks of concrete or half-crushed cars, dazed and desolate, no idea what comes next.
“What are we going to do?” Penelope pulls at her dark ponytail. Her school uniform is twisted, the seam of her skirt aligned with her knee instead of her hip. Her left shin is scraped.
Rosana, tall and elegant and bookish, pulls Penelope into her side. “There won’t be power, but we should get the radio.” Andres nods, and Lore feels a sharp prick of jealousy: Rosana and Andres are the parents, Penelope and Carlitos, their children. They are the family. Lore and Pedro the interlopers.
“I’ll go,” Andres says. “Where is it?”
But Pedro is already walking briskly up the three stone steps leading to the mint-green front door. Lore blinks back more tears. There used to be so much color on this street. Now everything is brown and gray, decomposing.
“Do you think it’s safe to go back inside?” Rosana asks Andres. “Tonight, I mean. Where will we sleep otherwise?”
They look at the roof, half of which seems intact, the other half badly battered. Andres, Lore knows, is not handy. When the toilet backed up one time and ten minutes of plunging didn’t work, he called a plumber. When he needed new brakes on his bike, he took it to the shop. Fabian would be able to tell them whether the building was structurally sound. He’d know what needed to be done if it wasn’t. She misses him the way she’d missed Mami when once, as a child, she’d gotten lost in a department store downtown. She couldn’t see over the racks of clothes, kept running into unfamiliar hips, the world from that angle strange and uninhabitable; she wouldn’t survive it alone.
“I don’t know,” Andres says.
Lore’s arm is around Carlitos’s arrowhead shoulders, and she feels a surge of love for Andres, that he can admit what he doesn’t know.
“We could—your parents—” he starts.
Rosana shakes her head. “How would we get there?” And once again, Lore is on the outside, because she doesn’t know where Rosana’s parents live, far enough away to be presumed both safe and unreachable.
“There will be shelters—”
“‘Shelters,’” Rosana snaps. “You mean tents. With thousands—”
“I know.” Andres looks at Penelope and Carlitos.
“Your apartment?” Rosana asks, as if it just occurred to her.
Lore speaks for what feels like the first time since they got there. “Gone.”
Rosana’s hand flies to her mouth. Her diamond catches the sun, and Lore gasps, looking at her own bare finger. Her wedding rings zipped into the interior compartment of her purse, now buried beneath tons of rubble. And the emerald Andres had tried to give her. She knew he’d put it in the small metal safe in the closet. It, too, is lost. She closes her fingers around her gold locket, brings it to her lips for a kiss. A dangerous thing, to continue to wear it here, but it’s her way of honoring Fabian and the cuates, and she never takes it off. Now she is desperately glad, as if the locket is a magical item, able to transfer the brush of her lips through the miles.
“Gone?” Rosana repeats. “Completely?”
Andres nods. “We barely made it out.” When Penelope pales, bluish half-moons darkening beneath her eyes, Andres says hurriedly, “No, mija, tranquila, I’m only being dramatic. We were already half out the door when it happened.”
“Then why are you only wearing a T-shirt?” Carlitos asks, and they all look down at Andres’s T-shirt, hanging to Lore’s thighs, her legs bare and dust-gray. “And no shoes?” Their feet are chalky and filthy, Lore’s makeshift bandages soaked through with blood.
“Jesus.” Rosana looks at Lore with new respect. “Pedro should take a look. Where is he, anyway?”
As if on cue, Pedro appears in the doorway, triumphant, Penelope’s boom box in hand. They can hear the low tones of the emergency broadcast, and it draws half a dozen other people standing nearby.
“Pedro,” Rosana says, touching his elbow. “Andres and Lore are hurt.”
Pedro is a doctor, ten years older than Rosana and Andres, with a thick shock of white hair and a dark beard. “Where?” he asks, as if affronted. When she points toward their feet, he says, “Ah, yes, of course. Look, we should all go inside. It seems stable enough in there and better than . . .” He looks around.
There is a small crowd surrounding the boom box—a paunchy-thin viejito in a guayabera; a Middle Eastern couple with three young children; a twentysomething woman in tight jeans and a rhinestone top.
“Por favor,” says the viejito. “Leave it if you’re going inside. We need to know what’s happening.”
Pedro is still gripping the handle. The boom box is red, the speakers yellow. It’s from another time. “We need this as much as anyone.”
“I have one, too,” Carlitos says. Lore squeezes his shoulder.
“Pedro, honestly,” Rosana says, impatient.
“Fine, fine.” Pedro gives it to the viejito, who says a somber thank-you.