“Yes, but are you sure we should go back in?” Andres squints up at the roof. “I’m not sure that—”
“Excuse me, are you an engineer?” Pedro snaps.
“Are you?” Andres shoots back.
“Why don’t we go take a look?” Lore suggests. “If nothing else, we can put some things in suitcases, make a plan.”
Rosana nods. “And we can take care of those feet.” She leads the way, with Penelope under her arm, and Lore follows, with Carlitos under hers. Now Andres and Pedro are the interlopers.
Inside, Pedro cleans Lore’s feet with hydrogen peroxide and spackles them with butterfly stitches before bandaging them. Andres rebuffs Pedro’s efforts, wiping his own feet, covering them with Band-Aids. Then Lore and Penelope begin sweeping the parquet floors free of glass and plaster and the concrete dust that seems to be everywhere. Pedro and Andres heft up Rosana’s heavy bookshelves, and Lore and Penelope pick up the dozens of fallen books. Lore asks Rosana whether she likes them organized in any certain way. After a moment, Rosana laughs. “DF may be destroyed, but goddamn it, my books will be alphabetized!” They laugh until it isn’t funny anymore.
On the radio—Carlitos’s boom box, silver, with a Luis Miguel cassette in the deck—they learn that the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes, on Eje Central and Xola Avenue, the southern end of the lake bed zone, has failed, cutting off communication between DF and the rest of the world. If Fabian has tried to call the hotel, he wouldn’t be able to get through. Lore is desperate to hear his voice, to let him know she’s alive, but how?
In the kitchen, Rosana is assembling lunch, or is it dinner by now? Lore looks out the window: all she can see are treetops, swaying. For a moment she panics, though it’s only the breeze. Yes—dinner. The sky, from what Lore can see, is a dusky pink.
Pedro and Andres are looking for candles and flashlights and extra batteries, discussing what they’ll do when they run out of drinking water. Lore swallows a dart of panic. She’s booked on a flight back to San Antonio in two days. Will planes still be flying in and out? How can she leave? How can she stay?
As the apartment dims into evening, Rosana and Lore set out plates on the blond wood dining room table. They’re serving all the cold food: roughly cut chunks of cheese, slices of ham, small bowls of leftover picadillo. Rosana pours generous glasses of red wine for the adults and Penelope, who is close enough, and Andres lights candles—“Better to reserve the batteries,” he says—and despite the surreal drone of the radio and the lacerating pain in her feet, dinner feels strangely festive, almost giddy, and Lore realizes they’re all on the verge of hysteria, because how do you process how quickly everything can be taken, including your own life?
That night, on blankets and pillows spread out on the living room floor, Lore’s tears come fast. She’s thinking of Fabian and the cuates, a deep, physical ache, but she’s also thinking of how things could have been different, if she had still been in Laredo, if Andres had been on his way to the UNAM without her making him late. She imagines him on his bike, the earth’s shudder sending him flying, the final crack of his skull.
“I’d die if I lost you,” Lore whispers, and the tears come harder.
Andres kisses her, the wine soured on his tongue and the smell of his sweat sharp and essential and alive. Lore pulls him on top of her, her hands on the waistline of his borrowed pajamas, with an urgency that borders on panic. They cover each other’s mouths—the bedrooms are all right beyond this room, anyone could walk out at any moment—and tears mingle on their faces as they move against each other, harder and harder. Lore wants to feel him everywhere, she wants to feel everything.
“What are we going to do?” Lore whispers afterward. Andres is still inside her. “What happens next?”
“You marry me,” Andres says.
Lore laughs. “What?”
“Marry me, Lore.” He touches her face, and a silvery streak of moonlight illuminates his eyes. “These are the times you realize what’s important, and that’s you and my kids. That’s it. I don’t care what happens next as long as they’re safe and you’re with me.”
And what can she say to that? How can she deflect the question again, here, now, after what they’ve just been through? She can no longer imagine life without him. She can no longer imagine herself without him. And what is marriage, really, but making official, on paper, what is already in your heart? So she says what she wanted to say almost a year ago, even though it’s destined to end in pain, though whose pain she cannot bear to imagine:
“Yes.”
Cassie, 2017
Before I gave up on my mother, I used to fantasize about the two of us running away together. It was always after one of the bad nights—heavy things knocked off shelves, the unmistakable dull thud of my mother hitting the wall—when I could hardly catch my breath in my dark bedroom, listening, some primordial reflex to remain vigilant. I’d imagine my mother and I meeting in the hallway, carrying only the most important things: our favorite crystals we’d dug up from the Salt Plains, my Tweety Bird journal with the little silver key, her wedding rings to pawn. We would pause outside her bedroom door, listen to the harshness of my father’s snores. In the dim, her bruises would look like war paint. She would grab my hand tightly enough to hurt. She would say, “He won’t wake for hours.” And we would exchange grim, knowing smiles, because she’d have slipped something into his drink. We’d like knowing that if we wanted to, we could do anything to him.
After that, though, the fantasy lost its shape. The edges blurred, fading out. I never knew what would come next. I felt that way now, with Andrew. We’d reached a tipping point of some kind, but where would it lead?
Once Duke left for the food truck after our brunch at La Condesa, I rehearsed what I’d say to my father. I’d be firm but nonconfrontational. I couldn’t risk him taking his anger at me out on Andrew. I’d call him at five, before my nightly call with Lore and before, I hoped, he’d be too wasted. At 4:45, though, my phone rang with a long international number. “Cassie Bowman speaking,” I answered, dropping the laundry I was folding in an effort to distract myself.
“Ms. Bowman. This is Penelope Russo.” The voice was husky, mellow. “You’ve left me several messages. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved, but—well—I’m intrigued. You’re working on a book about Lore?”
“Dr. Russo.” I shoved aside the clothing on the bed to set up my laptop. “Hi. Yes. As you can imagine, the Laredo Morning Times story caught my attention.”
Penelope gave a hard laugh. “Oh, I’m sure. Did Lore read the article?”
“She did.”
Penelope was silent, waiting for more.
“I don’t think she expected it all to come back into the public eye,” I said carefully, not wanting to alienate her by sounding too sympathetic toward Lore.
“Well, if you do something like that, you should be prepared for the consequences, whenever they occur,” Penelope said. “Don’t you think?”
“I do,” I said, both because it was what she needed to hear, and because it was true.
“I’m glad we’re in agreement,” she said. “So. What do you want to know?”
“Well, to start, I’d love to hear about your father. How you’d describe him, any special memories . . .”
Penelope sighed. “Thank you. That other reporter hardly asked about him. Everyone wants to know about Lore. It’s like he just gets lost.”
“That must be so hard,” I said, with a pinch of guilt.
“I’m older than he was when he died, you know. No parent should outlive their child, but outliving your parents—I mean literally accruing more years on earth than they did—it feels wrong in its own way.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. A part of me dreaded turning forty.
“Have you lost a parent?” Penelope asked.
“My mother,” I said. “I was seventeen.”