The power comes back the day after the temblor, and goes out again that night, when an aftershock sends them racing back outside, expecting Rosana’s apartment building to collapse. Still, it remains. Once they go inside, they sit in the dark, dusty, hot living room, too nervous to talk, all their notions of safety stripped away. They could all be in their coffin right now, so accommodating, waiting for the walls to close in on them.
A third of the city is without electricity. Millions without running water, shitting in buckets. Flights to and from the United States have been canceled. Early reports estimate that a third of the city’s buildings were damaged, with up to half the older architecture destroyed. The hospitals, the ones left standing anyway, are full. The army deployed. A curfew enforced. Gas leaks and fires and only one radio station coming through on Carlitos’s boom box. Everywhere, men are digging by shovel and pick, tiny handheld tools, trying to unearth people whose screams grow weaker by the hour. They work around the clock, guided by car headlights at night. The women hand out soup and tortillas and take turns digging with their hands, all while the pinche government rejects foreign aid, specifically from the U.S., at least until the day following the aftershock, when the collective roar of the people becomes too loud to ignore and finally the heavy equipment starts to descend, along with talk of Nancy Reagan coming to tour the disaster, a pointless gesture even with the million-dollar “down payment” on aid she’s rumored to be bringing with her.
A few days later, they’re finally able to make long-distance calls again. In the middle of the night, Lore slips from the nest of blankets on the floor and into the kitchen. She stretches the avocado-green cord as far as it will go, snaking it into the tiny laundry room. Her stomach curdles with fear of getting caught. She needs to do this.
The phone rings one and a half times before Fabian rasps hello. For a moment, Lore can’t even speak. He was sleeping. Sleeping, when he didn’t know whether she was dead or alive. In a flash of pettiness, she wants to punish him by hanging up. Instead, she whispers, “It’s me.”
And then he is awake, voice ripped open with relief. “Lore? Oh, thank God! Are you okay? Where are you?”
Her throat closes. “I’m okay.”
“God, Lore. They’ve been saying on the news that three Americans— I haven’t known what to think.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then she’s crying, trying to be quiet, though a sob is trapped in her chest. “I’m so sorry, Fabian.”
“Ay, Lore, it’s not your fault,” he says, rough and tender. “Where are you? Why are you whispering?”
“I’m—” She hesitates. “Staying with friends. Everyone is asleep. It’s been so hard to know anything about what’s happening. There’s only one radio station. The airport is still closed, I think.”
“No,” Fabian says urgently. “No, it’s open. The runways weren’t damaged. The UN is sending aid and everyone here is putting together packages, so—okay. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. Just give me a phone number where I can reach you.”
“Oh, uh—” The phone number is written in blue ink on a piece of paper taped to the handle. “I don’t know it. I’ll have to call you back when I can.”
“Tomorrow. Today,” Fabian says. “Call me later today. I’ll have everything figured out.”
Fabian has never sounded so capable, so determined. Lore closes her fingers around her locket, presses the sharp tip of the heart into her thumb. “Okay. Thank you. Wait—Fabian.”
“What is it?”
“My purse. I lost it. I don’t have my wallet, my passport, anything.”
“God, Lore.” Fabian’s voice shakes, as if imagining how she’d lost her purse and how she could have been lost, too. “Just hang on. I’ll get you home. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Lore whispers. She creeps back into the kitchen and sets the phone in its cradle. Then she gasps. Carlitos is standing near the pantry, a straw punched in a box of mango Boing.
“Carlitos!” Lore says, a hand on her chest. “You scared me.”
He lifts his drink. “I got thirsty.” His eyes are wide without his glasses. “Who were you talking to?”
Lore’s mind races. How much did he hear? “My sister. Come on. Let’s go back to bed.”
Carlitos lets her lead him out of the kitchen, a palm on his back. He slips into his room with a quiet goodnight, and she returns to the living room floor, heart pounding. Andres murmurs, folds himself around her. They will be married tomorrow.
Lore and Fabian were married at San Martín de Porres Catholic Church on December 12. They chose the date because the church, where they’d both grown up attending Mass, would already be decorated for Advent, the altar draped with aubergine cloth (so Lore’s bridesmaids wore purple). The scarlet blooms of poinsettias shivered when the heater kicked on. They smiled at each other while Marta read from Corinthians.
Lore had chosen the reading not for the lines everyone read but for these: “For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” Lore wanted to know Fabian, and she wanted to be known by him. She wanted to know everything she did not yet know. Her desire for the world was vast and dark and dizzying, and what was marriage if not a crucial part of that unknown world? What was love, Corinthians love, a love that transcended everything, even knowledge of itself? She wanted that.
But Corinthians didn’t tell her about the work of love, a work as endless as mining the earth for obsidian, transmuting it from rock to blade. If you didn’t kneel, if you didn’t take your tool in hand, if you didn’t search, you would have nothing. The obsidian of love would stay buried, and you would only half know, and you would only half be known.
As she limps beside Andres, with the ruins of the city momentarily obscured, Lore thinks there should be a word for the love that remains when the other love becomes unreachable. She and Fabian, their bodies monuments to the time they’ve spent together, the experiences they’ve shared, the lives they’ve created. Their bodies are like trees, branches separating even as their roots grow more deeply intertwined. Lore never wants those roots to untangle. She won’t let them untangle.
But with Andres, she has a chance again at that other love. The obsidian kind.
And yet—it’s crazy, what she’s about to do. How had one dance come to this? But she’s not willing to give him up, and if she’d said no to his proposal again, he would wonder why they’re together at all, why he’s wasting his time with a woman who doesn’t see a future with him and his kids. From moment to moment, Lore veers from a trapped kind of panic to a hyper-rational calm, a low internal voice reminding her that as long as neither man finds out, they won’t be hurt.
On their way to the UNAM’s Jardín Botánico, Lore, Andres, and the kids pass handwritten lists taped to telephone poles—the names, ages, and descriptions of people who are missing. They pass mass immunizations and temporary shelters made of sheets and plywood, the newly homeless gathered on a torn sofa or a seat ripped from the back of a totaled car. They pass protests, people with signs saying NO BURNING BODIES, and WE WANT THE BODIES.
“Do you think it’s wrong to do this now?” Lore asks Andres. Penelope and Carlitos walk ahead of them cautiously. They know now that the earth can devour them.
Andres squeezes her hand. “This was your idea,” he reminds her.
“I know.” There was no way she could actually plan a wedding. Who would she invite? It’s not like she could ask Marta and Sergio to be the padrinos de lazos, the way they were for her wedding to Fabian. But now Lore’s chest is tight, her breathing shallow again.
“Just, with everything that’s happened . . .” Lore says, trailing off.
Up ahead, Penelope is daring Carlitos to touch one of the talon-like thorns on a cactus labeled Myrtillocactus geometrizans. “Penelope!” Andres shakes his head once, sharply, and Penelope gives a wry half smile. Turning back to Lore, Andres says, “Like happiness shouldn’t be allowed in the midst of so much unhappiness?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Who deserves happiness?” Andres asks. “When should it be allowed or not allowed?”
Lore smiles. “Is class in session, Doctor?”