“Maybe what?”
“That maybe he and Lore were splitting up.” He rushed to add, “It was nothing he said. I mean, most of the time they seemed pretty good, better than most couples we knew. That’s why the whole thing with—you know, the other guy—was such a damn shock. Anyway, I suggested target shooting so Fabian could blow off some steam.”
“Was he using the .22?” I asked, flipping through the case file. I didn’t need to specify which .22. We both knew what I meant.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Sergio said. “They owned a few handguns.”
“They?” I repeated. “Lore owned a gun as well?”
“That’s not unusual down here,” Sergio said. “But, yes, Fabian bought her one. He thought she should carry for protection.”
There was a buzzing in my ears, a low whine. “And she definitely did? Carry, I mean?”
“Well, I can’t say for sure. I just know Fabian wanted her to.”
I paused, regrouped. If Lore had a gap in her alibi, and if Andres’s note had told her where he was staying, and if he’d been “bothering” her—and she happened to be carrying a gun, possibly the murder weapon . . .
Guilt is a terrible bedfellow, Lore had told me once. I couldn’t look at mine, either.
But it was all speculation. And, more to the point, it still didn’t make sense. Or, rather, it didn’t change anything. She could have been carrying the .22, seen Andres, and then gone home, where Fabian would have confronted her about her double life and later left to—intentionally or not—kill Andres.
“Did you hear from Fabian again that night?” I asked Sergio.
“No,” Sergio said. “Marta got on the phone with Lore later on—they were always on the phone, those two. You’d think they never saw each other. I assumed Fabian was there.”
“Could you hear what they were talking about?” Lore’s double life had been exposed by that point—how could she have been acting normal? There was nothing to preserve anymore. But maybe lying came naturally to her by then.
“I was watching TV,” Sergio said apologetically. “Marta took the call in the kitchen. I told her to go into the bedroom. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Were you surprised, afterward, to find out what Fabian had done?” I asked. “Did he normally have a temper?”
For the first time, Sergio sounded angry. “Of course I was surprised! It’s not like Fabian was some gangster. But look, if Marta had done what Lore did . . . I mean, who’s to say how you’d react?”
Sergio was saying something I’d learned from consuming crime my whole life: under the right circumstances, everyone has the potential for violence.
“You didn’t quite answer the question, though,” I said. “Did you ever know Fabian to be aggressive or violent?”
“No. Before this, he’d never hurt a fly. Well—maybe a fly, if it was hunting season. Here’s the thing, though.” Sergio’s voice lowered, drifted into timeworn regret. “He wanted to stay.”
I frowned. “Stay where?”
“At the ranch. He wanted to spend the night. That’s why I thought they might be splitting up.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Sergio exhaled. “It had rained earlier, when we were driving out there, and the pinches zancudos were biting something fierce. We were dripping sweat, no meat to cook, we’d drunk the beer. Fabian was pissed off, not good company. I just wanted to take a shower and watch TV in the air-conditioning. I always think—what if the cabrón was trying to keep himself away? To talk himself out of it? And I drove him right back.”
Sergio’s words had the sense of coming unglued, as if they’d been caught in his throat all these years and it was a relief to push them out.
“Do you remember the last thing he said to you that night?” I asked softly.
Sergio’s laugh was a puff of breath with a sound attached. “Pointed to his truck and said of course it had rained—he’d just washed it. That was exactly the kind of day he was having.”
Lore, 1985
Fabian was true to his word. The U.S. Embassy was chaotic but miraculously undamaged, and he coordinated with them to get Lore a new passport, then sent her some money through Western Union and made her an airline reservation.
By her gate, she clings to Andres. “I don’t want to go,” she says, her voice muffled in his shirt. She’s desperate to see Fabian and the cuates. To take a hot shower. To flush the toilet. To sleep in a bed. But how can she leave him here, like this?
Andres rubs her back, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “DF is no place to be right now. By the time you return, I’ll have a new apartment for us.”
Lore’s smile is wobbly. Andres is being optimistic. Tens of thousands of people—more!—lost their homes. She understands supply and demand.
“I love you, Mrs. Crusoe,” Andres says in her ear. It’s only then that she realizes how close it sounds to Mrs. Russo, and she laughs, on the verge of tears.
On the plane, Lore kisses her silver ring before zipping it into the interior pocket of the cheap purse she bought at the mercado. The canned air is thick with cigarette smoke and hushed, fervent conversations. As they taxi down the runway, picking up speed, the passengers meet each other’s eyes guiltily—what right do they have to be going where bodies aren’t being stuffed into plastic bags, arranged in wooden coffins at the baseball stadium, the unidentified ones thrown into mass graves?
And then they’re airborne. She can’t believe how quickly DF disappears beneath the clouds. It’s as if it ceases to exist. And with it, what she’s done. The man she’s married.
Once the plane lands, she follows the slow cattle trail of passengers through the oven-hot Jetway and into the San Antonio airport. A blast of air-conditioning hits her, and before she even begins to look for her family, Fabian’s arms are around her, followed by Mateo and Gabriel, their skin hot and summer-dark and smelling like the Irish Spring soap they use until the bars are translucent and sharp. Lore’s knees buckle.
“Mom, are you okay?” Mateo holds her elbow, supporting her.
“Is it true?” Gabriel asks. “How many people died?”
They stare at her with wide, dark, almond-shaped eyes, the eyes of her grandfather in the black-and-white photo in her childhood home. They both need a trim, their thick black hair falling below the collars of their shirts, Gabriel’s growing into a rat’s tail. They are a head taller than she is now and need jeans that aren’t too short. When she tried to take them back-to-school shopping last month, Gabriel said, “Mom, you can just drop us off.” Trying to hide the sting, she’d told them to be at the food court doors at three or she’d go looking for them. Even Mateo had grimaced.
Fabian isn’t letting Lore go. Even after the boys begin peppering her with increasingly morbid questions (Gabriel: “Is it true there are stacks of bodies in the streets?”), Fabian holds Lore close. She can hear the reassuring, slow beat of his heart. He rests his chin on her head, a perfect fit. When he finally pulls away, his eyes shine with tears, a sight so rare the cuates stop talking.
“I was so afraid,” Fabian says. She can’t remember ever hearing these words from him.
“I’m so sorry.” Her throat closes. It feels good to apologize, even if he doesn’t know for what.
“It’s not your fault,” he says, with a choked laugh. “I’m just so glad you’re home. Do you have anything? Any bags, or . . . ?”
Lore hefts her purse. “This is it.” She left what little clothing she’d bought with Andres. “Did you remember the spare key for my car?”
Fabian taps his pocket. “So—” He hesitates as they walk toward the escalators. “You lost—everything?” His voice croaks again, as if realizing that wherever she’d been staying was gone.