Lore nods. She looks at her bare ring finger. “Fabian, I’m so sorry—I took off my ring before bed. I was running late for a meeting. I left it there.” Lore didn’t know how difficult this particular lie would be to tell. Her life is one erasure after the next, because all of it—all of her—can no longer exist at once.
Fabian pulls her close. “You’re the only thing that matters.”
For a moment, guilt is a boa constrictor tightening around her, its cold muscular body emptying her lungs. She almost has to gasp for breath, pushing away from Fabian.
“Are you okay?” Fabian’s arm is still around her waist, ready to catch her if she falls.
Overhead, in English and Spanish, a woman’s measured voice welcomes them to Military City.
“I—yes.” Lore blinks hard, fighting off a wave of dizziness. What is happening to her? “Sorry. I just want to get home.”
“Of course.” Fabian is suddenly brisk and efficient, pleased to lead them where she remembers parking. “Are you okay to drive? We could always—”
“I’ll drive!” Gabriel says, and Lore laughs.
“Nice try,” she says. Though she and Fabian have been practicing with them, they won’t take driver’s ed until spring.
“But I could—”
“I want to get home,” Lore says again, though right now she can’t picture home at all.
Fabian returns to Austin several days later. He might not be back until Thanksgiving. He’s been bidding on jobs large and small: wrought iron gates for a restoration in Travis Heights; an altar railing with gold-leaf Trinitarian emblems for a Lutheran church; exterior stair railings for two medium-size business parks. The small jobs he forges himself in the warehouse space he rented. The larger ones are fabricated down here. Altogether, they usually cover payroll. But Fabian had to let go of the bookkeeper last week, meaning now the job is Lore’s, and for the last six months they’ve been making loan repayments out of their own dwindling savings account.
Over the next few weeks, Lore keeps jolting awake at odd hours, heart racing, sure the house is shaking. At the first Sunday lunch at Mami and Papi’s house, it’s all anyone talks about, ten pairs of adult eyes on her, and Lore tells as much of the truth as possible—that she was in Tlatelolco, that she saw the apartment buildings fall, that she stayed in La Roma for two weeks after. It’s as if she’s talking about a nightmare, something only she experienced, the horror of which is impossible to convey, and then suddenly, right in the middle of her telling, she remembers marrying Andres, the words they spoke, the lazo around their shoulders and the saguaro pointing up toward the sun, and she feels a different kind of terror, like a spider who’s stuck in her own web.
She consumes the news helplessly, voraciously. The count of the dead goes up to five thousand, then seven thousand. President de la Madrid refuses to cut foreign debt payments to help with the recovery, which must include demolition and clearing and the reconstruction of some thirty thousand housing units. Community organizers from Tlatelolco and La Roma are organizing marches for a more democratic reconstruction process, demanding meetings with the president.
But the story that destroys Lore comes from Andres. She calls him during the day, from her office, and he tells her about a nine-year-old boy who was sleeping in an eighth-floor apartment with his grandfather when it collapsed. For ten days, rescue workers tunneled in with shovels and their bare hands while the boy’s family kept vigil on the street. The cries grew weaker. Finally, sensitive sound equipment was brought in, listening for breathing and heartbeats. Sixteen days after the temblor, the workers were still convinced they could hear him knocking in reply to them. On the seventeenth day, heavy construction equipment was brought in. But by then, the sound equipment picked up only silence.
Three days later, the grandfather’s body was found.
“But what about Luis Ramón?” Lore asks at her desk. Everyone knows the boy’s name by now.
“Nothing,” Andres says, and Lore lowers her head and weeps, thinking of the mother they’d helped, Carlitos, the cuates at nine, their satin skin and rabbit hearts and the way they still hugged her with all their force. A nine-year-old boy buried alive for more than two weeks, a grotesque hide-and-seek, before eventually succumbing to entombment. It’s more than her heart can bear.
“Give the kids my love,” Lore says, getting control of herself. She doesn’t want Andres to feel responsible for her sadness.
“I will,” Andres says. “I love you, Lore.”
“I love you, too.”
When Lore has been married to two men for a month, Mateo comes down with the first cold of the season. Well, Lore hopes it’s a cold and not a throat infection, which is why she’s taking the morning off to take him to the doctor.
You aren’t supposed to have favorites as a mother, and yet she’d always known her own mother’s favorite was Pablo. Artistic, emotional, hypochondriac Pablo, who had painted over the white walls so long ago to “fix” them. With the rest of them, her mother’s love was brusque, matter-of-fact. When they misbehaved, punishment was a wooden spoon to the backside, the spankings measured and disciplined. But with Pablo, there was tenderness. That time he’d fallen from the high branch of the pecan tree, Mami had run outside and scooped him up, kissing his scrapes and singing, “Sana, sana, colita de rana,” while she dabbed Neosporin on the wounds. And when she had to spank him, tears shone in her eyes. Maybe it was because he was premature, ejected from Mami’s body before he could survive without lights and tubes doing the work of her womb. In any case, he was her Pablito. The favorite. And they all knew it.
Lore always promised herself she wouldn’t have a favorite. And what better chance does a mother have of loving equally than with identical twins? Conceived together, grown together, born minutes apart. Indistinguishable, until they are.
And maybe that’s the problem. When two boys start life at the same time, identical down to their eyelashes, their individuation is stark, and one is bound to fall short. And that one, God help her, is Gabriel. A whirlwind on the basketball court, the one with the quick smile girls are drawn to, but moody, prone to snapping and slamming doors. Just yesterday she was trying to talk to him about his grades, which she was shocked to see were all C’s on his first report card after a lifetime of A’s and B’s. He didn’t even bother looking away from whatever video game he was playing, as he muttered, so full of scorn, “Fuck off, Mom.” The rage inside her was like vines climbing from her stomach to her throat, thorns pricking her ears. She said, trembling-quiet, “Dímelo otra vez.” They glared at each other, breathing hard, and Lore wanted to hit him. Instead, she ripped the controller from his hand, yanked the console out from under the TV, and said, “I’m donating this—you have no idea how lucky you are! None! ?A tu cuarto!” He stormed off, slamming the door behind him, and she heard the sound of things breaking. She didn’t trust herself to check.
Mateo, though, he’s never spoken to her that way. And maybe that’s the terrible truth: that mothers love best the children who best love them.
Or maybe she’s simply not as good a mother as she’d like to believe. Maybe that’s what is really happening with Gabriel. Can she blame him for acting up, with two parents he hardly sees?
In the car, Mateo is sneaking glances at her, his profile sharp and worried as they turn down Saunders. Finally, he stabs the volume knob. Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing,” goes silent. How appropriate.
“Mom,” Mateo says. “We need to talk.”
“Okay . . .” It comes out like a question. “What is it?”
Mateo swallows, his still too-big Adam’s apple wobbling in his long, graceful neck. He isn’t looking at her. Oh, God. Did he find Andres’s letters, the two or three she hasn’t yet taken to her parents’ house and tucked beneath that loose flap of living room carpet? Is it something else? Did he overhear a phone call, did she slip up some other way?
Lore focuses on her hands on the wheel, her chipped red nail polish. “Mateo? What is it?”