I stiffened. “Yes. We’re sure.”
“But if your dad’s getting better.” Duke’s thumb brushed my eyebrows, applying pressure the way I usually liked. “Maybe it should be more of a conversation between all of us tomorrow?”
I jerked my face away from his hand. “No. I’m not going to take that chance.” Not again.
“I just think we should at least talk to Andrew,” Duke insisted. “Make sure this is what he wants.”
I sat up, the iron headboard pressing cold knuckles into my shoulders. “What he wants? Or what you want?”
Duke flicked on the bedside lamp. The LED glare was like the lights at a bar at 2 A.M., illuminating all the spilled beer and smeared makeup.
“It’s not like I’ve had a whole lot of time to get used to the idea.” His cheeks reddened. “I didn’t even know your dad was an alcoholic before a few days ago.”
“Well, you never worked very hard to get me to tell you about him! I mean, at a certain point, not asking becomes a choice, Duke.”
Duke sat up in a furious rustle of covers. “You never wanted to talk about your family, so I never made you! I’m the bad guy for that?”
Duke was right. For our entire relationship, my natural disinclination to reveal met his natural disinclination to ask. A perfect match. But something had changed. I thought of Lore. The intimacy of her relationships, not only with both men, but with me. She might be holding something back about the night Andres was killed, she might even have had something to do with the murder, but she was honest about her feelings, her desires, and she forced me to be honest, too, or at least wish I could be.
“Duke, I have to tell you something.” I focused on breathing through the blackness edging my vision. “About my dad. And me. When I was younger—” My phone buzzed. It was the number I’d programmed for Carlos Russo. “Shit.”
Duke made a grab for my phone, to silence it, and I swiveled away, finger poised to answer.
“It’s Andres’s son,” I said, already getting out of bed. “I’m sorry. It’s important.”
“And this isn’t?” Duke’s eyes were wide, the lines of his body tense.
“I just have to— Cassie Bowman speaking,” I answered, before the call could ring out.
Duke scoffed. “Sure, but I don’t fucking ask enough questions.” He turned off the lamp and I blinked in the sudden darkness. My phone like a star, guiding me from the room.
“Carlos Russo,” he said. “You been calling me. Leaving messages.”
“Yes, I’ve been wanting to ask you some questions about—”
“That bitch, I know.” Carlos’s tongue sounded thick and unwieldy: bish. I thought about what Penelope had said about his hard times—he was drunk or high or both. Well. That could work to my advantage.
In the kitchen, I rummaged around in drawers until I found an old bill and a pen, leaned over the counter to take notes.
“She used us,” he continued. “Used us and dumped us, like trash.”
The phrasing was almost identical to Penelope’s in the Laredo Morning Times. I imagined them as teenagers, trying to make sense of things. A line repeated to each other over the years.
“What do you think she used you for?” I tried to speak softly, not to wake my father or Andrew, but loudly enough to match his own volume.
“Who knows? Instant family, I guess. Maybe she hated her real family, maybe—”
“She didn’t,” I said, without thinking.
Carlos was quiet, breathing. “Then why?”
“If you ask me,” I said slowly, “I think she wanted too many good things at the same time. She didn’t know how to give any of them up. I don’t think she meant to hurt you.”
Carlos snorted, a wet, muddy sound. “She killed him.”
I froze. “What?”
“She killed my father.”
There was a crash, like he’d knocked a pot or pan to the ground.
“Carlos?” I said urgently. “Carlos? Are you there?”
“Shit. Hold on.” More noise. “Okay. I’m here.”
“Carlos, are you saying her choices killed him? Or . . .” I hesitated, hardly able to believe I was about to ask this. Carlos was obviously not in a good state. He’d self-medicated through his childhood trauma, and all that pain had probably twisted up into a story that depicted Lore as the monster she was in his mind. But there was also the gap in her alibi. And the gun she may have been carrying. “Or do you think Lore herself actually murdered your father?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” His voice wobbled. I heard liquid being poured. A steadying swallow. “You know what I think? I think she’s some kind of bruja. She makes people believe her. I bet she didn’t tell you.”
I was writing his words down verbatim, as quickly as I could. “Tell me what, Carlos?”
The seconds before he spoke again stretched like taffy, thinning, thinning. Then:
“She was pregnant.”
Lore, 1986
On one of their weekends with Penelope and Carlitos, Carlitos asks, “How come your sister’s never come to visit?”
It’s May, and they’re eating dinner in the new apartment, still only half-furnished, the walls bare. They could be anywhere. But at least they are somewhere, unlike so many thousands squatting in the husks of half-collapsed buildings, or city parks, or government camps. Fathers who had once left for work in the morning, mothers who had sent their children to school in clean clothes. And now those children, who had once traced painstaking cursive and practiced their times tables, cup their palms on Avenida Juárez, as if whatever you could drop in them would make a difference.
“My sister?” Lore gives a baffled laugh. She takes a bite of the calabaza con puerco Andres made.
“The one you were talking to after the earthquake,” Carlitos says. “Remember?”
Lore swallows, the meat catching in her throat. She takes a gulp of water, coughing. “We’re not close,” she says, finally.
“But you said you loved her.”
Andres and Penelope are watching her, identical looks of confusion on their faces.
“I thought you didn’t talk to your siblings,” Andres says, setting his fork down.
“I don’t. But I figured they’d still care whether I was dead or alive.” Her tone has taken on a clip of indignation, that first instinctive response to being suspected of something: make the other person feel bad. “I called her from Rosana’s house.”
Andres nods, thoughtful. “Why don’t I go up with you some weekend? Surely if they care you’re alive, they care you’re married to someone they’ve never met?” He makes it sound like a joke, but Lore can hear the disturbance in his voice.
She smiles. “Unfortunately, I think the caring is limited to dead or alive.”
“Why?” Penelope frowns. “I can’t imagine not talking to Carlitos when we grow up.”
Lore can’t imagine not talking to her siblings, either. “I’ll tell you some other time, okay?”
To her relief, they don’t push it. She can sense it will come up again, though. As it is, Andres asks her twice in the next few months when she is thinking of moving to DF, and she says the same thing both times: when the economy improves. How can she leave her job right now? Especially with DF still in shambles? Andres never argues with this. No one can argue with a steady paycheck.
But he might, one day soon, insist on coming to visit her again. She can’t blame him. They’ve been together nearly three years. If not for the temblor, she imagines it would have happened much sooner, because what is more unnatural—more dangerous—than a woman who claims to have no ties in the world?
Cassie, 2017
“Are you sure she was pregnant?” I asked Carlos Russo. “How do you know?”
“I’m the one—I’m—I found her test thing.” The words came slower now, cottony. “In the bathroom. I didn’t even know what it was. That’s why I ashed—asked—my dad.”
“When was that, Carlos?”