“You didn’t.” Cassie sounded incredulous, though not as surprised as I expected. “You’re still married.”
“Yes.” I moved toward the window and brought the drapes together. From the living room I could hear the music from Home Alone, the hijinks over, now the gentle, sad tinkle of a piano. Music for a forgotten boy, a scared boy, trying to be a man.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Her voice broke, like if she might burst into tears.
“You never asked. Mijita, are you okay? You sound—”
“I’m fine.” Cassie paused, and I imagined her closing her eyes, breathing deeply. “Lore, just be honest. For once. Did Fabian really kill Andres?”
I froze. “Yes. Of course. Why would you even ask that?”
“Okay. Why did he do it? Why, really?”
“Why do you think?” Discúlpame, Fabian. “He needed to feel like a man again.”
The answer, I sensed, was not what Cassie was expecting. But then, her questions hadn’t been what I was expecting. Be honest. For once. That wasn’t good.
“Did you know?” she asked. “When he left the house that night, did you know what he was about to do?”
I yanked decorative pillows to one side of the bed, piling them one on top of the other. I didn’t want to think of his face. The anger. Dios mío, he was always so angry.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“What about after? Did he tell you what he’d done?”
I sighed, folding down the comforter. I sat on the edge of the bed. Something about that music from the TV, the chill outside the window, and Fabian’s voice in my ear—the memory was closer than it had been in years. I’d been so lonely. “He told me later that night. It was . . .” I tried to think of a word. “Horrible.”
Cassie’s voice, when she spoke, was softer, all the edges smoothed. “Can you tell me about it?”
I closed my eyes. I could see him so clearly, his dark eyes flitting around the kitchen. He was like a long-legged insect that had landed on the wall, that might launch in any direction the moment you stepped closer. His mouth opening: I did something.
And later, Fabian’s bloodshot eyes, his shock, the sole survivor of some great massacre. He was the walking wounded, only it was I who had riddled him with holes. That was what I told Cassie, that though I knew Andres was dead, Fabian might still be saved. So I had lied to the police.
“You weren’t angry?” Cassie asked.
“Of course I was angry! ?Qué crees? A man I loved was dead, alone, lying there on some cheap carpet, and I couldn’t bring him back. I couldn’t make things right, couldn’t—” I felt as if I’d swallowed a giant hook and it was scraping me inside. “I couldn’t say goodbye.”
Cassie was quiet, making room for my grief.
“But you didn’t—” She hesitated. “You didn’t hate Fabian?”
“No.” I saw myself, stumbling toward him, both of us weeping. “How could I?”
“What happened next?”
My heartbeat was slowing. The past slinking away again, the present a warning glow. “Fabian threw the gun into the river.”
“What about the wallet?”
My eyes opened. The wallet. The photo of Andres and me beneath the saguaro cactus, squinting into the sun. “Yes,” I said. “That too.”
“Did you plan it? Together?”
“We discussed it.” I remembered how we’d waited for nightfall, how it had seemed to take so long, that terrible August day. The height of summer, when not even a storm can overpower the cruel sun for long. We had waited and waited, until porch lights flicked on and the remaining FOR SALE signs were silhouetted like gravestones.
“Is that why?” Cassie asked. “Why you stayed together? He killed Andres, you helped him hide it, you were . . . bound?”
“We are bound.” I picked up the framed photo of us on my nightstand, our skin smooth and grins wide, cans of Schaefer Light on the wooden picnic table at the ranch. “But not how you’re saying it. We’re bound by love, by time, by our children. We’re family. But the truth is”—I sighed—“at first there was no time to talk about hurt or betrayal. We could only talk about lawyers and police interviews and then bail and indictment and so on. He was gone before I knew it. And then everything became about the cuates—making sure they were okay, that they were surviving. Taking them for visits. And then, maybe six months into his sentence, he wrote me a letter. I wrote him back. And I guess that’s how we healed. Eventually.”
“Did he ask you questions? About Andres and your relationship? Did he want to know the truth?”
“He wanted to know me,” I said, setting the photo back. “And I wanted to be known. I wanted to know myself. That’s what it was all about.”
“The affair? The second marriage?”
“All of it. I mean, there was love, of course.” I thought of reading with Andres, riding with him, our fingers pointing to a mountain range, a waterfall, a lizard with its head thrown to the sun, its trembling bubble-gum throat. I remembered the way he kissed me and touched me, as slowly as he could for as long as he could, until we lost control. I remembered his hand pulling me from a building on the verge of collapse, and how we had stood in the ruins after, shocked at the completeness of loss. “But that wasn’t why. Not really. I just wanted to know myself,” I said again, frustrated at not being able to express how I felt, which was that I wanted to become new to myself again, to dig at myself—my mind, my heart—and witness the endless unveilings. I wanted to know all my possible selves, live every possible life.
“And I ended up alone,” I said, with a hard laugh. “I told Andres I had no family, and then I lost them all.” I remembered the hum of the refrigerator on endless nights. The only sound in the whole world. I shivered.
Then Cassie said, like an offering, “I confronted my dad.”
I felt a furtive warm flicker, like maybe among all the wreckage I’d done something good. “And?”
“I don’t know.” She sniffled. “At least I know I’m not crazy. Andrew hates me, though. And Duke—”
There was a knock on my door. “Mom?” I stiffened at Gabriel’s shape in my doorway. How he blocked the light. “Are you still talking to Dad? Because I—”
“I have to go,” I said to Cassie.
“Right.” Cassie went brusque with self-preservation. “Tomorrow at six?”
“I’ll talk to you then. Oye, mija,” I added. She waited. “I’m proud of you.”
Cassie, 2017
In the cellar, I couldn’t feel the thunder.