It’s the summer of the World Cup. What a commotion it’s made, what political shrieking. From those who thought Mexico never should have been awarded the tournament—DF already hosted once, after all—to the Mexican artists and intellectuals outraged at the idea of the December draw being held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, to Rafael del Castillo, the Mexican soccer federation president, saying there is no better way to show the world that Mexico is “on its feet.” Which it isn’t, obviously, and shouldn’t the world see that? But Mexico, for better or worse, is made up of Mexicans, and Mexicans, for better or worse, are proud.
And so Andres surprises Lore with tickets to the quarterfinal, Argentina vs. England, at the Estadio Azteca. At first, Lore doesn’t think she can be in a stadium without thinking of how the unidentified bodies were laid beside one another in stadiums around the city, three days of dry ice before the mass burials began. But she’s swept away by the thrill of it: almost 115,000 people filling the stands. She’ll never forget what will later be called Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal, a streak of blue, a goal granted only because the referee hadn’t seen the infringement, and then, right after, Maradona passing the English players one after another, none of his teammates available for a pass, a sixty-yard sprint all by himself, a feint and then his second goal in ten minutes. She and Andres are on their feet, screaming themselves hoarse, arms in the air and sweat streaming. They kiss as if something miraculous has happened, something redemptive.
Afterward, they go to some tiny nameless bar thick with smoke and riotous fans.
“Do you think Maradona should have accepted that first goal?” Andres asks. They’re squeezed into a corner at a sticky highball table, drinking beer from lukewarm bottles. Lore is taking it slow.
Lore laughs. “What do you mean accepted it?”
Andres sweeps his sweaty hair back with his thumb and middle finger, a futile, habitual gesture that’s become so familiar to her. “Remember Kant’s categorical imperative?”
“We have a duty to act morally, and we can tell if an action is moral if we can universalize the moral principle.” Lore grins, making a flourish with her beer. “The student becomes the teacher.”
Andres doesn’t smile. “So? What do you think?”
“Okay, well, first of all, I’m not a soccer expert, but I don’t think Maradona himself has the power to accept or not accept a ref’s call.”
“But if he did?” Andres presses.
“I think you’re suggesting that since the ref didn’t see the infringement, and Maradona did, he shouldn’t have taken the goal,” Lore says. “Because it’s not moral, since you can’t say it’s always for the universal good to . . .” She frowns. “What? It’s not like he cheated.”
“You don’t consider benefiting from someone’s oversight to be cheating?”
“I think he plays soccer,” Lore says, more sharply. “I think it was the ref’s job to score the match, and if he screwed it up, it’s his fault.”
“Even if Maradona knew better?” Andres’s tone, too, from what she can hear in the loud bar, is changing, escalating. His body is stiff, shoulders hitched.
“I don’t know! Are we really about to have a fight about the practical application of Kant’s categorial imperative in the World Cup?”
After a moment, Andres sets his beer down, releasing it with a hand that has been clenched tight. “Sorry. You’re right.”
Lore kisses him. His lips are unyielding, and she pulls away. “Okay, what’s wrong? It’s not the goal.”
Andres stares at the swordfish mounted on the faded brick wall behind the bar. Its skin looks shiny and hard, and Lore can’t tell if it’s plastic or if its gills once twitched in a midnight-blue underworld.
“What’s really keeping you in Laredo?” Andres asks. “I know what you’re going to say—your job. But will you ever move here, for good? With me and the kids?”
There’s a replay of the Hand of God goal on the tiny TV at the bar. A cheer rises, deafening. Lore wants to say you can also determine a moral action by what gives the most happiness to the most people.
“Well,” she says, when the noise fades, “when it makes sense, yes. But we have years of recovery ahead of us. You know that.”
Andres’s profile is statuesque, noble, like a soldier facing a losing battle. “What’s keeping you there?” he asks again.
“Andres—”
“I know you’re not close to your family. So is it friends? I still haven’t met any of your friends.”
“No. Andres, I’ve worked hard, you know. It’s hard to imagine turning my back—”
Andres’s mouth opens, incredulous. “Is that what you think I’m asking? For you to come here and be a housewife? Make me dinner every night?”
Lore fights the urge to leave the table. “Of course not.”
“Well, then?”
“Well, then, what?”
They glare at each other in an unfamiliar angry stalemate. She knows what would make it better: if she told him about the test she took yesterday. The plastic tray and tubes and eyedropper, the illustrated step-by-step instructions she nearly dropped when Andres knocked on the door. She’d called out, “Just a minute! It’s my stomach!” so she could finish waiting, the whole time praying, Please, please, please, as if God would know the rest. Then afterward, numb with shock, she stuffed everything back in the cardboard box and hid it under the counter, behind rolls of toilet paper and extra soap and shaving cream. She’ll need to send Andres on an errand later so she can throw everything away properly before she goes back to Laredo.
But it would end the fight if she were to tell him, if she were to place his hand on her belly, though she’s far from showing. She isn’t even nauseous, the way she was with the cuates. It makes her wonder, with a terrible ache, whether it’s a girl.
She wonders how Fabian would react if he knew. The first pregnancy wasn’t ideal timing, either. But he spun her joyfully in his arms until she told him she was about to throw up all over him. Then he laid her in bed with almost comic tenderness. He covered her belly with his big warm hands and said, “Daddy’s here, mijo.”
“Or mija,” Lore corrected.
“Or mija,” he agreed, smiling. “Daddy loves you and can’t wait to meet you.”
She had burst into happy tears. She couldn’t wait to tell her family, to tell Marta. She still thought, then, that Marta would be next. That this version of the future was inevitable, simply because they wanted it.
What would Fabian say this time? If she gave the cuates a few dollars and sent them off with their friends, where they always wanted to be anyway, and asked Fabian, “How do you feel about being a family of five?” Lore’s heart warms at the image of a little girl in his arms, her eyes fluttering to sleep. Would Fabian see this image, too? Would joy jostle for room in his chest, expelling the bad energy?
More likely, it would push him over the edge. She can imagine him demanding how this happened and doesn’t she remember how expensive babies are? And what about her job? They need her job. And wasn’t she on the pill?
Yes, she was. But as of yesterday, she was five days late, which makes her about five weeks pregnant, putting the time of conception in late May or early June. She and Marta had a girls’ night in right before the cuates’ summer break started; they’ll be juniors next year. She remembers moaning about it to Marta, how already they were in driver’s ed, and soon they would be grown up and leaving her, and then they were reminiscing about their own high school years. They drank too much. Lore threw up, Marta holding back her hair, laughing that maybe they hadn’t come so far since high school after all.
The next morning, Fabian surprised her by being amused by it all. He made coffee and chorizo con huevo and pressed a cold toallita to her head. And he kissed her. Gently, then not gently. The toallita fell to the side, the plate with its rustred crumbs, and then he was lifting Lore’s old T-shirt, taking a nipple in his mouth. She wriggled under him, and he pulled off her panties and slipped first one finger inside her, then another, her lips in the hollow above his clavicle. The house was Sunday-morning silent, the cuates sleeping in. Right before Fabian pushed inside her, he smiled, and she wanted to say, There you are.
She flew to DF the next night.
Telling Andres would buy her more time. But time for what? Decorating two nurseries? Two sets of doctors’ appointments, of heartbeats and ultrasounds, when there could be only one delivery? One life after that?