Lore doesn’t know whose child this is. All she knows is that it’s the end.
She just doesn’t know how soon.
Cassie, 2017
Duke and I zipped up our toiletries and stripped the bed without speaking. By 9 A.M., I still hadn’t seen Andrew. Duke was loading the car while I smoothed the bedspread over the bare mattress. A knock on the open door made me jolt in surprise.
My father looked as bad as I felt. His bruises had changed to a lurid green fanning out around the black, the swelling in his nose receding to reveal its new lumpy-clay shape. He cradled a long garment bag in his arms, as if it were a woman, passed out and flattened.
He cleared his throat. “I wanted to give you this. You might not want it, but—you might.”
I remembered the fit I’d thrown about the couch. That was only two days ago. It felt like an eternity.
“What is it?” I moved closer. Curiosity, as always, edging out any other emotion.
“Your mother’s wedding dress.” He draped it over my arms carefully. The exchange felt strangely familiar, and then I realized why: Andrew, passed from my arms to his twelve years ago. “She’d have wanted you to have it.”
I ran a hand up and down the bag, desperate to unzip it, to stroke and smell the white chiffon I’d only seen in photos, but I didn’t want to share my reaction with him.
He sighed. “I’m not asking for your forgiveness. Or understanding. But you should know, we loved each other. I loved her more than anything.”
I thought of Lore then. How she’d loved both Fabian and Andres, and all four children. We should be able to stop ourselves from destroying the people we love. Love itself should not be a destructive force. But I’d been reading true crime all my life: love was the most destructive force.
“Anyway.” My father scratched under the neck brace. “I talked to Andrew. I’m sorry you drove all this way.”
Such a stilted, formal way to acknowledge that my brother had chosen him over me. The remnants of last night’s rage sparked in my chest.
“You could have killed him,” I said, throat gravelly.
My father grimaced. “I know.”
“You don’t deserve him.”
“I know.” My father’s mouth twisted. I took a step backward as he clenched and unclenched his fists. “You, your mother, Andrew—you’re all more than I’ve deserved. But Cassie, I swear to you, I want you and Andrew in my life more than anything, and I know how close I was to losing you both. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything I put you and your mother through.” His eyes were pinched in the corners, mouth trembling until he clamped his lips together. He breathed loudly, trying to control his emotions. “I’ll never forgive myself.”
I clutched the garment bag to my chest like a shield. How many times had he said these words to my mother and meant them? How many times had she chosen again to believe him?
“I’m going to call him every day,” I said. “The second I hear you’re drinking again, I’m coming to get him. I’ll hire a lawyer if I have to.”
Behind his glasses, my father’s eyes flashed, a second of his other self, wrathful. Then it disappeared. “You won’t have to,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant because he would stay sober, or because he’d give up Andrew himself if he started drinking. It didn’t matter. We knew where we stood.
Back in Austin, Duke and I moved around each other like considerate ghosts, careful that our ephemeral skins didn’t brush. When our eyes met, he went back to cooking, or pulled on his North Face fleece to sit out back and scroll through Reddit. I let him go to bed first, relieved when he was snoring by the time I carefully slid in beside him.
In our five years together, Duke and I had rarely fought. Up until I’d started working on the book, our relationship had been all peaceful, easy accord. He was safe. He’d never let me down. But I’d also never given him the chance to. I hadn’t trusted him to look at the broken parts of me and see anything other than ruin. Maybe it had been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe everything would have been different if I’d told him about the abuse and leaving Andrew from the start.
Or maybe I knew all along how it would end up.
I couldn’t help but think of Lore and Andres and Fabian. There was love, of course, she’d said. But that wasn’t why. Not really. I just wanted to know myself. Even now, I had to admire this about her—the subversiveness of believing she was worthy of being known, by herself and others, whatever there was to find.
In the days after Enid, Andrew continued to ignore my calls and texts. I was forced to talk to my father each night. His sponsor was picking him up for daily meetings. Andrew was hardly speaking to him. My father understood. It would take time to make amends—with both of us. He would be patient. I could hear the work behind his optimism, all the cranking gears exposed.
My mother’s wedding dress hung in our closet. A lace bodice, cap sleeves. An empire waist and gauzy chiffon skirt. I was taller than she was, but we were both slim, angular. The dress fit me, grazing the floor in my bare feet. The hem was slightly dirty, a hint of grass. It made me feel close to her, this evidence of wear. Sometimes, while Duke was at the food truck, I spent hours in it, sitting on the couch with my laptop, rubbing at the grass stains with my fingers.
Lore’s pregnancy, which she still hadn’t told me about, and which Andres had discovered the day before flying to Texas, meant I had to look at all the evidence differently. I read through the case file again from start to finish. I reviewed the evidence log and news articles and police tapes. I reexamined the crime scene photos, witness statements, and autopsy report.
Using index cards, I made a fresh timeline showing the Riveras’ movements on the night Andres was murdered. I divided the cards into four columns on the coffee table, one for each family member. Lore at her doctor’s appointment—I wrote Pregnancy? Termination?—from 3:00 to 4:30 P.M., returning to the bank at 4:45, shortly after Fabian opened the door to Andres. Oscar had said Lore was frazzled by Andres’s unexpected visit, said he was “bothering her.” After reading Andres’s note, she had, according to Oscar, thrown “everything” in the trash. “Everything” could simply refer to the note and envelope. But Oscar had hung up right after I asked what he meant. If Andres had left something else for Lore, something small enough to fit in an envelope, what would it be?
A key.
What if he’d left her a key to his hotel room? She went and saw him, they had a confrontation. Maybe later, if she’d decided to keep the baby, she’d told Fabian it was his. Maybe she’d even told him, as she’d implied to Oscar, that Andres was threatening her in some way. Maybe Duke had been right, and Andres was a surrogate for Lore, the murder a kind of projected rage, a way to protect her while also punishing her. What had Lore said about the reason Fabian killed Andres? I searched through my dated interview transcripts—Thanksgiving, hard to forget. “He needed to feel like a man again.”
It tracked. It was compelling. If Lore had a key to Andres’s room, it explained how Fabian knew exactly where to find him. The question was: Was the murder premeditated? And how much did Lore know?
There was also the question of what had come of the pregnancy, the answer to which might explain everything or nothing.
Keep going, I thought. Make sure the theories fit the facts, not the other way around.