Cross-referencing witness statements, I added to the index cards. Gabriel and Mateo were alibied playing basketball at the park until 6 P.M., after which they walked home. Lore left the bank right after 5:15—maybe she’d intended to stay later, but the news about Andres had derailed her—and took the twins to Wendy’s for Frosties, where their receipt was time-stamped at nearly 6:30. Then the movies from 7 to 9:15. Their night out still bothered me. But again, maybe she was worried Andres would ring her doorbell any minute. Maybe she was trying to keep her kids from finding out, a little longer.
That kind of desperation—that’s what drives someone to murder.
Keep going.
Fabian getting picked up for the ranch between 5 and 5:30 and dropped off at home at 8. Lore’s call with Marta around 10:30, close to when Fabian was spotted at the hotel. From 5:15 to almost 6:15, no one could alibi Lore. And from 8 to 9:15, no one could alibi Fabian, though he wasn’t seen at the motel until 10:30.
That was the one incontrovertible fact, which seemed to prove that, despite what Carlos believed, Lore couldn’t have directly killed Andres: it was Fabian, not Lore, at the hotel during time of death. It was the brick wall I kept hitting, though it had never moved.
Even as I struggled to fit the pieces together, Lore and I talked every night at six.
“Do you wish you hadn’t done it?” she asked me, a week after Enid. “Things would be easier right now, right?”
I considered. If I hadn’t blown up at my father, I wouldn’t be stumbling my way through nightly phone calls with him. Andrew would be here. I wouldn’t have seen the look on Duke’s face in the cellar, as if I’d pulled off my mask and the face beneath was unrecognizable. Yet, I felt freer. By asking me to keep the abuse a secret, my mother had given me a seed to swallow, and it had grown into a poisonous vine. Now it was like I’d taken a knife to it, hacking and swiping, everything messy, but I could breathe.
“No,” I said. “I don’t regret it.”
“Eso,” Lore said, and I could hear her smiling.
“But . . . what should I do now?” I flushed. It felt ridiculous, asking for advice from a woman I couldn’t trust, a woman I was actively investigating for her role in a murder. But Lore had gotten her sons to forgive her. She must have done something right. “About Andrew?”
She sighed. “Mija, you just keep laying yourself at his feet, no matter how many times he steps on you on his way to the door. You keep offering yourself and offering yourself. One day he’ll turn around and you’ll be there to help him. That’s what being a mother is.”
“A sister,” I corrected.
Lore laughed. “Right.”
Lore, 1986
The cramps start early in the morning of August 1.
All throughout the board meeting, Lore presses her hands to her belly, imagining the tadpole inside pressing back against her warmth and knowing she has a mother. The baby is a girl, she’s sure of it, a girl she’s planning to name Marta. Lore is only eleven or twelve weeks along, but a few days ago she could swear her daughter moved, a silky flutter deep within her body. She doesn’t want to want this baby, but she does. Impossibly, the baby feels like she contains all three of them: Lore, Fabian, Andres.
The bleeding starts after lunch. Combined with the cramps, Lore knows immediately what it means.
Dr. Sosa, who delivered Gabriel and Mateo, is in his seventies, a slight curve in his spine, impatient though not unkind. He asks where Fabian is, and Lore says he’s out looking for work. Dr. Sosa grunts, squirting cold jelly on Lore’s stomach. He moves the ultrasound wand from side to side, pressing firmly. The small screen is black. There is a hollow echo where a heartbeat should be, a dark ocean of grief, and yet, like a flower pushing up through concrete, something like relief, because now she won’t have to choose between Andres and Fabian. She won’t have to decide which life to keep, at least not yet, and what kind of mother is she to feel this way about the baby she’s just lost?
Then—a tinny, weak throb. A spot of light on the screen, like a star.
Lore gasps. “Is that—”
“There it is, all right.” Dr. Sosa smiles, removing the wand and handing Lore a wad of tissues. “But your symptoms are concerning. Váyase a su casa. Put your feet up. Dígale a Fabian que you’re not allowed to do any housework today. Doctor’s orders.”
Lore smiles weakly, dizzy with the faint gallop of her daughter’s heartbeat. The panic returns, Lore’s back to the wall while all she can hear around her is the gnashing of teeth.
She thanks Dr. Sosa, leaving with a pamphlet on “spontaneous abortion” that she throws into a trash can on her way to the car. Spontaneous abortion. As if the baby could tangle herself in the trip wire of her mother’s mistakes and boom—gone.
The bank will be closing soon. She can sit behind the solid oak door of her office and let her blood pressure lower, her heart rate slow. Among the many things she knows herself to be, she is this baby’s mother. She needs to breathe peace into her body so the tadpole will know it’s safe to keep growing.
And then—then—well, Lore has no idea. All this time, all the work of splitting herself in two, of being wholly present in one life or the other to stave off the impossible future, and now the future is inside her, impossible to ignore.
Cassie, 2017
In mid-December, my most recent request to interview Fabian was granted. My first thought, now that I knew he and Lore were still married, was that she’d told him to speak to me, that it must be to maintain the story they’d told for so long. Well, so be it. People reveal all sorts of things they don’t intend to.
The interview was scheduled for Friday the twenty-second, a little over a week away, the same day Duke and I were due on the farm. Days passed, and I couldn’t seem to bring it up. I didn’t know how to make things better between us, but I knew this would make things worse.
On Tuesday, Duke came home from the food truck just after eleven. “I think we should talk about Enid,” he said. No stalling, no preamble, as if he’d practiced the words in his mind a hundred times before saying them out loud.
I was on the love seat, rereading the witness statements. The neighbor blithely waving to Andres, thinking it was Lore parking in her usual spot in the driveway. Lore had described that house in such detail. All the projects she and Fabian had planned when times were still good—changing the wallpaper in the kitchen, renovating the bathroom, adding a pool. The only thing they’d managed to do before the peso devalued was add a carport because the driveway was too narrow for them to park side by side. Something about that was bothering me, but—
“Cassie?” Duke put himself in my direct line of sight. “Seriously. We need to talk.”
I looked up at him and my chest ached, the reigniting of an old burn. I could still hear him in the cellar, asking me why, why, why. And the way I’d told him the absolute truth: I could only save one of us, and I chose myself.
“I know.” I gestured to my laptop. “But I think I’m onto something important here. Can we do it tomorrow? Please?”
The swell of Duke’s frustration was like a breaking wave. “Sure, why not? What’s the rush?”
He stalked to the bedroom, slammed the door. We weren’t normally door slammers, and I blinked away tears. Then I returned my attention to the witness statement.
The thought I’d been chasing, or the pulse before the thought, had disappeared.
The next morning, Duke pushed aside his breakfast plate.
“Cass,” he said. “We can’t keep going like this.”
I stared at the remnants of his avocado toast. Sea salt like tiny shards of glass. “I know.”
He ducked his head, trying to meet my eyes. “Can you look at me? I feel like you haven’t looked at me since Thanksgiving.”
I forced myself to meet his determined gaze.
“I’m sorry we fought.” He shook his head, the emotion fresh. “It’s just—there I was, shaking your dad’s hand, helping him cook dinner, not knowing any of this stuff, and it made me feel stupid. And angry.”
I grabbed our plates and took them to the kitchen, sweeping leftovers into the trash. “But it wasn’t about you. Or it shouldn’t have been, at least not right then.”