I offered Cassie a throw blanket, and she shook her head before sitting on one of the wicker rocking chairs. I spread a rust-orange knit over my lap, its tasseled edges tickling Crusoe’s cold snout. He circled, settled, sighed. Cassie’s cell phone was on the table in front of us, recording. She was always recording. Vámonos.
“How did you find out?” I asked, gazing at the white lights wrapped halfway up the trunks of the oaks. String lights with large vintage bulbs hung like glittering vines off the branches. Mateo and Gabriel had held the boys up earlier to toss the wire around the branches as they screeched with delight, “More, more!” I always wanted more, too.
“I spoke to Carlos,” Cassie said.
I looked at Cassie sharply. “When? How is he?”
Cassie shrugged. “He was drunk. I get the impression he’s drunk a lot.”
I ran my foot along Crusoe’s side. His tail thumped. An ache opened in my chest. “Do you think it’s my fault?”
Cassie stared into her wineglass. “I don’t know, Lore. I can’t imagine it helped, but then you have Penelope. People make choices.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “They do. Well, how did he know? Carlitos. Did Andres tell him?”
I watched Cassie realize. “Carlos was the one who found your pregnancy test,” she said slowly. “He showed it to Andres, the day before Andres came here. How did you know Andres knew . . . if you didn’t see him that day?”
Crusoe whined and stood, snaking his head between my knees. I scratched his knobby skull, rubbed his velveteen ears between my fingers. His black eyes shone.
“What happened, Lore?” Cassie asked.
We rocked beside each other like comadres, like viejitas, chairs squeaking. There was music coming from somewhere, faint notes of “Feliz Navidad.” I pressed a hand to the side of Crusoe’s snout, as if he were anchoring me here, keeping me from floating away to then.
“I’ve never talked about this,” I told her. “Never.”
Cassie nodded. Warm and lurid and fearful. “Take your time.”
The sky had been low and ominous, the air smelling like a soldador taken to iron. At the Hotel Botanica, mothers were shoving towels back into bags, gritando a sus ni?os, “?Cinco minutos más, eso es todo!” Wind whipped the straw roof of the palapa, plastic cups rolling toward the pool. Thunder growled in the distance.
I clutched the room key, but I couldn’t make myself use it. It felt too intimate when the man inside could no longer be my husband. I dropped it into my purse and knocked instead, three short raps.
Andres opened the door with the glazed, wild look of a man realizing he was lost in the monte. He smelled like Bucanas. He stumbled back with hands raised, preventing me from touching him. The gesture sliced through me.
Inside, Andres grabbed a glass from the TV console. There were two empty mini bottles beside it.
“I’d ask if you want one,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be good for the baby.” His furious, desecrating gaze landed on my belly. “Whose is it? Mine—or his?”
I placed a hand on my stomach. The way I’d felt earlier, como si the baby was a part of all of us, changed.
“It’s mine,” I said.
Andres slammed the highball back onto the TV console, making me jump. “This whole time? You’ve been married, this whole time?”
What could I do except nod? His repulsion shuddered through me. Where was the gentle man who’d understood when I declined his first proposal? Who made me caldo when I was sick, who smiled when my helmeted head butted against his on the moto? I never got to say goodbye to that man. Now this one stared at me como si I was a monster, a freak. I was wearing one of my skirt suits, and there was a dull, persistent pressure between my legs. I could feel my pelvic floor buckling, like a basket that might not be able to hold its weight for much longer.
“How could you?” he asked, bleak now, defenseless. “I trusted you.”
“Andres, I—”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not yet. God, I felt stupid. Can you even imagine how stupid? First, I find out my wife is pregnant and for some reason hasn’t told me. Then I show up at her house and realize, oh, I don’t have a key. She’s not home, so I’ll wait. Can you guess what happened next?”
I winced. The bank condo had been sold six months ago to some enterprising couple who’d be able to make twice their money on it in a few years.
“Yeah. Funny how you forgot to tell me you moved. Must have slipped your mind.” His hair was disheveled, falling from behind his ears into those shattered-bottle eyes. “And then, of course, I’m wondering why, if you’ve moved, you never gave me a new phone number. Why the old one has still worked. So I find a pay phone and call—and call and call—but you don’t answer. So there I am, in your city, with no idea how to reach you or anyone who knows you.” He laughed. “Can you imagine? What phone number was that, Lore?”
“The bank pay phone,” I whispered, staring at my feet. Qué vergüenza.
Andres’s laugh was strangled, like an injured animal. “How could I be so blind?”
“You weren’t!” My gaze shot up. I stepped closer, a hand outstretched. I wanted to comfort him somehow.
He shook his head, lips white with rage. “Oh, no? You’re just that good a liar? Have you done this before, Lore? Tell me the truth.”
“No! Of course not.”
“Of course not,” he repeated. “I was the lucky first. Good for me. You know what the worst part is?”
I waited. He obviously didn’t want me to answer.
“This morning, when I went to the bank, I still thought there must be some mistake. Some misunderstanding that would explain everything.” His laugh cracked down the middle. “I’m glad I finally got to meet Oscar. He was very helpful. Your house,” he added, with a spark of vindictiveness I’d never seen from him, “your real house, I mean—is very nice. I liked that picture of you two on the wall. The ribbon cutting? You looked so proud.”
I put a hand on the bed to keep from falling. “You went to my house?”
“I have to tell you,” Andres said. “I don’t know who’s the bigger pendejo: the man who never knew where you lived, or the man who never knew where you went.”
“I’m—”
“Don’t!” Andres’s voice was the growl of earth splitting apart. “You made a life with me, Lore, or at least half of one. With my kids! How could you do this to them?”
“I love you, Andres! And I love Penelope and Car—”
“Don’t say their names!” Andres roared. “Never say their names again.”
I covered my face with my hands. Andres took my wrists and pulled them away, forcing me to look at him. Even then, I couldn’t help wondering if this was the final time we’d touch. Even then, his grip tight on my bones, I wanted it to last.
“And don’t think I didn’t notice the other photos. You have kids of your own! All this time, I wondered how you were so good with mine, and it’s because you’re a mother. A fucking mother.” He flung my wrists away, and my hands slapped against my legs. “What kind of mother does this to her children?”
“The kind of mother who’s also a woman,” I said, defiant, because, yes, I was a mother—in those painful seconds I was thinking of the cuates, wondering if they’d been home, too, wondering if they knew, and I was thinking of the tadpole, a hand to my belly, begging her to wait a little longer—but I was also more than a mother, and I always would be, even if I buried that self forever after this, because what was the alternative for someone like me, who felt most alive when waiting for the train to hit?
Andres scoffed, picking up his Bucanas.
“Did you tell him?” I whispered, hating myself. “About us?”
Andres stared at me. “All you care about is yourself. I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”
The room was too hot, my fake-silk blouse sticking to my skin.
“Yes, I told him,” Andres said. “I don’t know what kind of man he is, and I don’t care—he doesn’t deserve this, either. No one does.”