The cramps were getting worse. They felt familiar, too familiar, shifting from a warning, a deep ache, to something sharper, like a knife switched from back to blade. I didn’t know how miscarriages worked—would I end up on the floor, legs spread, delivering a tiny corpse at Andres’s feet? A wave of nausea overcame me, and I pushed past Andres to the sink, drooling into the drain.
When the nausea passed, I cupped water into my palms and drank it. Then I walked to him, palms out. “Andres, it was real,” I tried to say. My last chance to try to make him understand. “I love you.”
I closed the remaining distance between us, so close I could feel the heat from his body. He shoved me backward. I caught myself on the foot of the bed, stunned. I cradled my belly, imagining the tadpole inside, the grip of her translucent fingers loosening. My purse fell to my elbow.
We stared at each other, absolute strangers, capable of anything.
Cassie, 2017
“When he pushed me,” Lore said quietly, “all I could think of was my baby. You have to understand—there’s nothing a mother won’t do to protect her children.”
At Lore’s words, I could almost feel the cold metal of my grandfather’s urn against my knuckles as I knocked it off the mantel. I could hear my father’s shout, see his wild swing, and feel the brush of my mother’s sleeve against my cheek. The memory was dizzying, overpowering the one I’d replayed in my mind for all these years. My mother had stepped in front of me. She had blocked the blow.
She had threatened to kill my father if he ever hurt me.
“You had the gun,” I said.
Lore nodded. She was rocking slowly, methodically. I could see how hard she was gripping the stem of her wineglass.
“The twenty-two?” I asked, for the recording.
“Yes,” she said. “Fabian gave it to me for protection. I always carried it in my purse. I didn’t plan it. It just happened.”
I felt unsteady and disoriented, as if a film reel had been slowed down and then sped up. I set my glass on the table beside my phone, trying to control my breathing. Four months ago, I would have been buzzing with excitement, with triumph. Now I felt hollowed out, almost sick with adrenaline, with the truth. At the same time, a small, calculating part of me was thinking ahead to calling Deborah—This could be big—and then another part of me folded in on itself, receding, whispering with a mother’s shattering gentleness, I’m disappointed in you.
“But, Lore—” I tried to make out her features. In the low light her face was all shadow. “How could you let Fabian take the fall for this?” My voice was reedy, accusatory. I tried to reframe the question. “How did Fabian get involved?”
Lore finished her wine. Her calmness was staggering, like a woman enjoying her last meal on death row, having long ago accepted her fate.
“I told him later that night. I realized . . .” Her fingers traveled to her collarbone. “I realized my locket had fallen off, probably when Andres pushed me. Fabian insisted on going back and getting it.”
His fingerprint on the base of the bed. An unnoticed touch as he’d pulled a delicate chain from the carpet.
“I already told you the rest,” Lore said. “About Fabian throwing the gun in the river, all that.”
My head was spinning, flitting through my remaining questions. “That thing you told Oscar, about Andres bothering you.”
For the first time, Lore flinched. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But then he did,” I said. “Push you, I mean. You did feel threatened.” I heard a kind of desperation in my voice, half like I was coercing a confession and half like a child, seeking the kind of confirmation I’d never received from my mother.
Lore stared into her glass, shoulders pulled forward. “Yes,” she said quietly.
I nodded, engulfed by sadness.
“Bueno.” Lore stood, folding the blanket neatly and draping it over her arm. “Now you know.”
She didn’t ask what I was going to do with the information. Whatever she assumed—that I would go to the police, that I would break the story, that I would swallow her secret forever—she seemed not only resigned but at peace. Maybe she was relieved someone else finally knew, even if it would blow up her life, the way I felt after Thanksgiving. Maybe she was glad it was finally out of her hands. I didn’t move from my chair.
“Cassie,” Lore said, with exaggerated patience. “I’m tired now. We can pick this up tomorrow.”
I almost laughed as I stood. Pick this up tomorrow. As if it were any other interview.
“Right,” I said. “Okay. Well, I’ll just be at the Hotel Botanica, if—”
Even in the dim, I saw Lore’s eyes flash, stricken. Had I never mentioned I’d been staying there? Did she find it morbid, macabre? Maybe it was. Maybe I had lost sight of the line.
I followed Lore back into the living room, where Mateo was watching TV. He half stood to say goodbye. I told him not to get up. Gabriel and Brenda were nowhere to be seen.
On my way back to the hotel, the city felt quiet and festive. A wire Christmas tree sparkled on the roof of a bank. The air smelled like a freshly struck match.
And there was Fabian, inside a prison, experiencing none of it.
Lore, 2017
After Cassie left, I lit several candles and drew a bath. I looked at my body in the mirror as I undressed: my sloped shoulders and heavy breasts, my belly with the red lines where it folded over when I sat. Once, I’d imagined Fabian touching me again. His body a question mark around mine on a Sunday morning. Our hands giving seeds to the earth that it would return to us the following year.
When I was younger and still indulged in useless rumination, I used to ask myself whether I would do it all again, knowing how it would end. Como si one day, if I could say no and mean it, the years would flow backward and I’d find myself thirty-two years old again, a wedding invitation in hand. But I could never say no. How does one wish to have not known love? I was not that selfless.
That’s one benefit of age, loss. I no longer lied to myself about who I was—or what I was willing to do for those I loved.
Cassie, 2017
Perched on the edge of the bed at the Hotel Botanica, I imagined Lore, only a few years older than I, standing in a room just like this. A gun heavy in her purse as a man she loved loomed over her, transformed into a stranger by the pain of her betrayal. In her veins, something primal and instinctual surging—a woman who would do anything to protect her child.
Lore had never been blameless to me. That was the point. She was so hungry to know her own heart she was willing to destroy those she loved most, including—paradoxically—her children. She was supposed to be the one in control. She wasn’t supposed to end up cornered by a man, driven to violence in self-defense. Such a sad, common thing.
Yet, Lore had survived. Women deserved to hear more stories of survival, fewer of the ones I posted on the blog—just yesterday it had been a mother suffocated by duct tape, discovered by her son; a serial killer targeting mothers and daughters across state lines; a woman mowed down by her ex-husband in a custody dispute. Men needed to know there were fucking limits. And if it had been self-defense, the law might be lenient on Lore, considering her age.
I remembered Lore winking at me while she ignored Brenda’s objection to ice cream for the boys. I saw her wild roses, her newly color-drenched house. I saw the way she looked at Mateo and Gabriel, at Michael and Joseph, with a quiet ferocity that made me miss my mother so much I couldn’t breathe. I saw Lore, in all her magnificent contradictions.
And she saw me.