Her usual spot. The driveway that was too narrow for two cars to park side by side, so they’d built the carport. Lore parked in the driveway up front and Fabian in the carport out back . . .
Heart pounding, I entered the Riveras’ old address into Google maps. The satellite image struggled to load with the hotel’s weak Wi-Fi. Finally, the picture cleared. I zoomed in. Just as Lore had described, it was a gray brick ranch-style home. A corner lot. Around the side, an iron gate must lead to the carport. But the driveway, as she’d said, was built for two cars parked bumper to bumper.
Okay. So at four thirty, Andres had pulled into the driveway, where the neighbor had waved because he thought it was Lore. I opened the transcript for my call with Sergio, hardly able to breathe. When Sergio picked up Fabian for the ranch, “he was standing in the middle of the empty driveway, looking almost like he didn’t know where he was.”
The empty driveway meant Fabian’s truck must have been parked in the carport all afternoon. Only, when Sergio dropped Fabian at home at eight, Fabian had, yes, “pointed to his truck and said of course it had rained—he’d just washed it.”
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Fabian’s truck wasn’t in the driveway when they left for the ranch. But it was there when he returned, at which point Lore was at the movies with the boys. Someone had moved it before six thirty, when she’d taken them for Frosties. It could have been Lore, but why? There was no reason to move the truck from carport to driveway if she wasn’t going to use the carport.
Fifteen, though, was old enough to know how to drive. She’d told me Gabriel wanted to drive them home from San Antonio when she’d returned to the States after the earthquake. Yes, Gabriel and Mateo had been alibied at the park from four to six, but if there was one thing this story made clear, people lied.
Here was the other thing: it was storming from five to six, not exactly ideal basketball-playing weather. What if Gabriel or Mateo—or both—had gone home early and been there when Andres confronted Fabian? One or both boys could have taken Fabian’s truck and killed Andres, maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose, returning home too flustered to remember to park in the carport.
Lore could have found out when she got home. Then taken the twins to Wendy’s and to the movies not to make sure she was alibied—but to make sure they were. After all, times were tough. Tickets and snacks are a luxury when money is tight. And two fifteen-year-old boys out with their mom on a Friday night? Even the movie cashier had commented on it. Plus, Lore had just come from the confrontation with Andres (if it had happened the way she described). She’d been afraid she was miscarrying. Would she really pick that night for an outing? None of it added up, unless she’d done it for a very specific reason—to make sure the twins were seen as close to Andres’s actual time of death as possible. It must have been a shock when the window was established as later that night, when Fabian was ID’d on the scene.
Jesus. Maybe Fabian would take the fall for Lore. But from everything Lore had told me about him, he’d definitely do it for one of his sons.
It finally made sense, why Lore had agreed to talk to me in the first place. I’d thought it was because she wanted to tell her story. But, I could see now, she wanted to control me, and she thought she could, a young nobody writer who would be all too eager to write exactly the story she told. And if I didn’t—she always had this option, her own false confession, tucked away in a back pocket.
Once I’d told her I knew she was pregnant, she must have thought I was getting too close, that a confession would get me to stop digging. Like Fabian, she’d been willing to martyr herself for her son. And, if I was right, it had almost worked.
But which one was it? Who were Lore and Fabian protecting?
The answer came, silky and obvious. Gabriel’s teenage volatility. His unbroken hostility toward me. The way he’d looked at me tonight, violence thrumming beneath his skin. And the way he’d answered when I asked how often they visited Fabian: It’s the least we can do. The countless photos he posted of his sons with heartfelt captions for a man who couldn’t read them: There is no love like a father’s love. Thanks for everything, Dad.
I turned back to the bed to grab my phone—but it wasn’t among the contents I’d shaken from my purse.
“Shit,” I said again, a moment before the landline’s strident ring fractured the silence. My heart hammered with the sudden noise.
“Ms. Bowman? You have a visitor.”
Lore, 2017
The night was replaying by itself now, memories coming so clear and whole it was like if they’d been preserved behind glass all these years.
It had been just after six when I pulled up to the house. Fabian’s truck had been in the driveway instead of the carport. I opened the back gate and sat in the car for a few minutes. I thought of telling Fabian what I’d told Oscar, that it had been an affair, a mistake. Even if Andres had shown Fabian the wedding photo, it wasn’t obvious it was a wedding, with my short white shift dress and Andres in his guayabera. An affair. Fabian could forgive that, couldn’t he?
The air was as soggy and hot as a dog’s panted breath as I ran to the back door, but instead of Fabian, it was the cuates standing in the kitchen. Red-faced and dripping rain onto the linoleum. They were wearing basketball shorts and tennis shoes. I’d interrupted them yelling, but whatever they’d been saying was lost. They looked at me and then at each other. For a moment, they were two years old again, communicating in mysterious glances. Then Gabriel swallowed.
“Mom,” he said, “I did something.”
“Dame un minuto,” I said, rushing to the bathroom. I couldn’t hear about his latest fight or flunked test right now.
“I killed him,” Gabriel said.
I turned.
The first twist came low in my belly. A sense of something pulling away, coming undone. I braced against the Formica counter.
“You did what?” I managed. “?Qué estás—”
“I killed your other husband!” Gabriel yelled. “He’s dead. I shot him.”
And finally, finally, I saw the gun. The .22 Fabian had given me, which I rarely carried. It was usually in the gun safe. The cuates had known the combination for years, ever since they started hunting with Fabian. Now the gun was beside the stove, between the jarro and the spice rack.
“I don’t—” I gripped the counter, moaning. “No entiendo. Gabriel, what are you talking about?”
“I was here, getting another basketball, when he came over.” Gabriel glanced at Mateo. “I heard everything he said to Dad.”
“Oh, God,” I said, and the second twist came, a cataclysm of falling organs, and I ran to the bathroom, slammed the door, pulled off my pants and underwear, and collapsed on the toilet. A sob, a push, and something solid and slick slid out of me. Blood on the toilet paper, poinsettia-red. I clung to the pink countertop as I stood, shaking. I didn’t want to look, but I had to bear witness, I had to give my baby that much, but she was gone; she had slid out of sight like a small animal going back to ground, and I was so relieved, so desperately relieved that I would never need to know how she looked when my failures unmade her.
I stumbled down the hall to my room, where I stuck a pad down to catch whatever was left. When I came back out, the cuates were sitting at the kitchen table, their heads in their hands.
“Mom,” Mateo said, looking up. “Are you okay?”
“No!” I yelled. “No, I am not okay! Gabriel, start from the beginning,” I ordered. “Dime qué pasó.”