“Mateo!” Gabriel dug his fingers into his brother’s arm. “?Ya cállate, cabrón! What are you doing?”
Mateo shrugged him away. “Well, what’s the alternative? Let Mom do it now? Let everyone in this family go down for it but me? She confessed tonight, Gabriel. That’s why I came. To make things right—finally.”
“No.” Lore looked at me with a flame of accusation in her eyes. I had come into their lives and shaken every tree it had taken them thirty years to grow, shaken so hard that now the roots were pulled from the earth, tangled and searching. “It was me,” she told me. “I did it.”
“No,” I said, more gently than I felt. Lore had, after all, been lying to me. Lore was always lying. “You didn’t.”
“I was home,” Mateo said, “when he came to the door.”
Lore shook her head. “You were at the park.”
“I left the park.” Mateo glanced at Gabriel. Something passed between them. “Dad was out back working on the stupid gate, so he didn’t hear me come in. I went straight to my room. I heard the doorbell ring and was coming out to answer. Dad got there first. I was in the hallway. I heard everything.”
For the first time, anger flashed across his face, rusted-old and fragmented. I knew that kind of anger. I’d seen it in my father. I’d felt it in myself.
“He asked for you,” Mateo said. “He sounded confused. So did Dad. Then the guy must have seen the picture on the wall, the one of you and Dad at the store. He started saying, ‘That’s Lore! That’s my wife!’ They were both yelling, and I just wanted him to go away. And then he did, but he told Dad where he was staying, said they needed to talk.” He gave a hard laugh. “I don’t know what he thought they were going to talk about.”
Lore was motionless, combustible. “Mateo, stop,” she said, but the command emerged as a plea.
“I went back to my room. I didn’t know what to do. Everything already felt so . . .” Mateo searched for a word. “Precarious.”
Lore’s voice cracked. “It did?”
“Of course it did,” he snapped. “You were never home. Dad was in his own world. Everyone was broke. We had friends—right?” he said, an aside to Gabriel, “—who’d lost their houses, who were selling drugs. It felt like we were next.”
“That’s not—” Lore blinked quickly. “That’s not how I remember it.”
“I’m not surprised,” Mateo said, though it was matter-of-fact, not bitter. “Anyway. Tío Sergio came to pick up Dad, and then I was by myself. I was afraid we were going to lose you to this complete stranger. I felt like—I needed to be the man. So I took the gun and Dad’s truck. I just wanted him to leave. I still hoped maybe he was crazy. Just saying stuff. But then I saw you, leaving his room.”
Lore’s whole body was shaking violently. I wanted to guide her to sit down but knew she’d erupt if I touched her.
“You looked upset.” Mateo’s eyes pleaded. “You were crying, your shirt was twisted. I knew then that it was true. But I also thought he’d hurt you. Did he?”
Lore put a palm to her chest. I thought of the shove, wondered if it had really happened. “No,” she said. “Never.”
Mateo sighed, looking at me. “Maybe it was what I needed to think.”
“Mateo, stop talking!” Gabriel boomed. Mateo was undeterred. The story poured from him now, unstoppable. His eyes were half-glazed with memory.
“I knocked, and he answered right away. He obviously thought it would be you again,” he said to Lore. “I told him who I was, asked if I could come in. And then it started storming. You couldn’t hear anything except thunder and water. He was telling me how sorry he was. How he hadn’t known. How he”—Mateo gritted his teeth—“loved you. How he had two kids of his own. A son my age. He stepped toward me like he was going to, I don’t know, hug me, and I thought of how you looked, coming out of his room, and . . . I don’t know. I took out the gun. And I shot him.”
The room was achingly silent. I felt a lurch of nausea, a terrible sweeping sadness.
“I didn’t mean to.” Mateo took a step closer to Lore, stopped. “I think back, and I don’t even recognize myself. I was just so . . . angry.”
Lore was weeping quietly into her cupped palms. She stared at the carpet, as if she could see Andres. As if she might fall to her knees and feel the heat of his life escaping.
“Did he say anything?” she whispered. “Did he suffer?”
Mateo shook his head. “It was instant,” he said, but his glance flicked in my direction. Andres had drowned in his own blood. There was nothing instant about it. For once, I didn’t want to replace a lie with the truth.
“I don’t understand.” Lore looked at Gabriel. “Why did you say it was you?”
Another silent communication passed between the brothers. A question, a decision.
Gabriel sighed, rubbing his goatee. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. But I had started dealing. I’d been doing it for a few months. It was such easy money. Mateo didn’t want anything to do with it.”
A tired realization dawned on Lore’s face. “Rudy and Wayo.” She almost laughed, a sorrowful sound. “The chucos. You tried to tell me,” she said to Mateo, who stood stoic, a silent confirmation. Back to Gabriel: “That’s why you two were fighting. Spending less time together.”
Gabriel nodded. “That’s why Mateo left the park that day.”
“And why they said you were both there,” Lore said.
“We all had skin in the game,” Gabriel said. “God, it was stupid. But I felt like—it was my fault Mateo was home. He never would have done this if I hadn’t made such stupid fucking choices.”
“You two.” Lore shook her head, the motion seeming to take more energy than she possessed. “Always protecting each other.”
“Besides.” Gabriel’s voice broke, and he gave a rough little shrug. “I knew it would be easier for you if you believed it was me.”
The air in the room thickened, threatening to drown us all.
“I’m so sorry.” Lore stepped toward her sons. She snaked her arms around their waists, her cheek pressed into Gabriel’s chest. “I’m so, so sorry.”
They encircled her, shielded her from my gaze, trapped her inside their pain.
Lore, 2017
In the silent darkness of my bedroom that night, I remembered being pregnant with the cuates—bowing beneath heaving waves of nausea, catching the ripples and thrusts beneath my skin, staggering with their growing weight upon my bones. Toward the end, I was so desperate to get them out, to be alone again in my body. I didn’t understand that I would never again have one body. That from then on, the cuates would be my organs, my tripas and corazón, pulsing and exposed, constantly under threat.
Andres had told me once how he used to wake to his mother watching him sleep. His mother who had miscarried so many times, whose need and love were too heavy for him to bear. He said he’d never understood it until he had children of his own—the sweet relief of watching them sleep, knowing that in those moments, at least, they were safe.
I had nearly told him the truth then.
The terror of being a mother never disappears. You only learn to absorb it into your body, to whisper it to sleep with the lull of everyday routine. But every so often it roars awake again, the knowledge that your children could be taken from you at any time, and that without them, your one, intact body may as well burn to ash.
All night I thought of the grip of Gabriel’s hands on the steering wheel. The way we’d run down the motel corridor as if expecting—what? Was Gabriel trying to stop Mateo from revealing the truth? Or had he thought Mateo could hurt Cassie? The thought made me stumble toward the bathroom, retching. Nothing came out of me but tears.