I called Cassie in the morning, once I heard the front door slam: Mateo, out for a run. Good. I didn’t want to see him yet. Gabriel—what he’d said about it being easier for me if I believed it was him. Even at fifteen, he’d known his brother was my favorite. My heart felt like tenderized meat, beaten soft and pulpy.
Cassie agreed to meet me at Mami and Papi’s house, and she was waiting in her car when I arrived. I said a silent prayer to the God of earthquakes and Abraham that my sacrifice might be enough.
“?Cómo estás?” I asked, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“Not great.” Her skin was nearly translucent, with lavender ojeras she didn’t bother covering with makeup. The sun shone off her light hair, pulled into a somber low ponytail. “How about you?”
“Same.”
Cassie nodded, waiting while I opened the padlock at the chain-link gate and led the way up the short, cracked cement walk to my parents’ front door. The house looked so small now. A battered antique dollhouse, overloved and forgotten.
“What are we doing here?” Cassie asked, following me inside.
“I want to show you something.”
The house was hot and musty, despite our weekly cleanings. Most of the furniture remained. I could still see the front room as it had been on so many Sundays: the long gleaming wood dining table sheathed in plastic, every chair taken, voices loud, arms reaching over each other to slap food into the children’s bowls. Papi had died so long ago, but I swore I could still smell the charcoal smoke and Old Spice. And there was Mami in the kitchen, covering the last of the tortillas with a secador, griping at me for complaining about her Carlo Rossi. I was breathless with longing for everything I’d lost.
“In here.” I led Cassie into the living room. Before we went any farther, I asked the question that had kept me up all night: “Cassie, did you think Mateo was going to hurt you?”
She looked down at the shag carpeting, toeing it with her boot. “For a second, yes.”
“Did he . . .” I put a hand against the wall. “Threaten you?”
“No.” Redness traveled up her neck in faint splotches. I studied her more closely. “I don’t think he meant to scare me. I think it was just me, thinking the worst of people, like always.”
I wanted to be reassured. But I kept remembering Mateo’s voice when he talked about shooting Andres. A kind of dreamy awe behind the regret, as if, even now, he was impressed with the shape his anger had taken, the shape he let it take: the crescent-moon curve of the trigger.
Cassie met my eyes. “I think Mateo made a mistake. But still—”
“Wait.” I hurried to the corner of the room. “Before you say anything else, just wait.”
I knelt, grabbed the carpeting, and pulled. As always, the floorboard beneath it lifted, too. I reached inside and pulled out a thick collection of letters, held together with deteriorating rubber bands.
Cassie crouched beside me, blue eyes wide. “Are these . . . ?”
“All the letters Andres wrote to me. And a few other things.” I lifted a Ziploc bag with one photo inside: Andres and me beneath the saguaro tree. Me in my cheap white shift dress, Andres in his white guayabera. Rings on our fingers.
“Oh my God.” Cassie reached for the bag. “The photo from the wallet.”
I handed it to her. “Gabriel told me he’d taken the wallet to make it look like a robbery. He gave it to me to get rid of.”
“Along with the gun?” Cassie asked.
I nodded. My chest hurt, remembering how the wallet had sat beside the gun on the kitchen counter. Gabriel hadn’t actually removed either one of them from his pockets. Mateo must have set them there before I arrived.
“And Fabian?” Cassie asked. “How did he find out about everything?”
“He was home when we got back from the movies,” I said.
He’d been slumped at the kitchen table. “Gabriel, Mateo, go to your rooms,” he’d said.
The three of us had looked at each other, realizing Fabian was inhabiting an entirely different reality from ours.
“No, Fabian,” I said. “We need to talk, all of us.”
Fabian’s dark eyes flashed with tears. “Cuates, I said go to your rooms!”
But they followed me to the kitchen table. I explained, repeating every word Gabriel had parroted to me while Mateo—what had he been doing? It was so hard to remember now. That must be because he was acting normal, or whatever could pass for normal in those circumstances. It was Gabriel who alternated between screaming at me and wiping furious tears, all of us sweating because it was so damn hot outside and too expensive to keep the AC lower than eighty. Fabian’s eyes had sharpened, his pupils dilating. He made Gabriel repeat the story four or five times. He asked what Gabriel had touched, and Gabriel said the door handles and the nightstand, where the wallet had been sitting, and the stupid glass of Scotch, which he said he’d drained after shooting Andres. Then I issued the final blow.
“My necklace.” I reached for the empty space at my chest. “I think it fell off in the room.”
Fabian’s mouth opened and closed. “You went there?”
My pad was heavy. My body ached with the remnants of what it had so recently held. “To end it.”
Fabian closed his eyes. “What did you touch?”
I told him about washing my mouth in the sink, the door handle on the way out, the nightstand where I’d taken the notepad. He looked at the clock on the microwave. Though it was after nine, the storm had passed, and the sky had cleared to a sleepy, twilit blue.
He stood up, standing straighter than I’d seen him in months. “I’m going to take care of it,” he said. “I’m going to take care of everything.”
Cassie, 2017
Lore again buried her arm beneath the floorboards. She pulled out a tiny Ziploc bag and handed it to me. I held the bag between two fingers. Inside, the gold locket still shone. But its delicate chain was tangled, darkened with time and—I looked closer—something else.
“Fabian brought it back to me,” Lore said, sitting back on her heels. “I couldn’t bear to wash it. I know how that must sound, but I couldn’t rinse him away like that. So.”
In my pocket, I could almost feel my phone getting warmer, as if the recording could sense the importance of this moment.
“This is Andres’s blood?” I asked, hushed, reverent.
Lore nodded. She gestured to the letters, the photo, the necklace. “You have everything now. Even—” She bent forward, pulling out yet another bag with a Hotel Botanica notepad and pen. Andres’s abandoned letter: Lore. “Only his fingerprints and mine will be on this. They can match his handwriting to the other letters. And, of course, you have my confession.” She paused, as her meaning fell into place. “You can get your big book deal with this, right?”
I jolted to my feet. “Jesus, Lore, after everything? You didn’t kill Andres!”
Lore’s knees cracked as she stood. “But I’m willing to say I did.”
I fixed my eyes over Lore’s shoulder, at the painting of the Virgin Mary cradling her infant son. Would she have taken his place if she could? I crossed my arms, still clutching the baggie with Lore’s necklace. I unclenched that fist—I didn’t want to risk damaging the evidence.
“What kind of journalist do you think I am?” I asked quietly. “What kind of person?”
Lore smiled. “The kind who reads about people’s tragedies and wonders how she can use them for herself. But, mija, I understand. Really. And I want you to get your book deal. You deserve it.”
I gritted my teeth. “Please don’t try to manipulate me, Lore.”
“I’m not,” she objected, but a smile played at the corners of her eyes, reminding me of Mateo.
At the thought of him, my stomach clutched. Last night, as they’d all trailed out of my room, Mateo had leaned down to whisper, “Do what you’ve got to do.” His lips had grazed the curve of my ear, making me shiver.