Sticks and stones may break your bones, I used to tell the cuates, but words will never hurt you. That’s not true, though, is it? Words leave scars. They change history.
That day at Mami and Papi’s house, I told Cassie to talk to Fabian. To see if exposing Mateo would feel like justice. And if not, I told her she could still write the book with my blessing, including the parts most people didn’t know. She could write about what Andres’s note had really said, and the last time I’d seen him, in the motel room. She could even write about the pregnancy. It would not be the explosive reveal of Mateo’s confession, but it was still a confession of a kind. She could even tell the story of how she’d found out “the truth.” I’d been reading more true crime, and writers seemed to like doing that—putting themselves into the book. I saw the gleam in her eyes. The sort of excitement that comes from knowing secrets, telling secrets. Being right at the center of everything. We were more alike than she realized.
She surprised me, though. She took her time. Did her research. Después de su breakup, I invited her to stay with me for a few weeks. We could work on the book. She could save her money. She ended up staying with me for three months. We found a good deal on airfare and went to DF together. In the end, she wrote the book from as close to my perspective as she could get. She ended it just as I arrived home after leaving Andres at the hotel. My hand on the back doorknob, still unaware—in the book, as in life—how everything would end; how it had already ended for Andres. Because this was all true, she could avoid outright lying about Fabian pulling the trigger. The reader, she said, could infer the rest based on the known “facts” of the case. Then she had included the first letter Fabian wrote me from prison; the first letter I sent him in return. A new beginning.
The reviewers called it an “extraordinary feat of journalism,” how close Cassie managed to get to my psyche, my voice. How she “laid bare” a “beautifully flawed” woman (like if she had spread me naked for everyone to see) while “resisting the temptation to glorify the murder.” This was, they said, the truest kind of crime book.
That made me laugh a little. Because, of course, there were slight bends in the truth that even Cassie didn’t know about. I’d told her that Andres and I went to Chapultepec Park on the night we met—when actually that came later, our midnight walk in “the lungs of the city,” the way we’d murmured beneath the shivering canopies of ahuehuete trees.
In reality, the night we met, at the wedding, we danced until three in the morning, invisible among the press of bodies on the floor. It was like if we were standing at the edge of a cliff while the world collapsed around us and all we had was this moment, an eternal present, everything permissible, everything forgivable. I’d laughed into his chest, smelling his damp-cotton sweat and the inexplicable tang of oranges on his fingertips, my red dress stuck to my skin, and as the edges of the night bled into morning, I took his hand and we stumbled into that caged elevator together.
Afterward, Andres had stood naked at the window, looking down at the Zócalo. Shadows pooled at his shoulder blades, the small of his back. I’d stared at him in fascination. This man who was not my husband. As my skin cooled, shame coated my throat. I went into the bathroom and cried while I ran the water, thinking it felt like a hundred years since I’d sunk into that tub, my fingers tracing the gold rope holding back the drapery. I had been another woman then.
No—I just hadn’t yet admitted the woman I was.
I didn’t like thinking about this first time, not then and not now, so many years later. The carelessness of it, the cliché: Okay, well, I have an early flight tomorrow, it was nice—ha, ha—it was nice to meet you. I’d gone home and tried to block it from my mind. But he’d called me at the bank—his sandpaper voice, Yes, I’m looking for Ms. Crusoe. And I realized what I thought had ended had only just begun.
It was the second time I met him that we went to Chapultepec. And it felt . . . pure. Real in a way the wedding night had never felt, the details lost to wine and tequila, so much tequila. When I returned home from the second trip, I remembered everything: his hand clasping mine to his chest on the bike; the way he’d asked me if I wanted children; and how we’d kissed, with abandon and desperation.
Mexico City, the constantly sinking land. Even now, we’re sinking. Do you feel it?
I feel it.
And so Chapultepec, over time, had obliterated the original memory. It had become the original, fused together with the wedding. This felt, to me, like the truth. Truth is a malleable thing.
Cassie would never have understood this folding and refolding of memory into a new shape, a true shape. Not then, anyway. Not at the beginning.
But now—with the book out, the accolades, the story we maintained and the one we’ve held between the five of us—now, Cassie might understand.
Acknowledgments
I have been writing stories since my third-grade teacher gave us small white hardback books with empty pages and asked us to write and illustrate what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wrote about being a singer (I couldn’t sing; still can’t) and accidentally fell in love with writing. My whole life after that has been an effort to get to this book you hold in your hands. What a miracle, that you’ve chosen to spend time with this story. Thank you.
I am profoundly grateful for parents who have supported this dream since I was a child. My mom gave me her love of reading, transferred to me as a toddler in her lap, and my dad gave me his stubbornness, his willingness to take big leaps, to not let fear of failure—or failure itself—mean the end. Mom and Dad, your love and belief in me are why this book exists. Thank you.
Bock and Lob, you may have preferred being soul skaters to coming to my reading parties, but you’ve read everything I’ve ever written—including about twenty drafts of this book, in Amanda’s case. Thanks for being my number one fan, manita! I’m so grateful to have siblings who are also friends, and whom I can count on for brainstorming, endless text exchanges, and the perfect mimosa recipe.
Thank you to my extended family: Caro, Matthew, Charlie, Tessa, and the whole Collins crew in Australia—Jude, Jode, Justin, Katie, Sammy, and Elle. I hope that by the time you’re reading this we’ve all been able to be in the same place together again, with champagne in hand.
I’m not sure I would have found my voice as a writer without the MFA program at Texas State University. There, for the first time, I began setting stories in South Texas, a place I used to think didn’t belong in literature because I never saw it there. I gave my characters familiar names, let them speak Spanglish when it suited them. I grew convinced that not only do Mexican Americans belong in literature, we make it better. I’m grateful to those who came before me and showed me the joy of seeing parts of my world reflected back.
Thank you to Amanda Eyre Ward for the support and encouragement, and for letting me know, on my previous novel, that the story began on page 200! Thank you to the Best Art Friends, May Cobb, Julia Fine, and Sarah Morrison. You are my writing and motherhood soul mates, and I wouldn’t want to be on this journey without you. Thank you, too, to the incredible authors who blurbed this book. I will be grateful for the rest of my life that you put your names on my work.