American Dirt

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Just on the outskirts of Guadalajara, inhaling the fragrance of chocolate, Lydia stops dead in her tracks. Her hand flies up to her mouth. Lorenzo turns to face her.

‘Yeah, so I guess the daughter read that article your husband wrote,’ he says.

‘Oh my God,’ Lydia says.

‘You didn’t know this?’

Lydia’s voice falters.

‘Yeah, somebody sent her the article, and when she read it, she freaked out and killed herself. Left her papi a suicide note. Shit was ugly. That’s why.’ Lydia’s mind races to put the pieces together while the boy sicario talks. ‘That’s why he went loco. Said you betrayed him, said your husband was responsible, said you were all gonna pay. He was really fucked-up.’

‘Wait.’ Because her brain has seized. It’s too full. Marta. Isolated memories surge up in Lydia’s consciousness one after another and then pop like bubbles. Javier in the bookstore, Skyping with his daughter in Barcelona before an exam. Her apprehension, his fatherly encouragement. Javier laughing when he told Lydia about the pogo stick Marta bought him for his fiftieth birthday. How he’d tried it out just to please her and ended up with his back in spasms. Javier’s insistence that Marta was the only good thing he’d ever done in his life. Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas. My sky, my moon, and all my stars. There’s an unwelcome pang in Lydia’s chest.

‘She didn’t know? She didn’t know about her father, about the cartel?’

‘I guess not.’

‘How could she not know?’ It seems so unlikely, but Lydia immediately perceives her own hypocrisy. She hadn’t known either. The first domino of her understanding teeters and falls.

Lorenzo shrugs. ‘I don’t know. But he made your family like a straight-up vendetta. It was practically a press release for Los Jardineros. Usually when there’s a job, you only hear what you need to hear, and it’s only the people involved who know anything about it, but this time was different. Everybody in the city knew, everybody in Guerrero.’

Lydia begins shuffling her feet beneath her again, but her mind is whirring like a disengaged motor. She is blindsided. All this time, all these miles, the same futile, idiotic refrain kept presenting itself through her thoughts. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to happen. She’d misjudged him. She had missed something. A thousand times, she’d replayed the conversation she’d had with Sebastián the night before the article came out. He’d asked if they should go to a hotel for a few days, to be on the safe side.

‘No, I think we’re fine,’ she’d told him.

‘A hundred percent?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘A hundred percent.’

How that answer has haunted her. It has followed her into sleep every night. It has twisted in her gut without reprieve. All the frivolous reasons she hadn’t wanted to go to the hotel: She hated to uproot Luca, for him to miss school, for her business to suffer. She hated the interruption to their routine. And she’d believed, truly, that Javier wouldn’t hurt them. What she wouldn’t give to go back to that moment with Sebastián, to say anything else. To suck those words back in and obliterate them. A hundred percent, she’d said. How presumptuous she’d been, how foolhardy! Of course she couldn’t account for every eventuality. Why hadn’t she seen that sooner? She could never have predicted this, but she could’ve predicted that something unpredictable might happen. Why, why, why. Her body feels like cracked glass, already shattered, and held in place only by a trick of temporary gravity. One wrong move and she will come to pieces.

Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything. Behind her shock, Lydia can sense waves of competing emotions, but she shuts them all down. De ninguna manera. She will feel nothing about Javier’s dead daughter. No, Lydia will not even say her name. She will feel nothing about his anguish. The note he sent her at the Duquesa Imperial: I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

No.

No.

His grief is not the same as hers. Lydia will not feel empathy for him. She will rage. She will inhabit the fury of her own senseless bereavement, the one that Javier invented for her. Instead, she will walk, she will leave him behind, she will repeat the sixteen names of her murdered family. Innocents, all of them. Sebastián especially. An honorable man doing his job.

She will list them and repeat them and remember. Sebastián, Yemi, Alex, Yénifer, Adrián, Paula, Arturo, Estéfani, Nico, Joaquín, Diana, Vicente, Rafael, Lucía, and Rafaelito. Mamá. Repeat. Her husband, her sister, her niece and nephew, her aunt, her two cousins, all their beautiful children. Her mamá. Lydia will not stop saying their names.

Lorenzo is saying something beside her, but his voice recedes behind her own recitation. She needs to be away from him. She will walk beside Luca instead, press his warm fingers into the palm of her hand.

Her repetition will become a prayer.

They pass into busier neighborhoods with curious dogs and kids riding bikes and women pushing strollers. Luca sees one man with a white cowboy hat riding an old pony and talking on his cell phone, which makes him laugh. There are also girls who look to be around the sisters’ age who stand near the tracks in groups of two and three. They wear clothes that look like Mami’s underwear, and white high heels or knee-high boots. They have neon pink lips, and they call out to their countrymen in their Central American accents as they walk past. The girls invite the men to come have a beer or a smoke or a rest, and Luca knows there’s something off about their appearance, their dress, something improper about their posture – so languorous against the bustle of the day. But he doesn’t understand how it all works. He doesn’t understand the difference between the men who shake their heads sadly and avert their eyes, and the ones who leer and whistle, who trot off to disappear into darkened doorways with those young dress-up girls. When he tries to ask Mami about them, she only shakes her head and squeezes his hand.

Several times they pass clusters of uniformed men who rouse themselves when they notice the passing migrants, but each time this happens, Danilo removes the still-sheathed machete from his shoulder and swings it alongside his body as he walks. He does some elaborate shuffle that passes for a dance, and sings as they go, ‘¡Guadalajara, Guadalajara! Tienes el alma de provinciana, hueles a limpio, a rosa temprana…’ When the men in their uniforms notice him, they return their interest elsewhere, so by the time they reach La Piedrera, Lydia feels as though Danilo has saved their lives perhaps seven times. She grips his hand and says thank you, but he shrugs it off and wishes them a safe continued journey. He turns and ambles back down the tracks the way they came. They hear him singing as he goes. ‘¡Guadalajara, Guadalajara! Sabes a pura tierra mojada.’

‘I wish he could come with us all the way to el norte,’ Rebeca says to Soledad as they watch him go.

‘I can take care of you,’ Lorenzo says in response.

The sisters turn to look at him.

‘Nah, we’re all set,’ Rebeca says. ‘Thanks.’

Lorenzo shrugs, but Soledad has no patience for this cholo and has never been a champion of subtlety anyway. She wheels on him.

‘Are you still here? Did we invite you to join us or something? Because I don’t remember doing that.’

‘Damn, girl. Cálmate. We’re all going to the same place, aren’t we?’

‘Are we?’

‘I mean, what, you own Guadalajara now?’

She turns away. ‘Come on,’ she says to Rebeca.

The girls start to walk, and Luca with them. Lydia doesn’t move. She knows Lorenzo could use that phone in his pocket to call Javier right now. He could snap her neck and then snap her picture, collect a big reward. Her death could make him a Jardineros hero. But isn’t it possible that, beneath the shield of his baby narco swagger, he’s also a scared boy, alone in the world and running for his life? And isn’t it also probably true that if he persists in not murdering them, he might know more things about the cartels that could help them? He’s already been a wellspring, and Lydia would like the chance to interview him further, to pump him for more information. Luca and the girls look back at her from the corner they’re about to turn. Luca is holding Rebeca’s hand. The pace of their life has become so fast and so slow; Lydia never has enough time to make decisions. She works from instinct alone, and her instinct is strong in this instance. It tells her to go, to get away from him.

‘Can I ask you one thing?’ she says.

He shrugs.

‘Do you think he’s still looking for us?’

‘Sin duda alguna,’ he says. Without a doubt.

It’s not surprising, but still, there’s no comfort in the validation. Her body feels leaden. ‘But we’re safer here, yes?’

Lorenzo’s wearing a string backpack. He squints and looks around. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I mean, anywhere is safer than Acapulco.’

‘But he has alliances in other plazas?’

‘Claro que sí, there’s a lot more cooperation with the other cartels than there was before him. He’s got reach. Deep into rival territories.’

‘Which ones?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. What do I look like, some kind of maldito expert?’

Well. Yes, she thinks. She moves her lips to one side. ‘I’m just trying to determine our safest route.’

‘There is no safest route, far as I can tell,’ he says. ‘You just gotta run like hell.’

She looks into his face, broad and young. His eyes are heavily lidded, his upper lip softened by a feeble crop of hair. He has the remnants of a breakout high on one cheekbone. He’s a veritable kid. Who has murdered at least three people.

‘Lorenzo, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ she asks. She tries to anchor his gaze, but he looks away.

‘Nah, I told you already. I’m done with all that. I’m out.’ He jams his hands into the pockets of his shorts.

She nods skeptically. ‘Thank you.’

‘Ni modo.’

It’s an effort to turn her back to him, because she is still afraid. The shock of a blade entering her flesh, severing her spine. The pile of her body in the road beside the tracks. ‘Suerte, Lorenzo,’ she says, and she turns to go. It’s even harder not to look back after she rejoins Luca and the sisters, but she knows he might interpret any backward glance as a weakness or an invitation, so she only imagines him falling behind. She pictures him following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance. Just before she enters, she turns and allows her gaze to sweep up and down the vacant road, to linger and search in every shadow, and to thank God. He is gone.

They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. There are good migrant services in the city, and between that and Danilo’s modest heroics, the Hershey’s Kisses, Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. It seems impossible that good people – so many good people – can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken. There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when he tries to make those two facts sit side by side.

At the shelter, Rebeca and Soledad stand guard for each other outside the bathroom door. It’s a luxury to slough the dust of the road off your skin, to soap up and stand beneath a spray of warm water, to watch it pool at your feet, grimy and brown, before it circles the drain and disappears forever. Soledad likes to think of the water molecules racing down the drainpipes, intermingling and dispersing, joining other pipes beneath the streets of the city, gathering volume and speed as they rush and tumble toward some unknown destination. She likes to think of the filth she washes from her skin, diluted and diluted until it no longer exists as filth at all.

Although Soledad has the cell phone Iván gave her, she can’t use it to make phone calls or text because it has no credit. If it did have credit, Soledad still wouldn’t use it, for two reasons: first, except for her primo César, no one she knows has a cell phone anyway, and second, like Lydia, she’s afraid that if she uses the phone, Iván will then somehow be able to find her. So the phone functions mostly as a repository of photographs, but also as a propeller that reminds Soledad how far she has come, and how much better her life will be when she gets to el norte.

So when, after their showers, the director of the casa asks them if they’d like to use the communications room to email or call anyone, the girls’ excitement is almost too much to articulate. Finally, they can call Papi. Rebeca has never used a phone before, never lifted a device to her ear and heard the familiar voice of a faraway loved one. Soledad has never initiated a call. It’s an ordinary modern convenience that, for the sisters, still carries the full weight of the miraculous.

‘How do we do it?’ Rebeca asks her sister after the director has shown them into the quiet room and closed the door behind them.

Soledad frowns. ‘Get Luca.’

The room is small, and it contains a desk with a glowing computer, one rolling office chair, and a small, floral-print couch. The phone sits on the desk beside the monitor. Rebeca returns quickly with Luca, who sits down at the computer, asks the sisters for the name of the hotel where their father works, and finds the phone number within seconds. He writes it down on the lone yellow notepad, but when he stands to go, Soledad asks him to dial it, too.

‘What’s your father’s name?’ he asks, covering the mouthpiece as the line rings in his ear.

‘Elmer,’ Soledad says. ‘Ask for Elmer Abarca Lobo in the main kitchen.’

So Luca does, but as he prepares to immediately hand the phone over to Soledad, the receptionist says, ‘I’m sorry, but Elmer isn’t working today. Hold on.’

Luca hears the sound of her voice, muffled for a moment before she returns to speaking clearly.

‘Can I ask who’s calling?’ she says.

‘I’m here with his daughters. I was just putting in the call for them.’

‘I see,’ she says.

‘Hold on, I’ll put Soledad on,’ Luca says.

He hands the phone to Soledad, who takes his seat, her face brightening in nervous anticipation. She hopes Papi won’t be angry with them. She hopes he’ll understand why they had to leave the way they did, without warning, without a proper goodbye. She’s been haunted, these last weeks, by the thought of him coming home alone to the dark apartment, exhausted from a double shift, and finding her note. She’s tried not to think about the anguish it might’ve caused him. She bites her lip.

‘Hello?’ she says.

‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice on the line – still the receptionist. ‘You’re calling for Elmer? Is this Elmer’s daughter?’

‘Yes, it’s Soledad. Is he there? May we speak with him?’

‘I’m afraid Elmer’s not working right now, Soledad.’

Soledad’s shoulders slump, and she leans back in the chair. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Can we leave a message for him? It’s an important message and I don’t know when we’ll have an opportunity to use a telephone again. I’m here with my sister, Rebeca, and we want to tell him we’re okay.’

‘Soledad,’ the woman says.

Just that, just her name. Soledad. But something about the hesitation in those three syllables makes Soledad’s stomach drop. She straightens up in the chair.

‘I’m sorry, but your father won’t be back to work for quite some time.’

Soledad grabs the edge of the desk, and turns her back to her sister. Luca reaches for the doorknob, but Soledad puts a hand on his shoulder. Her mouth is open, but she refuses to ask the questions that will lead to her enlightenment. She doesn’t want to know.

‘I’m sorry, Soledad, but your father had an accident. Not an accident. Your father, he – he’s in the hospital.’

Soledad clamps her knees together and stands up, sending the chair rolling away behind her. ‘Why? What happened?’

Rebeca stands up then, too, and Luca moves next to her.

‘Is he okay?’ Soledad asks.

The woman’s voice is low. ‘I think he’s stable, that was the last we heard.’

Soledad takes one breath. Stable. ‘But what happened?’

‘He was attacked coming into work last week.’

She moves to collapse into the chair again, but the chair is no longer behind her, and she almost falls to the floor. Luca grabs the chair and rolls it over. She sits.

‘He was stabbed,’ the woman is saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Which hospital?’

‘El Nacional. I’m sorry, Soledad.’

Soledad hangs up the phone, and it takes Luca less than one minute to find the number for the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula. Again, he dials for them, but this time he hits the speakerphone button so they can all hear. And 1,360 miles away, in the ICU unit in a six-story green-and-blue building, a nurse wearing clean white scrubs and a blue stethoscope darts into the nurses’ station and tosses a chart onto the cluttered desk. Luca, Rebeca, and Soledad all hear her pick up the phone. They lean forward.

‘I think my father is there,’ Soledad says. Her voice sounds swollen and cobwebby in her ears. ‘My father, Elmer Abarca Lobo. The woman at his work told us he was there since last week?’

They can hear things clicking and beeping in the background. Voices. A child crying. The nurse does not immediately reply.

‘Hello?’ Rebeca says.

‘I’m looking,’ the nurse replies. There are folders, charts. She’s flipping through them.

Soledad’s hand darts over and grabs her sister’s across the desk. Together, their knuckles turn hard and shiny.

‘A woman at his work told us he was stabbed.’

‘Oh,’ as if the nurse suddenly remembers. ‘Yes, Elmer,’ she says. ‘He’s here. Not in great shape, I’m afraid, but he’s stable now. He lost a lot of blood.’

Rebeca clamps her free hand over her mouth. Soledad digs her fingers into the skin of her face, her lower jaw. ‘Can we speak with him?’

‘No, he’s not conscious,’ the nurse says. ‘Can you come in?’

Rebeca shakes her head, but Soledad answers out loud. ‘We’re not in Honduras,’ she explains. ‘We’re in Mexico.’

Rebeca is stuck on a different detail. ‘What do you mean he’s not conscious? What does that mean?’

‘It means we have him sleeping right now because of the damage to his brain. He needs to sleep until the swelling and trauma are under control.’

Soledad pitches forward, curling her body over her knees.

‘Damage to his brain?’ Rebeca says. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes,’ the nurse says. ‘He was stabbed in the face.’

‘Oh my God.’ Both girls begin to cry.

Luca is shifting his weight ever more rapidly from foot to foot. He backs away from the phone until he’s leaning against the wall beside the door.

‘He was stabbed once in the stomach and twice in the face.’ The nurse keeps talking. She’s not oblivious to the sisters’ pain, but she knows she has to impart this information, and it’s better to do it quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid, so they can move on to the next part, where they already know all the awful information and can begin to process it. ‘The stab wound that did the most damage was to the right-hand side of his infraorbital region—’

‘Infraorbital? What is that?’ asks Soledad. ‘Please speak simply.’

Even the most hardened trauma nurse in the most violent city in the world would have difficulty conveying this detail to the family.

‘His eye,’ she explains.

‘They stabbed him in the eye?’ Soledad asks.

‘Yes,’ the nurse says.

‘Oh my God,’ Rebeca says again.

‘Yes,’ the nurse says.

She tells them he’s resting comfortably, that he’s stable, that they will keep him in the medically induced coma until the doctor feels it’s safe to wake him up. She doesn’t know how long that will be. She warns them that the stab wounds were significant, and that there may be lasting damage to his brain. She explains that there’s no way to assess that damage until the initial period of rest and healing has concluded.

‘Girls,’ the nurse says quietly, and they hear a door close on her end of the line, followed by a peripheral silence. ‘Do you know who did this to your father?’

Soledad lets out a sob and then answers, ‘Yes, I think yes. I do.’

Rebeca’s black eyes grow even larger and darker. A storm in her face.

‘Listen to me,’ the nurse says then. ‘I need you to listen carefully.’

Both girls breathe raggedly. They are shaking.

‘Don’t you dare come back here,’ the nurse says. ‘Don’t even think about it. Do you hear me?’

Their faces are wet, their noses filled with snot and tears. Rebeca sniffs loudly and lets a small cry loose into the room.

‘He’s getting the best care possible, okay?’ the nurse says. There’s a catch in her voice, too. ‘We are doing everything we can to make him well again. And if you come back here just to sit in our waiting room and wring your hands and cry and get yourselves both stabbed in the eye, too, well, it’s not going to do him one bit of good, you understand?’

They do not answer.

‘How old are you girls?’

‘Fifteen,’ Soledad says.

‘Fourteen,’ says Rebeca.

‘Good. Your papi wants you to live until you are one hundred years old, okay? You cannot do that if you come back here. Keep going.’

In San Pedro Sula, at the Hospital Nacional, they can hear the nurse blowing her nose.

‘My name’s Ángela. Call me again next time you get to a phone, and I’ll give you an update.’

‘Thank you,’ Rebeca says.

The nurse clears her throat. ‘I’ll tell your father you called.’

After they hang up, they stay in the room without speaking. Soledad stands up and sits down and stands up again at least ten times. Rebeca sits on the edge of the couch and shreds a Kleenex into pulp. Luca does not move. He hopes the sisters will forget he’s there. He hopes they won’t speak to him or ask anything of him. He needs to get out of this room but cannot move. His papi is dead. Luca lifts a hand to touch the red brim of his dead father’s hat. He pictures Papi on the back patio of Abuela’s house without nurses or blankets or beeping machines that might save him. He pictures the silence of pooling blood. Luca stands there and blends into the wall.

Soon, there’s a knock on the door. Soledad is grateful for the knock, as it gives her something outside her body to attend to. She opens the door.

‘About finished?’ A staff counselor stands in the hallway with another migrant. ‘There’s a fifteen-minute time limit when people are waiting.’

‘Yes, sorry,’ Soledad says. ‘We’ll be right out.’

Luca slips out just before the counselor closes the door.

Inside, Soledad whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ Rebeca looks up from her tormented Kleenex.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Rebeca. Forgive me.’

Rebeca moves swiftly across the small space and throws her arms around Soledad so her rainbow wristband presses against the still-wet blackness of her sister’s hair.

‘Sh,’ she says.

‘It’s all my fault,’ Soledad says over and over again, until finally Rebeca pushes back from her and shakes her roughly by her two shoulders.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s no one’s fault. Only ese hijo de puta.’

Soledad crumples even smaller into her sister’s arms. ‘But I had to make a horrible choice,’ she cries. ‘It was you or Papi, I knew that. I knew we were putting him in danger if we left. Iván warned me. I just, I didn’t really think he’d go through with it. I thought if we left, he…’

She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence because it doesn’t matter what she thought. She was wrong. The sisters take two shaky breaths together, and Rebeca wipes Soledad’s tears with her thumbs.

‘Stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘Stop it, Sole. Papi would’ve made the same choice. When he’s better he’ll be so proud of you. You’ll see.’

Soledad dries her face with a fresh Kleenex. She blows her nose. ‘You’re right.’

‘He’ll be okay,’ Rebeca says.

‘He has to.’

Into the clicking, beeping silence of Papi’s hospital room in San Pedro Sula, the nurse Ángela enters solemnly in her white sneakers. She had known his name, of course, because of the identification they found in his wallet. But there had been no visitors, no inquiries, until today. Sometimes it’s easier that way – you can provide the care the patient needs, manage his pain, and administer to his broken body without the weight of additional sorrow. Ángela has been a nurse in this city long enough to know that the pain of the family often eclipses the pain of the patient.

It’s relatively quiet in the ward this evening, so after she checks his vitals and changes his waste bag, Ángela has time to sit with him. It’s still light out, but she turns on the table lamp anyway because she finds its soft glow comforting. She closes her eyes briefly before she speaks to him. Her colleagues don’t do this anymore because it’s too taxing. Too heavy. Ángela is the only one. The violence is overwhelming in this place now. It’s become a gang pageant of blood and grisly one-upmanship. The ICU is always busy, but it’s not as overcrowded as the morgue. The other nurses use irreverent humor to cope. They use a secret rating system of smiley faces to forecast their patients’ chances of survival. Ángela doesn’t judge them for it. They have to go home to their children at the end of their shifts. They want to stay married. They want to eat dinner and drink a beer in the yard with the neighbors. But after twenty years on the job, Ángela still can’t shut it off. She doesn’t even want to.

She pulls the chair closer to Elmer’s bedside and lifts his hand, careful not to disturb his IV line. She rubs the back of his hand with her thumb. ‘Elmer, your daughters called today,’ she says quietly. ‘Soledad and Rebeca called from Mexico, and they’re doing well, Elmer. Your daughters are okay. They’re on their way to el norte.’