American Dirt

CHAPTER FIVE

At home, Luca’s little room has a night-light in the shape of Noah’s ark. It’s not a very bright one, but it makes enough light that when he has a nightmare and shoves back the covers to run in to Papi, he’s able to see where his bare feet meet the tiled floor. So he’s disoriented when he wakes up in the darkened room at the Hotel Duquesa Imperial. He can’t make out a single shape in the blackness. He sits up in the unfamiliar bed, thrusting his legs over the edge.

‘Papi?’ It’s always Papi he calls for first. Papi whose side of the bed he approaches, Papi he taps on the shoulder, who tucks him into the fold of his arm, who doesn’t make him go back to his own room. Papi’s pillow smells faintly of the amber liquid he drinks at bedtime. Mami is great for the daytime things, but Papi is better, infinitely better, at tolerating disruptions to his sleep. ‘Papi,’ Luca calls a second time, and his voice sounds strange without the close walls to contain it.

Luca clutches the edge of the puffy blanket. ‘Mami?’ he tries then. There’s breathing nearby, which ceases, then rearranges itself.

‘I’m here, mi amor. Come here.’

Mami. Luca draws his legs back beneath the covers and leans against the wall of pillows behind him, and that’s when it returns, all at once. The memory of what happened. The truth of where they are. The breath squeezes out of Luca’s small body, and his knees curl up to his face. He covers his head with his arms and screams without intending to – the sound escapes from him. Mami sits up quickly on her knees and reaches for the lamp, groping for the switch. Now the room is illuminated, but Luca can sense that only through the clamped shutters of his eyelids. Mami pulls him close and folds him up, gets her legs beneath him so the knot of him is on her lap, and they stay like that for a long time. She doesn’t try to stop him from screaming or crying, she just hangs on and wraps herself around him as best she can. It’s as if they are riding out a hurricane. When the worst of it has passed, perhaps fifteen minutes later, Luca’s eyes feel like sandpaper and he still can’t find a way to loosen the joints of his body, but at least he’s breathing again. In and out, in and out. His face is swollen.

Lydia gets out of bed, wearing one of the long T-shirts she bought at Walmart, and Luca writhes. There’s a physical pain to their minor separation. She grabs a bottle of water from the dresser and then darts back to him.

‘I’m right here,’ she says. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Luca lies on his side, curled up. She twists the cap off the bottle and takes a drink, then hands it to him. Her black hair is a wild tumble. He shakes his head, but she insists.

‘Sit up. Drink.’

He drags his body upright, and she holds the bottle to his lips, tips it in for him like she did when he was a baby.

‘Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.’

Mami cursed again! That’s the second time since yesterday. Luca closes his lips, forcing the bottle out, but she hands it to him.

‘Have some more,’ she says.

Her face is splotchy but dry, and there are dark circles beneath her eyes. Her expression is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek. Mami is contorted. She turns the alarm clock face so she can see it. When she leans over the nightstand, the weight of Papi’s wedding ring drags at the gold chain she wears around her neck, dwarfing the three little loops that have always lived there. She tucks it back inside the collar of her T-shirt.

‘Four forty-eight,’ she says. ‘No more sleep for us, right?’

Luca doesn’t answer. He drinks from the water bottle. She gathers her tumultuous hair into a ponytail, stands up from the bed again, and turns on the television. She finds an English-language cartoon. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Practice,’ even though he doesn’t need practice. His English is excellent.

She orders room service: eggs and toast and fruit. The thought of eating makes Luca’s stomach churn, so he stops thinking about it. He lets his eyes hook into the television, and his body soften. His head feels like a cinder block, his nose stuffed. He opens his mouth to breathe gently, but when Mami steps into the bathroom and turns the shower on, Luca gets up from the bed and pads across the room to join her. She’s sitting on the toilet, so he perches on the edge of the tub until she’s finished. Then he takes a turn. Not because he has to go, but because he doesn’t want to be alone in the other room. He sits there with his underwear around his ankles until he hears the handle squeak and the water stop. He stands and flushes just as she pulls back the curtain.

‘You should take a shower, too,’ she says, stepping out, wrapping herself in a towel. ‘It might be a few days before you have another chance.’

Luca looks at her in the mirror and shakes his head once. It’s impossible for him to shower. To be alone there, wedged between the tiled walls with the sound of gunfire raking across Abuela’s back patio. He shakes his head again, and shuts his eyes tightly, but it’s no use. He’s reliving it again, his body frantic, his breath a whip of panic. The sound that comes out of him this time is something between a whimper and a screech. He tries to be louder than the gunfire in his head.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,’ Mami says, holding him. And even though Luca knows those words are not strictly true, he clings to them regardless.

She washes him instead in the sink with sudsy water and a washcloth, like she used to do when he was a baby. Neck, ears, armpits, tummy, back, bottom, undercarriage, legs, and feet. She swabs off the grime, the spots of dried blood, the clinging flecks of vomit. She makes him clean and dry. She pats him down with a white towel, fluffy and warm against his skin.

Even though they’re expecting the room service delivery, the knock at the door, when it comes, startles them both. They are jittery from grief, and there’s a thinness in the air that amplifies every sound. He doesn’t want to, but Luca waits in the bathroom with the door locked while his mother answers the delivery. He hums softly to himself as soon as he’s alone, but it’s not music. There’s no melody in it. Lydia hesitates between the two locked doors. Behind the bathroom one, she can hear the tuneless humming. Behind the other, a man’s voice repeats the announcement of their breakfast delivery. She is barefoot on the carpet, and her hands shake as she lugs the desk chair out of the way and reaches for the doorknob. She wants to stretch up on her bare toes and look out the peephole to make sure, but how can she? How can she, when all she can imagine is seeing the dark tunnel of a gun barrel on the other side and then immediately seeing nothing at all ever again? But if that’s the fate that awaits her, she tells herself, then no, at least she won’t unlock the door and invite it in. She holds her breath as she reaches out silently and plants her hands on either side of the peephole. The young man outside pushes a cart laden with silver trays. He wears a uniform. His face is scarred with acne. His name tag says ikal. None of it means anything about their safety. She returns to the flats of her feet, pads over to the dresser, and removes her machete from the top drawer.

‘Be right there, just a second!’ she says.

She’s wearing the thick bathrobe she found in the closet, and she slips the machete into its baggy pocket. She keeps her hand in there and grips the handle tightly. She says the word ‘okay’ out loud to herself. And then she opens the door.

Ikal, it is immediately obvious, is not a sicario. He’s barely even a room service delivery boy. He ducks his head and clears his throat and seems embarrassed to be in a hotel room with a woman wearing a bathrobe. He averts his eyes as he steps past her and places their tray almost apologetically on the desk. Then he returns to his waiting cart in the doorway and hands her the billfold for her signature. Lydia feels confident enough to leave the machete in her pocket momentarily while she signs it. She thanks him and hands it back and then, just as the door is about to swing closed, he says, ‘Wait, I almost forgot,’ and Lydia’s hand darts back into her pocket. But he only hands her some cutlery wrapped in two cloth napkins.

‘And this,’ he says, producing a padded envelope from a lower shelf. ‘The front desk asked me to bring it up.’

Lydia takes a small step back. ‘What is it?’

‘A delivery,’ he says. ‘Arrived for you last night.’

Lydia shakes her head. No one knows we’re here, no one knows we’re here. A panic refrain.

He’s holding the parcel out between them but Lydia makes no move to reach for it. She stares at the brown paper. She can’t see any markings on it, not even her name.

‘Shall I put it on the desk with the food?’ he asks. He gestures inside but seems reluctant to step back into the room without an invitation.

‘No,’ Lydia says. She knows she’s acting crazy. She doesn’t care. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘Señora?’

She shakes her head again. ‘I don’t want it,’ she repeats. ‘Just get rid of it.’

Ikal attempts to suppress the confusion from his face with a firm nod. He replaces the parcel on his cart, and it’s not until its muffled rattle has almost reached the elevators at the end of the corridor that Lydia changes her mind. She opens the door and chases after him.

‘Wait!’

When she returns to the room, Luca has already emerged from the bathroom and is standing over the tray of food, removing the covers from the plates. Lydia holds the small parcel away from her body as she carries it into the bathroom and places it carefully on a towel in the bottom of the tub. She steps out and shuts the door, closing the parcel inside. She fixes her coffee from the tray, drinks it in one long guzzle, and then dresses quickly, hitching her scratchy new jeans up beneath the hotel robe.

Luca eats standing up, wearing only his underwear. He is starving, and that hunger feels like a betrayal. How can his body want food? He jams a slice of toast into his mouth. How can the butter taste so good? Luca chews it into a paste before swallowing. He watches his mother sideways without turning his head away from the television. He sees the way Mami screws her lips up to one side, and he decides he’s going to take care of her. He won’t be a baby anymore. He decides this very matter-of-factly, in a single instant, and he knows it to be immediately true.

‘We should go to el norte,’ he says, because he suspects that’s her plan anyway, and he wants to confirm that it’s a good one, the only one, to get to a planet where no one can reach them.

‘Yes.’ Mami stands beside the bed in her jeans and robe. She seems to have lost track of what she was doing halfway through getting dressed. She seems both hurried and unable to move. ‘We’ll go to Denver,’ she says after a moment.

She has an uncle there. Lydia slips a plain white T-shirt over her head and steps out from inside the puddle of robe around her feet. She feels so prickly and raw that even the cotton of the T-shirt brushing against her skin sends goose bumps racing down her arms. She rubs them off and tells Luca to hurry up and get dressed when he’s finished eating.

Back in the bathroom, she stares down at the padded brown envelope in the bottom of the tub, and can’t decide whether she made the right decision by bringing it into the room. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Someone knows they’re here, so now they have to leave immediately, regardless of what’s inside. It wasn’t curiosity that made her run after that food delivery kid. She’s not curious. She doesn’t want to know what’s inside. But she knows that disinterest is a luxury she can no longer afford to indulge. If she hopes to survive this ordeal with Luca, then she needs to pay attention to every single detail. She needs to be alert to every scrap of available information. She lifts the envelope carefully by one corner and examines the back seal. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. She’s going to have to open it. In here, in the bathroom? Or should she take it out on the balcony in case it explodes?

‘Carajo,’ she says out loud.

‘You talking to me, Mami?’ Luca says through the door.

‘No, mijo. Get dressed!’

She puts the parcel to her ear but can hear nothing inside. No ticking. No beeping. She lifts the parcel to her nose and smells it, but there’s no discernible odor. She carefully slides one finger beneath the sealed edge, closes her eyes, and gently pulls her finger along the loosening flap. In her head, the pounding of her own fear is louder than the ripping paper, but now here it is, opened in her hands. An ordinary brown envelope. No dreadful toxic powder spills out. No poisonous cloud of doom ascends.

Inside, tied with a pale blue ribbon, is an English-language copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. A book she once discussed with Javier, one of their many shared favorites. There’s something tucked between its pages. She tugs on the ribbon, which gives way and falls to the floor at her bare feet. Her body feels like an arrow that’s been launched from its bow but hasn’t yet found its target. She’s suspended, arcing, accountable to the laws of gravity. She opens to the page where an unsealed envelope is wedged into the spine. Of course she knows, she knew from the very first sound of mayhem in the yard, that Javier is responsible for the massacre of her family. It feels as impossible as it is true. But until this moment, she’s protected herself from fully acknowledging that fact. Because once she accepts that incontrovertible truth, she must also acknowledge her own guilt. She knew this man. She knew him. And yet she’d failed to appreciate the danger he presented; she’d failed to protect her family. Lydia can’t think about any of this yet; she isn’t ready. She must find a way to delay her despair. Luca is the only thing that matters now. Luca. He is still in danger.

‘Get dressed!’ she calls again, her voice pitching out at an unfamiliar angle.

She looks down at the book in her hand. A passage is highlighted there, the moment when the widowed heroine, Fermina Daza, reeling in the aftermath of her husband’s death, encounters the man, Florentino Ariza, whom she rejected fifty years earlier:

‘Fermina,’ he said, ‘I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.’

Lydia thrusts the book away from her and it somersaults into the tub. The envelope remains in her hand. She considers dropping it, too, and leaving it there, but she needs to know what it says. Her stomach plunges. She pulls the card out of its thick envelope and sees white lilies on the front. Mi más sentido pésame. Inside, the handwriting is immediately familiar.

She drops the card and it lands in the toilet, where it darkens at once. Lydia’s not sure what she’d been expecting when she opened it. There’s nothing he could’ve written there that would make any difference. No quiet slashing of ink on paper can resuscitate her dead mother, her husband. No apology or explanation can reanimate Yénifer’s brain, pin her soul back into her body. That girl smelled like grapefruit and sugar, and now she’s gone. Lydia beats back a sob using an English word she’s never liked: ‘Fuck!’ It works, so she says it again and again. Perhaps she’d hoped the card might illuminate something. She reads it once more, floating, the ink beginning to bleed, and she’s haunted by the familiarity of the handwriting. What had she missed? How can this be real? She tries, but she can’t force it to make sense, and the effort makes her dizzy.

Only one thing is clear: Javier knows where they are. She doesn’t have time to panic or reflect. She has to get Luca out of there. Now. They have to run. She bangs open the bathroom door and hisses at Luca once more to get dressed. He doesn’t answer, and when she looks up, she sees that he’s already dressed in fresh jeans and his father’s red hat, that he’s sitting on the chair beside the desk, wriggling his feet into his new socks. ‘Oh, ándale,’ she says. ‘Good.’ But then he reaches out for the tray of food, to cram in a bite before tackling the other sock, and Lydia lunges toward him. She smacks the toast from his hand and it skids to the floor.

‘Mami!’ Luca is shocked.

She only shakes her head. ‘Don’t eat it. Don’t eat any more food.’ Luca is silent. ‘I don’t know if it’s safe.’

She thinks about dragging him into the bathroom and sticking a finger down his throat, but there’s no time. She crams all their belongings into her mother’s overnight bag and the two backpacks. She hasn’t even put on her bra yet. No time. Her hair is wet; it’s leaving a damp ring around the shoulders of her T-shirt. She jams her bare feet into her mother’s quilted sneakers, straps the backpack on herself, and grabs her mother’s bag.

‘You ready?’

Luca nods and picks up the second backpack, the one they bought at Walmart.

‘Super quiet,’ she says. ‘No noise.’

Luca seals his mouth.

Lydia pauses at the door to lean her ear against the wood and listen before she dares to open it. She pins Luca to the wall beside her and then cracks the door. The hallway is empty, the only sound coming from a television in the room across the hall. She takes Luca’s hand and tugs him out, wedging a towel into the door so it won’t even click as it closes. They run silently to the service stairs, and when Lydia hears the ding of the elevator at the other end of the hall, she shoves Luca through the door. Seven flights down, Luca flies in front of her. Lydia’s feet touch every third or fourth step along the way.