* * *
Lydia is not sorry Lorenzo is dead. Neither does she feel bad that Soledad was the one to kill him, beyond whatever emotional fallout that truth might one day have for the girl she’s grown so fond of. But she does worry that something vital may be broken inside herself, because Luca is suitably upset, but for her, it seems like death – even sudden, violent death – may no longer have the capacity to shock her. It’s a fear she needs to press like a bruise, to test its tenderness. Both of Luca’s heels are wrapped with Band-Aids and fresh socks, his boots tied snugly to his feet, and he’s holding Rebeca’s hand. The magic that exists between those two billows up and covers them like a force field. His presence reanimates Rebeca, erasing her blankness and filling her in with a trace of color. That energy, in turn, calms Luca, and returns him to himself.
‘I’ll only be a second,’ Lydia says to El Chacal as he stuffs the colored sheet into his pack. ‘I need to see him.’
‘Wait,’ the coyote says, and then he bends into the space where Lorenzo had been sleeping. His discarded T-shirt is there, his shorts and shoes. El Chacal reaches into the pocket of the shorts and pulls out a black canvas wallet with Minecraft characters on it. There’s a scritch of Velcro as the coyote opens the wallet, but there’s no ID inside. He’d been hoping for something he could leave with the body, because that act of identification is the smallest kindness, and one El Chacal can afford to give. Still, maybe someone will recognize the wallet, which will remain intact long after the skin is gone, long after the flesh is entirely scavenged or decomposed. Bodies disappear with astonishing speed in the desert. It’s helpful to find some personal item near the bleached bones. He hands the wallet to Lydia. ‘Just leave this with him,’ he says.
When El Chacal returns to his packing, Lydia notices the cell phone, too, tucked inside one of Lorenzo’s expensive sneakers. She picks it up. Luca watches her, but he’s calm now, with Rebeca. She nods at him, and then climbs up the outside of the cave to where Lorenzo’s body is still fresh in the dirt. It feels wrong to see him like this. Not only dead, but also without clothes. It’s embarrassing to see the vulnerability of his bare chest. His eyes are open, and Lydia thinks about closing them, but she doesn’t owe him that. She doesn’t want to touch him, but she nudges his bare foot with her toe and watches his leg react. It wobbles and settles. He’s really dead. And still she feels nothing. She stands so her shadow falls across his face and says a Hail Mary. She says the Fatima prayer, she tries.
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. Amen.
It’s not enough.
She’s not praying for Lorenzo. She presses her lips together so hard her teeth bite into the flesh. She’s praying for herself, for grace. For everything she lost. For all the mistakes she made. For the apology she can never give to Sebastián. For being wrong about Javier. For being wrong about everything. For surviving when everyone else died. For being so numb. She is praying for her boy and their decimated lives.
A sudden wind creaks through the nearby rosewood tree and flips through Lydia’s hair. She squats down next to Lorenzo, and there’s the violent flashback of this posture on Abuela’s back patio. It floods in at her shoulders and at once she can feel it in her whole body. The sharp ache of tenderness, the half-moons of Sebastián’s pink fingernails. There was love. There was love. She had a family, and then they were gone. All at once, their bodies splayed out in grotesque shapes across the patio. Yénifer’s white dress, red. Her beautiful hair. Adrián’s balón de fútbol abandoned in the grass near his feet.
Mamá.
So there it is. The welling reservoir of grief, keen and profound beneath the bruise, the proof of her humanity, still intact. She needs to bury it back where it was. She can’t indulge it yet. She imagines a hole in the desert floor, all her pain inside. She imagines covering it with dirt, pressing down on the earth with her soiled hands. Lydia tucks the canvas Minecraft wallet beneath one slender, outstretched arm. She can see now, from the bareness of Lorenzo’s chest, the mold of his shoulders, what he’d been concealing beneath that troublesome shell. He’s only a boy. She stands and looks down again at the wreckage of the young body beneath her. And this is the moment.
This is the moment of Lydia’s crossing. Here at the back of this cave somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, Lydia sheds the violent skin of everything that’s happened to her. It rolls down from her tingling scalp off the mantle of her shoulders and down the length of her body. She breathes it out. She spits it into the dirt. Javier. Marta. Everything. Her entire life before this moment. Every person she loved who is gone. Her monumental regret. She will leave it here.
She stands at Lorenzo’s feet.
She turns away from him.
‘I forgive you,’ she says.
Lydia has already turned to go when she remembers his phone. She stoops again, to leave it where someone might find it. She stretches out her hand and sees it there, the innocuous, shiny thing, black plastic and gleaming metal in her hand. She closes her fingers around it and stands up again. She presses the button that makes it turn on, and she knows how, because it’s a nicer, newer version of her own phone, the phone that’s powered off, SIM card removed, stuffed inside her spare socks in the bottom of her pack right now. She is untraceable. But what about Lorenzo? Did he ever consider how his signal might be pinging between cell towers, triangulating his location? The thing glows to life in her hand, and there’s no passcode or lock, it just opens right up, and Lydia has to cover the screen to see it beneath the glare of the sun. She walks to the rosewood tree and ducks into its shade. There are text messages, seven of them. Unread. Her thumb hovers over the screen. But then she jerks her head up and looks around, over her shoulder. They are miles from nowhere. Alone. What is she afraid of? She touches her thumb to the screen and the messages swarm up, they tumble open. They are from someone named El Él. The Him. Lydia curls over the phone, and it’s instant, the way she consumes the information. It takes her no time at all to read them, and to know.
El Él.
L L.
La Lechuza.
The bottom drops out of her stomach. He’s been tracking her.
Nineteen days. 1,626 miles.
Only seconds ago, she felt liberated. She was free of him, the fear of him. He cannot follow her where she is going. No.
‘No!’ she says out loud.
She almost throws the phone. She almost kicks Lorenzo in his dead ribs for his easy betrayal, for his treachery, for his nature. She’d like to bash his head against that rock, to kill him again, my God. It won’t help. There’s no act she can perform that would appease the violent rush she now feels in her limbs. There are no swear words magical enough to carry some piece of this violence away from her. She is a tornado. She’s an eruption. She’s an huracán.