‘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: