On the sidewalk, she tightens the straps on Luca’s backpack, which are drooping too far from his small shoulders. He looks like a turtle with an inadequate shell, yet somehow he’s managed to draw his most vulnerable parts tightly within himself. She wonders about the lasting effects of that retraction.
‘What’s next, Mami?’ Luca asks her, in the flat tone of voice that seems to be his only inflection now.
‘Let’s find an internet café,’ she says.
‘But you have Papi’s tablet, right?’
It’s powered off in her backpack, and she’s not going to turn it back on. She also left the SIM card of her own cell phone in a garbage can outside the bank in Playa Caletilla. She felt marginally crazy, paranoid, as she pried the thing out with her fingernail, but she didn’t want to be a blue dot flashing on some remote, hostile screen. She adjusts the brim of Sebastián’s Yankees cap slightly lower on her son’s forehead. She should buy one for herself, too, she thinks.
‘Let’s go,’ she says.
El Cascabelito Internet Café is just opening for the day when Lydia purchases a coffee and fifteen minutes to look more closely at maps online. She buys Luca a bag of platanitos, too, but the green foil package sits unopened on the desk. Lydia chooses a computer in the back corner, one that has two chairs and a privacy partition so they’re hidden from view of the door. Luca draws his heels up to the seat of the chair and rests his chin on his knees, but his eyes remain unfocused on the platanitos while Lydia studies the screen. From Chilpancingo there are only two viable routes to Mexico City, and both are virtually guaranteed to have roadblocks. Lydia chews the inside of her mouth, and her knee undertakes a jittery hop beneath the desk. They can’t exactly walk to Mexico City from here. Lydia’s never been claustrophobic, but today she feels so trapped. She can feel it in her limbs, a panicky longing to stretch. She can’t see any way out. Dismay will not help.
She opens Facebook and finds Sebastián’s friend. He’s an attorney, and his profile shows the name of his law firm, but it’s Sunday and it won’t be open. She checks his About tab, and scrolls down to his likes: a local newspaper, a couple nonprofits, his alma mater, a fan page for Adidas sneakers, so much fútbol. But then, there. Bingo: a Pentecostal church here in Chilpancingo. A worship service at nine o’clock. She looks it up and finds it’s about two miles away. There’s a bus down the main thoroughfare, and twenty minutes later, Luca and Lydia are on it.
Lydia worries she wrote the address down wrong, because when they get off the bus, the street is lined with shops, all closed on a Sunday morning. They find the number they’re looking for sandwiched between an electronics store and a jeweler. But just as she’s double-checking the address on the scrap of paper in her hand, a young man pushing a baby carriage approaches and opens the door for his pregnant wife. Lydia peeks inside before the door swings closed, and she sees rows of folding chairs facing a stage. Luca tugs on her sleeve and directs her attention to a sign she hadn’t noticed, propped in the window: Iglesia Pentecostal Tabernáculo de la Victoria. There’s no steeple or stained glass, but this is the place.
Inside, it’s bigger than she imagined, with low ceilings, and fans attached to the walls. There’s a full drum kit, an amplifier, and some huge speakers set up behind the pulpit. There’s no cross, no font of holy water at the entrance, but Lydia blesses herself out of habit, and Luca follows her example. She waits for some bubble of feeling to follow – a whisper from her legion of newborn angels, or perhaps a low-down rage at God instead. But nothing comes; it’s spiritual tumbleweed. Un desierto del alma because she has room only for fear.
They sit in the last row, near the wall, and Lydia stows their backpacks under their folding chairs. She covers her face with her hands and instructs Luca to do the same, but it’s not veneration. It’s only for concealment, in case any of Los Jardineros are Pentecostal Christians, in case they traffic drugs on a Monday, stab people on a Thursday, and then come here seeking forgiveness on a Sunday. It doesn’t seem more outlandish than anything else that’s happened.
Through the screen of her interlaced fingers, Lydia watches the square of stark sunlight on the tiled floor grow brighter every time someone opens the glass door to come in. A few of the congregants notice them in the back row, and give them a welcoming nod or a smile, but most walk right past and find their usual seats.
The church is almost half-full by the time Carlos appears behind his wife and children. The wife greets everyone with hugs, and has the sharp voice of a gabacha above the hum of reverent conversation in the room. Lydia half stands from her seat and lifts a hand in greeting, but Carlos doesn’t see her. The youngest son alerts him, points to Lydia in the corner, and Carlos turns.
‘Lydia, oh my goodness, what are you doing here?’ His voice arrives before he does, but soon he maneuvers himself between the rows of chairs to where she’s standing. He embraces her. ‘It’s so lovely to see you, guau, what a surprise!’
Luca watches while this man, Carlos, kisses Mami on both cheeks and holds both her hands in his.
‘This must be Luca,’ the man says, bending toward him where he’s still seated on the folding chair. ‘You look so much like your papi.’ He straightens up. ‘Where’s Sebastián, did he come with you?’
‘You haven’t heard the news.’ Mami’s voice sounds far away. Luca can tell without having to look that Carlos’s face has suddenly shifted, that it’s drained to a sickly gray, that he’s already building the internal fortifications he’ll need in order to hold the horrific story Mami’s about to tell him.
‘Come,’ Carlos says, ‘we can talk upstairs.’
There’s an office there, and it’s not quite accurate to say that Luca zones out while his mother and Carlos talk, because that description would indicate some active participation of abstention on his part. Instead, his consciousness, like a helium balloon fastened to his person by some taut and fragile string, momentarily floats away. His body sits at a table with his backpack at his feet, his legs swivel the chair beneath his weight, his hands play with a nearby dish of paper clips, hooking them together into long strands, but his internal mappings are on vacation. The grown-ups glance at him now and again, past the barricades of their warbled voices and ashen faces, and his body responds to their questions with the appropriate nods or shrugs. A paper cup of water is set on the table before him, and he takes a dutiful sip. Downstairs, someone is playing the drums. An electric guitar. Luca can feel the bass vibrating through the floor. Then they’re in Carlos’s car, and they’re driving through the streets of the city to Carlos’s house. Mami sits in the backseat and tries to hold Luca’s hand. He sees this, sees Mami’s hand covering his own, and it’s the warmth and press of her fingers that bring him back.
Once they pass out of la zona centro, Luca sees that Chilpancingo isn’t so different from Acapulco. There are no seagulls here, no tourists, and the streets aren’t as broad. But there are many colorful shops and taxis, people wearing their church clothes in the sunshine. There are ladies with handbags slung over their shoulders, boys with slipshod tattoos. Plenty of bright, foamy graffiti. The houses are all painted in vivid colors. Luca watches them flip by like cards in a deck. After three and a half songs have played on the radio, Carlos turns onto a street that’s slightly wider than the others. There’s an arching canopy of shade trees that creates the sense of entering a secret place, a hushy hideout. In the middle of the block stands a handsome white church with modest twin bell towers at the front. It’s the kind they’re used to. Católica. The other buildings on the crowded street stand back from the little church, giving it room. Carlos pulls into a parking spot.