‘They’re Russian nesting dolls,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ Javier watched her face. ‘But really they’re me. Keep going.’
She pulled apart the last severed doll, no taller than her thumb, and inside she found the tiniest sister. This one was bright turquoise, and more beautiful, more exquisite and detailed than all the sisters before her. Lydia pinched her between finger and thumb. She held her up and studied the intricate silver filigree of her paintwork.
‘And that’s you.’ Javier tapped his chest with his fist. ‘Muy dentro de mí.’
Lydia blinked rapidly, but it was too late to conceal the tears that came to the corners of her eyes. Javier mistook them, and his smile broadened.
‘You like them?’
She sniffed. ‘Very much, thank you.’ She hastened to pack the dolls back into one another while he watched.
He noticed the way she didn’t take care to line up their tops with their bottoms. This was his first indication that something was truly askew. ‘What’s the matter, mi reina?’
When the dolls were reassembled, Lydia rolled them back into their brown paper and placed them beneath the counter with her phone. There was no easy way to say it. She might as well be direct.
‘I received some bad news last week,’ she said. He leaned forward, frowning. ‘About you.’
He leaned back, frowning deeper. A very long silence grew between them, and then a customer came in, jangling the bell above the door. The woman bought three notebooks, three fancy pens, and a birthday card, and Lydia found herself unable to smile while she rang the woman up. She felt Javier’s anxiety like a malediction in the room. It rattled into her chest. His shoulders were curled in, and he squeezed his flattened hands between his thighs. When the customer left, Lydia went to the door and locked it. She flipped the sign to cerrado.
They studied each other across the counter. She stared into his eyes, and neither of them shifted their gaze.
At length, he spoke. ‘I presumed you knew.’ His voice was strained, raspy.
She shook her head without removing her eyes from his. ‘How would I know? Why would I know?’
His eyes swam even larger than usual behind the glasses. His mouth trembled as he spoke. ‘It feels as though almost everyone knows. I thought . . . somehow, I hoped it didn’t matter to you. I thought it didn’t matter because you knew me, you could see the person I really am.’
‘I can, I still can,’ she said. ‘But, Javier, that other part of you, the part I don’t know . . . it’s irreconcilable. That person is real, too, yes?’
Finally, he dropped his gaze from hers. He blinked his eyes repeatedly, removed his glasses, and cleaned them on the tail of his shirt.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘No, you don’t.’
Lydia pressed her lips together.
‘I’m in love with you. I am in love with you.’
She shook her head.
‘Lydia, you’re the only real friend I have. The only person in my life who wants nothing from me except the joy between us.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is true! And when I’m not with you, I’m lonely for you. You have no idea the light you provide. You and Marta, you’re all I really have. Nothing else matters. I would leave it all if I could.’
‘Then do!’ She slapped her hand against the counter. ‘Leave it!’
He smiled sadly at her. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘It works whatever way you say it works! You’re the jefe, right?’
‘Yes, and if I leave, what then? What will become of Acapulco if I leave? How many people will die while they fight over who takes my place?’ His elbows were up on the counter. He tugged at his hair in distress. ‘You know I never wanted this. It was an accident of fate that I ended up here.’
Quite near the surface of her consciousness, Lydia knew that couldn’t really be true. If it was a lottery ticket, it was one he had selected and purchased with his own money. She knew this, that he must have committed specific evils to have attained this rank. How many? Of what nature? Some combination of fear and sadness prevented her from asking. She didn’t dare to contradict his justifications.
‘But here we are, here I am.’ His eyes were pleading. ‘There’s no getting out of it, Lydia, not for me. But it doesn’t define who I am.’
She could feel the dissonance throbbing through her brain like an erratic pulse. Of course it defines who you are, she did not say. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt him take her hand.
‘Please understand,’ he said. ‘Try.’
When Lydia had found Javier’s picture in Sebastián’s folder the previous week, she’d been riven with real anguish. Seldom had she experienced such profound and authentic friendship in her life. The prospect of losing that attachment grieved her. But now that Javier sat before her, clasping her hand in his, now that the thing had been spoken between them and confirmed to be true, all that was left for Lydia was autopsy. What love had been there was already slipping away. She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it. Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.
Chapter Nine
In Carlos and Meredith’s house in Chilpancingo, there are new ghosts to contend with. Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. During the three days that follow, she and Luca are often alone in the house while the boys are at school, Carlos is at work, and Meredith prepares the Indiana missionaries for their return home. There is no temporary suspension of living as there usually is with death, because a public pause would arouse suspicion. Lydia and Luca have to stay hidden. The family has to carry on in their typical fashion. The sons have well-stocked bookshelves in their rooms, gracias a Dios, so while they’re out living their regular lives, Luca reads two or three books a day. Lydia tries to read as well, but her mind can’t hold the words. She doesn’t have the reservoir of space to take anything else into her brain. So instead she tries to keep her body occupied. She cooks food that neither she nor Luca feels like eating. She cleans sinks and laundry and rugs that aren’t dirty. She watches as Luca grows silent.
The afternoons feel a thousand hours long. Luca barely even changes positions on the couch as he reads. He moves when he finishes a book; he gets up to retrieve another from the shelf. Whenever he rises to use the bathroom, Lydia tries to coax him into eating. The rest of her time she spends at the old IBM desktop computer that sits on a small cart in one corner of the living room. She checks the headlines coming out of Acapulco. There have been beautiful tributes to Sebastián by his colleagues, but Lydia can’t read the reflective pieces. The word héroe makes her angry, as if he chose his death courageously, as if it means something. For God’s sake, he died with a spatula in his hand. Instead she skims the news for emerging facts about the investigation, and it’s as she expected: nothing. Because fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice. There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication. So Lydia checks for other stories, new violence, any hint of what’s happening among Los Jardineros. A tourist was accidentally killed in a shootout near the beach huts at Playa Hornos yesterday afternoon. A burned-out car with two bodies inside, one large, one small, was found outside Colonia Loma Larga this morning.