The mouse pointer trembles on the screen, but she manages to click out of the news and shift gears. Carlos will get them as far as Mexico City, but what then? She must try to make plans. She researches the buses, and yes, there are reports of increased roadblocks across the area, an uptick in disappearances. Travel within cities is relatively safe, but between cities it is strongly discouraged. Authorities advise deferring nonessential trips on regional highways in Guerrero, Colima, and Michoacán. Lydia feels a new wave of despair threatening to descend, but she doesn’t have time for it. The roads are not an option. Even if her driver’s license were current, she wouldn’t risk driving with Luca right now, and the buses are no better. The roadblocks are too dangerous. So what’s left? She checks airline tickets, although she doesn’t love the idea of her name being on a flight manifest. Everything is digital now, and what good will it do to run a thousand miles away if her name raises a red flag in some online database? Tijuana is about as far as you can get without a passport, and that flight is three hours and forty minutes. Plenty of time for Javier to send a sicario to greet them when they deplane. Lydia imagines carnage at the baggage claim. She can see the headlines. There are no long-distance passenger trains in Mexico, so as a last resort, Lydia studies the freight trains the Central American migrants ride across the length of the country. All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way. Lydia shudders at the YouTube stories, the photographs, the grim warnings delivered by recent amputees. She starts over, researches everything again from the beginning. Buses, planes, trains. There has to be something she hasn’t considered. There has to be a way out. She clicks and scrolls and hours pass like sludge, while Luca turns page after page.
At the dinner table with Carlos and Meredith’s three boys, Luca wears his father’s hat, and Lydia doesn’t demand that he take it off, even when Meredith tells her youngest ‘no hats at the table.’ The older boy wipes his milk mustache and grins at Luca, still wearing the Yankees cap.
‘You like baseball?’ the boy asks.
Luca only shrugs.
He was always a quiet child. As a toddler, Luca never babbled. In fact, he didn’t speak at all until he was four years old, and by then Lydia had been panicking for two years. She began the practice of reading to him well before she suspected any problem, only because she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he’d build language from a foundation of literature and poetry. So she started with Márquez and Tolstoy and the Brontës, and eventually, as a result of her growing alarm, she read to him not in the typical way that parents read fairy tales and bedtime stories to their children, but in a frenetic and urgent manner intended to save him. When her fears bloomed and the habit became more concerted, she called upon Paz and Fuentes, Twain and Castellanos. She was fluent in English, too (it had been her minor in college), so sometimes she read Yeats, rendering the lush green of Ireland in her Mexican accent.
When Luca was an infant, she brought him to work tucked into a sling across her chest, and they read together between orders and customers and cleaning and stocking the shelves. Sometimes it was a long while between customers, so the two of them could submerge vividly into their stories. As he grew, he’d sit in a bouncy rocker or on a little play mat she set up for him in the corner behind the register. Eventually he was free to toddle around the shop, but when it was time to read, he always sat without prompting, cross-legged and silent, head angled to one side, as if creating a funnel of his ear for the words she’d give to him. She tried books with and without pictures. Colorful books, tactile books, poetry, photography, art. Children’s books, cookbooks, the Bible. Her son ran his hands carefully along the glossy or filmy pages, but still he did not speak. Sometimes she read until her voice gave out, and other days she quickly grew depressed by the solitary sound of herself in the shop, but whenever she wanted to quit, Luca would push the day’s book toward her insistently. He’d open it and press it back into her lap.
The week before his fourth birthday, as they sat eating pozole at the kitchen table, Lydia lamented their boy’s silence for the hundredth time. Sebastián balanced his spoon on the edge of his bowl and studied Luca’s face. Luca studied him back.
‘Maybe you don’t speak Spanish,’ Sebastián said in Spanish.
Luca, mimicking his father, balanced his spoon on his bowl, too.
‘That’s it, isn’t it,’ Sebastián said. ‘¿Cuál idioma hablas, mijo? English? Are you a gabacho? Wait!’ Sebastián snapped his fingers. ‘You’re Haitian. No – Arabic! Tagalog?’
Lydia blinked slowly at her husband, but Luca smiled and tried to snap his fingers, too. Sebastián showed him how. Click click click. Lydia was alone in her desperation. She reasoned that Sebastián must be concerned, also, but his dogged optimism prevented him from revealing it. The doctors could find nothing wrong. Lydia felt like screaming.
Instead, she patiently continued her efforts. Allende, Borges, Cervantes. She read so that the words she treasured might penetrate her son’s solitude. And then one day, as she turned the last, unsatisfying page of a short novel by some pretentious young writer, Luca sat up and shook his head. He brushed his hands across his knees. Lydia closed the book and set it on the table beside the rocker where they were seated together. Luca picked it up and opened it to the first page.
‘Let’s read that one again, please, Mami, except this time let’s make it a more agreeable ending.’
Perfectly. As if simply continuing a conversation they’d been having his whole life. Lydia was so startled she nearly hurled him across the room. She pushed him off her lap onto his feet. She turned him around and stared at him. ‘What?’ Luca pressed his lips together. ‘What did you say?’ She gripped his arms at his sides, too roughly perhaps, in her fear that she was coming unhinged. ‘You spoke! Luca! You spoke?’
After a brief and petrifying pause, he nodded.
‘What did you say?’ she whispered.
‘I would like to read it again.’
She clapped both hands onto his cheeks, laughing and crying at once. ‘Ay, oh my God! Luca!’
‘With a better ending.’
She crushed him into her chest and squeezed him there, and then she jumped up and took his hands and spun him in a circle.
‘Say it again. Say something else.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘Exactly that,’ she’d said. ‘My boy. He speaks!’