Lydia stands with her shoulders loose to the earth. Her mother. She moves toward Abuela, whose body is one of those now loosely covered with black plastic. An officer steps to intercept her.
‘Señora, please,’ he says simply.
Lydia looks at him wildly. ‘I need a last moment with my mother.’
He shakes his head once, the slightest movement. His voice is soft. ‘I assure you,’ he says, ‘that is not your mother.’
Lydia blinks, unmoving, her husband’s car keys gripped in the vise of her hand. He’s right. She could spend more time in this landscape of carnage, but why? They are all gone. This is not what she wants to remember of them. She turns away from the sixteen horizontal shapes in the yard and, with a squeak and a bang, passes through the doorway into the kitchen. Outside, the officials resume their activities.
Lydia opens the closet in her mother’s bedroom and withdraws Abuela’s solitary piece of luggage: a small red overnight bag. Lydia unzips it and finds that it’s full of smaller purses. It’s a bag of bags. She dumps them on the bed, opens her mother’s nightstand, pulls a rosary and a small prayer book from the drawer, and puts them in the overnight bag along with Sebastián’s keys. Then she stoops down and sticks her arm beneath her mother’s mattress. She sweeps it back and forth until her fingertips brush a fold of paper. Lydia pulls the wad out: almost 15,000 pesos. She puts them in the bag. She throws the pile of small purses back in her mother’s closet, takes the bag to the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet, and grabs what she can – a hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste, moisturizer, a tube of lip balm, a pair of tweezers. They all go into the bag. She does all this without thinking, without really considering which items might be helpful or useless. She does it because she can’t think of what else to do. Lydia and her mother are the same shoe size, a small blessing. Lydia takes the only pair of comfortable shoes from her mother’s closet – quilted gold lamé sneakers with a zipper on one side that Abuela wore for gardening. In the kitchen, the raid continues: a sleeve of cookies, a tin of peanuts, two bags of chips, all surreptitiously stuffed into the bag. Her mother’s purse hangs on a hook behind the kitchen door, alongside two other hooks that hold Abuela’s apron and her favorite teal sweater. Lydia takes the purse down and looks inside. It feels like opening her mother’s mouth. It’s too personal in there. Lydia takes the whole thing, folds the softened brown leather into the end pocket of the overnight bag, and zips it in.
The detective is sitting beside Luca on the couch when Lydia returns, but he’s not asking questions. His pad and pencil are resigned on the coffee table.
‘We have to go,’ she says.
Luca stands without waiting to be told.
The detective stands, too. ‘I must caution you against returning home right now, señora,’ he says. ‘It may not be safe. If you wait here, perhaps one of my men can drive you. We might find a secure location for you and your son?’
Lydia smiles, and there’s a brief astonishment that her face can still make those shapes. A small puff of laughter. ‘I like our chances better without your assistance.’
The detective frowns at her but nods. ‘You have somewhere safe to go?’
‘Please don’t concern yourself with our well-being,’ she says. ‘Serve justice. Worry about that.’ She’s aware that the words are leaving her mouth like tiny, unpoisoned darts, as futile as they are angry. She makes no effort to censor herself.
The detective stands with his hands in his pockets and frowns toward the floor. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Truly. I know how it must look, every murder going unsolved, but there are people who still care, who are horrified by this violence. Please know I will try.’ He, too, understands the uselessness of his words, but he feels compelled to tender them nonetheless. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a card with his name and phone number on it. ‘We will need an official statement when you’re feeling up to it. Take a few days if you need.’
He proffers the card, but Lydia makes no move to take it, so Luca reaches up and grabs it. He’s maneuvered himself in close beside his mother, laced one arm behind her through the strap of the red overnight bag.
This time, the detective doesn’t follow them. Their shadows move as one lumpy beast along the sidewalk. Beneath the windshield wiper of their car, an instantly recognizable orange 1974 Volkswagen Beetle, there is a tiny slip of paper, so small that it doesn’t even flit in the hot breeze that gusts up the street.
‘Carajo,’ Lydia curses, automatically pushing Luca behind her.
‘What, Mami?’
‘Stay here. No, go stand over there.’ She points back in the direction from which they came, and for once, Luca doesn’t argue. He scuttles up the street, a dozen paces or more. Lydia drops the overnight bag at her feet on the sidewalk, takes a step back from the car, looks up and down the street. Her heart doesn’t race; it feels leaden within her.
Her husband’s parking permit is glued to the windshield, and there’s a smattering of rust across the back bumper. She steps into the street, leans over to see if she can read the paper without lifting it. A news van is parked just beyond the yellow crime scene tape at the far end of the block, but its reporter and cameraman are busy with preparations and haven’t noticed them. She turns her back and tugs the slip of paper free from the wiper. One word in green marker: boo! Her quick intake of breath feels like a slice through the core of her body. She looks back at Luca, crumbles the paper in her fist, and jams it into her pocket.
They have to disappear. They have to get away from Acapulco, so far away that Javier Crespo Fuentes will never be able to find them. They cannot drive the car.
Chapter Three
Lydia circles the orange Beetle twice, glancing through the windows, inspecting the tires, the gas tank, what she can see of the undercarriage by stooping down without touching anything. Nothing appears different from how they left it, not that she was paying much attention. She stands back and crosses her arms over her chest. She won’t dare to drive it, but she must at least open it, to retrieve some of their belongings from inside. That need feels urgent, but her mind cannot reach beyond the immediate present, so she doesn’t get as far as the word keepsakes.
She peers through the window and sees Sebastián’s backpack on the passenger-side floor, her own sunglasses glinting on the dashboard, Luca’s yellow-and-blue sweatshirt sprawled on the backseat. It’s too dangerous to go home now, to the place where they all live together. She needs to be quick, to get Luca out of here. For a brief moment, Lydia considers that if there’s a bomb in the car, it might be kinder to take Luca with her, to call him over here now before she opens the door, but her maternal instinct defeats this macabre idea.
So she approaches with the key shaking in her hand, using the other hand to steady it. She looks at Luca, who gives her a thumbs-up. There won’t be a bomb, she tells herself. A bomb would be overkill after all those bullets. She pushes the key into the lock. One deep breath. Two. She turns the key. Thunk. The sound of the door unlocking is almost enough to finish her. But then silence. No ticking, no beeping, no whoosh of murderous air. She closes her eyes, pivots, returns Luca’s thumbs-up. She swings the creaky door open and begins rummaging inside. What does she need? She stops short, her confusion momentarily paralyzing. This cannot be real, she thinks. Her mind feels stretched and warped. Lydia remembers her mother walking in circles for weeks after her papi died, from sink to fridge, sink to fridge. She’d stand with her hand on the tap and forget to turn it on. Lydia can’t do a suspended loop like that; there is danger. They have to move.