‘How is it that you came to be traveling alone? Don’t you have family in Guerrero?’
‘Nah, not really.’ Lorenzo has plucked up a blade of dry grass from beside the tracks and tucked it into the corner of his mouth. He speaks past it. ‘My mom got married a few years ago and her husband didn’t really want me around, so I split.’
Lydia glances over at him. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
Younger than she thought. ‘And how old when you left home?’
Lorenzo looks up from his feet and snags the grass blade from his mouth. ‘Pssh, I dunno. Thirteen, fourteen. Old enough to look after myself.’ Lydia takes care not to contradict him, but he feels it anyway. ‘Not everybody has a mami like you, all right? Some mothers don’t give a shit.’ He tosses the grass at his feet.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lydia says.
‘Whatever. No importa.’ He slings his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts. ‘I was traveling with my homeboy anyway. We left together because he wanted to get out, too, but then we got separated in Mexico City and I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘But you have a cell phone,’ she says.
‘Yeah, his stopped working.’
‘Oh.’
They walk quietly for a few minutes, and then he says, ‘Yo, it was really sad what happened to el jefe’s daughter, but for real, what he did to your family? Eso fue de locos.’
Lydia frowns. ‘What?’
‘La Lechuza. What he did to your family, it was too much. When I saw that girl on the news in her quinceañera dress—’
That girl. ‘My niece.’
‘Yeah—’
‘My goddaughter. Yénifer.’
‘Yeah, when I saw her on the news, I mean for real I was already thinking about leaving, but that was it for me. Shit is out of control down there.’
Lydia cannot discuss this with him. They are only bodies to him, strangers on the news, people like the ones he has killed himself. That girl in her quinceañera dress. But then Lydia’s mind snags on a previous detail, an exit ramp.
‘What happened to his daughter?’ she asks. Lorenzo looks confused, so Lydia clarifies. ‘Javier’s daughter, La Lechuza’s daughter. You said it was sad, what happened to her.’
‘Yeah, you didn’t hear?’
‘Hear what? What happened?’
On the day Sebastián’s article was published, Javier read it in the backseat of his car while his driver shuffled him through the sluggish morning streets of Acapulco. All his life, Javier had enjoyed an almost preternatural ability to predict incidents and their outcomes. When he was eleven years old and his father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Javier knew that death would be swift; he knew that his mother, who’d previously been a good mother, devoted and affectionate, would handle it poorly, that she’d medicate her grief with alcohol and new men. He foretold and accepted her abandonment well before it came to pass. As a result of that aptitude, Javier was almost immutably composed. Nothing ever really surprised him.
So it was uncharacteristic that he failed to see the article coming. He wondered if his love for Lydia had blinded him to the inevitability of it, and that possibility caused him to feel a faint wrinkle of resentment toward her. Even before he read it and even with the anonymous byline, Javier, who read the article with his usual equanimity, presumed the article was the work of Lydia’s husband, whose journalistic expertise in the drug trade was well-known. Initially, he didn’t need to measure his response, because the article didn’t provoke much feeling in him. On the contrary, Javier regarded it to be a mostly fair depiction of his life. There were, of course, some marginal inaccuracies, one or two instances of exaggeration. There was more righteous condemnation than Javier was prepared to accept, but that was to be expected. Beyond those details, Javier thought, Sebastián had managed to apprehend something true about the essence of Los Jardineros in Acapulco. And he was bewildered but unexpectedly pleased by the inclusion of his poem. Javier presumed that Lydia had somehow given it to her husband. Had she memorized it? (A flattering notion.) Secretly photographed it with her cell phone during a moment of lapsed judgment? Though the poem revealed something intimate about him, it also illuminated his humanity, he thought. He therefore portended that it might make him beloved by the people. He neither smiled nor scowled as he folded the newspaper and set it in the sunbeam on the leather seat beside him.
Instead, he tried to anticipate the impact the article might have on his future. He understood immediately that there would be ramifications, that his relative anonymity was a thing of the past, that his liberty had been permanently compromised. He’d always known this would happen one day. He hadn’t expected it to be so soon, but he would adapt. It was, at worst, a nuisance. Perhaps it could even be fun. He couldn’t recall another time the press had devoted so much attention to a cartel as young as Los Jardineros. It had taken years of established work before ordinary people began to recognize the names El Chapo Guzmán or Pablo Escobar, and there were plenty of people who still loved those men for their generosity and mythos, even after their spectacular downfalls.
The only thing that truly unsettled Javier was his speculation that Lydia, his dear Lydia, had betrayed his confidence with the poem. That betrayal he had not foreseen, and it caused a treacherous quickening in his chest. But then it occurred to him that perhaps she hadn’t been disloyal at all. Maybe she’d provided the poem as a faithful contribution, a nod to his true self. Maybe the poem was a gift.
Lydia knew Javier as well as anyone knew him. His first response to the article was exactly as she’d predicted.
At that same moment, several miles away, just at the outskirts of the city, on a sprawling finca with glittering all-day views of the turquoise sea, Javier’s wife was also reading the article. She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been. Her hair was platinum, her mascara and lipstick tastefully applied, her bosoms maintained by the architecture of expensive lingerie, her nails, gleaming and square and only a shade pinker than natural. She hadn’t had a cigarette in almost three years, yet here she was, smoke curling from the tip of her quivering menthol. She had a name, but she seldom heard it. Instead, she heard Mamá or Mi Reina or Doña. She’d reached an age where she expected each day to be the unveiling of some quiet new sorrow, and where she simultaneously believed there was nothing left in life that could truly surprise her. As she pursed her lips to draw on the menthol, the fine lines around her mouth became grooves. She stained the filter of her cigarette with a shimmer of gold-coral lipstick and blew the smoke out over one shoulder. A nervous maid soundlessly approached and tipped extra coffee into her waiting cup. There were gulls out wheeling over the dappled blue horizon. The bougainvillea sang. But she sat, wordlessly rereading Sebastián’s article for the third time. It troubled her. It’s unsettling to see, emboldened by the veracity of black and white, the most deeply suppressed grapplings of your own smothered conscience, printed right there in the newspaper for all the world to read. Javier’s wife had failed to sufficiently calm herself when their daughter, Marta, called from boarding school in Barcelona later that afternoon and destroyed her with the simplicity of a single question: Mamá, is it true? And because of her failure, in that moment, to adequately reassure her daughter, she would forever blame herself for what happened next.