‘I wish he could come with us all the way to el norte,’ Rebeca says to Soledad as they watch him go.
‘I can take care of you,’ Lorenzo says in response.
The sisters turn to look at him.
‘Nah, we’re all set,’ Rebeca says. ‘Thanks.’
Lorenzo shrugs, but Soledad has no patience for this cholo and has never been a champion of subtlety anyway. She wheels on him.
‘Are you still here? Did we invite you to join us or something? Because I don’t remember doing that.’
‘Damn, girl. Cálmate. We’re all going to the same place, aren’t we?’
‘Are we?’
‘I mean, what, you own Guadalajara now?’
She turns away. ‘Come on,’ she says to Rebeca.
The girls start to walk, and Luca with them. Lydia doesn’t move. She knows Lorenzo could use that phone in his pocket to call Javier right now. He could snap her neck and then snap her picture, collect a big reward. Her death could make him a Jardineros hero. But isn’t it possible that, beneath the shield of his baby narco swagger, he’s also a scared boy, alone in the world and running for his life? And isn’t it also probably true that if he persists in not murdering them, he might know more things about the cartels that could help them? He’s already been a wellspring, and Lydia would like the chance to interview him further, to pump him for more information. Luca and the girls look back at her from the corner they’re about to turn. Luca is holding Rebeca’s hand. The pace of their life has become so fast and so slow; Lydia never has enough time to make decisions. She works from instinct alone, and her instinct is strong in this instance. It tells her to go, to get away from him.
‘Can I ask you one thing?’ she says.
He shrugs.
‘Do you think he’s still looking for us?’
‘Sin duda alguna,’ he says. Without a doubt.
It’s not surprising, but still, there’s no comfort in the validation. Her body feels leaden. ‘But we’re safer here, yes?’
Lorenzo’s wearing a string backpack. He squints and looks around. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I mean, anywhere is safer than Acapulco.’
‘But he has alliances in other plazas?’
‘Claro que sí, there’s a lot more cooperation with the other cartels than there was before him. He’s got reach. Deep into rival territories.’
‘Which ones?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. What do I look like, some kind of maldito expert?’
Well. Yes, she thinks. She moves her lips to one side. ‘I’m just trying to determine our safest route.’
‘There is no safest route, far as I can tell,’ he says. ‘You just gotta run like hell.’
She looks into his face, broad and young. His eyes are heavily lidded, his upper lip softened by a feeble crop of hair. He has the remnants of a breakout high on one cheekbone. He’s a veritable kid. Who has murdered at least three people.
‘Lorenzo, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ she asks. She tries to anchor his gaze, but he looks away.
‘Nah, I told you already. I’m done with all that. I’m out.’ He jams his hands into the pockets of his shorts.
She nods skeptically. ‘Thank you.’
‘Ni modo.’
It’s an effort to turn her back to him, because she is still afraid. The shock of a blade entering her flesh, severing her spine. The pile of her body in the road beside the tracks. ‘Suerte, Lorenzo,’ she says, and she turns to go. It’s even harder not to look back after she rejoins Luca and the sisters, but she knows he might interpret any backward glance as a weakness or an invitation, so she only imagines him falling behind. She pictures him following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance. Just before she enters, she turns and allows her gaze to sweep up and down the vacant road, to linger and search in every shadow, and to thank God. He is gone.
They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. There are good migrant services in the city, and between that and Danilo’s modest heroics, the Hershey’s Kisses, Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. It seems impossible that good people – so many good people – can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken. There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when he tries to make those two facts sit side by side.
At the shelter, Rebeca and Soledad stand guard for each other outside the bathroom door. It’s a luxury to slough the dust of the road off your skin, to soap up and stand beneath a spray of warm water, to watch it pool at your feet, grimy and brown, before it circles the drain and disappears forever. Soledad likes to think of the water molecules racing down the drainpipes, intermingling and dispersing, joining other pipes beneath the streets of the city, gathering volume and speed as they rush and tumble toward some unknown destination. She likes to think of the filth she washes from her skin, diluted and diluted until it no longer exists as filth at all.
Although Soledad has the cell phone Iván gave her, she can’t use it to make phone calls or text because it has no credit. If it did have credit, Soledad still wouldn’t use it, for two reasons: first, except for her primo César, no one she knows has a cell phone anyway, and second, like Lydia, she’s afraid that if she uses the phone, Iván will then somehow be able to find her. So the phone functions mostly as a repository of photographs, but also as a propeller that reminds Soledad how far she has come, and how much better her life will be when she gets to el norte.
So when, after their showers, the director of the casa asks them if they’d like to use the communications room to email or call anyone, the girls’ excitement is almost too much to articulate. Finally, they can call Papi. Rebeca has never used a phone before, never lifted a device to her ear and heard the familiar voice of a faraway loved one. Soledad has never initiated a call. It’s an ordinary modern convenience that, for the sisters, still carries the full weight of the miraculous.
‘How do we do it?’ Rebeca asks her sister after the director has shown them into the quiet room and closed the door behind them.
Soledad frowns. ‘Get Luca.’
The room is small, and it contains a desk with a glowing computer, one rolling office chair, and a small, floral-print couch. The phone sits on the desk beside the monitor. Rebeca returns quickly with Luca, who sits down at the computer, asks the sisters for the name of the hotel where their father works, and finds the phone number within seconds. He writes it down on the lone yellow notepad, but when he stands to go, Soledad asks him to dial it, too.