Sebastián’s backpack is here. She must pick it up. She needs to accomplish the tasks immediately before her. There will be time later to begin the work of comprehending how this could have happened, why it happened. She opens her husband’s backpack, takes out a sloshing thermos, his glasses, the keys to his office, his headphones, three small notebooks and a fistful of cheap pens, a handheld tape recorder, and his press credentials, and places everything on the passenger seat. Her husband’s Samsung Galaxy Tab and charger she keeps, though she powers the tablet all the way down before returning it into the now-empty backpack. She doesn’t understand how GPS works in these devices, but she doesn’t want to be trackable. She retrieves her sunglasses from the dashboard and shoves them onto her face, almost stabbing herself in the eye with one outstretched stem. She pushes the seat forward to see what’s in back. Luca’s church shoes are on the floor, where he left them when he changed into his sneakers to play fútbol with Adrián. Oh my God, Adrián, Lydia thinks, and the cleft feeling in her chest opens deeper, as if there’s an ax hacked into her sternum. She squeezes her eyes closed for just a moment and forces a cycle of breath through her body. She lifts Luca’s shoes and places them into the backpack. Sebastián’s red New York Yankees hat is on the backseat, too. She grabs it, climbs out of the car, and tosses it to Luca, who puts it on. In the trunk, she finds Sebastián’s good brown cardigan, which she shoves into the bag. There’s also a basketball (which she leaves) and a dirty T-shirt, which she keeps. She slams the trunk, walks back to the front seat to select one of his notebooks, not yet allowing herself to consider the reason she does this – to retain a personal record of his extinct handwriting. She chooses one at random, places it in the backpack, and then locks the doors behind her.
Luca comes to stand beside her before she beckons him. My son is fundamentally altered, she thinks. The way he watches her and interprets her wishes without command.
‘Where will we go, Mami?’
Lydia gives him a sideways glance. Eight years old. She must reach past this obliteration and find the strength to salvage what she can. She kisses the top of his head and they begin to walk, away from the reporters, away from the orange car, Abuela’s house, their annihilated life.
‘I don’t know, mijo,’ she says. ‘We’ll see. We’ll have an adventure.’
‘Like in the movies?’
‘Yes, mijo. Just like in the movies.’
She slings the backpack onto both shoulders and tightens the straps before hoisting the overnight bag, too. They walk several blocks north, then hang a left toward the beach, then turn south again, because Lydia can’t decide if they should be somewhere crowded with tourists or if they should try to stay out of sight altogether. She frequently looks over her shoulder, studies the drivers of the passing cars, tightens her grip on Luca’s hand. At an open gate, a mutt barks at them, lunging and nipping. A woman in a drab floral dress comes out of the house to correct the dog, but before she can get there, Lydia kicks it savagely and feels no guilt for having done so. The woman yells after her but Lydia keeps moving, holding Luca by the hand.
Luca adjusts the brim of his father’s too-big Yankees hat. Papi’s sweat is seeped into the hatband, so little currents of his scent puff out whenever Luca pulls it to one side or the other, which Luca does now at regular intervals so he can smell his father. Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it. At length, they spot a bus and decide to get on.
It’s midafternoon on a Saturday, and the bus isn’t crowded. Luca feels glad to sit, until he realizes that the movement of his legs beneath him, carrying the weight of his small frame through the streets of his city, had been the thing staving off the crush of horror that now threatens to descend. As soon as he’s seated beside Mami on the blue plastic seat, his tired legs dangling down, he begins to think. He begins to shake. Mami puts her arm around him and squeezes tight.
‘You cannot cry here, mijito,’ Mami says. ‘Not yet.’
Luca nods, and just like that, he stops trembling and the risk of tears evaporates. He leans his head against the warm glass of the bus window and looks out. He focuses on the cartoon colors of his city, the green of the palm fronds, the trunks of the trees painted white to discourage beetles, the vivid blare of signs advertising shops and hotels and shoes. At El Rollo, Luca looks at the children and teenagers in line for the ticket window. They wear flip-flops and have towels around their necks. Behind them, the red and yellow water slides swoop and soar. Luca puts one finger against the glass and squashes the children in line one by one. The bus squeaks its brakes at the curb, and three damp-haired teenage boys get on. They pass Luca and Lydia without a glance and sit in the back of the bus, elbows planted on knees, talking quietly across the aisle.
‘Papi’s going to take me in the summertime,’ Luca says.
‘What?’
‘To El Rollo. He said this summer we could go. He would take a day off work one time when I’m not in school.’
Lydia sucks in her cheeks and bites down. A disloyal reflex: she’s angry at her husband. The driver closes the door and the bus moves off with the traffic. Lydia unzips the overnight bag at her feet, kicks off her heels, and replaces them with her mother’s quilted gold sneakers. She doesn’t have a plan, which is unlike her, and she finds it difficult to form one because her mind feels unfamiliar, both frenetic and swampy. She does have the wherewithal to remember that every fifteen or twenty minutes, they should get off and change buses, which they do. Sometimes they change direction, sometimes they don’t. One bus stops directly in front of a church, so they go briefly inside, but the part of Lydia that’s usually available for prayer has shut down. She’s experienced this numbness a few times before in her life – when she was seventeen and her father died of cancer, when she had a late-stage miscarriage two years after Luca, when the doctors told her she could never have more children – so she doesn’t think of it as a crisis of faith. Instead she believes it’s a divine kindness. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies. Outside, Luca vomits on the pavement once more while they wait for the next bus.
Around her neck, Lydia wears a thin gold chain adorned only with three interlocking loops. It’s a discreet piece of jewelry, and the only one she wears apart from the filigreed gold band around the fourth finger of her left hand. Sebastián gave her the necklace the first Christmas after Luca was born, and she loved it immediately – the symbolism of it. She’s worn it every day since, and it’s become so much a part of her that she’s woven her mannerisms into it. When she’s bored, she runs the delicate chain back and forth along the pad of her thumb. When she’s nervous, she has a habit of looping the three interlocking circles together onto the tip of her pinky nail, where they make a faint tinkling sound. She doesn’t touch those golden hoops now. Her hand moves absently toward her neck, but already she’s aware of the gesture. Already she’s training herself to disguise old habits. She must become entirely unrecognizable if she hopes to survive. She opens the clasp at the back of her neck and slips Sebastián’s wedding ring from her thumb onto the chain. Then she refastens the clasp around her neck and drops the whole thing inside the collar of her blouse.