Lydia feels a tremendous sense of urgency about getting out of Guadalajara, and it’s not only because of Lorenzo. This city is a Venus flytrap, and she sees evidence all around as they rush through the indigo predawn streets. Migrants come here with momentum, on their way to el norte, and they may find a welcome, a slice of comfort, some relative safety away from the rails, so they stay an extra day to catch their breath. Then three more. Then a hundred. Look there, sleeping stretched out on a piece of cardboard in a disused corner of a parking lot, a shoeless mother and toddler in dirty clothing. There, with his eyes glazed and a brown paper bag of God-knows-what clutched tightly in his fist, a skinny teenage boy, track-marked and bruised. There, there, and there, so many young girls tottering on heels in shadowy places, the whites of their eyes glowing brightly against the gloom. Lydia hustles Luca and the sisters away from the shelter and toward the tracks while the light around them grows toward sunrise.
For Soledad and Rebeca, on the other hand, there’s some increased measure of reluctance about this leg of their journey, because they learned from a woman at the shelter last night that they will soon cross into the state of Sinaloa, a place that’s famous among migrants for two things: its expertise at disappearing girls and the vigor of its cartel. Still, there’s no way to get to el norte without passing through someplace that’s famous for those things, and they chose the Pacific Route specifically because it’s the most secure. So this is perhaps the most dangerous leg of the safest route, and in any case, the sooner they set out, the sooner they’ll be past it. Soledad also has a new, increased sense of determination: what happened to Papi will not have been in vain. She is desperate to get to el norte now, to make a life there that is good and golden, a life that will honor her family’s sacrifices. So there’s an urgent sense of disquiet among them as they move northwest along the tracks, listening all the time for the hopeful sound of a train at their backs. Lydia looks over her shoulder compulsively now, and when at length the train approaches, they board easily, without even much forethought or communication. That fact startles Lydia when she reflects on it.
‘We didn’t even think about it,’ she says to Soledad, once she has Luca safely belted onto the grating.
‘We’re becoming professionals,’ Soledad answers.
But Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, we’re becoming apathetic.’
Soledad frowns. ‘It’s natural to get used to it, though, right? We adapt.’
Lydia touches a thick strand of Luca’s hair that sticks out from beneath his father’s baseball cap. It’s too long, this hair. She coils one of the thick black curls around her finger, and in the tenderness of that act, she’s momentarily transported back to her mother’s garden. Leaning over Sebastián’s lifeless body, the handle of the bent spatula digging into her knee. She had touched her husband’s forehead, and the coarseness of his hair, still growing from its follicles, had tickled her wrist. Sebastián used shampoo with a scent of mint. A solitary sob rises up from Lydia’s bones and is lost in the rumble of the train beneath her. She turns her eyes from Luca and looks at Soledad.
‘From now on, when we board, each time we board, I will remind you to be terrified,’ she says. ‘And you remind me, too: this is not normal.’
‘This is not normal.’ Soledad nods.
The sky begins to brighten above them, and a ribbon of pale orange expands on the horizon, but it’s still twilight where the tracks meet the earth. There’s a handful of other migrants on top of the train, but it’s not nearly as crowded as yesterday, and although that fact might be explained by the earliness of the hour, it serves to underscore Lydia’s sense that Guadalajara has siphoned off some of their numbers. She feels her chest opening with something like relief as the train moves away from the city. A half hour north, the landscape is commandeered by miles of squat, spiky plants. They stretch into the distance along both sides of the tracks, their gray-green fronds like a million waving hands, and the train slows slightly at the outskirts of a town where the buildings are quaint and well kept. Lydia notes the sweet, sticky aroma of fermenting agave plants. Tequila. On the car behind them, two migrants climb down a side ladder and wait for a safe place to jump off. Luca tries to watch them, but the train turns, and the men disappear, and Luca has to content himself without proof that they landed safely. He has to create that truth with only the determination of his mind.
The train thunders on toward Tepic, toward Acaponeta, toward El Rosario. For a long time then, they pass nothing at all. Just grass and dirt and trees and sky. The occasional building, a rare cow. It’s pastoral, beautiful, and the morning air is fresh. Lydia feels a treacherous pang of smothered delight, a bewilderment of migrant as fleeting tourist, as if they’re on vacation looking out across some exotic landscape. It’s brief.
Despite the growing distance between herself and Lorenzo, the pique of his presence remains. It’s alarming that he found them so easily, so accidentally. He hadn’t even been looking. But Javier is looking, with all his considerable resources, with all his connections. Lydia turns her face to the south, ridiculously, as if she’ll see him standing there atop the train. As if he’ll push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and approach her. It won’t happen like that, she knows. When he comes for them, it won’t be him, wearing a smile and a cardigan, clutching a volume of poetry to his chest. It will be some faceless assassin, some boy in a hoodie, cold in the dispatch of her death. El sicario won’t feel anything when he delivers the bullet that murders her son. Lydia might be a hamster on a wheel. She knows their executioner might already be on this train, but she wills it to move faster regardless, that they might outrun that selfie of Lydia with Javier, as it pings its way from phone to phone, all the way across Mexico. Lydia shrinks between the sisters. She slips her finger inside Sebastián’s ring.
At a tiny village surrounded by mango orchards, La Bestia crosses without notice into Sinaloa. Soledad is stretched out, her pack tucked beneath her as a pillow and her fingers wrapped into the grating. Her face looks awash in a sickly gray.
‘How are you feeling?’ Lydia asks. The vocabulary of her former life is inadequate now, but it’s all she has.
Soledad opens her mouth, but then closes it again without answering and shakes her head.
‘When I was pregnant with Luca, olives helped with the nausea,’ she says quietly. Then her mind does a litany of counterarguments. When I was pregnant with Luca, I was not fifteen years old. When I was pregnant with Luca, I did not have to travel thousands of miles on top of a freight train. When I was pregnant with Luca, he was not conceived by rape.
‘Olives?’ Soledad grimaces, readjusts her chin on her backpack, and closes her eyes, but it’s no use. After two deep breaths, she lunges for the side of the train and vomits over the edge.
Rebeca watches, her eyes wide with worry. Then she hands her pack to Luca and crawls across to her sister. She rubs the small of Soledad’s back and waits for the retching to subside.