They must avoid drawing the attention of the bus drivers, who’ve been known to act as halcones, lookouts for the cartel. Lydia understands that her appearance as a moderately attractive but not beautiful woman of indeterminate age, traveling the city with an unremarkable-looking boy, can provide a kind of natural camouflage if she takes care to promote the impression that they’re simply out for a day’s shopping or a visit to friends across the city. Indeed, Luca and Lydia could easily change places with many of their fellow passengers, which Lydia thinks of as truly absurd – that the people around them cannot see plainly what abomination they’ve just endured. It feels as evident to Lydia as if she were carrying a flashing neon sign. She fights at every moment against the scream that pulses inside her like a living thing. It stretches and kicks in her gut like Luca did when he was a baby in there. With tremendous self-control, she strangles and suppresses it.
When a plan finally does begin to emerge from the violent fog of chaos in her mind, Lydia feels uncertain whether it’s a good one, but she commits herself to it because she has no other. At a quarter to four o’clock, just before closing time in Playa Caletilla, Lydia and Luca disembark from the bus, go into an unfamiliar branch of their bank, and wait in line. Lydia turns on her cell phone to check her balance, and then powers it all the way off again before filling out a withdrawal slip for almost the full amount: 219,803 pesos, or about $12,500, almost all of it an inheritance from Sebastián’s godfather, who’d owned a bottling company, and who’d never had children of his own. She asks for the money in large bills.
A few minutes later, Luca and Lydia are back on the bus, their life savings in cash stuffed into three envelopes at the bottom of Abuela’s overnight bag. Three buses and more than an hour later, they get out at the Walmart in Diamante. They buy a backpack for Luca, two packets of underwear, two pairs of jeans, two packets of three plain white T-shirts, socks, two hooded sweatshirts, two warm jackets, two more toothbrushes, disposable wipes, Band-Aids, sunscreen, Blistex, a first aid kit, two canteens, two flashlights, some batteries, and a map of Mexico. Lydia takes a long time selecting a machete at the counter in the home goods department, eventually choosing a small one with a retractable blade and a tidy black holster she can strap to her leg. It’s not a gun, but it’s better than nothing. They pay in cash, and then walk beneath the highway overpass toward the beach hotels, Luca wearing Papi’s baseball cap and Lydia not touching her gold necklace. She watches everyone as they walk, other pedestrians, drivers in passing cars, even skinny boys on their skateboards, because she knows halcones are everywhere. They hurry on. Lydia chooses the Hotel Duquesa Imperial because of its size. It’s big enough to provide a measure of anonymity, but not new enough to attract much in the way of trendy social attention. She requests a room facing the street and pays, again, in cash.
‘And now I just need a credit card on file for incidentals,’ the desk clerk says as he tucks two card keys into a paper sleeve.
Lydia looks at the keys and considers snatching them, bolting for the elevator. Then she opens the overnight bag and pretends to rummage for her credit card. ‘Shoot, I must have left it in the car,’ she says. ‘How much is the hold?’
‘Four thousand pesos.’ He gives her a clinical smile. ‘Fully refundable, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Lydia says. She props the overnight bag up on her knee and flips open one of the envelopes. She withdraws the 4,000 pesos without taking the envelope out of the bag. ‘Cash is okay?’
‘Oh.’ The clerk looks mildly alarmed and darts his eyes toward his manager, who’s busy with another customer.
‘Cash is fine,’ the manager says without looking up from his task.
The clerk nods at Lydia, who presses the four pink bills into his hand. He puts them into an envelope and seals it.
‘And your name, please?’ His black pen hovers over the front of the envelope.
Lydia hesitates for a moment. ‘Fermina Daza,’ she says, the first name that comes to mind.
He hands her the room key. ‘Enjoy your stay, Ms Daza.’
The ride in the elevator to the tenth floor feels like the longest minute and a half of Luca’s life. His feet hurt, his back hurts, his neck hurts, and he still hasn’t cried. A family gets on at the fourth floor and then realizes the elevator is going up, so they get off again. The parents are laughing with each other, holding hands while their kids bicker. The boy looks at Luca and sticks his tongue out as the elevator doors close. Luca knows by instinct and by Mami’s subtle cues that he must behave as if everything’s normal, and he’s managed that behemoth task so far. But there’s an elegant older woman in the elevator, too, and she’s admiring Mami’s quilted gold shoes. Abuela’s shoes. Luca blinks rapidly.
‘How beautiful, your shoes – so unusual,’ the woman says, touching Lydia lightly on the arm. ‘Where did you buy them?’
Lydia looks down at her feet instead of turning to engage with the woman. ‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ she says. ‘They’re so old.’ And then she stabs the ten button repeatedly with her finger, which doesn’t speed up the elevator but does have the intended effect of silencing any further attempts at conversation. The woman gets off on the sixth floor, and after she does so, Mami hits numbers fourteen, eighteen, and nineteen as well. They get off at ten and walk three flights down to the seventh floor.
A surprising thing happens to Luca after Mami finally opens the door of their hotel room with her card key, after she looks both ways up and down the carpeted corridor and ushers him quickly inside, after she dead-bolts and chain-locks the door, dragging the desk chair across the tiled floor and wedging it beneath the doorknob. The surprising thing that happens to him is: nothing. The cloudburst of anguish he’s been struggling against does not come. Neither does it go. It remains there, pent up like a held breath, hovering just on the periphery of his mind. He has the sense that, were he to turn his head, were he to poke at the globular nightmare ever so gently with his finger, it would unleash a torrent so colossal he would be swept away forever. Luca takes care to hold himself quite still. Then he kicks off his shoes and climbs up on the edge of the lone bed. A towel has been placed there, folded into the shape of a swan, which Luca takes by the long neck and thrashes to the floor. He clutches the remote control like it’s a life preserver and clicks the television on.
Mami moves their Walmart bags, backpacks, and Abuela’s overnight bag to the small table, and dumps everything out. She begins removing tags, organizing items into piles, and then quite suddenly she sits down hard in one of the chairs and doesn’t move for at least ten minutes. Luca doesn’t look at her. He glues his eyes to Nickelodeon, turns Henry Danger up loud. When at last she begins to move again, Mami comes to him and kisses his forehead roughly. She crosses the room and slides open the door to the balcony. She doubts there’s any amount of fresh air that could succeed in clearing her head, but she has to try. She leaves it open and steps outside.