The words future well-being pierce Lydia’s heart like a bell. She holds herself very still. El comandante replaces the cap on his pen, closes the cover of his notebook, and leans across it with his hands folded on top.
‘Most of these people are bad guys anyway, young man. It’s important for you to understand that. They’re not innocents. They’re gang members, they’re running drugs. They’re thieves or rapists or murderers, like the norteño president says. Bad hambres.’ He mispronounces the word hombres in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants bad men, inadvertently referred to them as bad hunger instead. It’s a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger. El comandante toes the line. ‘They had to leave where they came from because they got in trouble there, you understand. Good people do not run away.’
Luca opens his mouth, and Lydia watches him consider speaking. With every molecule in her body, she wills him to be silent. Luca closes his mouth.
‘Nevertheless, most of them will be okay,’ el comandante continues. ‘Some of them will be able to pay their own ransom. Like you. Those who can’t are likely to have family in el norte who can help. They will be here only one or two days, they will pay their toll, and they’ll be on their way. Understand? Nothing to worry about.’ He stands up from his chair but remains behind the desk. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to keep this business to yourselves.’
Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, señor.’
‘You needn’t hear about the dreadful things that happen to people who tell tales in Sinaloa.’
She shakes her head again. Who would she tell?
‘Good, then,’ el comandante says. ‘Our business is concluded. Rafa?’ He turns to the guard behind him. ‘See them out and send the next one in.’
Rafa turns from Lydia, which movement underlines her overwhelming hope of deliverance. They are being dismissed. She can hardly believe it. She grips Luca’s hand and stands shakily from her chair. In the corner behind the desk, Rafa opens a metal door Lydia hadn’t noticed before. It’s bolted at the top, but he reaches up and unlatches it. He presses on the bar that opens the door, and a slice of daylight pours in around its perimeter. Lydia moves her body toward that miraculous light.
But Luca doesn’t move, and her arm snags with his fixed weight.
‘Luca, come on,’ she says with a capricious note of hysteria in her voice. She lunges for him, but he dodges her grasp. ‘Luca, what are you doing?’ She grabs his arm, so agitated she could kill him herself.
‘We can’t leave them,’ he says.
Luca’s heart feels like a flapping bird in his chest, like that time a sparrow accidentally flew into their apartment from the balcony and couldn’t find its way out again, and then it beat itself against the glass over and over until Papi caught it in a towel and smuggled it out the door to freedom. Luca’s heart is in a similar terror, so it feels as if the glass of his rib cage might shatter and fall if the bloodied carcass of his heart doesn’t smash itself into dead pulp first.
His mother stares at him in awe. What is he doing? ‘Luca—’
‘No, Mami, they can’t pay,’ he says. ‘They don’t have any money.’
El comandante slumps back into his chair with his elbows on the rests and makes a tent of his fingers. He seems amused by the exchange. Luca turns to face him.
‘What happens to people who can’t pay?’
‘Young man, your loyalty is admirable—’
‘What will happen?’
Something frightful flashes across el comandante’s face, and once again Lydia reaches for Luca. But the man relents. ‘It’s okay, I won’t harm him,’ he says to Lydia. ‘I respect his courage. Please, sit.’
Lydia looks to the door. It had been opened. She had seen the fading daylight beyond, and she’s loath to relinquish that promise of freedom. But there is Luca, back in the chair, more afraid of leaving the sisters than he is of staying longer in this nightmare. Despite everything he’s been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation. If we survive this, Lydia thinks, I shall feel very proud. She shrinks two inches, her whole body collapsing from the lungs inward, and sits down beside her son, careful to keep her face turned away from the guard.
‘Who is he talking about?’ el comandante asks.
‘The two girls,’ Lydia says, ‘with the rainbow wristbands.’
‘Your son is a very impressive young man,’ el comandante says.
It’s deeply unsettling for Lydia to field a compliment from him. ‘The girls have no family to help them,’ she says.
‘They only have us,’ Luca says.
El comandante breathes heavily, bounces the end of his pen lightly across the top of the notebook. ‘Those girls would fetch a price on the open market. Two beauties like that?’ He whistles, then looks again to Luca. ‘But I wish to reward your bravery and fidelity. Very impressive.’ He sits up. Back to Lydia. ‘You have money?’
Lydia hesitates.
El comandante grins. ‘A woman who looks like you, who speaks like you? You have more money, yes?’
Lydia closes her eyes, and in that darkness she sees Soledad and Rebeca as she first encountered them on that overpass outside Huehuetoca, their singsong voices, their legs dangling down. She sees their vivacity and spirit. Her mind also reproduces, in that moment, the white lace, the dark red stain of Yénifer’s quinceañera dress. A sob cuts into her gut but doesn’t rise. Lydia opens her eyes. She nods.
El comandante raises his voice. ‘Rafa, bring the girls in.’ To Lydia, ‘Seventy-five thousand pesos.’
She gapes.
‘Each.’
That sum is almost all the money they have left. He’s demanding more for each sister than he took for Luca and Lydia combined, and she has a sickening moment of understanding that this amount is predetermined. It’s the calculated value of their worth as human capital. If Lydia doesn’t pay, someone else will buy the sisters. And then she also immediately perceives how her own price will skyrocket if that guard is able to recall why he recognizes her. The possibility of that recollection is like a ticking bomb in this box of a room.
Luca studies her face, and for him, she does not waver.
‘We will pay.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
All that’s left of Lydia and Sebastián’s life savings is the paltry sum el comandante returned to Lydia’s wallet after he collected the price for her and Luca. It’s a total of 4,941 pesos, or around $243. In regular life, that kind of money is substantial. It would buy many weeks’ worth of groceries. It would go toward rent or doctors’ bills or putting gas in the Beetle. But now the amount feels negligible. They have nothing. If they get to el norte, they will have to start from scratch. Already they need new shoes; Luca’s are beginning to run thin in the soles, Abuela’s gold lamé sneakers are peeling apart at the toe. The $243 minus some new shoes – it’s not enough. Lydia feels destitute. But thank God they still have her mother’s money in the bank, enough to pay a coyote to help them cross. That’s all she can think about for now.