Lydia peers through the darkness at the sisters off the side of the road. Her eyes have adjusted to the light so she can make out their faces but can’t read their expressions.
‘How far is it to town?’ Soledad asks.
‘Not far,’ the doctor says. ‘Another two or three miles. A half hour’s walk will get you to the edge of the city.’
‘What city is it?’ This is Luca. The word city has excited him, as it indicates a place larger than he expected.
‘Navolato,’ the doctor says. ‘About twenty miles west of Culiacán.’
Luca closes his eyes to look at the map in his mind. He can see Navolato there, a small dot next to Culiacán’s large dot, but he hasn’t stored any information about this place. Twenty miles, Lydia thinks. How in God’s name will we get back to the train? The sisters are in no condition to walk much farther.
‘Are there migrant services in Navolato?’ Lydia asks.
‘No,’ the man says. ‘I don’t think so. But there’s a church. They always help.’
‘What about in Culiacán? Are there migrant services there?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’
Lydia allows a big gust of a breath to billow out of her. The surge of stunned gratitude she experienced when all four of them emerged from that warehouse, alive and together, is still with her, but it’s beginning to fade behind exhaustion and lingering fear.
‘Are you hungry?’ the man asks.
‘Yes,’ Luca says.
‘Do you want a ride?’
Again, Lydia looks to the sisters.
‘Nope,’ Soledad says.
Lydia’s own disappointment, her eagerness to trust this man, surprises her, but she wants trace evidence of goodness in the world. She needs a glimmer. She can see only the outline of the man’s body ahead, lit by the peripheral glow of his car, the headlights pointing the opposite direction behind him.
‘Thank you anyway,’ Lydia says.
She ventures a few steps toward him, and Luca trots ahead. The jug of water sits near the back bumper, close to the man’s feet. Luca pries the cap off the jug and lifts it, but it’s too heavy for him and it sloshes awkwardly. The man helps. He holds the jug steady while Luca drinks and drinks. Luca turns his face away to breathe before going back for another long drink. Lydia stands behind him and waits for him to finish. She can hear the sisters approaching behind her, but they hang back in the shadows.
‘Listen, I don’t want to press you,’ the doctor says. ‘But it’s not safe for you to be out on this road at night. There’s a lot of activity in this area. There have been some terrible stories. Maybe you already know.’
Soledad snorts again, but this time it’s a solitary sound. She can no longer locate what was funny about it before. Concern creases the doctor’s face. A miniflashlight dangles from his key chain, and this he clicks on. He turns the small beam toward the girls’ legs to confirm what he thought he could see or smell there in the darkness: a significant amount of blood. And not only on Rebeca’s jeans, Lydia can see now. Soledad’s are covered as well, and the blood there isn’t dry. Luca is still drinking. The doctor clicks off the flashlight.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Won’t you let me help you?’
Soledad crosses her arms. Rebeca makes her jaw into the shape of a square. It’s Luca who speaks up.
‘How do we know you’re really a doctor?’
‘Ah.’ The man puts a finger in the air, then retrieves a wallet from his back pocket. There’s an identification card there. The man’s picture. It says ‘Doctor Ricardo Montañero-Alcán’. Luca breathes on it before handing it back.
‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Soledad observes. ‘You can be a doctor and still be a narco, too. You can be a doctor, a teacher, a priest. You can be a federal police officer and still murder people.’
The doctor nods, slipping the wallet back into the pocket of his jeans. ‘It’s true,’ he concedes.
‘And why do you want to help us anyway?’ Soledad asks.
The man touches the gold crucifix around his neck. ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.’
Lydia automatically blesses herself. ‘A stranger and you welcomed me.’ She completes the line of scripture, passing the water jug to Rebeca, who drinks only a little before passing it to Soledad.
‘We should go with him,’ Luca declares.
The man lets Soledad scroll through his phone first. He shows her his Facebook page, photographs of his wife and children. She’s so hungry, so depleted. She relents.
The doctor wants to take them to his clinic, but they refuse, so he drives them into the city, to a poorly whitewashed two-story building instead, with a shop on the bottom floor and bars on the windows above. Large red letters proclaim the building to be the Techorojo Motel. The shop beneath has a red awning and an open-air counter where two young women wear smock-aprons and eye the approaching patrons with considerable suspicion. Behind them are shiny tinfoil snacks and bottled soft drinks in neon colors. There’s also a grill, the aroma of cooking meat, and the shallow sound of a cheap radio playing música norteña, heavy on the accordion. The doctor buys them food and pays for their room.
‘If you want a ride to Culiacán tomorrow, I can come back in the morning,’ he says, and then he’s gone before they even have time to thank him.
After they’ve eaten and locked themselves inside their tiny room, after they’ve managed to lug the wide, heavy nightstand across the carpet and wedge it beneath the doorknob for extra security, Lydia collects everyone’s pants. The room does not have a bathroom, but there is, oddly, a toilet in one corner, and a yellow sink beside it. The water that emerges from the faucet of that sink is the color of sand, but Lydia doesn’t mind because the discoloration serves to camouflage the colors she has to wash out of those jeans. Luca’s, Rebeca’s, and Soledad’s. She uses the cracked bar of soap in the dish, and she scrubs and scrubs until finally the water she wrings from the denim returns to its original murky dun color.
By the time she’s finished, Luca is snoring softly on one of the room’s two single beds, and the sisters, too, are already asleep, curled up together. Soledad cradles her sister’s head in her arms, and their hair is fanned out in one twisted, black wave across their shared pillow. Lydia rummages through her pack for her toothbrush, and rations a smear of paste onto the bristles. She considers the brown water from the tap before sticking the toothbrush under there and wetting it. At home, there was a whole routine before she got into bed. It could take twenty minutes some nights. Cold cream, toner, moisturizer, floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, lip balm. Some nights tweezers, too, or clippers or nail files. Of course, the occasional exfoliant or mask. Hand cream. Fluffy socks if her feet were chilly. Sebastián would whisper-call from the bedroom, trying not to wake Luca in his impatience, ‘Madre de Dios, wife, the Eiffel Tower was built faster!’ But when she was finished, he’d always fold back the covers to invite her in. He’d drape them over her when she was settled, along with the top half of himself. His breath was clean when he kissed her.