‘Claro.’
The sisters paid only four each. ‘But I thought—’
The coyote intercepts her argument. ‘It’s not a negotiation. I have enough pollitos to cross without you. I don’t need the money. If you want to come, that is the price.’
Lydia closes her mouth. She’s short. She doesn’t know exactly how short, but they don’t have enough. Her stomach drops, and for the first time in days, she feels like she’s going to cry. The flare of her nostrils, the swamp of fluid into her sinuses, it’s almost a relief. She wasn’t sure she was still capable of crying.
‘How much is that in pesos?’ Beto removes the wad of cash from his pocket, and is flicking through it, counting.
The coyote pushes Beto’s hands down out of sight. ‘Put it away,’ he says. ‘You trying to get killed or just robbed?’ Beto stuffs the money back into his pocket while the coyote looks around to see if anyone’s watching them. ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this, the first thing is, you have to not be an idiot, okay?’
Beto looks sheepish and doesn’t clown. ‘Okay,’ he says with genuine remorse. ‘Sorry.’
The coyote nods. ‘Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it, right?’
Beto nods again.
‘You don’t even piss or sneeze without my permission. And for God’s sake, you don’t ball out with a wad of money and start counting it in the middle of the street.’
‘Okay.’
El Chacal returns his attention to Soledad. ‘It’s going to be tight quarters in the apartment with the extra people, but it’s only a couple days.’
‘Apartment?’ she asks. She’s taken her backpack off to drink from her water bottle. Luca and Beto collect their things.
‘Yeah, a place I use for staging. You’ll be there a day or two until the others arrive.’ He begins to walk, and Lydia grabs her backpack to fall in step behind him.
‘I need to go to a bank first,’ she says.
He turns and looks at her, eyebrows up. ‘A bank?’ he says, as if she’s requested they stop by the moon for a moment.
‘Yes. To get your money,’ she says.
‘A bank!’ El Chacal says again. ‘Maybe I should’ve charged you more!’ He laughs when he says this, and although Lydia is cheered by his unexpected congeniality, by his quickness to laugh, she can’t manage to join him.
Lydia is relieved to find a branch of her mother’s bank nearby, and she leaves Luca outside with the sisters. The building looks freshly whitewashed, and it makes her aware of how worn-looking and dirty she is. She pauses to check her reflection in the window. She’s been wearing the same powder-blue, button-up blouse for three days. Her armpits feel damp, and her hair is a mess. She hopes she smells okay; she can’t tell anymore. Lydia never wore makeup when she was younger, but since she turned thirty, she’s taken extra care with a bit of powder most mornings, a light dusting to cover the lines across her forehead. At work, she wore a light coat of mascara and a slick of nude lip gloss. She washed her hair every second day, and usually wore it in a ponytail when she was stocking the shelves. The woman in the window looks nothing like that recent Lydia. This woman is thinner and darker, with ropes of muscles in her neck and arms. This unshowered woman has dark circles beneath her eyes and a grim visage. She wishes for the armor of her small makeup pouch at home, hanging by its drawstring from a wooden hook in the family bathroom, but the bewilderment is almost comforting; perhaps no one would recognize her from Javier’s photograph after all. She’d like to take off the floppy hat, too, and stuff it into her backpack, because she feels ridiculous, like she’s going to church in her bathing suit. But even with the changes to her appearance, she’d feel too conspicuous without it. Enough wishing. There’s a security camera mounted on a bracket above her, and Lydia doesn’t want to be on it. She lowers her face beneath the hat as she opens the door of the bank, and steps inside.
In the fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned vestibule, Lydia’s arms immediately come up in goose bumps. Her body has become unused to electric comforts. She rubs both arms to warm herself, removes her mother’s bank card from the purse, and checks the account balance again at the ATM. It’s still all there, still untouched, 212,871 pesos. Lydia blows air through her parted lips. There’s a withdrawal limit of 6,000 pesos per day, and Lydia has delayed this moment for many reasons, not least of which is that she’s not sure how she’ll get her hands on the money without the required documentation. She knew it was safer to leave the money in the bank while they traveled anyway. But it’s also true that delaying the withdrawal was easier for Lydia, who isn’t ready to ratify the awful truth that her mother is really gone. She knows it will feel like stealing her mother’s money. She wants it to feel that way. Because Lydia has not been able to grieve, there’s still some significant way in which it feels like only she and Luca have gone, that the rest of their family is still intact and happy, living their lives as usual in Acapulco. She imagines Sebastián brushing past her hanging makeup pouch in the bathroom each morning, damp from the shower, his bare body wrapped in the blue towel. Lydia wishes she could further delay pulling the plug on that artifice.
But the existence of this electronic money is a miracle. A one-shot parachute. She writes her mother’s name in a binder on the counter, and then waits in a chair until the branch manager calls her into a private cubicle. Lydia sits, setting her backpack on the empty chair beside her. It’s a woman who sits in the chair facing her, so that feels like a bit of luck. The woman wears a navy blazer and has a single streak of gray in her hair. Her face is kind. Lydia studies the woman’s features for a moment and makes a snap decision. She will tell her everything. All of it. She will throw herself on the mercy of this stranger’s kind face.
It’s only the third time Lydia has told her story. The first was to Carlos in the office above the church in Chilpancingo and the second was to the nun, Hermana Cecilia, at the first Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca. Both times, the telling had taken a toll on Lydia, but both times, she’d received in return something that felt like salvation.
‘What can I do for you today?’ the branch manager asks, folding her hands in front of her on the desk. She doesn’t lean away, or eye the backpack suspiciously. She is gracious, and her name is Paola, according to her square, brown name tag.
‘I—’ Lydia begins, but then her nostrils flare and all the words catch in her throat. Lydia presses her eyes closed once, slowly, and begins again. ‘I need to close my mother’s account.’
‘Okay,’ Paola says. ‘I can help you with that. Is your mother . . . can she come with you to do that, or . . .’
‘She’s deceased,’ Lydia says.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Paola says this not unkindly, but mechanically, and only because it’s the thing people say.