American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (7 page)

‘Get dressed!’ she calls again, her voice pitching out at an unfamiliar angle.

She looks down at the book in her hand. A passage is highlighted there, the moment when the widowed heroine, Fermina Daza, reeling in the aftermath of her husband’s death, encounters the man, Florentino Ariza, whom she rejected fifty years earlier:

‘Fermina,’ he said, ‘I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.’

Lydia thrusts the book away from her and it somersaults into the tub. The envelope remains in her hand. She considers dropping it, too, and leaving it there, but she needs to know what it says. Her stomach plunges. She pulls the card out of its thick envelope and sees white lilies on the front.
Mi m
á
s sentido p
é
same.
Inside, the handwriting is immediately familiar.

Lydia,

Hay sangre en tus manos tambi
é
n. Lo siento por tu dolor y el m
í
o. Ahora estamos destinados a permanecer eternamente unidos por este pesar. Jam
á
s imagin
é
este cap
í
tulo para nosotros. Pero no te preocupes, mi reina del alma – tu sufrimiento ser
á
breve.

Javier

There is blood on your hands as well. I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief. I never imagined this chapter for us. But do not worry, Queen of my Soul – your suffering will be brief.

She drops the card and it lands in the toilet, where it darkens at once. Lydia’s not sure what she’d been expecting when she opened it. There’s nothing he could’ve written there that would make any difference. No quiet slashing of ink on paper can resuscitate her dead mother, her husband. No apology or explanation can reanimate Y
é
nifer’s brain, pin her soul back into her body. That girl smelled like grapefruit and sugar, and now she’s gone. Lydia beats back a sob using an English word she’s never liked: ‘Fuck!’ It works, so she says it again and again. Perhaps she’d hoped the card might illuminate something. She reads it once more, floating, the ink beginning to bleed, and she’s haunted by the familiarity of the handwriting. What had she missed? How can this be real? She tries, but she can’t force it to make sense, and the effort makes her dizzy.

Only one thing is clear: Javier knows where they are. She doesn’t have time to panic or reflect. She has to get Luca out of there. Now. They have to run. She bangs open the bathroom door and hisses at Luca once more to get dressed. He doesn’t answer, and when she looks up, she sees that he’s already dressed in fresh jeans and his father’s red hat, that he’s sitting on the chair beside the desk, wriggling his feet into his new socks. ‘Oh,
á
ndale,
’ she says. ‘Good.’ But then he reaches out for the tray of food, to cram in a bite before tackling the other sock, and Lydia lunges toward him. She smacks the toast from his hand and it skids to the floor.

‘Mami!’ Luca is shocked.

She only shakes her head. ‘Don’t eat it. Don’t eat any more food.’ Luca is silent. ‘I don’t know if it’s safe.’

She thinks about dragging him into the bathroom and sticking a finger down his throat, but there’s no time. She crams all their belongings into her mother’s overnight bag and the two backpacks. She hasn’t even put on her bra yet. No time. Her hair is wet; it’s leaving a damp ring around the shoulders of her T-shirt. She jams her bare feet into her mother’s quilted sneakers, straps the backpack on herself, and grabs her mother’s bag.

‘You ready?’

Luca nods and picks up the second backpack, the one they bought at Walmart.

‘Super quiet,’ she says. ‘No noise.’

Luca seals his mouth.

Lydia pauses at the door to lean her ear against the wood and listen before she dares to open it. She pins Luca to the wall beside her and then cracks the door. The hallway is empty, the only sound coming from a television in the room across the hall. She takes Luca’s hand and tugs him out, wedging a towel into the door so it won’t even click as it closes. They run silently to the service stairs, and when Lydia hears the ding of the elevator at the other end of the hall, she shoves Luca through the door. Seven flights down, Luca flies in front of her. Lydia’s feet touch every third
or fourth step along the way.

Chapter Six

They emerge from the stairwell into a small parking lot
behind the kitchen and the stink of hot dumpster garbage. Lydia tells Luca they’re going to be fine, but they must be both calm and quick now. They have to keep their heads. There’s a wall of hedges to hide the work of tourism from the tourists, and together they shove through it, out onto a manicured path that winds among the sparkling pools before reaching the beach. Lydia listens all the time for the sounds of pursuit behind them, but so far there’s nothing but the hushy voice of the ocean greeting the shore. The towel hut isn’t open yet, but a man on the pool deck is pushing a cart of clean, folded towels, and he offers one to Lydia, who smiles and slings it around her neck.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and takes one for Luca, too.

On the sand, they take off their shoes and try to make their silhouettes appear like casual morning beachcombers. In minutes, they arrive safely at the adjacent hotel property. They put their shoes back on and walk briskly through the lobby from back to front, discarding the towels on a lounger as they go. They pass potted palms and waiters carrying trays of orange juice, and the aroma of fresh coffee, and Lydia takes two muffins from an unattended tray of food on a stand. When they arrive at the hotel’s front door, there’s a shuttle bus waiting. They get on. Soon they’re driving past the entry of the Hotel Duquesa Imperial, and Lydia can see three black SUVs lurking in the parking lot. She clutches at Sebasti
á
n’s wedding band hanging from the gold chain around her neck, and feels for the three interlocking loops.

She doesn’t know how Javier found them. Or why. Did he mean only to scare the shit out of her? To spike her grief with terror? Or to warn her, to soil the purity of her anguish with his weird, revolting compassion? His motives are messy; Lydia cannot begin to understand them. That highlighted passage he chose – the dead husband, the vulgar proc
lamation of love. Does Javier not remember what happens next? That Fermina Daza is repulsed by the declaration, that she curses his name and throws him out onto the street, that she wishes him dead and orders him never to return? Lydia understands nothing.

For an instant – only an instant – she considers telling the driver to stop. She imagines walking over to those SUVs and knocking on one of the drivers’ windows. She thinks of going to Javier, wherever he is, meeting him outside the confines of the bookstore for the first time. She might embrace him, throw herself on his mercy, demand an explanation. She might beg him just to get it over with. She might punch and kick him, pull the machete from her pant leg, slash his face, slash his throat. And then she looks over at Luca, and it all evaporates. She’s in a stuffy shuttle bus and there’s something sticky on the seat. The ghost of some child’s melted candy. She is here with Luca and she will protect him at all costs. This is the only thing left that matters. Ahead of them, a black SUV rolls slowly across the intersection.

‘Can you take us to the bus depot?’ Lydia asks the driver.

‘I’m not supposed to deviate from my route.’

‘But there are no other passengers, it’s only a few extra blocks. Who’s going to know?’

‘GPS.’ The driver points to a screen strapped onto his dash. ‘There’s a different shuttle that goes to the bus terminal. This one’s for the shopping district. You want to go back to the hotel, you can take the other shuttle.’

‘Please,’ Lydia says. ‘I can pay you.’

In response, the driver brakes and opens the door. Lydia shoots him a hateful look but gathers her things and prompts Luca off the bus in front
of her. It’s too early for shopping, and the streets of the district are deserted. The driver closes the door behind them and rolls away. The boulevard is wide and open. It’s only half a mile’s walk from here to the bus station, but it feels an impossible, exposed distance to cover, like walking across a battlefield without armor or weaponry. She hides her fear well, but Luca can sense it anyway, in the cold slick of his mother’s hand.

Getting to the bus depot feels like some deranged version of the game Crossy Road, where, instead of dodging taxis and trucks and trains, Luca and Mami have to duck and lurch between the possibility of concealed narcos in their tinted SUVs. The ever-present threat of gunfire screams through Luca’s mind like the unexpected train.

‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Mami. ‘If anyone was looking for us, they’d go to the central terminal downtown, right? They wouldn’t expect us to be all the way out here in Diamante.’ Luca doesn’t know about the parcel, but his logic is enough to make Lydia smile for a moment.

‘That’s what I thought, too. Smart kid.’ She tugs the brim of Papi’s red baseball cap lower on Luca’s face. He walks too fast. ‘We have to walk like normal,’ she says. ‘Slow down.’

‘Normal people are sometimes late for a bus.’ Luca’s limbs feel twitchy.

‘There’s always another bus,’ she says.

It’s seven minutes past six in the morning when Mami purchases their one-way tickets to Mexico City, so they have thirteen minutes to kill before the bus leaves. The terminal is a modern structure, mostly glass, and even though the sun isn’t up yet, the sky has begun to lighten, and Luca can make out the shapes of the cars in the parking lot. There’s only one SUV, and it appears to be empty, lights off. But someone could be inside waiting, seat reclined, asleep on the job. Luca studies the SUV while Mami collects her change from the lady behind the counter. It’s Sunday, so the buses back to Mexico City will be crowded with families heading home from their minivacations. Luca and Mami can look like one of those families. There’s a handful of energetic children in the terminal already, chattering and skipping circles around their bleary-eyed, coffee-sipping parents.

Mami herds Luca into the handicapped stall in the ladies’ bathroom and makes him stand on the toilet seat inside. It’s the sort of thing she usually wouldn’t tolerate. Luca doesn’t think anyone in the terminal noticed them, and he feels pretty sure because he was studying the faces, but if there is someone looking for them here, if they do track them first to the bus terminal, then to the women’s bathroom, and finally to the handicapped stall, well, then standing on a toilet with your back
against a wall doesn’t seem like a very effective way to survive. Luca leans his hands down on his knees and tries not to shake. He watches Mami remove her backpack and prop it in the corner before hanging the overnight bag from the hook on the back of the door. She has to dig nearly to the bottom of it to find a pair of socks. They’re still attached by a plastic barb, which Mami snaps before putting them on. He doesn’t know how she does that. Luca always has to cut them with scissors. Mami doesn’t look that strong, but he knows she’s really powerful, because she can always snap that plastic barb like it’s nothing. She digs out a bra, too, and wriggles into it beneath her shirt. Then she zips up Abuela’s gold sneakers and turns her back to Luca so her feet are pointing in the right direction in case anyone looks under the stall. They’re alone in the bathroom, but he speaks to her very quietly anyway, so they can hear if the door opens, if anyone comes in.

‘So we’re going to Colorado?’

Lydia nods, and Luca wraps his arms around her neck.

He leans his chin on her shoulder. ‘Good plan.’

‘No one would ever think of Colorado.’ Lydia stares at the bag hanging in front of them and tries to remember if she ever mentioned Denver to Javier. Why would she have? She’s never been there and hasn’t seen her uncle since she was a kid.

‘Plus, it’s far,’ Luca says.

‘Yes,’ Mami says. ‘Very far away from here.’

In fact, Luca knows with some degree of precision just how far Denver is from Acapulco (almost two thousand miles by car). He knows this because Luca has perfect direction the way some prodigies have perfect pitch. He was born with it, an intrinsic sense of his position on the globe, like a human GPS, pinging his way through the universe. When he sees something on a map, it lodges in his memory forever.

‘I’m going to miss the geography bee,’ he says. He’s been studying for months. In September, his school paid six hundred pesos for him to take the international qualifying exam because his teacher was convinced he would bring home the $10,000 grand prize.

‘I’m sorry,
mijo,
’ Lydia says, kissing his arm.

Luca shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Before yesterday, that geography bee had seemed so important to all of them; now it feels like the most trivial thing in the world, along with everything else on the running to-do list Lydia kept beside the register in the bookshop: Fill out the church paperwork for Luca’s communion. Pay the water bill. Take Abuela to her cardiology appointment. Buy a gift for Y
é
nifer’s
quincea
ñ
era
. What a waste of time it had all been. Lydia feels annoyed that her niece won’t get to see the music box she purchased for her special day. How expensive it was! She realizes, even as this thought occurs to her, how bizarre and awful it is, but she can’t stop it from crashing in. She doesn’t rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.

Luca whispers in her ear, ‘With a population of almost seven hundred thousand, Denver, nicknamed the Mile High City because of its elevation, is located just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ Reciting from the memory of flash cards. ‘It is the state capital of Colorado and one quarter of its population claims Mexican heritage.’

Lydia squeezes his arm, reaches up, and runs a hand through his black hair. The summer before last, when Luca’s enduring interest in maps began to shift from fascination to obsession, Lydia kept him busy at the bookstore with guidebooks and atlases. It seems impossible that back then, just so recently, Acapulco was bright with tourists and music and the shops and the sea. Rock pigeons strutted across the sand. Vast foreign cruise ships disgorged their sneakered passengers onto the streets, their pockets fat with dollars, their skin glistening from coconut-scented sunscreen. The dollars filled the bars and restaurants. In Lydia’s bookshop, they filled the register. Those tourists bought the guidebooks and atlases, along with serious novels and frivolous novels and souvenir key chains and tiny tubes of sand corked with tiny stoppers that Lydia kept in a big fishbowl beside the register. And,
ay, Dios m
í
o,
those tourists couldn’t get enough of Luca. Lydia set him up like a puppet on a stool, and he’d tell them, in precise English, about the places where they came from. He was six years old. A wunderkind.

‘With a population of six hundred and forty thousand, Portland is located at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and is the largest city in the state of Oregon. The city was incorporated in 1851, sixty-five years after its eastern namesake in coastal Maine.’

Henry from Portland, Oregon, stood in front of Luca with his mouth hanging open. ‘Marge, come here, you’ve gotta see this! Do it again.’ Marge joined her husband, and Luca repeated his spiel. ‘Incredible. Kid, you are just incredible. Marge, give the kid some money.’

‘Did you make all that up?’ Marge asked skeptically, digging in her purse for some money regardless.

‘Nah, he knew the rivers,’ Henry defended him. ‘How could he make that up?’

‘It’s real,’ Luca said. ‘I just remember things. Especially about maps
and places.’

‘Well, Henry’s right, it’s incredible.’ Marge gave him a dollar. ‘And in perfect English! Where did you learn such perfect English?’

‘Acapulco,’ Luca said simply. ‘And YouTube.’

Lydia watched in silence and felt obscenely proud. Smug, even. Her boy was perfect – so smart and accomplished, so
guapo
and happy. She’d been teaching him English for almost as long as he’d been speaking Spanish. It was a skill that she knew would serve him well, growing up in a tourist town. But he quickly outstripped her knowledge of the language, and then they proceeded to learn together, mostly on her phone or computer. YouTube lessons, Rosetta Stone, soap operas. They often spoke English to each other when Sebasti
á
n wasn’t around, or when they pretended to have a secret in front of him. Sometimes they tried out slang on each other. She called Luca
dude
and he called her
shorty
. Marge and Henry laughed at Luca’s pragmatic charm and then gathered their friends from the cruise ship and returned to watch him perform. They offered him a dollar for every city he could tell them about. He made thirty-seven dollars that day and could’ve kept going, except the tourists had to get back to their ship.

So, yes, this geography bee has been almost two years coming. But Lydia cannot think of details right now, the annulled logistics of her life. Her brain can’t hold them. Even the biggest, most fundamental facts seem impossible to comprehend. Outside the stall, the bathroom door swings open. There’s no squeak, but they can tell someone has come in because suddenly the sounds beyond the door are temporarily louder, and then softer again as the door swings shut. They both hold their breath. Luca is still draped over Mami’s back, and she grips his arms where they encircle her neck. The pads of his fingers turn yellow as they dig into the bones of Mami’s wrist. She doesn’t move. He squeezes his eyes shut. But soon there’s the sound of the door latching on the neighboring stall. An older woman loudly clearing her throat. Luca can feel Mami let go of her breath like the air leaving a deflated balloon. He puts his lips against her neck.