‘Thank you,’ Lydia says. ‘It was my niece’s quinceañera. Yénifer.’
Paola crumples a tissue from the box and holds it beneath her nose. Lydia takes one, too. Then they look each other in the eye. Lydia whispers.
‘Do you have children?’
Paola nods. ‘Three.’
‘I’m afraid we’re going to die. This money is the only way to save my son.’
Paola pushes her rolling chair back from the desk. ‘Wait here,’ she says.
She’s gone for what feels like a very long time, and when she returns, she’s carrying a folder stacked with documents. She sits back into the chair, and Lydia straightens her posture. Paola opens the folder and, using the mouse, clicks the computer monitor to life. ‘Do you have any identification?’
‘Yes.’ Lydia digs into her backpack and finds her voter ID card. She hands it to Paola, who studies it for a moment, looks more closely at Lydia’s face, and then sets it on the folder.
‘Bank card?’
‘Yes.’ She produces this as well.
‘Are you a custodian on your mother’s account?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t have a death certificate for her, I’m sure,’ Paola says.
‘No.’
‘Or a copy of her will?’
‘No.’ Lydia tries not to panic. Surely this woman is going to try to help her. She understands. She knows that Lydia has none of these documents, has no way of obtaining any of these documents without returning to Guerrero and getting herself killed. But what if it’s simply impossible? What if Paola is trying to help Lydia find a loophole, but all she’s really doing is confirming the inevitable bad news that Lydia has no legal right to this money? Lydia tries to breathe deeply, but everything shakes.
‘What is your line of work?’ Paola asks.
‘I own a bookstore in Acapulco. Or I did. I guess I still do.’
Paola types into the computer. ‘Name of the business?’
‘Palabras y Páginas.’
She types some more, and then twists the monitor so Lydia can see. She’s not filling in forms, Lydia realizes. She’s googling her. Verifying her story. Making sure this is not a con job. ‘This is you?’
She’s opened the website Lydia’s been meaning to update. There is her picture on the ‘contact’ page. She’s wearing black leggings and an oversize sweater. It’s an outfit she’ll never wear again. It’s in her dirty clothes hamper in Acapulco. Lydia’s unremarkable happiness in the photograph takes her breath away, and a sob cuts loose into the cubicle. Lydia wishes the walls stretched all the way to the ceiling. Her eyes are two lines, her mouth, a line. She nods her head at Paola, who reaches across the desk and squeezes Lydia’s hand. Then she stands and steps around the desk. She removes Lydia’s backpack from the chair and sits down beside her.
‘My nephew disappeared last August,’ Paola whispers. ‘He was missing for three days. When they found him, his head…’ She pauses for a long moment, so Lydia thinks she might not continue. But she’s only gathering strength. ‘His head was separated from his body.’ Her hand trembles in Lydia’s. They squeeze each other tightly. ‘He was a beautiful boy,’ she says.
And now it’s Lydia’s turn to experience that empathy-paralysis. The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola’s murdered nephew? But there it is – an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met. For the innumerable griefs of all those stolen boys, stretching from family to family like one of Luca’s connect-the-dots. It’s so big, the pain. It’s exponential. Each violent death amplifies itself a hundred times, a thousand times. Everyone in this bank knows some small or large portion of that grief. Everyone in Nogales. Everyone who lives in a place that’s been carved up into plazas and parceled out for governance by men like Javier. For what?
Lydia lets go. All the torrent of emotion she’s been corralling for weeks, it all tries to squeeze through at once. She curls into a tight ball in the wooden chair and she sobs quietly, and her body is a knot of grief, and Paola is a stranger, but her hands on Lydia’s back are the hands of God. They are Sebastián’s and Yemi’s and Yénifer’s. They are her mother’s hands. Lydia weeps into Paola’s lap, and Paola weeps with her. They weep for themselves and for each other. And when they’re finished, they clean themselves up using only the Kleenex on Paola’s desk.
Paola rubs Lydia’s knee roughly and then honks her nose into a tissue. She tosses it like a three-pointer into the wastebasket on the far side of the little cubicle. And then, ‘I might lose my job,’ she says quietly. ‘But I will get you that money.’
Lydia’s head pounds. She closes her eyes in grateful disbelief. The aftermath is like a jackhammer in her sinuses.
It takes a few minutes, but soon there’s an envelope fat with cash, and then Paola produces her own purse from a locked drawer in the bottom of her filing cabinet, and hands Lydia an extra 500-peso note. ‘For your son,’ she says.
Lydia hugs her, and there’s no way to thank her. It’s impossible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The apartment is weirdly nice, if impersonal and sparsely furnished. It’s the lower level of a house that’s built into a hill, so it’s half a flight down from the street. It has four large rooms: a living room (with two black leather couches, a flat-screen television, and some grim artwork), a kitchen (whose refrigerator contains only a jar of mayonnaise and two eggs), and the two bedrooms (which are entirely empty, save a lone wire hanger on the tile floor in one, and an aerosol can of Raid on the high windowsill in the other). At the sleek kitchen counter, Lydia hands over their money. The price El Chacal demanded was $11,000. She gives it to him half in pesos and half in dollars because the bank didn’t have enough cash to give her all one currency. The two stacks of bills she hands him include all the money from her mother’s account, the 500-peso note Paola gave her, and every penny she had left in her wallet. The exchange rate has been dismal, so the total sum of her money is roughly $10,628. A few weeks ago, when the peso was stronger, it would’ve been enough. Today, she’s $372 short. The coyote counts the money, works out the exchange on his cell phone, and when he realizes she’s short, pushes the cash back at her, shaking his head.
‘No es suficiente.’
‘But we’re only a little short. Maybe I can pay you when we get to the other side. When I get a job, I can make up the difference.’
‘That’s not how it works.’
It’s inconceivable that it might come down to this. $372.
‘We had more, but we got robbed on the way.’ She hears the desperation in her voice.
‘Everyone gets robbed on the way,’ he says, unmoved.
‘No,’ Soledad says. ‘She paid to ransom us.’
‘She saved our lives with that money.’ Rebeca turns to her sister. ‘We can ask César. We have to.’
Soledad looks worried about asking their cousin for even more money, but she nods. There’s a note of hysteria in the room, hopping from face to face. Only the coyote is immune to it.
‘We won’t be leaving for at least a day or two,’ he says. ‘You can stay here with your son. You come up with the cash before then, you can come.’
Two days, Lydia thinks. They’d lived frugally in Acapulco, never touching their savings, taking a packed lunch to work most days, buying new clothes only when the old ones could no longer be repaired. The rare dinner out, an occasional movie. This is how they splurged. For their anniversary last year, Sebastián bought her a vial of lavender oil, so she could put a drop on her pillow each night before bed. What a luxury that had been! But when she thinks now of their small, sunny two-bedroom apartment, filled with shoes and books gathering dust, its kitchen pantry stocked with uneaten maize, dry beans, and cereal, the linens folded in the hall closet, two bubble-shaped wineglasses drying in the rack beside the sink, it all feels like extravagance. She has nothing now. What can she sell? How can she possibly get $400 in two days? Her mind searches for people she can ask for money. Dead. All dead. If she had her uncle’s number in Denver she might call. She thinks wildly, shamefully, of her body. How much could she get for sex? It’s sickening and obscene, and she’s grateful when she manages to discard the thought without real analysis. She will find a way.