‘How long have you been gone?’
‘Almost three weeks,’ Marisol says. ‘But I was in a detention center for more than two months before that.’ She shakes her head and presses her lips together in a gesture Lydia recognizes. It’s the one when you’re resolute about keeping your shit together despite the fact that your voice is quivering, and your chest feels cleaved with sorrow. Luca doesn’t seem to be listening, but Lydia knows better. He’s always listening now, walking a few steps ahead of them and watching the cars come and go.
‘What happened?’ Lydia asks.
Marisol takes a big breath before answering. ‘We went legally, when América was only four years old. My husband was an engineer – he had work there, so we got visas. And then Daisy was born, and years and years went by, you don’t even notice the time going by.’
Lydia finds herself instinctively drawing close to Marisol as they walk, up and down the sunny hillside streets, around corners, and through quiet intersections. Luca strides heavily in his new boots.
‘Then five years ago, Rogelio was killed, my husband was killed.’ Marisol blesses herself and Lydia gasps involuntarily.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Lydia says.
Marisol nods. ‘It was very sudden. A car accident as he was returning home from work.’
Something treacherous and unkind lurches up in Lydia – a jealousy almost, of that kind of widowing. A normal, ungruesome death. But then she follows it: Rogelio is no less dead than Sebastián. By the time she squeezes Marisol’s arm, her compassion is genuine again.
‘Our visas lapsed when he died. We were supposed to return home to Oaxaca. Only Daisy was permitted to stay because she’s a citizen.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ Lydia says. ‘She’s how old?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Ay.’ She’s heard the stories, of course. But it’s different talking to a mother who’s actually living it. Lydia can’t imagine being separated from Luca, on top of all the other griefs. He’s there, walking just ahead of them, but Lydia has to fight the urge to lunge for him, to crush him to her chest.
Lydia’s always been a devoted mother, but she’s never been the codependent kind who misses her child when he goes to school or to sleep. She’s always treasured that time to herself, to inhabit her own thoughts, to have a break from the nonstop emotional clamoring of motherhood. There were even times in Acapulco when she’d experienced a sliver of resentment at the way he barged into her heart and mind whenever he was around, how Luca’s energy usurped everything else in the room. She loved that boy with her whole heart, but my God, there were days when she couldn’t fully breathe until she’d left him at the schoolyard gate. That’s all over now; she would staple him to her, sew him into her skin, affix her body permanently to his now, if she could. She’d grow her hair into his scalp, would become his conjoined twin-mother. She would forgo a private thought in her head for the rest of her life, if she could keep him safe. Luca waits at the corner, and Lydia looks beyond him, across the street, where the side of a building is painted with graffiti. A giant question mark. No. No, it’s not a question mark. Lydia stops cold. She puts her hand out for Luca.
‘Mijo.’
‘Are you okay?’ Marisol asks.
It’s not a question mark. It’s a sickle. And beneath the sickle, in fresh black paint, the slanted letters warn: Vienen Los Jardineros. Perched on the curved blade is an owl. La Lechuza. And then something new, something Lydia has not seen before: a perfect, faceless rendering of Javier’s distinctive glasses. The exact shape as to provoke in her memory the man himself. Where the lenses would be, someone has scrawled, Aún te está buscando. He is still looking for you.
For me. He is looking for me, Madre de Dios. Lydia turns on her heel. ‘Luca, come.’
‘But, Mami—’
‘Come!’ she snaps, her voice like a whip.
Marisol jogs to catch up with her. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks again.
After seventeen days, sixteen hundred miles. Here, on the doorstep to el norte, los pinche Jardineros. How flawlessly the artist has rendered Javier’s glasses! As if he’s familiar with them. As if he’s seen them in person, here, in Nogales. Lydia will fall down on the street. Her knees will give way. The wind passes through her body as if she’s mostly holes, a ghost already. Marisol reaches out to steady her.
‘We cannot go that way,’ Lydia says, and she’s walking quickly now, but not too quickly, not quickly enough to draw the attention of those three boys leaning against the wall of the bodega. Her arms feel clattery in their sockets, her knees liquid with panic.
‘Okay, it’s okay.’ Marisol puts an arm around Lydia’s shoulder, and they fall in step together, Lydia’s stride matching the older woman’s accidentally. And here’s Luca, tucking beneath her other arm. And they’re already half a block away, the other direction, and now they turn a corner onto a shadier street, and Lydia doesn’t know if the direction they’re going is any safer than the one they’d been traveling before, and does Marisol know where they’re going? Is she leading them somewhere? Lydia shakes herself out from beneath the woman’s arm.
‘Thank you, I’m fine now,’ she says. ‘I’m fine, we’re fine.’ She grabs Luca by the hand. ‘I just remembered something we have to do,’ she says. ‘We’ll see you back at the apartment later.’
Marisol stops, confused. ‘Oh.’
‘We’ll be back soon,’ she says, and she drags Luca across another street, and they leave Marisol standing alone in the middle of the road.
They have to get off the street, out of sight. Away from anyone who might recognize them. Los Jardineros are here, in Nogales. Perhaps as an alliance. Perhaps as a test market, a turf war. Perhaps only to hunt her, to find her, to take her back to Javier so he can finish the job of eradicating Sebastián’s entire family in return for Marta’s death. Lydia can see it as if she’s there, in that dorm room in Barcelona: a creaking sound from above. Marta’s feet swinging slightly in their navy-blue tights, one chunky black shoe still clinging to her left foot, the right one fallen to the floor beneath. Lydia squeezes her mind closed against the image, and against the certainty that Javier would follow her here, will follow her indefinitely, across anyone’s territory, until he finds her. Only in el norte will his power be diminished. In el norte, where there’s no impunity for violent men. At least not for violent men like him, she thinks.
There are no sidewalks here; the garden gates and shopfronts sit directly at the edges of the streets. Cars have to swerve around the pedestrians. There’s no place to hide. They turn at the next corner and head back the way they came. Lydia’s not wearing her hat. Why didn’t she wear her hat? She hates that floppy, pink thing. She’d liked the idea of liberating herself from it long enough to buy groceries and pretend normalcy for an hour. Until the graffiti it had felt like a jaunt. Things had gone well yesterday at the bank. The apartment was comfortable. They were so close! She had let her guard down. Estúpida.
An old woman leans against her door jamb and calls out to them as they pass, ‘¿Fruta, pan, leche, huevos?’
It’s not the supermarket Lydia’d been in search of, but maybe it’s better: a woman selling the basics out of a makeshift shop in the dark front room of her house. They duck inside and Lydia keeps an eye on the street through the open door. They buy eggs, tortillas, onions, an avocado, and some fruit.