“Are you holding up? You know you didn’t have to come down with me, considering.”
“I’m okay. Just a bit tired. It’s still early enough that I don’t feel too frazzled. That will probably change soon.”
“It did with Sonia—” He stopped himself, but it was too late. The damage was done. Rachel shook her head.
“It’s okay, Noah. I’m not bothered by it.”
It was clear she was lying.
The bus hit something on the road, some rough spot that caused the entire length to shake. Noah held Rachel’s hand as she squeezed, reminding him of the delivery room when Eli was born. He tried to push the memory out of his mind, unwilling to have it contaminated by his situation. Rachel had her eyes closed as though in prayer, waiting for the disruption to end, and Noah wished he’d been able to convince her to stay at home. Already, he was terrified about what he might find when he finally discovered Eli, and Rachel’s presence only further compounded his fears.
Noah carefully took in the crowd of passengers. They barely looked human, as though sculpted from leather, not flesh, filled with sand, not blood. Their movements were sluggish and weighted, eyes half-lidded or closed—a lifetime of survival had worn them down. Across the aisle sat an elderly lady, her head covered in a thin shawl, her feet bare and calloused. In her hands was a small leather-bound book with blank earmarked covers. She stared unblinkingly at Noah and Rachel, and he had to look away as much from embarrassment as from fear; in her gaze he saw nothing but the endless expanse of desert. The woman opened her mouth to wheeze, and Noah worried the glaring heat had baked him out of reality and into some sub-reality, one in which everything moved slower than it should. She raised her hand, her crooked fingers bent in some crazy pattern, and touched her stomach in the same manner Rachel touched her own. He saw Rachel’s hands awkwardly fall away.
“Tú tienes la marca de la Madre. Bendita sea la Madre.“
“What’s she saying?” Rachel whispered to him, visibly upset. He wished he knew, but it was clear by the sudden shuffling of feet and positions that the woman’s voice was making the strangers around him and Rachel almost as uncomfortable.
“Something about you being a mother, I guess.”
The old woman nodded, smiling, repeating, “Madre.“ Rachel smiled too, hers as forced as the old woman’s crazed.
“Ya mero llega la hora,“ she said with glee, then laughing returned to her small leather-bound book. Rachel leaned toward his ear, her breath as hot as the sun.
“I remember now why I never wanted to visit Mexico. My sister had a horrible time in Guadalajara. Why the hell would Sonia have brought Eli here? What’s there to see but a whole lot of nothing?”
“I have no idea.” There was too much Noah didn’t understand, nor was he sure he wanted to. Sonia had changed after the divorce, only slightly at first, but over time the cracks grew wider and greater in number. There had always been something inside her, something he saw only on rare occasions. It was in her eyes, in the tone of her voice, but she managed to keep it hidden. When the cracks grew wide enough, however, there was no hiding it, and what she once tried to suppress she instead became. It was the only explanation he had for why she would have taken Eli from him. The boy was everything, and to have him gone for nearly half his life evoked a pain Noah could never sufficiently convey to Rachel. Sometimes he wondered if she had only become pregnant to try and replace what he had lost. But how could he ever replace Eli? It was like trying to replace a piece of his soul. “What are you looking at?” Rachel asked. Noah’s eyes were wide and dry. He hadn’t blinked in what seemed like days.
“I think we’re getting close.”
The black mark on the horizon grew as the bus approached it, peeking out from the haze of the radiating desert to form a church spire, then the rickety buildings beneath it. Within the hour the bus was close enough for Noah to point out the village to Rachel, who simply nodded solemnly. Noah itched for action, desperate to be freed from the bus he had been trapped in for so long so he might begin the search. Sonia and Eli were there, somewhere, in the small village, and he knew it. Knew he was so close. Strangely, the excitement made him salivate, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in anticipation before Rachel noticed. All he tasted was salt.
As the bus pulled into Astilla de la Cruz, things became clearer to Noah. The church spire he had seen from so far away was broken, the cross hanging precariously upside down from little more than a wooden sliver. No one seemed to be tending to the church to fix it, however. The delicate stained glass was broken, the ground of the small graveyard beside it upturned until few of its tombstones remained upright. The stores along the street of the village were no better, a small step beyond wooden shacks, nearly indistinguishable from the rundown houses around them. Had the road not been paved, he would have wondered if there were a road at all. Each crack and pothole jolted the bus, shaking Rachel’s head back and forth as though she were a puppet. Noah put an arm across her chest while his other hand gripped the back of the torn vinyl seat in front of him. He squeezed tight, hoping to keep them both from being pitched to the ground. None of the other passengers, including the elderly lady, seemed nearly as concerned.
The bus came to a stop alongside a long wooden platform set in the dirt. At one end was a small wooden office with the word Estación carved in a plank hanging above the door. “I guess this is the station,” Rachel said as Noah relaxed the arm that had been holding her down. They gave the other passengers time to stand and gather their things before they retrieved their bags from under the seat and made their way off the bus. When they stepped down onto the platform—Noah taking Rachel’s hand as she navigated the stairs—he cast a glance sideways at the window he had been sitting beside for so long. The glass reflected the light from the bright streets, yet the reflection looked almost like a negative of him that had been burned in by the blazing sun. He stared at it, but did not admit it to Rachel for fear he was hallucinating. Then that image moved, and the confusion made him dizzy. Rachel tripped as she came down the stairs but Noah snapped back in time. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, then looked again at that image in the window. It had become translucent, and when he looked again he was able to see through it to what lay beyond: the elderly woman, glaring. Noah nervously raised a hand to shield his eyes, but it was too late. She had stepped away from the window and vanished into the patterns of light.
Rachel stood on the rickety platform with her bag over her shoulder, ignoring the low creak as her weight shifted to her left foot. Noah flashed to when he’d first met her, standing much the same way outside the front of the police station. Her shape was different then—straighter, leaner. It was a good shape, but he liked the new shape better. Still, there was something there that was familiar, some older memory that the new could not successfully supplant. Without Eli, it all seemed worthless. “So,” Rachel finally said. “Where do we go from here?”
Noah sputtered.
“What do you mean?”
“Where’s the hotel? How do we get there?”
“Ah.”
“Why, what did you think I meant?”