American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Page 8

  She opens Facebook and finds Sebastián’s friend. He’s an attorney, and his profile shows the name of his law firm, but it’s Sunday and it won’t be open. She checks his About tab, and scrolls down to his likes: a local newspaper, a couple nonprofits, his alma mater, a fan page for Adidas sneakers, so much fútbol. But then, there. Bingo: a Pentecostal church here in Chilpancingo. A worship service at nine o’clock. She looks it up and finds it’s about two miles away. There’s a bus down the main thoroughfare, and twenty minutes later, Luca and Lydia are on it.

  Lydia worries she wrote the address down wrong, because when they get off the bus, the street is lined with shops, all closed on a Sunday morning. They find the number they’re looking for sandwiched between an electronics store and a jeweler. But just as she’s double-checking the address on the scrap of paper in her hand, a young man pushing a baby carriage approaches and opens the door for his pregnant wife. Lydia peeks inside before the door swings closed, and she sees rows of folding chairs facing a stage. Luca tugs on her sleeve and directs her attention to a sign she hadn’t noticed, propped in the window: Iglesia Pentecostal Tabernáculo de la Victoria. There’s no steeple or stained glass, but this is the place.

  Inside, it’s bigger than she imagined, with low ceilings, and fans attached to the walls. There’s a full drum kit, an amplifier, and some huge speakers set up behind the pulpit. There’s no cross, no font of holy water at the entrance, but Lydia blesses herself out of habit, and Luca follows her example. She waits for some bubble of feeling to follow – a whisper from her legion of newborn angels, or perhaps a low-down rage at God instead. But nothing comes; it’s spiritual tumbleweed. Un desierto del alma because she has room only for fear.

  They sit in the last row, near the wall, and Lydia stows their backpacks under their folding chairs. She covers her face with her hands and instructs Luca to do the same, but it’s not veneration. It’s only for concealment, in case any of Los Jardineros are Pentecostal Christians, in case they traffic drugs on a Monday, stab people on a Thursday, and then come here seeking forgiveness on a Sunday. It doesn’t seem more outlandish than anything else that’s happened.

  Through the screen of her interlaced fingers, Lydia watches the square of stark sunlight on the tiled floor grow brighter every time someone opens the glass door to come in. A few of the congregants notice them in the back row, and give them a welcoming nod or a smile, but most walk right past and find their usual seats.

  The church is almost half-full by the time Carlos appears behind his wife and children. The wife greets everyone with hugs, and has the sharp voice of a gabacha above the hum of reverent conversation in the room. Lydia half stands from her seat and lifts a hand in greeting, but Carlos doesn’t see her. The youngest son alerts him, points to Lydia in the corner, and Carlos turns.

  ‘Lydia, oh my goodness, what are you doing here?’ His voice arrives before he does, but soon he maneuvers himself between the rows of chairs to where she’s standing. He embraces her. ‘It’s so lovely to see you, guau, what a surprise!’

  Luca watches while this man, Carlos, kisses Mami on both cheeks and holds both her hands in his.

  ‘This must be Luca,’ the man says, bending toward him where he’s still seated on the folding chair. ‘You look so much like your papi.’ He straightens up. ‘Where’s Sebastián, did he come with you?’

  ‘You haven’t heard the news.’ Mami’s voice sounds far away. Luca can tell without having to look that Carlos’s face has suddenly shifted, that it’s drained to a sickly gray, that he’s already building the internal fortifications he’ll need in order to hold the horrific story Mami’s about to tell him.

  ‘Come,’ Carlos says, ‘we can talk upstairs.’

  There’s an office there, and it’s not quite accurate to say that Luca zones out while his mother and Carlos talk, because that description would indicate some active participation of abstention on his part. Instead, his consciousness, like a helium balloon fastened to his person by some taut and fragile string, momentarily floats away. His body sits at a table with his backpack at his feet, his legs swivel the chair beneath his weight, his hands play with a nearby dish of paper clips, hooking them together into long strands, but his internal mappings are on vacation. The grown-ups glance at him now and again, past the barricades of their warbled voices and ashen faces, and his body responds to their questions with the appropriate nods or shrugs. A paper cup of water is set on the table before him, and he takes a dutiful sip. Downstairs, someone is playing the drums. An electric guitar. Luca can feel the bass vibrating through the floor. Then they’re in Carlos’s car, and they’re driving through the streets of the city to Carlos’s house. Mami sits in the backseat and tries to hold Luca’s hand. He sees this, sees Mami’s hand covering his own, and it’s the warmth and press of her fingers that bring him back.

  Once they pass out of la zona centro, Luca sees that Chilpancingo isn’t so different from Acapulco. There are no seagulls here, no tourists, and the streets aren’t as broad. But there are many colorful shops and taxis, people wearing their church clothes in the sunshine. There are ladies with handbags slung over their shoulders, boys with slipshod tattoos. Plenty of bright, foamy graffiti. The houses are all painted in vivid colors. Luca watches them flip by like cards in a deck. After three and a half songs have played on the radio, Carlos turns onto a street that’s slightly wider than the others. There’s an arching canopy of shade trees that creates the sense of entering a secret place, a hushy hideout. In the middle of the block stands a handsome white church with modest twin bell towers at the front. It’s the kind they’re used to. Católica. The other buildings on the crowded street stand back from the little church, giving it room. Carlos pulls into a parking spot.

  Carlos’s house is turquoise – the exact color of the middle stripe of ocean in Acapulco, in between the light sandy stripe near the shore and the darker blue at the horizon when you stand on the steps at Plaza España and look out on a sunny day. The house feels big and modern even though it’s attached to an identical purple one on the right and an identical peach-colored one on the left. Carlos carries their bags inside.

  Carlos’s wife is named Meredith, and she’s white. She’s from Estados Unidos, and that’s a fact Luca could’ve gathered without being told, just from the quick glimpse he got of her in church before Carlos took them upstairs. Her voice, her clothes. Her way of holding people by the shoulders and shaking them slightly while she speaks to them. Luca investigates the empty house, the family photographs, a closer look at the three boys, who all have Meredith’s pink complexion and Carlos’s dimples. The middle one looks about the same age as Luca. Meredith eventually arrives home without those boys (who stayed behind for even more church), and with her comes Luca’s first experience of proprietary grief.

  Proprietary is a word Luca knows (in Spanish, but not in English) because he knows lots of words other eight-year-olds don’t, like viscous and bombastic and serendipity. But he’s never truly understood the meaning of the word propietario until now. He’s never felt the feeling before. It rumbles through him like a steamroller with a broad, flattening crush. Because who is this woman, crying for Papi? Who is this lady with her quivering features and her leaking eyes and her trembling hands and her need to be consoled? It surprises Luca – his ungenerous interpretation of such raw emotion. After all, she’d been Papi’s friend at one time. Or at least she’d married Papi’s friend. And she’d liked Papi well enough to make him the godfather to her eldest son. So why shouldn’t she be saddened, even traumatized, by the news of his unexpected and violent death? Why shouldn’t she weep and lament and exhibit her devastation? Luca cannot, therefore, explain why the display of it irritates him so. When she tries to hug him, he can’t endure it, and Mami doesn’t make him. She intercepts him and takes him to the bathroom and splashes water on his face, and when they return, Meredith has composed herself. She urges Mami to sit while she makes tea
for everyone. The tea doesn’t move from the cups, but the conversation goes on for a long time regardless, and Luca lets most of it pass him without landing.

  Meredith met Carlos when she was a college-aged missionary from Indiana, and she’s still involved with that faraway cornfield church. That summer she first came here, she fell in love with Carlos and with his country. She liked the way Mexicans were easy in their faith. She liked the sense of being in a country where it wasn’t controversial or weird to talk openly about God. In Mexico, prayer was normal then, public. Expected. To Meredith, those cultural conventions felt miraculous. So she and Carlos married young, and then she made it her life’s work to preserve the link between Chilpancingo and that Indiana church community, to share the experience of this place with others.

  In fact, right now there are fourteen Indiana missionaries visiting here for spring break. Those missionaries are being hosted in Chilpancingo by the church Carlos and Meredith attend. Meredith is the chief coordinator of this annual visit, and two additional ones each summer. It’s a nonstop wheel of blond Indiana missionaries, cogging their way through Guerrero. The current group will fly home to Estados Unidos Wednesday afternoon, so the church’s three passenger vans are scheduled to depart for Mexico City at seven o’clock Wednesday morning. This is where the conversation takes on amplified urgency. Luca sits up in his chair and fiddles with the handle of Mami’s teacup.

  Carlos says, ‘They can go in the shuttle, of course. It’s perfect.’

  Meredith says nothing with her mouth, but conveys plenty with her eyes, and none of it is very accommodating.

  And then Mami says, ‘We’d be safe getting through the roadblocks, if we were on the church shuttle.’

  ‘They’d never expect you to be with the missionaries,’ Carlos says.

  Mami shakes her head. ‘They wouldn’t even look.’

  And then Meredith uses her mouth. ‘Safe for who? Maybe safer for you, but I’m sorry, I can’t put all those kids at risk.’ She shakes her head, and Luca has the notion that she looks nothing like the woman who was crying for Papi just a few minutes ago. She’s different colors entirely, and her spongy features have hardened into new shapes.

  Mami opens her mouth but manages to close it again without speaking. She fidgets with the loops of gold at her neck.

  Carlos taps his pointer finger on the table between them. They all look at that finger. ‘Meredith, there’s no other option for them. I understand your concern, but this is the only way to get them safely out of Guerrero. If we don’t help them, they could die.’

  ‘Could is an understatement,’ Mami says.

  But Meredith crosses her arms and shakes her head some more. Her hair is some color between brown and gold, and it’s pushed back from her face with a black headband. Her nose is red, cheeks red, eyes hard blue. Mami lifts her teacup and tries a sip, but when she sets it back down, Luca can tell she didn’t swallow any.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s too risky,’ Meredith says. ‘It’s not fair to do that to the kids, to their parents in Indiana. This is exactly the kind of thing those families fear, sending their kids down here to Mexico. Do you have any idea what it takes to placate those fears? We give them our word their kids will be safe. I personally guarantee their safety. I tell them this kind of thing will never happen.’

  Mami clears her throat and her face looks like a bomba about to go off, but she breathes through it. ‘This kind of thing?’

  Meredith presses her eyes closed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean. I don’t even know what to say.’

  ‘Sebastián is dead, Meredith,’ Carlos says. ‘My friend, your friend. He’s gone. And fifteen more besides. This is not the kind of thing that happens, ever. Not even here. Do you know anyone else who’s lost sixteen family members in one day?’ Meredith glares at him, but he plows ahead. ‘We have to help them. If the suffering of our friends means nothing, if those kids can’t be allowed to see us, to see Mexico as it really is, then what are they even doing here? Are they just drive-by Samaritans?’

  ‘Carlos, don’t,’ Meredith says, and Luca has the feeling this is a very old conversation between them.

  ‘They just want to make pancakes and take selfies with skinny brown children?’ Carlos asks.

  Meredith slaps her hand against the table, and the tea ripples in the cups. But Mami intercepts the rising anger between them. She speaks like a void, like she’s left the conversation entirely, and only her voice remains behind. She chants without any expression. ‘Sebastián, Yemi, Alex, Yénifer, Adrián, Paula, Arturo, Estéfani, Nico, Joaquín, Diana, Vicente, Rafael, Lucía, and Rafaelito. Mamá. They are gone. All gone.’

  A lump rises in Luca’s throat and grows one size with each name that leaves Mami’s mouth. He looks at Meredith to see how she’ll respond, but her face is an unreadable smear of pink and blue. Instead it’s Carlos who replies, placing his hands flat on the table. ‘We will help you,’ he whispers. ‘Of course we will.’

  Meredith stands to pace behind her chair, her arms crossed in front of her. ‘Lydia, I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through. It’s unimaginable. And yes, of course we’ll do everything in our power to help. But please try to understand, I also have to weigh my moral responsibility here. Sometimes there are no easy answers.’

  Mami tents her hands over her forehead. ‘I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone. I just want to get Luca out of here. I have to.’ For the first time since all this started, Luca thinks she might unravel. He watches intensely, and her voice cracks. ‘Please. We’re desperate.’

  Carlos looks up at his wife. ‘Honey, listen. I understand your resistance, I do. But sometimes there are easy answers. This is an easy answer: If we don’t help them, if they get on a bus alone, if they get stopped at a roadblock and killed because we didn’t have the courage to save them, can you live with that? Can we?’

  Meredith sighs and leans over the back of her chair. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  ‘Just pray on it,’ he says. ‘Give it up to God.’

  She turns and clicks on the electric kettle, even though no one has yet managed to choke down the first cup of tea. With her back to the table she says, ‘Are you sure they’re even looking for you now?’ She faces the table again and leans against the counter. ‘Wasn’t Sebastián the example they wanted? They got him, so maybe it’s over now.’

  Luca looks from Meredith back to Mami, and she meets his gaze, and pauses, as if weighing how much to say in front of him. Perhaps she remembers that fear is good for him now. He should be afraid.

  ‘No,’ Mami says quietly. ‘He won’t stop until he finds us.’

  Chapter Eight

  In bed, on the night she discovered that Javier and La Lechuza were the same person, Lydia turned off the lamp but did not close her eyes. She and Sebastián had always agreed that married people were entitled to a certain measure of privacy, that they needn’t tell each other everything. It was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him; he didn’t press her on personal matters, he was seldom jealous, and he had no interest in annexing or directing her friendships with other men.

  ‘You’re a person, an adult,’ he said to her before they were engaged. ‘And I am your lover. If we get married, you choose me. I hope you’ll continue to choose me every day.’ Lydia had laughed at his unfashionable use of the word lover, but the sentiment thrilled her. Before Sebastián, she’d always presumed that marriage would entail a sacrifice of her liberty. That it had not, delighted her. They were both trustworthy, and they fancied themselves quite modern. They kept nothing of import from each other, but Lydia liked having a sacred cupboard within herself, to which only she was allowed access.

  So there’d been nothing untoward in her failure to mention the name Javier to her husband before, but, of course, that night, everything changed. When Sebastián got up in the morning and kissed her forehead on his way to the b
athroom, she was still awake. She sat up in bed, her stomach lurching with the movement.

  ‘Sebastián,’ she said. She thought about not telling him, about asking questions instead. She knew that once the words were out of her mouth, her friendship with Javier would come to an end, and beneath everything else, there was a foundation of grief to that impending loss. She wanted her discovery to be untrue, a misunderstanding.

  Her husband turned toward her in the gray light of the bedroom. ‘What’s wrong?’ He knew instantly, from the pitch of her voice. He crossed the space between them and sat beside her on the bed.

  ‘He’s my friend,’ she confessed.

  Sebastián didn’t go to work that morning. He called his editor and left a message that he was following a lead and wouldn’t be in until later. He and Lydia sat together on the unmade bed and talked for hours, while outside the light shifted from gray to pink to broad, sunny yellow. When it was time to wake Luca and take him to school, they managed the routine in a distracted haze.

  ‘I’ll take him today,’ Sebastián insisted. ‘You wait here.’

  Lydia cried in the shower.

  When Sebastián returned they continued their discussion at the kitchen table. Lydia’s wet hair was knotted on top of her head and her face felt blotchy.

  ‘Is there any chance you’re mistaken?’ she asked, her arms folded in front of her. She already knew the answer, but it made no sense. She was floundering.