American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (11 page)

‘And that’s you.’ Javier tapped his chest with his fist.
‘Muy dentro de m
í
.
’

Lydia blinked rapidly, but it was too late to conceal the tears that came to the corners of her eyes. Javier mistook them, and his smile broadened.

‘You like them?’

She sniffed. ‘Very much, thank you.’ She hastened to pack the dolls back into one another while he watched.

He noticed the way she didn’t take care to line up their tops with their bottoms. This was his first indication that something was truly askew. ‘What’s the matter,
mi reina
?’

When the dolls were reassembled, Lydia rolled them back into their brown paper and placed them beneath the counter with her phone. There was no easy way to say it. She might as well be direct.

‘I received some bad news last week,’ she said. He leaned forward, frowning. ‘About you.’

He leaned back, frowning deeper. A very long silence grew between them, and then a customer came in, jangling the bell above the door. The woman bought three notebooks, three fancy pens, and a birthday card, and Lydia found herself unable to smile while she rang the woman up. She felt Javier’s anxiety like a malediction in the room. It rattled into her chest. His shoulders were curled in, and he squeezed his flattened hands between his thighs. When the customer left, Lydia went to the door and locked it. She flipped the sign to
cerrado.

They studied each other across the counter. She stared into his eyes, and neither of them shifted their gaze.

At length, he spoke. ‘I presumed you knew.’ His voice was strained, raspy.

She shook her head without removing her eyes from his. ‘How would I know? Why would I know?’

His eyes swam even larger than usual behind the glasses. His mouth trembled as he spoke. ‘It feels as though almost everyone knows. I thought
.
.
. somehow, I hoped it didn’t matter to you. I thought it didn’t matter because you knew me, you could see the person I really am.’

‘I can, I still can,’ she said. ‘But, Javier, that other part of you, the part I don’t know
.
.
. it’s irreconcilable. That person is real, too, yes?’

Finally, he dropped his gaze from hers. He blinked his eyes repeatedly, removed his glasses, and cleaned them on the tail of his shirt.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t.’

Lydia pressed her lips together.

‘I’m in love with you. I am
in
love with you.’

She shook her head.

‘Lydia, you’re the only real friend I have. The only person in my life who wants nothing from me except the joy between us.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is true! And when I’m not with you, I’m lonely for you. You have no idea the light you provide. You and Marta, you’re all I really have. Nothing else matters. I would leave it all if I could.’

‘Then do!’ She slapped her hand against the counter. ‘Leave it!’

He smiled sadly at her. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘It works whatever way you say it works! You’re the
jefe,
right?’

‘Yes, and if I leave, what then? What will become of Acapulco if I leave? How many people will die while they fight over who takes my place?’ His elbows were up on the counter. He tugged at his hair in distress. ‘You know I never wanted this. It was an accident of fate that I ended up here.’

Quite near the surface of her consciousness, Lydia knew that couldn’t really be true. If it was a lottery ticket, it was one he had selected and purchased with his own money. She knew this, that he must have committed specific evils to have attained this rank. How many? Of what nature? Some combination of fear and sadness prevented her from asking. She didn’t dare to contradict his justifications.

‘But here we are, here I am.’ His eyes were pleading. ‘There’s no getting out of it, Lydia, not for me. But it doesn’t define who I am.’

She could feel the dissonance throbbing through her brain like an erratic pulse.
Of course it defines who you are,
she did not say. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt him take her hand.

‘Please understand,’ he said. ‘Try.’

When Lydia had found Javier’s picture in Sebasti
á
n’s folder the previous week, she’d been riven with real anguish. Seldom had she experienced such profound and authentic friendship in her life. The prospect of losing that attachment grieved her. But now that Javier sat before her, clasping her hand in his, now that the thing had been spoken between them and confirmed to be true, all that was left for Lydia was autopsy.
What love had been there was already slipping away. She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it. Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.

Chapter Nine

In Carlos and Meredith’s house in Chilpancingo, there
are new ghosts to contend with. Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. During the three days that follow, she and Luca are often alone in the house while the boys are at school, Carlos is at work, and Meredith prepares the Indiana missionaries for their return home. There is no temporary suspension of living as there usually is with death, because a public pause would arouse suspicion. Lydia and Luca have to stay hidden. The family has to carry on in their typical fashion. The sons have well-stocked bookshelves in their rooms,
gracias a Dios,
so while they’re out living their regular lives, Luca reads two or three books a day. Lydia tries to read as well, but her mind can’t hold the words. She doesn’t have the reservoir of space to take anything else into her brain. So instead she tries to keep her body occupied. She cooks food that neither she nor Luca feels like eating. She cleans sinks and laundry and rugs that aren’t dirty. She watches as Luca grows silent.

The afternoons feel a thousand hours long. Luca barely even changes positions on the couch as he reads. He moves when he finishes a book; he gets up to retrieve another from the shelf. Whenever he rises to use the bathroom, Lydia tries to coax him into eating. The rest of her time she spends at the old IBM desktop computer that sits on a small cart in one corner of the living room. She checks the headlines coming out of Acapulco. There have been beautiful tributes to Sebasti
á
n by his colleagues, but Lydia can’t read the reflective pieces. The word
h
é
roe
makes her angry, as if he chose his death courageously, as if it means something. For God’s sake, he died with a spatula in his hand. Instead she skims the news for emerging facts about the investigation, and it’s as she expected: nothing. Because fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice. There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication. So Lydia checks for other stories, new violence, any hint of what’s happening among Los Jardineros. A tourist was accidentally killed in a shootout near the beach huts at Playa Hornos yesterday afternoon. A burned-out car with two bodies inside, one large, one small, was found outside Colonia Loma Larga this morning.

The mouse pointer trembles on the screen, but she manages to click out of the news and shift gears. Carlos will get them as far as Mexico City, but what then? She must try to make plans. She researches the buses, and yes, there are reports of increased roadblocks across the area, an uptick in disappearances. Travel within cities is relatively safe, but between cities it is strongly discouraged. Authorities advise deferring nonessential trips on regional highways in Guerrero, Colima, and Michoac
á
n. Lydia feels a new wave of despair threatening to descend, but she doesn’t have time for it. The roads are not an option. Even if her driver’s license were current, she wouldn’t risk driving with Luca right now, and the buses are no better. The roadblocks are too dangerous. So what’s left? She checks airline tickets, although she doesn’t love the idea of her name being on a flight manifest. Everything is digital now, and what good will it do to run a thousand miles away if her name raises a red flag in some online database? Tijuana is about as far as you can get without a passport, and that flight is three hours and forty minutes. Plenty of time for Javier to send a
sicario
to greet them when they deplane. Lydia imagines carnage at the baggage claim. She can see the headlines. There are no long-distance passenger trains in Mexico, so as a last resort, Lydia studies the freight trains the Central American migrants ride across the
length of the country. All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way. Lydia shudders at the YouTube stories, the photographs, the grim warnings delivered by recent amputees. She starts over, researches everything again from the beginning. Buses, planes, trains. There has to be something she hasn’t considered. There has to be a way out. She clicks and scrolls and hours pass like sludge, while Luca turns page after page.

At the dinner table with Carlos and Meredith’s three boys, Luca wears his father’s hat, and Lydia doesn’t demand that he take it off, even when Meredith tells her youngest ‘no hats at the table.’ The older boy wipes his milk mustache and grins at Luca, still wearing the Yankees cap.

‘You like baseball?’ the boy asks.

Luca only shrugs.

He was always a quiet child. As a toddler, Luca never babbled. In fact, he didn’t speak at all until he was four years old, and by then Lydia had been panicking for two years. She began the practice of reading to him well before she suspected any problem, only because she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea
that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he’d build language from a foundation of literature and poetry. So she started with M
á
rquez and Tolstoy and the Bront
ë
s, and eventually, as a result of her growing alarm, she read to him not in the typical way that parents read fairy tales and bedtime stories to their children, but in a frenetic and urgent manner intended to save him. When her fears bloomed and the habit became more concerted, she called upon Paz and Fuentes, Twain and Castellanos. She was fluent in English, too (it had been her minor in college), so sometimes she read Yeats, rendering the lush green of Ireland in her Mexican accent.

When Luca was an infant, she brought him to work tucked into a sling across her chest, and they read together between orders and customers and cleaning and stocking the shelves. Sometimes it was a long while between customers, so the two of them could submerge vividly into their stories. As he grew, he’d sit in a bouncy rocker or on a little play mat she set up for him in the corner behind the register. Eventually he was free to toddle around the shop, but when it was time to read, he always sat without prompting, cross-legged and silent, head angled to one side, as if creating a funnel of his ear for the words she’d give to him. She tried books with and without pictures. Colorful books, tactile books, poetry, photography, art. Children’s books, cookbooks, the Bible. Her son ran his hands carefully along the glossy or filmy pages, but still he did not speak. Sometimes she read until her voice gave out, and other days she quickly grew depressed by the solitary sound of herself in the shop, but whenever she wanted to quit, Luca would push the day’s book toward her insistently. He’d open it and press it back into her lap.

The week before his fourth birthday, as they sat eating pozole at the kitchen table, Lydia lamented their boy’s silence for the hundredth time. Sebasti
á
n balanced his spoon on the edge of his bowl and studied Luca’s face. Luca studied him back.

‘Maybe you don’t speak Spanish,’ Sebasti
á
n said in Spanish.

Luca, mimicking his father, balanced his spoon on his bowl, too.

‘That’s it, isn’t it,’ Sebasti
á
n said. ‘
¿Cu
á
l idioma hablas, mijo?
English? Are you a
gabacho
? Wait!’ Sebasti
á
n snapped his fingers. ‘You’re Haitian. No – Arabic! Tagalog?’

Lydia blinked slowly at her husband, but Luca smiled and tried to snap his fingers, too. Sebasti
á
n showed him how.
Click click click.
Lydia was alone in her desperation. She reasoned that Sebasti
á
n must be concerned, also, but his dogged optimism prevented him from revealing it. The doctors could find nothing wrong. Lydia felt like screaming.

Instead, she patiently continued her efforts. Allende, Borges, Cervantes. She read so that the words she treasured might penetrate her son’s solitude. And then one day, as she turned the last, unsatisfying page of a short novel by some pretentious young writer, Luca sat up and shook his head. He brushed his hands across his knees. Lydia closed the book and set it on the table beside the rocker where they were seated together. Luca picked it up and opened it to the first page.

‘Let’s read that one again, please, Mami, except this time let’s make it a more agreeable ending.’

Perfectly. As if simply continuing a conversation they’d been having his whole life. Lydia was so startled she nearly hurled him across the room. She pushed him off her lap onto his feet. She turned him around and stared at him. ‘What?’ Luca pressed his lips together. ‘What did you say?’ She gripped his arms at his sides, too roughly perhaps, in her fear that she was coming unhinged. ‘You spoke! Luca! You spoke?’

After a brief and petrifying pause, he nodded.

‘What did you say?’ she whispered.

‘I would like to read it again.’

She clapped both hands onto his cheeks, laughing and crying at once. ‘
Ay,
oh my God! Luca!’

‘With a better ending.’

She crushed him into her chest and squeezed him there, and then she jumped up and took his hands and spun him in a circle.

‘Say it again. Say something else.’

‘What shall I say?’

‘Exactly that,’ she’d said. ‘My boy. He speaks!’

Lydia closed the shop early that day and took Luca home to perform for his father. She remembers it so clearly, but she doesn’t trust that memory now, because the further she gets away from it, the more fanciful it seems. How could he have been so silent for all those years? And
then, how could he have started talking like that, like a news anchor, like a college professor, in those beautiful, complex sentences all at once? It’s impossible. A miracle of syntax.

But now, in Carlos’s turquoise house, after more than four years of talking beautifully in two languages, Luca’s voice retreats, and the erstwhile silence returns. Lydia sees it happening, and there’s nothing either of them can do to prevent it. It settles over him lightly at first, but soon, like a shellac, it hardens. By Wednesday morning, his muteness is pronounced. He responds to direct questions only with his face, his body. He perfects, once again, the art of the blank stare, and Lydia feels inside her some last, clinging boulder of sanity slipping.

During these days of calcifying quiet, the dreadful wheel of Lydia’s mind never slows, no matter how she tries to arrest it. She keeps herself steady in front of Luca, but there are times when she has to excuse herself quickly. She slips into the bathroom and opens the tap so the running water will disguise the muffled, wrenching noises of her grief. Her body is a cramp of misery, and the physical sensation is so elemental that it makes her feel like a wild animal, a mammal bereft of her pack. At night, as she lies next to Luca in Sebasti
á
n’s godson’s narrow bed, she directs her thoughts toward blankness. She does this exercise with authority, and her mind obeys. She repeats this over and over:
don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
And because of this self-control, she moves mercifully toward sleep. The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a
hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted. Her eyelids drop. But then there’s the moment after letting go, the momentary drift after casting off from the shore and before being caught by the current, and in that lapse, she plummets. Her limbs jerk, her heart clobbers, and her brain provides the memory once again of clacking gunfire, the odor of burning meat, the sixteen beautiful faces, scrubbed blank of their animation and turned vacant toward the sky. She sits up in bed, steadies her pitching breath, and tries not to wake Luca beside her. Every night, this hurdle between wake and sleep. This one patch she can’t cross. What kind of person does not bury her family? How could she leave them there in the backyard with their eyes and their mouths open, the blood cooling in their veins? Lydia has seen outspoken widows before, widows made brave by their anguish. She’s watched them talk into the cameras, refusing to be silenced, placing blame where it belongs, scorning the violence of cowardly men. Naming names. Those women get gunned down at funerals.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.

On Wednesday, Carlos takes the day off work to drive the third church van to Mexico City. Lydia leaves Abuela’s red overnight bag on the end of the bed where they’ve spent the last three nights. Inside are her heels and Luca’s dress shoes. She’s crammed everything else into the two backpacks, and that’s all they will carry now. They will fly north from Mexico City, she’s decided. It’s their only option. They will go with only these two backpacks so they’ll be nimble, so they won’t have to stand gazing at the baggage carousel waiting for what they don’t need anyway. Lydia doesn’t know what, if anything, Carlos and Meredith have told the Indiana missionaries about their two extra passengers, but no one asks her any questions when they get in. The teenagers flash their gooey smiles and try to talk to her about their Savior, but Lydia pretends not to speak English. She keeps one arm around Luca in the backseat and tries to act the way a normal person would act. She has difficulty remembering. The missionaries have duffel bags and fancy backpacks, and every single one of the girls wears her hair (curly or straight, coarse or silky) in two French braids. It’s a missionary code, Lydia realizes, and she reaches up to touch her ponytail. The girl on the bench seat beside her notices.