American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (4 page)

‘Oh.’ The clerk looks mildly alarmed and darts his eyes toward his manager, who’s busy with another customer.

‘Cash is fine,’ the manager says without looking up from his task.

The clerk nods at Lydia, who presses the four pink bills into his hand. He puts them into an envelope and seals it.

‘And your name, please?’ His black pen hovers over the front of the envelope.

Lydia hesitates for a moment. ‘Fermina Daza,’ she says, the first name that comes to mind.

He hands her the room key. ‘Enjoy your stay, Ms Daza.’

The ride in the elevator to the tenth floor feels like the longest minute and a half of Luca’s life. His feet hurt, his back hurts, his neck hurts, and he still hasn’t cried. A family gets on at the fourth floor and then realizes the elevator is going up, so they get off again. The parents are laughing with each other, holding hands while their kids bicker. The boy looks at Luca and sticks his tongue out as the elevator doors close. Luca knows by instinct and by Mami’s subtle cues that he must behave as if everything’s normal, and he’s managed that behemoth task so far. But there’s an elegant older woman in the elevator, too, and she’s admiring Mami’s quilted gold shoes. Abuela’s shoes. Luca blinks rapidly.

‘How beautiful, your shoes – so unusual,’ the woman says, touching Lydia lightly on the arm. ‘Where did you buy them?’

Lydia looks down at her feet instead of turning to engage with the woman. ‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ she says. ‘They’re so old.’ And then she stabs the ten button repeatedly with her finger, which doesn’t speed up the elevator but does have the intended effect of silencing any further attempts at conversation. The woman gets off on the sixth floor, and after she does so, Mami hits numbers fourteen, eighteen, and nineteen as well. They get off at ten and walk three flights down to the seventh floor.

A surprising thing happens to Luca after Mami finally opens the door of their hotel room with her card key, after she looks both ways up and down the carpeted corridor and ushers him quickly inside, after she dead-bolts and chain-locks the door, dragging the desk chair across the tiled floor and wedging it beneath the doorknob. The surprising thing that happens to him is: nothing. The cloudburst of anguish he’s been struggling against does not come. Neither does it go. It remains there, pent up like a held breath, hovering just on the periphery of his mind. He has the sense that, were he to turn his head, were he to poke at the globular nightmare ever so gently with his finger, it would unleash a torrent so colossal he would be swept away forever. Luca takes care to hold himself quite still. Then he kicks off his shoes and climbs up on the edge of the lone bed. A towel has been placed there, folded into the shape of a swan, which Luca takes by the long neck and thrashes to the floor. He clutches the remote control like it’s a life preserver and clicks the television on.

Mami moves their Walmart bags, backpacks, and Abuela’s overnight bag to the small table, and dumps everything out. She begins removing tags, organizing items into piles, and then quite suddenly she sits down hard in one of the chairs and doesn’t move for at least ten minutes. Luca doesn’t look at her. He glues his eyes to Nickelodeon, turns
Henry Danger
up loud. When at last she begins to move again, Mami comes to him and kisses his forehead roughly. She crosses the room and slides open the door to the balcony. She doubts there’s any amount of fresh air that could succeed in clearing her head, but she has to try. She leaves it open and steps outside.

If there’s one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what’s happened, but for now, the possibility of what might still happen serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish. She peers over the edge of the balcony and surveys the street below. She tells herself there’s no one out there. She tells herself they are safe.

Downstairs in the lobby, the front desk clerk excuses himself from his post and heads for the employee breakroom. In the second stall of the bathroom, he removes the burner phone from his interior suit jacket pocket and sends the following text:
Two special guests just checked in to the Hotel Duquesa Imperial.

Chapter Four

On the occasion of their first encounter, Javier Crespo
Fuentes arrived alone at Lydia’s shop on a Tuesday morning just as she was setting her chalkboard on the sidewalk outside. That week, she’d selected ten books from faraway places to promote with a hand-chalked sign that read
books:
cheaper
than
airline
tickets
.
She was holding the door open with one leg as she lifted the sign through, and then he appeared, approaching quickly to help with the door. The bell above them jangled like a pronouncement.

‘Thank you,’ Lydia said.

He nodded. ‘But far more dangerous.’

She frowned and propped open the easel. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The sign.’ He gestured, and she stood back to assess her lettering. ‘Books
are
cheaper than traveling, but they’re also more dangerous.’

Lydia smiled. ‘Well, I suppose that depends on where you travel.’

They went inside, and she left him to his own counsel while he browsed the stacks, but when at last he approached the counter and set his books beside the register, she was startled by his selections.

Lydia had owned this store for almost ten years, and she’d stocked it with both books she loved and books she wasn’t crazy about but knew would sell. She also kept a healthy inventory of notecards, pens, calendars, toys, games, reading glasses, magnets, and key chains, and it was that kind of merchandise, along with the splashy best sellers, that made her shop profitable. So it had long been a secret pleasure of Lydia’s that, hidden among all the more popular goods, she was able to make a home for some of her best-loved secret treasures, gems that had blown open her mind and changed her life, books that in some cases had never even been translated into Spanish but that she stocked anyway, not because she expected she’d ever sell them, but simply because it made her happy to know they were there. There were perhaps a dozen of these books, stashed away on their ever-changing shelves, enduring among a cast of evolving neighbors. Now and again when a book moved her, when a book opened a previously undiscovered window in her mind and forever altered her perception of the world, she would add it to those secret ranks. Once in a great while, she’d even try to recommend one of those books to a customer. She did this only when the customer was someone she knew and liked, someone she trusted to appreciate the value of the treasure being offered; she was almost always disappointed. In the ten years she’d been doing this, only twice had Lydia experienced the pleasure of a customer approaching her counter with one of those books in hand, unsolicited. Twice in ten years there’d been a wild spark of wonder in the shop, when the bell above the door was like mistletoe – a possibility of something magical.

So when Javier approached Lydia as she stood behind the register perusing catalogs, when she lifted his selections from the counter to ring them up, she was astonished to find not one, but two of her secret treasures among them:
Heart, You Bully, You Punk
by Leah Hager Cohen and
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
by Sebastian Barry.

‘Oh my God,’ Lydia whispered.

‘Is something wrong?’

She looked up at him, realizing she hadn’t actually looked at him yet, despite their cheerful banter earlier. He was fancily dressed for a Tuesday morning, in dark blue trousers and a white guayabera
,
an outfit more suitable for Sunday Mass than a regular workday, and his thick, black hair was parted sharply and combed to one side in an old-fashioned style. The heavy, black plastic frames of his glasses were similarly outdated, so retro they were almost chic again. His eyes swam hugely behind the thick lenses and his mustache quivered as she considered him.

‘These books,’ she said. ‘They’re two of my favorites.’ It was an in
sufficient explanation, but all she could muster.

‘Mine, too,’ the man across from her said. The mustache hitched ever so slightly with his hesitant smile.

‘You’ve read them before?’ She was holding
Heart, You Bully, You Punk
with both hands.

‘Well, only this one.’ He gestured to the one she was clutching.

She looked down at its cover. ‘You read in English?’ she asked, in English.

‘I try, yes,’ he said. ‘My English isn’t fluent, but it’s close. And this story is so delicate. I’m sure there were things I missed the first time around. I wanted to try again.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled at him, feeling slightly crazy. She ignored this feeling and plowed recklessly ahead. ‘When you’re finished you could come back, we could discuss it.’

‘Oh.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘You have a book club here?’

Her mouth opened slightly. ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘Just me!’

‘All the better.’

He smiled and Lydia frowned, eager to preserve the sanctity of this moment. Was he flirting? Whenever a man’s behavior was inscrutable, the answer was typically yes. She placed the book on the counter and her palm flat against its cover.

He read the caution in her gesture and endeavored to correct himself. ‘I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.’ He looked at the book beneath her hand. ‘A remarkable book. Remarkable.’

She conceded a smile, lifting her scanner from its cradle and pointing it toward the book.

When he returned the following Monday, he went directly to the counter, even though Lydia was busy with another customer. He waited to one side, hands clasped in front of him, and when the customer left, they smiled broadly at each other.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Even more incredible the second time.’

‘Yes!’ Lydia clapped her hands.

One of the book’s main characters had a condition where she couldn’t prevent herself from jumping off high things. She didn’t want to die, but she was constantly hurting herself because of this dangerous impulse.

‘I have this same condition,’ Javier confessed suddenly.

‘What? No!’

The condition was fictional.

And yet, Lydia had it, too. Anytime she stood too close to the balcony railing at home, she had to dig her fingers in. She had to press her heels to the floor. She was afraid that one day she would leap over without thinking, without purpose. She would splatter on the pavement below and the Acapulco traffic would screech and blare, swerving needlessly around her. The ambulance would be too late. Luca would be orphaned, and everyone would misinterpret the act as suicide. Lydia had run the scenario through her brain a thousand times as an attempted an
tidote.
I must not jump.

‘I thought I was the only one in the world,’ Javier confessed. ‘I thought it was a crazy fabrication of my mind. And then there it was, in the book.’

Lydia didn’t realize her mouth was hanging open until she closed it. She sat back onto her stool with a bump.

‘But I thought
I
was the only one,’ she said.

Javier straightened his body away from the counter. ‘You also?’

Lydia nodded.

‘Well, my God,’ he said in English. And then he laughed. ‘We will start a support group.’

And then he stood there, talking with her for so long that she eventually offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted. She pulled a stool around to the far side of the counter so he could drink it in comfort. He was careful not to get foam on his mustache. They talked about literature and poetry and economics and politics and the music they both adored, and he stayed for nearly two hours, until she began to worry that he’d be missed somewhere, but he waved his hand dismissively.

‘There is nothing out there more important than this.’

It was just as Lydia had always hoped life in her bookstore would be one day. In between the workaday drudgery of running a business, that she might entertain customers who were as lively and engaging as the books around them.

‘If I had three more customers like you, I’d be set for life,’ she said, taking her last sip of coffee.

He placed a hand across his chest and bowed slightly. ‘I shall try to be enough.’ And then he said casually, softly, ‘If I had met you in a different life, I would ask you to marry me.’

Lydia stood abruptly from her stool and shook her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Javier said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’

She gathered the cups in silence. The treachery wasn’t in receiving his confession. The treachery was in her unspoken response: in a different life, she might’ve said yes.

‘I should get back to work,’ she said instead. ‘I have to place an order this afternoon. I have to prepare some parcels for the mail.’

He took seven new books with him that day, three of which were Lydia’s recommendations.

On the following Friday morning a summer shower washed down the street, and two large, worrisome men crowded themselves in beneath the awning that hung above Lydia’s bookshop door. Moments later,
Javier appeared, and Lydia felt a strong measure of happiness. There would be new books to discuss! She tried to behave naturally, but as she watched those men in the doorway, her breath constricted in her chest.

‘They make you nervous,’ Javier observed.

‘I just don’t know what they want.’ Lydia paced from her usual position, emerging from behind the register. She, like all the other shop owners on this street, already paid the monthly
mordidas
imposed by the cartel. She couldn’t afford to pay more.

‘I will send them off,’ Javier said.

Lydia protested, grabbing his arm, growing louder even as Javier’s voice dropped to a comforting hush. He stepped around her when she tried to block his path.

‘They will hurt you,’ she whispered as severely as she could without raising alarm.

He smiled at her in a way that made his mustache twitch and assured her, ‘They will not.’

Lydia ducked behind the counter, lowering her head as Javier opened the door and stepped outside. She watched in astonishment as he spoke to the two bulky thugs beneath her awning. Both men gestured to the rain, but Javier pointed a finger, made a shooing gesture with his hand, and the men trotted off into the downpour.

Lydia was reluctant to understand. Even as his visits continued and lengthened, as their conversations deepened into more personal matters, as she caught fleeting glimpses of the men on two other occasions, Lydia willfully forgot the power Javier had wielded on that rainy morning. When eventually he spoke adoringly about his wife, whom he called
la reina de mi coraz
ó
n,
the queen of my heart, Lydia felt her defenses relax. Those shields dropped further still when he revealed the existence of a young mistress, whom he called
la reina de mis pantalones,
the queen of my pants.

‘Disgusting,’ she said, but she surprised herself by laughing, too.

It was hardly unusual for a man to have an affair, but talking so openly about it with another woman was something else. For that reason, the confession served both to cure Lydia of any flattered wisp of attachment and, as Javier revealed more and more of his secret self, to turn the key in the intimate lock of their friendship. They became confidants, sharing jokes and observations and disappointments. They even spoke at times about the irritating things their spouses did.

‘If you were married to me, I would never behave that way,’ Javier said when she complained about Sebasti
á
n leaving his dirty socks on the kitchen counter.

‘Of course not.’ She laughed. ‘You’d be an ideal husband.’

‘I’d wash every sock in the house.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’d burn all the socks and buy new ones each week.’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘I’d forgo socks altogether, if it would make you happy.’

Lydia laughed in spite of herself. She’d learned to roll her eyes at these proclamations because, in the weather of their friendship, his flirtation was only a passing cloud. There were far more important storms between them. They discovered, for example, that both of their fathers had died young from cancer, a fact that would’ve bonded them all by itself. They’d both had good dads, and then lost them.

‘It’s like being a member of the shittiest club in the world,’ Javier said to her.

For Lydia, it had been nearly fifteen years, and though her sorrow was now irregular, when she did stumble into it, her grief was still as acute as the day her father had died.

‘I know,’ Javier said, even though she didn’t say these things out loud.

So she endured his intense flattery, and he, in turn, accepted, perhaps even relished, her wholesale rejection of his flirtation. She came to think of it as part of his charm.

‘But, Lydia,’ he told her reverently, placing both hands on his heart, ‘my other loves notwithstanding, you truly are
la reina de mi alma
.’ The queen of my soul.

‘And what would your poor wife say about that?’ she countered.

‘My magnificent wife only wants me to be happy.’