‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Mami. ‘If anyone was looking for us, they’d go to the central terminal downtown, right? They wouldn’t expect us to be all the way out here in Diamante.’ Luca doesn’t know about the parcel, but his logic is enough to make Lydia smile for a moment.
‘That’s what I thought, too. Smart kid.’ She tugs the brim of Papi’s red baseball cap lower on Luca’s face. He walks too fast. ‘We have to walk like normal,’ she says. ‘Slow down.’
‘Normal people are sometimes late for a bus.’ Luca’s limbs feel twitchy.
‘There’s always another bus,’ she says.
It’s seven minutes past six in the morning when Mami purchases their one-way tickets to Mexico City, so they have thirteen minutes to kill before the bus leaves. The terminal is a modern structure, mostly glass, and even though the sun isn’t up yet, the sky has begun to lighten, and Luca can make out the shapes of the cars in the parking lot. There’s only one SUV, and it appears to be empty, lights off. But someone could be inside waiting, seat reclined, asleep on the job. Luca studies the SUV while Mami collects her change from the lady behind the counter. It’s Sunday, so the buses back to Mexico City will be crowded with families heading home from their minivacations. Luca and Mami can look like one of those families. There’s a handful of energetic children in the terminal already, chattering and skipping circles around their bleary-eyed, coffee-sipping parents.
Mami herds Luca into the handicapped stall in the ladies’ bathroom and makes him stand on the toilet seat inside. It’s the sort of thing she usually wouldn’t tolerate. Luca doesn’t think anyone in the terminal noticed them, and he feels pretty sure because he was studying the faces, but if there is someone looking for them here, if they do track them first to the bus terminal, then to the women’s bathroom, and finally to the handicapped stall, well, then standing on a toilet with your back against a wall doesn’t seem like a very effective way to survive. Luca leans his hands down on his knees and tries not to shake. He watches Mami remove her backpack and prop it in the corner before hanging the overnight bag from the hook on the back of the door. She has to dig nearly to the bottom of it to find a pair of socks. They’re still attached by a plastic barb, which Mami snaps before putting them on. He doesn’t know how she does that. Luca always has to cut them with scissors. Mami doesn’t look that strong, but he knows she’s really powerful, because she can always snap that plastic barb like it’s nothing. She digs out a bra, too, and wriggles into it beneath her shirt. Then she zips up Abuela’s gold sneakers and turns her back to Luca so her feet are pointing in the right direction in case anyone looks under the stall. They’re alone in the bathroom, but he speaks to her very quietly anyway, so they can hear if the door opens, if anyone comes in.
‘So we’re going to Colorado?’
Lydia nods, and Luca wraps his arms around her neck.
He leans his chin on her shoulder. ‘Good plan.’
‘No one would ever think of Colorado.’ Lydia stares at the bag hanging in front of them and tries to remember if she ever mentioned Denver to Javier. Why would she have? She’s never been there and hasn’t seen her uncle since she was a kid.
‘Plus, it’s far,’ Luca says.
‘Yes,’ Mami says. ‘Very far away from here.’
In fact, Luca knows with some degree of precision just how far Denver is from Acapulco (almost two thousand miles by car). He knows this because Luca has perfect direction the way some prodigies have perfect pitch. He was born with it, an intrinsic sense of his position on the globe, like a human GPS, pinging his way through the universe. When he sees something on a map, it lodges in his memory forever.
‘I’m going to miss the geography bee,’ he says. He’s been studying for months. In September, his school paid six hundred pesos for him to take the international qualifying exam because his teacher was convinced he would bring home the $10,000 grand prize.
‘I’m sorry, mijo,’ Lydia says, kissing his arm.
Luca shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Before yesterday, that geography bee had seemed so important to all of them; now it feels like the most trivial thing in the world, along with everything else on the running to-do list Lydia kept beside the register in the bookshop: Fill out the church paperwork for Luca’s communion. Pay the water bill. Take Abuela to her cardiology appointment. Buy a gift for Yénifer’s quinceañera. What a waste of time it had all been. Lydia feels annoyed that her niece won’t get to see the music box she purchased for her special day. How expensive it was! She realizes, even as this thought occurs to her, how bizarre and awful it is, but she can’t stop it from crashing in. She doesn’t rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.
Luca whispers in her ear, ‘With a population of almost seven hundred thousand, Denver, nicknamed the Mile High City because of its elevation, is located just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ Reciting from the memory of flash cards. ‘It is the state capital of Colorado and one quarter of its population claims Mexican heritage.’
Lydia squeezes his arm, reaches up, and runs a hand through his black hair. The summer before last, when Luca’s enduring interest in maps began to shift from fascination to obsession, Lydia kept him busy at the bookstore with guidebooks and atlases. It seems impossible that back then, just so recently, Acapulco was bright with tourists and music and the shops and the sea. Rock pigeons strutted across the sand. Vast foreign cruise ships disgorged their sneakered passengers onto the streets, their pockets fat with dollars, their skin glistening from coconut-scented sunscreen. The dollars filled the bars and restaurants. In Lydia’s bookshop, they filled the register. Those tourists bought the guidebooks and atlases, along with serious novels and frivolous novels and souvenir key chains and tiny tubes of sand corked with tiny stoppers that Lydia kept in a big fishbowl beside the register. And, ay, Dios mío, those tourists couldn’t get enough of Luca. Lydia set him up like a puppet on a stool, and he’d tell them, in precise English, about the places where they came from. He was six years old. A wunderkind.
‘With a population of six hundred and forty thousand, Portland is located at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and is the largest city in the state of Oregon. The city was incorporated in 1851, sixty-five years after its eastern namesake in coastal Maine.’
Henry from Portland, Oregon, stood in front of Luca with his mouth hanging open. ‘Marge, come here, you’ve gotta see this! Do it again.’ Marge joined her husband, and Luca repeated his spiel. ‘Incredible. Kid, you are just incredible. Marge, give the kid some money.’
‘Did you make all that up?’ Marge asked skeptically, digging in her purse for some money regardless.
‘Nah, he knew the rivers,’ Henry defended him. ‘How could he make that up?’
‘It’s real,’ Luca said. ‘I just remember things. Especially about maps and places.’
‘Well, Henry’s right, it’s incredible.’ Marge gave him a dollar. ‘And in perfect English! Where did you learn such perfect English?’
‘Acapulco,’ Luca said simply. ‘And YouTube.’
Lydia watched in silence and felt obscenely proud. Smug, even. Her boy was perfect – so smart and accomplished, so guapo and happy. She’d been teaching him English for almost as long as he’d been speaking Spanish. It was a skill that she knew would serve him well, growing up in a tourist town. But he quickly outstripped her knowledge of the language, and then they proceeded to learn together, mostly on her phone or computer. YouTube lessons, Rosetta Stone, soap operas. They often spoke English to each other when Sebastián wasn’t around, or when they pretended to have a secret in front of him. Sometimes they tried out slang on each other. She called Luca dude and he called her shorty. Marge and Henry laughed at Luca’s pragmatic charm and then gathered their friends from the cruise ship and returned to watch him perform. They offered him a dollar for every city he could tell them about. He made thirty-seven dollars that day and could’ve kept going, except the tourists had to get back to their ship.