At length, Mami stands. ‘Stay here,’ she instructs him in a whisper. ‘Don’t move until I come back for you. Don’t make a sound, you understand?’
Luca lunges for her hand. ‘Mami, don’t go.’
‘Mijo, I will be right back, okay? You stay here.’ Mami pries Luca’s fingers from her hand. ‘Don’t move,’ she says again. ‘Good boy.’
Luca finds it easy to obey his mother’s directive, not so much because he’s an obedient child, but because he doesn’t want to see. His whole family out there, in Abuela’s backyard. Today is Saturday, April 7, his cousin Yénifer’s quinceañera, her fifteenth birthday party. She’s wearing a long white dress. Her father and mother are there, Tío Alex and Tía Yemi, and Yénifer’s younger brother, Adrián, who, because he already turned nine, likes to say he’s a year older than Luca, even though they’re really only four months apart.
Before Luca had to pee, he and Adrián had been kicking the balón around with their other primos. The mothers had been sitting around the table at the patio, their iced palomas sweating on their napkins. The last time they were all together at Abuela’s house, Yénifer had accidentally walked in on Luca in the bathroom, and Luca was so mortified that today he made Mami come with him and stand guard outside the door. Abuela didn’t like it; she told Mami she was coddling him, that a boy his age should be able to go to the bathroom by himself, but Luca is an only child, so he gets away with things other kids don’t.
In any case, Luca is alone in the bathroom now, and he tries not to think it, but the thought swarms up unbidden: those irritable words Mami and Abuela exchanged were perhaps the very last ones between them, ever. Luca had approached the table wriggling, whispered into Mami’s ear, and Abuela, seeing this, had shaken her head, wagged an admonishing finger at them both, passed her remarks. She had a way of smiling when she criticized. But Mami was always on Luca’s side. She rolled her eyes and pushed her chair back from the table anyway, ignoring her mother’s disapproval. When was that – ten minutes ago? Two hours? Luca feels unmoored from the boundaries of time that have always existed.
Outside the window he hears Mami’s tentative footsteps, the soft scuff of her shoe through the remnants of something broken. A solitary gasp, too windy to be called a sob. Then a quickening of sound as she crosses the patio with purpose, depresses the keys on her phone. When she speaks, her voice has a stretched quality that Luca has never heard before, high and tight in the back of her throat.
‘Send help.’
CHAPTER TWO
By the time Mami returns to pull Luca from the shower, he’s curled into a tight ball and rocking himself. She tells him to stand, but he shakes his head and rolls himself up even tighter, his body flapping with panicked reluctance. As long as he stays here in this shower with his face lowered into the dark angles of his elbows, as long as he doesn’t look Mami in the face, he can put off knowing what he already knows. He can prolong the moment of irrational hope that maybe some sliver of yesterday’s world is still intact.
It might be better for him to go and look, to see the brilliant splatters of color on Yénifer’s white dress, to see Adrián’s eyes, open to the sky, to see Abuela’s gray hair, matted with stuff that should never exist outside the neat encasement of a skull. It might be good, actually, for Luca to see the warm wreckage of his recent father, the spatula bent crooked beneath his fallen weight, his blood still leaching across the concrete patio. Because none of it, however horrific, is worse than the images Luca will conjure instead with the radiance of his own imagination.
When at last she gets him to stand, Mami takes Luca out the front door, which may or may not be the best idea. If los sicarios were to return, what would be worse – to be on the street in plain sight, or to be hidden inside where no one might witness their arrival? An impossible question. Nothing is better or worse than anything else now. They walk across Abuela’s tidy courtyard and Mami opens the gate. Together they sit on the yellow-painted curb with their feet on the street. The far side is in shade, but it’s bright here, and the sun is hot against Luca’s forehead. After some brief swell of minutes, they hear sirens approaching. Mami, whose name is Lydia, becomes aware that her teeth are chattering. She’s not cold. Her armpits are damp, and she has goose bumps across the flesh of her arms. Luca leans forward and retches once. He brings up a glob of potato salad, stained pink with fruit punch. It splats onto the asphalt between his feet, but he and his mother don’t move away from it. They don’t even seem to notice. Nor do they note the furtive rearrangement of curtains and blinds in nearby windows as the neighbors prepare their credible deniability.
What Luca does notice is the walls that line his abuela’s street. He’s seen them countless times before, but today he perceives a difference: each house here is fronted by a small courtyard like Abuela’s, hidden from the street by a wall like Abuela’s, topped with razor wire or chicken wire or spiked fence posts like Abuela’s, and accessible only through a locked gate like Abuela’s. Acapulco is a dangerous city. The people take precautions here, even in nice neighborhoods like this one, especially in nice neighborhoods like this one. But what good are those protections when the men come? Luca leans his head against his mother’s shoulder, and she puts an arm around him. She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because from now on that question will carry a weight of painful absurdity. Lydia tries her best not to consider the many words that will never come out of her mouth now, the sudden monster void of words she will never get to say.
When they arrive, the police pull yellow escena del crimen tape across both ends of the block to discourage traffic and make room for the macabre motorcade of emergency vehicles. There are a lot of officers, a whole army of them, who move around and past Luca and Lydia with choreographed reverence. When the senior detective approaches and begins asking questions, Lydia hesitates for a moment, considering where to send Luca. He’s too young to hear everything she needs to say. She should dispatch him to someone else for a few minutes, so she can give forthright answers to these dreadful questions. She should send him to his father. Her mother. Her sister, Yemi. But they are all dead in the backyard, their bodies as close as toppled dominoes. It’s all meaningless anyway. The police aren’t here to help. Lydia begins to sob. Luca stands and places the cold curve of his hand across the back of his mother’s neck.
‘Give her a minute,’ he says, like a grown man.
When the detective returns, there’s a woman with him, the medical examiner, who addresses Luca directly. She puts a hand on his shoulder and asks if he’d like to sit in her truck. It says SEMEFO on the side, and the back doors are standing open. Mami nods at him, so Luca goes with the woman and sits inside, dangling his feet over the back bumper. She offers him a sweating can, a cold refresco.
Lydia’s brain, which had been temporarily suspended by shock, begins working again, but it creeps like sludge. She’s still sitting on the curb, and the detective stands between her and her son.
‘Did you see the shooter?’ he asks.
‘Shooters, plural. I think there were three of them.’ She wishes the detective would step aside so she can keep Luca in her line of sight. He’s only a dozen steps away.