Lydia hesitates, because the most impeccable French braids in the world wouldn’t cause anyone to mistake her for a teenage missionary from Indiana. But even ludicrous armor is better than nothing. The girl mistakes Lydia’s reticence for a language barrier, so she points to her own braids, the braids of the two girls in the row ahead, and then to Lydia’s hair. ‘You like? French braids?’
Lydia nods, pulling the ponytail holder out of her thick, black hair, and turning her back to the girl, who begins crawling her fingers along Lydia’s scalp. It’s hot in the van. When the girl is finished, she asks if anybody has a mirror. There are five teenage girls in this van, and not one of them is vain enough to carry a pocket mirror. Finally, one of the girls opens the camera app on her iPhone, switches it to selfie mode, and hands it to Lydia. ‘They’re so pretty on you!’ she says loudly, pointing to the braids. ‘¡Me gusta!’
Lydia looks at herself on the screen, twisting her head slightly to inspect the braids. She looks younger, she thinks, a little. She smiles and hands the phone back. Relief washes over Lydia when the singing starts, because the clamor of it fills the van and leaves no room for thinking. All the missionaries sing, and Carlos, too, loudly and cheerfully.
‘You should nap,’ she says quietly into Luca’s ear as they approach Axaxacualco. He looks at her without blinking. ‘I see traffic ahead. You should nap on the floor, here. Cozy.’ Lydia reaches beneath the bench seat and makes a space between two of the larger duffel bags. Luca slips into it and makes himself small. A stuffed backpack makes a pillow. He closes his eyes as the traffic begins to snag, and with it, the breath in Lydia’s chest. The girls sing ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’ louder. Carlos catches Lydia’s eye in the rearview mirror. He blinks once, because it’s all the reassurance he can offer her. The line of cars in front of them has come to a stop. Theirs is the second of the three vans. Meredith is driving the one in front.
In the road ahead, two young men, two teenage boys, really, tote AR-15s. Perhaps it’s precisely because that make of gun isn’t quite as prolific or as sexy as the ubiquitous AK-47 here that Lydia finds it all the more terrifying. Ridiculous, she knows. One gun will make you as dead as another. But there’s something so utilitarian about the sleek, black AR-15, like it can’t be bothered to put on a show.
Sometimes the muzzle of one of those guns makes it inside the rolled-down window of a waiting car, but generally they remain outside, pointing skyward. The boys hold their weapons with both hands. Mostly the drivers don’t flinch. Mostly the drivers defer to the boys’ exaggerated egos, go along with their pretend swagger, because although no one expects the boys to open fire, they all know that the only road to genuine bravado runs through faking it first. It’s only a matter of time, and no one wants to find out if today is the day these boys finally mean it. One by one, the drivers reach carefully into their wallets or purses or glove compartments to extract the mordidas. They hand over the money without complaint, and with genuine bendiciones, because these boys could be anyone, they could be the drivers’ brothers or children or grandchildren. Certainly, they are someone’s.
Carlos rolls and brakes, rolls and brakes. Luca keeps his eyes closed, and the missionaries sing. Lydia prays for the unlikely possibility that the boys on the road ahead are uncorrupted autodefensas.
The singing missionaries are conducting their own brand of bravado, too, because even though the roadblock is exciting to them, even though their pastor, who’s in the van behind, explained that roadblocks are quite common here and nothing to be alarmed by, that they’re almost like passing through a toll gate, the girls know that toll booth operators in Indiana don’t carry automatic weapons. Secretly, in the sinful hidden chambers of their hearts, most of these girls had looked forward to experiencing a roadblock – the exotic thrill of it, the wash of adrenaline, the stories they’d get to tell when they returned home to Indiana! But on the way down from Mexico City, they’d been waved right through without stopping. A guilty disappointment. Still, now that the moment is actually upon them, now that they can see the boys in the road ahead, close in age to themselves and brandishing unthinkable weapons, now that their inexperienced missionary nervous systems are flooding their bloodstreams with chaotic hormones, every one of those braided girls feels sick with fright. Some of them wish for the courage to witness to the boys, to save them by reminding them of Jesus. But mostly they just want to go home. One of the girls in the front seat, the one with the iPhone, tries to start another round of singing, but no one joins her and the effort falters after a couple of bars. Carlos rolls down his window.
The boys stand on either side of the van ahead. Lydia can make out Meredith’s silhouette in the driver’s seat, talking to the boy at her window. He must be the one in charge. Meredith gestures with a finger to the other two vans behind, and both boys look back. Lydia freezes in her seat. There’s no way they can notice her here, in the backseat of the van’s darkened interior. The boy jefe on the driver’s side of the van wears a plain blue ball cap with no insignia. He directs his colleague to investigate the other vans. The boy passes between the bumpers of the idling vehicles and approaches Carlos’s window, the business end of his AR-15 tracing the dotted white lines of the road. Lydia glances down at Luca on the floor and sees that his eyes are wide open, as round as soupspoons. She shifts mildly in her seat so her legs mostly cover him.
‘Where are you heading today?’ the boy asks Carlos, to make sure he tells the same story as Meredith.
‘Only to the airport in Mexico City. Our visitors are flying home today.’
‘¿De dónde eres?’ he says to the girl directly behind Carlos.
‘They don’t speak much Spanish,’ Carlos says in Spanish. ‘They’re from Indiana.’
The boy tips his head slightly inside the rolled-down window and surveys the silent, smiling girls. If he’s susceptible to their pheromones, he’s getting bombarded. His eyes land on Lydia, and he scrunches up his mouth.
‘Who’s the woman?’
‘One of our counselors.’
‘¿Estadounidense también?’ The boy has a handsome, skeptical face.
‘No, she’s from here. She’s one of ours.’
‘Why’s she sitting in back?’
Lydia knows not to glance at Luca, but he’s her only anchor left in the world, and her eyes want to go to him. She glues her gaze to the back of Carlos’s seat.
‘One of the girls was carsick,’ Carlos says. ‘She went back there to help.’
Lydia lifts her hand and places it maternally, mechanically, between the shoulder blades of the girl beside her, the girl who braided her hair. Lydia rubs a circle on the girl’s upper back, and the girl wonders how Lydia can tell she’s scared. The girl is grateful for the small demonstration of comfort, and gives Lydia a watery smile. The boy at the window wraps the fingers of one hand over the edge of the door and speaks directly to Lydia.
‘¿Cómo se llama, Doña?’
‘Mariana,’ Lydia lies.
‘She still sick, Mariana?’ He points to the girl beside her with his chin.
‘She’s feeling a little better, I think,’ Lydia says, still rubbing the girl’s back. ‘Not great.’
The unwitting girl supports the story by going quite pale in the face. She leans slightly forward and Lydia thinks perhaps she really is about to vomit.
The boy lingers, his AR-15 hovering just outside the window, his eyes scrutinizing the lines of her face. He leans his head slightly inside the window again. ‘Only girls in this van? No boys?’ he asks.