The number pops up on the screen in front of her, and it’s more money than Lydia had dared to hope for: 212,871 pesos; more than $10,000. Lydia breathes a fragment that might just be relief, but feels like joy. This is a lot of money. The women in Abuela’s gardening club would be scandalized by the amount. Lydia retracts the card and replaces it reverently in her mother’s purse without making a withdrawal. It’s safer to leave it in the bank until they need it. If money could solve all their problems, she and Luca would be saved. And yet there’s still no way for them to buy their way out of Mexico City, and now, with this single electronic transaction, she knows she may have dropped a pin on Javier’s map. She’d known that the vastness of Mexico City would be her only chance to make this transaction without immediately revealing themselves, and now that she’s done it, they have to move. They order tacos at the food court, and Luca asks for extra sour cream, which Lydia finds remarkably comforting. They eat them on the 6:32 p.m. commuter train to Lechería.
It’s still light out, with long shadows reclining across the pavements, by the time Luca and Mami arrive at the address she found at the library, but the doors of the Casa del Migrante are locked and the windows are darkened. Mami shields her eyes against the glass, and Luca follows suit. He can see nothing inside. A woman walks past them on the sidewalk, pulling a rolling metal cart full of groceries.
‘Está cerrado,’ she says.
‘Closed?’ Mami turns to look at her. ‘For the night?’
‘No, closed for good. A few months ago. The neighbors complained. It was too many problems for the community. Look here.’ The lady lets go of her cart and opens the metal mailbox hanging beside the door. She draws out a pamphlet and hands it to Lydia.
‘Amigo migrante,’ Lydia reads aloud. ‘The neighbors of Lechería invite you to continue your journey to the Casa del Migrante in its new location at Huehuetoca.’ Lydia snorts. ‘How hospitable of them.’
The lady throws her hands up in the air. ‘It’s not the fault of the migrants, you poor people, but where you go, the problems follow.’ She returns to her cart, tips it onto its wheels.
‘But wait,’ Lydia says, ‘where is Huehuetoca?’
The woman starts walking. ‘North,’ she says, waving back over her shoulder. Lydia looks at Luca, who only shrugs. He could tell her that Huehuetoca is about seventeen miles away, because he saw it on the map when Mami was looking up Lechería on the computer in the library, but his tongue lacks the capacity to formulate the words Mami, it’s too far to walk tonight, so he follows his mother the wrong way down the street for three blocks, back toward the train station and the setting sun, before she spots a group of men wearing backpacks and baseball caps. Luca can tell her anxiety is growing with the length of their shadows. Soon it will be dark. The men turn to look at them as they approach, and they greet Mami immediately.
‘Saludos, señora. ¿Cómo va?’
‘Good, thank you. Can you tell us how to get to Huehuetoca?’ she asks. ‘We just found this message – the migrant shelter is closed.’
‘Yes, it’s closed. It’s a hike up there to that other place, señora,’ the youngest man says. There’s something sour on his breath.
‘How far?’
‘A distance. It has to be ten, fifteen miles from here.’
‘Wow.’
The men all nod. One has a toothpick in his mouth. He’s leaning on a low wall.
‘Is there a bus?’
‘No bus, but you can take the train from here to the end of the line at Cuautitlán. That gets you a little closer. You can walk from there, maybe four, five hours.’ Only the youngest man talks. The other two watch the conversation like it’s a tennis match. Luca watches them watch the tennis.
‘That’s too far tonight,’ Mami says.
‘You can camp with us.’ The man grins. ‘Go in the morning, señora.’ His body moves like a noodle, and the offer feels abrupt and dubious. Luca steps in between the men and his mother, not from any real sense of martyrdom, but because he’s observed that, on occasion, the presence of children serves to inhibit people’s bad behavior. He tugs on Mami’s hand, and together they get moving.
At Lechería station once again, they take the next northern-bound train to the end of the line at Cuautitlán, where Mami splurges on a cheap motel room. She tells Luca it’s their last stay in a hotel for a very long time.
In the morning, she wakes him at first light, and they set out north toward Huehuetoca, not necessarily because they need to find the migrant shelter, but because they need to find the migrants.
Cuautitlán is the last stop on the commuter railway line, but the tracks continue north. A new million-dollar fence separates the street from the tracks; it’s part of the Mexican government’s Programa Frontera Sur, which is funded largely by the United States, and aims to clear migrants from the trains. Migrants can’t jump onto the trains here because the fence keeps them out, but about a mile north of the station that fence ends abruptly, so Luca and Lydia walk up the grassy little berm and stay beside the tracks.
Luca doesn’t understand why they have to walk. He knows they have enough money to buy a ticket. He’d like to ask Mami about it, but his voice stays sealed inside. He hops from tie to tie on the outside of the track, and Lydia watches their backs to make sure there’s no train coming. He still has the ticket card from yesterday in his pocket – the one they bought from Lechería to Cuautitlán. Mami trusted him to be in charge of his own ticket, even though they had to swipe it twice – once getting on the train and then again getting off. He digs into his pocket now and pulls out the card. He tugs on Mami’s sleeve, and she turns to look at him. He waves the card at her, and she understands what he wants to know, because she understands everything.
‘You can’t buy tickets for these trains,’ she explains. ‘That was the last stop.’
Luca frowns, and a small groove appears in his forehead. He tilts his head up and squints. He can see the tracks. He crawls his fingers upward through the air, tracing the railway lines he can see on the map in his memory.
‘Those tracks beneath your feet keep going and going,’ Mami confirms. ‘All the way to el norte.’
Luca’s gaze expands and he can nearly feel the tracks beneath him, trundling through the miles ahead, stretching beneath the daytime and nighttime skies, all the way to Texas. So then why can’t they buy a ticket?
‘The trains that run north from here are only for cargo,’ Mami says. ‘Not for people.’
With effort, Luca manages a single word. ‘Why?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know, amorcito.’
It seems so simple when he asks it. Why? Didn’t there used to be passenger trains in Mexico, along with the freights? Lydia has a vague childhood memory of trains ferrying more than just cargo across the landscape. She remembers people standing on platforms holding luggage, the cheerful peal of a steam whistle. But the railways stopped carrying passengers a lifetime ago, and Lydia searches her gauzy memories, but it’s no use. She can’t remember why, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Beside her, Luca continues stepping from tie to tie. He watches the toe of his blue sneakers press against the wood. Sometimes he asks why only because he’s programmed to ask it, she realizes. He doesn’t really care that she doesn’t have an answer, as long as she gives him something.