It’s midafternoon on a Saturday, and the bus isn’t crowded. Luca feels glad to sit, until he realizes that the movement of his legs beneath him, carrying the weight of his small frame through the streets of his city, had been the thing staving off the crush of horror that now threatens to descend. As soon as he’s seated beside Mami on the blue plastic seat, his tired legs dangling down, he begins to think. He begins to shake. Mami puts her arm around him and squeezes tight.
‘You cannot cry here, mijito,’ Mami says. ‘Not yet.’
Luca nods, and just like that, he stops trembling and the risk of tears evaporates. He leans his head against the warm glass of the bus window and looks out. He focuses on the cartoon colors of his city, the green of the palm fronds, the trunks of the trees painted white to discourage beetles, the vivid blare of signs advertising shops and hotels and shoes. At El Rollo, Luca looks at the children and teenagers in line for the ticket window. They wear flip-flops and have towels around their necks. Behind them, the red and yellow water slides swoop and soar. Luca puts one finger against the glass and squashes the children in line one by one. The bus squeaks its brakes at the curb, and three damp-haired teenage boys get on. They pass Luca and Lydia without a glance and sit in the back of the bus, elbows planted on knees, talking quietly across the aisle.
‘Papi’s going to take me in the summertime,’ Luca says.
‘What?’
‘To El Rollo. He said this summer we could go. He would take a day off work one time when I’m not in school.’
Lydia sucks in her cheeks and bites down. A disloyal reflex: she’s angry at her husband. The driver closes the door and the bus moves off with the traffic. Lydia unzips the overnight bag at her feet, kicks off her heels, and replaces them with her mother’s quilted gold sneakers. She doesn’t have a plan, which is unlike her, and she finds it difficult to form one because her mind feels unfamiliar, both frenetic and swampy. She does have the wherewithal to remember that every fifteen or twenty minutes, they should get off and change buses, which they do. Sometimes they change direction, sometimes they don’t. One bus stops directly in front of a church, so they go briefly inside, but the part of Lydia that’s usually available for prayer has shut down. She’s experienced this numbness a few times before in her life – when she was seventeen and her father died of cancer, when she had a late-stage miscarriage two years after Luca, when the doctors told her she could never have more children – so she doesn’t think of it as a crisis of faith. Instead she believes it’s a divine kindness. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies. Outside, Luca vomits on the pavement once more while they wait for the next bus.
Around her neck, Lydia wears a thin gold chain adorned only with three interlocking loops. It’s a discreet piece of jewelry, and the only one she wears apart from the filigreed gold band around the fourth finger of her left hand. Sebastián gave her the necklace the first Christmas after Luca was born, and she loved it immediately – the symbolism of it. She’s worn it every day since, and it’s become so much a part of her that she’s woven her mannerisms into it. When she’s bored, she runs the delicate chain back and forth along the pad of her thumb. When she’s nervous, she has a habit of looping the three interlocking circles together onto the tip of her pinky nail, where they make a faint tinkling sound. She doesn’t touch those golden hoops now. Her hand moves absently toward her neck, but already she’s aware of the gesture. Already she’s training herself to disguise old habits. She must become entirely unrecognizable if she hopes to survive. She opens the clasp at the back of her neck and slips Sebastián’s wedding ring from her thumb onto the chain. Then she refastens the clasp around her neck and drops the whole thing inside the collar of her blouse.
They must avoid drawing the attention of the bus drivers, who’ve been known to act as halcones, lookouts for the cartel. Lydia understands that her appearance as a moderately attractive but not beautiful woman of indeterminate age, traveling the city with an unremarkable-looking boy, can provide a kind of natural camouflage if she takes care to promote the impression that they’re simply out for a day’s shopping or a visit to friends across the city. Indeed, Luca and Lydia could easily change places with many of their fellow passengers, which Lydia thinks of as truly absurd – that the people around them cannot see plainly what abomination they’ve just endured. It feels as evident to Lydia as if she were carrying a flashing neon sign. She fights at every moment against the scream that pulses inside her like a living thing. It stretches and kicks in her gut like Luca did when he was a baby in there. With tremendous self-control, she strangles and suppresses it.
When a plan finally does begin to emerge from the violent fog of chaos in her mind, Lydia feels uncertain whether it’s a good one, but she commits herself to it because she has no other. At a quarter to four o’clock, just before closing time in Playa Caletilla, Lydia and Luca disembark from the bus, go into an unfamiliar branch of their bank, and wait in line. Lydia turns on her cell phone to check her balance, and then powers it all the way off again before filling out a withdrawal slip for almost the full amount: 219,803 pesos, or about $12,500, almost all of it an inheritance from Sebastián’s godfather, who’d owned a bottling company, and who’d never had children of his own. She asks for the money in large bills.
A few minutes later, Luca and Lydia are back on the bus, their life savings in cash stuffed into three envelopes at the bottom of Abuela’s overnight bag. Three buses and more than an hour later, they get out at the Walmart in Diamante. They buy a backpack for Luca, two packets of underwear, two pairs of jeans, two packets of three plain white T-shirts, socks, two hooded sweatshirts, two warm jackets, two more toothbrushes, disposable wipes, Band-Aids, sunscreen, Blistex, a first aid kit, two canteens, two flashlights, some batteries, and a map of Mexico. Lydia takes a long time selecting a machete at the counter in the home goods department, eventually choosing a small one with a retractable blade and a tidy black holster she can strap to her leg. It’s not a gun, but it’s better than nothing. They pay in cash, and then walk beneath the highway overpass toward the beach hotels, Luca wearing Papi’s baseball cap and Lydia not touching her gold necklace. She watches everyone as they walk, other pedestrians, drivers in passing cars, even skinny boys on their skateboards, because she knows halcones are everywhere. They hurry on. Lydia chooses the Hotel Duquesa Imperial because of its size. It’s big enough to provide a measure of anonymity, but not new enough to attract much in the way of trendy social attention. She requests a room facing the street and pays, again, in cash.
‘And now I just need a credit card on file for incidentals,’ the desk clerk says as he tucks two card keys into a paper sleeve.
Lydia looks at the keys and considers snatching them, bolting for the elevator. Then she opens the overnight bag and pretends to rummage for her credit card. ‘Shoot, I must have left it in the car,’ she says. ‘How much is the hold?’
‘Four thousand pesos.’ He gives her a clinical smile. ‘Fully refundable, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Lydia says. She props the overnight bag up on her knee and flips open one of the envelopes. She withdraws the 4,000 pesos without taking the envelope out of the bag. ‘Cash is okay?’
‘Oh.’ The clerk looks mildly alarmed and darts his eyes toward his manager, who’s busy with another customer.