Chapter Five #2
She shakes her head again. “I don’t want it,” she repeats. “Just get rid of it.”
Ikal attempts to suppress the confusion from his face with a firm nod. He replaces the parcel on his cart, and it’s not until its muffled rattle has almost reached the elevators at the end of the corridor that Lydia changes her mind. She opens the door and chases after him.
“Wait!”
When she returns to the room, Luca has already emerged from the bathroom and is standing over the tray of food, removing the covers from the plates.
Lydia holds the small parcel away from her body as she carries it into the bathroom and places it carefully on a towel in the bottom of the tub.
She steps out and shuts the door, closing the parcel inside.
She fixes her coffee from the tray, drinks it in one long guzzle, and then dresses quickly, hitching her scratchy new jeans up beneath the hotel robe.
Luca eats standing up, wearing only his underwear.
He is starving, and that hunger feels like a betrayal.
How can his body want food? He jams a slice of toast into his mouth.
How can the butter taste so good? Luca chews it into a paste before swallowing.
He watches his mother sideways without turning his head away from the television.
He sees the way Mami screws her lips up to one side, and he decides he’s going to take care of her.
He won’t be a baby anymore. He decides this very matter-of-factly, in a single instant, and he knows it to be immediately true.
“We should go to el norte,” he says, because he suspects that’s her plan anyway, and he wants to confirm that it’s a good one, the only one, to get to a planet where no one can reach them.
“Yes.” Mami stands beside the bed in her jeans and robe. She seems to have lost track of what she was doing halfway through getting dressed. She seems both hurried and unable to move. “We’ll go to Denver,” she says after a moment.
She has an uncle there. Lydia slips a plain white T-shirt over her head and steps out from inside the puddle of robe around her feet.
She feels so prickly and raw that even the cotton of the T-shirt brushing against her skin sends goose bumps racing down her arms. She rubs them off and tells Luca to hurry up and get dressed when he’s finished eating.
Back in the bathroom, she stares down at the padded brown envelope in the bottom of the tub, and can’t decide whether she made the right decision by bringing it into the room.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Someone knows they’re here, so now they have to leave immediately, regardless of what’s inside.
It wasn’t curiosity that made her run after that food delivery kid.
She’s not curious. She doesn’t want to know what’s inside.
But she knows that disinterest is a luxury she can no longer afford to indulge.
If she hopes to survive this ordeal with Luca, then she needs to pay attention to every single detail.
She needs to be alert to every scrap of available information.
She lifts the envelope carefully by one corner and examines the back seal.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary. She’s going to have to open it.
In here, in the bathroom? Or should she take it out on the balcony in case it explodes?
“Carajo,” she says out loud.
“You talking to me, Mami?” Luca says through the door.
“No, mijo. Get dressed!”
She puts the parcel to her ear but can hear nothing inside.
No ticking. No beeping. She lifts the parcel to her nose and smells it, but there’s no discernible odor.
She carefully slides one finger beneath the sealed edge, closes her eyes, and gently pulls her finger along the loosening flap.
In her head, the pounding of her own fear is louder than the ripping paper, but now here it is, opened in her hands.
An ordinary brown envelope. No dreadful toxic powder spills out. No poisonous cloud of doom ascends.
Inside, tied with a pale blue ribbon, is an English-language copy of Love in the Time of Cholera.
A book she once discussed with Javier, one of their many shared favorites.
There’s something tucked between its pages.
She tugs on the ribbon, which gives way and falls to the floor at her bare feet.
Her body feels like an arrow that’s been launched from its bow but hasn’t yet found its target.
She’s suspended, arcing, accountable to the laws of gravity.
She opens to the page where an unsealed envelope is wedged into the spine.
Of course she knows, she knew from the very first sound of mayhem in the yard, that Javier is responsible for the massacre of her family.
It feels as impossible as it is true. But until this moment, she’s protected herself from fully acknowledging that fact.
Because once she accepts that incontrovertible truth, she must also acknowledge her own guilt.
She knew this man. She knew him. And yet she’d failed to appreciate the danger he presented; she’d failed to protect her family.
Lydia can’t think about any of this yet; she isn’t ready.
She must find a way to delay her despair.
Luca is the only thing that matters now. Luca. He is still in danger.
“Get dressed!” she calls again, her voice pitching out at an unfamiliar angle.
She looks down at the book in her hand. A passage is highlighted there, the moment when the widowed heroine, Fermina Daza, reeling in the aftermath of her husband’s death, encounters the man, Florentino Ariza, whom she rejected fifty years earlier:
“Fermina,” he said, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
Lydia thrusts the book away from her and it somersaults into the tub.
The envelope remains in her hand. She considers dropping it, too, and leaving it there, but she needs to know what it says.
Her stomach plunges. She pulls the card out of its thick envelope and sees white lilies on the front.
Mi más sentido pésame. Inside, the handwriting is immediately familiar.
Lydia,
Hay sangre en tus manos también. Lo siento por tu dolor y el mío. Ahora estamos destinados a permanecer eternamente unidos por este pesar. Jamás imaginé este capítulo para nosotros. Pero no te preocupes, mi reina del alma—tu sufrimiento será breve.
Javier
There is blood on your hands as well. I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief. I never imagined this chapter for us. But do not worry, Queen of my Soul—your suffering will be brief.
She drops the card and it lands in the toilet, where it darkens at once.
Lydia’s not sure what she’d been expecting when she opened it.
There’s nothing he could’ve written there that would make any difference.
No quiet slashing of ink on paper can resuscitate her dead mother, her husband.
No apology or explanation can reanimate Yénifer’s brain, pin her soul back into her body.
That girl smelled like grapefruit and sugar, and now she’s gone.
Lydia beats back a sob using an English word she’s never liked: “Fuck!” It works, so she says it again and again.
Perhaps she’d hoped the card might illuminate something.
She reads it once more, floating, the ink beginning to bleed, and she’s haunted by the familiarity of the handwriting.
What had she missed? How can this be real?
She tries, but she can’t force it to make sense, and the effort makes her dizzy.
Only one thing is clear: Javier knows where they are.
She doesn’t have time to panic or reflect.
She has to get Luca out of there. Now. They have to run.
She bangs open the bathroom door and hisses at Luca once more to get dressed.
He doesn’t answer, and when she looks up, she sees that he’s already dressed in fresh jeans and his father’s red hat, that he’s sitting on the chair beside the desk, wriggling his feet into his new socks.
“Oh, ándale,” she says. “Good.” But then he reaches out for the tray of food, to cram in a bite before tackling the other sock, and Lydia lunges toward him.
She smacks the toast from his hand and it skids to the floor.
“Mami!” Luca is shocked.
She only shakes her head. “Don’t eat it. Don’t eat any more food.” Luca is silent. “I don’t know if it’s safe.”
She thinks about dragging him into the bathroom and sticking a finger down his throat, but there’s no time.
She crams all their belongings into her mother’s overnight bag and the two backpacks.
She hasn’t even put on her bra yet. No time.
Her hair is wet; it’s leaving a damp ring around the shoulders of her T-shirt.
She jams her bare feet into her mother’s quilted sneakers, straps the backpack on herself, and grabs her mother’s bag.
“You ready?”
Luca nods and picks up the second backpack, the one they bought at Walmart.
“Super quiet,” she says. “No noise.”
Luca seals his mouth.
Lydia pauses at the door to lean her ear against the wood and listen before she dares to open it.
She pins Luca to the wall beside her and then cracks the door.
The hallway is empty, the only sound coming from a television in the room across the hall.
She takes Luca’s hand and tugs him out, wedging a towel into the door so it won’t even click as it closes.
They run silently to the service stairs, and when Lydia hears the ding of the elevator at the other end of the hall, she shoves Luca through the door.
Seven flights down, Luca flies in front of her.
Lydia’s feet touch every third or fourth step along the way.