Chapter Eight #2
Sebastián grimaced. “Terrible.”
Lydia went to the cupboard and took down two mugs, which she filled with coffee. She set one in front of her husband and sat down beside him once again. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs.
“Sebastián, I think he’s in love with me.”
Sebastián filled his cheeks with air before letting it all loose into the room. “Maldita sea,” he said. “Of course he is.”
In the short term, the only real change was that Sebastián began calling and coming to the shop more frequently than he had before.
Four or five times a day he texted, and even if she was busy, she made sure to respond, to reassure him.
All was well. Lydia was intensely nervous when Javier came the following week.
She texted Sebastián beneath the counter. He’s here. I’ll call u after.
Javier carried a small parcel and his eyes were brighter than usual.
He seemed eager for the other customers to withdraw, but Lydia took her time, reluctant to be alone with him.
When the last couple wandered toward the exit without any purchases, she called after them, “Did you find everything okay?” They didn’t answer her.
The man only nodded, and the bell above the door startled as they left.
Lydia’s hands trembled as she spooned sugar into Javier’s cup.
He smiled broadly at her from his stool. “I brought a gift.” He prodded the paper-wrapped bundle across the counter to her.
It was plain brown paper, taped and devoid of ribbons, but the austerity of the wrapping didn’t diminish the intimacy of an unwarranted gift on a Wednesday morning.
Lydia opened it anyway. Inside was a wooden nesting doll, peanut shaped and about the length of Lydia’s forearm, with a barely visible seam running around her middle.
She was painted in festive colors: black hair, pink cheeks, yellow apron, red roses.
Lydia pulled her apart at the seam and, inside, found her identical, smaller sister.
She pulled her apart again, and again, and each time she discovered in miniature the shell of the doll before her.
“They’re Russian nesting dolls,” she said.
“Yes.” Javier watched her face. “But really they’re me. Keep going.”
She pulled apart the last severed doll, no taller than her thumb, and inside she found the tiniest sister.
This one was bright turquoise, and more beautiful, more exquisite and detailed than all the sisters before her.
Lydia pinched her between finger and thumb.
She held her up and studied the intricate silver filigree of her paintwork.
“And that’s you.” Javier tapped his chest with his fist. “Muy dentro de mí.”
Lydia blinked rapidly, but it was too late to conceal the tears that came to the corners of her eyes. Javier mistook them, and his smile broadened.
“You like them?”
She sniffed. “Very much, thank you.” She hastened to pack the dolls back into one another while he watched.
He noticed the way she didn’t take care to line up their tops with their bottoms. This was his first indication that something was truly askew. “What’s the matter, mi reina?”
When the dolls were reassembled, Lydia rolled them back into their brown paper and placed them beneath the counter with her phone. There was no easy way to say it. She might as well be direct.
“I received some bad news last week,” she said. He leaned forward, frowning. “About you.”
He leaned back, frowning deeper. A very long silence grew between them, and then a customer came in, jangling the bell above the door.
The woman bought three notebooks, three fancy pens, and a birthday card, and Lydia found herself unable to smile while she rang the woman up.
She felt Javier’s anxiety like a malediction in the room.
It rattled into her chest. His shoulders were curled in, and he squeezed his flattened hands between his thighs.
When the customer left, Lydia went to the door and locked it. She flipped the sign to CERRADO.
They studied each other across the counter. She stared into his eyes, and neither of them shifted their gaze.
At length, he spoke. “I presumed you knew.” His voice was strained, raspy.
She shook her head without removing her eyes from his. “How would I know? Why would I know?”
His eyes swam even larger than usual behind the glasses. His mouth trembled as he spoke. “It feels as though almost everyone knows. I thought … somehow, I hoped it didn’t matter to you. I thought it didn’t matter because you knew me, you could see the person I really am.”
“I can, I still can,” she said. “But, Javier, that other part of you, the part I don’t know … it’s irreconcilable. That person is real, too, yes?”
Finally, he dropped his gaze from hers. He blinked his eyes repeatedly, removed his glasses, and cleaned them on the tail of his shirt.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
Lydia pressed her lips together.
“I’m in love with you. I am in love with you.”
She shook her head.
“Lydia, you’re the only real friend I have. The only person in my life who wants nothing from me except the joy between us.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true! And when I’m not with you, I’m lonely for you. You have no idea the light you provide. You and Marta, you’re all I really have. Nothing else matters. I would leave it all if I could.”
“Then do!” She slapped her hand against the counter. “Leave it!”
He smiled sadly at her. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“It works whatever way you say it works! You’re the jefe, right?”
“Yes, and if I leave, what then? What will become of Acapulco if I leave? How many people will die while they fight over who takes my place?” His elbows were up on the counter. He tugged at his hair in distress. “You know I never wanted this. It was an accident of fate that I ended up here.”
Quite near the surface of her consciousness, Lydia knew that couldn’t really be true.
If it was a lottery ticket, it was one he had selected and purchased with his own money.
She knew this, that he must have committed specific evils to have attained this rank.
How many? Of what nature? Some combination of fear and sadness prevented her from asking.
She didn’t dare to contradict his justifications.
“But here we are, here I am.” His eyes were pleading. “There’s no getting out of it, Lydia, not for me. But it doesn’t define who I am.”
She could feel the dissonance throbbing through her brain like an erratic pulse. Of course it defines who you are, she did not say. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt him take her hand.
“Please understand,” he said. “Try.”
When Lydia had found Javier’s picture in Sebastián’s folder the previous week, she’d been riven with real anguish.
Seldom had she experienced such profound and authentic friendship in her life.
The prospect of losing that attachment grieved her.
But now that Javier sat before her, clasping her hand in his, now that the thing had been spoken between them and confirmed to be true, all that was left for Lydia was autopsy.
What love had been there was already slipping away.
She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it.
Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver.
When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde.
When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.