Chapter Eleven
The commuter rail station is located at one end of a vast shopping mall with a Sephora and a Panda Express and even an ice rink.
The street in front is crowded with pink taxis and red buses.
The shoppers and vendors wear fancier clothes than you usually see in Acapulco.
Everyone has clean sneakers. At the bookstore window, Lydia pauses briefly to gaze at the tiered rainbow of gleaming books on display: the season’s new releases, some of which are featured in her own window at home.
She thinks of the driver who makes her deliveries stopping outside her shop, tenting his hands above his eyes while he peers through the grate and darkened glass.
She thinks of her two part-time employees: bespectacled Kiki, who can never be trusted to stock shelves because she stops to read every book that passes through her hands, and Gloria, who’s never read a grown-up book in her life but has great taste in children’s literature, and is a diligent worker.
She wonders how they’ll manage now, without the bookshop income both their families rely on.
Lydia thinks of her stockroom gathering dust, her undelivered parcels.
When she steps back from the bookstore window, her hand leaves a ghost print on the glass.
Lydia and Luca have to wait in line at the Banamex on the third floor, and a girl nearby is hawking postcards from a large canvas bag.
The Zócalo at sunset, the Palacio de Bellas Artes lit up like Christmas.
Lydia thinks about buying one and addressing it to Javier.
What would she write there in the blank space?
Would she appeal to his abandoned humanity, acknowledge his weird condolences, plead for their lives?
Would she make some futile attempt to articulate her hatred and grief?
For all her love of words, at times they’re entirely insufficient.
In the bottom of her backpack, folded carefully into a compartment she hasn’t unzipped since they left Acapulco, is her mother’s purse.
Inside that purse, tucked into a slit in her wallet, is her mother’s bank card.
Lydia knows her mother’s PIN because she’s the one who helped set it up, who taught her how to use it.
The small, brown handbag is the same one her mother has carried for literally as long as Lydia can remember.
The leather is thick and was stiff when Lydia was younger, but it’s grown soft from years of use.
The clasp broke long ago, so it’s only the flap folded over the opening that keeps whatever’s inside from falling out.
Lydia does not pause to reminisce. She leans her backpack against the glass wall beside her and opens her mother’s purse.
Luca doesn’t watch. He stands beside her, picking at the corner of a large sticker affixed to the glass, advertising low-interest loans.
Not long ago Lydia would have corrected this behavior, would have told her son that someone paid good money for that sticker and it’s not his to pick from the window.
Not now. She stares into her mother’s purse.
There’s a particular smell, or rather a conglomeration of smells.
It assails her, even here, between McDonald’s and the Crepe Factory.
The aroma evokes immediate memories that Lydia refuses to indulge.
It’s old leather and Kleenex (both used and unused) and the cinnamon gum her mother always buys, and the black licorice drops she likes, wrapped in a small white paper bag, and a miniature tube of hand lotion with apricot extract, and the clean, babylike smell of her pressed powder compact, all combined into the intimate, unmistakable scent of Lydia’s childhood. Mamá.
Luca smells it, too. He mouths her name without turning his face away from the glass, “Abuela,” and renews his attack on the sticker.
Lydia breathes through her mouth. When it’s their turn she stands at the ATM with the detritus of her life spilling out of the backpack around her feet.
A young woman using the adjacent ATM is careful not to look at them.
Lydia is embarrassed by the woman’s caution.
In addition to fending off her memories, Lydia is also frightened.
She worries that this single electronic transaction will be like shooting up a flare to mark her location.
Her hand trembles as she jams her mother’s ATM card into the machine and punches in the code.
The machine beeps loudly and spits the card back out.
“?Me lleva la chingada!” she says. Luca turns to look at her. “It’s fine,” she lies. And inserts the card into the machine a second time. She takes greater care now, watches the way her fingers shake as she punches in the code. She knows it. It’s Luca’s birthday. It has to work.
It works. Gracias a Dios.
It’s unusual in a culture where adult children take care of their aging parents that Lydia’s mother even had a savings account.
Indeed, owning an ATM card made Abuela something of an anomaly among her peers, even in a robust urban economy like Acapulco’s, even among Mexico’s solid and growing middle class.
But then, Lydia’s mother had always been something of an anomaly.
She’d always done things a little out of step with her generation.
She refused the first two boys who asked to marry her, for example.
And much to her mother’s consternation, when she finally did deign to get married, well past her prime at the age of twenty-four, she did not immediately quit her job as a bookkeeper at a local hospital but instead returned to school to further her education.
She was already three years a missus when she was certified as a public accountant and got a job working for the city.
Her parents and peers sometimes raised their eyebrows at Abuela’s choices, but Lydia’s father loved being married to a trailblazer, even after their two daughters were born and he had to do more diaper changing than he meant to sign up for.
So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future.
A mother who had loaned her the money to open her bookstore.
Though Lydia had been grateful, she’d never imagined that her mother’s eccentricity might one day save her life.
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, senora. ?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, senora,” 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?”