Chapter Fourteen #2
Luca thinks of the men running alongside the train in the clearing outside Lechería, the way they ascended, one by one, and disappeared, while he and Mami watched, unable to move.
He thinks of the deafening roar and clatter of La Bestia, shouting its warnings into their hearts and bones while they watched, and he feels awed by these two powerful sisters. “How?” he asks.
Soledad shrugs. “We’ve learned some tricks.”
Mami hands Luca a canteen, and he drinks. “Like what?” Mami asks. “We need some tricks.”
Soledad retracts her dangling legs and folds them beneath her, shifting her spine and shoulders into a stretched posture, and Lydia sees, even in this minor animation of the girl’s body, how the danger rattles off her relentlessly.
These sisters haven’t befriended anyone since they left home; they, too, have kept to themselves as much as possible.
But they haven’t yet met anyone so young as Luca on their journey.
Neither have they met anyone so watchfully maternal as Lydia.
So it’s a great pleasure to feel normal for a minute, to inhabit the softness of a friendly conversation.
There can’t be any harm in sharing some advice with their fellow travelers.
“Like this,” Soledad says, gesturing at the tracks beneath them. “One thing we noticed is they spend all that money on fences around the train stations, but nobody has thought yet to fence the overpasses.”
Luca watches Mami’s face as she surveys their position now from the angle of this new information.
Mami leans ever so slightly forward and gauges the distance to the ground beneath them.
It’s not that far. But then she tries to imagine how this space would change with the noise and weight and presence of La Bestia charging through it.
“You board from here?” she asks incredulously.
“Not here,” Soledad corrects her. “Because you’d hit your head as soon as you dropped. The overpass would knock you right off before you got your balance. We sit on this side to watch for it coming. But then you jump on over there.” She points.
Luca follows the direction of her gesture across the roadway, and he sees there, affixed to the guardrail, a bleached white cross with a burst of faded orange flowers at its center.
Likely a memorial, he realizes, for someone else who attempted to board the train at this place, and didn’t manage it.
He bites his lip. “You just jump on top?”
“Well, not always,” Soledad says. “But, yes, if the conditions are right, you just jump on top.”
“And what makes the conditions right?” Lydia asks. “Or wrong?”
“Well. The first thing is, you have to choose carefully where to do it. So this place is good because you see,” she says, standing and pointing across the roadway to the tracks beyond, “you see the curve there, just ahead?”
Lydia stands, too, so she can see where the girl is pointing.
“The train always slows down for a curve. When it’s a big curve, it slows way down. So we know it’ll be going slow when it passes. And then the next thing is to make sure there are no other hazards ahead. That’s why we chose this overpass instead of the first one.”
Lydia looks south, back along the path they just walked. She hadn’t even noticed that first overpass when they’d walked beneath it. She’d only been grateful for its momentary shade, a shallow respite from the sun.
“Because if you jumped on over there, on that one,” Rebeca adds, taking up the explanation for her sister, “you’d only have a moment to get your balance before you’d have to hit the deck to pass beneath this one. Tricky.”
Lydia blinks and shakes her head. She can’t envision it.
“So we sit here,” Soledad continues. “We watch. We wait for the train. And when we see one we like, we cross the road, we gauge the speed, we make the decision to board, and then we drop.”
“Like going off a diving board?” Luca asks, thinking of the water park at El Rollo.
“Not exactly,” Soledad says. “First you lower your backpack, because it makes you top-heavy, wobbly. So you toss that first. And then you squat down really low. You don’t dangle, because if you do that your feet will get going with the train and then your top half won’t catch up.
You get stretched like a slingshot. So you roll your body up small and hop on like a frog.
Low and tight. And just make sure your fingers grab something right away. ”
Luca’s heart is hammering in his chest just thinking about it.
He reminds himself to breathe. Then he looks at Mami, taking it in, considering their likelihood of survival.
He feels a sudden surge of manic energy coursing through his body, so he has to stand and spring and kick and let it loose into the world.
“If you get really lucky, sometimes the train might even stop,” Rebeca says. “And then you just climb down. Simple.”
“But there’s plenty of times we let a train go by, too,” Soledad says. “If it’s moving fast, we don’t even try. We’ve already seen two people who tried to board and didn’t make it.”
Lydia looks at Luca to see how this information will affect him, but he gives nothing away.
“Were those people boarding the same as you? From the top like this?”
“No!” Rebeca seems almost proud. “We’re the only ones who board like this. I haven’t seen anybody else do it.”
Lydia screws up her mouth. So these girls are either brilliant or insane. “How many times have you done this?” she asks.
The sisters look at each other, and it’s Soledad who answers. “Five, maybe? Six?”
Lydia lets out a deep, low breath. She nods. “Okay.”
“You want to come with us?” Rebeca asks.
It’s not until after the words are out that she glances at her sister, remembering they’re always supposed to check with each other first about everything.
Soledad touches the top of Rebeca’s head, and the gesture reassures her sister in the language of their lifelong intimacy that it’s fine.
“Maybe,” Lydia answers, ignoring the hitch in her lungs as she expels the word.
They talk a little while they wait, and Lydia learns that the girls are fifteen and fourteen years old, that they’ve traveled over a thousand miles so far, that they miss their family very much, and that they’ve never been on their own before.
They don’t say why they left home, and Lydia doesn’t ask.
They both remind her of Yénifer, though it’s probably only their age.
The sisters are taller and more slender, darker skinned than her niece, and both are luminous and funny.
Yénifer had been studious and solemn. Even as a baby she’d had a certain gravity to her.
Lydia’s older sister, Yemi, had selected Lydia, who was just seventeen the year their father died and Yénifer was born, to be the girl’s godmother.
Lydia remembers holding the baby over the baptismal font and crying.
She made sure not to wear mascara that day so she wouldn’t stain the baptismal dress.
She’d known she would cry, not from joy or the honor of being the godmother or the emotion of the moment, but because her father wasn’t there to see it.
So Lydia’s own tears had splattered across the child’s forehead along with the holy water, and Lydia was surprised to see, through the blur of her vision, that the baby in her arms didn’t join in her tears.
Yénifer’s eyes were wide and blinking. Her mouth, a perfect and puckered pink bow.
Lydia loved that baby so much that she couldn’t imagine she’d ever love her own child more.
When Luca was born, years later, Lydia learned the incomparability of that kind of love, of course.
But it was still Yénifer, that somber, shining girl, who had allayed her grief when she lost the second baby.
Wise little Yénifer at nine years old, who’d cried with her and stroked her forehead and reassured her, “But you do have a daughter, Tía. You have me.”
The enormity of Lydia’s loss is incomprehensible.
There are so many griefs at once that she can’t separate them.
She can’t feel them. Beside her, the sisters talk lightly to Luca and he responds with his reanimated words.
There’s an effervescence among them that feels extraordinary. The sound of Luca’s voice is an elixir.
The sun feels hotter when they’re sitting still, and Lydia notices that her arms are as tan as childhood.
Luca, too, is a shade browner than usual, and there are dots of perspiration all along his hairline beneath Sebastián’s cap.
But the wait beneath that sapping sun is almost too brief, Lydia thinks.
She could’ve used more time to talk herself into this.
It’s not even two hours before the distant rumble of the train grows into their consciousness and all four of them rise without speaking and begin to ready themselves.
In truth, Lydia’s in no way convinced that they’re actually going to go through with it.
She hopes they do because they need to be on that train.
And she hopes they don’t, because she doesn’t want to die.
She doesn’t want Luca to die. She feels as if she’s outside her own body, listening to that train approach, moving her backpack to the other side of the roadway, prompting Luca along in front of her.
She packs their canteen into the front pocket of her backpack and zips it up.
Even if she felt confident that she could jump onto a moving train, how can she ask her son to do this crazy thing?
Her shoulders feel loose, her legs erratic beneath her.
Adrenaline sluices all through her jittery body.