Chapter Nineteen #2
Well. Yes, she thinks. She moves her lips to one side. “I’m just trying to determine our safest route.”
“There is no safest route, far as I can tell,” he says. “You just gotta run like hell.”
She looks into his face, broad and young. His eyes are heavily lidded, his upper lip softened by a feeble crop of hair. He has the remnants of a breakout high on one cheekbone. He’s a veritable kid. Who has murdered at least three people.
“Lorenzo, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” she asks. She tries to anchor his gaze, but he looks away.
“Nah, I told you already. I’m done with all that. I’m out.” He jams his hands into the pockets of his shorts.
She nods skeptically. “Thank you.”
“Ni modo.”
It’s an effort to turn her back to him, because she is still afraid.
The shock of a blade entering her flesh, severing her spine.
The pile of her body in the road beside the tracks.
“Suerte, Lorenzo,” she says, and she turns to go.
It’s even harder not to look back after she rejoins Luca and the sisters, but she knows he might interpret any backward glance as a weakness or an invitation, so she only imagines him falling behind.
She pictures him following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions.
She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving.
It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance.
Just before she enters, she turns and allows her gaze to sweep up and down the vacant road, to linger and search in every shadow, and to thank God. He is gone.
They’re exhausted by the time they arrive.
There are good migrant services in the city, and between that and Danilo’s modest heroics, the Hershey’s Kisses, Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers.
It seems impossible that good people—so many good people—can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken.
There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when he tries to make those two facts sit side by side.
At the shelter, Rebeca and Soledad stand guard for each other outside the bathroom door.
It’s a luxury to slough the dust of the road off your skin, to soap up and stand beneath a spray of warm water, to watch it pool at your feet, grimy and brown, before it circles the drain and disappears forever.
Soledad likes to think of the water molecules racing down the drainpipes, intermingling and dispersing, joining other pipes beneath the streets of the city, gathering volume and speed as they rush and tumble toward some unknown destination.
She likes to think of the filth she washes from her skin, diluted and diluted until it no longer exists as filth at all.
Although Soledad has the cell phone Iván gave her, she can’t use it to make phone calls or text because it has no credit.
If it did have credit, Soledad still wouldn’t use it, for two reasons: first, except for her primo César, no one she knows has a cell phone anyway, and second, like Lydia, she’s afraid that if she uses the phone, Iván will then somehow be able to find her.
So the phone functions mostly as a repository of photographs, but also as a propeller that reminds Soledad how far she has come, and how much better her life will be when she gets to el norte.
So when, after their showers, the director of the casa asks them if they’d like to use the communications room to email or call anyone, the girls’ excitement is almost too much to articulate.
Finally, they can call Papi. Rebeca has never used a phone before, never lifted a device to her ear and heard the familiar voice of a faraway loved one.
Soledad has never initiated a call. It’s an ordinary modern convenience that, for the sisters, still carries the full weight of the miraculous.
“How do we do it?” Rebeca asks her sister after the director has shown them into the quiet room and closed the door behind them.
Soledad frowns. “Get Luca.”
The room is small, and it contains a desk with a glowing computer, one rolling office chair, and a small, floral-print couch.
The phone sits on the desk beside the monitor.
Rebeca returns quickly with Luca, who sits down at the computer, asks the sisters for the name of the hotel where her father works, and finds the phone number within seconds.
He writes it down on the lone yellow notepad, but when he stands to go, Soledad asks him to dial it, too.
“What’s your father’s name?” he asks, covering the mouthpiece as the line rings in his ear.
“Elmer,” Soledad says. “Ask for Elmer Abarca Lobo in the main kitchen.”
So Luca does, but as he prepares to immediately hand the phone over to Soledad, the receptionist says, “I’m sorry, but Elmer isn’t working today. Hold on.”
Luca hears the sound of her voice, muffled for a moment before she returns to speaking clearly.
“Can I ask who’s calling?” she says.
“I’m here with his daughters. I was just putting in the call for them.”
“I see,” she says.
“Hold on, I’ll put Soledad on,” Luca says.
He hands the phone to Soledad, who takes his seat, her face brightening in nervous anticipation.
She hopes Papi won’t be angry with them.
She hopes he’ll understand why they had to leave the way they did, without warning, without a proper goodbye.
She’s been haunted, these last weeks, by the thought of him coming home alone to the dark apartment, exhausted from a double shift, and finding her note.
She’s tried not to think about the anguish it might’ve caused him. She bites her lip.
“Hello?” she says.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice on the line—still the receptionist. “You’re calling for Elmer? Is this Elmer’s daughter?”
“Yes, it’s Soledad. Is he there? May we speak with him?”
“I’m afraid Elmer’s not working right now, Soledad.”
Soledad’s shoulders slump, and she leans back in the chair. “Okay,” she says. “Can we leave a message for him? It’s an important message and I don’t know when we’ll have an opportunity to use a telephone again. I’m here with my sister, Rebeca, and we want to tell him we’re okay.”
“Soledad,” the woman says.
Just that, just her name. Soledad. But something about the hesitation in those three syllables makes Soledad’s stomach drop. She straightens up in the chair.
“I’m sorry, but your father won’t be back to work for quite some time.”
Soledad grabs the edge of the desk, and turns her back to her sister. Luca reaches for the doorknob, but Soledad puts a hand on his shoulder. Her mouth is open, but she refuses to ask the questions that will lead to her enlightenment. She doesn’t want to know.
“I’m sorry, Soledad, but your father had an accident. Not an accident. Your father, he—he’s in the hospital.”
Soledad clamps her knees together and stands up, sending the chair rolling away behind her. “Why? What happened?”
Rebeca stands up then, too, and Luca moves next to her.
“Is he okay?” Soledad asks.
The woman’s voice is low. “I think he’s stable, that was the last we heard.”
Soledad takes one breath. Stable. “But what happened?”
“He was attacked coming into work last week.”
She moves to collapse into the chair again, but the chair is no longer behind her, and she almost falls to the floor. Luca grabs the chair and rolls it over. She sits.
“He was stabbed,” the woman is saying. “I’m so sorry.”
“Which hospital?”
“El Nacional. I’m sorry, Soledad.”
Soledad hangs up the phone, and it takes Luca less than one minute to find the number for the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula.
Again, he dials for them, but this time he hits the speakerphone button so they can all hear.
And 1,360 miles away, in the ICU unit in a six-story green-and-blue building, a nurse wearing clean white scrubs and a blue stethoscope darts into the nurses’ station and tosses a chart onto the cluttered desk.
Luca, Rebeca, and Soledad all hear her pick up the phone. They lean forward.
“I think my father is there,” Soledad says. Her voice sounds swollen and cobwebby in her ears. “My father, Elmer Abarca Lobo. The woman at his work told us he was there since last week?”
They can hear things clicking and beeping in the background. Voices. A child crying. The nurse does not immediately reply.
“Hello?” Rebeca says.
“I’m looking,” the nurse replies. There are folders, charts. She’s flipping through them.
Soledad’s hand darts over and grabs her sister’s across the desk. Together, their knuckles turn hard and shiny.
“A woman at his work told us he was stabbed.”
“Oh,” as if the nurse suddenly remembers. “Yes, Elmer,” she says. “He’s here. Not in great shape, I’m afraid, but he’s stable now. He lost a lot of blood.”
Rebeca clamps her free hand over her mouth. Soledad digs her fingers into the skin of her face, her lower jaw. “Can we speak with him?”
“No, he’s not conscious,” the nurse says. “Can you come in?”
Rebeca shakes her head, but Soledad answers out loud. “We’re not in Honduras,” she explains. “We’re in Mexico.”
Rebeca is stuck on a different detail. “What do you mean he’s not conscious? What does that mean?”
“It means we have him sleeping right now because of the damage to his brain. He needs to sleep until the swelling and trauma are under control.”
Soledad pitches forward, curling her body over her knees.
“Damage to his brain?” Rebeca says. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes,” the nurse says. “He was stabbed in the face.”
“Oh my God.” Both girls begin to cry.
Luca is shifting his weight ever more rapidly from foot to foot. He backs away from the phone until he’s leaning against the wall beside the door.