Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Listen, I don’t want to press you,” the doctor says. “But it’s not safe for you to be out on this road at night. There’s a lot of activity in this area. There have been some terrible stories. Maybe you already know.”
Soledad snorts again, but this time it’s a solitary sound.
She can no longer locate what was funny about it before.
Concern creases the doctor’s face. A miniflashlight dangles from his key chain, and this he clicks on.
He turns the small beam toward the girls’ legs to confirm what he thought he could see or smell there in the darkness: a significant amount of blood.
And not only on Rebeca’s jeans, Lydia can see now.
Soledad’s are covered as well, and the blood there isn’t dry.
Luca is still drinking. The doctor clicks off the flashlight.
“Please,” he says. “Won’t you let me help you?”
Soledad crosses her arms. Rebeca makes her jaw into the shape of a square. It’s Luca who speaks up.
“How do we know you’re really a doctor?”
“Ah.” The man puts a finger in the air, then retrieves a wallet from his back pocket. There’s an identification card there. The man’s picture. It says “Doctor Ricardo Montanero-Alcán.” Luca breathes on it before handing it back.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Soledad observes. “You can be a doctor and still be a narco, too. You can be a doctor, a teacher, a priest. You can be a federal police officer and still murder people.”
The doctor nods, slipping the wallet back into the pocket of his jeans. “It’s true,” he concedes.
“And why do you want to help us anyway?” Soledad asks.
The man touches the gold crucifix around his neck. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.”
Lydia automatically blesses herself. “A stranger and you welcomed me.” She completes the line of scripture, passing the water jug to Rebeca, who drinks only a little before passing it to Soledad.
“We should go with him,” Luca declares.
The man lets Soledad scroll through his phone first. He shows her his Facebook page, photographs of his wife and children. She’s so hungry, so depleted. She relents.
The doctor wants to take them to his clinic, but they refuse, so he drives them into the city, to a poorly whitewashed two-story building instead, with a shop on the bottom floor and bars on the windows above.
Large red letters proclaim the building to be the Techorojo Motel.
The shop beneath has a red awning and an open-air counter where two young women wear smock-aprons and eye the approaching patrons with considerable suspicion.
Behind them are shiny tinfoil snacks and bottled soft drinks in neon colors.
There’s also a grill, the aroma of cooking meat, and the shallow sound of a cheap radio playing música nortena, heavy on the accordion.
The doctor buys them food and pays for their room.
“If you want a ride to Culiacán tomorrow, I can come back in the morning,” he says, and then he’s gone before they even have time to thank him.
After they’ve eaten and locked themselves inside their tiny room, after they’ve managed to lug the wide, heavy nightstand across the carpet and wedge it beneath the doorknob for extra security, Lydia collects everyone’s pants.
The room does not have a bathroom, but there is, oddly, a toilet in one corner, and a yellow sink beside it.
The water that emerges from the faucet of that sink is the color of sand, but Lydia doesn’t mind because the discoloration serves to camouflage the colors she has to wash out of those jeans.
Luca’s, Rebeca’s, and Soledad’s. She uses the cracked bar of soap in the dish, and she scrubs and scrubs until finally the water she wrings from the denim returns to its original murky dun color.
By the time she’s finished, Luca is snoring softly on one of the room’s two single beds, and the sisters, too, are already asleep, curled up together.
Soledad cradles her sister’s head in her arms, and their hair is fanned out in one twisted, black wave across their shared pillow.
Lydia rummages through her pack for her toothbrush, and rations a smear of paste onto the bristles.
She considers the brown water from the tap before sticking the toothbrush under there and wetting it.
At home, there was a whole routine before she got into bed.
It could take twenty minutes some nights.
Cold cream, toner, moisturizer, floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, lip balm.
Some nights tweezers, too, or clippers or nail files.
Of course, the occasional exfoliant or mask.
Hand cream. Fluffy socks if her feet were chilly.
Sebastián would whisper-call from the bedroom, trying not to wake Luca in his impatience, “Madre de Dios, wife, the Eiffel Tower was built faster!” But when she was finished, he’d always fold back the covers to invite her in.
He’d drape them over her when she was settled, along with the top half of himself.
His breath was clean when he kissed her.
Lydia avoids her reflection in the harsh yellow light of the rusty mirror.
She spits into the sink and rinses her mouth.
She splashes murky water over her face and neck and dries herself off with the shirt she wore for the last two days.
When she finally slips into bed beside Luca, before she can even invoke her don’t think mantra, exhaustion descends like anesthesia and blots out everything else. They sleep.
Some hours later and well before dawn, Rebeca wakens Lydia from a black sleep.
“It’s Soledad,” Rebeca whispers to Lydia. “Something’s wrong with her.”
Lydia disentangles herself from Luca, who smacks his lips in his sleep, and then rolls tighter into a ball facing the wall.
A good deal of light comes in through the room’s only window, which has an insufficient curtain and is positioned beneath an overzealous streetlamp.
Lydia moves to the other twin bed, where Soledad sits rocking over her legs and clutching her stomach.
“Soledad? Are you okay?”
She clenches her jaw and rocks her body forward. “Just bad cramps.”
Lydia looks up at Rebeca, whose face is a cloud of worry. “Just sit with Luca,” Lydia says. “Make sure he stays asleep.”
Rebeca sits at the foot of Luca’s bed.
“Can you stand?” Lydia asks.
Soledad gathers her strength and then rocks herself onto her feet.
There’s a dark stain on the mattress beneath her and the mineral scent of blood.
Lydia grips her under the elbow and steers her around the bed toward the corner of the room where the plumbing is.
She positions the flimsy curtain to give Soledad as much privacy as possible while she miscarries her baby.
Good to his word, the doctor returns in the morning and drives them to Culiacán.
The girls’ jeans are still damp and stiff from Lydia’s scrubbing, but they wear them anyway, and the sun isn’t long drying them.
It eats the moisture from their clothes and their hair and skin.
Rebeca moves a little easier and Soledad with a little more difficulty than yesterday.
Lydia wants to buy a packet of sanitary napkins for Soledad, but they’re expensive, so she puts her embarrassment away and asks the doctor, who, being a doctor, thinks nothing of the request and complies without hesitation.
He also buys them breakfast and a tube of sunscreen, which he urges them to use, and for Luca, a comic book.
When he takes his leave, he does so abruptly, to release them from the effort of gratitude.
Lydia cannot wait to get back on the train, to get away from the nightmarish memories of this place, to be traveling north at high speed.
She’s terrified as they walk the tracks through the city that they will be spotted, that the guard from yesterday will be out driving to work—Do these men commute to work?
Is that what they call it? Do they kiss their wives and children goodbye each morning and then climb into the family sedan and set out for a day of raping and extortion, and then return home exhausted in the evenings and hungry for their pot roast?
—and he’ll see her, he’ll see the four of them walking north along the tracks, and the information will snap into place, and he’ll remember: her face smiling beside Javier’s in that picture.
She pushes Luca gently in the back, ushers him into a faster pace.
They cross over a muddy river on a skeletal railway bridge, and discover a train yard where the tracks are lined on one side with giant boulders.
A few clusters of migrants wait there, surrounded by the dirty colors of litter and debris, mud and weeds.
There’s a boy among them, slightly older than Luca, but certainly younger than Rebeca.
He stands while the other migrants sit hunching their shoulders against him.
His eyes are unfocused and his posture is the shape of a question mark.
His hands float unsteadily in front of him, and he sways strangely on his curved legs.
“Mami, what’s wrong with him?” Luca asks.