Chapter Thirty-Two #2
Mami presses her lips together and draws him to the side of the trail, out of the line.
The other migrants don’t stop or even slow.
They continue at speed, and by the time Lydia’s down on one knee with Luca’s pant leg rolled up at the cuff and his sock pulled down, they’ve all passed.
It’s difficult to see in the dark and the rain, but El Chacal has forbidden the use of flashlights, so Lydia draws her face down close to Luca’s heel to investigate.
His socks are sopping, and she runs her hand across the back of his foot, where she can feel the forming bubble of a blister.
There’s nothing she can do for him because of the dampness of his skin, the dampness of his jeans, the dampness of everything.
Band-Aids are impossible. But she has to try.
She unslings her pack, finds the zippered compartment on one side where she stashed a handful of Band-Aids before they set out.
They are wet, of course, but Lydia selects the driest one, from the middle of the stack.
She opens her coat and leans over his ankle, trying to make an umbrella of her body.
“Take the boot off,” she says.
“But, Mami, they’re going,” he says. “We don’t have time.”
“Do it quickly,” she snaps.
Luca obeys, tugging on the laces, ripping off the boot, which somersaults to the ground beneath.
“Sit here.” She points to her pack, and Luca sits.
“Sock, too,” she says, and then she glances up through the streamers of rain, to where she thinks she can still see the last of the group disappearing into the darkness.
She stashes the wrapped Band-Aid between her lips.
Luca whips off the wet sock, and she crams it into her pocket, untucks her shirt from beneath her hoodie, and uses her shirttail to dry his foot as best she can.
His little toes are pruned. She tucks his foot into the warm fold of her armpit, and then reaches over Luca’s shoulder to unzip the backpack he’s still wearing.
She knows there are two pairs of socks inside, right-hand side, near the bottom.
She worries that her panic will make her clumsy, that she won’t be able to find the socks, groping blindly into the pack this way, that she’ll find them, and drop them, and they’ll be drenched and useless, and they will have lost the group for nothing, that they will die here, not shot through with cartel bullets at a family party, but alone in the desert.
They will both die because of a blister.
Because of rain. No. There, her fingers brush against a soft ball of rolled socks, still dry.
Gracias a Dios. She tugs them out and sticks them into her armpit with the foot, zips the pack.
The other migrants are gone now. She can no longer see them or hear them, but all her senses strain after them, she sends her mind to follow the direction they were taking.
God, please let us find them, she prays.
She peels the wrapper off the Band-Aid, spits the papers onto the ground, gives Luca’s foot another wipe with her shirttail, blows on the damp foot with her meager breath, and then presses the adhesive bandage against the curve of his skin.
Please, God, let it stick. She unfolds the dry socks and tugs one onto his foot.
It seems to take hours, the wriggling of the foot into the tube of material, the correct placement of the seam across the toe, the adjustment of the dry cotton into position around the afflicted heel.
She thinks about putting the second one on him, too.
An extra layer of protection between the boot and the skin.
Would that be better or worse for the blister?
Extra padding, but a tighter fit. The time constraint is the deciding factor.
She tucks the other dry sock beneath her bra strap and retrieves the toppled boot.
She loosens the laces and pulls at the tongue.
She wipes the inside of the boot with her shirttail, and Luca jams his foot in. She yanks on the laces.
“I’ll do it, Mami,” he says.
She holds her coat over him while he ties the boot quickly, impressively, and then, “I’m good,” he says. “I’m okay, Mami. Thank you.” And he stands up from her backpack. He takes a few steps to test the repair. “Much better,” he says.
Lydia has refastened the side zipper on her pack, and is already walking after him, jogging, really, while she slings the backpack around to her shoulders. The gallon jugs of water bang and slosh beneath. “Go, mijo, quickly, we have to catch up,” she says.
Altogether, the delay cost them perhaps two and a half minutes.
Maybe three. Enough time to become completely lost from the group.
They’re well out of earshot because all they can hear is the thundering wash of the rain hammering down all around them.
Lydia feels panicky, all her fears compressed into a tight ball that lodges in her chest. This is how it happens, she thinks.
And her voice becomes frantic as she urges Luca to move faster, but he’s remembering, too, that day outside Culiacán when la migra were chasing them and Mami twisted her ankle and fell.
They can’t afford a twisted ankle on top of everything else, Luca thinks, and that worry slows him into a pace that’s too cautious.
So perhaps this will be it instead, they will die from caution.
“Apúrate, mijo, please.” Lydia fights against a mounting scream in her throat, and now there’s a new doubt: What if they’re hurrying in the wrong direction, diverging only slightly from the path, a fork, so that with each step, they stray a little farther from the group?
This is the way they went, isn’t it? There’s no possibility of tracking them in this rain, in this dark.
They have to just go. Move. Keep moving.
In desperation Lydia breaks the crucial rule about silence, and she calls out for them, but there’s no response.
They walk and stumble and hurry through the dark for some time, and every few minutes, she breaks that rule again, louder and more desperately each time Lydia tries a name.
Soledad.
Rebeca.
Beto.
Help.
Nicolás.
Choncho.
Where are you?
Luca is no longer in front of her or behind her, but beside her, holding her hand, and she glances infrequently at the darkness of his eyes, and she sees that he’s calm. He doesn’t share her panic.
“It’s okay, Mami,” he says at length. “This is the right way.”
She believes him because she must. And he knows these things. Doesn’t he?
Chacal.
Marisol.
Slim.
Hello?
The only answer is the whip of falling rain in thick cords upon their shoulders, fat drops spattering against their hoods.
She pushes through the darkness, and in some detached corner of her mind where operations are still functioning normally, she makes jokes for herself, about being lost in the desert for forty days, for forty millennia.
Her Catholic vision of hell is all wrong: there’s no fire, no wretched burning.
Hell is wet and cold and black and lost. Her brain tap-dances and contracts, and then.
Then. She sees a shape moving through the darkness.
A shadow. A barely discernible movement, a distant blotch of black that’s a slightly dimmer shade of black than all the fixed blacks around it.
Lydia yelps, and feels a shot of hope club through her sternum, and she squeezes Luca’s hand, and drags him into a quicker pace, and she charges after that blotch of black as it moves through the invisible landscape, and she’s not imagining it.
It’s no mirage. It continues its trajectory, bump, bump.
It moves forward, and Lydia fixes her eyes on it and she follows, she pulls Luca, she runs, heedless of the treacherous ground beneath their feet, until the shape grows larger, closer, and it is a backpack.
It is Ricardín’s backpack. She calls out once more.
Ricardín.
David.
And the shape pauses. Turns toward her. They are found. They are saved.
Salvación. Salvación. Lydia cries.
Ricardín ushers her into the line ahead of him, ahead of his primo David.
And here are the sisters, Rebeca. Soledad.
It’s easy for Lydia to believe the girls might not have noticed their absence.
It’s so dark and the rain is falling so hard, it’s difficult to observe anything beyond the border of your own hood, your outstretched hands, your churning feet.
Lydia doesn’t want to know if the sisters noticed they were gone, if they mentioned it to El Chacal, or asked him to stop and wait.
If she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t have to ask herself what she might have done in their position.
It’s okay now anyway, it doesn’t matter.
It’s okay. Lydia crosses herself in the darkness.
She breathes into her shoulders. She inhales the endless rain.