Chapter Thirty-Four
The cave, when they finally reach it, is warm and dry, and the rising sun paints the back wall orange and pink and yellow.
It’s not a sunken cave with a dark hole of a mouth like Luca expected when he heard the word cueva, but rather, it’s as if a huge divot has been hollowed out of the earth with an ice-cream scoop, and then softened and cleaned by the elements.
There are several copper nails hammered into the top of the cave’s opening, and El Chacal takes a sheet from his pack that’s painted in earthy stripes the exact colors of the landscape.
He tacks this sheet onto the nails above, dropping the migrants into a light shade.
The migrants look different in this morning’s light than they did in yesterday’s.
Some of them had already known they were capable of walking away from a wounded man, of abandoning a person in the desert to save themselves.
Marisol, for example, believes there’s almost no despicable thing she wouldn’t do in order to get back to her daughters.
Lorenzo would trample a baby to get to el norte.
For others among them, the discovery of their own compliance is an unpleasant surprise.
They all know how lucky they are that it was Ricardín who broke his leg, and not them, and the recognition of that good fortune makes them each feel damned, doomed. Unconscionable.
“Men outside first,” the coyote orders them, when the sheet is fixed in place.
Lorenzo groans, but the others duck through without complaint.
Rebeca is soaked and there’s a dank smell rising off the back of her neck where the hood of her sweatshirt has gathered the oils running from her sopping hair.
Her toes are frozen, and her feet feel raw in her shoes, but she’s terrified of taking off her clothes.
“It’s the only way to get dry.” Soledad plops down on her backside and peels off her soggy sneakers. Her toes are tingly. “I feel better already,” she says.
They all undress. They don’t look at one another.
Beto stays in only his underwear because he has nothing else to put on, so Lydia fishes out the same spare T-shirt he wore as a makeshift hat yesterday and hands it to him.
The rain has had an unhealthy effect on his lungs, and he rattles and wheezes when he lifts his arms to pull the gifted T-shirt over his head.
Lydia finds her own spare clothes, rolled inside a plastic bag in her pack, to be reasonably dry.
Luca’s, too. Soledad stands up and removes her sweater, which she holds up in front of Rebeca like a curtain so her sister can change.
They all peel the clothes from their wet bodies.
They slip into large T-shirts and change their underwear.
They’ll have to stretch their jeans to dry on the rocks outside.
Even though there’s a new solemnity among them in the absence of Choncho and Ricardín, the solace of this place, this moment, is extraordinary.
The ordeal of the rain makes Lydia appreciate the comfort of dryness in a way she never even considered before now.
While the men strip and change in the cave, she and Luca sit just outside the sheet with their bare legs stretched out in the sunshine.
It’s still early morning in the desert, but the temperature is rising quickly.
The rock is soft and dry beneath them, and the sun warms the patches where their skin is chafed and tender.
Luca wants to ask Mami what they’re going to do when they get to el norte, but he’s afraid she won’t have an answer, and besides, he doesn’t want to jinx the nearness of their arrival.
There’s one question that won’t leave him alone, though.
“What about Rebeca and Soledad?” he says. “Do you really think they’ll go to Maryland?”
Lydia squints her eyes against the brightness of the growing day and pulls his feet onto her lap to examine his blister.
The Band-Aid from last night is still surprisingly well fastened to his heel, so she doesn’t mess with it.
She can feel the warm weight of Sebastián’s ring sitting in the hollow at the base of her throat.
A mild breeze crosses her bare brown knees, and Luca wiggles his toes.
“It’s always been their plan,” Lydia says carefully.
“But couldn’t they change their plan?” he says. “If we ask them?”
The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them.
It feels like a dream, all that rainfall.
This is a cycle, she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it’s over, this feeling of surreal detachment.
A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured.
The mind is magical. Human beings are magical.
“Anything’s possible, Luca,” she says, looking past her toes and out across the ruddy landscape.
And maybe they really could change their plans.
Lydia thinks about how adaptable migrants must be.
They must change their minds every day, every hour.
They must be stubborn about one thing only: survival.
The moon has risen like a frail white eggshell against the blueness of the daytime sky.
“Can they stay with us?” Luca asks. “Can they live with us?”
“Yes,” she answers him easily. “If they want to.”
Lydia can’t imagine saying goodbye to Soledad and Rebeca now. Another parting.
“And maybe Beto?” Luca asks.
“Oh my goodness!” She laughs. “We’ll see.”
Luca doesn’t ask Mami if she thinks Choncho managed to get Ricardín to the Ruby Road. He doesn’t ask if she thinks someone found them by now, if they’re okay. He’s already made up the answers to those questions in his own mind; they are the answers he needs them to be.
Their drinking supplies are beginning to run low, which feels ludicrous after all that water.
The coyote instructs them to drink what they need, but conserve as much as they can.
In the large cave, they sleep all morning, and by mid-afternoon they are thirsty and sweaty and hungry, and the relative comfort of this place has melted with the oppressive heat of the day.
They endeavor to sleep through their discomfort.
They know that tonight is the last night, and they’re all eager to get out of here, to get where they’re going, to descend from this airless, waterless, colorless nowhere and get to that road down there, to follow it to where there’s life.
It becomes stifling in the cave because the camouflage of the hanging sheet, now weighted with rocks along its bottom to prevent the wind from billowing it in and out of the cave, also prevents that breeze from cooling them.
Rest becomes difficult, and Rebeca is hot and frustrated when she sits up in the cave and finds everyone else asleep.
All around her, the other migrants make the breathy noises of unquiet sleep.
Beto is the loudest, wheezing impressively with every breath, but he doesn’t stir.
He uses one arm as a pillow, and sleeps with his mouth wide open, trying to draw the oxygen out of the air.
Rebeca jams her bare feet into her sneakers and steps over him.
The sneakers are scratchy and misshapen from being so wet and then drying out again, but she doesn’t bother tying them.
She only has to find somewhere to pee. Lorenzo opens his eyes as the girl picks her way across and around the sleeping migrants.
He looks right up the smooth brown skin of her leg as she passes, and is rewarded by the sight of her yellow cotton underwear beneath her baggy white T-shirt.
She ducks beneath the hanging sheet and steps outside.
Without a sound, Lorenzo sits up from his place, leaves his shoes off, and follows her.
Rebeca rounds the side of the cave, leaves the softness of rock behind her, and steps into the scraggy tangle of undergrowth in search of a place to empty her bladder.
There are scrubby trees here, and she ducks beneath one, pulling her cotton panties to her knees and squatting in the shade.
She hears Lorenzo before she sees him, because he grunts at the prickly sharpness of plants and stones underfoot.
She stands immediately, leaving a trickle of urine down the inside of one leg.
She snatches her panties up around her hips and pulls the T-shirt down.
He gives her a crooked smile, an attempt at charm. “Should’ve worn my shoes,” he says, stepping painfully toward her across the rocks. “Guess I’m not as smart as you.”
Rebeca takes two steps back. Away from him. She puts one hand out and feels the rough bark of the rosewood she just watered. Its boughs are low overhead. A small branch tangles in her hair.