Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘So we’re going to Colorado?’

Lydia nods, and Luca wraps his arms around her neck.

He leans his chin on her shoulder. ‘Good plan.’

‘No one would ever think of Colorado.’ Lydia stares at the bag hanging in front of them and tries to remember if she ever mentioned Denver to Javier. Why would she have? She’s never been there and hasn’t seen her uncle since she was a kid.

‘Plus, it’s far,’ Luca says.

‘Yes,’ Mami says. ‘Very far away from here.’

In fact, Luca knows with some degree of precision just how far Denver is from Acapulco (almost two thousand miles by car). He knows this because Luca has perfect direction the way some prodigies have perfect pitch. He was born with it, an intrinsic sense of his position on the globe, like a human GPS, pinging his way through the universe. When he sees something on a map, it lodges in his memory forever.

‘I’m going to miss the geography bee,’ he says. He’s been studying for months. In September, his school paid six hundred pesos for him to take the international qualifying exam because his teacher was convinced he would bring home the $10,000 grand prize.

‘I’m sorry, mijo, ’ Lydia says, kissing his arm.

Luca shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Before yesterday, that geography bee had seemed so important to all of them; now it feels like the most trivial thing in the world, along with everything else on the running to-do list Lydia kept beside the register in the bookshop: Fill out the church paperwork for Luca’s communion. Pay the water bill. Take Abuela to her cardiology appointment. Buy a gift for Yénifer’s quinceañera . What a waste of time it had all been. Lydia feels annoyed that her niece won’t get to see the music box she purchased for her special day. How expensive it was! She realizes, even as this thought occurs to her, how bizarre and awful it is, but she can’t stop it from crashing in. She doesn’t rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.

Luca whispers in her ear, ‘With a population of almost seven hundred thousand, Denver, nicknamed the Mile High City because of its elevation, is located just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ Reciting from the memory of flash cards. ‘It is the state capital of Colorado and one quarter of its population claims Mexican heritage.’

Lydia squeezes his arm, reaches up, and runs a hand through his black hair. The summer before last, when Luca’s enduring interest in maps began to shift from fascination to obsession, Lydia kept him busy at the bookstore with guidebooks and atlases. It seems impossible that back then, just so recently, Acapulco was bright with tourists and music and the shops and the sea. Rock pigeons strutted across the sand. Vast foreign cruise ships disgorged their sneakered passengers onto the streets, their pockets fat with dollars, their skin glistening from coconut-scented sunscreen. The dollars filled the bars and restaurants. In Lydia’s bookshop, they filled the register. Those tourists bought the guidebooks and atlases, along with serious novels and frivolous novels and souvenir key chains and tiny tubes of sand corked with tiny stoppers that Lydia kept in a big fishbowl beside the register. And, ay, Dios mío, those tourists couldn’t get enough of Luca. Lydia set him up like a puppet on a stool, and he’d tell them, in precise English, about the places where they came from. He was six years old. A wunderkind.

‘With a population of six hundred and forty thousand, Portland is located at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and is the largest city in the state of Oregon. The city was incorporated in 1851, sixty-five years after its eastern namesake in coastal Maine.’

Henry from Portland, Oregon, stood in front of Luca with his mouth hanging open. ‘Marge, come here, you’ve gotta see this! Do it again.’ Marge joined her husband, and Luca repeated his spiel. ‘Incredible. Kid, you are just incredible. Marge, give the kid some money.’

‘Did you make all that up?’ Marge asked skeptically, digging in her purse for some money regardless.

‘Nah, he knew the rivers,’ Henry defended him. ‘How could he make that up?’

‘It’s real,’ Luca said. ‘I just remember things. Especially about maps and places.’

‘Well, Henry’s right, it’s incredible.’ Marge gave him a dollar. ‘And in perfect English! Where did you learn such perfect English?’

‘Acapulco,’ Luca said simply. ‘And YouTube.’

Lydia watched in silence and felt obscenely proud. Smug, even. Her boy was perfect – so smart and accomplished, so guapo and happy. She’d been teaching him English for almost as long as he’d been speaking Spanish. It was a skill that she knew would serve him well, growing up in a tourist town. But he quickly outstripped her knowledge of the language, and then they proceeded to learn together, mostly on her phone or computer. YouTube lessons, Rosetta Stone, soap operas. They often spoke English to each other when Sebastián wasn’t around, or when they pretended to have a secret in front of him. Sometimes they tried out slang on each other. She called Luca dude and he called her shorty . Marge and Henry laughed at Luca’s pragmatic charm and then gathered their friends from the cruise ship and returned to watch him perform. They offered him a dollar for every city he could tell them about. He made thirty-seven dollars that day and could’ve kept going, except the tourists had to get back to their ship.

So, yes, this geography bee has been almost two years coming. But Lydia cannot think of details right now, the annulled logistics of her life. Her brain can’t hold them. Even the biggest, most fundamental facts seem impossible to comprehend. Outside the stall, the bathroom door swings open. There’s no squeak, but they can tell someone has come in because suddenly the sounds beyond the door are temporarily louder, and then softer again as the door swings shut. They both hold their breath. Luca is still draped over Mami’s back, and she grips his arms where they encircle her neck. The pads of his fingers turn yellow as they dig into the bones of Mami’s wrist. She doesn’t move. He squeezes his eyes shut. But soon there’s the sound of the door latching on the neighboring stall. An older woman loudly clearing her throat. Luca can feel Mami let go of her breath like the air leaving a deflated balloon. He puts his lips against her neck.

After the lady in the stall next door finishes her business and washes her hands and compliments herself out loud in the bathroom mirror, it’s time for them to venture back out. He knows they can’t stay in this bathroom forever, but his heart beats in a clamorous thud when Mami opens the door. It’s time to get on the bus. When they cross the lobby, Luca registers the faces of the people who remain in the terminal: the immaculate lady behind the counter with her lips outlined a shade darker than the lips themselves, the man in his paper hat selling coffee, the couple with the fussy baby who are waiting until the last minute to board. On the television affixed to the wall, Luca sees a prim newscaster and then, starkly, Abuela’s little house. The yellow crime scene tape flutters and sags. The camera focuses on the courtyard gate hanging open, and then the back patio, the tented shapes of Luca’s family covered by plastic tarps, the grim faces of los policías as they walk, stoop, stand, scratch, breathe, as they do the things living people do when they walk among corpses. Luca squeezes his mother’s hand, not to get her attention, but to prevent himself from crying out. She doesn’t look up. She pulls him along the shiny, tiled floor, but he feels as if he’s walking in a sucking sand at high tide. Luca waits for the crack of a bullet to strike the front wall of the terminal. He waits for the shower of raining glass. But now his feet are on the pavement outside, and the pavement is a shadowy purple in the growing cast of daylight. His sneakers are blue there. Only two people wait in front of them to board the bus. Only one. Mami pushes him on ahead of her, and then she’s there, too, glued to his backpack, propelling him down the aisle past extruding knees and elbows. And when he collapses into the seat, against the soft fabric of the cushions, and Mami plops down next to him, he feels more grateful and relieved than he ever has in his entire life.