Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘I mean, it’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?’ she’d challenged him when he stopped by the shop to pick her up for lunch. She flipped the sign to read cerrado and then locked the door behind them.

Sebastián frowned at her. ‘Actually, I don’t think it can be melodramatic enough. I don’t think words exist that can sufficiently capture the atrocity of what’s happening here.’ He slung his hands into his pockets and watched her face as they walked. He spoke carefully, endeavoring to suppress the accusatory note in his voice, but it was there. She could hear it. ‘You don’t agree? That it’s unspeakably horrific?’ A kind of mild, repressed superiority.

‘I mean, of course I do, Sebastián. It’s insane.’ She dropped her keys into her bag and wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘But Acapulco Falls ? Like Rome is burning ? I mean, look around. It’s a regular day, the sun is shining. Look, there are tourists.’ She nodded toward a café on the corner where a group of rowdy estadounidenses sat at an outdoor table in the shade of an awning.

There were several nearly empty carafes of wine on their table. ‘We should get one of those,’ Sebastián said.

And though it was not yet noon, Lydia agreed, and they mostly drank their lunch that day instead of eating it. She cut her eyes at him across the table and did not say the things she wanted to say, that it was asinine of him to write this stuff, that he was turning himself into a target, that she wanted no part of his righteous campaign of truth, that she hoped he was satisfied with his byline and that it was worth the danger. She did not say: You are a father. You are a husband. But he felt all of it there, in the angle of her gaze across the table. And he didn’t respond by condemning her lack of courage. He didn’t bristle against her resentment or pick at the waiting scab. He knew her vigilance was not a shortcoming. He held her hand across the table and studied his menu in silence.

‘I think I’ll have the soup,’ he said.

That was more than a year and a half before she’d met Javier. But thinking back on it now, from the bottom bunk of the women’s room at the Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca with Luca sleeping heavily on her arm, she wonders if Javier had anything to do with those first heads, if he saw them or sanctioned them, if he swung the weapon responsible for severing one of them from its body. Of course he did, she thinks. He must have . What was once inconceivable now seems foolishly plain. Por Dios, how would her life be different at this very moment if she’d accepted that truth sooner?

There was a time once, perhaps a year ago, when a customer came into her shop on a windy day, his hair tossed up in a mess, and his cheeks reddened by the wind. A shiver of animation skated in on his shoulders. He was agitated and spoke quickly to Lydia. There’d been a shooting a few blocks away. Some men had pulled up on a motorcycle and shot a local journalist twelve times in the head. The man was still lying there dead in the street.

‘Who was it, who was it?’

The customer shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Some reporter.’

Lydia bolted. She grabbed her cell phone and ran outside. She left the man standing at her counter unattended. She left without ringing up his purchases. She hit Sebastián’s number while she ran down the street. Straight to voicemail. She panicked and cried out. When she got to the corner, she realized she didn’t know which way she was running. Where was this shooting? Which street? She turned in circles. Hit redial. Straight to voicemail. The shopkeepers were standing in their doorways.

‘Where was it?’ she asked the shoe store owner and she hit Sebastián’s number for a third time. Voicemail. The shoe salesman pointed, and Lydia ran. She turned another corner and another, hitting redial all the time. She called out for directions as she ran, and people pointed, and she kept going, and she kept hitting redial and she kept running, and then she stopped when she got to the street where la policía were just pulling up, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered in a clump around the body. She stopped because she didn’t want to go any closer. She didn’t want to see. Her husband lying there in the puddle of his spent life. Her thumb was cold as she redialed Sebastián’s number three more times. Voicemail. She was crying before she approached, her hair stringing across her face in the wind, collecting her tears. She clasped the cell phone with both hands in front of her. She walked the double yellow line like it was the plank of a ship, her legs wilty beneath her.

And then it was not him. There was so much blood that it was at first difficult to ascertain, but within a few moments she could see clearly, no, those were not his shoes. No, Sebastián’s hair was not that length, his legs were not that thick. Oh my God, the relief. It was not him. She cried harder and harder. It was not him. A stranger scooped Lydia into her big, doughy arms then and held her while she cried. The woman was enormous and smelled of powder, and Lydia did not resist her emphatic embrace, nor did she correct the woman’s assumption that her breakdown was caused by some familiarity with the deceased reporter. After all, that notion did feel approximately true. So Lydia allowed the stranger to comfort her, to murmur over her tears, to offer her the kindness of a tissue from the pocket of her sweater, and in a few minutes it was all over. For Lydia. It was some other widow’s turn that day. And when she finally extracted herself from the stranger’s arms, Lydia’s body felt jerky and clattery with adrenaline as she walked the several blocks back to her shop to find that her customer had left his money, plus a little extra, on the counter beside the register.

She’s still afraid that, one day, it will be Sebastián. She’s been afraid for so long that now she can’t catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it. And not only Sebastián, but Mamá, too, and Yemi and her beautiful children, and none of them had chosen to marry Sebastián, or to take on the risks of his profession as their own. Only she had done that, and now her family had paid for her choice. The fears of her past and the horrors of her present are so mixed up they feel like the unmatching pieces of a rompecabezas, like she’s trying to piece together things that were never meant to fit.

Perhaps she’s just not ready. Lydia knows the stages of grief, and this is denial. Instead of acceptance she wants to recall Sebastián’s face, lunch that day in the café, the boyish tilt of his posture at the small table after their first glass of wine. They’d laughed together, and Sebastián had made a show of looking discreetly down her top, of rubbing her thigh beneath the table, of asking if she wanted to head back to the shop early so he could help her ‘check inventory’. But in the slick heat of the memory that follows, she cannot conjure Sebastián’s face. The absolute absence of him feels like unmitigated terror.

Lydia is startled by the lateness of the daylight when she opens her eyes, and for a moment, she doesn’t know where she is. Luca is already awake beside her, watching her, his black eyes clear through the curtain of his sleep-sticky lashes. She can smell something cooking, and there’s the distant clinking of forks against dishes. ‘Come on, let’s get some food.’ She sits up, but then leans back and presses her lips against the warm expanse of Luca’s cheek. There’s such comfort there that she stays for a minute, her hands against the softness of his skin.

Luca sits bolt upright in bed, his hands flying up to his head to confirm what he already knows, that Papi’s hat is not there. He wears it even when he sleeps now, and when he has to remove it to shower, he makes Lydia hold it in her hands until he comes out. She’s not allowed even to set it down. Neither is she allowed to put it on her own head, because it must maintain the precise smell of Papi mingled with Luca, a mix that Luca is very pleased to note has not diminished but only intensified in the time he’s been wearing it. Perhaps Papi’s smell is also his smell, and he can keep enhancing it by its continued use. They mustn’t accidentally introduce any new ingredients, therefore, to corrupt the purity of the hat. It must’ve fallen off last night, when he was sleeping, or during one of his many trips up and down from the top bunk to the bathroom.