A short story from cartel country by Tim MacGabhann.
Lucio’s wife and daughter are asleep upstairs and he is nodding off in front of Heat, alone on the couch where he sleeps, when his daughter’s teacher, Yael, texts him for the first time since she ended their affair.
– Hey, are you busy? she writes.He doesn’t know what to tell her. The thrill of her name on the screen fades instantaneously. He’s been happily settled on the couch, the crick in his back slowly opening, the tired ache leaking out. He was even thinking of having a bowl of his daughter’s Coco Pops, if there’s enough in the box.
– Hi, he says. Long time.
– Hi, yeah. Listen. Sorry. Little emergency.
On the screen, a black tar of burst eardrum leaks from the side of a dazed-looking bank guard’s head.
He loves this film.
Michael Mann really did his homework. The steam rising from the bullet holes in Robert De Niro’s chest, the thing about eyeballs turning black when people are shot in the head – he loves those bits. Sometimes it feels like nobody cares enough about bodies to know things like this. But Michael Mann does. He gets it. If they met, he thinks they’d get on, talking about stuff like that. Lucio cares about the bodies, too. He has to. He’s a forensic cleaner, sterilising the homes of people who have been murdered, or have died in destitution. Not even the police had wanted to know what his job entailed when he’d started out, dropping off his business card at the precincts.
The cursor pulses at the bottom of the WhatsApp window on Lucio’s phone. While he is trying to pick words out of the big wad of everything he’s never been able to say to Yael, she calls him.
– Are you there? says Yael.
– Little? he says. Little emergency? How’s that?
– Look. It’s someone I know. I think he’s overdosed.
– Where? Lucio turns off the TV, kicks back the blanket, wedges the phone between his cheek and his shoulder, and takes his black slacks from where they’re sitting folded on the armchair.
– My place.
– OK, Lucio says, pulling on trousers, standing into his Florsheim penny loafers, the ones that look like silencers but with buckles on. He tells himself he’s
not dropping everything for her: he’s only doing this because the Twelfth Step says to carry the message to the addict who still suffers. But he can’t pretend – as
he pulls his belt tight, and checks in his briefcase for the little thing of naloxone that he keeps nearby – that he doesn’t sort of love the excuse to get out of here.
– Ten minutes, he says to Yael, then hangs up before she can thank him. He’s groggy, his nose stings. He’s too irritable to say any of the right things. He has to drop a bomb of sulphides and nitrites at the end of
a job, to chase out the particles of dirt and blood and interior-body bacteria there might be hovering in the air. Even with the ventilator on, something of that bomb always gets through the mask, leaves him with
a heavy head and stuffy sinuses even into the next day. Today’s was a big job, the biggest all year – eight people, stabbed to death at a house in Colonia del Valle. Every spatter, every dragging hand print along the paint and the plaster, every tear in every curtain had transformed in his head into a scream, a jetting artery, a shock-widened pair of eyes – cinematic. It was a long job. His eyes still sting from the sweat that flowed down from his eyebrows; it gets humid inside the ventilator mask. It’s not the kind of thing showering or drops can do much about: the sting, he knows, is as much in his head as anything, because all of the time he spends mixing his formulas – titrating, calibrating, thinking in millilitres and milligrams and parts-per-million – until he feels like he’s nothing but a cloud of atoms wafting through another, bigger cloud, just all these tiny, spiky particles buzzing and zipping through and around and within him, all the time, to the point where he can’t feel himself as anything but a series of reactions.
He buttons up his shirt and puts on his leather jacket and then he’s out the door and over to the car. Their dog, Lucinda, is still up, pacing the garden. She’s
a rust-coloured barrel-chested mastiff, and she’s been barking a lot at night. He blows her a kiss and gets into the car. She watches him, tail down, looking worried, as he turns on the ignition and reverses out of the driveway. The vibes of the neighbourhood must be creeping in on her, he thinks. Texcoco isn’t safe anymore, not even in the gated communities like the one their house is in.
As he drives, he reminds himself that whatever else went on, the main thing is that Yael has been good
for his daughter, Natalia, who’s only six but reads everything she can find. This used to make her bored with almost everything else that happened in class. She’d lay her head on her wrists, face-down on the desk, banging her head and sulking whenever they were doing maths or drawing. She’d count aloud the dots in the
perforated ceiling panels. That changed when Yael came along. Soon, they no longer had to get Natalia out of bed with a crane, and the fact that her only homework was to make up short stories meant that she actually did her homework. Lucio had gone to meet Yael after class one day to thank her and ask how she’d done it. The first thing he’d felt, seeing her, was amazement that she was so young – maybe 26, 27 – and had arms covered in modish red-and-black tattoos, vivid inks that matched the streaks in her hair. But she didn’t seem like a tattooed person at all: she’d been courteous, cool, professional.
– I give her older kids’ readers, she said, taking a book that showed an old man and an old woman slowly turning into two trees knitted together by their branches. He flicked through the pages, saw boxes, English words, French ones.
– It’s for 14-year-olds, that one, Yael said.
She took out an A4 notebook with a seamed green cover and handed it to him. Lucio ran a finger along
the cracks.
– It’s her dictionary. Every time she doesn’t get a word, Yael says, she finds the definition, writes it down.
Lucio moves through the pages, turning them gently. The words Natalia doesn’t know are in red, the definitions in blue, the cursive so carefully braided that
the letters could be diagrams of veins and arteries. This
is why Natalia’s so calm now, why he no longer has to hover so keenly over her shoulder.
– Joined writing, he said.
– Nobody wants to teach that anymore.
Yael shrugged.
– I lost a whole summer because I couldn’t figure it out. My father held me back. Watching my cousins play with SuperSoakers and there I was, trying to get the ‘S’ right. It’s not easy when something isn’t clicking. I don’t want that for her.
– I’d never keep Natalia in all summer, Lucio said, and he could hear the shock in his own voice. Yael had laughed, and then touched his arm, saying
– You’re too nice. Her touch had only been there for a second: she brought it away fast, like she’d touched him without realising, or was pretending she hadn’t.
He couldn’t stop the invitation tumbling from
his mouth.
– If ever, you know, he said, hearing the click of his own throat as he swallowed.
– Just if you need a break. Anything like that. Or to talk. Well, you know. He fumbled his business card out of his wallet for her, pinching at it like he was pulling
a condom from its wrapper.
– Thanks, she said, almost coldly, but then she texted him an emoji thumb before he was even out of the building. The place where she’d touched him stayed tingling all the way home.
She’d made that first move, then the second and third: a stilted coffee at a place he’d felt too young to be in, ostensibly to discuss Natalia, which they managed for about ten minutes before she’d started laughing for too long at his jokes and giving him little brushing slaps on his arms, even his chest. She’d invited him over for dinner then. He’d lied to his wife, Claudia, about dropping off business cards at precincts, and even stayed over to shower. After that, he did all the running. She’d hanker after any old crumb of attention like a little dog craning, but then she’d clam up if you gave too much. It was never a game he could catch her in: she kept jinking away, and he’d keep blundering on after her, like that kids’ book of Natalia’s, the one about a honey-crazed bear being outfoxed by a chippy, precocious gnome.
It’s foggy and dark. The ‘V’s of the car park lights at
the Walmart across the road look submerged. The blue glow of hot-dog stand LEDs and the Pemex pump’s red-green fuzz blurred into one cool, lonely feeling in him. Yael’s house isn’t far. The lights inside are cloudy, the outside painted a dirty teal, all of it sad and laboratorial. That house used to sadden him when they weren’t having sex, the sickly jam-red half-gloom of her room, the slight tightness he’d feel at those windows of hers that never let in enough light. But when the frenzy was on him it was like he was crashing through all notion
of feeling, good or bad, those hard, bereft kisses of hers sucking him under into nothing. It was why he’d kept going back, long after he even really liked her as a person, until the grim wrench of the ending: him pacing back and forth in front of her doorstep all night, chain-smoking, pressing her buzzer for longer and longer, in different patterns, in an S-O-S pattern, in a long insistent honk. In these little bips or chirrups that he almost meant to sound cheery, while Independence Day fireworks went crackling overhead, brief greens and reds and whites that stung like a flicked cigarette against the inside of him, thinking of all the happy lives he was miles away from. But he was unable to leave either, because there was a speed bump right outside the building, and as each car slowed down over it, he’d get a leap and crash of hope in his chest thinking maybe it was the taxi bringing her back, her eyes swimmy with drink, smeared grease-paint tricolors on her cheeks, staggering like a foal from the door of the car and into his hug. He’d begun to set limits after which he could plausibly decide to give up hope: counting taxis, counting the fireworks, finally just counting, then breaking all of the limits anyway, saying after thirty, after fifty, after a hundred, sure that if he waited past hope he’d be rewarded and she’d take him in out of the cold. Finally going home only when the sky was greying towards morning and he assumed she’d looked up from whoever she was with to reply to his string of texts with I’m celebrating with my mother. And I think your wife is right. I think we should maybe leave it. I’ve sort of met someone.
He pulls up outside for the first time since that night, gravel crunching as he brakes. At the door he takes a deep breath as his thumb hovers over the buzzer, then presses it flat like he wants to drive it through the wall. Footsteps thunder down the stairs, a flash of dark hair in the window above the door, and there she is: shorter than he remembers, pale, her eyes and mouth open in panic, and all he can do is watch his own mind vitrify, leaving him with no room except to obey.
– I can’t thank you enough, she says, opening the door, the words coming out in a breath. She’s in sweatpants and a striped T-shirt, tired and frantic. He felt the electric kick of her remembered smell jolt through him.
– No need. He clears his throat. And so?
– Come on, she says, running back up the stairs.
Lucio shuts the door and jogs up behind her, towards a noise like a saw rasping through wood. On the floor of the bathroom where Yael is standing lies
a young man flat on the tiles, his arms up and out in
a ‘Y’. He’s wearing a mangy grey robe, the opening swagging so low that Lucio can see his small lilac nipples.
A clear plastic tube is wrapped so tightly around his arm that the veins stand up high and blue. Lucio doesn’t
feel scared. He has seen so many people die that he no longer even uses the word: they just sort of seem to stop to him now. He lays a pair of fingers against the kid’s throat. This one hasn’t stopped yet.
– Good, good, Lucio says, setting down his briefcase. He opens the snaps, takes a clear vial of naloxone and
a foil-wrapped syrette from the black foam lining inside, then peels off the foil and lets it drop to the floor with
a dainty scurry of his fingers. He slides the needle into the perforation in the jar and sucks up the naloxone with a shallow zip. For a moment, stooping to Diego’s side, he sees himself as Robert De Niro in Heat, all careful, frowning precision. He’s the guy who turns up to a soundtrack of tense, held strings low on a violin, before the jump-cuts and clicks and tightened screws, gleams of metal, the camera going smooth as a metal runner, until there’s nothing left of his presence but the shine his work leaves behind him. He flicks the needle, then pulls back Diego’s dressing-gown to jab him in the hip. Diego sits up with an angered, almost sexual grunt, Lucio thinks. Then he hears Yael’s little shocked laugh of relief, sees the way her eyes go looking at him, the way she puts her hands to her mouth, the size of her smile, and Lucio isn’t Robert De Niro anymore. He’s nothing, nobody. A minor character in someone else’s love-story. He’s not even Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, because the script he’s in has no room for charisma: all he’s asked to be is bluff, numb, biddable. He’s a chump with a beat-up Jetta. It’s worse than work. He’s not even getting paid. He hears the digestive twangs of his stomach, acids softening his dinner of enchiladas. This will kill him. Who will clean him up when he dies?
– There we go, Lucio says. The anger is shaking
his entire body. He eases Diego back onto the floor with the flat of his palm. He hears his breathing already. Lucio is sweating. The big wave of adrenaline is washing back out of him.
– He used to write, you know, Yael says.
– He forget how?
– Don’t be mean, Yael said.
– Did I sound sarcastic?
– He still thinks of this as writing, she says, waving her hand at the works lying on the floor: a scuzzy
needle climbed with brownish syrup, burnt-black foil,
a bag of dirt-coloured powder.
– It’s ink to him. He says. Something about turning his body into a page. Sometimes he calls the needle a pen-nib. Then he passes out.
– If we just turn him over and let him sleep it off, he’ll be OK.
– Let me. Yael gets down on her hunkers as well, sending a waft of argan oil around him. She grips Diego by the hip and shoulder and slowly eases him onto his front, his forehead resting on the inner fold of his forearm. Diego’s cheek kicks in response.
– He swallowed his tongue earlier, Yael says. It was fucked up. He sounded like a stuck blender.
– You must love him.
– I don’t want him to die, if that’s what you mean.
– That’s a good start. He in a program or anything?
– Bounces in and out. She pulls a towel from the rail and lays it under Diego’s head.
– There someone from the group you can call?
he says.
– I guess. She reaches into Diego’s dressing-gown pocket and swipes the screen unlocked.
– So you stayed an item, Lucio says, watching
her type.
– Became one, Yael says.
– We weren’t anything yet when you and I finished.
– Making us less than nothing, Lucio said.
– Don’t be bitter.
– I’m here, aren’t I?
The phone buzzes.
She leaves the bathroom. Lucio watches Diego’s chest rise and fall. He could clasp his hand over Diego’s nose and mouth until he went still. If he’s pumping Diego’s chest when Yael comes back, it’ll look like the naloxone just didn’t take: happens all the time. A car scrapes past in the distance. A tang of woodsmoke cuts through the odour of raw sewage in the air.
Then Diego takes in a huge, sucking breath, eyes startled wide, sitting bolt upright on the floor. Then he slumps forward, retching, saying,
– Oh, Jesus. I thought I’d really gotten out that time.
Lucio says nothing for a moment. He watches Diego gag and groan, twisting around on the floor.
Diego clasps his skull.
– Oh, fuck, man, it feels like my brain’s boiling over. What did you do to me?
– Wasn’t me. Lucio gives another jerk of the head towards the bathroom door.
– Your girlfriend asked me.
– That son of a bitch, Diego says dolefully in English, adding a yokel’s twang to his voice.
– Hey, easy.
– What, what, I’m joking. I’m being a cowboy.
Lucio hears her come back upstairs.
– Adonai’s on the way, she says, as she enters the bathroom again.
– I can’t stick around. I’ve work.
Diego puts his face in his hands and groans.
– Who’s Adonai?
– His sponsor. Kind of.
Lucio looks at Yael, lets his eyes move over her
gently hooked nose, over those sticky-out ears that she hates and calls her ‘Dumbo ears’. He can’t blame her.
He doesn’t even want to.
– No problem, he says.
– I’ll sit with him. Keep him up. There’s a film on. He gives Diego a big clap on the shoulder.
– What do you say, man?
– Thank you, Yael says. Thank you.
– That’s OK.
She’s gone, and he hears her run up the hall, hears the bedroom door close.
Diego gets shakily to his feet, leaning on the toilet. Lucio puts an arm behind his shoulder. He could run his thumb along the long, shallow scallop of his scapular, he’s that thin.
Diego leans, glowering suspiciously.
– You a doctor?
Lucio shakes his head, easing him out the door, and starting down the stairs.
– Cleaner, he says.
– Why’d you have that injection shit on you, then?
– My wife gets it for me. They’re all the way down the stairs now.
– She’s a nurse.
– That’s weird, Diego says.
– Ow. Fuck. Pins and needles.
– You passed out in a weird position. The feeling’ll come back. Don’t worry. Lucio leads Diego into the sitting room, eases him down onto the couch. He turns on the TV, flips the channels. Heat is still on. Al Pacino is walking along the dry basin of a river, flapping his arms like a crow. Lucio pulls at the knees of his trousers as he sits down beside Diego.
– I come across a lot of ODs, Lucio says. Places
I tend to work tend to be pretty sad neighbourhoods.
– Jesus. Diego recoils a little. They’re half-way down the stairs.
– What kind of fucking cleaning do you do, man?
Lucio rubs his face. He can feel the marks of the ventilator mask. He hates explaining his work. He likes it to be invisible, its importance unknown except to him, and that knowledge can be a quiet hub of warmth inside him. It makes him feel heroic. When he had to explain his job to cops at the start, they’d frown at him, call him morbid, tell him they just get regular house cleaners in for that stuff, send him on his way. He’d walk back out, chastened, under the police station’s throbbing fluorescents, his returned card held in both hands, back out past the shambling, bruised suspects who’d softened all night by interrogation, through the lilac buzz of the vending machines in the waiting room, where families dozed, on then to the parking lots where bashed-in cars caught reddish glow from pay-by-the-hour motels across the street.
– I clean up bodies, Lucio says.
– Basically. And it’s not morbid, before you say anything. Because I sort of love them. I have to. Someone has to.
– How’d you get into that, then? he says.
– Always have been. Lucio leans forward, half-watching the film.
– Saw my first dead body when I was nine. I was watching TV. After football one Saturday. I’ll never
forget any of it. Not even the feeling in my lungs. All puffed up around the sting of running down the wing for 90 minutes. He rubs his chest.
– But yeah. Bugs Bunny outrunning Beaky Buzzard one minute, next minute I hear this bang. Big ragged
sob from the street. Like someone’s sad and scared at the same time. Then silence. I go to the window, kneeling
on the seat of the good armchair with the tassels, like
I wasn’t meant to, and pushed back the lace curtains, also like I wasn’t meant to, then looked down to see a man lying with arms and legs all twisted like the swastikas I’d see carved in school desks. And there’s blood ribboning out of this man’s head. And there’s another man standing in front of a Nissan, bumper dinged in, hands gripping his head, and everyone on the plastic stools under the striped tarp of the taco stand on the corner just goggling.
Diego says nothing. On the screen, Val Kilmer is squinting at the moving blade of a tiny saw, a pale dust of metal silting up along its edge.
– My whole body went numb. All I could do was watch the whole thing, beginning to end – the ambulance arriving, the body going onto its stretcher, a sheet over the dead man’s face, a damson stain printing itself over the hole in his head, the police arriving, the driver in cuffs, the tow truck hauling his smashed-up car away. But the worst was afterwards. The taco-stand owners went and scrubbed up the blood with ordinary buckets of regular soap and water, twists of dark red suds spiralling down the drain. Jumps out at me, sometimes, that image, springing up out of any old thing. And fills my head up, all the way up. Just this feeling of suction. Urgency. The seething noise of a million tiny bubbles popping. It makes me feel like I have to do it. I have
to care about it. Nobody knows where the blood should go. Nobody but me. So I do it.
– No shortage of work, anyway, Diego says, after
a moment.
– Two murders a week, he said.
– My God.
He nods.
– Friend of mine. Program guy. Twelve Steps. He’s a murder detective. Tips me off.
On the screen a helicopter is rising high over blurry canyons of yellow light. It feels like it’s lifting up inside him.
– God, I love this film, Lucio says.
– It’s a dad film, no?
– Maybe. Yeah. I don’t know. I love any film with characters like this. Collateral. The Departed. What I like about this film, Lucio says, wagging his finger at the screen, is it’s about two people who are so good at their jobs that they’re bad at everything else.
Diego frowns a little, then he nods, eases back against the sofa, says,
– Yeah. You’re right. Then he leans forward, holds his face in his hands, and says,
– Oh, man, I fucked up so much.
– It’s OK.
– I had six whole months.
– Yeah.
– I don’t know why she sticks around. I really don’t.
On the screen, Al Pacino is beating the shit out of
a television.
– You don’t need to say things like that, Lucio says.
– She loves you. Better than that, she gets you.
Diego flops back, his face all scrunched up. He’s won, and he doesn’t even realise it, but Lucio feels sad for the guy. It’s always humiliating when someone
has to take you back from the brink. All you want is someone to coax you back, though you’d sooner cry than admit it. It’s the sentimentality Lucio hates most about people in a relapse. They want an audience,
not assistance.
– Don’t question it too much, Lucio says.
– That was my mistake.
Diego is looking at him with disgust.
– What?
– Easy for you to say, Diego says.
– What? Why?
– You ever see yourself?
– You’ve lost me.
– Jesus. Diego shakes his head. Has nobody told you?
– Told me what?
Diego shakes his head. Robert De Niro is leant back against the banquette of a diner, scowling like a pissed-off teenager, while Al Pacino gives him a manic stare.
– You’re him, Diego says, gesturing at the screen with both hands. The camera’s just showing Robert
De Niro now. Diego brushes his cheek with one finger.
– Your mole’s just on the other side.
– Huh, says Lucio. The screen goes black before
an ad break. He sees himself reflected in the screen. For a moment, he gets it.
Diego tuts, shaking his head.
– Honestly, man, upstairs, when you showed up,
I thought I was fucking hallucinating. Thought Robert De Niro was getting ready to take me over the River fucking Styx, man.
Lucio laughs. He sort of hates the bloom of pride he feels going up through him, but he doesn’t try to stop it, either.
– I’m not fucking laughing, Diego says.
– That shit was scary. Fuck. Be just like my fucking life to see a fucking film star showing up instead of saints and angels and shit. And that ‘Don’t fuck with me’ look, you could dirty pants at a hundred yards. And you listen. Not just butting in everywhere with questions, like a cop.
– I care that you’re not dead. That’s all.
Diego snaps his fingers and points, saying,
– And that’s it. Right there. That’s why I’m with her and you’re not.
– Hey, now.
– No. No. It’s a compliment. She likes a project.
A fixer-upper. And you’re not that. You’ve no edges. You’re all whole. And I’m all hole. He laughs a little.
– Probably you just looked a bit rumpled one day. Vulnerable. And she thought that was you. But knowing you it was probably just a bad day. You didn’t need her enough. She needs to be needed.
Lucio doesn’t say anything. The warm feel of
the pride has started to singe around the edges. What relationship isn’t just a misunderstanding getting embroidered around the edges, he wants to say. What does he know. Diego keeps talking.
– This is what me and her are like, see, he says, interlacing his fingers, pulling them taut.
– Compatible flaws. Built to last.
A yellow motorbike slows towards the door. A tall, heavyset man covered in tattoos gets off the saddle, peeks through the window with a worried expression, then waves.
– Ah, shit, Diego groans.
– The fucking cavalry.
– Great, says Lucio, standing up with a deep breath. His chest feels tight and big at once. If he had to, he couldn’t name the feeling.
– See you in a meeting, Diego.
Diego doesn’t look away from the TV as he says
– Thanks.
Lucio lets himself out, leaving the door ajar. The tall man – Adonai, he supposes – is coming up the path.
– Hey, man, thanks for that, he says. He has crosses and teardrops under his eyes but the look on his
face makes Lucio think of a golden retriever, or Owen Wilson.
– How’s our boy doing?
– I gave him naloxone. He didn’t need it. Nothing coffee and some food won’t fix. Maybe a meeting.
Adonai shakes his head, looking through the window.
– I’d go through fire for that fucken idiot, man. Already went through a fucken quake for him, know’m saying? Like, literally, man.
– He’s got charisma, Lucio says, looking in at the couch, where Diego’s leg is up on the seat, tapping the cushion, while his mouth goes mauling at a hangnail. The lights of the shootout scene flicker over his face.
– Twelfth Step, though. Carry the message, not
the addict.
– If I can resist. Adonai laughs, then draws his hand back to grab Lucio’s in a handshake.
– Well, you know, you’re welcome in our home group anytime, man. 222 Insurgentes. Between the two sex shops.
– Thank you, Lucio says, and nods.
Adonai goes into the house. Lucio gets into his car and drives home. Morning light is coming up in the gaps between the clouds, the lurid magenta of candle wax. Day labourers are gathering on the main street, faces seamed and ruddy with sun and work and boredom. The vans come earlier all the time, taking them away to build the new airport. They get out early from work and cause a ruckus, these men in their twenties, hanging around secondary schools, sometimes driving girls home in shared cars. They’ll drive past the evangelical churches, with their graphic signs, those nail-holed outstretched palms with blood fountaining out of them in a curve, and they’ll bless themselves, and they’ll have one hand on the wheel and the other on the thigh of a girl of about 15. A truck rumbles past, the back shutters painted with
a full-colour image of Jesus en route to Calvary, his eyes hazel, bovine, peaceful. Tears of blood drip from his crown. Pasted to the side of the traffic-lights there’s
a MISSING poster showing a chubby, smiling boy, his
fingers working against each other, his hands at his throat, like he gets made fun of for his weight a lot and is already trying to hide it. Xerox copy-lines streak his face and hair. The note is misspelled and says that the kid is deaf, that he got separated from his mother in Walmart, that he could be anywhere. The lights change and Lucio goes the last seven blocks home.
When he gets home, Claudia is in the kitchen, battling with the coffee filter.
– You went out, she says.
– Yeah.
– Work? She slams the percolator against the wall and the filter door stays shut. She flicks the switch. The spout begins to gutter.
– Fuck, finally, she says.
– Not work, he says.
– Overdose. Nobody died.
Claudia’s eyebrows rise a touch.
– Alright, she says, along an inhale of an angry-sounding breath. Lucio takes the foil wrap of the syrette from his pocket. He smooths it along the table. Claudia turns at the sound of the uncrumpling foil.
She nods.
Lucio feels a dark thrum of a feeling that he doesn’t have the word for, because ‘resentment’ is the only feeling that comes up in his Twelve Steps meetings. He toys with the foil.
– Can you take Natalia? Claudia says. She checks the time on her phone.
– This fucking machine. I don’t leave now I’m late.
Lucio doesn’t even say ‘are you sure?’ in case she whips the offer away from him. It’s been months. Sometimes they’re both gone when he wakes up. He just mutters ‘Thanks’, pockets the foil, half-gallops up the stairs to Natalia’s room.
Natalia is already sitting up when he gets there, eyes wide, holding two fistfuls of blanket in a ball under her chin.
– Mama’s mad, she says, in a whisper.
– At the coffee machine. Not you.
– Or you?
– She’ll be mad at me for a while yet, love, but that’s my job to worry about.
– I always say I’m sorry straight away, Natalia says.
– That works for me.
– I’ll try that.
Now Natalia purses her lips and lowers her chin further into the blankets, her eyes seeming to bulge,
in a trick that’s made her mother nickname her Gizmo.
– We don’t have Coco Pops, love, Lucio says, lying.
– I ate them.
– OK. She sits up, shrugging, then tosses her hair and swings her legs from the bed, suddenly a teenager.
– Worth a try.
She’s months from turning seven, and already he can see the tactics she’ll be trying on him in ten years. At this age they aren’t really kids: they’re more like
funhouse mirrors, the blurred shape of themselves
as babies on one side, the ghost of their adult mess on the other. Diego had that about him too.
– Get those teeth brushed and the uniform on like a good girl, will you?
– And I can pick the music in the car?
She looks at him over her shoulder and plucks
a pair of tights from the drawer as he shuts the door, goes down to the kitchen, and gets the Coco Pops out, because Natalia loves surprises.
In the car, after breakfast, he reaches behind him into the backseat with a coin on the palm of his hand.
– I’m heads, he says.
– Right, she says, then flips the coin with her thumb. Heads. The sigh she utters is so long and loud that he smells the mint on her breath. In the rearview mirror she flutters her eyelids ruefully. The kids really do seem to get all their body language from the screens.
– You get the second song, he says, plugging in the aux cord.
She strains against her seatbelt and squints at the bar on the dashboard screen, then says,
– Seven minutes?
– The drum solo at the end, Lucio says, pulling out of the driveway, is the pinnacle of Western popular music.
Natalia’s nose wrinkles: another screen facial expression.
– It sounds like music from inside an elevator, Natalia says.
– In the mall.
– If that was true, Lucio says, I’d live in that fucking elevator. He turns up the volume.
Natalia narrows her eyes at him.
– Twenty pesos, she says.
– Twenty?
– The ‘f’-word is 20. The ‘s’-word is 15.
– Wow. It was less last week.
– Times are tight for everyone, says Natalia.
They’re at the school now. Natalia goes to hand Lucio back the coin. He waves her away.
– Get a mazapán, he says.
The school’s security guard walks towards the curb, shotgun bouncing off his chest, to check Lucio’s face against the photo on a laminated information sheet. He’s new. The school put him in after that thing in Tláhuac. A kindergarten left a girl outside because her parents were late collecting her. She was picked up, kidnapped, found in a bin bag five days later.
– Mazapánes are bad for you, says Natalia, tutting.
The security guard nods and ticks their names off
a clipboard wedged awkwardly under his bicep. Lucio looks back at Natalia over his shoulder.
– But Coco Pops are fine? he says
– They have milk on them. She slides the coin into her pocket, kisses the air near his cheek, says, – Byedadiloveyou, then gets out of the car. He watches her as the knot of girls opens at her approach, most but not all turning with smiles and wide arms, then closing in around her. A football arcs through the air with a loud whoop from the schoolboys, but she doesn’t even look, just steps into her friends’ hugs, a poised smile on her face, cool as though she’s receiving no more than her due. He has no idea where she got that from, but he’s glad she has it. Lucio’s car moves up the queue, level with the doorway, where Yael is leaning, arms folded, eyes ticking over the kids. She looks over at his car. She waves, and a smile starts to spread across her face, but then she stops herself, stiffening her posture. That’s enough for him. He lifts a finger from the wheel, nods, then merges into the traffic carrying him away from her.
