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1. Here, look, now. Some nights she wakes in her bed and finds that she’s been screaming, is shocked into alertness by the sound of her own voice, the cadence of her own crying. There are floor to ceiling windows in her bedroom and there is a city below the hill her house perches on, like some modernist bird of prey. There are fingers of dawn creeping into her room, draping themselves across the floor, uninvited. There are memories she isn’t sure are memories. They may be just inventions, just too many documentaries, too many museums, too many whispers. They are of men in black, in green, in red. Men sneaking into the house, men wrapping her mother in their arms and fading into shadows. In some of these memories, these nightmares, they shoot her mother in the face. In some of these memories she is soaked. In some she doesn’t hear a thing, just wakes up the next morning to her father’s sobbing. And in some she isn’t a child at all. In some she sits in a café with her back to a well-dressed young man. Here. Look. Now. In Lydia Rodarte-Quayle’s life, some things just disappear.
2. She liked Fring because he was Chileno. He understood that business integrity was essential, that things needed to be organized, tracked, documented. He spoke softly and calmly. He didn’t cause fights and he was clear-eyed, focused. When he spoke of revenge, it was in muted undertones. He would smile, so gentlemanly, and say, “Un día, todos van a morir.” There was nothing inherently violent about this. Nothing other than the way he slit the firm red flesh of the peppers the way she imagined he would slit the hearts of the men in Mexico, the men in Chile. She liked Fring because he was as afraid of disappearing as she was. When he died, she was glad it was in public. For his sake.
3. She wasn’t always afraid of Mike. She had once given Mike a handjob at a party in Rome. “What,” he asked, “You need some kind of excuse to throw those gloves away?” What she needed was an excuse to throw her wedding ring away, but she just smiled. She liked Mike differently than she liked Fring. It was changeable. It was dependent on circumstance. And circumstances could change. Changed.
4. “Debes saber que tu madre amaba.” Well she knew that somebody loved her. She had faith in as little as that. In as little as the way her father touched the back of her neck, the only contact he gave her after they immigrated to the United States, as though to protect the most vulnerable part of her. The part of him that would be severed in a car crash three years later when she was ten years old. Sitting in the hospital with an immigration agent and a lawyer and a doctor and tracing the steps the nurses took in her head.
5. Fring only mentioned Mike in passing, as though he were hardly a person. And something about this she could respect and something about it was repulsive. Mike had eyes like sea-glass, a smile like a dead animal ground against the freeway until it was forced to reveal its teeth. Sometimes Mike was with Fring and sometimes Mike was with the mafia and sometimes Mike was with Lydia and that suited her just fine until it didn’t anymore, and then she had to pretend it did until she couldn’t.
6. She’s a loose cannon.
7. Well, she wouldn’t call herself that. Not strictly speaking. Though maybe suggesting to her ex-husband that Mike had “assumed things about the nature of the relationship” and “had overstepped serious boundaries” had been in poor taste. Perhaps marrying a Mafioso had been in worse taste, but those things were in the past. We learn from our mistakes, Lydia. That’s what they told her as they shipped her from home to home across the southwest. She wasn’t entirely sure what her mistakes were then. It became easier to identify them with the passage of time.
8. The thing about Todd was that he wasn’t Mike. That he wasn’t Fring. That he wasn’t her ex-husband. It felt safe, considering most things, to have a boy like that. He could be counted on to deal with business reasonably. He could be counted on to have the connections necessary to ensure constant cash-flow. He could be counted on to respect her. He could be sweet.
9. She let him touch her in very particular ways. The back of her hand, the upper part of her arm, the small of her back. Once, she let him put his hand around her waist. Once, she let him kiss her on the cheek. And once he put his hand on the back of her neck to re-arrange her hair and she elbowed him in the stomach reflexively, but so hard that he spat phlegm onto her jacket. He apologized. She didn’t.
10. She spent six weeks in the hospital after the phone-call. She didn’t attend any of the funerals. Not the one the doctors thought would need to be prepared for her. Not the one for Todd, not for Mike, not for Fring.
11. Here. Listen. Now. She wakes up screaming and swears she must have invented the memories. There is no way she is as important as all that.
There were bad men and what country they lived in didn’t matter and she took the steps she thought was necessary to prevent herself from vanishing the way that the people around her did. All the men she loved ended up as de facto deseparacidos and all the men she loved had started as de jure criminals. She says she loved them, all of them, particularly the boy, as though the night has any conscience of empathy, any consciousness at all. She cries because she is afraid for her daughter but mostly she cries because she is afraid her daughter would be better off. Look at how much success comes from tragedy. Look at the historical precedent. Look at the memories she doesn’t know are memories. Here, listen, now. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is waking up alone.