On the day of the funeral mass for Papi León, I was elsewhere. Cousins and aunts and uncles, I learned later, had flown over the border and thousands of miles to attend. Should anyone have wanted to know why I wasn’t there (they didn’t), my absence would have been easy to explain: I hadn’t been told he’d died. Neither had my mom, who was estranged from the Leóns, who were Dad’s family and not hers (they’d long been divorced). What did I know about Dad? Or about his dad, Papi León? Only a pocketful of stories from my childhood before the divorce. I remember my abuelos’ big homestead in Cuernavaca and its tremendous stonewall fence with wrought-iron gates, the beautiful pool, tiled at its bottom in a pattern of radiant color that shimmered up through the chlorinated water, where I would drift on an inflatable flamingo and dream of helados and cacahuates and the ridged feel of Dad’s paint-splotched canvases, which had cast a spell on me from my earliest memories. I also didn’t go because the funeral was not in the Distrito Federal but in a tiny Cajun town in Louisiana, and I was not yet aware of my larger American family.
Instead, at the time of the funeral, I was probably working a double at Carlos & Charlie’s in Coyoacán with my best friend, Paola. She’d gotten me the job that summer, in a time when Mom’s alcoholism had turned her into the Hulk and I needed to be anywhere but home. I worked any double I could get, even a few triples. This was exhausting, but there were rhythms to the job that I cherished. I loved, for example, the way the barback would sing a song to himself in the banda style his parents had raised him listening to. Or how the cook would smirk as I balanced three plates on my tiny arm and cry my name out to the heavens at the sight of me. Or—and this was my favorite—at the end of the lunch rush, when Paola and I would sneak out back for a cigarette, feet pulsing from overwork, not saying a word as we looked at the dumpster in the alley and listened to the sounds of dishes clinking through the cracked door behind us. One day like that, maybe even the day of the funeral, as Paola and I smoked, a boy named Chuco, a dishwasher who’d just quit, approached us. “Mira, mis putas,” he said, kissing us each on the lips and smiling. Paola asked what the deal was. He told us that he’d just come out to his parents and it had been shit like he expected but it was good because now he was leaving D.F. and did we want to come with him?
“Come where?” I asked. Paola looked at me like I was crazy.
“A Cancún, pues.”
When Chuco had worked with us, I’d seen how others smirked when he’d walk away from them having just snapped off a witty self-compliment that they couldn’t see for the desperate attempt at self-validation that it was. In those moments, I’d come to believe Chuco was like me, and not because he was also gay and I also wanted to be out. It was more than that. I felt his insecurity as being similar to my own, and I yearned to be able to handle it in his charming way.
And that was why I said yes to him before even discovering when he was leaving—turned out, the next day—and as I watched Paola watch me do a little dance in the alley with Chuco at our spontaneous decision, I wondered if this was one of those moments where you’d later point to it and say, yep, that was the end of one friendship and the beginning of another. In the middle of a derpy Roger Rabbit kick-out, I caught the melancholy way that Paola was watching us, and it stopped my happy feet and nearly broke my heart. So many times, I’d been the one watching and not the one dancing. “Come with us, Paola!” I said.
Chuco didn’t care. “Yeah!” he screamed, then sashayed over to her and put two fingers to his face like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction with puckered lips, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
The next day we hitched a ride in a logging truck outside of Las Aguilas, and the driver, a compact, quiet man named Guzman from Guerrero, took us as far as the jungles of Veracruz. As a journalist who has survived a kidnapping attempt, I now know how incredibly dangerous that was—not the ride itself, because Guzman was a gentleman and we told him that Chuco and I were newlyweds and Paola our maid of honor, and he treated us like the upstanding people we pretended to be. Rather, it was our night in Veracruz that could’ve killed us, for we must have been obvious to everyone in that small town as young and not as smart as our sense of sarcasm, easy marks who looked like we might have rich parents who would pay any ransom. We hopped out of Guzman’s truck obliviously an hour before sundown, laughing loudly enough for any drug lieutenant to hear. With half the cash we had earned from tips at Carlos & Charlie’s, we rented a single room.
That night in the hotel, we were delirious with our freedom. Even Paola, who had earlier spent the ride with Guzman looking like she needed to shit a brick. As we watched reruns of Chespirito, she was the one passing around a joint and asking if we wanted to play Spin the Bottle. “You don’t really want to play that,” Chuco said, for she was a bit of a prude. We all knew he was right. Instead, we stayed up late exchanging fucked-up stories about our families. Chuco started, told us about the time his father burnt a cigarette on his arm and somehow it was funny, even to Chuco, a half-hour later as his parents joshed him about his having cried over it. Paola went next, and wanting to take it down a notch, divulged a story about her mother’s affair with a pilot from Lufthansa, how Paola had walked in on them one afternoon. How her mother had met her eyes as she stood naked from the waist down, the pilot kneeling behind her, hiding his face like Paola was the paparazzi. She’d told me this story in private before, and to hear it again in the company of Chuco, told in this jokey way instead of with the heartfelt sense in which she’d first told me—made me wonder whether this was her way of trying to bend to the new me. The me that danced with Chuco in the streets. The me who would hitch to Cancún on a dime.
Then, it was my turn to tell a story, and that was when I told them about Tommy. I’d never mentioned him to anyone before, and since family revelations seemed to be the bonding method of the moment, and since I was trying to keep one friend and make another, it somehow made sense to try it out with both of them at the same time. “My dad had this whole other family before he met my mom,” I said. Paola cocked her head. Chuco was unimpressed. “Whatever,” he said. “My grandfather had three kids by my grandmother—Sergio, Antonio, and Juan. And then, we learned later he had three sons by this other puta, and do you want to know what their names were? That’s right—Sergio, Antonio, and Juan. Fucker didn’t want to give himself any chance to mess up the names.” Paola was floored, but I just felt usurped. It had been a big deal to me, to announce Tommy’s existence, and it stung to see how easily he could be washed away in a tide of Mexican storytelling.
The next morning, we hitched the rest of the way to Cancún with a single woman who told us her own tale of disappointment in men. We half-listened, but the closer we got to the Caribbean, the harder it was to pretend we cared. She dropped us off just beyond the area where all the gringos were housed in their resorts, in an abandoned stretch of Avenida Tulum, where the concrete slabs of future hotels had been poured and then left after the government rezoned the area for a bird sanctuary that itself was then scrapped over the protests of a violent drug lord. He wanted it for a beachside headquarters, an unsuspecting place from which to load and unload his wares bound for the States. But the traffic of the Mexican coast guard shifted, and the plan seemed doomed, and he realized how much more money he could make if he simply developed the property as tourist real estate, in the way the original investor had intended. Now, it was finally set to be developed in that way, except that the drug lord had been extradited to New York on racketeering and conspiracy to commit fraud, and until a new lieutenant filled the power vacuum, this concrete slab was mostly frequented by homeless youth too carefree or drugged out to be scared by the truth of who owned it.
That, anyway, was what Trini told us on our first morning. She was a skinny, tatted girl with a stud through her nose and the look of a ghost with longing in her heart. She emerged from a pop-up tent at the sound of the three of us whispering on the foundation, wondering where we’d landed. “We probably can’t stay very much longer, but look at this view,” she said, gesturing to the blue-green waters of the Caribbean. The we, it took me a moment to realize, meant the four of us. She had been living alone here, who knows for how long. “I don’t mean the sea,” she said then. I shortened my gaze out to the coast, and I saw what she had really been pointing at. On the beach stood a lifeguard station, and sitting atop it was a beautiful girl in a red bikini. I’d thought before then in abstract terms about the idea of being with a woman, but what did I know? Trini’s bald desire was written on her face. “Her name is Ingrid,” she said, “and before this summer is over, I promise you that I will sleep with her.”
Paola looked at me then. I avoided her gaze, but I could feel her judgment and concern. She would pull me aside later, I knew then, and ask me what on earth we were doing here. I wouldn’t be able to tell her why, for I didn’t yet know how to say that I wanted to become a person who would chase the wild, who would always want to see what was on the other side of things.
“Here,” Trini said, “let me show you my tent.” Inside, she kept a duffel in which she stored mace for protection, along with a few changes of clothes and a water bottle. “I spend my days walking the tourist shops and I try to stay out as late as I can. This slab is close enough to the hotels, and those places have security, so it’s okay to sleep a few hours.”
“Rad,” Chuco said.
“What do you do for money?” Paola asked.
“Money? I try not to need much. I know a couple of waiters at the gringo restaurants who slip me take-out containers that tourists forget.”
“I used to do that for my buddies,” Chuco said.
“You should buy some tents and stay awhile. It’s always safer in numbers, and my two friends who were staying here took off this week.”
“Where did they go?” Paola asked.
Trini smiled sadly. “They wanted to get married,” she said, “and this is no place for people with commitments.”
_____
Chuco told her that we were going to take a walk to get to know the town on our own terms, and we all knew that meant we’d be deciding whether to set up camp with Trini. We walked the beach like we owned it, and only later did I think what we must have looked like to the Americans, the beautiful and annoying American women in their two-pieces and sunglasses and pursed lips that made them look so unapproachable and sad: Chuco in a Smiths tee shirt and black pants, me in a hippie dress of many colors torn at the edges and cinched at the waist with a belt of Dad’s—the only thing of his I owned—and Paola in a polo shirt and sensible shorts. None of us were looking at the sea, and we were each worrying over different things: I was wondering whether I could feel comfortable coming out to Trini, whether she might like me in some vague, romantic way that I could hardly yet conceive. Chuco was probably wondering how long he could ride this Cancún weirdness out. “What do you think happened with Trini’s friends? You think they really ran off to get married?” he asked. Meanwhile, Paola was the only one worried about the obvious. “This is crazy,” she said. “You two aren’t really thinking of camping back there with her, are you?”
“Que cobarde!” said Chuco. “What are you afraid of? I told you this would be an adventure. What would it be to stay with Trini, if not that?”
Paola turned to me, pleading for validation. She was right, of course. But I’d decided that that wasn’t the type of person I would be anymore. “I don’t care what you do. I’m staying.”
And I did. And she didn’t.
Chuco and I bought tents, and that night before setting them up, we said goodbye to Paola at the bus station, where, before she boarded, she shrugged her shoulders at me, gave me a big hug, and slipped me an old Polaroid of the two of us making the peace sign at some birthday party. “Be safe,” she said, seeming already to understand that her concern would have no impact on my choices.
The next two weeks were a kind of Eden. Trini turned out to be the most charming guide to homeless living I could’ve asked for, anticipating my every question with answers that assured me and made me feel understood. Before I even asked that first night about what we should check out first, she volunteered that the best thing about this life—aside from her view of Ingrid every weekday from eight am to one pm—was her morning walk down Avenida Tulum, surrounded by the bustle of foreigners on vacation. “I know,” she said, “I’m not supposed to say that. But you can’t deny that, more than any other people, they’re all just so energetic.” I’d expected her to say that they were all just so happy, and the twist ending to her statement made me recalibrate what it might mean to be rich and in a country far from your origin, to be so certain of how your desires would be met, and how, when you were done meeting them, there would be a home waiting for you as sure as the sun.
And at first, my desires were met in that way. When I felt my first hunger pangs on our second day, Trini said, reading my mind, “There’s this alley behind Club Med—five-star detritus.” And, after a few days, right when I’d started to wonder where she came from, she volunteered her story that night, how she’d made her way here from a small town some kilometers inland; how she had a cousin who joined a cartel; how she wanted to get as far away from all that as quickly as possible. Chuco could relate, he said. They talked about their escapes from various teenage versions of entrapment, and I listened and felt so happy to be included. For most of these sessions, Trini would’ve stolen some tequila from her hookup at Club Med, and by the flash of a light-up rubber ball that colored her face in blues and greens as she bounced it on the concrete, she would talk. We’d pass the bottle. Often, she’d want to tell us about Ingrid, who was, from what Trini had gathered from talking her up a few times, a runaway from Chiapas. She sported a big tattoo, Trini claimed, of a female version of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas, the ink revealing a woman whose face was half-shrouded in a bandanna while a clip of ammo was strapped to her shoulder and a red star patched onto her arm. When Trini asked Ingrid about her tattoo, Ingrid, apparently, had only shrugged and mentioned off-handedly that her family had been killed by the paramilitaries, the ones who’d made camp in the vast and dangerous Lacandón jungle just beyond her family’s village. What was left for her now but to look at the Caribbean every day? Maybe save a life or two? “She told me that, and I was a goner,” Trini had told us. “I am a sucker for a beautiful woman with a sad and violent heart.”
I realized then that this might be true for me, too. But after she finished, I couldn’t shake the story of how Ingrid came here. Who’d killed her family? Why? What was the larger set of political forces that had acted on her? These questions only manifested inside that tent in how I dumbly stared at Trini after her story had ended, and in how Chuco nudged me to make sure I was all right as I absorbed it all.
Once, Trini asked me about my family, and I told her about Dad and his art and his absence—and about my mother, and even now I feel bad about how I described her. Sure, it was true that she was a drinker, but she loved me despite that, and while I never felt secure with her, I knew how much worse I might have had it. I gave all those qualifications, and still it felt like a betrayal of her, but I think I was really worrying over Paola as the one I’d betrayed and wanted a way to transfer it to some other anxiety. Maybe it was the incense-laden, claustrophobic aura of Trini’s tent that brought my mother to mind and made me pass over my guilt about Paola. It was such an intimate space, and its suffocating smallness recalled the sardine can of an apartment that Mom and I shared when I was a kid: our secondhand couch, which, despite its shabbiness, was too big for the tiny living room in which it dominated the space and made it so that there was nowhere to hide when Mom began, in her alcoholic rants, to complain about Dad in the scant times he’d been around. In the same way, Trini’s inflatable raft, which she’d bought at a tourist store and used for her bed, was too big for her tent, and as Chuco and I listened to her, we had to scrunch in the corner so as not to invade her little rectangle of private space.
Even so, I felt myself leaning toward her as, high on some drug she hadn’t shared with us, she talked about her upbringing. She mentioned the oddity of growing up in a household in which her father had spent most of her childhood north of the border. She mentioned a job he’d held in Texas on a string of construction sites, which brought to mind Dad’s brief stint in Louisiana, when he’d met Tommy’s mother and they’d had him. I didn’t say anything about Trini’s dad, though. I was hyper-conscious of how her way of storytelling made me want to sleep with her. Her lips moved with such ease, and she talked with such charm about the disasters of her fatherless childhood, and all of that drew me to her, made me not care whether Chuco could see what was happening.
“I like how cozy it is in here,” I said, apropos of nothing.
“Thanks,” Trini said.
Chuco smirked. Without breaking eye contact with Trini, he bumped my knee with his own as we sat cross-legged in the tent, and I knew this meant that he would find an excuse to vacate the premises shortly, and that, for doing so, he’d later demand a full accounting. On cue, he yawned and stretched his arms above his head, scraping the curved vinyl ceiling of the tent. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’m turning in.” With that, he left with a tide of insincere apologies for his fatigue.
Trini and I waited for the zipping up of his tent across the way, the settling of his body, the rhythms of his breathing to sound like sleep, and then she smirked and patted the space beside her on her blow-up raft. Sheepishly, I complied. With a sigh that made me feel like she’d been waiting for this moment, she rested her head against my shoulder. As she placed her hand on my knee, I found myself paralyzed. What were you supposed to do when you were this close to something happening, but you still didn’t know what was happening? Trini cleared her throat, crept her hand above my knee and walked her fingers up my thighs. I focused on the crash of the breaking waves. They sounded like they were inside the tent. She broke the tension by raising her arms up to my shoulders and hugging me tight, like I was some long-lost friend. Hesitant, I returned the favor, and then she pulled back to say something that seemed to have just occurred to her: “I came out to my cousin,” she said. “He’d just committed to the drug life a few months before.”
“Okay,” I said.
They’d chanced upon each other, Trini continued, at the Oxxo in the small town where they were both raised—she looking to steal a handle of rum, he looking to rob the place more violently for the sake of his boss—and when they caught sight of each other, they halted their operations to acknowledge each other. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He didn’t say but asked if she wanted to smoke a cigarette. In the half-light of a Caribbean sunset, they puffed and spoke. Something about his new distance from her life made her feel like she could tell him that she was gay, and that she would be leaving her mother for good within the next few weeks. She was heartened by his smirk. “I get it. What is there for you in this place? Get the fuck out while you can,” he said. A lieutenant from the cartel showed up then, and Trini’s cousin had to disavow knowledge of her. As the cousin walked away, he chanced a side-eyed smirk in her direction, and that was their final goodbye. They disappeared to each other forever, he to some brief and violent life, she to the wilds of the road that had led her here to Cancún.
I said nothing. I couldn’t tell what it meant to her, my still way of listening. I worried I’d killed any chance of something sexual, that I’d revealed my own ignorance in the face of someone whose take on the world mattered to me. I wished so badly that I knew the right thing to ask that would’ve opened up the moment. As I continued not to speak, I felt her sinking with malaise into the role of the one who knows things. I felt dread about how I was widening the gap between us instead of bridging it.
“I’ve never traveled alone before,” I said.
“Sometimes, I sleep with a mannequin,” she said.
I laughed. “What?”
“I keep a mannequin buried in the sand over there”—she gestured beyond the slab—“and sometimes, I pretend to sleep with it.”
“Why?”
“So that the worst that any creep would do is listen. If they think a man is in here, they won’t try anything.”
I asked what the mannequin looked like, and she asked me if I wanted her to dig it up to show me. I almost said yes, but then, the idea of digging up anything resembling a body unsettled me, and I must’ve shrugged, for she squeezed me against her side, a kind of protective gesture. I felt her breasts against my ribcage, worried she could feel the fluttering of my heart, and then, before whatever might’ve come next could happen, I felt the rhythm of her sleeping on my shoulder. The drugs, I guessed. I laid her down on the raft and returned to my tent, wide awake and fully attuned to the night-soft rhythms of the surf, the ocean breathing like a beast.
_____
The next afternoon, after a full day in which Chuco led me by the hand through a chain of gay bars on a mission to find a boy toy before ditching me when one finally started chatting him up, Trini took me down the beach a ways to where this group, she said, sometimes lit a bonfire and smoked weed until the sound of the waves turned them all into philosophers. “Ingrid sometimes hangs out there,” she said. I understood then that I was to be her wingman, and I exhaled at the clarification of my role. At the bonfire, I watched from a distance as Ingrid talked to a boy who tried to impress her with some specialized knowledge—from his Misfits tee shirt and dark eyeliner, probably the peculiar history of eighties punk in Mexico. Trini trained a stare in Ingrid’s direction until Ingrid looked her way and offered first a smirk and then, after Misfits leaned into Ingrid for some dramatic flailing of arms meant to be charming, an eyeroll. Trini whispered to me, “Tonight is the night, sweetheart.” She squeezed my love handles in a way that lit me up, and when she let go of my waist, she walked straight to Ingrid, interrupted Misfits, and never came back to my side. I was left with my hands in the pockets of my hippie dress to watch as Trini dismissed Misfits with easy charm and then set to her seduction of Ingrid in earnest.
As Trini put her hooks into Ingrid, Misfits made his way by the fire. The temperature had dropped since sunset, but I wouldn’t have called it cold, and as Misfits rubbed his hands together like some American Boy Scout, I caught his eye and gave him a look that said that I saw that he was posturing, and I thought that this was okay. Immediately, he started to talk.
“Love sucks,” he said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Like, just when you think someone’s interested in you, they turn out to be a lesbian.”
Oh, God, I thought. Even at that young age, I’d seen enough of boys who thought the world owed them a conversation with a woman. “Yeah, right?” I offered.
We talked about old Mexican tv shows from our childhoods, and I was pleasantly surprised that he turned out to be capable of making me laugh. I even considered the possibility of going somewhere else with him. I would never have slept with him, but the meekness of his observations of Mexican tv made me feel safe. When Trini finally took Ingrid’s hand and started walking her back toward our concrete slab, I saw Misfits notice. “There they go,” he said, smirking and shaking his head like he’d predicted it.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” I asked.
“Who cares?” he said mercifully. “Let’s walk the beach like we’re rich Americans.”
We left the bonfire and within five minutes trespassed onto the private property of a resort. By then, Trini had trained me to look for the tell-tale signs of gringos being catered to: trash cans screwed into the sand like umbrellas, lifeguard highchairs with a thousand rules tacked to the stanchion, the occasional lone-wolf white man ambling around by himself in a linen shirt contemplating the sadness of a privileged life. On that walk, we saw all those things, and we laughed at them like assholes, not yet understanding that life is hard on everyone.
In only a few minutes, we encountered the body. I thought at first that it must be the carcass of a small shark, but what I initially saw as lifeless fins were, in fact, the extended arms of a dead woman. “Holy shit,” Misfits said. She was dressed in a bikini top and sheer white pants that hugged her thighs, and the waves were moving her subtly each time they crashed and receded. I looked around. There was no one.
“What do you think happened?” I asked. I scanned the body from where I stood: rings on her fingers; a ruby bracelet on her wrist. “She looks like she must have been at some party. Maybe at the resort.”
“Maybe,” Misifts said. “But look at the tattoo on her hand. Those three dots. She was some cartel guy’s girlfriend. I bet she was fucking with some güero and got caught.”
The woman’s eyes were open. With each wave, water trickled into and out of her mouth. The only sound was the ocean. She seemed so lifelike; she couldn’t have died more than an hour earlier. Misfits walked to the other side of her. He crouched down, put one hand to the wet sand beside her, the other up to his chin. Her abdomen was exposed, crusted with sand. Misfits came out of his crouch and walked around the dead woman, keeping his fingers to his chin like some movie detective. He must have seen me eyeing the sky-blue button on her white pants, because then he asked me, “Do you want it?” Without waiting for a response, he plucked it off her pants like a blueberry off a vine. Handed it to me. I didn’t know what else to do but thank him. Mortified and exhilarated, I pocketed it.
“Who do you think did this to her?” I asked. “I don’t see any signs of violence.”
“But it was. Violent, I mean,” he said.
“Could the killer be nearby?”
Misfits, weirdly amped, saw the fear in my eyes and came to my side, hugged me for an awkward moment and made to kiss me. I pushed him away, and he stepped back and assessed me as if for the first time.
“Lesbians, I swear. Why the fuck did you come on this walk with me?”
I had no answer. Didn’t want to have to have one. When he stormed away without another word, I was so relieved not to have to say anything else; also terrified at being alone in the dark with the dead. Once Misfits disappeared, I walked back toward the resort, across its private beach and past the bonfire, where hookups between strangers seemed imminent in the small talk I overheard. When I got near my concrete slab, I heard Trini and Ingrid in the throes of fucking. From Chuco’s tent came similar sounds in a deeper, masculine register, interrupted by small talk with his lover about how he was getting what he wanted from this trip, joking how he’d soon return to Mexico City with a whole new idea of himself. I walked past my own empty tent to the other side of the slab, where Trini’s mannequin’s hand poked up through the sand, as if trying to unbury itself. I quickened my pace, trotting past resort after resort. A trillion grains of sand. A trillion liters of ocean. The lights of a city built for anyone but me.
I must have kept walking another hour. I suppose the danger increased the farther I got from civilization, but once the resort’s lights faded and I could hear only the sound of the waves, I calmed down. Relished the quiet. My calves ached from the exertion of pushing my feet out of the sand, and I stopped and sat down. I’d ended up just back of the sandiest part of the beach, in a deserted area where the terrain was firmer, less of a slog. As I folded my legs to my chest, I felt the rigid push of Paola’s Polaroid tucked against my waistline. I’d cinched my dress with Dad’s belt, the one he’d probably meant for my brother and not me, and I unbuckled it now, felt the liberating looseness at my hips. I placed the belt over the picture of Paola and me so that it wouldn’t get blown away by the wind. By starlight I could see the white crests beyond the breakers, glimmers of starlight atop the water like the sea was an infinite birthday cake lit with candles. I fingered the dead woman’s blue button, turning it over in my hand like a poker chip.
When and how does a person decide what their life will be? I looked down at the button. It might hold some answer, I thought, but how to decipher the signs? I heard the faint sound of a siren in the distance, a blunt reminder of the dead body’s proximity. I would have to leave my concrete slab for good before detectives came calling; before drug lords reclaimed their foundation; before Trini, now that she’d bedded Ingrid, would move on to whatever was next for her. I knelt in the dirt-sand and dug with my fingers, making a hole the size of a bucket. I rolled up Dad’s belt and placed it in the hole, put Paola’s Polaroid on top of it and dropped in the sky-blue button. It only took a few waves of my hands, a few kicks of the sand and dirt to cover the hole and smooth it out. I saw no way to mark the spot. What else could I do but shrug and stand and breathe and wonder where I was?
For the first time in my life, I tried to pray. I didn’t know how to start, and I can’t remember what words I uttered, only the feeling of closing my eyes and wishing there was someone who could listen to me.
Was it that weekend that Tommy would’ve been at the funeral for Papi León? In Lafayette, Louisiana? It was then—wasn’t it, Tommy?—that Dad finally revealed to you, in his guilt, that I existed. If you’d been me that night—if I’d been at Papi León’s funeral that day and you’d been on that beach instead—I think you would’ve done what I did next. Is it something genetic inside us? Did we get it from Dad? Those years he spent in the sixties painting and writing pamphlets in Roma as part of the resistance to the PRI, his collaborations with Jodorowsky and Cuevas and all those other counter-revolutionary, surrealist, weirdo art people?
Anyway, I knew then that I would not return home. Would not go back to Carlos & Charlie’s, or to Paola. Or to my mother. I walked to the nearest road and put out my thumb. It took hours, but by dawn, three drivers stopped and asked me where I was going, a host of creeps and do-gooders who were not the wild I sought; I turned them all down. Not until a gentle-faced teen in a yellow Beetle slowed beside me and allowed that she was headed not to D.F. like the others, but toward the Lacandón jungle in Chiapas, did I hop in without reservation.
“Why Chiapas?” I asked.
She shrugged. She’d heard it was cool. Her ignorance didn’t matter, though, for I knew why I was going: the jungle; the rebellion from which Ingrid had emerged. I’m on my way, I thought. I’m finally on my way.