JONAH SAT THERE IN A STUPOR WATCHING HER EXIT THE CHURCH before he got up to follow.
She was outside, hunched with her hands on her knees. The way he’d seen her at the end of a race. Worn down, nothing left. He approached timidly, and hated his fear.
Slowly she straightened. She drew a deep breath and exhaled as she collapsed to sit on the church steps. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Was it something in that reading?” Jonah sat next to her. “I couldn’t understand the Spanish . . .”
Luz shook her head, and Jonah waited for more but the wordless space between them hardened. He still needed to talk to her about his intentions to make a life together in New Orleans, but he’d never felt so nervous around her. A cab smoked in the street. Sun-blasted faces passed, eyes focused only on the bricks ahead of their feet. Jonah didn’t know what to do with his hands and he crossed his arms and then uncrossed them and gripped the hard edge of the stone step beneath him.
“I’m just,” Luz began, and relief leaped inside Jonah. He found himself leaning toward her, grateful for whatever she was going to say. “I’m just—” She paused again and shivered. She seemed like she was fighting something.
“It’s okay,” Jonah tried. “It’s okay, Luz.”
“Something bad happened to me,” she said.
The words were sudden. She glanced at Jonah and her eyes were red and ringed with water, and she looked quickly away.
“When I was on my way back. That’s why it took me so long to get here.”
“What happened?” His windpipe constricted with the dread that sails ahead of tragic news. “What do you mean?”
She crossed her arms on her knees and pressed her forehead against them. “I’m all right now.” She lifted her face. “Please, Jonah. You need to know that. I’m all right.”
“Yeah, but—”
She shook her head and reached, taking his hands. And he looked down at them and saw again her healing fingertips and the yellow-purple bruising around her wrists and then he met her eyes, trying desperately not to cry himself, though he had nothing to contend with yet but his own imagination and the suggestion that the woman he loved had been wounded.
“My cab from the airport,” Luz said, “got caught in a shoot-out.”
“Jesus, Luz,” Jonah whispered. “Like a drug war thing?”
Luz nodded. “The car wrecked. Really bad.”
“The miscarriage, is that when . . . ?”
“Later. But maybe. I don’t know.”
Jonah waited.
“I saw—” she said, closing her eyes as if she was still seeing whatever it was.
She was holding her breath, it seemed. She exhaled slowly. And again. She didn’t finish describing what she had seen. She gripped Jonah’s hands and he felt her rough fingers sliding over his palms. She opened her eyes.
“Some men, they took me. They tied me up.”
All the world drained away from them, all sound and sensation, where they sat on the steps.
“I’m okay,” Luz said. “All right?”
“Okay,” Jonah heard himself.
“They didn’t do anything to me. Not that, you know? They wanted to sell me to somebody, I think. They locked me in a shed.”
“Christ.”
“I got away,” she told him. “I ran.” A long, granite silence ensued. There was more there, Jonah could tell, much more there, but finally she said, “The military found me.”
Luz let go of his hands and rubbed her palms on her thighs and sighed. She looked off up the hill, away from Jonah. He thought she started to say something more, but her voice clotted. She wasn’t looking at him.
“Luz?”
“I don’t know how to explain the rest,” she said, turning toward him.
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head, lowered her eyes.
“It’s fine,” Jonah said, scooting nearer and putting his arm around her. He thought she meant that she didn’t know how to tell him what it all felt like, how it had changed her. He wanted her to know that he was with her, that he could help her bear her pain, somehow. “I understand,” he said. He knew it must be hard for her to talk about because it was hard to listen to, as well. “I do.”
Luz leaned into him.
“I’m so sorry, Luz.”
She sniffed. He felt her ribs rise and fall. They sat for a long time.
When the church doors opened behind them, Luz stood as though she’d been startled. Parishioners began to exit, and Jonah got up and followed Luz down the steps. He wanted to pursue the conversation, but what to say?
Luz halted and Jonah stopped alongside her.
“Can I show you something special?”
“Okay,” Jonah said. “I’d like that.”
They passed her grandmother’s building and climbed the street. Jonah glanced over his shoulder, where the steep grade sank away, offering the illusion that the city existed on the summit of some collisional world. Luz led them into a park, a shaded trail switchbacking through the trees. All quiet. Not even the thrum of insects.
“I thought I’d forgotten the way,” Luz said.
Jonah noted that her tone had changed. There was something breathless in it, something excited. It was a comfort, a sense of healing.
“Remember when we went out to the levee the first time?” Luz asked him.
“Yes.”
“You said your family used to go out there, that your mother took you.”
“Yeah.”
“This place where we’re going. It’s like that. Mamá took me here, when I was little.”
The path climbed a hill and the trees fell away and the trail narrowed to a scratch through the dry grass. This, Jonah realized, is it. This was the truth he’d sought in the dark of his bedroom with Luz, and this was what he’d searched for in San Antonio. He had come to Mexico to find this. This was what they needed between them. This would carry them together into the future.