3. Wilderness
It wasn't even the evening yet when Fernando walked towards his motorbike with a box I figured he was going to attach to it. I had to stop him before it started.
"Wait, you're not planning to drive on that all the way to San Diego, are you?" I asked. Obviously a rhetorical question, why else would he be doing what he was doing?
"Why not?"
"I wouldn't be able to keep up with you in that car."
"I wasn't thinking we'd be going separately."
I had simply not wanted to assume that we'd go together. Not in front of him. Aside from the fact I'd gotten used to having space to myself, that was a long time that he could use to dig into all the problems with me.
"That's... It would be like an hour in that thing." I said "I'd get dizzy pretty soon."
"You shouldn't be driving that car either."
He wasn't wrong.
"You can drive it, then." I said.
He squinted at the horizon as if I hadn't just spoken to him.
"Besides, when it comes to crossing we're not gonna get there any faster with a motorbike" I said "And they'll probably think you look suspicious driving one."
"Come on, Lena. You know those people don't want me in that country regardless."
I had to sigh.
"Alright." I said "But I still can't take a long drive on a motorbike."
I ended up leaving most of my stuff in what had been my parents' home. It didn't take long for Fernando to just ask what he really wanted to know, only a few minutes after he started driving my car.
"I want to know if you're staying," he said "at the Zorra."
"Maybe for a few more days."
"That means you're not staying."
"I'll have to think about it." I said
I could mentally hear him say 'what is there to think about?', but I imagined he decided to end it there.
The drive to the city was almost the same image that was saved in my memory from when I walked through a big part of it. He could probably tell I was thinking of that because of the way I stared through the windows instead of saying anything.
"You were lucky you even survived the journey to Tijuana."
"Well, yes, I know that now."
"Do you?" he said, with a "You could have been found by some gang and gotten cut into pieces, or sold as a sex slave."
"But it didn't happen, so what's your point?"
He said nothing but just looked at the beige nothingness he was driving through. I understood he'd been worried about me, but I was also bothered that he couldn't word it that way. Still, I kept looking at him after that because he had a very nice side profile. Just staring made me want to kiss his nose and lips.
...
It took an hour but we got to the Southern edge of Tijuana and found someplace to eat. I hadn't had time to start missing the city, but he looked all around the place for the first minutes after sitting down, then it seemed he was overwhelmed by the incoherent mixture of objects in the space of the city. As I had been before.
At some point I mentioned Elena, something about how it seemed that she'd grown so fast. Really, the transition from childhood to adolescence is very fast, so it would have seemed that way even to those who'd been living with her.
"Marina wouldn't have wanted to tell you," he said "but she did have a little brother."
"Elena?" I said "what do you mean?"
"Did she have a miscarriage?" I said after a silence that probably meant he didn't want to say it himself.
"No, she did give birth." he said "but he died on the second day."