Everybody backs off, relieved. I head to the door as Carlos Chiquito tries to get things under control.
“Calm the fuck down, dipshits!” he says.
Pedro spots me and shouts, “Let him go! Let him through!”
“Who?” Carlos Chiquito asks, perplexed.
I squeeze between the bodyguards and ask Pedro, “What’s going on? What’s all the fuss?”
“Are you O.K.?” Pedro asks.
“What did they do to you, Larry?” La Murciélaga asks.
Standing next to them is Julieth and some other people I hadn’t seen earlier. Nelson pokes his head out the door.
“What’s going on, kid?”
“Nothing, Nelson, just my friends looking for me.”
Carlos Chiquito orders his men to shut the door. I want to say goodbye to Nelson, but two bodyguards have formed an impenetrable wall. Pedro hugs me. “We assumed the worst, man,” he tells me. Who are those guys?, Julieth asks. Pedro got us all freaked out, says La Murciélaga, and with this business about your father showing up, we thought . . . Swear to God, Pedro breaks in, I thought you’d been kidnapped. How did you know I was there?, I ask. I saw you, says Julieth, and I told these guys I’d seen you go in with a couple of dodgy-looking dudes. They turned out to be friends of my dad’s, I explain. We should go somewhere else, La Murciélaga suggests. Yeah, Pedro says, let’s get the check and go. I feel like everybody’s looking at me, like they’re thinking, great, this bullshit again. Libardo’s son getting into trouble again.
In the car, I gradually piece back together all the muscles and bones that came loose from my skeleton in the chaos. Exhausted, I try asking again: “I want to go home, Pedro. I want to say hello to my mom.”
“It’s no big deal, man,” he says. “It was just a misunderstanding.”
“No, it’s not that,” I tell him.
I’m too tired to repeat what I’ve already told him so many times. It’s not that, it’s everything.
“You sure you’re O.K.?” asks Julieth, who’s sitting next to me with her hand on my thigh.
I’m not O.K., but I’m not about to tell her that. Maybe later I’ll tell Fernanda and confess how sad it’s made me to discover that Libardo opened up to these guys more than he did with us, that they know more about my dad than she, Julio, and I do.
2
Libardo steeled himself to keep from falling apart when he saw Escobar’s body lying on the roof of the run-of-the-mill house where the world’s most wanted man had been hiding out. The rumor reached him before he saw the announcement on TV; like everybody else, he thought it was another made-up death, just like the numerous other times Escobar had died over the course of his life. But within half an hour they’d started reporting developments on the radio. On a hunch, he’d called Fernanda to go pick us up from school.
Though I’m younger than Julio, the two of us were in the same grade—eleventh—but we’d been put in different classes. My brother had failed ninth grade, but I was a good student. Our driver usually came to get us, so that afternoon we were surprised to see two SUVs drive up; Fernanda was in one, and the boys were in the other. She was distracted, smoking a cigarette and drumming her fingers on the steering wheel as if she were playing along to a song. Confused, Julio and I walked over. Fernanda wasn’t very clear; she said she’d come to get us because there were going to be demonstrations later that afternoon. Julio asked her who was going to be protesting, and she said the students. The students again, she said indifferently. But I already knew. The school secretary had interrupted biology class and whispered something to the teacher. After she left, he told us what was being reported on the news. It felt like everybody in the class was turning to stare at me.
“Pablo’s dead,” I said to Fernanda once we were in the car.
She looked at me in the rearview mirror, and Julio, who was riding up front with her, said in surprise, “What?”
“That’s just a rumor,” said Fernanda.
“That’s why you came to get us,” I said.
“Is it true, Ma?” Julio asked.
“It’s hearsay—nothing’s been confirmed yet,” she insisted.
Julio turned on the radio, Fernanda switched it off, Julio turned it on again, and she told him, turn that off, I’ve got a headache. She doesn’t want us to find out, I piped up from the back. Julio rotated the dial, searching for a news station. Fernanda looked at me again in the rearview mirror and said, “I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
She pressed the cigarette lighter on the dashboard and pulled a pack out of her purse, but she couldn’t shake a cigarette out. Julio stopped the dial on one of the many stations discussing the news. The announcer, very worked up, said that the area had been cordoned off, taken over by the military; the corpse of the individual presumed to be Escobar was still lying on the rooftop, and some soldiers were raising their arms with their fingers held in a V for victory. Fernanda smacked the cigarette pack harder against her leg and cursed. The lighter popped out, and she told Julio, turn that off and get me a cigarette out. Julio said, this is going to blow up, referring to the news.
Fernanda didn’t speak again, and Julio kept switching from station to station. All of them were full of excitement and speculation; every report was heralded as breaking news. Fernanda was on the verge of crashing the car. I was looking out the window, which was shut despite the stifling afternoon, and I seemed to detect in people, in everything I saw, the upheaval described on the radio. If what was already being reported as fact was true, that Thursday in December was going to split our recent history in two. All of us felt it: Fernanda as she stomped on the brake and jerked the steering wheel, urgently smoking a cigarette, and Julio, his eyes glued to the radio, as if it were transmitting the images being described. And me, still staring out the window and sensing reproach on every face, as if everything that was being set in motion were my fault.
Fernanda entered the house through the kitchen door, went upstairs, and shut herself in her room. From outside we could hear the TV in the living room. We found Libardo intent on the news, muttering and as pale as a sheet. As soon as he saw us, he scrambled for the remote and shut the TV off. He smiled as if we’d caught him up to something.
“We were listening to the news in the car,” Julio said.
“Everything’s going to be O.K., boys,” Libardo said, but his voice sounded nervous.
“It’s going to be a shitshow, Pa,” Julio said.
“It’s been a shitshow for a while,” Libardo pointed out, and then asked, “Where’s your mom?”