Lydia, Do You Get It?
Lydia might be a sympathetic character—possibly, to some at least—but one is clear for sure. She is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. After all, does one really have to use such metaphorical imagery to describe a guy who rises to the head of a Mexican drug cartel to someone who hasn’t been maybe possibly flirting with men her husband is writing about:
“But he’s a murderer, Lydia. Many times over. This guy is made of blood.”
Lydia Catches On
Taking longer than it should, though perhaps not as long as one might expect, Lydia finally does catch on to the fact that the exceedingly unlikely friendship that has just developed out of mid-air with a new customer to her bookstore is not all it might have seemed to be. Better late than never, perhaps:
“Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.”
Jump
The unwisely intimate friendship with a stranger may not necessarily have been stimulus that brought her to the moment when she is willing to urge her young son to jump onto a moving train. But certainly it didn’t help things. Well, things happen, after all and when you are in a position where pushing your eight-year-old to leap onto a moving train is not even a desperate act any more, but merely the pathway to survival, who has time to regret stupid flirtations?
“She feels as though she’s watching herself in a nightmare doing a monstrous thing that makes her panic.”
Over, Not so Easy
Part of the escape from the cartel across the border into America involves a short stay with old friends of her husband. They cannot act any differently, cannot break from the routine as that would arouse suspicion, which leaves Lydia and Luca alone in their home with too much time to consider the past and the consequences:
“Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.”
The Coyote
The man hired as the coyote to help Lydia and Luca and the beautiful teenage girls they add along the way is known only as El Chacal: the jackal. But it is a misleading name as is, for that matter, his work. It is no longer a passion, but merely a job; a means to an end with eternally diminishing returns:
“He used to feel like a minor hero, a guide with the power to lead people to the promised land. Now he pays la migra and the cartels both for the privilege of crossing this binational scrap of dirt. They eat his profits and his freedom.”
