The second and third weeks were different.
She would not describe those weeks in detail to anyone for a long time, not because the words were unavailable but because there was a specific shame attached to that kind of cold, that kind of hunger, that kind of management of a child’s fear, that she was not yet ready to hand to another person. What she would say, eventually, was that you learn things about a city when you have no fixed address in it. You learn which train stations have bathrooms that stay unlocked and which ones lock at midnight. You learn that bus depot waiting areas will tolerate you until a certain hour and not one minute past. You learn the particular performance required to remain in a fast food restaurant long enough to use the outlet to charge your phone without being asked to leave. You learn how much energy it takes to appear, at all times, as though you are passing through rather than living in, because the moment you stop performing passage and begin performing residence, you are moved along.
On the morning she walked into the bank, Mateo had been coughing since before dawn.
It was not the small ordinary cough of a child with a cold. It was a cough that shook his whole body, that bent him forward in her arms and left him momentarily breathless, his small face reddening with the effort of it. She had been walking a half-mile circuit in the predawn dark, Mateo against her chest and Sofia beside her, keeping moving because movement generates heat, and with each cycle of that walk she had been saying to herself the same thing she had been saying for three weeks: tomorrow will be better, something will change, this cannot continue much longer.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth circuit, with the sky just beginning to lighten over the rooftops and Mateo’s cough rattling through her like something she had personally caused, she finally said out loud what she had been refusing to say. She said it quietly, to no one in particular, just into the dark air in front of her face. She said: I have run out of options.
The release of those words was not relief exactly. It was more like the moment when you have been holding yourself very rigid against something and you finally let your muscles go, not because the thing has gone away, but because the holding has cost more than you have left to spend. She stopped walking. She stood on the sidewalk with Mateo coughing against her shoulder and Sofia’s hand in hers and she thought about the card.
