He was patient. Rodrigo returned to his mother’s house that same morning, but this time he didn’t go to cry; he went to look for evidence. He entered cautiously. Sunlight streamed through the open door, illuminating for the first time what eight months of darkness had concealed. The room looked worse in the light than in the dark. There were more marks on the wall than he had counted. Some were made with a small stone, others with a fingernail.
Rodrigo ran his fingers over the lines and felt the depth of each one. His mother had counted each day of his confinement with her hands. Under the mattress, he found what Lupita had told him about. The drawings, carefully folded and stacked like love letters, were flowers, butterflies, a sun, a house with an open door, and on one of them, Carmen’s trembling handwriting. A phrase written with something that looked like charcoal. My God, let my son come back.
Rodrigo put the drawings in his shirt pocket, pressed against his chest. Then he looked for his mother’s cell phone. She wasn’t home. That confirmed his suspicions. He went straight to Graciela’s house. She wasn’t there. Neither was Tomás. But the bedroom door was open, and on the nightstand, under a magazine, was Carmen’s cell phone. An old push-button phone with a scratched screen. Rodrigo turned it on. The battery was half dead.
It was a sign that someone was keeping it charged, someone was using it. He opened the messages and there it all was. Eight months of conversations between him and his mother, only his mother had never written a single one of those replies. “I’m fine, son, don’t worry. I’m busy with some things, I’ll call you later.” “Don’t send me so much, a little is enough.” “It’s better not to video call, my phone freezes a lot.” All written by Graciela. Rodrigo knew it now because he saw the differences he had previously ignored.
His mother never used punctuation, never wrote “haha,” never sent emojis, never used the full word “precurios.” She always wrote “preocups” because it was difficult for her with her thick fingers. Graciela didn’t even bother to imitate her properly, and he didn’t notice. Rodrigo read each message one by one, like someone deliberately stabbing themselves with thorns. Every “I’m fine, my son” that he had once read with relief now burned him. While he read those messages in his workshop on the other side of the border, his mother was in the dark counting lines on the wall, waiting for someone to open the door.
But there was something else. He checked the bank account. Every month without fail, Rodrigo made a deposit. The money went into the account Graciela had given him years ago. “For your mother,” she had told him. Rodrigo never asked for receipts, never inquired about how the money was spent. He trusted her. Eight months of deposits, more than 60,000 pesos in total. He left the house and walked around the property. He saw Graciela’s house with different eyes. New furniture visible through the window, a large television in the living room, tile flooring where there had once been dirt, an internet antenna on the roof, the patio
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