ALL THAT'S LEFT

CHAPTER TWO: UNCLE LUIS

My uncle's house was six blocks from the offices of Auto Electrica Border Logistics, and when I was a child this proximity was simply geography.

I did not connect the place where Uncle Luis worked with the person who had killed my parents; the name El Patrón was a ghost I carried privately, not something I associated with the ordinary world of offices and parking lots and men in collared shirts.

There was a boy I used to see when I visited my uncle at work. This was before Seth's illness made things complicated, before Uncle Luis made it clear that his workplace was not somewhere children should linger.

I was perhaps six, seven, eight years old, the years when everything is curiosity and nothing is fear and I would sometimes come to deliver his lunch when he forgot it, a task I had appointed myself with great seriousness, as though the feeding of adults was an important civic duty.

The boy was a little older than me. He had his father's angular jaw and his mother's soft eyes, which I would only understand in retrospect, knowing now whose son he was. Then, he was simply Diego: a boy who sat on the steps outside the building and read books thicker than my head, who looked up when I came and offered me a corner of whatever he was eating, who spoke to me as though what I said was worth hearing, which was not how most older children treated me.

"What's that book?" I asked him once.

"Stories about the sea," he said. "Have you ever seen the sea?"

"No."

"Neither have I." He looked down at the pages. "But I think it must be like this city. Enormous and loud and full of things that will eat you if you're not careful."

I laughed. He looked surprised that I laughed, then pleased. We were friends, in the uncomplicated way of children who share a few hours of the same space. I never knew his last name.

I never knew whose son he was. He was simply Diego, the boy on the steps, the boy who talked about the sea.

By the time I was ten, those visits had stopped. Uncle Luis had become more guarded, more careful about the distance between his work life and his home life, and I had grown old enough to walk Seth to his appointments alone, which consumed the free hours I had once used for wandering. Diego became a memory folded into childhood, smooth and imprecise.

I carried both things; the tattoo and the boy on the steps, in separate chambers of myself, and they never once touched.

* * *

Uncle Luis was injured on a Tuesday in March, the year I turned nineteen.

A hydraulic press malfunction, they called it. The kind of accident that happens when machines are not maintained, when corners are cut in ways that only become visible through someone's body.

He lost partial use of his right hand and fractured three ribs, and he lay in the hospital for two weeks before they let him come home, and then he lay on his pull-out sofa for weeks more, a large man made small by pain and stillness.

The money question appeared before the hospital question had finished resolving itself. That was the particular cruelty of poverty: it did not wait for you to catch your breath.

The organization provided worker's compensation, but it was not enough; there were Seth's medications, and the apartment's rent, and groceries, and the slow accumulation of small costs that poverty collects like a tax on your existence.

"I'll go to them," Uncle Luis said, when I raised the subject one evening. "I'll ask them to let me keep drawing pay until I can come back."

"And if they say no?"

He did not answer that.

"Seth can't take the job," I said. We both knew this. Seth was having a bad season, his crises coming more frequently, his good days fewer. He was brave about it, joked about it constantly, but his body was telling a different story than his mouth was. "It has to be me."

"Beth." Uncle Luis said my name the way he sometimes said it; heavily, as though it were a full sentence.

"I'm nineteen. I can do administrative work. I've been doing the accounting for the Vargas shop since I was sixteen."

This was true; I had a head for numbers, had always organized the household's finances with a precision that amused Seth and awed Uncle Luis.

"Let me go in your place. Just until you're well enough to return."

He looked at me for a long time. There was something in his face I did not know how to read, not reluctance exactly, but something more layered, something freighted with knowledge I did not possess.

"It's not a good place for you," he said finally.

"Is it a good place for anyone?"

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the resistance had gone out of his expression, replaced by something sadder, more resigned. "I'll make the call," he said. "But Beth. Whatever you see there. Whatever you hear. Keep your head down and come home."

I promised him I would.

The promises we make before we know what we are promising.

* * *

Auto Electrica Border Logistics occupied a compound on the southern edge of Matamoros that was larger than it needed to be for what it claimed to do. I understood this only vaguely at first, the way you understand that a house is too large for its stated family without being able to articulate exactly what the extra rooms might be for.

The main building was a four-story concrete structure of relentless functionality: no ornamentation, no flourish, just walls and windows and the perpetual low hum of machinery from somewhere below.

My role was administrative support in the logistics department, which meant I processed paperwork, shipping manifests, customs documents, inventory records.

It was not complicated work. What made it strange was the texture of incompletion that ran through everything: forms with columns left blank, shipments whose contents were described in terms too vague to be useful, numbers that did not add up in ways that resolved if you stopped looking for them to resolve.

I was not yet asking questions. I was keeping my head down, as promised, and coming home.

I was watching Seth get thinner and watching Uncle Luis get better with a slowness that frightened me and counting the days until I could return the chair I now occupied to its rightful occupant.

I was doing exactly as I had been told, which meant I was completely unprepared for the day everything changed.