out in the Zócalo in Mexico City to protest election fraud, her marches down the Paseo de la Reforma to protest police brutality. All part of the woman he fell in love with.
“You’re completely opposed to virtually everything DEA does,” he says.
“But you could change policies.”
“I don’t know,” Keller says.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play it the other way. Why wouldn’t you?”
Keller lays out the reasons for her. One, he’s done with the war on drugs.
“But maybe it’s not done with you,” she says.
Forty years is more than enough, he tells her. He’s not a bureaucrat, not a political animal. He’s not sure he can even live in the US anymore.
She knows that Keller’s mother was Mexican, his father an Anglo who brought them to San Diego and then abandoned them. But he grew up as an American—UCLA, the US Marines—then the DEA took him back to Mexico and he’s spent more of his adult life there than in the States. Marisol knows that he’s always been torn between the two cultures—Arturo has a love/hate relationship with both countries.
And Marisol knows that he moved to Juárez almost out of guilt—that he thought he owed something to this city that had suffered so much from the US war on drugs, that he had a moral obligation to help its recovery—even if it was as small a contribution as paying taxes, buying groceries, keeping a house open.
And then taking care of Chuy, his personal cross to bear.
But Chuy is gone.
Now she asks him, “Why do you want to live in Juárez? And tell the truth.”
“It’s real.”
“It is that,” she says. “And you can’t walk a block without being reminded of the war.”
“Meaning what?”
“There’s nothing for you here now but bad memories and—”
She stops.
“What?” Keller asks.
“All right—me,” she says. “Proximity to me. I know you still love me, Arturo.”
“I can’t help what I feel.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Marisol says. “But if you’re turning this down to be near me, don’t.”
They finish dinner and then go for a walk, something they couldn’t have done a couple of years ago.
“What do you hear?” Marisol asks.
“Nothing.”
“Exactly,” Marisol says. “No police sirens, ambulances screaming. No gunshots.”
“The Pax Sinaloa.”
“Can it last?” she asks.
No, Keller thinks.
This isn’t peace, it’s a lull.
“I’ll drive you home,” Keller says.
“It’s a long drive,” Marisol says. “Why don’t I just stay at your place?”
“Chuy’s room is free,” Keller says.
“What if I don’t want to stay in Chuy’s room?” Marisol asks.
He wakes up very early, before dawn, with a cold Juárez wind whipping the walls and rattling the windows.
It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.
Maybe it was the sign that decided it.
ADÁN VIVE.
Because it was true, Keller thinks that morning. The king might be gone, but the kingdom he created remains. Spreading suffering and death as surely as if Barrera were still on the throne.
Keller has to admit another truth. If anyone in the world could destroy the kingdom, he tells himself—by dint of history, experience, motivation, knowledge and skills—it’s you.
Marisol knows it, too. That morning he comes back to bed and she wakes up and asks, “What?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“A nightmare?”
“Maybe.” And he laughs.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’m ready to be a ghost yet,” Keller says. “Or live with ghosts. And you were right—my war isn’t over.”
“You want to take that job.”
“Yes,” Keller says. He puts his hand to the back of her head and pulls her closer. “But only if you’ll come with me.”
“Arturo …”
“We wear our sorrow like it’s some sort of medal,” Keller says. “Drag it around like a chain, and it’s heavy, Mari. I don’t want to let it beat us, make us less than we are. We’ve lost so much, let’s not lose each other, too. That’s too big a loss.”
“The clinic—”
“I’ll take care of it. I promise.”
They get married in New Mexico, at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, have a brief honeymoon in Taos, then drive to Washington, where O’Brien’s Realtor has lined up houses for them to look at.
They love a house on Hillyer Place, put in an offer and buy it.
Keller’s at work the next morning.
Because he knows that the ghost has come back.
And with it, the monster.
Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
—Shakespeare
Richard II, Part One
