Bronx Noir

was going to touch off the trap. Wondering—much worse—if she could have just moved. Then he turned into the kitchen, where the smell of corruption was worst, and there she was.

“Luis. You’re back.”

“Mercedes.”

She was sitting at the table where he and Mama used to eat their meals, a shriveled, white-haired woman behind a sea of pill bottles. Wrapped up tightly in an ugly pink robe that was much too large for her. Propping herself up at the table by her elbows, her head balanced on both hands.

“Mercedes.”

He said her name again, more as a question than anything else. At first he could not believe it was her, this husk of a woman. Her cheeks sallow and caved in on themselves, the rest of her a pile of bones and papery flesh. But her eyes, her eyes were just the same as ever, large and dark and fierce.

“Yes, Luis, it’s me,” she said calmly, her voice hoarse but threaded with sarcasm. “How ever did you find me?”

He brought up the gun in his hand and moved across the kitchen toward her, shouting, “Never you mind!”

She had left the neighborhood right after the trial. Nobody from the building, nobody at all knew where she had gone, or what had happened to her. Prison had been just as bad as he thought it would be. Years had gone by in a fog, while he just tried to survive.

Then the computers had come in. He had signed up to learn them, volunteered for a job in online marketing. He had used his access to search for her everywhere, even in Mexico, but there was still nothing— less than nothing—as if she had never existed in the first place.

It was only a couple years before, long after he knew he should have stopped looking, that he had come up with his first trace of her. A credit card number in her real name. He could scarcely believe that it had been there all along and he had missed it. Soon after that, her whole history had opened up to him—everywhere she had been, the different names she had used; all the jobs she’d had over the past thirty years. He had read it like a paperback novel from the prison library. Following the jobs she had taken—waitressing, running a cash register, answering phones—but never once anything that he could find that included acting. Tracing the places she had lived, weaving across the country to Los Angeles, then down to Mexico City, Miami, the Island—then back home. To the very same address, the very same building where they had lived. Beyond that, even. To his own apartment.

He had thought that over for days, after he discovered it. Lying in his cell at night, thinking about her living there, wondering what it meant. He sat up and stared at the picture of her from her driver’s license, the one he had printed out surreptitiously when the supervisor had gone to take a leak. The color was blurry, but from what he could see she looked remarkably similar, as if she had barely aged at all. Her hair the same pitch-black color, her face grave and beautiful and nearly unlined, staring back out at the camera. So much as it was—

Yet when he got to look at the mirror in the Port Authority bathroom, he saw an old man before him. His hair not even gray but white, an old man’s mustache doing nothing to rejuvenate his face, his slouching jowls, and his unmistakable prison pallor. He had seen it on old men before, back in the neighborhood, wondering how long they had been away. Now he was one of them, his life gone. But he could at least do this.

He had picked up the .38 in the back of the bodega his cellmate had told him about. Strangely pleased when the man handed it to him wrapped in a paper bag, just as she had given him Roberto’s gun thirty years ago. He had rolled out the bullets, checked the firing mechanism in the back lot behind the store, then, satisfied, had paid the man and taken the 4 train on up to 161st Street. Where he had stood again on the platform, listening to the crowd in the stadium.

“Don’ be angry,” she said, unfazed by his charge across the room. Her voice a long wheeze that broke down into a cough.

“You’re sick,” he said, lowering the gun again and staring at the array of pills.

“Ah, amado, you always were obvious,” she sighed, and he straightened.

“You know what I came back for,” he said coldly, though even now he had to fight back the urge to help her somehow.

“I imagined you would,” she said, and he thought he heard a hint of triumph within that dim voice, something that infuriated him all over again.

“So that’s why you moved in here. Hoping to surprise me.”

She said nothing, but made a small, neutral gesture with one hand.

“Why did you do it?” he asked despite himself, hating the pleading sound in his voice. “Why did you do it? I thought you loved me.”

“I needed the money,” she wheezed. “And I didn’t need you.”

“What about all your big plans?” The anger growing in him again, baffled and enraged that she had so little to say for herself. When he had first glimpsed her, in her decrepit state, he had expected her to do the pleading. Now he was conscious that he could hear the sound of the ballgame through the windows, much louder than he remembered it—the rising beat of the organ, the noise of the crowd building in that steady, dangerous way.

“What about being an actress?” he tried to taunt her.

“Mierda. Well, I wasn’t an actress after all,” she told him, and gave a little cackle that trailed off into a cough. “I couldn’t do anything. But I tried. I left this place.”

“So—maybe you needed me after all,” he said, lowering the gun and trying to smirk at her. Desperately wanting to hear her say it, to hear her admit it, even this sick, dying remnant of the woman he had loved. “Maybe you wish you had stayed with me now.”

She fixed him with another look, a glint in her eye.

“Why would I ever need you? A man who is too afraid to take what he wants? A man who lets a woman plan for him—who is too afraid to stand up to another man on his own?” She gave a short, scornful laugh, and drew