If I had a peso for every time I hear Nick’s grimly cheerful motto — “Only in Mexico, man!” — my empty purse wouldn’t be so empty. It’s a constant refrain as the insanities pile up across the Mexican borderland. The discovery of a drug-flinging cross-border catapult in Mexicali. The rash of high-profile kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez, including the abduction of an entire troupe of jugglers from Michoacan. The revelation that the imprisoned head of the Tijuana drug cartel, Benjamin Arellano, was living like a king in the most-maximum security prison in Mexico, enjoying a steady stream of prostitutes and tequila and caviar. Last week jailed narcotraficantes in the Matamoros prison expressed their displeasure with the government by killing six guards and dumping their bodies outside the front gate, only to be attacked by the Mexican Navy 1,000 miles from any ocean because the cartels forgot to bribe them. A few days ago the Mexican Army declared martial law in Nuevo Laredo because the local police had simply disappeared, melting away like spilled ice on the kitchen floor.

But even Nick admits it’s getting bad when the US State Department warns American citizens to beware of northern Mexico. Suddenly the American ambassador is all over the local airwaves, solemnly blathering on the Tijuana stations in Spanish I can almost but not quite follow. When I flip to the San Diego stations he’s curdling blood with soundbites like “escalating violence” and “increasing numbers of murdered and kidnapped Americans in recent months.”

Nasrin intensely hates my Tijuana life, mostly because it means I’m with Nick instead of my husband. My safety is last on her list of worries, after our family’s honor and all the shame I’m causing them and whether they can repay my mahr to Saman’s family. If I died all my family’s problems would be solved. No wonder Nasrin argues with me in a triumphant tone of voice, convinced I’m living in a lawless drug-fueled war zone and putting myself in horrible danger.

And maybe I am. I can never figure out where the hype ends and the reality begins, you know? La Frontera doesn’t have enough pages to cover all the killings here, bodies that turn up in the desert dawn and sticking out of maquiladora machinery and stuffed into alley dumpsters on Avenida Revolucion and floating face-down in the beach surf. Talking heads on TV Azteca and Canal Once do voiceovers to footage of mercenary shootouts between the Tijuana city cops and Baja California Norte state police and the federales. Their San Diego counterparts report a “crime wave” against American tourists who cross the border to visit warm welcoming Tijuana and wind up getting robbed or raped or kidnapped instead.

But I haven’t experienced anything like that here. These dusty crumbling blocks are full of families doing what families everywhere do — disappearing to jobs and schools and reappearing again, drinking beer on the porch and fixing vehicles in the driveway and playing in the street, sometimes arguing loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. I’ve never felt anything but safe amidst the tourist eye-candy of Avenida Revolucion, or strolling through the glassy skyscrapers and shopping arcades of Zona Rio downtown, or even touring the grim half-dead slums that surround the maquiladora zones. The cops we’ve encountered don’t seem like bloodthirsty killers for hire, just ill-fitting uniforms filled with mexicanos who are always too fat or too thin. They almost seem embarrassed by their own fabricated bluster about this law we broke or that law we broke, and half the time Nick talks our way out of trouble without ever reaching for his wallet.

Okay, I admit it — I got a little scared when those local gang-bangers checked out the two mysterious Americans who’d moved into the neighborhood. Maybe that visit could’ve ended in a hail of gunfire and I would’ve died without ever becoming more than Nick’s buddy. But he made smalltalk about his doctoral research and gave them beers and we haven’t seen them since.

Nasrin fills my ears with words like “stupid” and “foolish” and worse, and maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m all of those things and I’m going to wind up in a ditch and how I got there will make people shake their heads. But if that happens, at least I finally lived — finally actually lived! — before I died, and maybe even loved and was loved in return.