He never said a word.

I keep replaying the scene in my mind, again and again and again, hoping against hope that I’m just remembering it wrong, that I’ll blink away my tears and we’ll be standing in the plaza of the Museo de las Momias again, except this time he opens his mouth and says…

But he didn’t. He just stood there, posed in mute disdain, his face smooth and tanned and invulnerable. The shock hasn’t worn off yet. I’m carrying his child, panicked with anxiety about our future, and he looked right at me. Right through me.

Remorse dilates my heart. I should’ve turned with an impulse to explain myself, from the beginning all the way to the end, because then he’d want to explain himself too. I should’ve gone back to him.

But when I paused to look over my shoulder Nick was still standing there, watching me recede. He hadn’t advanced a step in pursuit. He wasn’t raising an arm to stop me. He didn’t utter my name.

Afterward my flight took on the flat urgency of a trance. I ran and cried and ran some more on a treadmill of cobblestones. The overcast tableau of Guanajuato became a gray backdrop for the disembodied heads of Mexicans, turning to stare at the tearful fleeing gringa and her evil eye. For no reason I paused to toss money from my purse, a shower of green dollars and rainbow-colored pesos that delighted every brown face. Then my hand closed around the cool metallic shape of my cellphone, the twin of Nick’s. I tossed it away too.

That hour and all the rest were torrents of sadness. I pictured my cellphone ringing, a street urchin listening to a repentant Nick, all his words of apology and tenderness filling the wrong ear. Maybe, just maybe…

But I’m already sick of maybes. I can’t live on maybes, and neither can my baby.

Later I glimpsed a phone kiosk inside an open storefront. Smothering my sobs with a tiny impotent fist, I locked myself in the glassy enclosure. In its confines I felt my hope intensely, a guilty furtive thing. But after feeding a pound of coins into the slot I still couldn’t make the stupid phone work, and my heart began fluttering in frustration, and I just gave up on that.

My own words keep ringing in my ears. You need to forget I even exist… And especially I’m just going to go away…

I imagine trying to scoot to the far side of the hotel room bed, but it’s so cramped that I’d still be touching him. I need to move farther away, into memory and beyond. For both of us. For all three of us.

Past the Teatro Juarez I discover a line of buses that look stunned and abandoned in the dusk. A converted school bus shudders in the wind. Its rusty dented body sticks out amongst the tourist buses, proud and devastated. I mount the steps in a dream. I’m wearing my only clothes, and toting a backpack full of nothing much, and carrying a new life in my stomach. When I hand over a fistful of pesos I don’t even bother to ask where the bus is going, and the driver doesn’t tell me.

I sit silently amongst the locals in the vinyl seats, worn through to the springs and patched with duct tape. The driver works to make the engine turn over, grunting loudly as if lifting an impossible weight. Outside the dirty windows Guanajuato is sinking into twilight. Eventually the streetlight vista lurches into motion, grinding slowly and then quickly into a murky blur.

The silhouettes in the bus begin disappearing one by one. Eventually I join them. I lie down on the seat and use my backpack for a pillow, closing my eyes. Wishing I could leave myself behind instead of Nick. Wondering where I’ll be when I wake up.