The House in the Pines(18)

“What?” Maya says, staring up from the piles of books surrounding her on the floor, even though she’d heard the words just fine.

Her grandmother has died of a stroke in her home in Guatemala City. She was a constant, but distant, presence in Maya’s life. A voice on the phone several times a year. A photograph. Handwritten birthday cards. Maya’s father may be dead, but that’s how it’s always been. No one she actually knows has ever died.

“Aw, Muffin,” her mom says, entering the room as Maya flips back through her memory for the grandmother she has suddenly lost. And what Maya realizes is that she never really knew her. Her grandmother had been as abstract as death itself was up until this moment—an idea, nothing more—but suddenly Abuela’s absence seems very real, a hollowness growing in her chest.

Abuela was a connection to Maya’s father. The person who knew him best. There are so many questions Maya should have asked.

Her mom sits beside her on the carpet, careful not to disturb the stacks of books. She looks almost apologetic.

“I never wrote back to her last birthday card,” Maya says.

Her mom always impressed upon her the importance of getting to know her father’s mother, reminding Maya to write back to her, to call her. But Maya was too young to understand, or maybe too selfish, as children are. Too wrapped up in herself. Too self-conscious of her terrible accent to speak Spanish on the phone, forcing her grandmother to make all the effort on the rare occasions that they did speak.

Her mom puts a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about that,” she says. There are tears in her voice.

“I want to go to the funeral.”

Her mom stares at her.

Maya has never been to Guatemala.

Her mom has always said it’s too dangerous—and all she has to do is point to what happened to Maya’s father: Jairo Ek Basurto was shot dead in the doorway of his parents’ house at the age of twenty-two.

The year was 1990, the Guatemalan civil war just beginning to wind down, and the army was killing people who didn’t agree with them.

Maya was twelve when she managed to wrangle this information from her mom. It had shocked her. Why would the army kill their own people? Brenda, who’d been in the country on a missionary trip for her parents’ church when she met Jairo, had explained as best she could to someone so young.

The land where the Mayans had been living for millennia happened to be perfect for growing large quantities of bananas. Chiquita, back in the ’40s, was the largest landowner in the country. It was called the United Fruit Company then, and it had a lot of control over the Guatemalan government.

But in 1944, the Guatemalan people got rid of the government loyal to the fruit company and elected a president who wanted, among other things, to buy back some of the company’s land and return it to the ones who’d lived there. Land that was sacred. The dense jungles and misty highlands. Volcanos and cenotes.

This newly elected president, and then his successor, believed that people are worth more than money, more than cheap bananas. The United Fruit Company disagreed. It wanted that land. The fruit company was the forefather of the modern PR campaign, and just as it convinced Americans to buy more bananas, it convinced the president of America that the newly elected Guatemalan president was a communist. This was in the 1950s, as the Cold War snowballed. Maya hadn’t known anything about the Cold War at twelve but sensed from her mom’s tone that things were about to get dark.

President Eisenhower listened to the fruit company. He sent the CIA down to secretly stir up a small Guatemalan opposition. The US trained them and gave them guns. And in 1954, that opposition, with a lot of help from the US, overthrew the democratically elected president. They installed a military officer in his place, a man happy to let the fruit company grow its bananas.

Things grew very hard for the Mayan people then, especially the peasants, along with anyone who supported them. The students, the teachers, the artists, the writers, the neighbors. All these people made up most of the country, but it was the top few who had all the power. Some people grew so angry that they ran off into the mountains to fight, recruiting starving children to their side. The civil war lasted for thirty-six years, and two hundred thousand people died, many of them tortured, thousands upon thousands disappeared—a term that twelve-year-old Maya hadn’t understood.

It means the police secretly arrested them, her mom had said, and they were never seen again.

Twelve-year-old Maya was, by this point, beginning to regret she had asked.

She’d been bugging her mom for as long as she could remember to explain why her father had died. And how. And where. And when. But once her mom had started telling her, Maya felt her throat tighten.

Her father was a college student studying literature. He was also a writer—but that was another story, one that Maya already knew.

This was the story of his death. Finally. (But at the same time too soon.) Her father was part of a student organization that went out to a small village in the highlands. The army had recently carried out a massacre in the village, and Maya’s father, along with other students and a few professors, went to march alongside the survivors, demanding an end to the army’s presence in the village. Maya’s heart had puffed with pride at this, then clenched in fear as her mom explained that someone had photographed him there.

That was all it took in those days.