The House in the Pines(19)

The world had begun to notice what would someday be called the Silent Holocaust, but in 1990 the army was still getting away with killing people who didn’t agree with them.

People like Maya’s father.

This was the why of what happened to him.

The how was a bullet to his head.

The when was two months after the protest. Jairo had been photographed that day marching beside a well-known history professor who had recently gone missing—and not just him, but three of his friends too. A baker. A teacher. A priest. Being associated with this particular history professor was enough in those days.

The killer would never be named, much less brought to justice. He could have been in the army, or moonlighting for them, or perhaps a member of Guatemala’s notorious death squads. He walked right up to Jairo’s door on a Saturday morning.

Jairo’s mother was behind the house, rinsing a red-flowered tablecloth in the pila. His father was in the living room, reading the paper on the couch.

Maya’s mom was in the kitchen.

Brenda was making herself a cup of instant coffee—one spoonful of Nescafé, one of sugar, and two of powdered milk. She’d been in Guatemala just over a month, was pregnant but didn’t know it yet, and this was part of her routine: she liked to take her coffee outside and up the rickety metal stairs to the roof on sunny mornings such as this one.

(But that was another story too.) She was stirring the instant coffee into a steaming mug of water when she heard the gunshot. She will never forget this.

She stares at her daughter.

“I want to go to the funeral,” Maya says again, as if she has forgotten that her mother told her all this when she was twelve.

“You know it’s too dangerous.” Brenda had promised to take her once it was safe enough, but to this day, it hasn’t been.

“I’ll be careful,” Maya says.

Her mom shakes her head.

“I’ll be eighteen in August.”

Anger flashes in her mom’s eyes.

Maya never met her grandmother, and now she never will. And all that she has of her father are a few pictures and a handful of stories—all stories told by her mom, who only met him a month before he died.

Suddenly Maya is hit by the weight of all that she doesn’t know about her own family.

“I’m going,” she says. Her own eyes flashing.





TEN




Brenda started work at five in the morning these days, baking breads, pastries, and desserts to accommodate the array of dietary restrictions among the patients at Lakeside Serenity Center. The patients were, in her words, a choosy bunch, and with what they were paying, they felt they deserved a lot of options: macrobiotic, vegan, gluten-free. They had their choice of art and yoga classes, music therapy, and forest bathing. They swam in the pool, relaxed in the sauna, and got acupuncture. The center was a few towns over, nestled into the kind of view that tourists thought of when they thought of the Berkshires. Mountains covered with trees that flamed into red, orange, and gold foliage in fall.

Brenda was up each day at four a.m., and usually in bed by eight—and it was 8:30. Her head tipped forward, but she hauled it back up, fighting to stay awake as she sat with her daughter in the small, tidy living room.

Maya waited at the other end of the couch. As soon as her mom fell asleep, she would take her keys and drive ten minutes to the Blue Moon Diner in the YouTube video. The Berkshire Eagle article said that Cristina died on a Sunday, and today was Sunday, a likely night to catch the waitress at work.

The radiator clanged in the corner over the Simpsons rerun on TV. Reaching for the remote, Maya turned the volume down, and before long, her mom began to snore softly. Sneaking out of the house, creeping down the dark hall and through the kitchen as an adult, felt ridiculous. Like being a teenager again (the walls between then and now growing thin), a muscle memory of lifting her mom’s car keys from her messy, oversized purse and slinking into the night. Outside was cold and starless. A light snow had fallen. Maya brushed off her mom’s windshield with the sleeve of her coat and got in.

She couldn’t say exactly what she hoped to learn from talking to the waitress who’d been there when Cristina died, but maybe there was more to the video than what the camera had caught, some nuance to the blank expression on Cristina’s face, so subtle you’d only see it in person.

Or maybe the waitress had heard something. Maya had to try. Steven Lang still hadn’t written back. Maya took Lincoln, driving past more houses like her mom’s, an old silk mill, and the public library. The library had been one of her favorite places when she was growing up. She would hang out in the free air-conditioning all summer, reading books or sunning herself on the terrace. But now the old brick building brought on a wave of dread. The library was where she’d met Frank.

She drove across the icy Housatonic and into the parking lot of the Blue Moon Diner. Maya remembered coming here as a child, but it had been a Friendly’s then. Then, as now, the parking lot had been mostly empty. Maya took a deep breath as she got out of the car, going over what she planned to say to the waitress.

Entering the diner, she stood face-to-face with a statue of Betty Boop. A neon jukebox played “Dream Lover.” The floors were black-and-white checkerboard, the booths red vinyl, but the layout hadn’t changed since the place was Friendly’s. Maya remembered sharing a sundae with her mom at a table now occupied by a middle-aged man, eating alone while he looked at his phone.