The House in the Pines(25)

She waited. In the dark, the room felt like hers again. The furniture was new, but the smell of the house she’d grown up in hadn’t changed. A smell like a time machine. Musty, coffee-and dish-soap-scented, a touch of cinnamon, and a few other things she couldn’t name. It was so familiar to her that it took only a moment to realize something was off.

She smelled fire.

The tame, cozy kind. Sweetly crackling wood. A pleasant smell in most circumstances, but her mom’s house didn’t have a fireplace.

Her eyes snapped open. She was still on her side, face turned to the wall about two feet away. But the wall had changed. Now it looked like it was made of logs. She could almost see the whorls in the wood by the flickering light of the fire she felt at her back. She wanted to get up—to run—but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed. She felt a presence in the room. She couldn’t see the person, but she felt the weight of their eyes on her neck, the part of it the blankets didn’t cover.

Then she heard footsteps getting closer. Creaking their way across the floor, moving as slowly as a funeral procession. Maya felt the bed dip as someone crawled into bed with her. A scream curdled in her lungs. A feathery breath brushed her neck.





THIRTEEN




The day Maya meets Frank, she is rereading a particularly enigmatic passage of her father’s incomplete novel on the sunny reading terrace of the public library, where she’s come to warm her bare arms and legs after several hours of blissful air-conditioning. She comes here often in the summer when her mom is at work and Aubrey is busy, like today. Maya doesn’t have other friends. She has people she’s friendly with, people who’d invite her to a party, but few she is likely to keep in touch with now that high school is over.

And anyway, she’d rather be alone, sitting on this wooden bench, poring over these forty-seven pages. She’s been back from Guatemala for two weeks and has already, with the aid of a translation dictionary, translated the whole document into English. It helps that the pages are double-spaced and that her father’s sentences are clear and straightforward. She now knows what every word means on a literal level. But on some other level, the language remains coded, as if the story it tells is symbolic of a deeper story just beneath the surface.

It’s very much a mystery, just as her mom had said it would be—both in genre and in practice, as all Maya has here is the novel’s opening and one scene that seems to skip ahead, as if Jairo had planned to go back later to fill in the intervening chapters. Because of this, she has only the barest sense of what the plot was going to be.

The story opens in an unnamed village so high in the mountains that its inhabitants spend all their time in the clouds. There’s hardly any description of the village, as the main character can only see a few feet in front of his face at all times, yet he never bumps into anything. A warm light suffuses the mist. There’s a touch of magic to this part of the story. The main character is a young boy named Pixán, who lives with his mother and father, who love him very much, in a small hut with a grass roof and stone hearth.

One day Pixán’s mother tells him that a distant relative of theirs has died, a great-aunt, and left him an inheritance. Not money, but something else—a surprise! Pixán is to go down from the mountain and into the city to collect from the great-aunt’s cranky husband, who isn’t so keen to give the prize up.

Pixán’s mother explains that the husband is selfish and wants to keep the inheritance for himself, but the great-aunt had written her will in ink, and Pixán’s name is clearly on it.

So his parents give him a backpack, which they claim contains everything he needs, and a compass. He’s told to walk west. He seems so young, Maya thinks, to be doing this on his own, but his age is never given, so maybe she’s wrong. The clouds part as he walks down the mountain, and it’s here that the tone changes. It grows less magical. Guatemala City appears in the distance, rendered in sharply realistic detail.

Pixán is scared—the city is loud and bright. And no sooner does he step onto its hectic streets than he is hit by a car. His head slams against the pavement. For a moment it seems he will die, but he doesn’t—he pulls through, only now he has total amnesia. He doesn’t think to look for his backpack, having forgotten that he had one, along with the parents who had given it to him. He has forgotten his home. His own name.

A childless couple takes him in and calls him Héctor. And for reasons not entirely clear, this inexperienced young couple pretend to be his real parents. They do it not out of malice but out of some vague sense that it’s the right thing to do. Pixán becomes Héctor. Maya’s heart aches for his true parents (and she can’t help but think about her own mother, how she’ll feel when Maya leaves).

The narrative skips ahead here a few decades to a day at the shore of El Lago de Atitlán. No explanation is given for this time jump.

Very little happens in this brief, final scene of the novel, and almost no context is given. Héctor, now a man, sits barefoot in the sand on the shore of a deep, wide lake, gazing out across the water at the towering volcano on the other side. The top of the volcano is wreathed in mist, and something about the sight of it strikes a chord in him. He has a sudden longing to climb it. To pull the clouds around his shoulders. He can’t explain why the beauty of this place makes him want to cry, makes him yearn for something he can’t name.