The House in the Pines(45)

The trip had been organized by a group affiliated with the church she’d opted out of as soon as opting out had been an option. It wasn’t that she wasn’t spiritual; she just didn’t buy what the church was selling. She went to Guatemala not to preach the message of Christ but to see what she could learn. How she could let the experience change her. She went, in other words, to do the exact opposite of missionary work, which was typical of Brenda. She was oppositional. Always had been, in her quiet way.

Brenda was supposed to have stayed for a month. She was placed with a host family in Guatemala City, a middle-aged couple with two children: a daughter who’d moved away and a son, a college student, who lived at home.

The middle-aged couple were Maya’s grandparents.

The son was Jairo.

Brenda felt shy around him from the start. He was shy around her too, which meant they hardly spoke for the first week she was there, even though they were often in the living room together. They learned each other slowly this way, in stolen glances and broken Spanish and silences that grew more and more comfortable. It soon became obvious that they had feelings for each other, but it seemed that nothing would ever come of it. They came from different worlds. And they were never alone.

Then one night Brenda woke to hear a strange sound outside her window. A rapid pecking punctuated by moments of silence, like a woodpecker, but there was something unnatural about it, as if it were mechanical. It was just loud enough to wake her but not so loud that it kept her up. Although she was curious about it, she soon drifted back to sleep.

She forgot about it until the next night, when it happened again. This time Brenda got out of bed and went to the window. She put her head out—there weren’t any screens—and listened. The sound was coming from the roof. She looked up but couldn’t see anything, so she got back in bed and fell asleep listening to the sound. She dreamed of a mechanical bird with copper feathers and gears for a heart, dreamed of it pecking at a branch, trying to tell her something in its strange, staccato code. Hinges creaked as it lifted its wings and flew away.

In the morning, she tried to explain the sound to her host family, but her Spanish was poor, and no one could help her. On the third night, as soon as she heard the pecking, Brenda got out of bed, tiptoed outside, and climbed up the rusty stairs that led to the roof.

The air was different on the roof, freer and more open than it was down below, where a cinder block wall surrounded the house on all sides. Brenda was scared as she looked around, having no idea what she would find, but her fear melted away because she saw that it was him.

Jairo. He sat at the edge of the roof, facing away from her, with his legs dangling over the side. He was holding something in his lap. The source of the sound. As Brenda got closer, she saw that it wasn’t a mechanical bird but an old typewriter making all that noise. His fingers flew across the keys.

Jairo waited until everyone slept, then brought his typewriter to the roof, where the sound wouldn’t wake anyone. Or so he had thought.

He apologized to Brenda for waking her, but she didn’t mind. She stayed, and they talked until the stars faded and the sun rose, and after that, she took to joining him several nights a week up there. This was how they fell in love. On the roof of a house in Guatemala City, looking out over a wall topped with barbed wire. They talked about all kinds of things, and everyone complimented Brenda on how much her Spanish had improved.

No one knew about them yet, but they planned to tell his family soon. They wanted to be together and would have gotten engaged if Jairo hadn’t been killed three weeks after Brenda found him writing on the roof.

Brenda didn’t know that she was pregnant when she packed up her belongings and bid her host family a teary goodbye. It wasn’t until three weeks later, when she found herself vomiting every morning, that she knew.

She had always wanted children, but this wasn’t what she’d pictured. She knew it would be hard to raise a child on her own, not to mention that it would be years before her Catholic parents forgave her, but there was never any question that she would have the child. The story ended with what her mom called the happiest day of her life. The day Maya was born.

I can see why that book is so important to you, Frank had said.

He had seemed like such a good listener, but now Maya understood that he just knew the value of a person’s stories. The ones that tell us about who we are and where we’re from. Our personal creation myths, the ones we blow out candles for every year. Maya might as well have handed Frank a key to her head and her heart the day she told him the story of her dead father.

She saw this in the clear light of morning as she paused in her pacing to drink water at the kitchen sink. She told herself she needed to stay focused. She had hoped that reading the book would jostle something loose, some memory—and it had, but it was faint. She set down her glass, closed her eyes, and pressed her palms into the sockets. She could summon the smell of a cozy fire and the sound of a stream, but when she tried to recall what it was that she actually saw that night—what it was that happened after she went looking for the cabin—the only image her brain coughed up was that of Frank’s key.





TWENTY-SIX




You don’t get it, do you?

Aubrey’s words simmer in Maya’s head as she walks home. She’s so distracted that she steps in front of a car as it pulls out of a gas station. The driver honks. The air smells like gasoline. Her plan had been to smooth things over with Frank, but instead the opposite had happened. He was upset with her when he left Dunkin’ Donuts—but he was the one who’d made a point of seeing Aubrey again.