Hard Red Spring (57 page)

“Maya.” Jean held open the glass door. “Please come in with me.”

“I'll be happier out here with my magazine. Seriously. It's the Fall Fashion issue.”

“Honey.” Jean closed the door. “I know you think that makes you happy,
but it doesn't. That's not happiness, it's entertainment. Can we please do this together? I think you'll be happy later that we did.”

“I think I'll have a better time out here. What's happiness if it's not having a good time?”

“This is
important
, Maya. If nothing else, do it to make me happy. You're the only person in the world I want to be with for this.”

Maya collected herself slowly, resentfully, into a standing position. “Fine. But you should know, Mom, that the things you claim make you happy only piss you off. You should see your face when you're reading your
New Yorker
every week. All those articles about poor people and pollution. It's giving you wrinkles.”

Inside the modern lobby, three American couples waited. Too nervous for the scattered magazines, they were engrossed in the television playing high up in the corner. The smiling woman at the counter asked Jean, in English, her purpose. She said it just like that, referring to Jean's purpose.

“I'm here to see my daughter's records,” Jean said. She hesitated, then pulled Maya into view with a gentle hand. Maya allowed herself to be pulled, infected by the tense air of the lobby. The woman nodded tightly, as if she had been warned of this situation, but had yet to deal with it. She seemed to take great relief from the protocol of pushing the sign-in paper across the desk.

Everyone, Jean could feel, was staring. So she tried to lighten the mood. “What are you planting out there? Vegetables for the children?”

“Yes.” The woman smiled, probably not knowing vegetables. “Children.”

“That's a lot of vegetables. That whole field?”

“Not vegetables. A soccer field. For the children. AstroTurf.”

Jean pushed her paper back across the desk and the woman studied it.

“What was her name?”

“María Tierra López,” Jean said, for the first time in fourteen years.

The woman squinted. “What year?”

They sat down to join the nervous parents-to-be among the stacks and stacks of newspapers, magazines, and books. The mere volume of reading material implied decades of waiting. These couples watched Jean and Maya through blurred eyes, as if they had read every article available to them and still their names had not been called.

“Who's María Tiara López?” Maya asked, sitting in a molded plastic chair.

“That's you. That was your name at the orphanage.”

“It was?” Maya said the name a few times, under her breath, deciding on an accent. She pronounced Tierra like tiara. “Did my mom name me that, or did the orphanage?”

“I don't know. Maybe we'll find out.” In truth, Jean had no idea what the records would say. They could say everything, or nothing at all. She suspected the latter.

Their attention wandered up to a preacher, speaking in a Mayan language on the high television. Jean followed the English subtitles: “Only Jesus has the power to raise up a nation. Only Jesus has the power to know the truth. And Jesus will punish those who need to be punished. Jesus is the one and only Truth Commission!”

The preacher just missed being handsome, with a bright row of cartoon teeth for a smile. He thanked his sister church, watching from Colorado, and for whom the subtitles had been provided. Then he took prayer requests, while Maya's lips moved, reading. “I lost my whole family,” she mouthed along with a Mayan woman on the screen. “But I am thankful for what the Lord has given to me. I do not want revenge, I want to break the cycle of violence. There are people who only care about the past, they are infected with a sickness of the past. Let's pray for them.”

The pastor prayed for the sickness of the past, read from the New Testament, something about forgiveness, then sang a solo. The audience clapped, waved their hands, and wept in one cohesive wave of emotion. Then the screen split to reveal the Colorado congregation mirroring their motions of praise.

“
The Healing Hour
, with Pastor Mincho Escalante-Lincé, will be right back.”

The preacher was in the process of laying hands on an old blind woman when the receptionist appeared with a slim file and directed Jean and Maya to a room behind the counter. This room had been primed but not painted, giving the walls a bright, uneven veneer. Maya took the only chair. Jean knelt beside her and pried open the gummed seal of the orphanage file. The first thing to fall out was Maya's baby picture, the one Jean had received and had cried over in 1983. She felt those same tears now, returning. A color photo, the kind tinged red, making the tiny, emaciated body look burned with fever. Maya wore nothing but an obscenely large plastic diaper that accentuated her starved body. Thankfully, her skull wound did not show from this angle.

“Oh my God,” Maya breathed, leaning in. “What's wrong with me?”

“You weren't that bad, Maya. It's the color, it makes it look worse,” Jean lied, taking her hand. “They used old, damaged film. Seriously.”

In fact, seeing this picture, Jean felt the room collapsing around her. She knew this picture, knew it so well, so why did she feel like she'd been punched in the stomach? For the first two years, she had carried this photograph in her wallet, to remind herself to be patient with her new daughter. Single motherhood had not been easy. So she looked at this raw, wounded baby during many sleepless nights and screaming fits. But eventually Maya began to sleep peacefully in her crib and new images and memories eased Jean's frustrations: Maya eating spaghetti, Maya playing in ocean waves for the first time. At what point had she stored this photograph away? She had no idea.

With her free hand, she placed the picture facedown on the table and read the two pieces of paper that made up the file. One a medical record. Jean remembered it well: jaundice, malnutrition, dehydration, double ear infection. On her copy at home, there'd been no mention of a knife wound on her head. Through her limited Spanish and the watery gloss of tears, she saw words that referenced it now. Not wanting to upset Maya further, she turned it over and lifted the second paper, which Jean wasn't sure was supposed to be in there. It gave Maya's birth mother's information: fifteen-year-old Cruzita Sola Durante, from Nueva Aldea de la Vida, had given up her baby because of poverty. The girl had been the same age then that Maya was now.

~~~~~

Despite her reputation as a miserable cunt, the professor had many admirers, and Jean was becoming jealous of the young coeds who cluttered the hallway outside her office. With Maya perpetually in the company of Brett, her friends, or at flag line practice, Jean began to have enough free time for jealousy. She had put her ear to Telema's office door one day and had heard a young hopeful trying to explain herself.

“Little bombs,” Telema interrupted her dramatically. “A little girl of fourteen, dressed up and educated in the ways of seduction . . .”

Jean did not stay to hear the rest. She was enraged, and had no reason to be. She could not claim Guatemala for herself, especially in a class in which she wasn't even enrolled. The only thing to do, Jean decided, was to claim Telema for herself, to extract some level of commitment from her. This had been the idea when she invited Telema over one evening, just before Spring Break. But everything they'd done over the past few weeks had begun with
some hope, soon thwarted. Jean felt as if they were having an affair, with complications, people to take into consideration, though there were none. Why, then, was this so difficult?

Because she needed to tell her about Maya's origins first, to begin with her.
My daughter is a Guatemalan war orphan
. How could Telema have a problem with that? Because she had a problem with everything. She constantly surprised Jean with her pronouncements, decrying what was generally accepted as good—humanitarian aid, breast cancer awareness—while praising things like handguns, cacao farming, and the kidnapping of the aid worker in Colombia. And her article “The Economy of Love” proved that Maya would be a bigger obstacle than Jean had ever imagined. Scandals, stolen babies, baby brokers, a whole vile economy teeming under the surface of American domestic life. In Telema's opinion, no brown baby in the world could be adopted under moral circumstances. After forcing herself to finish the article, Jean became determined to prove her innocence to Telema and herself. Just yesterday, she'd bought the plane tickets to Guatemala. She would track down the records herself.

But this plan lay months away, and nothing would be easy tonight. Telema was in a mood. The dean had launched an investigation into the American happiness ghost panel from the day before. No panelists had ever arrived. Every faculty member denied involvement. A subversive prank, with Telema as the main suspect.

“As if I have the time for shit like that,” Telema said, settling into a chair, her black eyes scanning Jean's beach from the deck. Fifty yards away, someone was trespassing. Jean sat across from Telema, sipped her wine, and watched the dark, solitary form take its time, toeing the high-tide line.

“Have you ever done something for love?” Jean asked, testing. “Something other people disapproved of and couldn't understand? Something you wholly believed in, but others considered evil?”

Telema smiled inwardly, her lips stained with red wine. “Oh yes.”

“What was it?”

Telema's naked foot found Jean's under the deck table. “The Sandinistas. I was young, still in high school. But I worked evenings at the library and sent everything I made to my brother, who was fighting with them. I think two hundred dollars in all.”

“Are you still happy you did?”

“Of course.”

“And your brother?”

Telema just shrugged, and Jean saw her opening.

“I thought you opposed anything that funded any cause, just improving the circulation of the Great White Beast. Isn't that what you told me?”

“I meant any cause that's legal. Anything accepted by the corrupt powers is, in itself, corrupt. If you give money to charities deemed acceptable, that means they're part of the machine. It's one great circulatory system. If the charity makes the Beast happy, that means it's not effecting any great change. Like cancer research.”

“But the Sandinistas were?”

“The only charity that makes change is the charity that fights the Great Beast. That is the only cause that will truly help people. You give money to cancer research and you get all kinds of stickers and congratulations. You sabotage Dow, which makes the cancer, and you get arrested. The Great White Beast loves research, Jean. We already know what causes cancer, though we pretend not to.”

“The Great White Beast sounds very biblical, Professor.”

“Christians don't have a monopoly on beast metaphors. They think they invented everything.” She sighed, tired of having a retort for everything. “The FBI has a file on me for that two hundred dollars, for the fact that I'm related to my brother, and for my research.”

“How do you know?”

“The Great White Beast is clumsy. It's so powerful it never had to learn subtlety or grace.” She raised her wineglass. “They probably have a file on you now, too. For seeing me.” She grinned. “Actually, I'm sure of it.”

Jean pursued the conversation fearfully. “And what about Boston? Did they follow you there?”

“Of course. They are the ones who turned them against me.”

“Them?”

“The staff of the mental institution. Well, maybe that's the wrong word. It wasn't a straitjacket sort of place, more like a retreat for exhaustion. I got what I needed from them, though. Most of what I needed.”

“About Evie Crowder?”

“No, no. I told you, Dorie Honeycutt. A friend of mine in Guatemala broke into the
Prensa La Verdad
records and got the address of that crazy letter-writer from Boston claiming to be Evie. I traced it all back, then had to do some records magic of my own to find out who lived in that room in 1983. A sixty-year-old woman, definitely not old enough to be Evie. Checked in almost thirty years before by her big-shit husband.”

“So did you get to talk to her?”

“No. She's dead. She died shortly after she wrote the letter. Like, a week after she wrote it. And this is what one of the nurses who remembered her told me. She said this Dolores had an elderly, important husband who would come and visit her a few times a year, but she never said a word to him. She seemed almost perfectly normal otherwise. Just quiet and fragile. Insisted on getting dressed every day like she was going somewhere. For almost thirty years, she did this. Never any drama or worry. She seemed content there, and that was what made them believe she belonged there, how content she was. Normally, people stayed there for a few months or a year, but her husband kept paying the bills. Then, not long after she wrote that letter, her husband arrives for his visit. She sits there for a while, listening to him talk, then she just gets up from her chair, runs across the room, and throws herself out the window. Never said anything, never screamed. Breaks through the glass, falls five stories, and dies.”

“Jesus!”

“And the best part is, Honeycutt is the last name of the American ambassador in Guatemala during the coup. She was that fucker's wife! That's as far as I got before the goons shut me down. But it doesn't matter. She wasn't Evie, could not be. But she did get me thinking that maybe this Evie was alive. No one ever found her body, or her parents', though there were supposed murder confessions. But the funny thing about the confessions is they were all in Spanish originally. Eleven illiterate Mayan field hands, and one Ladino overseer. He probably spoke Spanish, but the others? No way. Not to the level of detail they supposedly provided.”