Hard Red Spring (63 page)

“And you're saying the money you gave a Guatemalan dictator wasn't political?”

“I gave money to Operation Open Arms,” her mother said, straightening. “A humanitarian organization.”

“Operation Open Arms was a major artery of cash flow to that government, Mom!”

“You didn't say who wrote the report, Jean.”

“The UN.”

“Oh!” Her mother threw her hands up and threw herself back into the couch cushions. “The UN! Well, that explains everything.”

“Whatever could you have against the UN, Mom? Do you even know anything about the UN?”

“I know they let China have a say. A veto, even! They let China have a big say in what goes on in the world! You claim to care so much about people, what about China?”

“We aren't talking about China, we're talking about Guatemala. You gave a hundred dollars to a dictator to murder people!”

“I did not! I gave a hundred dollars for food and diapers. Corn mix, actually. Those people really like corn, the pamphlet said. You can't kill people with food and diapers, Jean.” Her hand went again to her heart. But Jean would not give her an out so easily. The gesture enraged her. No one else in the world could duck the truth so easily.

“You marked a box on a piece of paper and you really think that's where your money went?”

“God spoke to me when I saw that footage, Jean. I was sitting up late at night. I just saw the footage of those big-eyed children and God spoke to me. God is not wrong.”

“God did not speak to you, Mother. That was you. You heard yourself,
your conscience, which is not infallible. I heard a voice when I saw those pictures, too. It's me. It's my thoughts. My conscience. Not God.”

Her mother became defensive, hugging a pillow to her chest, her face shaking with disapproval. “I believe that. You've shut God out. How could you hear Him? How can you hear Him when you're drinking? When you spend all your time shouting at people?”

Just a few nips of whiskey. Her mother smelled it on her, thought she was drunk.

“Mom, that dictator, those soldiers you funded, massacred entire towns. They've found mass graves filled with women and children. Beaten and tortured. Over four hundred villages destroyed in seventeen months!”

Her mother's face spasmed into horror, real worry, but not at what Jean had hoped. “Why, Imogene?” she gasped. “What is the matter with you? Why are you so obsessed with such horrible things?”

“Because I want them to stop!”

“But you don't even know what happened. You just read that paper—”

“Clinton apologized. Our government has even recognized the report, recognized that our military trained Guatemalan soldiers to kill, to maim, to psychologically terrorize the population. He apologized to Guatemala.”

“Oh, so now Clinton is our moral compass?”

That was it. Jean reached over and grabbed the pillow from her mother. They struggled a moment, push and pull, until Jean wrenched it away and threw it across the room. “I don't care if Clinton got a blow job! Are you hearing me!” she screamed.

“Jean!”

“Killing children, Mom. Raping them, gutting them, bashing their heads against trees!” She got the disturbing urge to grab her mother by the hair, to shake her, to throw her on the floor. Instead she grabbed her own hair and pulled it down over her ears. “You paid for that! Torturing families in front of each other, setting people on fire! It could have happened to Maya!”

At the mention of the name, both women turned automatically to the dim hallway, where the leggy shadow of Maya stood. In nothing but a T-shirt and underwear, she was unmistakable, and she had been there for a while.

“Oh, Maya.” It was Jean's mother who said this, who went to her without hesitation. The thin shadow retreated back to the bedroom and Jean's mother followed.

Jean sat by herself, her brain pounding like a heart. It was always like
this, always the same. She felt empty and defeated. On the television, Pat Robertson's talking head was accompanied by a phone number at the bottom of the screen. Jean grabbed the remote and turned him off.

She walked to her old bedroom and pressed an ear to the closed door.

“She screams at her family because she cares about people, sweetheart. I know it's hard to understand. It took me a long, long time to understand. She cares very deeply about faraway people she doesn't know.”

“But what about us? How could she say that to you, Grandma?”

“I don't know, Maya. But I know she loves you very much.”

“No, she doesn't,” Maya sniveled dramatically. “She hates how I am, she hates my friends. She only cared about me when I was a baby in Guatemala.”

“I know for a fact that's not true, Maya. Your mother loves you so much. You know, when she first told me she wanted to adopt a baby from Guatemala, I was against it. I'm ashamed of that, it was a weakness of mine, but now I'm so glad. I am so glad your mother went against my wishes. I didn't love you until I held you for the first time. I guess I'm simpler in that way, but in the end, we both love you just the same.”

—

The next morning, Jean woke up late to find the house empty. Sunday. She knew right away what was going on. She had never allowed Maya to go to her parents' church, but they'd snuck out while Jean slept in.

They came back four hours later. Maya, strangely silent, walked very straight, as if her own body had become alien to her. The braided crown on her head tilted to one side, the shorter hairs around her ears floating loose. Jean knew Maya had agreed to go to church just to enrage her. When she asked, innocently, how it had gone, Maya said, “They brought me up front and Pastor Wayne put his hands around my head and prayed for my people to be delivered.”

Jean could see it. She knew how Pastor Wayne prayed for people, wrapping his large hands around their heads and pulling them to his chest, like a basketball he was about to pass.

Within five minutes their bags were packed and Jean's mother and father crowded the front door, her mother begging them not to go, her father with both hands twisting his hearing aids on.

“I hate you,” Jean spat, once Maya walked out of earshot.

“No, you don't.” Her mother smiled in the open doorway. Her father
waved to Maya and had not heard. Maya did not wave back. She merely let herself in the backseat of the rental car and closed the door, done with all of them.

This trip marked another change in Maya. She held herself differently after, as if she existed in a delicate bubble. She walked with caution, held herself straighter, as if she knew she'd been called to God's attention and He was now watching her. As if her actions spoke for her race and, based on what He saw, He would decide whether to deliver her people—eight million strangers in a strange country she had never visited.

Her daughter had had the weight of God thrust upon her. Jean knew exactly how it felt, and pitied her. Three days later, Maya's fits started up again, worse than ever. She threw herself to the ground, screaming the most bizarre accusation:
Dykes go to hell, you know that, Mom? Don't you care? Don't you care that I'll be stuck in heaven without you?

~~~~~

More paint had appeared on the hotel wall, next to the blue hand. In addition to the red embellishments from the day before, a full red handprint had been stamped to the right of the blue hand, stamped with too much paint, then scraped down. Jean, for the first time, found the graffiti truly disturbing.

Maya was not at the pool. Jean ascended the stairs, but found their room empty. With panic rising in her chest, she jogged the halls, calling her name.

“Mom!” Maya appeared out of one of the empty rooms.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Hiding.”

“Great, Maya. Thanks. You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Checking both ways in the hall, Maya walked over and pulled Jean to their own room. “Not hiding from
you
. From the proprietor.” Maya closed the door.

“Why are you hiding from her?”

“Because she's
fucking nuts
!”

“Language, Maya.”

“She's convinced I'm going to marry one of her sons! All I did was ask where they were and she pulled me into her room and tried to get me to put on her old wedding dress!” Her face melted fearfully. “Where were you?”

“Did she hurt you? Are you okay?” She placed a hand on Maya's head, but she ducked under and away, out of reach.

“She didn't hurt me. She's really nice, it's horrible how nice she is. I don't
think she's well,” she concluded, maturely. “She just makes me feel so guilty, smiling at me, giving me things.
Where were you?
”

“I toured town. You said you didn't want to come. I'm sorry to have been gone so long.” Jean sat down on her bed.

“That woman is crazy, but her sons are cute.” Maya smiled to herself. “She showed me pictures. They're not here today, but she says I'm just their type.”

“
Their
type? You plan on going on a date with both of them?”

“Maybe. Maybe to the vegetarian restaurant. They aren't vegetarians, though, she told me.”

“What would Brett say?” Jean asked, too sarcastically.

Ignoring her, Maya strutted back and forth in their tiny room. Her shadow, on the wall, was enormous and pleasing to her. She watched herself, working herself up for something. Angry for Jean's long absence, her Brett blasphemy. She prepared herself, then said over her shoulder, “Your friend Telema came here while you were gone.”

“What!” Jean leapt up. She did not catch herself in time. Maya grinned, enjoying her reaction. She'd figured out that much from the airport. “When was she here? Why?”

“She came to the meditation garden. The proprietor showed her in.”

“What was she doing here?'

“I don't know. Maybe she was looking for a room. But I don't think she's staying here. She liked the meditation garden, though, she stayed for a while and we talked.”

“You talked to her? What did you say? What did she say?” She'd been wrong. Telema had followed them here.

“Geez, Mom. You don't have to flip out. I thought she was your friend.”

“She was. Is. She is my friend.” Jean tried to calm herself. The worst had happened, but nothing had come of it. Why was Telema even here? Crossing in front of them, Telema had known they were in that alley. It was just how she would follow someone, by lingering in front instead of behind.

“She said she's here to research her book. She's trying to find out about a little girl who disappeared, like, a hundred years ago. An American girl in Xela who was abducted and raped by Indians!”

Jean crossed the small room, crossed back. Telema was stalking her, that was the word. They had to leave as soon as possible. “Maya—”

“It's okay, Mom. I know what rape is. I know all that stuff. They taught us about condoms in school, too. We put them on bananas.”

Drink, Jean needed a drink. Alcohol first, then packing.

“But she says the little girl wasn't raped.” That word again. “She wasn't raped or even taken by Indians. Her parents abandoned her, just left her and their debts to start a new life. Her dad was so sketchy and had all these money schemes going on and he just had to flee. So the parents abandoned the little girl and the government just sent her back to New York and completely made up her murder. It was a story the white power structure was always telling to keep people afraid of Indian men, to justify enslaving them. She called it a myth. The myth of the sexual savage!”

“So that's what you talked about? The myth of the sexual savage.”

“Some. And other parts of her book. She wants to interview me for it.”

Jean, very deliberately, said nothing. All of her energy went into her silence, so she didn't realize she'd grabbed Maya's suitcase and begun stuffing clothes inside.

“I told her I'd love to be in her book. She thinks I could have an entire chapter.”

“An entire chapter? An entire chapter on what?” Jean tried to laugh it off.

“On me.”

“What about you?” Jean spat, anger traveling to the far reaches of her body, making her flutter her fingers. She stuffed everything into one suitcase. She struggled to close the bulging mass, and was able to subdue it with a knee and slam the clasp down. “What would she write about you? About how your favorite place is the mall? How you're too cool to be interesting in any way? About your insipid friends, who'll get knocked up in a year? There's nothing to write about!” It all came out so quickly, so harshly. Jean sensed someone at the door, listening. She took deep breaths and counted, reassured herself. Her daughter was safe. On the bed, Maya cried discreetly into the pages of her magazine.

“You aren't going to be in her book, Maya,” Jean said evenly, repentantly. There was no way to take it back, to even apologize for what she'd said, so instead she apologized for something else. “I'm sorry. I'm telling you that right now. You are a minor, I'm your parent. Legally, you need my approval.”

“You aren't my real mother.” She flipped a page and wiped a tear. “And it's too late anyway. She interviewed me already. She wrote everything down in her notebook.”

“She interviewed you. About what? What did she ask you, Maya?”

“All kinds of questions. And she told me quite a few things, too. Like, I
wasn't born by cesarean. People down here are too poor for that.” Her hand went up to her scalp, tracing through her hair. “She said she could see it. She said it's a big scar!” Maya's face twisted in rage. “And you'd been gone for hours and hours and I just kept thinking of her book, and the little girl left behind by her parents. And I started to think you'd left me, too. Because you hate how I am! You think I'm dumb and you hate Brett. You hate Brett, but he's the only one who loves me! He loves me exactly how I am! And I know you'd rather find yourself another Guatemalan baby down here, to start over! I thought you'd left me with that crazy woman. She kept saying crazy things about me being her daughter, about one of her sons marrying me!”