Authors: Kate Wilhelm
The teakettle made a whistling, rattling sound, and from where Barbara was sitting she could see Papa Pat pour steaming water into the teapot. Anaia paused as he crossed the room to put the pot on the table and resume his seat.
“Today,” Anaia said then, “Barbara brought me the proof of what she said on the telephone. She brought me documents describing incidents that only Shala and I knew about. No one else on earth could have related those things. My sister did not die at sea. She was taken to Haiti and forced into slavery and prostitution there. And she took my daughter with her and protected her over the next eighteen years until her death.”
Her hand had rested on the manila envelope as she spoke. Now she opened the envelope and withdrew the photographs Barbara had given her. “I can't share the written words with you,” she said. “That is too personal, but these are pictures of my daughter, Lavinia Santos Thurston.”
She reached down the table far enough that Papa Pat could take the photographs. He laid them out between him and Robert and drew in a long breath as he studied Binnie's face. He looked from a photograph back to Anaia, then to the picture again.
Robert also looked up from the photographs to Anaia and back to them. He spoke first. “She is very like you,” he said. “Very like Shala. She is beautiful.”
Anaia nodded. “She is very like both Shala and me, and she is even more like our mother, for whom she was named.”
“You never mentioned a child, a daughter,” Papa Pat said in bewilderment.
“No. Those were turbulent times, Patrick. My father had disowned me. My husband had been recalled to the States. Robert was in California. Shala and I lived in the Belize City house in those days. She was enrolled in university, and I discovered that I was pregnant. My father, others, some I had considered friends, thought Lawrence had toyed with me, a native girl, naïve and innocent in many ways, and then abandoned me. I could feel their scorn, their mockery, their pity, and I was humiliated. I came to accept that same opinion. I told no one of my pregnancy, knowing they would only scorn me more, laugh at me. Shala was my only confidante. My pride would not permit me to suffer the humiliation if others should learn of it.”
She shook her head. “I know I could not have concealed her very long, but I was not thinking clearly, only minute by minute. Lawrence did not answer my letters, they were returned with no forwarding address. I was confused, bitter by turns, heartbroken, furious, and I was deeply ashamed. I became reclusive, refused to go out or to see anyone. And my child was born. I named her after our mother, Lavinia, but Shala and I called her Binnie from the day of her birth. She was born mute and with a birthmark on her breast. That year a terrible hurricane hit Belize. Shala and I gathered what we could and fled inland to high ground, and when we were able to return, it was to find that our house had been destroyed. Much of Belize City was destroyed. Thousands died during the storm and the months that followed.”
Robert poured tea into the fourth cup and took it to Anaia. He refilled Barbara's cup and resumed his seat without speaking. The surreal tea party had turned into a boardroom meeting, Barbara thought distantly. Anaia was chairman of the board, telling lies that only Barbara might dispute, and she remained silent, waiting to see where this was going. As Anaia talked, she included Barbara when she looked at those seated at the other end of the table, and her gaze was level and unblinking.
Anaia addressed her next remarks to Papa Pat, saying, “That was when the decision was made to move the capital inland, to Belmopan, several years before your arrival.”
He nodded. “Belize was considered a hardship mission, the reason I could have moved on in two years. It was still very much devastated when I got here. But how did your child end up in Haiti, in America?”
Anaia sipped her tea, then, with her head lowered, her gaze fixed on the cup, she said, “When the rainy season started, months after the hurricane, a new calamity struck. Cholera. It was widespread and it was deadly. Shala had become engaged to Juan Hernandez, and they arranged to sail on a freighter to Jamaica, to go to his parents where they would marry. Our father had been trying to arrange a marriage between her and the son of another landowner. We kept it a secret that she would leave with Juan out of fear that Father might have seized her and taken her to the finca. The cholera epidemic kept spreading, increasing in virulence, and I was terrified that Lavinia might be infected. A day before the freighter sailed, Shala and I decided that she would take my child to Jamaica with her, and I planned to take the first flight available to join them. In those days, with our airport in disrepair we didn't know when that would be, but we were told it would be within a month. She was delighted to be a surrogate mother to my child for that time. We smuggled Lavinia aboard, after learning that the freighter captain refused to accept infants as passengers.”
She looked directly at Barbara as she continued. “When the pirates attacked, Shala was taken by one of them. She clung to Lavinia, claiming that if her daughter was injured she would kill herself. Evidently he accepted that the child was hers, and he took them both to Haiti, where he kept them until Shala's death three years ago.” Her gaze held Barbara's for another few seconds before she turned to Papa Pat and said, “My daughter escaped immediately after Shala's death. She fled to America.”
Papa Pat rubbed his forehead and looked at Robert as if asking for help. Robert might have been a carved wooden figure with an unreadable expression. “But the memorial service,” Papa Pat said. “It was for Shala with no mention of a child. She was not listed among the victims. I read about it.”
“Father arranged the service,” Anaia said. “I was in a state of shock. My mother dead, abandoned by my husband, my sister, my child dead, disowned by my father. I felt that I had no friends. Even Robert was gone, studying at UCLA. I was numb with shock. No one knew about Lavinia. My father died without knowing about her. No one knew. I was just going through the necessary motions for weeks, months, grieving, in shock, alone. Later there seemed little point to reopen such wounds.”
Helplessly Papa Pat turned to Barbara. “How did you get involved? How did you come to arrive here at this time?”
Barbara glanced at Anaia, who nodded. “Tell him about meeting her and her husband,” she said.
Barbara kept it brief, sticking to the barest of facts. After telling of the meeting, and the subsequent visit by Nicholson, she said, “We were able to find an account of the piracy since it's on record, and I came here not knowing that Augustus Santos had died. I planned to appeal to him to help his granddaughter, as well as to appeal to Anaia. I was trying to prevent her deportation to Haiti, and hoped they would both come to her assistance.”
“They'd deport her back to Haiti?” Papa Pat said in alarm. “They'd do that?”
Barbara nodded. “I'm afraid so.” Quite deliberately she added, “Binnie grew up believing Shala Santos was her mother. She has no documentation whatsoever, and she is an illegal alien. The law is clear. She will be deported.”
“But you can prove she is your child!” Papa Pat said to Anaia.
She shook her head. “I can't prove that. The midwife who delivered her died years ago. There is no hospital record since it was a home delivery. When the capital was destroyed, almost all the public records were also destroyed, including Lavinia's birth certificate. I didn't know that until years later since I had no reason to inquire about it. I learned about it only when a woman in Belmopan tried to obtain the certificate for her own child in order to get a passport. It took her many months to straighten out the matter. I had no reason to go through the process.”
Barbara had to admire her. She was covering all the bases with well-thought-out answers. Admitting that, however, did not inform her about Anaia's intentions, and she continued to wait to see where it was going.
Papa Pat, clearly confused and troubled, asked if Lavinia had been christened. There would be a record. Anaia said gently that they didn't do that. A child was baptized at puberty, at the age of reason. No surprise there, Barbara thought, since Anaia did not address him as Father Patrick. In frustration he said that no one could hide an infant for a whole year. Someone had seen her.
“Many people saw her,” Anaia said. “You don't understand how it was, homeless people looking for shelter, moving whenever they heard of anything available. We moved several times during those months, an emergency shelter, an apartment, a hotel room, sharing a house with two other families. Strangers moving in shock, that's how it was for months. Who would recall one infant, two desperate women, when everyone was desperate?”
“You could have gone to the finca,” he said after a moment.
She shook her head. “No, Patrick. I could not have gone to the finca. When I married Lawrence my father had said he never wanted to see me again. Shala might have gone, but only to a forced marriage, and she would not leave me and my child.”
He looked down as if shamed by not recognizing what she had gone through.
The monkeys howled closer to the village, and in spite of herself Barbara gave a start. No one else appeared to notice.
After another lengthy silence Papa Pat looked at Barbara beseechingly. “Can't you explain the true situation, make them understand that her only relatives are here in Belize?”
“They demand documents, proof. They don't accept anecdotal testimony. There may already be an arrest warrant for Binnie. She was ordered to present herself yesterday. I wrote a letter pleading for more time to locate the necessary documentation, but I didn't wait for a response. I booked a flight to Belize instead. I don't know if additional time was allowed or not. If not, and with her failure to appear as ordered, they have the legal right to arrest and deport her.”
“She could already be in detention?” he said in an agonized whisper. “Is that what you're telling us, that she might have been arrested already?”
“No. She is in a secure place, in hiding, exactly the way that Anaia is. Also,” she said, “I believe Binnie is in the same kind of danger that Anaia is. Not only the danger of deportation, but possibly she has been targeted for murder.”
She repeated what she had told them about Nicholson's visit. “My suspicions were aroused. Why would the DEA be watching them, how could he have known they had come to me for advice? There was no connection between the girl Domonic Guteriez had claimed was his minor daughter and Lavinia Santos. He probably gave her name as Binnie Guteriez. I doubt that he even knew her name was Lavinia. But on her marriage license she signed Lavinia Santos and that's the only official document that bears her name. Only a tip to the authorities could have made that connection. Someone wanted her deported.”
Robert shook his head. “Why does that make her a murder target? Someone could have had a different reason to expose her status.”
“Of course,” she said. “But yesterday I went to the finca and I caught a glimpse of the man who called himself Nicholson in Eugene, the Drug Enforcement Agency official. He seems likely to have been the source of the tip, and he obviously knew who she was. And he knows I have been retained to represent her interests. I think they wanted deportation because it is silent, no investigation into her background, no Santos name involved, no connection to Belize. Now, knowing none of their expectations in those regards are likely to be realized, they may well decide to simply eliminate the other possible heir to the Santos estate.”
Robert's eyes narrowed with her words. “Why did you go there?” he demanded in a hard voice.
Anaia looked pinched and frightened. She drew back in her chair. “Yes, why did you go there?” she said. “What exactly are you doing here? Why did you go to see my uncle?”
Barbara explained about the broncos' invitation. “I had a lingering thought that the brother of her grandfather, her great-uncle, might be enlisted on her behalf,” she said. “I was wrong. I didn't trust him and told him nothing, but Nicholson saw me.”
Robert stood and walked to the back door, where he remained facing out. Papa Pat touched the photographs on the table, first one, then the other.
Abruptly he stood and said, “I think I'll put on coffee. Ms. Holloway, would you like coffee? Anaia? Robert?”
They both shook their heads, but Barbara said, “I'd like that very much.”
He went to the other side of the kitchen and opened a cabinet, saying, “I drink coffee for breakfast, but not later in the day. Sometimes, not often, just now and then, I find I'm in need of strong coffee. Weak willpower, I suppose. I should resist. It's very expensive and available only when I go to Belize City. What they have in Belmopan is inferior.⦔
His words were strangely inflected and spaced, as if he were thinking something altogether different, not about what he was actually saying. As if, Barbara thought, he was trying with empty chatter to deny all that he had heard, deny the implications, the possible outcomes of what he had heard. She turned her gaze again to Anaia.
“You have to keep her safe!” Anaia said harshly. “Keep her in a safe place. They won't hesitate to gun her down exactly the way they did my father. I can give you the documents you need. I will. But that's not enough. They don't care about proof, documents. She is in their way and they will kill her if they find her.”
“How can you prove it?” Robert asked, swinging back toward the room.
“Patrick, help me!” Anaia cried. “You take birth certificates to have them registered every month or so. You can fill out a birth certificate for my daughter, have it registered with the others.”
Barbara leaned back in her chair, watching Anaia, and she believed she knew where it had been heading from the beginning. Anaia had known exactly where she was going with her lies. A masterly performance, she said to herself, star performance, thought-out from beginning to this point, choreographed all the way. Of course, Patrick loved her. It was apparent in his every glance, his every halted motion toward her, his disappointment when Barbara had come alone from the church, the involuntary rush to her side when he saw her tear-smudged face and tear-reddened eyes. And Patrick did not believe her story. That was apparent to Barbara, also.