The floor of the house was fine white sand. In the morning Maya and Pilla, the maid, raked and swept the sand, checking for scorpions, sweeping it smooth. For the first hour Maya would yell at the boys “Don’t walk on my floor!” as if it were newly waxed linoleum. Every six months one-eyed Luis would come in with his mule and carry out saddlebags of sand, make countless trips to the beach for fresh white sparkling sand washed up by the sea.
The house was a palapa, the roof made of thatched palm. Three roofs, for there was a tall rectangular structure met on each end by a semicircle. The house had the majesty of an old Victorian ferryboat, that’s how it got the name la barca de la ilusión. Inside, cool, the ceiling was vast, tall tall posts of ironwood, crossbars lashed together with guacamote vine. The house was like a cathedral, especially at night when stars or moonlight glowed through the skylights where the palapas joined. Except for an adobe room beneath the tapanco there were no walls.
Buzz and Maya slept on a mattress in the tapanco, a large loft made of the veins of palm trees. Ben and Keith and Nathan slept in bunks in the adobe room when it was very cold. Usually they slept in hammocks in the large living room, or outside by the datura. The datura that bloomed in a profusion of white flowers that hung heavy clumsily until night when the moonlight or starlight gave the petals an opalescent shimmer of silver and the intoxicating scent wafted everywhere in the house, out to the lagoon.
Most of the other flowers had no perfume and were safe from ants. Bougainvillea and hibiscus, canna lilies, four o’clocks, impatiens and zinnia. The stock and the gardenias and roses were giddy with perfume, alive with butterflies of every color.
At night Maya and her neighbor Teodora patrolled the gardens and the coconut grove with their lanterns, killing the swift columns of cutter ants, pouring kerosene into the nests of these ants that ate their tomatoes and green beans, lettuce and flowers. Teodora had taught Maya to plant during the new moon and to prune when it was full, to tie jugs of water to the lower branches of a mango tree if it wasn’t bearing fruit. Juanito, Teodora’s seven-year-old son, came to Maya’s school in the mornings except when the coffee beans were ripe in the hills and he had to work every day.
Ben and Keith, seven and six, ranged between first and fourth grades in arithmetic and spelling. Keith loved fractions and decimals, a mystery to Ben and Maya. Ben read everything from children’s books to adult books like The White Nile. Every morning the boys had classes at the big wooden table. Scratching, sighing, erasing, giggling, the boys leaned their bare brown backs over their marbled copybooks. Reading and writing and arithmetic. Geography. Reading and writing in Spanish, with Juanito.
The house was built at the edge of a coconut grove on the bank of the river. Across the river was the beach and the perfect bay of Yelapa. Up the rocks from the beach and over the hill was the village, above a small cove. High mountains surrounded the bay, so there were no roads into Yelapa. Horse trails through the jungle to Tuito, to Chacala, hours away.
The river changed all year long. Sometimes deep and green, sometimes just a stream. Sometimes, depending on the tides, the beach would close up and the river turned into a lagoon. This was the best time, with blue herons and egrets. The boys would spend hours playing pirates in their dugouts, catching crawfish, tossing nets for fish, ferrying passengers across from the beach. Even Nathan could handle a canoe well, and he was barely four. In the dry season there would be no water at all. The children would play soccer with boys from the village, have races on scrawny horses. After the rains began the water would come, sometimes in wild torrents, carrying boughs of flowers, branches of oranges, dead chickens, a cow once, and the swirling muddy water would break through the beach with an enormous gasp and suck of sand, swirling out into the turquoise ocean. And as days passed the river water grew clean and sweet and the warm rock pools filled with the water for baths and washing.
In the evening Teodora strolled past their house to the river with a huge rattling tin tub of dishes on her head. Donasiano followed her, a few paces behind, carrying a machete, wearing a straw hat with ACAPULCO on it. Teodora was a widow, Donasiano her lover, although he had a wife and family in town. They would return after dark, the dishes clattering, slower now. In the morning before he went to the hills to pick coffee Donasiano would squat on the other side of the river, in the shadow of the strangler fig or yellow-blossomed papelillo, waiting for deer to come to the water to drink. Only once had Maya actually seen him kill a deer, although he did often, sharing the meat with the village. He had sprung out from behind the tree and beheaded the doe with one glittering blow of his machete. The head fell into the sand, blood flowed in the current, the fawns fled.
Buzz and Maya worked to keep the fence mended against the donkeys and pigs, to keep the garden watered and weeded. Pilla and Luis carried endless buckets of water, from upriver, or from the well in the village during the dry season. Luis and Pablo and Buzz gathered and chopped wood for the fire that burned all day.
“It’s tough, this living in paradise,” Buzz said.
Maya wondered how long they could stand living in paradise. At night while she read at the table Buzz would lie in the hammock smoking weed, staring out to sea.
“Are you okay, Buzz?”
“I’m bored,” he said.
Maybe if they had a farm, a real one, or started a real school. The problem was Buzz didn’t have to do anything. He never had. His father had been a wealthy Boston physician. Handsome and bright, Buzz had been an honors student at Andover and Harvard, Harvard graduate school. In his second year of medical school he had begun to play saxophone, to go hear Dizzy and Bird, Jaki Byard, Bud Powell. He had become addicted to heroin, was expelled from medical school for morphine. He had married Circe, a Boston heiress, got off drugs. They went around the world. They settled in New Mexico, where he played saxophone and raced Porsches, in the U.S. and Europe. For something to do he started a business. He bought the first Volkswagen franchise west of the Mississippi, almost instantly became close to a millionaire. He stopped racing cars, he stopped playing saxophone. He and Circe were divorced. He and Maya fell in love, had an affair.
“Give me something to live for—you and the boys” was how he had proposed to her. Maya had actually thought that was romantic. They were married. He adopted Ben and Keith and they had Nathan. She had not known he was back on heroin until a month after they were married. Heroin is easy to hide if you are rich, because you always have it.
When he was off drugs their life was wonderful. They loved each other, they had beautiful children. They were wealthy and free, traveled in their little plane all over the United States and Mexico.
But finally drugs became Buzz’s only reason for living. Soon the children would be old enough to be aware of it. The only people they saw were connections and dealers, the narcs that followed them. Heroin was the focus of every day, all day, for both of them. The move to Yelapa was their only chance.
Little by little it began to seem all right. That Yelapa could be home. Buzz started to fish from the boat inside the bay, catching sierra or red snapper. He did free dives near the rocks, coming back with oysters and lobster. More and more Ben and Keith went with him. Illogically, since she was so afraid of coconuts falling on their heads, Maya didn’t worry about the children, out to sea in the tiny open boat. True, sometimes there were dangerous swells, sharks, manta rays that played with the boat. Underwater there were stingrays, moray eels. But they returned with fish and clams and lobster, tales of dolphins and humpback whales, giant sawfish. Maya loved to hear Buzz and the boys telling about their trip, arguing, exaggerating. Keith was the best fisherman, patient and determined; Ben was the finder, of fine conches or the tip of blue lobster feeler hidden in the rocks.
After a year Buzz got a generator that he set up on the point. They filled scuba tanks and hunted for fish underwater, with spear guns. Little by little more village boys learned to dive and get fish, began to make their living this way. Sefarino and Pablo bought their own boats and tanks and sold fish in town. A little restaurant opened in town. Ronco and Buzz bought a motor and a fiberglass boat. They went farther out to dive, as far as the islands. When they anchored in the late afternoon their calls and laughter floated across the ocean.
Days and months passed in an easy rocking rhythm. Just before dawn the roosters crowed and at the first light a thousand laughing gulls flew past the house upriver. Flocks of parrots flashed green dazzling against the cool gray coconuts. A different Nile, green iguanas sunned on the river rocks. Pigs grunted in the mud and horses from Chacala snorted on the trail. Spurs. The gentle surf whispered day and night and the palms rustled with the same beat as the sea. At noon every day the Paladín would dock in the bay and twelve tourists would ford the gentle surf to the beach. They would wade in the river, or let Nathan ferry them if it was too deep. Some rode horseback upriver or through the village and up to the waterfall. Sometimes Ben and Keith, like the village children, would act as guides. The tourists would often ask Nathan directions but he didn’t speak English. If they wanted to cross the river he would simply point into his dugout and say, “Sit!” They would sit, holding tight; he stood imperiously at the back, poling or rowing, his pale blue eyes serious in his brown face, curly blond hair shining.
At three the Paladín would be gone and only the six or seven gringo houses and the two hundred people of the village remained. Dogs barking, chopping wood. When it got dark the pulsating sound of crickets and peepers, and later the cry of owls.
Liz and Jay often came down from their house on the rise. They were old friends, from New Mexico. The couples would drink jamaica juice or manzanilla tea, smoke marijuana and watch the sun set pink on the bay. Maya would grill fish or chicken, with beans and rice, fresh greens from the garden. During the rainy season, especially, they would stay up late playing Scrabble or Monopoly or gin. Sometimes Ben and Keith spent the night up at Liz and Jay’s, cooking fudge, sleeping on a waterbed under the stars. Liz and Jay were weavers; the boys made a hundred God’s eyes from scraps of wool.
They had to renew their tourist cards every six months. Maya, the children, Liz, and Jay just made a quick trip to the border and back, but Buzz usually had several weeks of business in New Mexico. Talks with his business partner, tax papers, leases to sign. In the beginning, each time he went he scored heroin, but it was less each time. A week of staying high, a week of being sick. He has the “dengue,” Maya told Pilla and Teodora. Once Teodora brought him a tea to cure him, and it did, overnight, all the withdrawal symptoms gone, even though it was a cure for dengue, a kind of malaria. A tea of papaya leaves, chamomile, and a horse turd. Finally, the second year, when Buzz made his trip he came back clean, with no drugs. That was the time he came back with the scuba tanks. And as the days and months went by that world began to seem far in the past. Connections and dealers and police, fear seemed far in the past.
Everyone was strong and healthy. There was no candy or sodas. No one fell from trees or rocks. The rare times anyone was sick Maya and Liz consulted the Merck manual and a PDR, if necessary gave antibiotics.
Keith got a bad sore throat that didn’t get better even with injections of ampicillin. Maya took him in the Paladín to Puerto Vallarta, flew with him to a clinic in Guadalajara. The doctor there took his tonsils out and kept him for a few days. After he was better he and Maya had a three-day holiday. They took taxis and buses all over town, spent hours in the market and shops buying presents and supplies. Keith loved the telephone and the television. They called room service for hamburgers and ice cream, went to a movie and to a bullfight. El Cordobés himself was staying in their hotel, signed his autograph for Keith.
And then getting out of the elevator she saw Victor, a drug dealer, in the lobby. She tried to shoo Keith back in but the doors closed and there Victor was. Out of prison. For years he had always found Buzz, in New Mexico, in Chiapas. Several times he had burned Buzz for thousands of dollars. But there is no recourse when that happens. It was because Maya had gone to buy the heroin, and didn’t test it. Maya’s fault, Buzz had slapped her so hard she fell, cracked her head. In Guatemala Buzz had been strung out and sick. Victor made him crawl across the floor to get a fix.
Close, always he stood so close you could smell him. Dark, almost black, lean, feral. He was an orphan, from Mexico City streets. They had first met him in Acapulco. He had been a gigolo then, too, a handsome beach boy with a throaty laugh, shiny white teeth. One night he had stolen all of an old woman’s money and jewels and had also taken her false teeth.
In front of the elevator Victor gripped Maya’s arm. “Where’s Buzz?”
“Ajijic,” she said. “We live in Ajijic.” She in turn gripped Keith’s wrist, praying that he wouldn’t speak. “Don’t come, Victor. He’s clean now.”
“Oh, I’ll stop by sometime … Give me some money, Maya, so I won’t join you for dinner. I only have a … Give me some money, Maya.”
She gave him what was in her purse. Fifty thousand pesos. “Ciao.”
The next morning Maya and Keith flew to Vallarta, arrived in time to catch the Paladín. The radio on the Paladín blared the Rolling Stones and the tourists were drinking rum, laughing and talking, necking, throwing up. The sea was rough. Keith cheered when they finally reached the white rocks and saw the bay of Yelapa. Pelicans dove all around them; dolphins raced the boat. Buzz and Ben and Nathan waved from the beach.
Maya and Keith talked at once while they unpacked presents. Butterfly nets, games, a periscope, a telescope, a globe of the world. Peanut butter! Chocolate bars! They had brought a knife for Juanito and a canary in a wooden cage. Cans and cans of flowers and vegetables for Maya and Teodora, who insisted they had to be planted this very moment as tonight was the new moon.
Buzz helped them plant, starting the holes with a pick, carrying buckets from the river. When they were through they sat outside. Ben was in his hammock, insisted he could read perfectly by the light of the stars. Keith stood at the fence with the telescope, cried out when he spotted a school of phosphorescent fish in the bay. “Quick let’s go swimming!”
Later Buzz told her that it was dangerous to swim around the phosphorescent fish, because sharks are attracted by the light. But that night they dove among them with masks and flippers, treaded water and watched the patterns on the tapestries made by the fish. Skinny, shivering, Ben and Keith lay with the telescope on the beach, taking turns looking at the stars. Out in the rocking of the sea Buzz and Maya embraced, salty and intertwined, laughing wet into the warm night sky. They lay on the sand later, by the boys, and passed the telescope back and forth. Buzz stroked Maya’s arm, laid his hand gently on her belly.
“It must be a girl,” he said. “You’re still so small.”
Maya sat up on her elbow, kissed Buzz’s salty lips.
“I’m glad about the baby now. What a lucky baby!”
At that moment, then, she believed that their baby would be coming into a sweet safe world.
Keith reminded them that they had brought marshmallows from Guadalajara for cocoa. Buzz built a fire in the huge copper pot on the living room floor; Maya cooked hot chocolate on the Coleman stove, beat it frothy with a wooden whisk. It was one in the morning, but they got Nathan up out of bed to join them.
For the next few days, instead of school, Buzz and the boys and Juanito caught butterflies that fluttered undulating in the killing jar and were mounted on cotton batting under glass. What they hadn’t bought, what they really needed, was a butterfly book.
Early one morning Buzz and the boys packed sandwiches and jamaica juice and went up river, looking for the neon-green-and-black butterflies they had seen in the lavender lantana on the trail to Chacala. Nathan had begged to go too, so after Pilla built the fire and brought water Maya told her she could have the rest of the day off. Sulking, Pilla left. She wanted to be with Nathan or to stay in the beautiful garden.
Maya raked the floor, lay in a hammock to watch the gulls go upriver. From time to time she got up to check the beans, lay back down in a lazy reverie. A hawk soared high above the strangler fig and on the far bank zopilotes flapped around the carcass of a deer.
It was pleasant to have the house alone. She lay in the scent of the datura until she heard the whistle of the Paladín. She got up then and put more wood on the fire. With a long fork she toasted green chilies, peeled them with a paring knife. They were pungent and hot. Tears came to her eyes and she wiped them with the back of her hand.
Victor had appeared without a sound, without warning. The river was too high to cross. He must have walked across the beach and over the trail. His expensive shoes were dusty from the path. Maya smelled his sweat and cologne. She didn’t speak or think. She stabbed him in the stomach with the paring knife. Blood gushed down his white sharkskin pants. He laughed at her, grabbed a rag.
“Get me a bandage.”
She didn’t move. With a thief’s instinct he went straight for the basket where the first-aid kit was. He put alcohol on the still bleeding cut, bound it tightly. Blood seeped red against the white gauze, his black hard skin.
He went up the tapanco, came down wearing a pair of Buzz’s pants, a T-shirt that said SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH. It had been a present, a joke. He poured himself a glass of raicilla and stretched out in a hammock near her, rocked himself with one foot, bare now.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “it was only a flesh wound.”
“Go away, Victor. Buzz is clean. I’m having a baby. Leave us alone.”
“I can’t wait to see old Buzz.”
“He’ll be back late. You’ll miss the boat.”
“I’ll wait.”
They waited; Victor in the hammock, Maya still standing at the stove, still holding the knife. The Paladín whistled and set out to sea.
They came back, laughing on the trail. Oh what wonderful butterflies. But Ben and Keith had wood ticks, in their hair, on their legs. They knelt in the grass while Maya got them out; some had to be burned out with a cigarette. The boys took soap then and went running to the river to bathe.
Buzz and Victor sat at the table, talking softly, sharing a joint.
“Were you surprised to see Victor?” Buzz asked. Maya didn’t answer; she chopped meat and onions for tacos.
“She was surprised,” Victor said. “Gave me a swell welcome.”
She sent the boys up to Liz and Jay’s with some green chili and a note asking if they could spend the night. They were pleased, took the telescope, and the butterfly nets for morning.
Dusk began to fall. Teodora and Donasiano passed by the gate with her dishes. Her chickens squawked as they settled in the bushes and trees for the night. After dinner Maya cleared the table and took Nathan into the adobe room. She lit a lantern, checked the bed for scorpions. Nathan’s eyes were closing; he was tired after going upriver, but she continued to sing to him and stroke his hair even after he was asleep. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” “The Red River Valley,” she sang to herself, tears soaking the pillow.
Buzz had built a big fire in the copper pot; the men sat cross-legged by it, drinking coffee, smoking marijuana. Maya sat at the table with a glass of raicilla. She left, obediently, when Buzz said she must be tired, ready to hit the sack. “Duerme con los angelitos,” Victor said.
The surf crashed on the far beach, the river lapped at the bank just outside. Somewhere someone was chopping wood, someone else was playing a guitar. She tried not to hear their voices beneath those sounds, but couldn’t keep from listening.
“I figure you owe me five thousand. Dollars,” Buzz said.
“Jesus that was a raw deal, ese. What a scam … I lost ten thousand on it myself. That’s why I’ve been looking for you. I can make it up to you, wait till you see what I got.”
“What, some of that caca-colored Mexican shit?”
“No way. This is a sealed box. Sealed. Glass vials inside. Pure medicinal morphine. Ten milligrams a pop. Check it out, man. Sealed. We’re talking unadulterated high. This is my apology to you, brother.”
Silence. She didn’t want to hear, to look. She drank more raicilla, covered her head with a pillow, but she couldn’t keep herself from crawling to the edge of the tapanco and looking down, like people stare spellbound by a fire, a fatal accident. She watched, even though she was sickened by that look on their faces, both gaunt, skull-like in the firelight. The look of the addict about to fix, intensely sexual, a look of greed, desperate need. Close to each other they tied up each other’s arm. Victor heated the spoon in the fire. “Go easy, man, this shit ain’t cut like we’re used to.” Buzz filled the needle first, tried and tried until he finally found a vein. The needle filled with blood and he jammed in the plunger. The tie fell from his arm. His face turned to stone, his eyes euphoric, hooded. His body too seemed to turn to stone, but he rocked slowly, smiling, the erotic smile of a figure on an Etruscan tomb. He was moaning, softly, like a chant. Victor watched him, grinning, and then he filled the needle and fixed. The minute Victor got a hit he fell forward into the flames. Maya screamed but Buzz didn’t move. She leapt down, far, landed on her knees. Her knees were scraped; tears stung her eyes, a child with skinned knees. There was a nauseating stench of burning hair and skin. She grabbed Victor and beat his head into the sand. He was dead. Buzz was lying down now. He was breathing shallowly, his pulse was slow. Maya couldn’t wake him. She covered him with a Navajo blanket. She blew out the lantern and sat in the dark. Shaking, Maya sat at the table for a long time, utterly alone.
She checked on Nathan. He slept soundly. She kissed his damp salty hair. Back in the living room she hid the needle and the box of morphine in a canister. She emptied Victor’s pockets, burned his wallet and ID in the remaining coals. She rolled his glasses up in the SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH shirt and put it in the tapanco.
She dragged his body by the feet, out of the house, over the grass and out the gate. She rested then in the moonlight. There was a swiftly moving line of cutter ants in the path. Maya began to giggle, hysterically, but then was quiet, hauling him over the rushes to the riverbank, where she finally heaved his body into the boat. He stank of burned skin and shit. She gagged and vomited. She shoved at the panga but it didn’t move; at last she got down on her hands and knees and pushed it with her shoulder until it slipped slowly into the water. Splashing in the cold water she chased the boat and jumped in, tugging at his arms and legs to get at the oars. The dugout glided smoothly as she paddled, a breeze blew in her sweat-soaked hair. She pulled the oars in when she reached the boca, praying to hit the incoming surf just right. A wave sent the boat high into the air. It landed with a whap, spinning wildly. She rowed furiously then, humming to calm herself, paddling first to one side then the other.
The canoe was in the middle of the bay, skimming smoothly and evenly now out toward sea. A mist had covered the moon and stars so it was dark, but the waves hitting the receding beach shone neon silver. There was only one tiny light on in the village. Her hands were blistering but she kept rowing, past the white rocks, past the point. She rowed until the light in the village disappeared and until she could feel the boat being pulled south by the swift current outside the bay. The little boat spun and teetered as she pulled and shoved at Victor’s body. At last she heaved it into the water where it regained its lightness and sank in an instant.
Her lungs were bursting, heart bounding with fear as she rowed, fighting the swift current to get back into the bay. Once inside she had to keep pausing to hear where she was, listening for the gentle whisper of waves breaking on the beach. The mist had turned to clouds. It was so dark, her hands so bloody now she couldn’t beach the canoe. It capsized; she lost the oars. She swam then underwater until she was free of the boat. Flailing, choking, she realized that she could stand. Cool white foam swirled around her. She lay in the sand until she could make it across the river. The river water seemed warm, heavy after the ocean. Crabs, a turtle, bumped her leg; schools of minnows tickled her ankles like raindrops.
She reached the path and by force of habit followed the line of cutter ants into the garden. Even in the dark she could see that they had eaten the stock and the roses. Two donkeys were in the vegetable garden; she shooed them out and shut the gate, the barn door. She giggled. Inside, Buzz had moved to a hammock. Nathan slept peacefully. It was still dark, but roosters had begun to crow, donkeys to bray.
Maya was shaking as she bandaged her badly blistered hands. Buzz woke, sat up straight, disoriented.
“Where’s the box?”
“It’s safe.”
“Where’s the box.”
“In the blue canister.”
“Where’s Victor?”
“He’s dead. He OD’d.”
“Where’s Victor?”
“He’s gone. Go up to bed.”
Buzz went out to the far corner of the garden to pee. The sky was turning lavender. Stiff-legged he walked back to the ladder and climbed up to the tapanco. He had the box with him.
Maya dragged the copper fire kettle up the trail beyond the house, dumped the still red embers and ashes into the flowing water. She scoured the pot with sand.
Inside she made a fire to boil water, put dry bandages on her hands. Everything was hard, muffled, because of her hands. Raking, sweeping. Awkwardly, determinedly she swept the sand of the living room until it was smooth, as if no one had been there.
Pilla arrived before Nathan woke. Maya had changed and combed her hair, was drinking coffee at the table.
“Doña! Are you ill? And your hands! ¿Qué pasó?”
“Pilla, it was a terrible night. The señor was very ill, maybe the dengue. I stayed up with him, fell from the ladder onto my hands.”
Immediately, when an addiction resumes, the lies resume. Fear comes back.
Suspicion comes. Those gringos must have gotten drunk, Pilla thought. My poor Nathan!
“And the Mexican man?”
“He is gone.”
Pilla went out into the garden.
“The boat is gone too,” she said drily.
“No te digo pues … it was a terrible night.”
“¡Aí, y las rosas! The ants ate them!”
Losing patience, Maya interrupted her.
“Please, dress Nathan and take him for breakfast in the village. Bring him back at dinnertime. I have to rest. I’m worried about my baby.”
“You’re not spotting or cramping?”
“No, but I’m exhausted. Please, take Nathan for me.” Maya thought she might scream, sob, vomit, but she stayed calm, rocked Nathan, awake now, weeping bitterly about the missing boat. Luis came running down the trail, his machete glinting in the sun. Hot already.
“Fíjase, señora. Ronco found your canoe smashed up at the point, on the pelican rocks.”
“And the man? Maybe he’s drowned!” Pilla was cheering up with all this news to tell in the village.
“No. He left on foot,” Maya said. “I expect the canoe just came unmoored. The river is high. We’ll get a new one, a nicer one, Nathan.” For God’s sake please go, all of you, she said to herself.
“Didn’t like his looks. Callejero … vicioso,” Pilla whispered to Luis. Vicious, the Spanish word for addict.
Maya lay in the hammock under the mango tree, was falling asleep when Liz appeared, smiling at the gate. Good morning! She was beautiful in a pink shift, her red hair crackling in the strong sunlight.
“Come in, Liz. I’m too tired to get up.”
The women embraced; Liz pulled a leather chair out by the hammock. She smelled clean.
“You are so clean!” Tears ran down Maya’s face.
“What’s wrong, love? Oh, is it the baby? You’re not losing the baby?” She held Maya’s hand.
“No. It’s Buzz. A connection showed up yesterday; Buzz is back on drugs.”
“He’s been clean a long time, Maya. He’ll do it again. Be patient. He loves you and the children. He’s a very beautiful man, a man with a beautiful noble soul. And you love him very much … be patient.”
Maya nodded while Liz spoke, shivering, her teeth chattering.
“I want to go back to the real world,” she said.
Liz pointed up to the green palms, to the sky. “This is real, Maya. You’re just worn out. Rest all day. Jay took the boys and Juanito up past the waterfall to the orchards.”
The women drank tea. Liz stroked Maya’s hair, patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It will be all right.” Maya fell asleep then and Liz left.
Maya was awakened when she heard the Paladín’s whistle. Is it coming or going? I don’t know if I’m coming or going! Why do I make jokes at the worst of times, like Mama did?
The Paladín headed out of the bay toward the ocean. Maya lay back in the hammock in the hot sultry afternoon. No, she thought, it isn’t going to be all right. The fear and the desolation felt familiar to her, like coming home. Ashes.