Dawn sprang in like lions through the windows. Brenda had left for work at 4:30 a.m., so there was no one to wake, and Maya strode freely up and down the hall outside her old room in a T-shirt and purple sweatpants she had found in the basement. Moving helped her think. She understood her father’s story now, but not what it meant in terms of Frank. Was it that Maya, like Pixán, had forgotten something important?
Or was it something else? Something more obvious?
Looking back on herself at seventeen was almost painful. She’d sat alone day after day at the library, so absorbed in the mystery of her father’s book—translating it, taking notes, flipping carefully through its brittle pages—that she hadn’t noticed the creepy part-time librarian who must have been watching her from behind the reference desk.
As she read the book, he had read her. It must have been easy. Anyone could see that she held those pages close. Of course Frank had used them to get to know her. He would also, as a library employee, have had access to her lending history and seen that she was interested in Guatemala. The Frank she knew could have easily made up the story about sneaking up a Mayan pyramid at dawn. She doubted very much now that this had happened, or that he had ever been to Guatemala, period. He must have figured it would impress her to say he had, and he’d been right.
But he hadn’t stopped there. When he’d learned the book was written by her dead father, Frank’s interest grew. Now she wondered if this was part of why he’d chosen her. Like Cristina, estranged from her parents, Maya had a hole in her life—and Frank had seen it as an opportunity.
He wanted to take up space in her life, to be the most important person to her—and he wanted it immediately. If she wasn’t available when he wanted her to be—if she had plans with Aubrey, say—then he was going to make her late, punish her somehow.
The first time he asked Maya to tell him about her father was on a hot, lazy day as they sat in the grass on the town common, sipping on cherry slushies.
What do you want to know? she’d asked.
His story.
And he would have known that stories were all she had.
The one she told him was her favorite, one her mom had told her when she was young. Brenda had often told it to her before bed, and like so many stories told this way, parent to child, it had taken on the quality of a fairy tale over the years, polished smooth over countless tellings. Some details faded while others grew exaggerated, but the heart of it had stayed the same.
The story went that Maya’s mom knew almost nothing about Guatemala before she went there, and this was part of what drew her to it. She was twenty-two years old and had never stepped foot outside the US. All three of her brothers had moved to other states, leaving only her there to care for her parents, still grieving the death of their elder daughter, as they aged. Part of Brenda had always known she’d never truly leave Pittsfield, which was maybe why another, less dutiful part of her had been desperate to get away. And Guatemala seemed to her about as far from Pittsfield as she could get.
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.