Dr. George Clancy kept admonishing me, saying that I should not be seeing too many visitors. But that didn’t stop him from coming into my hospital room every other hour or so. I came to expect him.
“I don’t think I’m that bad off, Dr. Clancy,” I said the fifth time he came in. “It’s really just a flesh wound. It’d be nice to go home.”
“Please, call me George. And it’s more than a flesh wound, Romilia. He nicked you pretty deep. You were lucky. We all were lucky, I guess,” he said, his voice turning humble, embarrassed. He smiled, then grew serious again, professional. “Besides, the whole incident was very traumatic for you. I think it’s good for you to rest here for a couple of days.”
I couldn’t help but think he used his professional authority for personal gains. But I let him. It was nice being waited on hand and foot. And I was tired. Very tired.
Once Mamá came, she never left. She had her sister, my aunt, come up from Atlanta and take care of Sergio at the house. She did allow Sergio to come in once, after I had pleaded, then demanded of her, to let me see my son.
He came in. His eyes kept on me, his face suspended, as if the wrong wind could blow it down. At first he did not come to me, as if afraid, frightened by what he later called “the big Bandaid” around my neck. I called him over, “Veníte, mi corazón,” familiar words for him, ones that beckoned him my way. He stood by the bed. I pushed my fingers through his hair.
“Did you get the bad guys?” he asked, his little voice trickling into my ear.
“Yes, mi corazón. I got them.”
Then he stared at the bandage. “But they got you, too.”
After a short visit, and some coaxed kisses, my aunt led him out of the room, leaving my mother to weep, and me to stare, with tears rolling away from my own sight.
My mother was asleep the time Lieutenant McCabe came in. He had a fresh newspaper rolled up under his arm. He plopped it down on the bed. “Here’s some reading material for when you’re feeling better. You’re the newest Nashville hero.”
“Heroine,” I said.
“Right. By the way, the mayor called me this morning, after reading the paper. He wanted me to extend to you his hopes that you get better soon, and that he looks forward to seeing you back in service, especially after you’ve shown yourself to be of such a high caliber, yada yada yada. He’s also very thankful for you bringing peace to our fair city by clearing up the death-squad scam that Wilson stirred up.”
I laughed, though it hurt my neck some to do that. “Is this the same guy I barged in on the other day, with Tekún Umán?”
“Yes, well, the mayor’s feeling a little humbled by the cassette that you got, with Wilson’s confession. He also said he’s cutting all ties with Mr. Murillo—or Tekún Umán—until this is all cleared up.”
“Will there be an investigation?”
McCabe sighed. “I’m sure there will be. But Tekún’s lawyers are already making statements this morning on the radio and television, saying that Wilson’s taped confession is not enough to bring their client to court.”
“I see. And what about dear Tekún? Is he faring well?”
Again, McCabe hesitated. Then he just blurted it out. “He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. Left last night.”
“Gone?! Where the hell did he go?”
“Supposedly his personal doctor in Atlanta said that, due to his peculiar health status, Tekún needed to be taken directly to his own private-care facilities. About three hours after Wilson killed himself, a team of men supposedly came in from Atlanta and checked Tekún out of the hospital. They had their own emergency health equipment, transportation, everything. They flew out on a private jet from the airport around five-thirty this morning. It was destined to land in Atlanta. But it never showed up there.”
Son of a bitch, I thought. No doubt he’s somewhere in a ritzy hospital in Guatemala City right now.
McCabe interrupted my quick surge of anger. “Listen. You don’t need to be worrying about people like Tekún right now. You’ve been wounded in action. You’ve got some health time, plus some of that ‘emotional stress’ whatever-they-call-it time coming up. Once you check out of here, I don’t expect to see you in the office for a couple of weeks.”
Maybe four, I corrected him in my mind, adding on my vacation time. But I didn’t tell him that.
“Tell me, how did you know so quickly that Jerry had set up to kill Tekún and that boy Miguel? Looks to me like he had set it up to make it appear that Miguel was shooting Tekún.”
I sighed, more to catch my breath. “He had. But it was the bullet holes that Tekún had made. They were aimed at Jerry, not Miguel. That made me think about listening to the tape of the shooting sequence. Lucky we had Miguel wired. His recorder caught the whole thing. You can hear it clear as a bell. The bullet sequence is all wrong. Two forty-five shots, then Tekún’s shots. Then one parabellum shot after Jerry yelled. That was Jerry’s shot, the only parabellum in the room. Jerry had the forty-five in one hand and the parabellum in the other. He first shot Tekún twice with the forty-five, then shot Miguel twice with his parabellum. Then he placed the forty-five in Miguel’s dead hand and aimed it at his own arm, wounding himself. This made it look like Miguel had shot Jerry, even leaving gunpowder residue on Miguel’s hand. The problem for Jerry was he faked his ‘piercing cry’ of pain before he had really been shot. Once you hear it on the tape, it sounds almost ludicrous.”
“So Jerry carried two guns, and he was shooting with both hands?” asked McCabe.
“He was ambidextrous. I watched him doodle a great cartoon of Mrs. Hatcher with his left hand. Then I saw him draw his gun on those two illegal Mexicans with his right. He could shoot with either hand.”
“So once you suspected your partner,” McCabe pondered, “you called the newspaper about the computer …”
“Right. I figured that the whole Kaibil angle was a hoax. Jerry had created that file in Sáenz’s computer right when we were all sitting around it. No doubt right when he had ‘accidentally’ spilled coffee on the table, which distracted Stapleton and me. Jerry also set the computer’s calendar back two days, to November first, to make it look like Sáenz had created that computer file before he died. I’m sure he would have tried to correct the date to cover his tracks, but the phone call came about Gato Negro getting beat up. We ran out of the newspaper offices before he could fiddle with the computer any more.”
McCabe looked down at my bed, shook his head, and smiled. Then he frowned. I supposed he was thinking about the dead detective, a killer who had worked under McCabe’s watch. I wanted to tell him not to think about such thoughts. Before I could say anything, McCabe grabbed my toe underneath the sheet and squeezed it slightly. “Good work, Romilia.” With that, he left my mother and me. Mamá still dozed in the chair to my side.
Later that day I stood up to look at the bandage in the mirror. It curved around my neck and held tight to the wound. They had changed it again, so I could not see any stain of blood. They said that there were twenty-four stitches holding it together. My jaw tightened. That hurt. Yet it still tightened, thinking of images of Frankenstein, his head sewn to his neck to keep it in place. I wondered about scarring. I tossed my hair over to the left side of my neck, then tried to imagine how I could cover it completely. “Maybe if I grow my hair out just a little bit longer,” I muttered to the mirror. My jaw then started to tremble, as if it heard me planning to hide the scar and take back my appearance. For a quick moment I was glad that the bastard had blown his own head away. Then I knew I was not, for I had seen it, had heard the pistol report, and saw his hand barely jerk as the bullet entered his head and rattled his entire skull for a scant second before making his whole body drop to the ground before me. It would take longer than a couple of weeks to forget that scene. It would take time to try to figure out, or make sense out of the fact that someone I was beginning to trust was in fact a killer. Then, I knew, there would be no figuring out anything. There would only be time in its merciful passing.
A nurse walked in. “You’re feeling a little better, Ms. Chacón?” she asked, seeing that I was out of bed. Then she handed me a small package. “Someone delivered this earlier today.”
I thanked her and crawled back into my bed. She checked my water pitcher and clipboard, then walked out. Mamá stirred about that time. “What is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Looks like a card. And a present.” I pulled the envelope and the tiny box out of the package. First I read the letter. It had been typed.
Mi amor,
Though I have had to make a sudden departure due to my health, please know that I take you with me. These have certainly been difficult days, haven’t they? Sometimes it is best to pull back, survey the world around you, and get a better sense of the situation you are living in.
Yet one thing that I cannot separate myself from is my memory of you. If it were not for you, I would not be alive this instant, writing this letter, thinking about you. It is because of you that I exist. And now, my existence desires only to think of you. Yes, I know that some harsh words have been exchanged between us recently, but I wish to make amends, to reconcile, and move on. Much like García Márquez once said, “The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” I certainly hope this is the case with us.
In the spirit of that same book, I leave you with this little gift. See it as a true act of commitment, one which I am willing to wait for. If Florentino Ariza could wait fifty-one years, nine months, and four days to tell the woman of his heart that he loved her, then I too must rise to such challenges of passion.
Forever yours,
Tekún
Obviously, Tekún had read Love in the Time of Cholera.
My mother appreciated the literary reference. “Well, now, he truly is a romantic, isn’t he?” she said, beaming at me.
“Mamá, haven’t you read the papers? Haven’t you heard what I’ve told you about him? He’s a drug runner, for god’s sake! He carved up that boy! And … and Wilson, too.”
She just shook her head. I wondered if her tears would come again. “I don’t know what to believe anymore …”
I shook my head, then opened the box. It was a ring. The rocks on it almost sung with sparkles.
“Dios mío,” my mother exclaimed. “María y todos los ángeles …”
I didn’t hear her very well. Before she had a chance to tell me what a catch he’d be, I slammed the little box closed, lifted it to the side of my head, and flung it across the room. I’m proud to say it slammed directly into the garbage can.
“¡Hija! What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?” She made to retrieve it from the garbage can. Just then a cleaning woman walked in. I had learned her name earlier that day, Betsy Anne. She was a young white divorcé with three kids under the age of seven.
“Mamá, leave it in the garbage can! Do not take it out!”
She heard the forthrightness in my voice, something I rarely used on her. Since it was so rare, she stopped herself.
“But Romi, you can’t throw such a ring away, for god’s sake. It could be worth a great deal.”
“Betsy Anne, you can have it.”
“Have what?” she asked, peering into the can.
“That box. It’s got a ring in it. Keep it. Sell it. I don’t care.”
“Why, thanks very much, Ms. Chacón!” she said, fishing the box out of the can.
It was the next day that we learned what Betsy Anne did with the ring. She took it to a jeweler, who estimated its value at four thousand dollars. Betsy Anne called me to make sure it was okay if she kept it. She even told me the price. With no hesitancy I said, “Of course. Use it for all it’s worth.” She did. She sold it to the same jeweler, bought herself some clothes, took her kids out to a nice restaurant, bought them some clothes, then put the rest in the bank.
My mother just shook her head and crossed her arms. She stared up at the television while I closed my eyes. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”
“I don’t expect you to, Mamá.”
“I mean, you could have done the same. Kept it. Sold it.”
“Yes. But I didn’t.”
She didn’t argue anymore, knowing that I wouldn’t move from my ethical spot. Perhaps she agreed with me. She pulled some tamales from a bag. I was glad; I had been smelling them for several minutes. “Doña Marina made these just this morning for you. She wants to get over and see you some evening, after she closes up the shop.”
“Great,” I said. I truly did look forward to the visit.
We sat for a long while, not eating. A tear, silent, ran down my mother’s aging cheek. She turned and looked at me. Then she asked, “Hija, it’s over with, isn’t it?”
Then a tear rushed into the corner of my eye as I saw the fear in her face, one that wanted with all its heart to rest, to forget about a beloved country and its bloody history. Yet this had been too hard on my mamá, these recent days in this new city, when the killers of another time and place had supposedly followed us to our new home. I didn’t know what I was angrier about: the fact that Wilson had killed, or that he had created a huge façade that had, momentarily, turned this entire city against my own people. Or because Wilson’s well-fabricated lie had struck close to home, and had hurled my mother into a painful, unnecessary past. But now everyone knew it had all been a lie. There were no Kaibiles. And that bastard was dead.
We ate the tamales. Mamá flipped the television remote that dangled from a cable next to my bed. “This TV doesn’t have Univisión. How can I keep up with my telenovelas?”
Her complaint rang in my ears like a blessing.