Part 10 (2/2)

”Maybe you just needed a change of scenery.”

Will raised one eyebrow. ”Could be. I'm so relaxed right now I don't know what to do with myself.” He wiggled his arms and his shoulders around, rotated his head. ”My neck is sore, though.”

Monica held up a hand. ”Don't look at me. I'm on vacation.”

Will signaled to the shopkeeper with two fingers to bring more beer. Monica sat back in her chair and looked around the store at all the food products she hadn't seen in years. There was something about this night-her senses were sharper, her eyes keener. Maybe it was the thick beach smells, the shadows of night, just being in El Salvador, all of it so, so intoxicating. Will was right about this place. Her whole body felt effervescent.

When Monica looked up, she was stunned to see that Will was watching her, his head c.o.c.ked to the side a bit. A faint smile pa.s.sed over his lips. His dark eyes were b.u.t.tery, intense, and unflinching, and without a word he handed his admiration over like a parcel, warm and squirming on her lap. By the time she recognized it, she had been staring back at him for a long time, reading his face, until she understood what they had just exchanged. She could almost hear the groaning s.h.i.+ft of weight, the settling into place of something newly created.

She tore her eyes away. She put her hand up to her forehead to try to cover her eyes. The skin on her face and neck was burning. ”Maybe we should get back,” she said, looking around.

”Oh, come on, just a little longer. I'm enjoying the crowd,” he said, gesturing toward the empty room behind him. ”And I know for sure that you're not anxious to get back to that decrepit guesthouse with the sh.o.r.e crabs staring up at you in the shower.”

Monica smiled, amused by his reference to the creatures that populated her childhood. ”I guess you met the caballeros. Gentlemen caballeros. Gentlemen-isn't that a funny name for crab? I used to know their Latin name. Anyway, I told you it was rustic out here.”

Will opened his eyes wide. ”I used to define rustic rustic as camping on a beach in Rhode Island, where a distant relative to the as camping on a beach in Rhode Island, where a distant relative to the caballero caballero is served with drawn b.u.t.ter and a side of onion rings.” is served with drawn b.u.t.ter and a side of onion rings.”

Monica chuckled and began to peel the gold-edged ace-of-hearts label off her beer bottle. There was a moment of silence between them, and she could tell Will was looking at her again. ”I remember watching a caballero caballero crawl on my mother's back when she was asleep on the beach,” Monica said cautiously. ”She mumbled in her sleep and it scared the crab away. I'll never forget it. She revealed something I wasn't supposed to know.” crawl on my mother's back when she was asleep on the beach,” Monica said cautiously. ”She mumbled in her sleep and it scared the crab away. I'll never forget it. She revealed something I wasn't supposed to know.”

Will leaned forward. ”What?”

Monica took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to decide whether she should share. She sipped her beer and looked at his face. Even though it was half-lit, she still glimpsed a confidence and maturity that she wasn't accustomed to seeing in men under fifty: that paternally driven instinct to protect, to identify problems at the root and fix them.

Monica picked up a napkin and began to fold it into ever smaller triangles before she spoke. ”My mother confirmed my suspicion that she was having an affair with a married man. It was the saddest moment of my life, next to the day my father told me she had drowned.”

”How old were you?”

”Twelve.”

”That's a lot for a kid to deal with. Supposedly, most kids feel responsible for their parents' marriages.”

”Exactly.” Monica nodded. ”And I don't know why, but my father is vague about anything having to do with my mother, her death, our life here.” She gestured behind her, in the direction of the beach. ”Marcy told me that she got blasted by my dad for giving me the airline ticket. They had a big blowout over it. But when I ask him point-blank what the big deal is, he just brushes me off?' She tossed the napkin back into the center of the table, then watched it, the way you toss a stick into a bonfire and wait for it to burn. She narrowed her eyes. ”I've come to the conclusion that he's afraid I'm going to find something out about my mother that will hurt me.” She looked up at Will. ”But what could be worse than her affair?”

Will drew his eyes down to the dusty tiles of the floor. ”Something about her death?”

Monica shrugged, looked up to the exposed wood beams of the room.

”I think this conversation calls for cigars,” Will said. ”Will you indulge me? We're going to be here awhile.”

”Where are you going to get a cigar?”

Will held up a finger and summoned the shopkeeper, and a few minutes later she produced two dried-out Dominican cigars, which she said she kept in stock for one of the doctors at the clinic who came by infrequently. She chopped off the ends and handed the cigars over with a book of matches. Will lit both cigars in his mouth and handed one to Monica. When she took the cigar into her mouth, the moisture he'd left behind on the tip felt like an unintentionally intimate exchange. She closed her eyes as the smoke rolled back toward her face.

”Okay,” he said, settling back in his chair. He took a puff of his cigar, tilted his head back, and blew upward. ”Take me back to the days just before she disappeared, to the first domino that knocked everything else down. Start with what you had for breakfast that morning.” He pointed the cigar at her. ”And I bet you still remember that detail.”

Monica closed her eyes against the screen of smoke that rose from her own mouth. She thought it was interesting that her family's past was somehow becoming a part of Will's present.

chapter 11 EL CADEJO.

On a damp morning in June of 1985, Bruce was in his study, furiously tapping away at his electric typewriter. He was a correspondent for the a.s.sociated Press then, and he was covering the Zona Rosa ma.s.sacre: thirteen people, including four U.S. marines, were gunned down in cold blood in San Salvador's lively strip of upscale eateries and bars. The photos strewn about Bruce's desk showed bloodied corpses lying at the foot of a sidewalk cafe. Someone had covered the victims' faces with linen restaurant napkins. On the phone a few minutes later, Monica heard her father shout, ”Of course the shooters weren't real militares; militares; they were communists in stolen military uniforms” they were communists in stolen military uniforms”

Monica stared at her mushy Cap'n Crunch cereal, unable to eat. She knew it wasn't the right time to talk to her dad about her mother and Max, but seeing the color photos sitting on his desk had triggered something, a realization of what Max and his friends were a part of. All the talk of fairness for the poor and equality among citizens didn't add up to those horrifying photos: the old lady who had been selling roses just minutes before the shooting now lay dead next to the man who had been waiting for his chauffeur. Each victim had sprayed the sidewalk with the same red blood. What more proof did anyone need of equality?

Everyone was so anesthetized from all the violence. In fact, Monica was sure that the witnesses who had spilled out of the Mexican restaurant across the street had eventually gone back to stuff themselves with chimichangas and margaritas. But Monica's own numbness had just worn off at the sight of those crime-scene photos. She felt dirty from exposure; from knowing people who believed that the importance of their beliefs stood above the right of others to be alive. If her mother's philosophy was true about the ocean claiming that which was unclean and making it pure, then El Salvador was due for a flood of biblical proportions. Downtown, thirteen people were dead. It wouldn't be long before something terrible happened, and Alma was right in the middle of it.

At school that week, some of Monica's friends had expressed shock that Monica's parents didn't employ armed bodyguards like all of the other affluent families. ”Your mother es una loca es una loca,” someone had said in the Spanglish that was the official language of the American School. ”She's going to get secuestrada secuestrada by by guerrilleros guerrilleros.'” It had become fas.h.i.+onable among teenagers at the American School to brag that their parents were rich enough to be worth kidnapping. ”I'd be embarra.s.sed if I were you,' a cla.s.smate advised Monica. ”I'd worry people might think we couldn't afford bodyguards.'

If they only knew that Mami and I once gutted fish for one hundred guerrilleros guerrilleros, Monica thought.

The answer to the family troubles came to her from the back of the box of Cap'n Crunch cereal, with its offer of temporary tattoos with three proofs of purchase. It was the cereal her grandmother Winters always got for her when she visited her home in Connecticut. Grandmother Winters had two extra bed rooms, a perfect place to start a new life. Monica decided right then and there that they had to get out of El Salvador. It was time to flee.

Monica went back into her father's study and approached his desk just as he pulled a page out of the typewriter. ”There,” he said. ”I have to run to the office to wire this. You want to go for a ride?”

They got into his red Toyota pickup. He drew the lap belt over her legs and snapped it in place. When they pulled out of the driveway, with him still jabbering about the ma.s.sacre, Monica interrupted him and said, ”Dad, we have to move to Connecticut.”

The somberness of her voice made him take his eyes off the road. He s.h.i.+fted gears, drove slower down the steep hills of the Escalon neighborhood. ”What's going on?” he said, glancing briefly at the road, then back at his daughter, a look of deep concern already visible on his face. Monica was silent as she fought the grip that was taking hold at the back of her throat.

He said, ”Is it something going on at school?”

She shook her head.

”A boy?” he said almost hopefully. Again she shook her head.

”I don't want you and Mom to get a divorce, and I'm afraid something bad might happen to Mom,” she blurted.

”Did your mom say she wants to divorce me?”

”No,” she said, pulling at the threads on her skirt.

”Then don't worry about it. Your mom and I are fine.”

”No, you aren't,” she said, staring out the window as they pa.s.sed block upon block of homes hidden behind twelve-foot brick walls topped with garlands of electrified razor wire, some of them with armed guards standing out front. Others were protected more subtly, from castlelike turrets hidden among the leaves of almond trees overlooking the street.

Then it came, like hot vomit erupting from some secret, contained place inside her: ”Mom is with Maximiliano, Dad. Mom is with with Maximiliano,” she repeated, hoping he understood. Maximiliano,” she repeated, hoping he understood.

Bruce exhaled loudly, beeped his horn at somebody, and stepped on the gas. They approached the edge of the property of a mysterious, overgrown mansion of crazy construction-an Italian Renaissance palazzo from the north face, a red-and-white Chinese palace on the south. Bruce pulled the truck into a strip of driveway just before the mansion's grand gates. He turned off the engine. The sun dropped through the winds.h.i.+eld with the oppressive weight of a wool blanket. A skinny, black dog appeared and sat beside Bruce's door, sniffing at the air.

”Are you sure about what you're saying, Monica?” He sounded angry.

Monica looked down at her sandals. She began to cry, now that she had spoken of it. She looked up at her father. ”They take me on trips with them,” she said, covering her face with her hands, hoping he wouldn't need for her to go into detail. After a while, she turned to look at him.

He was staring straight ahead, and for a moment Monica wondered if he had even heard her. He bit down on his lip, hard. Sweat beaded up among the blond hairs on his forearm. The tip of his nose reddened and his eyes became gla.s.sy. If there were any tears, he managed to blink them away. ”G.o.d” is all he said. Outside, the skinny, black dog began to scratch at his door, then came around and started whining and scratching on Monica's side.

”We have to get out of here, Dad. Max's wife is following Mom and me around.” Monica felt a wave rise deep in her entrails. She opened the door of the truck, leaned out, and threw up a yellow pool of liquefied Cap'n Crunch cereal. Almost immediately, the dog leaped forward and happily lapped it up.

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