“My brother’s a police captain in Iowa,” says the detective, “and he thinks at least 60 percent of all suicides are actually murders in disguise.”
Bruno makes a strangled sound—of course, his father did not kill himself; of course he was murdered—but remains mute. Why? I’ve wondered this for years. All that foamy-lipped rage, bottled up tight in front of the cops, then spewed out so viciously on the three of us—day after endless day of fountaining bile—that for the first time I am sure Hana will finally leave him. Which, being the exemplary Catholic she is, she won’t even consider.
And Stefan? What you would expect. His grades go to hell, he can’t eat, can’t sleep, walks around like a zombie. Later I’ll see the same look on kids’ faces in war zones, the look of being pushed too far, of being shocked out of their real selves with nobody around to help them figure out what happened. This is what’s happening to Stefan, because Hana and Bruno, neither of whom believe in psychology, much less in something so completely nonproductive as clinical depression, are worthless at this point. As for me, as long as I stay angry enough at Djed for killing himself, I don’t have to feel sad.
In another year—by now it is 1970—Stefan is well over six feet tall with hair the same color and length as mine. His horn-rims have given way to hip-looking gold granny glasses, and he is about an inch away from getting booted out of St. Silvan’s. Bruno gets livid just looking at him, has endless theories about drug-dealing, needle-sharing, war-protesting faggotry. I’m only eleven, but even to someone as clueless as me this sounds like an exaggeration. Not that I come to his defense. Most of Stefan’s time, as far as I can tell, is spent lounging in the park with a couple of bell-bottomed, dope-smoking losers from the public high school down the road, neither of whom wants a kid sister around. So the day Bruno uncovers a stash of pot in Stefan’s room and officially throws him out, I am momentarily, perversely glad. I haven’t had a brother since Milo died, not really, and whose fault it that? Not mine, that’s for sure.
The next day, before Bruno gets home from work, Stefan makes a quick, quiet visit to the house. I am brooding in my room with music blaring and do not hear him enter. But then there is a knock at my door, and when I shut off the radio and open it, my brat is standing there with a brown paper shopping bag in his arms, looking uncomfortable and ashamed, as though he might be trying and failing to come up with an explanation I can understand. I stare back at him defiantly, daring him to try and make me feel better.
Finally, as though giving up the ill-advised effort at reconciliation, he shrugs. “My clothes,” he says, “and some other stuff I’m going to need.” And then, watching my face, which must have revealed right then what I was desperately trying to hide, he sets the bag carefully on the floor and takes me into his arms. Instantly, the waterworks come on, a flood of them down the front of his old green T-shirt. “Oh, Eva,” he murmurs into my hair, “don’t worry about me, okay? It’s not as bad as you think. Okay?” And after I finish with the snorting and the gulping and the pathetic little moans of sorrow and despair, he adds, “Be strong, little sister. And get the hell out of here as soon as you can.”
Afterward, I take myself and my grief-swollen eyes into his abandoned bedroom and make my search. He’s taken some of his underwear, a couple of shirts, some jeans, his tennis shoes. A few books are missing from the shelf. On the bedspread is a neat stack of Milo’s crap: the red-and-white checkered scarf, the cluster of old papers in Croatian, the watch cap, the bag of cheap religious medals. The black-and-white photos, including the one of my massacred grandmother.
When I peer under the bed, I see that the locked box is gone.
Much as I hate to admit it, Robert was probably right about me. There’s a coldness inside that can scare people—men—while attracting them in ways that must feel vaguely uncomfortable to them, no doubt what eventually kills each of these relationships. I’m not the kind of woman who’s going to cling. They don’t have to worry about being guilt-tripped or grasped at with desperate female fingers should they decide to head on down the road. I got cured of all that when I was eleven. You can only feel devastated for so long—especially when you are a kid, especially when you are that self-centered—and then you start to harden up.
Bruno was actually my biggest help here. On the rare occasions he mentioned his exiled son, it was with loud, scornful assertions that Stefan was fine, no doubt making more money as a drug dealer than he himself was making at the steel plant, no doubt living it up and laughing through his cocaine-stuffed nose at the rest of us. Sometimes, when I was at my most self-pitying, I almost believed him. Mostly, though, I simply adopted what looked to me like strength, working furiously to make my tata’s legendary toughness my own.
As for Stefan, I thought about him almost every day for months and months, and then, finally, hardly at all. As though he’d died and been buried after a big Croatian funeral Mass—the kind of no-holds-barred ethnic mourning-fest St. Silvan’s had refused to put on for Djed—and now it was time to get over it.
Chapter Four
Jan and Rikki and I were headed for the North Acropolis. I wasn’t wild about hiking in the jungle at night. You never know what’s prowling behind you, and it’s easy to get disoriented by the intensity of the blackness. Sounds are distorted and you’re always brushing up against something you don’t want to touch. However, we really didn’t have far to go—while it was still twilight, we’d hauled the equipment up our private trail as close as we could get while steering clear of tourists—so after dark, when the last voices faded away down the long trail that led to the park entrance, we were within a quarter mile of the Great Plaza. “There will be guards,” Jan said over his shoulder. “So don’t jump out of your skin when one comes up behind us.”
A few minutes later I was glad for the warning, for a hand suddenly came out of nowhere and touched my arm. I didn’t scream, but I did turn and raise my knee, and whoever it was took a step back. “Buenas noches,” said Jan invisibly.
“Ah, señor,” said someone off to my left. Apparently, we were surrounded. “Lo siento—we could not see you well in the dark.”
“No hay problema.”
“Y quién es esa señora?”
“My photographer.”
“Ah.” The owner of the hand stepped forward again. “Do you need guides?”
“Gracias,” said Jan, “pero no.”
“Muy bien. Entonces buena suerte, señor. Que le vaya bien.”
I was embarrassed at the way my heart was slamming around. I hadn’t heard a single footfall—nothing. They’d surrounded us like a pack of ghosts, and then vanished just as silently. I thought of the Chiapan rebels Stefan talked about in his letters to Jonah, not to mention the ones I’d photographed in Nicaragua and El Salvador the last time I was in Central America.
Jan said, “Are you all right?”
“Si.” It came out more gruffly than intended, but I’d found over the years that the minute you started admitting to men that you were a little shaken up, they went into their hero mode and forced you to consult them about every step you took thereafter.
Just then a roaring began almost directly overhead, and it took every ounce of grit I had not to hit the deck and cover my head. Because of course it was howler monkeys, not jaguars at all, and the funniest thing you can do in the Guatemalan jungle is fall for their mimicry. I wasn’t up for being the butt of anybody’s joke. The roaring went on for minutes, then died away. We stood there in silence in the pitch black. Then Jan moved off and I hurried to catch up.
In ten minutes we broke out from under the canopy to the open grass of the Great