The year was 1990, the Guatemalan civil war just beginning to wind down, and the army was killing people who didn’t agree with them.
Maya was twelve when she managed to wrangle this information from her mom. It had shocked her. Why would the army kill their own people? Brenda, who’d been in the country on a missionary trip for her parents’ church when she met Jairo, had explained as best she could to someone so young.
The land where the Mayans had been living for millennia happened to be perfect for growing large quantities of bananas. Chiquita, back in the ’40s, was the largest landowner in the country. It was called the United Fruit Company then, and it had a lot of control over the Guatemalan government.
But in 1944, the Guatemalan people got rid of the government loyal to the fruit company and elected a president who wanted, among other things, to buy back some of the company’s land and return it to the ones who’d lived there. Land that was sacred. The dense jungles and misty highlands. Volcanos and cenotes.
This newly elected president, and then his successor, believed that people are worth more than money, more than cheap bananas. The United Fruit Company disagreed. It wanted that land. The fruit company was the forefather of the modern PR campaign, and just as it convinced Americans to buy more bananas, it convinced the president of America that the newly elected Guatemalan president was a communist. This was in the 1950s, as the Cold War snowballed. Maya hadn’t known anything about the Cold War at twelve but sensed from her mom’s tone that things were about to get dark.
President Eisenhower listened to the fruit company. He sent the CIA down to secretly stir up a small Guatemalan opposition. The US trained them and gave them guns. And in 1954, that opposition, with a lot of help from the US, overthrew the democratically elected president. They installed a military officer in his place, a man happy to let the fruit company grow its bananas.
Things grew very hard for the Mayan people then, especially the peasants, along with anyone who supported them. The students, the teachers, the artists, the writers, the neighbors. All these people made up most of the country, but it was the top few who had all the power. Some people grew so angry that they ran off into the mountains to fight, recruiting starving children to their side. The civil war lasted for thirty-six years, and two hundred thousand people died, many of them tortured, thousands upon thousands disappeared—a term that twelve-year-old Maya hadn’t understood.
It means the police secretly arrested them, her mom had said, and they were never seen again.
Twelve-year-old Maya was, by this point, beginning to regret she had asked.
She’d been bugging her mom for as long as she could remember to explain why her father had died. And how. And where. And when. But once her mom had started telling her, Maya felt her throat tighten.
Her father was a college student studying literature. He was also a writer—but that was another story, one that Maya already knew.
This was the story of his death. Finally. （But at the same time too soon.） Her father was part of a student organization that went out to a small village in the highlands. The army had recently carried out a massacre in the village, and Maya’s father, along with other students and a few professors, went to march alongside the survivors, demanding an end to the army’s presence in the village. Maya’s heart had puffed with pride at this, then clenched in fear as her mom explained that someone had photographed him there.
That was all it took in those days.
The world had begun to notice what would someday be called the Silent Holocaust, but in 1990 the army was still getting away with killing people who didn’t agree with them.
People like Maya’s father.
This was the why of what happened to him.
The how was a bullet to his head.
The when was two months after the protest. Jairo had been photographed that day marching beside a well-known history professor who had recently gone missing—and not just him, but three of his friends too. A baker. A teacher. A priest. Being associated with this particular history professor was enough in those days.
The killer would never be named, much less brought to justice. He could have been in the army, or moonlighting for them, or perhaps a member of Guatemala’s notorious death squads. He walked right up to Jairo’s door on a Saturday morning.
Jairo’s mother was behind the house, rinsing a red-flowered tablecloth in the pila. His father was in the living room, reading the paper on the couch.
Maya’s mom was in the kitchen.
Brenda was making herself a cup of instant coffee—one spoonful of Nescafé, one of sugar, and two of powdered milk. She’d been in Guatemala just over a month, was pregnant but didn’t know it yet, and this was part of her routine: she liked to take her coffee outside and up the rickety metal stairs to the roof on sunny mornings such as this one.
（But that was another story too.） She was stirring the instant coffee into a steaming mug of water when she heard the gunshot. She will never forget this.
She stares at her daughter.
“I want to go to the funeral,” Maya says again, as if she has forgotten that her mother told her all this when she was twelve.
“You know it’s too dangerous.” Brenda had promised to take her once it was safe enough, but to this day, it hasn’t been.
“I’ll be careful,” Maya says.
Her mom shakes her head.
“I’ll be eighteen in August.”
Anger flashes in her mom’s eyes.
Maya never met her grandmother, and now she never will. And all that she has of her father are a few pictures and a handful of stories—all stories told by her mom, who only met him a month before he died.
Suddenly Maya is hit by the weight of all that she doesn’t know about her own family.
“I’m going,” she says. Her own eyes flashing.
TEN
Brenda started work at five in the morning these days, baking breads, pastries, and desserts to accommodate the array of dietary restrictions among the patients at Lakeside Serenity Center. The patients were, in her words, a choosy bunch, and with what they were paying, they felt they deserved a lot of options: macrobiotic, vegan, gluten-free. They had their choice of art and yoga classes, music therapy, and forest bathing. They swam in the pool, relaxed in the sauna, and got acupuncture. The center was a few towns over, nestled into the kind of view that tourists thought of when they thought of the Berkshires. Mountains covered with trees that flamed into red, orange, and gold foliage in fall.
Brenda was up each day at four a.m., and usually in bed by eight—and it was 8:30. Her head tipped forward, but she hauled it back up, fighting to stay awake as she sat with her daughter in the small, tidy living room.
Maya waited at the other end of the couch. As soon as her mom fell asleep, she would take her keys and drive ten minutes to the Blue Moon Diner in the YouTube video. The Berkshire Eagle article said that Cristina died on a Sunday, and today was Sunday, a likely night to catch the waitress at work.
The radiator clanged in the corner over the Simpsons rerun on TV. Reaching for the remote, Maya turned the volume down, and before long, her mom began to snore softly. Sneaking out of the house, creeping down the dark hall and through the kitchen as an adult, felt ridiculous. Like being a teenager again （the walls between then and now growing thin）， a muscle memory of lifting her mom’s car keys from her messy, oversized purse and slinking into the night. Outside was cold and starless. A light snow had fallen. Maya brushed off her mom’s windshield with the sleeve of her coat and got in.