Seeing this behavior in someone else was sobering. Her body flushed with empathy at the thought of Barb explaining her haunted diner theory to the police, but her mind sided with Dr. Barry on this one. Maybe this was Maya’s problem after all. Maybe her mind couldn’t see its own illness.
ELEVEN
Four days after her grandmother’s death, Maya walks slowly alongside her mom and dozens of other people through the Cementerio General in Guatemala City behind the casket of Emilia Ek Basurto. The cemetery is enormous and mazelike, taking up several city blocks, yet feels overcrowded. High, thick walls line the route of the funeral procession, each wall a grid of row upon row upon row of what look like file cabinets to Maya, but which are actually graves. Each cabinet has a body inside, sealed off by a layer of concrete, bearing, in most cases, a placard naming the person contained therein, and the years of their birth and death.
Flowers in all stages of decay adorn the tombs, their colors bright against the gray concrete and dark green moss that crawls over everything. This is the rainy season, the usual afternoon showers on the way, the air thick, and the procession so slow they could be walking underwater. Sweat dampens the long black dress she wears, plasters it to her back, and she breathes through her mouth, trying not to let on how affected she is by the smells filling her nose. First there are the flowers—lilies, roses, daisies, gladiolus—bursting from the buckets of vendors at the cemetery gates, spilling from graves, fallen petals browning every surface. They fail to mask what Maya can only assume is the smell of death. Like bodies turned inside out.
Vultures swirl overhead. Their numbers swell the deeper the funeral winds into the cemetery, and Brenda explains to her daughter, as calmly as possible, that graves here are rented like apartments. Families must pay regular fees to keep their loved ones interred. And if a payment is missed, the body, as if it were a tenant, is evicted and thrown into a mass pit at the edge of the graveyard.
The walls of tombs give way to a field of crumbling mausoleums. Abuela’s plot is deep within the cemetery, beside that of her son. The family mausoleum is about the size of a phone booth, with a rusted metal door and a stone crucifix on top. A vulture perches on the low branch of a nearby tree, preening its creaky black wings. The smell is somehow even worse here at the edge of the cemetery, a chemical smell, burning tires mixed with death and flowers. A smoky haze fills the air.
Maya clutches her mom’s hand.
“The city dump,” her mom whispers. “It starts just over there at the edge of the cemetery. Thousands of people live in it, picking through the trash for whatever they can sell or eat.” Brenda came to Guatemala after college as part of a missionary group even though she didn’t believe in God, still doesn’t, and disagrees with the premise of missionary work. She’d simply thought that she might do some good with the certificate in respiratory care she had earned from Berkshire Community College. Not to mention that she’d never been outside the US.
Her days were spent volunteering at an orphanage not far from the city dump. Her evenings consisted of getting to know the family who’d volunteered to house her for three months. Brenda hadn’t expected to fall in love while she was in Guatemala, but the rest is Maya’s favorite story in the world—the story of her mom and dad. This is the story she tries to remember while she is here, as opposed to the story of her father’s death.
Brenda has seemed on edge ever since they arrived in Guatemala City, losing things at the airport and laughing nervously at nothing. It can’t have been easy, Maya realizes for the first time, for Brenda to build a relationship between her daughter and the Basurtos. All the letters and phone calls and, later, emails that grew less and less frequent over the years. Brenda only knew Jairo and his family for a month before he was killed, and she fled the country immediately afterward. This is the first time she’s been back.
She is the one who taught her daughter most of what Maya knows about Guatemala. Brenda hung Mayan tapestries on the walls and played CDs of marimba music while she and Maya baked together. Brenda taught herself to make tamales wrapped in banana leaves and made them every Christmas. She encouraged Maya to learn Spanish in school.
Yet to convince her to go on this trip, Maya had resorted to threats. She threatened—not that it was a bluff—to buy herself a plane ticket with the money she’d made tutoring middle school students, money she’d been saving for college. She said that if she couldn’t go to her grandmother’s funeral, she would fly to Guatemala—alone—on her eighteenth birthday.
So Brenda caved, and now here they are, clinging to each other among all this death and flowers. Everyone around them dressed in black, veiled in tears. Walking in slow motion. Maya is related to many of the people in this crowd, yet they are strangers to her. But never in her life has she encountered such warmth. She’s been here less than twenty-four hours, but her family treats her and her mom as if they’ve been there all their lives. Brenda’s offer to stay at a hotel wasn’t even entertained. Instead, Maya’s grandfather handed over the bed he’d shared for decades with his wife so that Brenda and Maya could sleep there while he slept on the couch.
“Mija,” says a voice directly at her back. “Toma estas flores.”
Maya turns to see her father’s sister, Carolina, standing behind her. Carolina looks like how Maya will look in a few decades. They’re exactly the same height. Carolina’s skin is darker, but she shares her niece’s high cheekbones and mahogany eyes. Meeting her for the first time, Maya felt a pang of familiarity, as if she’d suddenly caught her own reflection in a mirror she hadn’t known was there. Carolina hands her a spray of yellowed roses, gestures for Maya to hold them to her nose to block out the smell.
“Gracias,” Maya says.
She buries her face in the flowers and closes her eyes as the pallbearers begin to lower her grandmother’s casket from their shoulders. When the priest begins to speak, the vulture spreads its wings with a snapping of air.
* * *
—
A chorus of whispered prayers fills the small living room and dining area of Maya’s grandfather’s house: “Santa Maria, madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen . . .” Sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, and neighbors crowd onto the couch and love seat, and stand along the walls. They hold rosaries in their hands, rotating them slowly, every bead a prayer.
Sandwiched between her mom and Tía Carolina on the couch, Maya finds herself praying along, the repetition taking hold. Easing her into the language. Carolina serves Nescafé, black beans, tortillas, and fried plantains after the novena, the first of nine nights of prayer following the funeral.
Carolina and her husband, To?o, moved into the extra bedroom last year to help take care of Abuela, who, as it turned out, had been sick for a while.
Maya will always wonder why no one told her this.
Her grandfather Mario Hernández Basurto is a man of few words. He has thick, wavy hair, eyebrows like caterpillars. His wife had been the talkative one, handing him the phone to wish his granddaughter a happy birthday or to congratulate her on a good report card. Emilia’s death has left him silent with grief. In this small house, with family, friends, and neighbors streaming through to honor his wife, Mario, in his living room recliner, is never alone yet rarely talks to anyone.