She smelled fire.
The tame, cozy kind. Sweetly crackling wood. A pleasant smell in most circumstances, but her mom’s house didn’t have a fireplace.
Her eyes snapped open. She was still on her side, face turned to the wall about two feet away. But the wall had changed. Now it looked like it was made of logs. She could almost see the whorls in the wood by the flickering light of the fire she felt at her back. She wanted to get up—to run—but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed. She felt a presence in the room. She couldn’t see the person, but she felt the weight of their eyes on her neck, the part of it the blankets didn’t cover.
Then she heard footsteps getting closer. Creaking their way across the floor, moving as slowly as a funeral procession. Maya felt the bed dip as someone crawled into bed with her. A scream curdled in her lungs. A feathery breath brushed her neck.
THIRTEEN
The day Maya meets Frank, she is rereading a particularly enigmatic passage of her father’s incomplete novel on the sunny reading terrace of the public library, where she’s come to warm her bare arms and legs after several hours of blissful air-conditioning. She comes here often in the summer when her mom is at work and Aubrey is busy, like today. Maya doesn’t have other friends. She has people she’s friendly with, people who’d invite her to a party, but few she is likely to keep in touch with now that high school is over.
And anyway, she’d rather be alone, sitting on this wooden bench, poring over these forty-seven pages. She’s been back from Guatemala for two weeks and has already, with the aid of a translation dictionary, translated the whole document into English. It helps that the pages are double-spaced and that her father’s sentences are clear and straightforward. She now knows what every word means on a literal level. But on some other level, the language remains coded, as if the story it tells is symbolic of a deeper story just beneath the surface.
It’s very much a mystery, just as her mom had said it would be—both in genre and in practice, as all Maya has here is the novel’s opening and one scene that seems to skip ahead, as if Jairo had planned to go back later to fill in the intervening chapters. Because of this, she has only the barest sense of what the plot was going to be.
The story opens in an unnamed village so high in the mountains that its inhabitants spend all their time in the clouds. There’s hardly any description of the village, as the main character can only see a few feet in front of his face at all times, yet he never bumps into anything. A warm light suffuses the mist. There’s a touch of magic to this part of the story. The main character is a young boy named Pixán, who lives with his mother and father, who love him very much, in a small hut with a grass roof and stone hearth.
One day Pixán’s mother tells him that a distant relative of theirs has died, a great-aunt, and left him an inheritance. Not money, but something else—a surprise! Pixán is to go down from the mountain and into the city to collect from the great-aunt’s cranky husband, who isn’t so keen to give the prize up.
Pixán’s mother explains that the husband is selfish and wants to keep the inheritance for himself, but the great-aunt had written her will in ink, and Pixán’s name is clearly on it.
So his parents give him a backpack, which they claim contains everything he needs, and a compass. He’s told to walk west. He seems so young, Maya thinks, to be doing this on his own, but his age is never given, so maybe she’s wrong. The clouds part as he walks down the mountain, and it’s here that the tone changes. It grows less magical. Guatemala City appears in the distance, rendered in sharply realistic detail.
Pixán is scared—the city is loud and bright. And no sooner does he step onto its hectic streets than he is hit by a car. His head slams against the pavement. For a moment it seems he will die, but he doesn’t—he pulls through, only now he has total amnesia. He doesn’t think to look for his backpack, having forgotten that he had one, along with the parents who had given it to him. He has forgotten his home. His own name.
A childless couple takes him in and calls him Héctor. And for reasons not entirely clear, this inexperienced young couple pretend to be his real parents. They do it not out of malice but out of some vague sense that it’s the right thing to do. Pixán becomes Héctor. Maya’s heart aches for his true parents （and she can’t help but think about her own mother, how she’ll feel when Maya leaves）。
The narrative skips ahead here a few decades to a day at the shore of El Lago de Atitlán. No explanation is given for this time jump.
Very little happens in this brief, final scene of the novel, and almost no context is given. Héctor, now a man, sits barefoot in the sand on the shore of a deep, wide lake, gazing out across the water at the towering volcano on the other side. The top of the volcano is wreathed in mist, and something about the sight of it strikes a chord in him. He has a sudden longing to climb it. To pull the clouds around his shoulders. He can’t explain why the beauty of this place makes him want to cry, makes him yearn for something he can’t name.
* * *
— “You ever been there?”
Maya snaps back to reality. She’s on the library reading terrace, probably sunburned by now. She squints as she looks up from her father’s book at the guy who’s just interrupted her reading.
She’s seen him somewhere before but doesn’t know him. He’s older than she is, probably at least twenty. Average build and forgettable looks. His skin is pale, his dark hair lightly disheveled, and he’s smoking a cigarette in casual defiance of the no smoking sign. The smell of it fills her nose.
“I’m sorry—what?” she says.
“Lake Atitlán.” He points with his eyes at the photography book sitting beside her on the bench. She’d checked the book out earlier from the library, a collection of photos of the lake mentioned in her father’s book and its surrounding towns and volcanos.
“Have you been?” he asks her again.
She shakes her head, annoyed at being interrupted in her reading.
“You should go,” he says. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Cool,” she says flatly. “Thanks.” That’s when it clicks. “You work here,” she says. She’s seen him sitting at a computer behind the reference desk.
“Part-time,” he says, “and just for the summer. I tend not to stay anywhere too long.”
Maya’s not sure what to say to this, so she smiles tightly, then looks back down at her book, hoping he’ll get the message.
“Just last year,” he says, “I backpacked through Central America. I was in Guatemala for a while. I was at that lake. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.”
Maya has to agree with him. She’s never been, of course, but the lake in the photographs is indeed as beautiful as described by her father in the scene set on its shore. Her eyes drift from the page in her hand to the cover of the book on the bench.
“I went to each one of the little villages that surround it,” he says. “Most of the people are Mayan, everyone walking around in the most colorful clothes you’ve ever seen. The women weave this cloth covered with patterns and symbols that convey information to whoever knows how to read them.”