Then she thought of the basement. Maybe her mom had been bluffing about Goodwill; maybe all she’d wanted was for her daughter to come home. Maya hurried downstairs, walking lightly so she wouldn’t wake her mom.
The basement had scared her as a child. It was colder than the rest of the house, and musty. A long room that got darker the farther back you went. First there were the washer and dryer and a dresser that served as a folding table. Then a shelf lined with kitchen gadgets and the remains of DIY projects. A jar of marbles. Cans of paint, an ice cream machine. Beyond that, boxes of books, but not the one she was looking for. She went deeper. Waded through clothes in bins. Please be here, please be here. Crawling now, she opened a crate and found a tea set furred by dust. Another crate held the games she’d played. Sorry! Battleship. Clue. It was all here—her mom had saved everything. A wave of gratitude swelled in Maya’s chest. She found her father’s book in a box with other stories she had loved, the ones on her old shelf.
She took it upstairs and began to read.
TWENTY-THREE
I? forgot I was the son of kings.
This was the title of her father’s book. Maya had written it in English on the first page of the marbled notebook that held her translation. The notebook had been tucked into the manila envelope along with his forty-seven pages.
She was glad to have her translation, as she didn’t have it in her to wade through the Spanish right now. Translating it had been a major endeavor for her at seventeen, difficult at first, but then it had gotten easier as she got the hang of it, or maybe she was just so immersed in the story unfolding in her hands that hours had passed like minutes. She’d worked on it at the library every day for almost two weeks and had been working on the very last page the day she met Frank.
She’d worked meticulously, searching for clues as to where the plot was headed. This had been the greatest mystery of her life then—and it was a mystery to her still. Holding the notebook in her hands brought back the old questions. Does Héctor remember that he’s really Pixán? Does Pixán collect his inheritance? Does he ever make it home again? Is he reunited with his parents?
I forgot I was the son of kings.
Something clicked as she ran her eyes over the title.
The title!
Maybe she had needed to step away from the book for seven years in order to see the most obvious clue, the one typed on its very first page. She had been so focused on the story when she was younger, on the incomplete plot and what it meant, that she had forgotten about the poetry of its title. Her aunt had said it was a line from a very old poem Jairo had loved. Why hadn’t Maya thought of this sooner? Her father had loved poetry—surely whatever poem he’d quoted would provide some clue as to what his novel was about. What it meant. What it was he’d been trying to say.
Her bed had become a nest, blankets, pillows, and pages heaped all around. She rifled through it for the phone and found it wedged between the headboard and mattress. She typed the title, in quotes, into her search bar.
The poem popped right up—it had its own Wikipedia page. And it wasn’t exactly a poem, as it turned out, at least not as Maya understood it, but a hymn. “The Hymn of the Pearl.” Carolina hadn’t been kidding when she said it was old. It was ancient, its author unknown. According to Wikipedia, the hymn appeared in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, which Maya understood to have something to do with the Bible.
The Acts of Thomas, she read, was from the third century—but apparently the hymn was even older. It appeared within the Acts, sung by Thomas, presumably the main character, while he was doing time in prison. The hymn told a story that had been around for at least a couple hundred years before the Acts was written, a story within a story. No one knew where it came from, though it bore traces of ancient folktales.
Maya wondered where her father had come across this very old hymn, and what, if anything, it had to do with the novel he’d begun to write. She scrolled down to “Extracts from the text” and read:
When I was a little child,
and dwelling in my kingdom of my father’s house,
and in the riches and luxuries of my teachers,
I was living at ease.
[Then] from our home in the East,
after they had made preparations,
my parents sent me forth.
[. . .]
Then they made with me an agreement,
and they inscribed it in my heart so that it would not be forgotten:
“If [you would go] down into Egypt
and bring [back] the one pearl,
which is in the middle of the sea
surrounded by the hissing serpent,
then you will put on your glorious garment
and your toga which rests （is laid） over it.
And with your brother, our second in command,
you will be heir in our kingdom.”
[. . .]
I went straight to the serpent,
around its lodging I settled
until it was going to slumber and sleep,
that I might snatch my pearl from it.
Then I became single and alone,
to my fellow-lodgers I became a stranger.
[. . .]
But in some way or another,
they perceived that I was not of their country.
So they mingled their deceit with me,
and they made me eat their food.
I forgot I was a son of kings,
and I served their king.
And I forgot the pearl,
on account of which my parents had sent me.
Because of the burden of their exhortations,
I fell into a deep sleep.
Maya set down her phone. She picked up the notebook and read over the words so carefully translated into English in her own oversized handwriting from seven years ago. Her mouth hung open as she reread the story she had never really forgotten and saw the parallels: Pixán was clearly the “little child” of the hymn. And the “pearl” was the inheritance his parents had sent him to collect, while the “hissing serpent” was the difficult husband who didn’t want to give it up. And just like that, Maya understood what her father had been doing. It wasn’t so different from what Thomas, or whoever it was who wrote his Acts, had been doing when they embedded the very old hymn into their book.
But where Thomas had made it clear that a hymn was being recited, her father had chosen to hide it in the plot. He’d carried the old story on like an heirloom, bringing it into the present by slowing it down and coloring it in with moments from the life of a boy growing up in Guatemala City. He’d woven it in like a secret. Stretched the hymn out so that, had he lived to finish it, his novel would have been one long prayer. A surprised laugh rose in Maya’s chest. She clasped a hand over her mouth, tears welling in her eyes. She’d solved the mystery, or at least one of them （though she sensed that were she to look closer, even this mystery would prove to be a symbol for one that ran even deeper, a truth coursing just beneath the surface）。 She pulled up the complete “Hymn of the Pearl” on her phone and read it beginning to end. And as she read, the contours of her father’s story revealed themselves. And she finally understood how it ended.
TWENTY-FOUR
Maya doesn’t want to talk to Aubrey but needs to know exactly what happened yesterday when Frank drove her home. A five-minute drive. Enough time for them to talk, to laugh, to flirt. Maya has never mistrusted Aubrey before, but now she’s seen Frank’s eyes traveling her body. That stupid fucking dress. It was only a glance, less than a second, but that look Frank gave Aubrey has expanded to fill hours of Maya’s life.