Toward the Light

by Bonnar Spring

  Luz said slowly, “As you noticed, I’ve come back to work for the Benavides. I’m providing information about their household to the U.S. government.”

  Until five minutes earlier, positive Toño was already aware of the plot, Luz’s biggest worry had been soft-pedaling the extent of her involvement in the assassination. Toño had once risked his life to save hers. If she disclosed her role, he’d try to stop her. Luz still had to safeguard that information, but now … now Toño had to know more.

  “A man from the State Department, someone I’ve known for years, recently approached me about returning to help them. They needed a Guatemalan they trusted, someone who could work unobtrusively in the residence.” Luz looked down at her sensible sneakers, which were windshield-wipering the black dirt. She brushed away a beetle climbing up her leg. It was time to spit it out. “Toño, they plan to assassinate Martin Benavides and discredit his son with the goal of shifting the balance of power toward the FPL in next year’s election.”

  “I know nothing about this.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Saturday evening, after he got Richard off the phone, Evan tried—and failed—to come to terms with what he had learned and what he now suspected. His thoughts became disjointed, unglued. Evan retreated to the world of images, mute and immutable: Luz, always Luz, in the thousand ways he’d seen her. The light faded, and his kitchen grew chilly. An insistent car horn eventually pulled him away from his inner slideshow.

  Get a grip, Evan. He shut all the windows he’d opened that morning. He closed the curtains. He took the stupid Peace Lily—he’d always thought the flowers smelled like cat pee—into the bedroom and slammed the door. He retrieved Luz’s portrait from the stack in the corner. Then, from his ratty green armchair, Evan held a one-sided conversation with his creation: What do you want? he asked the canvas.

  Silence.

  What can I do?

  Luz remained mute.

  Faced with unrelenting silence, Evan finally decided to show up unannounced. He’d tell Luz he knew she was sick, that he hated how Richard was taking advantage of her. He’d beg her to reconsider the danger. He’d promise to take care of her. Forever. They’d leave Guatemala and get her the best medical care. No—he’d stay with her in Guatemala. He’d buy a house in the mountains, not too far from town, so she could have anything, everything. Whatever she wanted.

  It was getting late, so Evan hurried over. No one answered his buzz at the gate. She must be in the shower. At nine thirty, he buzzed again. Working late? Ten o’clock. Evan pictured Luz lying in bed, too weak to respond. He gave up at midnight but called periodically through the night.

  On Sunday, he buzzed each of her neighbors in turn. Several came out to talk to him. None admitted seeing Luz recently. None let him in.

  By Monday morning, Evan had hardly slept. He rang Luz’s bell one more time and was about to go home to call Richard and ask what he should do, a call that would inevitably reveal he knew far more about Luz than he should, when he spied her coming round the corner. She wore the same embroidered shirt she’d had on Saturday morning at his house, her cheeks rosy and her hair in a loose knot. She looked like someone who’d been riding horses or flying a kite, not like she’d been lying in her apartment all weekend, too ill to answer the phone.

  He ran toward her. “Where’ve you been?” he called as they approached her gate from opposite directions.

  Luz jumped when he spoke.

  “Sorry,” Evan said. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I’ve been calling all weekend. And when I didn’t see you at the market earlier, I worried something was wrong.” Evan linked his arm through hers, but Luz pulled away.

  “I was busy,” she said.

  “But I asked your neighbors and they said—”

  Luz whipped around, hands on hips, elbows wide. Her face drained of color, leaving only red spots high on each cheekbone. “You what?—for crissakes, Evan.” From radiant to deeply distressed in the space of seconds. “Ay, Dios mío, what did you say? Did you talk to anyone else?”

  “No one had seen you all weekend,” he continued, “so I was afraid you were sick again.”

  “I can’t—” she began. Then, passing her palm over her mouth, Luz shook her head and resumed marching toward the gate. Without turning around, she said, “Go home.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t follow me,” she muttered as she walked away. Then louder, “I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.”

  Whatever the misunderstanding, he had to clear it up. Evan sprinted ahead of Luz and stood blocking her gate. He imagined cupping her chin in his hand. He’d make her look at him, make her see she didn’t have to do Richard’s dirty work.

  Luz backed away so fast she bumped into the high stucco wall and a flurry of scarlet bougainvillea blossoms from an overhanging branch rained down on her.

  Evan reached toward her once more. “What’s wrong?”

  Luz batted his hand away, looking like she would bolt again. “Why are you interfering? Leave me alone.”

  “I can’t, Luz. I know you’re sick. I know—”

  “You know absolutely nothing about me. Nothing. Do you understand?”

  That wasn’t true. He pitched his voice low and gentle, as if calming a skittish colt. “I know you’re doing something dangerous for Richard. I know he’s taking advantage of you. I know you have ALS, Luz.”

  Luz raised her head then. She wasn’t looking at him exactly; she was seeing a different place and time. The silence lengthened between them, a long vibrating tunnel of words selected and then discarded.

  “Have you ever really hated someone?” Luz’s voice wasn’t even heated. She could have been asking if he wanted a beer. Without waiting for an answer—which, in Evan’s case, would’ve been no—she continued, “You spend your life hating. You’re taught the person you hate is El Diablo himself. You remember his face, red and shiny, in firelight, light you now imagine as hellfire. Then this golden opportunity lands in your lap.” Luz almost smiled. “What if you got the chance to avenge the cruelest injustice ever done to you and your family?”

  Since he didn’t have an answer to that, Evan proffered his first objection. “Richard doesn’t seem to care about the danger you’re being exposed to. I do.”

  “Oh, Richard knows exactly what I’m doing. I’m going to blow Martin Benavides straight to hell.”

  “A bomb?” Oh, no. That was worse than any of his jumbled conjectures.

  Luz ran her fingers across her mouth, a retroactive zipping of her lips.

  “My God, Luz, their compound is a fortress. How can you smuggle a bomb in? And how the hell are you going to get out?”

  “I’m not coming out.”

  Evan’s ears started ringing. The scarlet of the bougainvillea momentarily blazed so bright he had to shut his eyes against its intensity; then it faded to sepia. He pulled his collar away from his neck, but breathing didn’t come any easier. “What are you saying?”

  “The bomb that kills Martin will take me, too.” A brief pause. “It’s my gift to everyone who didn’t survive.”

  “You can’t—”

  She was in his face before he finished, hurling words instead of punches. “Oh, yes, I can and I will. I’m dying anyhow. Now, a year from now, what’s the difference?”

  I could be the difference. “But we—”

  “Listen to me,” she shouted. “In a year, I’ll be bedridden, on a ventilator. I can’t cope with that. This is what I want to do.”

  What I want to do.

  What Luz wanted … not the clichéd romantic fantasy he’d created in consultation with her imperfect image, also his creation. If that was what Luz wanted, what did he want? Protect her, said a vehement voice in his head.

  Help her! Quietly, a sigh on the wind. Then louder: Help her.

  “Don’t come over here again, Evan. I’ll keep going to the market in the morning, but stay away from me unless you have a message, and in return, I prom
ise to let you know when I’m ready to move.”

  There had to be more he could say or do. “At least let me come in.”

  “No, I’ve got to get ready for work.” She shot him a look, hard and cold as a diamond, but one in which Evan imagined a trace of underlying fracture.

  “Have you been gone then?” Evan meant to stay casual, a lame attempt to eliminate the elephant of her revelation that jostled between them. It came out sounding banal, he knew, but right now banal was all he could process.

  “I spent the weekend with another man.”

  He recalled her tangled hair, her bright eyes and flying feet as she ran around the corner. Luz held out a hand as if she would grasp his. Evan, more confused than he’d been a second before, reached out. Luz used his outstretched arm to push him, hard. Evan took two tripping steps backward and stumbled over the curb. She was at the gate and inside before he recovered.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Luz slammed her front door and shot the bolt. She stormed into her bedroom. Damn. Damn. She stubbed her big toe on the bureau as she rounded it, too fast and too angry.

  Damn.

  She’d returned to Guatemala City via a faster route than her outward-bound journey with the soldiers. After waking her in the gray light of early morning, Toño kissed her goodbye. Then he’d given instructions to her drivers, a well-dressed young couple, and blindfolded her. They took the rickety van to a settlement about an hour from the camp. There, the man had maneuvered into a garage or shed, and they’d switched to a small sedan. The woman guided her into the rear seat, had Luz lie down, and tucked blankets around her. And left her to her thoughts.

  On the way to the mountains, as the hours had slipped away and Luz had become increasingly confident the men were taking her to see Toño, she’d worried about how to explain her absence to Evan. And if he notified Richard, she was screwed. This was a private matter; Richard would go ballistic if he found out she’d lied about contacting the guerrillas.

  She’d have to invent a story neither man would question. Luz’s first idea was to tell Evan she’d been pressed into working overtime at the Benavides’. Maybe they’d taken her somewhere without phones. En sus sueños. She hadn’t concocted a more sensible fiction before Toño’s ignorance of the U.S. plot against the Benavides had derailed everything else.

  Toño had grilled Luz for hours. The only lies she told him were about the endgame—and there, instead of admitting she’d detonate the bomb, Luz pleaded ignorance. He asked who set up the project, what Luz knew about them, and how she funneled information to the conspirators. When she described her connection with Evan, Toño had been blunt. “He’s a security problem. Get rid of him.”

  Inventing another man as the reason for her absence was the only thing she could think of to drive Evan away. It had the added benefit of being difficult to disprove and something Evan wouldn’t necessarily tell Richard. But that lie, which she’d accepted as necessary at the mountain camp, had been much harder to speak than she imagined.

  As they got closer to the city, the car slowed. Horns honked. A blaring loudspeaker, probably mounted on a pickup truck, broadcast its message of responsibility and safe sex while it crept along. Long pauses that must’ve been traffic lights. Then the woman removed Luz’s blindfold. They were on a busy street two blocks from her house. The man pulled to the curb and told her to get out. She was anticipating a hot shower and another cup of coffee when Evan jumped out at her.

  At least he hadn’t talked to Richard.

  The push had started as an apology of sorts—it’s not you, it’s me—a stupid impulse she instantly regretted as hope and desire blazed afresh for Evan.

  Damn.

  Sunny, dry air had streamed over the mountains during the weekend. The rainy season, people said, had finally run its course. Winter had arrived, a transition from stormy to sunny. Just in time for Christmas.

  Change accelerated at the Benavides’. Luz arrived at work to find tiny white fairy lights wound around the iron bars in the gates. Fake candles illuminated the glass-shard-topped security wall. In the yard, an elaborate nacimiento—Mary and Joseph with baby Jesus, surrounded by shepherds, sheep, angels, donkeys, goats, oxen, magi, camels, boxes wrapped with red paper and garlands of gold ribbon. Aromatic pine garlands festooned the house, and it was surrounded by tubs of poincianas. Ten days until Christmas.

  All of which left Cesar, in the vivid words of a former coworker at the Portsmouth day-care center, bouncing off the walls. Still frazzled from her weekend abduction, from Toño’s unanswered questions, and from encountering Evan before she was ready, Luz held a book in front of her nose, oblivious to the unintelligible squiggles, and let Cesar’s manic waves wash over her.

  If only I could see Richard again. Talk to him. Hear his voice—that, mainly. Funny to think that’s what she longed for: Richard, sitting on the brown sofa by the lamp hung with little ivory tassels while he patiently answered her questions, her mother bustling in and out as she prepared dinner.

  Richard was never the huggable sort of Honorary Uncle. More like a kind schoolteacher, one who was always willing to stay late and explain what you’d been confused about in class.

  One unexpected torment of getting sick was not being able to talk to him about it—not so much the getting-sick part, but about her decision. That sunny September afternoon after the doctor had failed to sugarcoat the grim diagnosis, Luz went home to her sweltering apartment. After hours staring at nothing, a strange honking outside roused her. When she opened the window, a huge flock of geese flapped by, their V extending farther than her eyes could see.

  Flying south. Too early. Watch the animals around you, her father always said, and you’ll find the clues you need to live in harmony with your environment. The geese were getting out ahead of the coming bad weather.

  And that’s when she decided.

  After Richard’s first call, when Luz pretended to be in too much of a rush to chat, she’d let the rest go to voicemail. But she returned home a few days later to find Richard pacing outside. He followed her into the apartment, pointed her into a chair, and sat down on the old brown sofa. “What’s going on?”

  Delaying tactics on the phone were one thing; lying to his face was impossible. So Luz told him. Just the facts, what the doctor said. Richard rallied, though his pallor told a different story. He moved quickly into problem-solving mode—second opinions and home health aides and medical trials.

  When her lack of interest in his suggestions became obvious, his left foot began tapping on the wooden floorboards. “Tell me the rest of it,” Richard said.

  “It was the geese.” Luz pointed out the window, fluttered her fingers to mimic wings beating. “Heat like this in September—it doesn’t fool them. Geese always know when it’s time to go. I thought I should pay attention.”

  “Go?” Richard turned into a statue. “What are you saying?”

  “Why wait until there’s ice on the ponds and rain has turned to pellets of sleet? Why not go when you can still feel the warmth of summer?” Luz shrugged. “I want to leave on my own terms, leave before it’s too late.”

  He argued with her into the night, but for the first time since she’d known him, Richard didn’t have an argument to steer her onto his preferred path.

  It was chilly a few weeks later when they met for her birthday lunch, and rain blew sideways as they walked from his car into the restaurant. After the hostess seated them, Richard took her hand in his. “It’s going to be winter soon,” he said. They both knew what he meant. “I brought some things.” He laid a stack of glossy brochures on the table by Luz’s plate—long-term-care facilities.

  The losses had already begun. She’d quit her job to save the embarrassment of being fired. No longer feeling it was safe to drive, she’d sold her car.

  “Richard, don’t.” Luz swept the papers aside. “We both know that’s not what I want.”

  Richard nodded—rather it was the down stroke of a nod. His chin remaine
d tucked. “Okay.” He raised his head and spread his fingers on the white tablecloth as though it were the keyboard of a piano. “Okay, Luz, in that case, I want to tell you about something going on at work you might be interested in.”

  If she could only ask him, Richard would make everything clear. Once Luz denied an interest in contacting the guerrillas, any alliance Richard had formed with one of the other commanders would’ve been beyond her need to know. If she asked, though, he’d tell her how the Frente fit into their plans. But Luz was in Guatemala, sent off without a panic button. There was Evan, of course. He could relay a message. I don’t want to send a message. I just want to talk to Richard.

  But it was Cesar, jiggling her arm, who wanted to talk to her, so Luz laid down her book, and they constructed an obstacle course for his remote-control car.

  Then Delores poked her head in to say that the return of dry weather meant she could start pre-holiday house cleaning. Today, she wanted to take up the rugs and beat them on the roof. She’d enlisted the help of two burly guards standing behind her in the hall.

  Forty-eight hours earlier, Luz’s tasks were stalled, out of reach. Now that she craved more time, perversely, solutions began dropping like fruit ripe for harvest. Delores played drill sergeant, assigning one man to lift the furniture while she and the other man knelt and rolled up the rugs. They completed the living room and moved to Cesar’s bedroom. In the back corner of the bedroom, an old oak bookcase proved too heavy for a single guard to shift, so he called his partner over to join him.

  “Uno!” called one man. Delores hunched over the rug.

  “Dos!” She took hold of the leading edge.

  “Tres!” They lifted the bookcase, and Delores yanked on the rug. It came loose with such momentum that she tumbled backward and landed on her behind, wailing. Her hair came unpinned. Her key ring skipped across the floor. Her stubby legs, encased in magenta tights, splayed. Cesar laughed at the spectacle. The men dashed over to hoist Delores to her feet. Luz kicked the key ring under the bed. The men lifted the rugs onto their shoulders and followed Delores out.