“He…gets confused. He probably heard you wrong.”
“No,” Liliana said. “I told him she was killed, he…”
“There are some people out there who still just can’t accept what happened. They still hope that all of the disappeared are somehow still out there, still alive.”
“Did you see the way he…the way he looked at me? It was like…”
“Who knows what Zalo sees? He’s messed up. Don’t take it personally.”
“I’m not taking it personally. He saw me and it was like he knew me.”
Diego didn’t argue with her, he didn’t say anything at all. He had seen the way Zalo had looked at her. She was right. Something about it felt wrong. He bit his lip and dreaded the question he knew she would ask next.
But instead she said, “I look like her, you know.”
Liliana let the seatbelt fly behind her and leaned against the dashboard until she could see the moon.
“Do you think he saw her? Do you think that’s what he was talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Diego said honestly.
“Is he always there?”
“Most nights.”
“We have to go back.”
“You want to go back and talk to him?”
Liliana nodded. “But I want to talk to Trini and Adrian first.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Talking to Zalo, I mean.”
“Why not?”
“He’s just…I told you he’s messed up. His memory, it’s not reliable anymore. If you were to ask him about your mother, he might say that he saw her, but there’s no way to know for sure. Maybe you looked like someone he saw, but you’ll never know if it was her. You have to understand that with all he’s seen and been through, confusing the past and the present is a daily struggle for him. It wouldn’t be good for him to try to go back there and it wouldn’t be good for you either.” He sighed. “Just trust me.”
His words were stiff—the implication behind them unyielding and he watched as Liliana sunk into her seat, as if her limbs were already growing heavy as the impossibility of talking to Zalo began to weigh on her. But Diego knew he was right. Zalo was unreliable, his memory just too dark to navigate. But even if he was wrong, there’s a reason the government wants so many of the secrets of the war left buried and there’s a reason so many of the citizens comply. Not because they don’t think they deserve the truth, but because in the aftermath of a war that some officials still argue never even happened, learning to function without the truth is sometimes easier than realizing that the truth is actually more terrible than you could have ever imagined.
Diego caught Liliana glancing back in the rearview mirror at the road winding out from beneath the glow of the taillights, as if solidifying every curve and dilapidated road sign to her memory before they were swallowed into the night. She seemed to catch sight of Diego’s eyes watching her in the rearview mirror and she abandoned the back window and turned to face him.
“So the apartments on vines,” she said, redirecting their conversation. “Could you go tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Diego laughed. “I have to work sometime.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, then?”
Liliana perched on her knees until she was at eye level with Diego.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” he repeated. “What about your Dad? Isn’t he starting to wonder where you are all the time?”
“He’s gone on business. He’s been busy taking over all of my uncle Raul’s accounts. He won’t get back for three more days. But even if he was here, I doubt he’d notice. Nita would have him all over the city, she’s so restless. It won’t be a problem, really. So we’ll go tomorrow.”
There was that “we” again. The way she said it made Diego’s pulse quicken, and he prayed that what was going on between them wasn’t all in his head and that it wouldn’t be over once they found whatever it was that Liliana was looking for. Headlights from an oncoming car streaked Liliana’s skin with light and when it disappeared her eyes were still flickering in the darkness. There was a flame in them and the moment he said yes the flame began to swell.
She was close to him now and her skin smelled like rosewood and lavender. He tried to keep his eyes on the road but all they wanted to do was roam the soft contours of her face. There was something about Liliana, besides the soft curves that made him ache, from the slope of her cheeks, to her lips, to the backs of her calves. There was so much mystery about her and it awoke every inch of his mind and body and he wanted nothing more than to know he was capable of making her feel the same.
“We can go tomorrow night, on one condition,” Diego said.
“What condition?” Liliana asked.
“Tell me what all of this is really about.”
He could understand having questions, even being consumed by them. But in that moment he felt that there was something about Liliana’s relentlessness that felt dangerous and needed to be confronted.
“I told you,” she said, “I just want to know the people who knew my mother. I want to know them so I can know her.”
Diego knew the old woman who used to live at the vineyard house. He never knew the man, her husband, he was gone before Diego could remember him. But the old woman, Liliana’s grandmother, was a frail, small thing and Diego would always see her outside, floating around the property without a sound. Inside the house, he had seen pictures of a young woman, dark hair trailing down to her waist. He asked his father one day who the pictures were of and he told him that her name was Isabella and that she was killed in the war.
Diego knew what it felt like to lose someone, even if his mother had chosen to abandon him rather than being robbed from him like Liliana’s mother had. He barely knew his mother and some days not knowing her made him feel like he didn’t know himself. His father had managed to fill some of the holes, although his moments of sobriety were few and far between and any talk about Diego’s mother would only send him reaching for the bottle that much sooner.
“Your dad hasn’t told you about her?” Diego asked, staring at the road, afraid of catching a familiar sadness in Liliana’s reaction.
“No.”
“No?”
“We never talk about her,” she said. “I’ve asked him but he just can’t.”
“What about the woman who lives with you, Ana?”
“She’s my father’s cousin. As far as I know she barely knew my mother. I’m not even sure how well she really knew my father before she started living with us. She was just the only female relative he had who wasn’t married and never planned to be. She just came to help him raise us.”
“So this is the only way,” Diego said.
“It is. I think it is, for me anyway. The longer I’ve been away the farther away from her I’ve felt. I always wanted my father to tell me about her, something about her, anything. But I never pushed him and I think it’s because deep down I knew I wasn’t ready. I had no idea what I would find once I started digging up the past and it scared me. I was so young when she died and what happened to her was so...” Her words trembled against her lips and then they trailed off. “When I think about it, I can never picture my mother as the victim. I can’t think of all of the awful things that could have happened to her. It’s too hard and I’m still afraid of knowing what really happened but I just have to know. I need to know her.”
“To know yourself.” The words slid from his lips before he could think.
Liliana curled her feet under her and leaned her back against the door.
“You know?” she said.
Diego nodded. “My mother left when I was young. I never really knew her either. I heard she tried to go to the states but I really have no idea where she is.”
“I’m sorry,” Liliana said.
As they pulled up to the house a light came on in Liliana’s room and her hand leapt for the door handle. But as the engine whirred to a stop, the steel entrails knocking and gasping, she suddenly didn’t want to mo
ve. Instead she sat there, as if searching Diego’s face in the dark for anything his mother might have left behind—a birthmark on the curve of his top lip or the long black lashes that settled against his cheeks. His lips parted and he drew in a breath but Ana’s shadow suddenly began to swell behind Liliana’s bedroom curtain and she jumped down from the truck and ran inside.
Chapter 20
Liliana
When I got to the bar Trini was there with Adrian. They both ignored me the entire night but I wasn’t really in the mood to talk to them either, even if Adrian had warned me about Ben. I sat down on a loveseat in the corner and watched the door. Couples and university students were making their way inside. I saw Adrian scanning the doorway and I wondered if he was looking for Ben too or someone else or maybe something else. His senses seemed to be on high alert and it only made me more anxious.
Ben finally walked in and I waved him over. One of his fingers traced the soft skin along my wrist. He turned his face to me, lips finding my cheek before he could stop himself, the dark worry in my eyes more powerful than our lack of seclusion. What is it, he said, unease thick and quavering in his voice. Adrian, he said the military is starting to target Jews, I said. Ben looked at the ground. I know, he said. You knew, I repeated, why haven’t you said anything. My eyes began to burn and he pulled me to his chest shielding me from the hundreds of eyes pointed in our direction. It’s ok, he said, it’s going to be ok.
***
Nita was sprawled out in the sand, her skin which she refused to put sunscreen on despite Ana’s warnings, soaking up every ray of sun.
“I’m sick of everybody calling me ‘that American girl’. I need more sun.”
“Or maybe you just need to practice your Spanish.” Liliana laughed. “How is school going by the way?”
“Nobody speaks English. I hate it,” Nita huffed.
“You’re not picking up the language any faster? Come on, I’ll help you practice.”
“It’s Saturday, Liliana. I need a break. Can we just pretend to be in California for a while before I lose it, really.” Nita sat up and tossed a clump of sand on Liliana’s stomach. “And stop laughing. That is the Pacific Ocean and you have to speak English, ok.”
“Ok, ok,” Liliana laughed, “but they do speak Spanish in California too.”
This time Nita crawled on her knees over to where Liliana was sitting. She slapped her hand over Liliana’s mouth and shook her head.
“I said shh.”
“Oh really?”
Liliana stood up, her feet sliding in the soft sand as she chased Nita down the beach and into the waves. When Nita laughed, not the way she did at school in front of boys, but the way she had since she was born, a raspy chuckle that started in her shoulders, another memory, half buried of the two of them at the vineyard with their mother, resurfaced. Nita was a baby and their mother was holding her with one arm and dipping her toes in the warm foam that lapped up the beach with the other. She had squealed every time the water licked across her skin and Liliana had watched her with such wonderment.
She had never been jealous when her sister was born; instead she’d felt an insatiable curiosity about her and still did. She had long black hair, and thick eyebrows like their father. She had his lips too and his mannerisms—the way he talked with his hands and the intense stare that made him so intimidating in the boardroom.
Being around Nita, watching her was like seeing what it would be like if their father ever smiled, if he ever laughed. Suddenly Nita stopped, that hard stare trailing back up to the house, as waves lapped against her chest.
“He likes you,” she said.
“What?” Liliana asked as she turned to look.
Diego was carrying a stack of rotting tree branches across the sand, a pile strewn over each shoulder. He had a bandana tied across his brow to keep the sweat from stinging his eyes and no shirt to protect his skin from the jagged branches and the sharp burrs that sometimes grew on them.
“Ana knows you’ve been sneaking out with him.”
“She does? Why hasn’t she said anything?”
“I don’t know. I think she kind of likes him. She’s had him working on the house non-stop.”
“Yeah, it’s starting to look so much better.”
Liliana saw the slightest of frowns flash across Nita’s face before she smiled wide and threw a handful of seaweed at her chest.
“So, what have you been doing with him every night…in the dark…where no one can see?”
Liliana couldn’t tell her the truth. She had a feeling it wouldn’t just upset Nita to know they were trying to find out what happened to their mother, but it would scare her. The more Diego taught Liliana about the war and what it was like, the more she worried that their mother’s death was going to turn out to be something even more horrible than they could have imagined.
So many people disappeared during the war that it was easier, over time, to ignore the individual deaths. But now that they were living in Argentina again, surrounded by the now abandoned battlefields of the war, which were also supermarkets and schools and town squares; now that Liliana was older and she was learning more and more what it really meant to have disappeared she was plagued with questions about her mother’s death that she knew Nita would never be able to handle the answers to. Was she in pain? Did she suffer? Was she alone? Was it senseless or calculated? Was she afraid? Did she fight back? Was she thinking of them?
So instead Liliana decided to indulge her sister, recounting to her romantic trysts in the city and walks along the beach, that had never happened but that she suddenly and unexpectedly wished had.
Chapter 21
Liliana
“Look’s like this is it.”
Liliana stared up at three balconies all lined with a row of endless numbered doors.
“How should we do this?” Diego asked.
“My lucky number’s twenty-one,” Liliana said, “what’s yours?”
Diego laughed, “Thirteen.”
Behind door number thirteen was an elderly woman with a wall full of Russian nesting dolls and a Great Dane that thought it was a cat. Behind door number twenty-one was a janitor’s closet. An hour later they had winded their way up two floors and were standing in front of a door marked with a plastic three and the shadow of a number five. Diego knocked. Nothing. He knocked again and soft footsteps made their way to the door.
Liliana was standing in front of the peephole and she imagined how fish-like her face must look to the person inside, but even warped she hoped it at least looked pleasant and unassuming enough to be let inside. The door opened and a tall thin man wedged his face through the small space.
“Can I help you?” he said.
Liliana stepped forward.
“Adrian,” she said, “Mr. Monroe?”
“Yes,” he said.
Can we come in? I just wanted to ask…”
The door fell closed, there was a click, and then they heard the clink of the chain as Adrian fastened it closed.
“What the,” Diego said banging on the door. “Hey, she just wants to ask you a question. Come...”
“Diego it’s ok.”
“Sorry, we’ve just been knocking on doors all afternoon and when we finally find this guy he slams the door in your face.”
“I’ve got it,” Liliana said, “Uh, Mr. Monroe, my name is Liliana. I think you knew my mother. Her name was Isabella.”
They heard a TV click on followed by the mechanical musical intro to a cartoon.
Diego faced out over the balcony, shoulders slumped. “You ready?” he said motioning to the truck.
Liliana reached for the railing, lingering there, when the door suddenly swung open and Adrian, backing away quietly, beckoned them inside. They followed him into the kitchen, the three of them awkwardly maneuvering around the table before finally sitting down. Liliana noticed the glow of the television set in the next room casting shadows of two small children along the far wall. They were roc
king back and forth on their knees, hypnotized by the electric colored cartoons and techno music.
“Thirsty?” Adrian finally said.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Me too,” Diego said.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Monroe.”
“Adrian’s fine.”
“Adrian, I just moved back to Buenos Aires. My father moved my sister and me to the states during the war and we lived there for almost fourteen years. The truth is I don’t know anything about my mother. I barely remember her. But when we moved into her old house at the vineyard I found something of hers, a journal, and she mentions you in it and someone named Trini.”
A pallid vacancy fluttered behind Adrian’s eyes, draining into his skin. He walked to the next room and picked up the remote. Then he turned the volume up on the TV before walking back to the table. Diego cleared his throat.
“Adrian, do you know where we can find Trini?”
Adrian’s fingers curled against the edge of the table, his knuckles burning white.
“She’s dead,” he said, his jaw tight and trembling. “I killed her.”
Liliana felt Diego’s arm reach for her under the table as Adrian began to whisper.
“It’s my fault,” he said, “I asked her to come with me. It’s my fault she’s dead.”
His arms rested on the table, clenched fists trembling and Liliana reached out for them.
“Don’t,” Diego said.
But she slid her hand across the table until the tips of her fingers were resting on Adrian’s hands.
“I’m sorry, Adrian. We can leave. You don’t have to talk about it.”
Adrian shook his head.
“Your mother was Trini’s best friend and she hated me. But she was right to hate me. She knew I would put Trini in danger and I did. Trini should have listened to her.”
***
Trini and Adrian ran off with a section of the ERP and headed north, away from the city. Louis was right. They were spreading out, trying not to draw any attention to themselves as they waited for any word on their next plan of attack. They moved into a small two-bedroom apartment that they shared with six other members of the ERP.
The Things They Didn't Bury Page 10