“We’re going to have to work on it,” she told her husband. “We’re what they’ve got, poor little guys.”
Todd shook his head. But Holly held out her hand. “Are you going to come see them?”
“How did we let this happen?” Todd asked, holding back.
She smiled at him bleakly. Todd took her hand, finding it was as cold as her smile; as tense and necessary to him as the breaths he drew. He let her lead him into the kitchen, when he sat down shyly between the boys.
“My dear,” Tânia told Holly, “You must spend the rest of your life teaching your children that this was not their fault.”
“Promise me they’ll listen,” Holly said.
Epilogue
Holly stooped in the front hallway to pick up the mail. There were two invitations to her friends’ openings, magazines, bills, an envelope from her dealer, business letters for Todd’s consulting firm. After returning to Vancouver, Todd had set himself up as an environmental consultant. It allowed him a slower pace, more flexibility, more time with the boys. Meanwhile, Holly had her studio in the garage. They were lucky to own a house large enough that they could both work at home. It let them keep apart if they wished. Also be together.
A final envelope dropped free of the slot. Glancing down, Holly saw it was a letter from the priest, Ignacio, addressed politely to both of them. She picked it up unhappily, reluctant to open — re-open — whatever it was Ignacio had to say. Then she ripped it open, finding it contained two photographs wrapped in several pages of baroque handwriting. Taking out the pictures, Holly saw a priest in the first one. It must have been Ignacio, holding up a little girl of two or three for the camera. Holly was puzzled until she turned to the second photograph, in which a group of forest people were standing around a bride and groom in Western dress. The bride was as tiny as the people of the forest, but the groom was tall enough that he must have been Jefferson. So, he’d found his wife, found the tribe. A happy ending, after all.
Holly leaned against the doorframe, holding the letter unread in her hand. From what’s she’d finally heard, poor Jefferson’s quest could not have been easy. For months after Todd and Ignacio had left him, he’d been unable to find his adopted tribe. Discouraged, suspicious of the geological team, he’d begun to haunt Mankiewicz’s camp — a concrete explanation for Celso’s gleeful report to Todd that the labourers there felt watched. Unfortunately, Jefferson got too used to stealing from the kitchen, and the cook finally caught him a couple of weeks before the boys were kidnapped. Mankiewicz turned him over to some friendly police, and Doutor Eduardo was able to order the photograph that was faxed to their house in Rio. Not long afterward, the kidnapping ended, and Celso arranged for Jefferson to be freed.
This much they knew before leaving Brazil. Turning back to the letter, Holly learned from Ignacio that Jefferson had returned to the rapids after his release. Under orders from new management at Rio Anna, the geological camp there was being dismantled and abandoned by a puzzled Mankiewicz and his men. Mankiewicz turned out to be right: Jefferson was better off after the company’s arrival than before. He was able to scavenge enough discarded lumber to build himself a comfortable house, and found that the runway provided sufficient pasturage for a couple of cows. After setting himself up, Jefferson farmed, prospected and cleared more land, waiting for his wife to come back. Eventually she did.
From her they discovered there had been a second incursion above the rapids. Not long after the first skirmish, with Jefferson already on his way to get help, sentries ran into the longhouse warning that outsiders were approaching. A large party was slipping and snaking its way up the portage, carrying three light aluminium boats and bristling with arms. In a panic, the people packed whatever they could and fled into the serra. They hadn’t meant to travel far, but soon the loud and callous machinery forced them over the mountains, where they explained their problem to the northern tribe. The longhouse people weren’t particularly welcome in the north, but under the circumstances they were tolerated, and planted a season of crops. Meanwhile they watched the geologists leave; watched Jefferson build his camp unmolested. Now that another season had quietly passed, they proposed moving south again, and Jefferson was able to assure them they’d be safe.
Ignacio wrote that none of this was to be made public. There had been no armed men, no skirmish, no mining exploration. Officially, Mankiewicz had never even visited that part of the country. He couldn’t have, since an Indian bureau document, dating back four decades, created a closed reserve south of the serra. The longhouse people had always lived there, migrating into the serra and out. Perhaps their latest migration had been a little more circuitous than usual, Ignacio wrote. But then, everything was, occasionally.
Holly let the letter drop, thinking that the fiction was finally complete. Their time in Brazil had been completely papered over. Nothing untoward had happened, and nothing anomalous could result. Tânia, for instance. Even though Tânia was taking an increasingly active role in running the Gusinde family holdings, this was seen publicly — as far as it was seen at all — as an overdue generational change. Doutor Eduardo was yesterday’s man, old-style, somewhat countrified. He had no place in an increasingly internationalized economy. In fact, Tânia told Holly he was becoming almost an embarrassment to the family, issuing orders where he had no authority, demanding confidential information to which he had no right. As a result, his children conspired with Tânia to keep him out of the way, safe on his ranch near São Paulo. He could stay busy there; told his children he would die there.
Tânia said she hoped he would. She also complained that she had scant time for painting lately, although she’d surprised herself with a new lover. This was a spiky young artist. A sculptor; a woman. Tânia thought she was living a little through her lover, and told Holly she was never happy. Yet she said she took great gusto in living. Her daughters were splendid, her friends a consolation. Her son, Eric, had not changed, and was incrementally breaking her heart.
The Austens’ sons, of course, had never been kidnapped. At least, the media never reported they’d been kidnapped, police records were unhelpful, and gunfire wasn’t heard in the Zona Norte that final night. Ask any local resident if they’d heard gunfire, and they’d look blank. Gunfire? Sé la. If three bodies were found near the morro the next morning, they would simply have been the castings of another fight between drug traffickers, or perhaps the bicheiros. Trafficking was woven together with the numbers racket into such an intricate screen it was hard to tease out who might be responsible, and any corpses found in such circumstances would be buried by women who wailed poignantly, but didn’t talk. Certainly when the Austens left Rio, their Brazilian friends knew of no problems locally, although those who saw them understood from their shattered faces that they were forced to leave because of a family emergency at home. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, friends gathered they’d returned after becoming unnerved by life in a violent city, worn down, plagued by homesickness and tropical parasites: which was about what everyone had expected all along.
One crack in the tower of silence. Shortly after the boys came home, a dead American was discovered in the Zona Norte, his genitals severed and placed in his mouth. There was a flurry of lurid newspaper stories in the days following the discovery, during which the body was finally identified as that of one Edgar Eugene Polh, a former airline pilot wanted in the U.S. on smuggling and racketeering charges, many of them related to a child prostitution ring. American consular officials did not appear to regret his demise, although a former neighbour in his Forth Worth condominium was quoted as saying Polh had been popular with residents. The children liked seeing him dressed in his uniform, she said, and sometimes he would give them plastic packages of wings.
Evan’s and Conor’s counsellor believed Polh had never touched them. Holly couldn’t help fearing that the truth was buried here as well, but the counsellor felt almost certain the boys hadn’t seen P
olh during the kidnapping, and continued to believe he’d been shot by accident in the Amazon. In fact, they’d liked him, and Holly and Todd found themselves helplessly bound not to say anything implying they thought otherwise, which would only disturb the children further.
Evan was having the worst time. He withdrew for months after the kidnapping, his speech deteriorating, his coordination becoming jerky and rough. Eventually they realized that part of this was a terrible saudade, homesickness for Brazil. Tânia started sending packages of local candies and comic books, but Holly was haunted by something she’d said about a fissure having opened in Eric’s personality as he’d moved between countries. It was true other people survived the experience. Much of restless modern life was predicated on surviving it. But Evan’s improvement was slow, and even though he was back to speaking at age level, he was still prone to sudden terrors that could paralyze him in the middle of a game of catch.
Conor, fortunately, had held up much better, although he’d become almost too mature for a boy his age. This didn’t make him popular, although he had a similarly bright best friend from the program for gifted children, and usually said that one friend was enough. He was also growing, weedy, his hair still blonde as others went darker, and Todd said he was increasingly reminded, God help the boy, of himself.
Sighing, Holly turned back to Ignacio’s long letter. The priest wrote that he had officiated at Jefferson’s marriage and the daughter’s baptism about three months before. The ceremony was at Jefferson’s farm, where the family planned to live. Fortunately for Jefferson, the farm was located just outside the boundaries of the reserve. He was also fortunate that tribal elders had given him permission to cross the boundaries at will. Or rather, permission was granted at their behest by Celso, whose recent promotion within the Indian bureau placed him in charge of contacts with the tribe. Apparently Celso was proving a stickler for the bureau policy of keeping reserves closed to outsiders, Jefferson being the one exception — along with Celso himself, of course, for the purposes of anthropological research.
Ignacio wrote with some asperity about Celso. The agent had recently refused him permission to open a one-man mission on the reserve, although he said he planned to keep applying. Holly smiled. From what she knew, it was easy to picture years of jockeying between the two, the end of which even Todd would not be able to predict. At least, it was clear Celso would arrange matters to his own liking, but Todd had scant hope of guessing what this might be. Holly and Todd had lived in Brazil for almost two years, but by the time they’d left, they’d only started to learn how much they would never know about the country, its politics, its culture, even their friends.
About as little as she’d ever know about her husband.
Todd was coming in the kitchen door, and smiled when he saw Holly.
“Mail?” he asked, giving her a kiss.
Silently, Holly gave him the letters, Ignacio’s on top. Todd drew in a short breath, then read the priest’s letter while sucking his cheeks, emotion flitting like sunlight across his worn face. Holly felt that they were married again, after a separation that hadn’t really ended until long after they’d moved back home. Yet there were still some subjects they couldn’t discuss. Her Darwin series. Larkin.
Holly hadn’t been in touch with Larkin since leaving Brazil, and didn’t want to be, poor man, although she couldn’t help reading about him from time to time. It was hard to tell whether Larkin’s celebrity had increased, or if she was simply more conscious of it. His Brazilian CD got good reviews, and the newspapers ran flattering profiles when he toured the clubs with his show. One day, when they were in a music store, Holly saw Todd snatch a copy of the latest CD, buy it surreptitiously, and throw it out as soon as they got home. She hadn’t even been tempted retrieve it, knowing what music it contained, and not seeing any use for it. Not long afterwards, they almost stumbled on Larkin’s acting debut, as he played the owner of a video store in an independent film. They’d been on the way out the door to see it, not knowing about his part, when Evan’s tears had kept them in. After that, Holly noticed that Todd read film reviews more carefully, and she subsequently learned that Larkin took the role of a suave uncle in a young director’s comic first feature, a popular hit, although his character was played by someone else when it was made into a television series; to Larkin’s credit or discredit, Holly didn’t know.
One time she caught herself staring at Larkin’s grainy photograph in the newspaper. She’d felt embarrassed, baffled, tender, regretful. But when she also caught herself feeling superior, Holly pushed the paper away. She had nothing to feel superior about, even though her reputation as a painter was growing. She did figures, portraits. Sometimes she painted children, although Todd couldn’t bear to hang her child portraits on their walls. Her palette was raw, brutish, vital. People said she was good, and Todd seemed to agree. Not that he claimed to be much of a critic. At least, he was trying not to be.
When Todd finished the letter, he folded it roughly.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Another portion of the world swings back into balance,” she answered. “More or less. For a while.”
“You’re not hopeful, then.”
Feeling surprised, Holly replied, “I don’t know if you’d want anything more.”
Todd imagined she was right. As she gave him a kiss, he understood he’d started trusting her again, and wondered if she’d managed the same with him. Holly seemed much more sardonic lately, more nervous and open than she’d been before. Yet on her way out to her studio, she turned to give him a look of intelligent sympathy, so clear-sighted and so very kind that Todd couldn’t help smiling back. Holly’s blue eyes seemed tropical to him now, twin fragments of a sky they’d left behind, and were never leaving.
Lesley Krueger is the author of seven previous books. Her most recent novel was The Corner Garden, called “masterful” by the Ottawa Citizen. It was published by Penguin Canada and is now available as an e-book. She is also the author of the novel Poor Player, the short story collection, Hard Travel, and two non-fiction books, Foreign Correpondences and Contender. She is also the author of a children’s book, Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World.
Please visit Lesley’s webpage, www.lesleykrueger.com or connect with her on Facebook.
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