What You Wish For

by Janet Dawson

  The passenger elevator opened and Nina stepped out, dressed in dark gray slacks and a neon pink shirt. She crossed the marble floor toward the coffee bar in the Dunlin lobby alcove. “Mother? What are you doing here?”

  “We’ve both had a day to cool off,” Lindsey said. “We need to talk.”

  Nina frowned. “It’s a bad time. The board meeting—”

  “This can’t wait.” Lindsey touched her daughter’s arm. “Putting things off is what got us into this mess in the first place. Please talk to me. Here, outside, anywhere. But let’s talk.”

  “All right,” Nina said. “I came down to get a latte.”

  Progress, however small. “I could use some coffee myself,” Lindsey said.

  At the coffee bar they ordered lattes. “There’s no privacy here,” Nina said. “Let’s go upstairs.” With cups in hand, they walked to the counter staffed by the security guard. Lindsey wrote her name and the time on the check-in sheet and obtained a visitor badge. They took the elevator to the fifth floor and walked to Claire’s office, a corner suite. “Ellie, this is my mother, Lindsey Page. This is Claire’s regular assistant, Ellie Stern. I’ll be covering her desk while she’s on leave.”

  “Nice meeting you.” Ellie’s belly stuck out in front of her like a medicine ball. “I’m off to my doctor’s appointment. Then I’ll get lunch and be back by by two. Unless I go into labor.”

  “When are you due?” Lindsey asked.

  “Two weeks. But if Junior decides to show up early, I’m way past ready.” Ellie grinned and glanced at Nina. “The board meeting will probably last till noon. You have a lunch date?”

  “Yes, with Tess, my roommate,” Nina said. “Is it okay to leave?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Mrs. Megarris is at the meeting. Sometimes she and Claire have lunch afterwards. If that’s the plan today it’s not on the calendar. Claire doesn’t have any other appointments this afternoon. See you later.”

  When Ellie had gone, Nina sat down at the desk. “Okay, you wanted to talk.”

  Lindsey pulled up a chair. “I know you’re angry with me. I’ve made mistakes. Mothers always do. I had my reasons for not telling you who your father is. I thought they were good reasons. I wanted to protect you, from hurt and uncertainty.”

  “You wanted to protect him.”

  “Yes, and other people too. He wasn’t the only one to consider.”

  “So you hurt me instead.” Anger flickered in Nina’s eyes. Then sadness took its place. “I wish you had been honest and open from the start.”

  “When I made those choices I thought they were the right choices,” Lindsey said. “But I was wrong. Nothing in life turns out exactly the way we plan. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You might have been hurt even if you had known all along who he is. Because we can’t be a family, the three of us. That’s the hand we were dealt. We have to play our cards the way they fall.”

  Nina spread her hands wide in frustration and supplication. “What do I do now?”

  “I have to tell him,” Lindsey said. “I never did, though I ­wondered if he guessed. Men have remarkable tunnel vision. Sometimes they can’t even see what’s staring them in the face.”

  “What am I supposed to do with my hurt?” Nina’s voice wavered. “Just get over it and move on?”

  “The alternative is to hang onto your anger for the rest of your life and let it warp everything you do or are.”

  “The way it has so far?”

  “I didn’t say that, you did.” Lindsey sighed. “I didn’t know how to answer your questions about your father. I wondered why I wasn’t good enough for you. You’ve built up a powerful load of resentment. It’s colored your life for too long. It’s done serious damage to our relationship. Why does this have such power over you? Please tell me so I can understand.”

  “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Nina’s voice had a singsong cadence as she repeated the phrase that children learn early. “That’s not true. Words hurt. They hurt like hell. They sting and make you cry.”

  “Words have power only if you grant them power.” Even as she spoke, Lindsey recalled the angry words Nina had flung at her in the past. She’d given them power. They still hurt.

  “It takes time to learn that,” Nina countered.

  “Some of us never do.”

  “Think about how hard it is for a kid.”

  Lindsey nodded. “Believe it or not, I do remember what that’s like.”

  Nina sighed. “It was okay when I was a kid. We lived with Aunt Emma. Then we moved to the city. You taught at San Francisco State. Back then I didn’t think about not having a father. Maybe it was because I was so young. But we were always getting together with other people’s families—Gretchen, Annabel, the neighbors. There were adult males in my life who filled that role. Some of my classmates had single parents. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything odd about not having a father living with us. Then we moved to San Luis Obispo. I didn’t want to go. I felt uprooted.”

  “You know why I took that job at Cal Poly. Grandpa was sick. We didn’t know then what Alzheimer’s was, what it does to a person, a family.” Lindsey felt again the sadness and frustration of her father’s slow deterioration. “He was getting more forgetful, more difficult. I needed to be there. Grandma couldn’t manage.”

  “I know that now,” Nina said. “I know how hard it was on you and Grandma. But I was a kid. I hated San Luis Obispo. After San Francisco it was the sticks, the back of beyond. Paso Robles was smaller still. With attitudes to match. You know small towns. School was worse.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have talked with your teachers or the principal.”

  “It was a girl in my class,” Nina said. “The same class, all the way up through high school. The popular girl, the one who was destined to be prom queen. She was a bitch. She picked on kids like me, the new ones, the kids who were a little bit different. She’d seize on one thing about her victims and torment them. The other kids followed her lead, like a pack of wolves. She called me a bastard. It hurt. I started wondering who my father was, why he wasn’t around, why you never married him. I asked questions. You wouldn’t answer. I resented you and him. There was this big hole you wouldn’t fill. I try to be logical about it. But the emotional part gets me every time.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re my daughter and I love you. Always remember that, no matter what.” Lindsey reached for Nina’s hand and held it. Nina didn’t pull away. Instead, Lindsey felt an answering pressure.

  “Tess and I had a long talk last night,” Nina said. “She wondered why I’d moved out of your house so abruptly. I told her about our quarrel, but I didn’t tell her who my father is. I wasn’t ready.”

  “I’ll talk with him. Then the two of you can sort things out on your own.”

  Voices buzzed in the hall, as though someone had disturbed a beehive. Lindsey looked in the corridor, at people exiting the board room. A man and a woman stopped near the doorway. “Llewellyn replacing Caldwell,” the woman said. “Claire won’t like that. They shot down everything she proposed. Brinker won this round.”

  The old dinosaur has teeth, Lindsey thought. So the meeting hadn’t gone Claire’s way.

  The woman whistled the opening bars of “Stormy Weather.” She and the man retreated. Claire approached, face like a thundercloud, dark and lowering. Mrs. Megarris was with Claire. Despite the age difference, they looked so much alike, not only the planes and angles of their faces. Mother and daughter wore the same bitter, dissatisfied visage.

  I know some of your secrets, Aunt Rebecca. You’re an accessory to murder.

  Evidently Nina hadn’t picked up on Claire’s foul mood. “How did the meeting go?” she asked.

  The wrong question at the wrong time. Anger flashed in Claire’s eyes, quickly masked. She didn’t answer Nina, instead addressing Lindsey. “Lindsey. What a surprise. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I was in the city, so I stopped
to see Nina. I’m just leaving.”

  Claire turned to Nina. “Any messages?”

  “None. It’s quiet. Ellie’s gone to her doctor’s appointment. I’m planning to meet Tess for lunch. Should I wait until Ellie gets back?”

  “No, go ahead,” Claire said. “Mother and I are going to chat, then I’ll walk her down to the garage.” Claire took Mrs. Megarris’s arm, steered her into the inner office, and shut the door.

  “I don’t understand all the ins and outs of the company yet,” Nina said. “Claire had some proposals for the board. Sounds like the meeting didn’t go the way she’d hoped. She and Mrs. Megarris are probably doing a postmortem.” She took out her cell phone and punched some numbers. “Tess, I’m free for lunch now. Meet you on the corner?”

  Lindsey glanced at her watch. It was noon, time to meet Rod Llewellyn in the lobby. “I have a lunch date, too. We’ll talk later.”

  They took the elevator downstairs and Nina headed for the street. A tall, dark-haired man waited by the coffee bar. “Lindsey,” Rod said. “Good to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

  “I understand you’ve been elected to the board. ­Congratulations.”

  “Word travels fast,” he said as they left the building. A cable car went by on California Street, bell clanging. “It’s a lot of responsibility. I’ve got to go back to Houston and wrap up things so I can hand them off to my successor. Give up my apartment there and find a place to live here.”

  “Where did you live before? When you were here in the Bay Area.”

  “North Beach. I’ve always liked the neighborhood. But it’s changed.”

  “Yes. Everything has.”

  They walked a few blocks to a restaurant and were shown to a table near the front window. “Let’s have some wine to celebrate my promotion,” he said. “I like a good Merlot.”

  “So do I.” She scanned the menu. When the server returned with their wine, they both ordered salads.

  “Max says you want some background information on the coffee business.” He reached for a slice of sourdough. “For a book you’re writing.”

  “That’s how it started.” Lindsey sipped her wine. “Were you in El Salvador in April of nineteen eighty-nine?”

  His lean face turned wary. “Why?”

  “I’m interviewing Central American immigrant women for my book,” Lindsey said. “One is a woman from El Salvador. In April of nineteen eighty-nine, she lived in a village called San Blas, on the Aragón finca in Chalatenango department. Something terrible happened there. I talked with Merle Sefton, the reporter who wrote about it. She saw a tall dark-haired man at the Aragón house and overheard conversation indicating the man was a coffee broker from Dunlin Corporation. It wasn’t Hal Norwood. He was in New York that weekend. Was it you?”

  Rod tore the bread into smaller pieces. He set the fragments on his plate and met Lindsey’s gaze. “Yes. I was there. With Claire.”

  31

  Chalatenango Department, El Salvador, April 1989

  The sound jarred him from his after-breakfast somnolence, a short repeating burst, a staccato pattern reminding him of the pneumatic rattle of jackhammers. But he wasn’t in the city. He was miles from the nearest town, in a country ravaged by civil war.

  Rod Llewellyn set his cup on the railing. “That sounds like gunfire,” he said as his host joined him on the veranda.

  “It’s just my men,” Humberto Aragón said, “practicing at the shooting range. We are involved in a war.”

  That’s exactly why the sound of gunfire disturbs me, Rod thought.

  Humberto had close-cropped gray hair and a thickset torso in khaki pants and shirt. “My finca is quite large. My family has owned this land for a hundred years. I must defend it from those who would take it away from me. The army can’t patrol everywhere, all the time. These rebels try to disrupt agricultural production. I don’t intend to let them interfere. So I have my own army.”

  Rod had heard of these private militias, bought and paid for by wealthy landowners, sometimes with more firepower and equipment than the Salvadoran army. “Have you seen fighting here?”

  “We’ve had our share. There are rebels in the town of Los Árboles.” The landowner pointed to the northeast, where mountains rose dark green against the blue sky. “About thirty-five kilometers. Severino assures me the next army offensive will drive them away.”

  Rod converted thirty-five kilometers to twenty-one miles. He didn’t much like the idea of a rebel outpost so close. But the acquisition of coffee beans to be shipped back to the United States involved more than correspondence, phone calls, and bills of lading. He also visited coffee plantations, consulting with growers, sampling and tasting the crop. He’d put off this visit to El Salvador, reluctant to go into a war zone, though other countries he’d visited in Latin America, Africa and Asia had their share of civil and political unrest. The Dunlin Corporation was always concerned about things that could disrupt production of the crops the company imported—weather, natural disasters, civil strife, labor disputes, and politics. But what mattered above all else was business, the crop itself, not culture, government, or the people who grew it.

  El Salvador was a pinpoint on the map, but the country had been a major coffee producer since the mid-nineteenth century, when coffee supplanted indigo as the main crop. Coffee flourished on the high, cool hillsides and the growers, the coffee elite, amassed huge fortunes and enormous plantations. This unequal distribution of land led to conflict. In the 1970s, failed efforts at land reform brought increasing violence. The civil war began in earnest in the 1980s, with reports of death squads in the cities and massacres in the countryside, the civilian population caught in the crossfire. At times rebels had controlled whole departments in the north and east. The escalating involvement of the United States provided financial aid to the Salvadoran government and an influx of military advisors to the Salvadoran army, but the fighting went on. The intensity and viciousness of the war gave him pause.

  Rod had originally planned a quick visit to El Salvador in late March. Then Claire Megarris, now a junior executive in Marketing, invited herself along, delaying the trip till mid-April. She revised the itinerary to a leisurely jaunt spanning more than a week. Their last stop, a long weekend, was the Aragón finca. Rod was annoyed, but Claire was the boss’s niece and she had Marketing’s blessing. Who was he to argue?

  They picked up a rental car at the San Salvador airport and headed west into the region called Cinturón de Oro, the belt of gold, a broad agricultural area tucked between the two mountain ranges that crossed El Salvador from east to west. Some of the peaks were dormant volcanoes. In the past the country had been rattled by eruptions that had covered the landscape in ash. Geysers shot up water and steam. Fumaroles emitted smoke and volcanic gases. The byproduct of volcanic activity was fertile soil, some of the richest in the country. Cattle grazed and other crops grew, but the major crop was Bourbon Arabica coffee.

  Distances didn’t look that great on the map, but in many areas the roads were terrible. It took them hours to get from place to place. They drove through verdant countryside, where colorful flowers contrasted with lush green. The land itself was beautiful, but El Salvador’s roads were lined with people, whole families of them, dressed in threadbare clothes, trudging along the highways with their meager possessions, looking as though they didn’t get enough to eat.

  He’d seen poverty before. But the destitution—and the disparity—seemed even more appalling here. They stayed with growers they visited, wealthy men who owned the land and ran the country. The coffee elite lived in opulent homes, ate from tables laden with food. At each stop Rod felt more disturbed, contrasting the comfortable lives and surroundings of the wealthy planters with those of the peasants who worked in the coffee fields and processing plants. The peasants lived—if you could call it that—in hardscrabble villages, huts clustered on the outskirts of towns, in corners on the vast plantations. Or they had nowhere to live at all, like the pe
ople walking along the roads, like troops marching from one camp to another.

  “Who are all these people?” he asked early in their journey. “Where are they going?”

  “Campesinos.” Claire, at the wheel of the rental car, pulled out and passed yet another straggling procession of peasants. “Migrant workers. They move from plantation to plantation, working the coffee crop.”

  “Isn’t there any permanent workforce?”

  “Some campesinos live in villages on the fincas. When there isn’t enough work, they move from place to place. It’s the custom of the country.”

  “It’s a bad custom.”

  She flashed him a sideways glance. “We have migrant workers in the United States. How is it any different here?”

  “I’ve never seen migrant workers in the States that looked this beaten down.”

  “Been to any good slums lately?” she asked. “I understand the ones in Mexico City and Manila are particularly fetid. And how about those favelas in Rio? You think I’m hard-hearted? Just practical. I didn’t realize you were so naïve, after all these years in the business. We can’t do anything about the conditions in this country, things that have existed for a long time. Lighten up. Look around you. The weather is gorgeous. The countryside is beautiful.”

  Callous was what he’d been thinking, but hard-hearted would do as well for a description. You haven’t changed a bit, he thought. He was stung by her accusation of naïveté. Maybe he couldn’t do anything about the conditions he saw that left these people in misery, impoverished in body and spirit. But at least he could acknowledge what he saw, like the woman whose eyes met his at a dusty crossroad. She was young, but hunger and hard living had etched lines on her face. She carried a sleeping toddler on her back. Her skirt had faded to gray, like all the hopes and dreams Rod imagined a young woman would have. She trudged in run-down shoes, moving as though her feet hurt. For a moment she looked directly at Rod, her eyes rimmed with fatigue, black with despair, empty of hope. For Rod, the young woman at the crossroads became the face of poverty in El Salvador.