* * *
We dropped Isabella at school, and the three of us took Colin’s truck to the coast. I let Paulo drive. Paulina leaned forward from the backseat and whispered in my ear, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him so happy.” I handed him my Costas, which he accepted and wore proudly.
We returned due west to the coast to an inlet on the beach where several companies ferried surfers to offshore reefs to surf waves often reaching twenty feet in prime conditions.
Like yesterday. Palm trees dotted the dunes and a frayed hammock rocked between two. An American guy was sitting in an old Ford van topped with eight surfboards of varying lengths. He was reading a paperback novel. Led Zeppelin spilling from the speakers. Long bleached hair. Bronzed skin. Skin and bones. Bare feet propped on the dash. Life was good, but currently slow.
He hopped out of his van when we pulled up. “Help you?” he asked.
I showed him Zaul’s picture. “Seen this kid?”
He studied it, finally nodding. “Yeah. Yesterday.”
“Where?”
He pointed at the swaying hammock. “Right there.”
“Talk to him?”
He shook his head. “No. I took his four friends”—he pointed toward the reef—“out for a few hours. Gnarly action. Epic.”
“He didn’t go with you?”
“Nope. Lay right there.” He placed his hand on his rib cage. “Dude was hurt. Took a spill or something. Walking pretty slow. Limping around. No shape to surf.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”
He chuckled. “Yeah. When we got back, he was gone.”
“Where’d he go?”
“No idea. His buddies didn’t know, either. They seemed happy to be rid of him. No love lost there.”
That meant the money had run out. “Any idea where they’re staying?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
I strode over to the hammock, and while I couldn’t find anything that belonged to Zaul, one thing stuck out. Blood. Soaked through the fabric and caked on the right side of the hammock. And a good bit of it, too. Paulo rubbed his finger across it and smelled it. Paulina looked concerned but said nothing. We drove the coastline until lunch but discovered nothing. Paulina checked in with the hospital in León, but no patient had checked in fitting either Zaul’s description or wound.
* * *
We returned to the house at lunch. Feeling helpless and knowing I could do nothing to help Zaul, we drove Colin’s truck to the plantation, where we were met by a smiling and growing crowd. More than a hundred waited in line. She turned to me. “Looks like you have a fan club.”
“Why?”
“They want to meet the man who did to the foreman what they always wished they could.”
“Which was?”
“Shame him.”
Paulina began examining the people in line while Paulo uncoiled the rope and held out my harness. I buckled in and descended into my hole, spending the afternoon digging, worried about Zaul and wondering how I would explain to his mother how I found him dead in a ditch. Or worse, didn’t find him at all.
Paulo pulled me out at dark, when I discovered the crowd had not abated, but grown. Torches lit the night. Paulina was talking to a young mother and rocking a sleeping baby. When I climbed out, they inched closer. Paulo patted me on the back and showed me the rope. Fifteen feet. He nodded. “Good dig.”
While the crowd watched from a safe distance, Anna Julia, the woman whose tooth I pulled last week, walked forward smiling a nearly toothless smile. She held out her hand and placed a single piece of hard candy in my palm, then closed my fingers around it and patted my hand.
I didn’t want to get Colin’s truck dirty, so I climbed into the back of the bed while Paulo turned the truck around. As he did, people began climbing on or getting in the vehicle. One by one, the men slung themselves up with the gringo while the older women or nursing mothers climbed in the backseat. By the time Paulo began rolling down the bumpy six-mile road, there were nine mothers in the cab with Paulo and eighteen men sitting with me on the rails or just standing in the back of the truck. Each talked to me, speaking in fast Spanish—none of which I understood. What I did understand, what I interpreted completely, was Paulina’s laughter spilling out of the windows up front.
When I was studying in London, Amanda and I took a weekend trip to Vienna to hear the Three Tenors. Specifically Pavarotti. I’m not much of an opera fan, but when that man sang “Nessun Dorma,” something in me responded, awakened, that had been asleep for all of my life prior. When he opened his lungs and belted out that last high C, there was a voice inside me that despite the fact that I can’t sing my way out of a wet paper bag wanted to. I wanted to stand up on that stage and sing with all that I am. I wanted to join that man. Join my voice with his. Not because I could or would have added anything. Certainly, I wouldn’t have. I’d only have taken away, but that’s not the point. The point is, I wanted to. That “wanting to” was the effect of that man and his song on my soul. Julie Andrews had the same effect, which might explain why Maria and I shared so much from The Sound of Music.
I’ve only had that response one other time in my life, and it was coming down that mountain in the back of that truck, covered in volcanic mud, surrounded by a bunch of sweaty Nicaraguans I couldn’t understand, and listening to the most beautiful laughter I’d ever heard coming out of the front seat.
If ever a soul was alive, it was hers. There. In that moment. When her soul sang.
In my entire life, I don’t ever remember crying. I may have shed a tear or two, but I’m talking about crying—tears dripping from a heart that feels. I did not cry when my dad died. Not when my mom died. Not when I lost Amanda. Not when Hack died. Not when I lost Shelly. Not when Maria cried out to me from the hospital bed. Not ever. The part in me that felt, where my soul and my emotions crossed, had been disconnected from the part that poured. Tears have to be broken loose and mine had not been.
Until my ride down that mountain.
Whether it was my helplessness regarding Zaul or Maria or Hack or Shelly or the emptiness that had become my life…I rode, moonlight shining down, wind in my face, a stream of tears cascading down my cheeks. I wouldn’t call them tears of joy or sorrow. I don’t really know what to call them. I just know that they flowed out of an emotive response—they carried with them a feeling or emotion or something and that something was aimed at someone other than me. The proof lies in the source. They did not fall from my head. They poured up and out of my heart.
Big difference.
I rode those six glorious miles, shoulder to shoulder with a truck bed full of men who would do well to take a shower and put on some deodorant, but to be honest, I don’t know if I was smelling me or them. Oddly, that thought never crossed my mind. I blended in. What struck me was a feeling, and it was a feeling I’d possibly never known. It was the feeling of something in me coming clean. That ride bathed me in laughter, in moonlight, in my own tears, and in the singular and surprising thought that maybe my cold, dead, calloused heart wasn’t as cold and dead as I’d long believed it to be. The type of bath I needed—that my heart craved, that could wash off the stain of me—was not of water acquired from an external source, that came from a bucket or tub or even the kind that you dove into, but water that rose up from a source on the inside.
My life had been characterized by emptiness the size of the Sahara but there, in that moment, in the back of that truck in the armpit of Nicaragua, I wondered—for the first time—if there wasn’t a river flowing down deep inside me.
If so, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head—where I’d learned to rationalize my indifference.
But water from my heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The euphoria of the previous night was muted early the next morning when Paulina woke me, crying. I checked my watch. It was 3:17 a.m.
She said, “You mind driving me up? It’s Roberto. H
e’s…” She trailed off.
I jumped out of bed. “Sure.”
Paulo asked a neighbor to sit with sleeping Isabella, so the three of us climbed the mountain in Colin’s truck. Thirty minutes later, we walked into Roberto’s room, where a vigil was under way. Candles had been lit, and beneath the whispers, I heard singing. Soft and angelic. Coming from the voices of the mothers and several of the children. All the women wore scarves, covering their heads.
I held back while Paulina and Paulo tiptoed their way through the crowd to Roberto. Another woman sat next to him, waving a fan while a second woman gently swayed the hammock. He was pale in the dim light, his eyes half-open. Paulina tied a scarf around her head, and then she and Paulo stepped through his door, but they weren’t the only ones to do so. Death was there, too.
Paulina knelt next to him and slid her hand in his. The right side of his face twitched upward and held for a second. At one time, that would have made a smile. His clothing was dry. As was his skin. Without moving his head, he held up his right hand, beckoning her. She leaned in, placing her head on his chest, where he rested his hand on her head. The movement exhausted him, and he lay several minutes catching his breath. Finally, he whispered. Faint. She nodded. Crying but trying to smile. He whispered some more. She cried harder and the pain peeled the forced smile off her face entirely. Tears streaming, she lifted her head; he placed his right thumb on her forehead and crossed her. Three times. Sobbing, she held his emaciated head in her palms and kissed his forehead, then his cheek. When she kissed his cheek a final time, he relaxed, exhaled, and died—his hand inside hers.
She hugged him several minutes while the crowd continued to sing. Paulina knelt on the floor, buried her face in her hands, and cried. Out loud. The cries were deep, echoed across the room, and I had the feeling that more than the pain of Roberto’s death was leaving her body.
After several minutes, Paulo lifted her to her feet where she stood along with the rest and sang a quiet song. When the song finished, someone stretched a dirty, tattered sheet over Roberto, covering his body and face. Silently, each person filed out of Roberto’s cramped room and the hallway that led to it.
Outside, Paulo asked, “Mi hermano—” He searched for the words. “Please, may I drive?” He pointed at Paulina. “She asks you to walk.”
I gave Paulo the keys and followed Paulina off the mountain. She had wrapped her arms around herself as if cold in the hot night air. I walked alongside. Saying nothing. Stepping around the rocks, which were difficult to see in the darkness of the new moon. She was sweating and her soaked blouse stuck to her back. The first several miles, she said nothing. Halfway home, she stopped, stared up at me, then off toward Las Casitas in the distance. She stood, shaking her head. Tears drying on her face. Every few seconds, another would trickle down, hang on her chin or the side of her lips, before finishing its fall. Unaware, she didn’t bother with them.
Around us, swarming in the trees, parrots and howler monkeys lit the early morning in a cacophony of sound and prelight activity. Either unable or unwilling, she didn’t speak on the way home until just a few hundred yards from the house. Finally, after a silent six miles, she turned. Her face looked tortured. She said, “I wonder if I could trouble you.”
“Anything.”
“We need to build a coffin. This morning. Would you help Paulo?”
“Certainly.” A pause. “Anything else?”
“I—” She searched my face. “I’d like to…we used to…a funeral—”
I handed her two hundred-dollar bills. “What else can I do?”
She held the money in her hand and choked back a sob. Collecting herself, she said, “Thank you.”
* * *
When Paulo showed me his rudimentary tools and a coffin, which he had built months prior for a man who had yet to die, I asked if there was a hardware store close by. He said, “León.” We drove to León, I bought the tools we needed, and then Paulo led me to a lumberyard, where we bought planks of seasoned Nicaraguan hardwood. It was some of the most beautiful wood I’d ever seen, and Hack would have really appreciated it.
When we returned, Paulo clued in to the fact that I had some experience with wood, so without steamrolling him or making him feel like his coffin wasn’t good enough, he and I set out to build Roberto’s coffin. When I fashioned my first dovetail together with seamless edges, Paulo sat back and patted me on the shoulder. “You finish.”
By midafternoon, I’d finished the coffin. Paulo ran his fingers along the smooth edges, along the rounded corners, the cross that would rest above Roberto’s face and nodded. “Mi hermano, you honor us.”
The four of us drove up the mountain for the beginning of the procession. The women—each head covered—had prepared Roberto’s body, dressing him in a white dress shirt and pants, which Paulina had bought with some of the money I’d given her. Then they laid him on top of a thin mattress covered with a blanket hand knit by one of the older women in the plantation. When the women began singing, the procession of almost two hundred lifted Roberto onto their shoulders and began walking down a path that led toward the remains of the mudslide. The younger men carried Roberto, sharing the load, passing him from shoulder to shoulder. Other than the almost subaudible singing from the women, the procession walked silently. Stepping quietly. Reverently. While Paulina and Paulo walked up front, alongside Roberto, Isabella remained next to me and slipped her hand in mine.
When the path leveled out, we walked out from the trees and into a valley spiked with several dozen tall white crosses. A cluster of three sat off to one side, and alongside them, someone had dug a hole. When the young men reached the hole, they laid the coffin on top of the boards that crossed it. The soft-spoken preacher spoke several minutes, followed by Paulo, who said a few words. Finally, Paulina stepped forward, and without saying a word, she opened her mouth and sang a song I’d never heard but will never forget. It was beautiful, mournful, and the other women joined her in the chorus.
Without being instructed, the young men slowly lowered Roberto into the hole and, one by one, each individual in the crowd crossed themselves, whispered words I could not understand, and dropped a gentle handful of dirt onto Roberto’s coffin. When they’d finished, Paulo handed me a rudimentary wooden shovel, and I helped him fill the hole. When we’d finished, the crowd had filed out of the valley and back up the hillside. Silently.
When I turned around, Paulina, Isabella, and the rest of the crowd had disappeared while one older woman stood next to me. It was Anna Julia. She tugged on my shirtsleeve and looked up at me. Paulo listened as she spoke. When she’d finished, he nodded, and she turned and followed the others uphill. Then he turned to me. “It was the most beautiful coffin. She’s never seen its equal. She say God will surely accept him and the angels will be jealous.”
I didn’t know Roberto but evidently everyone else did, and the fact that he was beloved by young and old was evident by the reverence with which they handled him. Seldom, if ever, had I seen such tenderness toward the living or the dead.
When we returned uphill, we found the beginnings of a banquet in full force. Huge pots of steaming rice, beans, and hundreds of handmade tortillas lay mounded on tables. A rather large pig hung roasting over a spit, where four boys took turns turning it, and greasy, sweat-soaked women began pulling the meat off the bone.
The subdued party continued long into the night as everyone ate plate after plate. Isabella conscripted me to help her make coffee and stir the punch in coolers and then pour it into paper cups. Near midnight, I took a break from cleaning up, from carrying food, from pouring punch, from doing whatever was needed. When I stopped to drink some punch and wipe my head, Paulina appeared next to me. Dripping with sweat, her scarf soaked to her forehead, a satisfied and weary smile on her face, she hooked her arm inside mine, leaned on me, and said nothing as we stood staring at the party around us. Several older folks came up to her, speaking quietly, nodding, and holding both her hands in theirs.
She spoke softly as well, nodding to each one and hugging several. When they’d left, she turned to me. “Thank you for this.”
I’d known beautiful women. But I’d never known a human being whose inward beauty had the effect Paulina’s had on all those around her. Her outward beauty was unequaled, but it was her inward beauty that left me speechless. I said nothing.
She waved her hand across the dwindling crowd. “They’ve not eaten like this…since my father. They were thanking me for that.” She turned to me. “So thank you.”
* * *
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when we got home. Isabella had been asleep on Colin’s front seat for the better part of three hours. Paulo carried her to her bed. I stretched out in the chicken coop and was too tired to kick off my flip-flops.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Friday morning appeared and only Paulo woke before me. We shared a quiet cup of coffee while Paulina and Isabella slept, and then I called Colin. Time to check in. I told him about the poker game, the truck, and about finding someone who’d seen Zaul—and about the blood on the hammock. I thought about not, but it’s not my place to withhold from Colin. Zaul’s not my son.
Colin listened quietly and then agreed that if Zaul was out of money, and possibly hurt but unwilling to go to the hospital, chances were good he’d return to the house in Costa Rica to rest, heal up, get whatever money he’d left there, and put together plan B since plan A had failed. I told him I was heading out in a few hours and that I’d be there tonight. We talked about Maria, her improvement, and he told me they were scheduling a follow-up surgery with Shelly to reduce some of the scar tissue. They had yet to tell Maria.
Before he hung up, I said, “Wonder if you’d do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“You have any attorney friends in this part of the world?”
“You need one?”
“Maybe, but not for anything criminal. Least not yet.” I told Colin what I needed, or wanted, and when I finished, he was quiet a minute. Finally, he said, “Give me a few days.”