Grave of Hummingbirds (18 page)

Enrique Torres Arroyo held the rifle steady against the indent of his shoulder, his knuckles white on the grip.

Gregory moved slowly away from the stairs, toward the front door. All he needed was a little time. If he could distract the men, draw their attention away from Alberto, somehow get them to focus on him instead . . .

“Step away from the door, Doctor,” Gabriela’s father said, calmly enough.

Gregory stopped. “Lower the rifle, Torres. The police are here. Let them take him away. You don’t want to do this.”

“You’re wrong. I’ve never wanted to do anything more in my life.”

Gregory hunted for the right words. “You’ll go to prison. Your life will be over. Please, put down your weapon.”

“You think I worry about that? I don’t care about prison.”

Fury took hold of Gregory. “Stand down. Now. I warn you, Torres. This is my house. There will be no bloodshed here.” For seconds he thought it had worked. The angry lash of his voice cracked the tension and momentarily shifted the balance of authority. The men wavered, adjusting to his unexpected show of aggression.

But that definable moment was lost when Alberto squeezed between Finn and Manco to take a step forward.

“No,” Manco said. “Please. We’ll hand him over to the police. I’ll take him myself. You can go with us.”

Sophie, dressed in one of Gregory’s shirts, came out onto the landing on unsteady legs. She took hold of the banister for support and tried to speak, but all she could manage was a faint “Stop this, all of you. Enough.”

Alberto turned to look up at her. Smiling, he reached behind his back to withdraw something from under his shirt.

Enrique Torres Arroyo fired.

Gregory lunged toward his son and fell to his knees beside him at the foot of the stairs. Ineffectually searching for a pulse and growing clumsy in his efforts to cover a bloody wound with his hands, he repeated no over and over again, first in denial, then as a plea. When he felt someone grip his shoulder, he straightened, and it was then that he noted the small smile that played about Alberto’s lips, as though at last everything had fallen into place, just the way he wanted.

In one hand he held a tattered copy of a book called
El principito
.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
hey buried Alberto between Nita and the condor, with Manco standing beside Gregory as they lowered him into the ground. Finn and Sophie stood at the fringes of the crowd that had gathered to support the two men.

In the days that followed, Colibrí prepared for an onslaught of political and legal attention.

Sophie recovered quickly from her physical injuries. She spoke to the police with a quiet sense of confidence and insisted she be part of the forensics team that would gather to excavate the cave. She promised to bring the wrath of the international community, humanitarian groups, and monitoring agencies down on the heads of the Pájaron government and assured them that satellite imagery of every inch of the highlands would be examined in search of mass graves.

Gregory invited her and Finn to stay and offered the use of the house, clinic, and outbuildings as a base for the forensics team.

Raphael made the decision to cancel the fiesta, and the condor was returned to the high slopes, where he had space and time to catch the updraft he needed to fly free. It took courage to break with tradition, but too much had happened and no one openly challenged his decision.

“We lost one condor this year,” he said to Gregory. “I won’t risk another.”

Gregory dreaded returning to his bedroom every night. He found excuses to keep Finn up with him, long after Sophie had retired, and snatched a few hours of senseless sleep when he could. He grappled with images that took the form of memories, bitter or blissful, always tinged with regret and self-recrimination. Every touch, all the fleeting time he’d spent with Nita, was now tainted by what she had hidden from him.

Alberto’s life, from the day Gregory had first met him at age twelve, slipped through an hourglass in the sleepless minutes of Gregory’s nights, the words and gestures of the wild mountain boy returning to give weight to every grain Gregory had failed to capture.

He saddled Tomás and rode along the narrow trails and logging roads, through woodland and down to the lake, until Pájaro’s wilderness again took root and sprouted within him. He saw Nita in the green and gray brown, the ostentatious, flowering forest and the sparse, exhausted fields; heard her in the twitters and hoots and howls; smelled her at the lapping lake edges and in blooms of sweet alyssum and forget-me-nots that he picked for the table and to place on her grave.

Sophie took an indefinite leave of absence from teaching and arranged for Finn to complete his senior year through online courses. They agreed that his ballet training would have to wait.

Isabella came up from the village each day and taught Finn how to groom the horses, muck out the stables, and look after Gregory’s birds.

Each night Sophie went to sleep with the light on, but in her dreams she couldn’t escape the dark, where Alberto’s mask chased her toward a splintered mirror. In the cracked glass, her eyes were lopsided and vertical slits dissected her nose and mouth. Her unfinished tattoo wound around her neck and tightened. She’d wake in a sudden jolt of terror, sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath and clawing at her skin. She disturbed both Gregory and Finn, but it was Finn who went to her, night after night, who patted her awake and sat with her until her eyes closed again and she calmed.

As time went on, the illustration rested, delicate and indelible beneath the collar of her shirt, and she grew used to it.

During the day, Sophie was professional and brusque. The cave was confirmed as a mass grave and disposal site. She pulled her hair back in a high braid, drank bottle after bottle of water, and focused on cataloging the grotto and its contents. As part of the forensic management team, she quietly went about her work, setting up a baseline and flagging the remains and evidence.

Crime scene investigators had moved through the chamber to the prison within. Because the grave had been disturbed, bones were mingled on the rippled floor. Even with powerful lighting, inaccessible crevices into which small fragments had fallen were difficult to see.

Sophie identified and inventoried the scattered bones, and the team estimated a minimum of twenty-five bodies, nineteen of them more recent than others, piled at the base of the mountain shaft. Many of these had broken in the fall from a low-flying plane or helicopter. Some would have bounced off the walls as they plummeted.

Sophie worked on the ground while two members of the team rappelled, checking the walls for evidence and taking samples. Bits of snagged cloth clung to rocky outcrops. A few of the bodies had been blindfolded, hands and feet bound with cable ties. They had been alive during their descent.

The more athletic members of the team worked off ropes suspended from the mouth of the shaft, using cling wrap to secure the blindfolds and the disassembled hands and feet.

Where possible, the team worked from the center of each corpse, moving outward and following the anatomical contours to its ends. They tagged bullets and shell casings and used tissue paper and Bubble Wrap to cushion the bones for transportation back to the house. Body bags were numbered and labeled with permanent markers, and individual cadavers carried out on stretchers.

The people of Colibrí opened their homes to the team, and Raphael saw to it that the remains were guarded around the clock on Gregory’s property.

TWENTY-NINE

S
ophie and Gregory often drove to Búho in his refurbished Land Rover for meetings with legal experts and government representatives. Gradually her resemblance to Nita faded, as though it was no longer needed or had somehow reached its expiration date. Now, when Gregory looked at her, he caught himself searching for the signs in her face that had caught him off guard that day at Rufo’s café. From time to time he saw them in the angle of her head when she listened to him speak about Nita or Havana, in the quick sadness in her eyes when he told her about Penelope and Alberto, and in the raw love she showed when she watched Finn from across the table in the kitchen.

Weeks passed before she laughed, and when she did, all traces of Nita vanished as she threw back her head and opened up. It was something he said, something unintentionally funny, and keen as a child, he wanted to say it over and over again, hoping to elicit the same response.

When he touched her for the first time as a man rather than her doctor, resting a hand on the small of her back as she preceded him through the police commissioner’s office door, she hesitated briefly and turned. Their eyes met in a raw, bare exchange, her expression momentarily unguarded before she lowered her startled gaze. But his palm read her nonetheless and sent a tingling scribble into his brain.

“What were you like as a child?” he asked her on the way home from the meeting.

“As a child? I don’t know. Afraid, I guess, a lot of the time.”

“Afraid? What of?”

“Who knows?”

Gregory asked because he needed to increase the gulf between her and Nita. Far away, as a child of privilege in the land of the free, Sophie would have had very little in common with Nita.

“I was afraid of not being chosen,” she said. “I don’t think I ever felt quite good enough.”

He glanced across at her, puzzled.

She smiled. “Chosen, you know, for the basketball team. For a date to the prom. For a dance.”

“No!” Gregory said. “I don’t know about the basketball team, but you could never have struggled for a date.”

“Now, how would you know that?”

He huffed. “Because I have eyes in my head.”

“I was odd,” she said, “and awkward. I kept trying to resuscitate dead things.”

Gregory laughed softly. “What things?”

“Earthworms. Birds. Roadkill. My dad and I once drove past a moose who’d been hit by a car. I made him stop and tried to get him to load it in the trunk. I was eight years old.”

“Okay, yes, you were odd.”

“And you?”

“Me?” Gregory said to Sophie. “It’s so long ago. I don’t remember.”

A few times he caught Finn watching him, a wary, considering look in his eyes.

After Father Alfonso’s requiem Mass, Colibrí buried its dead in the small cemetery across the bridge, half a mile from the village. Families, friends, and neighbors stood around closed caskets in the clutches of sorrow, their grief alleviated by closure. Many paid their respects to Rufo before they left the graveyard.

Media interest built quickly, and for the first time, the Pájaron parliament was forced to acknowledge that to date it had failed to appoint any commission to investigate reports of human rights abuses.

Pájaro’s transformation, once initiated, lit up the country like a skyrocket firework. Police stations and government offices overflowed with bereaved families, now less fearful in their search for missing relatives and friends. Protesters filled the streets. The army kept an uneasy low profile, complying with the country’s manic attempt to repair its image at home and abroad. Ahead of national elections, the Democratic Revolutionary Party scrambled to live up to its name.

Complaints against the police force grew more voluble, and an Independent Police Complaints Commission stepped in to investigate the worst of them. Free of government and departmental influence, the commission applied itself to probing allegations of corruption and brutality.

It was a good start but not enough to erase years of repression and abuse. Protests continued, peaceful and insistent, demanding social and economic change and, beyond the impressive arrests, justice.

Sophie considered renting a small apartment in Búho as the glare of the international community intensified and more graves were uncovered, two in neighboring villages and several at the base of the broken slopes of the Eastern Pájaron Escarpment. Gregory’s house had adjusted to her and Finn and had begun to feel dangerously like home. It was time to leave.

She spoke to Gregory about moving one night after dinner as he washed dishes and she dried them. Finn had left them alone together and gone up to his room to tackle an English assignment.

The days were growing longer, night settling in later, and the sky was still a rich, dark blue, not yet black.

“Gregory,” Sophie began, “can we talk?”

“Uh-oh, now why does that sound ominous?” He turned off the tap and dried his hands. “Come, let’s go into the study.”

“No, no, it won’t take long. I just . . . I think it’s time we moved on. You’ve been so kind, really . . . but . . .”

Gregory leaned against the sink and folded his arms. “You haven’t been here that long, have you? Are you uncomfortable?”

“No, of course not. We love . . . this house, and yes, we’ve been here that long. We all . . . We need to move on. We need to give you back your space.”

“Space. So you’re feeling claustrophobic.”

“No.”

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “The mountains not big enough for you?”

“Please don’t be angry. You know what I mean.”

Gregory pushed away from the sink and moved closer to her. Sophie’s heart began to knock, but he didn’t touch her, just stood looking down into her eyes, and she stared back like a mesmerized deer.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said. “Finn must study—he can do it here.”

“It’s not just that. He needs to get back to ballet. I need to . . .”

“You need to what? Return to your old life?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Gregory raised his hand and slowly brushed his finger along a stray lock of hair that drifted against her cheek. He tucked it behind her ear.

“Don’t leave just yet,” he said. “Stay, for just a while longer. Give us all time. You need a base, and it’s not Búho.”

“But Finn . . .”

He turned away and put some distance between them, opening drawers and putting away knives and forks. “Finn will find his way, Sophie. Before too long, he’s going to tell you what he wants to do.”

“Oh, been there, done that,” she said.

Gregory abruptly stopped what he was doing. “You must do what you feel is right. I don’t want you to go. This house is too big for me. I’ve been considering bringing the horses inside.”

She smiled.

“Or maybe I’ll just get a dog. It doesn’t make sense that I don’t even have a dog.”

She threw the dishcloth at his head and was shocked at the transformation that came over him. He caught it and stared at her, all traces of humor wiped off his face.

“What?” Sophie said. “I’m sorry, I was just kidding. Gregory . . .”

Slowly, he put the dishcloth down. “No, no, don’t be sorry. It’s me, not you. I should . . . I have some work to do.”

What happened? Something happened . . . Had she triggered a memory?

“Tell me, please.”

“It’s something my wife did once.”

“She threw a dishcloth at your head?”

He smiled. “Not exactly. But close.”

Sophie let it go. “What are you working on? Wind turbines?”

“Yes. I have paperwork to do with renewable energy. Don Quixote, that’s me.” He headed for the door, then stopped and said over his shoulder, “You don’t have to run. Please, stay for as long as it takes . . .” He paused and met her eyes. “For us all to heal some.”

Their lives assumed the precarious rhythm of a transplanted heart.

In light of the shifting political landscape, Raphael was a popular choice to replace Rufo when Gregory declined to run for governor. Steady and cautious, Raphael lacked Rufo’s political ambition, but made up for it with a transparent devotion to his community, which people trusted.

Rufo’s bloody last will and testament fell away and served only as evidence against Alberto. The governor’s legal will left most of his assets, including Los Colibríes, to Manco and four of his horses to Gregory.

Raphael and Manco drove the animals up to the house on horseback. Finn, Sophie, and Gregory were sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off three of his famous omelets along with toasted cinnamon-and-nutmeg sweet-potato bread, soft cream cheese, and guava jelly when they heard the clop of hooves on the cobbled driveway.

Finn had helped Gregory clean out the barn and build partitions for the extra stalls until there was time to add on to the stables. Over the next few days, Gregory intended to shop around for the rails and posts they’d use to build a round training pen. These were Rufo’s best horses, but they had been roughly handled—the flashy palomino Peruvian Paso he had ridden in parades and ceremonies and the two Chilean horses he had used to work the cattle brought down from the rangelands.

Gregory stepped out to greet them while Finn and Sophie watched from the threshold. Following a short distance behind, Isabella rode up, leading a dappled gray with dark eyes and a long, curly mane and tail. Shy and skittish at first as Gregory approached, the horse calmed when he kept his eyes on the ground and his body relaxed. Snorting, she let him rub the flat of his hand against her forehead.

Rufo had bequeathed Gregory Esmeralda’s foal, now a beautiful filly he could train his way, a way that would bond her to him and him to her without fear or force. Her mouth had suffered from hard hands and a cruel bit, and as Gregory caressed her back, he noticed the patterns of scars from a switch on her shoulders and flank. He angled away to give her time to understand that he posed no threat and saw Finn stroking the palomino, murmuring into an ear turned toward him so as to catch every word.

Gregory caught Sophie’s eye, and she smiled—a purely Sophie smile.

Just after midnight, with the house quiet, Gregory slipped out and made his way to Nita. He came empty-handed, guided by the lights that were still on upstairs and in his study.

He stood at her marble gravestone and tried to gather her in his mind, form a picture that would explain how he had known so little about her. The closer he’d gotten, the longer their life together, the deeper she’d burrowed away from him.

A light wind stirred the hair on his forehead, as though to move it out of his eyes.

Gregory lowered himself to his haunches. “My love. Nita,” he began. Tears pricked his eyes, and he did nothing to stop them from running down his cheeks. “Can you forgive me?”

He got no answer. A branch creaked nearby and leaves whispered but not words, nothing he needed to hear. “I want to shout at you, shake you,” he said, resting his hand on the cool stone. “But I . . . I shouldn’t be angry. You gave me everything, and I took. That’s what I did. I just kept taking.” He moved onto his knees. “And you? Never mind what I did; what did you do? Look . . . look what happened to our son.” He gently pressed his fist against the engraving of her name. “It didn’t have to be this way. How? How. Could. You. Keep this from me?” He punctuated each word with his knuckles, rubbing them against the letters on the gravestone as though kneading bread.