Maya's Notebook: A Novel (45 page)

Manuel called Blanca, who ran over from her house even though she’s not really up to that sort of exertion at her age, and between the two of them they revived me with very strong coffee, washed me, put me to bed, and tidied up the damage. I’d drunk a bottle of wine and the rest of the vodka and
licor de oro
I found in the cupboard, and was utterly intoxicated. I started drinking without a second thought. I, who bragged about overcoming my problems, who could go without therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous because I had more than enough willpower and wasn’t really an addict, reached for the bottles automatically as soon as that Seattle backpacker dumped me. I admit the cause was a crushing blow, but that’s not the point. Mike O’Kelly was right: addiction is always lying in wait, looking for its chance.

“I was so stupid, Manuel!”

“It’s not stupidity, Maya. It’s what’s called falling in love with love.”

“What?”

“You don’t know Daniel very well. You’re in love with the euphoria he produces in you.”

“That euphoria is the only thing that matters to me, Manuel. I can’t live without Daniel.”

“Of course you can live without him. That young man was the key to opening your heart. An addiction to love won’t ruin your health or your life, like crack or vodka, but you need to learn how to distinguish between the object of your love, in this case Daniel, and the excitement of having your heart opened.”

“Go on, man, you’re talking like the therapists in Oregon.”

“You know I’ve spent half my life closed up like a tough guy, Maya. I only recently started opening up, but I can’t choose my feelings. Fear gets in through the same aperture as love. What I’m trying to tell you is that if you’re able to love very much, you’re also going to suffer a lot.”

“I’m going to die, Manuel. I can’t bear this. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”

“No,
gringuita
, it’s a temporary misfortune, small potatoes compared to your tragedy last year. That backpacker did you a favor—he gave you the opportunity to get to know yourself better.”

“I don’t have a fucking idea who I am, Manuel.”

“You’re on your way to finding out.”

“Do you know who you are, Manuel Arias?”

“Not yet, but I’ve taken the first steps. You’re already farther along and have a lot more time ahead of you than I
do, Maya.”

Manuel and Blanca endured this
absurd gringa’s crisis with exemplary generosity; they soaked up tears, recriminations, moans of self-pity and guilt, but they wouldn’t tolerate me swearing or my insults or any threats of smashing up any more of other people’s property, in this case Manuel’s. We had a couple of loud fights, which all three of us needed. Everything can’t always be so Zen. They’ve had the good grace not to mention my drunkenness or the cost of the destruction, knowing that I’m ready and willing to pay any penance to be forgiven. When I calmed down and saw the computer on the floor, I had a fleeting urge to jump into the sea. How was I going to be able to look Manuel in the face? He must love me a lot, this new grandpa of mine, who should have chucked me out on my ass! This will be the last tantrum of my life; I’m twenty years old now, and it’s not cute anymore. I have to get him another computer somehow.

Manuel’s advice about opening myself up to my feelings keeps ringing in my head; it could have come from my Popo or Daniel Goodrich himself. Oh! I can’t even write his name without bursting into tears! I’m going to die of sadness, I have never suffered so much. . . . No, it’s not true, I suffered more, a thousand times more, when my Popo died. Daniel is not the only one who has broken my heart, like in the Mexican
rancheras
my Nini hums. When I was eight, my grandparents decided to take me to Denmark to nip in
the bud my fantasy of being an orphan. The plan consisted of leaving me with my mother so we could get to know each other, while they went on holiday in the Mediterranean; they would pick me up two weeks later and we’d go back to California together. That would be my first direct contact with Marta Otter, and to make a good impression they filled my suitcase with new clothes and sentimental gifts, like a locket with some of my baby teeth and a lock of my hair. My dad, who was opposed to the visit at first and only gave in after combined pressure from me and my grandparents, warned us that the teeth and hair fetish wouldn’t be appreciated: Danes don’t collect body parts.

Though I did have several photographs of my mother, I imagined her to be like the otters at the Monterey Aquarium, because of her last name. In the photos she sometimes sent me at Christmas, she looked thin and elegant and had platinum blond hair, so it was quite surprising to see her in her house in Odense, looking a bit chubby in track pants, her hair badly dyed the color of red wine. She was married and had two children.

According to the guidebook my Popo bought at the station in Copenhagen, Odense is a charming city on the island of Funen, in central Denmark, birthplace of the famous writer Hans Christian Andersen, whose books occupied a distinguished place on my shelves, beside
Astronomy for Beginners
, because it belonged to the letter A. This had sparked an argument; my Popo insisted on alphabetical order, and my Nini, who worked at the Berkeley library, assured him that books should be organized by subject. I never found out if the island of Funen was as charming as the guidebook claimed, because we didn’t get to see it. Marta Otter lived in
a neighborhood of identical houses, with a patch of grass in front, hers set apart from the rest by a clay mermaid sitting on a rock, just like the one I had in a glass ball. She opened the door with an expression of surprise, as if she didn’t remember that my Nini had written to her months in advance to announce the visit, had done so again before we left California, and had phoned her the previous day from Copenhagen. She greeted us with formal handshakes, invited us in, and introduced us to her sons, Hans and Vilhelm, four and two years old, little boys so white they probably glowed in the dark.

Inside it was tidy, impersonal, and depressing, in the same style as the hotel room in Copenhagen, where we hadn’t been able to shower because we couldn’t find the taps, just smooth minimalist surfaces of white marble. The hotel food turned out to be as austere as the decor, and my Nini, feeling swindled, demanded a discount. “You’re charging us a fortune, and there aren’t even any chairs here!” she complained at reception, where there was only a big steel desk and a floral arrangement consisting of an artichoke in a tall glass. The only decoration in Marta Otter’s house was the reproduction of quite a good painting by Queen Margrethe; if Margrethe weren’t a queen, she’d be more appreciated as an artist.

We sat on an uncomfortable gray plastic sofa. My suitcase, at my Popo’s feet, looked enormous, and my Nini held on to me by one arm so I wouldn’t run away. I’d been bugging them for years to take me to meet my mother, but at that moment I was ready to flee, terrified at the idea of spending two weeks with that stranger and those albino bunnies, my little brothers. When Marta Otter went to the
kitchen to make coffee, I whispered to my Popo that if he left me in that house I’d commit suicide. He whispered the same thing to his wife, and in less than thirty seconds they both decided that the trip had been a mistake; it would have been better for their granddaughter to go on believing the legend of the Laplander princess for the rest of her life.

Marta Otter came back with coffee in cups so minimalist they had no handles, and the tension relaxed a bit with the ritual of passing the cream and sugar. My whiter-than-white little brothers started watching an animal show on TV with the sound turned down, so they wouldn’t bother us. They were very polite. The grown-ups started talking about me as if I were dead. My grandmother pulled out the family album and told my mother about the photos one by one: naked two-week-old Maya, curled up on one of Paul Ditson II’s giant hands, three-year-old Maya in a Hawaiian dress with a ukulele, seven-year-old Maya playing soccer. Meanwhile I was devoting excessive attention to the study of the shoelaces of my new sneakers. Marta Otter said I looked a lot like Hans and Vilhelm, although the only similarity I could see was that all three of us were bipeds. I think my appearance was a secret relief to my mother, because I showed no evidence of my father’s Latin American genes; in a pinch I might even pass for Scandinavian.

Forty minutes—which felt like forty hours—later my grandfather asked to borrow the phone to call a taxi, and soon we were saying good-bye, with no mention at all of the suitcase, which had been growing and now weighed as much as an elephant. At the door Marta Otter gave me a shy kiss on the forehead and said that we’d be in touch and that she’d come to California in a year or two, because
Hans and Vilhelm wanted to see Disney World. “That’s in Florida,” I explained. My Nini shut me up with a pinch.

In the taxi my Nini stated her frivolous opinion that the absence of my mother, far from being a misfortune, had turned out to be a blessing; I got to be raised free and spoiled in the magic house in Berkeley, with its colorful walls and astronomical tower, instead of having to grow up with minimalist Danish decor. I took the glass ball with the little mermaid inside it out of my bag, and when we got out, I left it on the seat of the taxi.

After the visit to Marta Otter I was sullen for months. That Christmas, to cheer me up, Mike O’Kelly brought me a basket with a checked tea towel on top. When I pulled off the cloth I found a little white puppy the size of a grapefruit sleeping placidly on top of another tea towel. “She’s called Daisy, but you can give her another name if you want,” the Irishman told me. I fell head over heels in love with Daisy, and ran home from school every day so I wouldn’t miss a minute in her company. She was my confidante, my friend, and my toy. She slept in my bed, ate off my plate, and went everywhere in my arms. She only weighed about four pounds. That animal had the ability to calm me down and make me happy, and I didn’t think about Marta Otter anymore. Daisy went into heat for the first time when she was a year old; instinct overcame her shyness, and she slipped outside and ran onto the street. She didn’t get very far. A car hit her at the corner and killed her instantly.

My Nini, unable to give me the news, phoned my Popo, who left his work at the university to go and pick me up from school. They took me out of class, and when I saw him waiting for me, I knew what had happened before he
had a chance to tell me. Daisy! I saw her running, saw the car, saw the inert body of the little dog. My Popo picked me up in his enormous arms, hugged me to his chest, and cried with me.

We put Daisy in a box and buried her in the garden. My Nini wanted to get another dog, as much like Daisy as possible, but my Popo said that it was not a question of replacing her, but of trying to live without her. “I can’t, Popo. I loved her so much!” I sobbed inconsolably. “That affection is inside you, Maya, not in Daisy. You can give it to other animals, and what’s left over you can give to me,” my wise grandpa answered. That lesson about grief and love will be useful now, because it’s true that I loved Daniel more than I loved myself, but not more than my Popo or Daisy.

Bad news, very bad. When
it rains it pours, as they say here when misfortunes pile up; first Daniel and now this. Just as I feared, the FBI is on my trail, and Officer Arana showed up in Berkeley. That doesn’t mean he’s going to come to Chiloé, as Manuel reassures me, but I’m scared; if he’s gone to the trouble of looking for me since last November, he’s not going to stop now that he’s traced my family.

Arana turned up at my grandmother’s door, in civilian clothes, but flashing his badge. My Nini was in the kitchen, and my dad invited him in, thinking it was something to do with Mike O’Kelly’s delinquents. He got a disagreeable surprise when he found out that Arana was investigating a counterfeiting case and needed to ask Maya Vidal, alias
Laura Barron, some questions; the case was practically closed, he added, but the girl was in danger, and he had an obligation to protect her. My Nini and my dad’s fright would have been much worse if I hadn’t told them that Arana is a decent cop and had always treated me well.

My grandmother asked him how he’d tracked me down, and Arana had no objection to telling her, proud of his bloodhound’s nose, as she put it in her message to Manuel. The police officer began with the most basic clue, revising the lists of missing girls from all over the country during 2008 on the police department computer. It seemed unnecessary to investigate previous years, because when he met me he could tell I hadn’t spent much time living on the street; runaway teenagers acquire an unmistakable stamp of abandon very fast. There were dozens of girls on the lists, but he limited his search to those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, in Nevada and bordering states. In most cases there were photographs, though some were not all that recent. He had a good memory for faces and was able to narrow the list down to just four girls, one of whom caught his attention, because the notice coincided with the date when he’d first met Brandon Leeman’s so-called niece, June 2008. As he studied the photo and information available, he concluded that Maya Vidal was the one he was looking for. That’s how he found out my real name, that of my relatives, and the addresses of the academy in Oregon and my family in California.

It turns out that my dad, contrary to what I’d assumed, had looked for me for months and sent my description to every police station and hospital in the country. Arana made a call to the academy, talked to Angie to get the de
tails he lacked, and thus arrived at my dad’s old house, where the new occupants gave him the address of my grandparents’ big multicolored house. “It’s lucky that they assigned me to this case instead of another officer, because I’m convinced that Laura, or Maya, is a good girl, and I’d like to help her, before things get complicated for her. I think I can prove that her participation in the crime was insignificant,” the officer told them as he wrapped up his explanation.

In view of Arana’s conciliatory attitude, my Nini invited him to stay for dinner, and my dad opened his best bottle of wine. The policeman pronounced the soup perfect for a foggy November evening. Was it perhaps a typical dish from the lady’s country? He’d noticed her accent. My dad told him that the chicken stew was Chilean, as was the wine, and that his mother and he had been born in that country. The officer wondered if they often went back to Chile, and my dad said they hadn’t been there in over thirty years. My Nini, hanging on the policeman’s every word, kicked her son under the table for talking too much. The less Arana knew about the family, the better. She’d sniffed a little lie in what the officer said, and it had put her on her guard. How was the case going to be closed if they hadn’t recovered either the counterfeit money or the plates? She had also read the magazine article about Adam Trevor and had studied the international traffic in counterfeit money for months, considered herself an expert, and knew the commercial and strategic value of those plates.