“There’s no hope. What are we waiting for?”
“What if you and I just eloped to some other country? I have friends in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica who could help us get set up. And my sister is still living in San Francisco, last I heard.”
“I couldn’t simply run away with my tail between my legs — not as long as my father is alive. It would literally break his heart if I went off.” She pauses. “And I don’t think you would want to get any farther away from your kids than you are already. Isn’t Mexico far enough away?”
“It is.” Guillermo gets up and heads to the bathroom.
When he comes back, Maryam has wrapped a sheet around herself and is sitting on the bed watching television. He glances at the set and sees a boy and a girl crying on the screen. “Watching a soap opera?”
“Not a soap opera, Guillermo, real life. A woman from Vista Hermosa went shopping to Paiz in her Ford Explorer. When she returned home, she parked for a second to open the gate and a car with tinted windows drew up and two men pounced on her. This was according to the maid, who saw everything from inside the house. They shot the woman dead. The thieves killed her to kidnap her car.”
“You can’t kidnap a car—”
“Damn it, Guillermo, you know what I mean. They hijacked her car. She has two teenagers. There they are crying,” she says, pointing to the TV. “The family is ruined. All this over stealing a stupid car!”
Guillermo sits down beside Maryam and hugs her tightly. All in all, this has not been a good day. Maryam is so upset over her life with Samir that she is feeling desperate, almost hopeless. And then the talk about their future further depresses her. And now this senseless killing.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Maryam says, bursting into tears. “I won’t do it. I love you, but this is going to kill me. Kill us. We need to find a way to get away from this life—”
“And take your father and his factory and my law firm with us?”
“You know I don’t mean that. It’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer safe to take a bus anywhere because you’ll be assaulted, robbed, or raped. Now you can’t even go shopping in your own car without being killed. The other day my maid Lucia was crying because her thirty-year-old nephew had just been killed — sprayed with thirty-two bullets because he refused to join the gang operating in his neighborhood. He was a good boy, attending the university, crossing the street to avoid the Maras until they said to him, You are going to be one of us. He kept walking away till they isolated him below La Plaza Berlin. They filled him with bullets and left him to die. Lucia’s sister Mirta wants to kill herself. He was her only son.”
Guillermo holds Maryam, though she tries to push him away. He refuses to loosen his grip until she finally stops resisting him.
“I want to propose something.”
Maryam reaches over to the night table and grabs a tissue.
“Please listen to me.”
She nods like an obedient puppy.
“From now on, I want you to take your passport and a thousand dollars with you wherever you go, whether to the hairdresser, the gym, the tennis court, or to go shopping. I will do the same. I want both of us to have the documents and the money to leave this piece-of-shit country at the drop of a hat.”
“You think we need to do this?”
“Absolutely. We can’t just sit here waiting for our future to happen. Maryam, I don’t know what’s going to happen with Samir. I assume you think I was kidding about killing him—”
“You better have been kidding,” she says, slapping him hard, quite hard, on the chest.
“Okay, so it was only a stupid idea,” he says, just to calm her down. “We have to figure out our next step. I don’t want you to spend another year under the same roof with Samir. We have to figure something out,” he repeats. “But one thing I know: we have to be ready to run. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Maryam says, grabbing her cup of tea and drinking it down.
“And we have our plan to meet in La Libertad.”
“I hope to God we are just spinning our wheels.”
“Me too. I’m an optimist, but I don’t want to be taken by surprise. We need to have an alternate plan.”
As he says this he sees that the television station is showing a clip of the woman in Vista Hermosa as she’s gunned down. Apparently it was filmed on a phone by a teenager living across the street.
Guillermo is scared for himself, and more than a bit scared for Maryam.
Something has to change.
chapter fifteen. let’s bring the mountain to mohammed
One late Tuesday afternoon, as Maryam is playing solitaire on the dining room table and wondering how long her stalemate with her husband will last, Samir comes home early from work. He shuffles over to her and announces that his niece Verónica Handal will be coming to visit from Tegucigalpa, Honduras that very night and will be spending a few days with them.
“Don’t I have a say in the matter?” she says, looking up from her cards.
“It is through my kindness that you are still living in my apartment. Someone else would have thrown you out a long time ago for your indiscretions.”
“You don’t need to throw me out. When I leave, it will be voluntarily.”
Samir nods at her disparagingly. He is wearing a three-piece herringbone suit with an open white shirt. “I have told you I will not be made the laughing stock of the Lebanese community. You will go when I tell you to go. In the meantime, as you have observed, you are free to come and go as you wish. . But Verónica is my only niece and is taking care of my brother and his wife in a nursing home. My home is her home. I can invite her here whenever I want without consulting you.”
Maryam has always disliked Verónica. She is some ten years older than her, in her early fifties, and has never married. Since both her parents developed dementia, she has acted as the world’s only true, suffering martyr for having sacrificed her happiness in order to care for them. In reality, she’s never had a life of happiness to sacrifice. She is severe in her tastes, dowdy in her dress, and enjoys criticizing anyone who has an ounce of spunk or defiance. Her features are exceedingly big: her ears, her lips, and certainly her breasts, which hang like huge, shapeless eggplants that no man would want to touch. But it is not her looks that upset Maryam as much as her lack of sincerity, and her habit of probing into everything as if picking at a scab. The two women have never gotten along, not from the moment they met at her and Samir’s engagement when, at the home of Jorge Serrano Elías — a former president of Guatemala of Lebanese descent — Verónica began criticizing her for her low bodice. Instead of reveling in the moment and feeling beautiful, Maryam spent the evening pulling up her dress to cover her breasts.
Oddly, both women are the same height and have the same hair and eye color. But the similarities end there. Verónica has no light of her own and is a poor reflection of the light of others. If she were to die, Maryam thinks, no one on this earth would miss her. Not her ailing parents, not even Samir.
“And how long is she staying?” Maryam is turning over three cards at a time, having lost track of her game. Four kings are already displayed and she might win.
“Just a few nights.”
“Has she been sent on a mission here by your brother Saleh?”
“You mean my poor demented brother in the nursing home? Your sense of decency has escaped you.”
Maryam is in an awful mood. Her period is two weeks late. She fears she is pregnant. And she is also having cramps that are particularly intense. Is she falling apart?