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. He’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.