Introduction

This trip wasn't about her, her need to escape. She had been too young when it happened. Too young to understand what could be worth risking everything for. Even now they seemed naïve, foolish in their belief that anything could change. They had tried to save a generation. If she couldn't save them, she might find a way to finish their story.

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Excerpt

The Zona Rosa

“You must eat here a lot,” Neva said, after they had been seated at a small round table by a window overlooking the courtyard. The room smelled of eucalyptus and garlic. The maitre d’, then the waiters had nodded at Tomas in recognition.

“My apartment is around the corner,” he said.

Neva looked down at her lap. A parrot screeched, “Cu-cu-cu-cullo!” from the courtyard.

She thought: Well, I guess I know what he’s planning. But I’m through with all that. With this. I don’t want to love anyone anymore. I don’t want to be touched.

“I mean: my apartment is around the corner, so I eat here often.”

She felt a faint heat in her cheeks in the cool room, knew she was blushing. Oh, she thought. He didn’t mean that. Then this wasn’t a date? She never knew when something was a date. She didn’t know she’d been dating Will until she’d slept at his apartment for a month.

“The calamari is good,” he said. He reached across the table and pointed it out on her menu.

“Cujillo! Cujillo!” the parrot shrieked.

“And they make a salad with jicama and lime–you might like that,” he said, his voice Matter of fact.

“All right,” she said, nodding. “The calamari and the jicama salad.” The waiter hovered. Tomas gave them their order and turned to go.

“At the same time,” Neva said to his back. “I want them together. Junto,” she said, looking at the waiter for the first time.

“Okay, Miss,” he said.

Tomas said, “After dinner, we can walk around for my car and I’ll drive you home.”

When she said nothing, he said, “Or I can put you in a cab if you’d rather.”

“All right,” she said.

The silence was awkward. They both began talking at once, “Did you–” “That marine--”

“You first,” she said.

“I couldn’t get back inside, at Mario’s. They wouldn’t tell us anything, and then they ordered everyone away.”

“It was a marine,” Neva said. “He shot himself.”

“I heard,” Tomas said. “I heard later. How awful. Were you--”

“No, I was in the other room. I didn’t really see it. We got home really late, though. And then these soldiers picked us up and drove us home.” She didn’t tell him the rest.

“Does that sort of thing happen to you often?” Tomas asked.

She shook her head, then realized he was teasing her. “Yes, all the time,” she said. She began to laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was just so awful.”

“Really awful, all that blood,” she realized her giggles had turned to something else, her eyes wet and stinging.

He handed her a handkerchief across the table. “Really, I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so scared when the soldiers picked us up, so glad to get home. I hadn’t really thought about him–that marine.”

He nodded at her across the table.

“He must have been so homesick,” she said.

The waiter brought the wine, and Tomas poured her a glass.

“Or maybe,” she said, “he was ashamed. Of what is happening here. Of what the U.S. is doing here.” She gulped her wine.

“I’m sorry,” Tomas said. “Are you all right?”

Neva nodded. She didn’t see how the evening could save itself. But then he slid his chair closer to hers and reached for his handkerchief. He dried her eyes, then reached down and squeezed her hand where it lay in her lap. “Okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m even hungry.”

They talked easily after that, and Neva relaxed a little, knowing at the end of the evening, she could get in her cab and go home to her quiet room. She could have this evening, apart from her life and not look back at it, ever. She could remember how the handkerchief had smelled a little like clove when he dried her tears, how his hand had met hers with kindness, even tenderness. But she didn’t have to scrutinize anything for clues. It was here: the present, pushing both past and future away and claiming its own territory.

But after the calamari, the jicama, a plate of cheese and slices of a green fruit that tasted a little like nectarines, after a conversation about the six different kinds of hummingbirds you could see in the city, E.M. Nesbitt’s The Enchanted Castle, a book they had both read as children–In Spanish or English? she’d asked, but he couldn’t remember–elephant stories, the way they surround the wounded, she said, an elephant’s heart, he said, is a foot-and-a half of muscle. Not politics, family, where are you from, former lovers, or how hard it was to get good help. They did not talk about the war. About who might be dying, as they fished the calamari from its bowl of butter and garlic. Who might be tired or hungry or hiding. After coffee so good she sighed loudly without meaning to and when he both smiled and looked puzzled, she said, “We have trouble finding good coffee. You know how it is.”

He frowned. “I do. Everything good here sent away. Shipped north.”

“Not just coffee?” Neva asked.

“Not just,” he said. “Fruit and textiles. Our best students. They go to American universities and never come home.”

“But Americans come here, too,” Neva said. “They come and stay.”

“Of course,” he said. “Even now with a war on, they come. You come.”

“I heard that lots of Americans moved here in the 60s and 70s.” She looked at him and waited.

“Before my time,” he said.

“Activists,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. He shrugged and smiled at her.

Neva changed the subject. She would keep asking and sooner or later someone would tell her something. She smiled at the waiter and nodded when he offered her more coffee.

When it got closer and closer, the time when they would leave the restaurant, when something would happen or nothing would happen. When she wouldn’t know what to do. She found it harder and harder to eat, as if her jaws had clamped down, her throat and stomach grown mysteriously smaller. She felt a drop of sweat run down her belly and clamped her legs together to catch it.

After all of that, there were no cabs. It was cool outside where they stood in front of the restaurant’s small, barely noticeable sign. She could smell something–fragipani or jasmine. “We can go back in and call one,” Tomas said “or walk over to Monteverde.”

He thinks I hate him, Neva thought. She felt so stiff. Dinner, with the table between them, with no room for touching, she had been so relaxed. Happy, she thought, I have been happy this evening. But now her arms were stiff by her sides. She had never known how to do any of this. How did other girls growing up know to toss their hair? To smile and smile? Sit back, while he paid or opened the car door? How did they know how. She was hopeless, Will a fluke, a force of nature, something she could not remember agreeing to. No wonder I held on. No wonder I clung to misery.

“Let’s get your car,” she said.

And how it had happened she wasn’t sure, except that she knew she had leaned toward him, turned her face up toward his and he had stopped, keys in hand, from unlocking the car door. He had looked at her for a long moment, but she had kissed him. Of that she was sure.

“It’s up to you,” he said when they broke apart. “You must know I want you to come up.”

They kissed again and then they leaned together. His hair smelled like wood. “Stay or go,” he said.

“Stay,” she said in a small voice in his left ear. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Neva’s acknowledged reason for traveling to Central America is to look for her parents. What other reasons might she have? What reasons does she have to stay?

2. Identity is one of Neva’s important struggles. What different identities does she inhabit over the course of the novel? Do these different identities ever conflict with each other?

3. Why is Neva so reluctant to accept friendship with Deb and Kira?

4. What kinds of love are portrayed in this novel? What role does love play a role in the decisions that Neva makes?

5. Did the novel change or challenge your ideas about the lives of Native Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

6. Toward the end of the novel, Kira explains to Neva why she’s been working for the resistance movement in Coatepeque. “You have to do something,” she says. Do you agree? Is violence justified when its goal is to end injustice?

7. Similarly, do you think Neva’s parents were right in their choice to try to end the sterilization of Native American women, even though their actions, however inadvertently, resulted in the death of a young Indian man?

8. When Neva made the trip to La Loma, what did you expect her to discover?

Weblinks

»	Author Janet McAdams' web site
»	Author Janet McAdams' blog

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