Wealth Can’t Absolve the Families of the Disappeared

Several hours into the highlands, nearing the arranged meeting place, Great-Aunt Silvia’s chauffeur pulled off the road. “It’s a new army checkpoint,” he said. Soldiers in camouflage moved up and down the edge of the highway, questioning all motorists headed west. 

“Not a word, Ester,” Silvia said under her breath as a man stooping beneath his machine gun rapped at their window.   

“What are you ladies doing out here?” he asked, peering into their car. “Are you aware it’s a live conflict zone?”

Great-Aunt Silvia touched the gold cross at her throat. “Mercy. Not right here, Teniente?”

“Afraid so,” said the lieutenant. “There’s been new activity at Cuatro Caminos—a guerrilla roadblock’s gone up. We can’t let anyone proceed.”

“Claro que sí, Teniente.” Gathering Ester under one arm, Silvia batted her lashes. “But we’re not actually going that far. We just want the turnoff for Lake Atitlán.”

The lieutenant’s face loosened a bit. “Going on holiday, are you?”

“Exactly,” Great-Aunt Silvia lied.

And the man with the gun waved them on—persuaded, perhaps, by their town car, or by the lie and the flirting. Or perhaps by Ester, a little girl wearing the white eyelet dress Silvia had coaxed her into just before they left home.  

“See that now, Ester?” Great-Aunt Silvia said as they descended the side road to Lake Atitlán. They were passing a statue of boots—boots with black heels and black laces. Black army boots, tall as the pines. “That’s where los héroes de la patria labor for us. For all good Guatemalans.” 

Ester stared at those boots, at the barracks behind them and the soldiers in uniform marching around. She couldn’t see what was so special. Her great-aunt did not clarify, and soon they reached the shores of Lake Atitlán. When they parked beside an abandoned café with an overgrown lot, Ester’s parents emerged from the brush. 

“Mami! Papi!” Standing up on the seat, she pushed herself out the rear window. 

“Estercita. Mi Estercita,” her father said, smiling, and hugged the top half of her.

Then she was back where she wanted to be, on his lap with her mother close by. Her parents smelled as they did whenever they returned from the campo, of dried sweat and woodsmoke and the corn that country people ground for tortillas. They had dirt under their fingernails. Their faces, however, were recently washed, and except for Ester’s father’s huaraches, which Silvia called hippie shoes, they wore clean city clothes. Having tossed their backpacks and muddy hiking boots into the trunk, her parents looked, more or less, like they belonged in a town car behind a liveried driver.   

“Gracias, Tía,” said Ester’s father. “Thanks for coming for us. We know you’d rather not.”

“Don’t think I’ll do it again.” Great-Aunt Silvia eyeballed Ester’s parents’ attire. “So you’ve heard about the checkpoint already.”

Ester felt her father go tense, but her mother replied, “Yes, Tía, we heard.” 

“A new army checkpoint,” Silvia said, “because those hooligans—because the guerrillas—have decided to block off the road.”

“It’s a protest. Over land rights,” said Ester’s father, in a voice that made Ester worry. “Maybe the government will pay some attention now.”

Great-Aunt Silvia was a lady, as she often remonstrated to Ester. A lady would never snort. Yet the sound she made came close. “Terrorism,” she said, “is one way to get some attention.”  

“Tía Silvia,” said Ester’s mother. “Those people are not terrorists.” 

“They’re revolutionaries, you’ll say,” Great-Aunt Silvia shot back. “You’ll say the revolution’s a beautiful thing. But I wasn’t born yesterday.” 

“Our Tía has old-fashioned ways,” Ester’s father once tried to explain. “The only time she saw eye-to-eye with your mother and me was about choosing your name.” Ester’s name came from the Bible, where the first Ester, a queen, had saved her people from being destroyed. This story, Ester was fond of. She didn’t grasp till much later that when she was born in 1975, most Guatemalans agreed their country, their people, needed saving as well. But depending on who did the talking, saving our people meant such different things.  

“With due respect, Tía,” Ester’s father said now, “how would you understand why the people need revolution?”

Ester looked low and sideways, afraid of everyone’s face. Her great-aunt was twisting her rings. “What I understand, m’ijo,” Silvia said, “is your revolution will bring our family down.”

The grownups had squabbled throughout Ester’s life, but she liked to picture a more distant past when her father was Silvia’s only child, her adopted and doted-on son. When Silvia’s sister—Adrián’s mother—had died unmarried and young, Silvia took over Adrián’s care, raising him on the family plantation but following him to Guatemala City for his first year of college. Even after he married Paola and moved to a neighborhood Great-Aunt Silvia would not deign to visit, she remained in the city—“because your parents need me,” she’d confided to Ester. “Whether they see that or not.” 

As their car climbed to the highway, the enormous statue of boots slid by on the opposite side. Armed soldiers still drilled around it. 

“Look, there they are!” Feigning excitement, Ester leaned forward on her father’s knees. “Los héroes de la patria.”

The silence that fell in the car was even worse than the quarreling. 

Ester’s mother took her by the wrists. “Ester, no. Those men are not heroes. Do you understand? A good soldier protects his own people. But right now, in this country, that’s not what our soldiers do.” 

Ester’s father was clearly unhappy, too. “Those men are not heroes, Ester. Let us hear that you understand.”

“Sí, Papi,” she said, ashamed. 

“God preserve us,” Great-Aunt Silvia said. “The things you two tell that child!” 

Ester’s mother released her; her father wrapped her in his arms, squashing the lace on her dress. “Tía Silvia,” he said, more gently. “Ester’s our daughter. What we teach her is up to Paola and me.”

One month later, however, it wasn’t up to them anymore, and behind the mahogany china cabinet—as if she’d been slapped—Ester awoke with a start, in the dark, to hear Silvia calling her name. 

Ester’s parents had died in a clandestine cell on some army base—days, maybe weeks after their disappearance—and were buried in an unmarked mass grave. That much, anybody could reasonably guess. It had happened to thousands of others. In the 1980s, in Guatemala, you could breathe such facts in with the air.

But when Great-Aunt Silvia brought Ester to live at her house, a veil was drawn over their names. Ester felt she could not touch it. When, for the first several weeks, she awoke every night sobbing, she crept down the stairs from her new bedroom to stand outside Silvia’s door. Lacking the courage to knock or barge in, as she would’ve done with her parents, Ester curled up on a rug in the hall, where she fell asleep until dawn. How long she kept up this pattern—starting and ending in her little bed but passing the night’s bleakest hours by her aunt’s door—she never could calculate. But Amparo found her there one early morning and carried Ester to her own pocket-sized maid’s room at the back of Silvía’s house. 

Amparo, who had worked on the family plantation since Silvia was a baby and Amparo herself could’ve been no more than ten, had accompanied Silvia on her move to the city, years before Ester was born, and would remain with her for life. Amparo’s room was much smaller than Ester’s, but behind her door there was light, and the late-night breeze made a jangling music in the patio clotheslines nearby.  

“It’s a terrible thing that has happened to you,” Amparo told Ester gravely. “But you can find comfort in La Virgencita. You can take hope in her.”

The Virgin of Guadalupe, a statue six inches tall, lived on an altar in Amparo’s room, along with a candle and postcard and a rosary dangling a pink plastic cross. “La Virgen is powerful,” Amparo said. “She takes care of anybody in need. She’s the Mother of the Downtrodden.” Amparo gave Ester the statue to hold. “See how she’s standing in front of the sun, and also on top of the moon?” Ester could handle the postcard as well. It showed the Basilica of Guadalupe, in Mexico, which housed a miraculous cloth with an image of the Virgin on it. “And her image”—Amparo raised her spidery brows—“stays the same temperature always. Thirty-seven degrees Centigrade, like a human body—to remind us of her living presence. Do you understand, Estercita?”

Ester didn’t, not really. But Guadalupe wasn’t a stranger to her. She’d been there, too, in Ester’s first house—where Guadalupe stood not on an altar but on the desk Ester’s parents had shared, among piles of books and mimeographed fliers they brought from the student union to distribute in their neighborhood. When Amparo gave Ester her own figurine, Ester placed it on her dresser. She didn’t pray to Guadalupe, exactly—her parents would not have prayed—but sometimes she touched the Virgin’s robes spangled with stars, and silently asked, Do you remember them, too? 

“Gracious, what’s this?” Great-Aunt Silvia said when she spotted Amparo’s gift. 

“The Virgin of Guadalupe,” said Ester. “She’s a friend of the poor.” 

“Cosa de campesinos.” Thing of the peasants, Great-Aunt Silvia said. “And yet you’re not poor, are you, Ester? I’m not raising you to be campesina. Or some kind of bohemian.”

So Ester put Guadalupe away—for a while, in her sweater drawer. But she barely noticed when she lost track of the Virgin. Her waking hours were packed, starting with formal, recited prayers, then breakfast with rolls and croissants—because, Great-Aunt Silvia said, tortillas were déclassé. Schooldays at Colegio Americano were followed by etiquette lessons, which Ester despised, or dance lessons, which she preferred. At evening Mass twice a week, Silvia said rosaries for their government and for Señor Ronald Reagan in the United States, protecting big farms like their family’s from the evil guerrillas. Then she and Ester walked home through Zona 2, back to their polished front door. 

But no one ever hung a black wreath on that door for Ester’s mother and father. No one spoke their names again. For a long time, Ester did not question this. She closed down one part of her mind. It was only at a busy day’s end, in her room, when loneliness swelled through her cells, warping her like a book left in the rain. 

By Ester’s last year of high school, the civil war finally was guttering out. There were plans for a Truth Commission, rumors of a Peace Accord. And a new kind of gringo, not tourists precisely, began to show up in the city: bearded priests, middle-aged social workers, grunge university students. Wearing fanny packs and earnest expressions, they traveled around taking photos and notes, asking questions, in an onslaught of attention—outrage over the war—that seemed a little too late. 

One gringa came to the Zona 2 house on a sunny Saturday morning. Her name was Molly, she said. On Molly’s T-shirt—it snagged Ester’s eye—was the Virgin of Guadalupe. Great-Aunt Silvia did not remark on this; she let Molly into the parlor because of her excellent Spanish and her white skin. Molly said that she, too, lived here in Guate—where she led delegations, or learning tours.

“Learning tours?” Silvia echoed.

“Well,” Molly said, “some people in the U.S. are concerned about Guatemala. About the role our country played in your war.”

Great-Aunt Silvia tightened her lips. She was probably thinking, a lady never talks politics. She said, “I wouldn’t know about that.” 

Ester saw Silvia recognize, then, who was on Molly’s shirt. Guadalupe looked different there than on Amparo’s shelf, or on Ester’s bureau. She was bigger and bolder, her eyes open and gazing ahead, as if to take on the world and its woes.

“I’ve come because I’m interested in—well, some of your family members?” Molly addressed Silvia. “Your late nephew—your adopted son, right?—and his late wife. Adrián and Paola. I’d love to ask about them.”

Under her makeup, Ester’s great-aunt had gone ashy gray. “Señorita, disculpe. I cannot help you. There’s nobody here who can help.” Silvia stood up again. “I’ll have my maid show you the door.”

While Molly left by the house’s front door, Ester dodged out the back entrance. To catch up with Molly, she ran at full speed down the street—a narrow avenue studded with spiny trees, where nothing of interest had ever happened before. 

“Espérese.” Wait, Ester said, as Molly turned in surprise. “What did you want to ask?”  

“You knew Adrián and Paola?” Molly kept using their names as if she’d known them, too. Or as if they were superstars.

Ester swallowed and nodded. She could not catch her breath. When was the last time she’d said such a thing? “They were my parents,” she said.  

Not long after, in a bustling café near the National Palace, Ester met up with Molly again. Over lattes, Molly dropped her voice to ask if she or her aunt had made contact with GAM.

“GAM?” Ester said.

“Sh.” Molly leaned closer. “The network for families of the disappeared. You’ve never heard about them?”

Then she said something else Ester had not heard before. Ester’s parents, said Molly, were national heroes. “They gave their lives for the cause.”

 “What do you mean?” Ester said.  

“The revolution.” Molly kept her voice low. “In your parents’ day, the radical fringe at San Carlos had connections with the guerrillas. You never knew? And you’ve lived in this  country all of your life?” Then she checked herself. “Right—sorry. I guess that’s why you don’t know.”

In the café around them, businessmen in sharp suits and gold watches sipped espresso, while young housewives held a baby shower, with pink and white pearly balloons tied to the backs of their chairs. The women were dressed much like Ester, in skirts and cardigans, sheer nylon hose, ballet slippers or kitten-heeled shoes. The kind of people Ester had seen all her life, who rarely used words like guerrillas—or if they did, never said it with pride. But Ester was magnetized, still, by the image on Molly’s T-shirt. Like an isolated flicker of light, Guadalupe belonged to that darkest year when Ester at six had moved into Silvia’s house. When her world started over.

“My great-aunt,” said Ester. “When you came by today—when you wanted to talk—she was rude.”  

“Well.” Molly shrugged. “It’s a sensitive issue.”

“She never talks about them,” Ester said. It took effort to say, mother, father. A wheel in her mind, once turning smoothly, had locked shut with rust.  

“She must’ve seen your parents as her enemies,” Molly said.

“No,” Ester said. The thought pained her. “Every week, we had dinner together.” It was her oldest clear memory, Friday-night dinners at Silvia’s house, where she’d sat between her father and mother.

“They must’ve been enemies of what your aunt stood for, at least,” Molly said. “All of your dad’s family.”

“How do you know this?” Ester pushed her coffee aside. Was she angry, or was she elated? 

“I’m telling you,” Molly said. “Your parents—in my circles, they’re kind of famous. We want to honor the work they did as leaders in the student resistance. To highlight their legacy.” She studied Ester across their small table. “If your great-aunt won’t help us, maybe you could.”

Ester felt herself stepping over a line she couldn’t quite see till she’d crossed it. She asked, “What can I do?”

Before she spoke to Molly’s delegations, Ester educated herself. She read the books Molly gave her—written by Guatemalan exiles, smuggled in from outside—until she could rattle off facts. How in the 1970s, when she was born, the military government launched its scorched-earth campaign, and students at the University of San Carlos tried for a while to push back. They organized protests and marches, risked their lives to hand out political fliers or tag a wall with graffiti. Or they spent weeks in the highlands, forging ties with the guerrillas. Then the army surrounded the San Carlos campus with helicopters and tanks; foot soldiers ransacked the registrar’s office, finding new names for the death lists. By the mid-1980s, the student movement was crushed. A lost generation of its own kind.

But Americans, Molly said, liked personal stories. So Ester told each visiting group what she knew of her parents’ lives: her father, raised on a sugar plantation, was radicalized at San Carlos, where he’d met her mother in class. They’d joined the resistance; they took the side of the poor. Ester narrated her own recollections of them and of the night they had been disappeared. Though she rarely cried anymore, some in her audience did, or they blew their noses during the Q & A sessions. “You’re such a brave girl, ESS-ter,” the delegates said, mispronouncing her name, as they hugged her goodbye. “Thank you for your testimony.”

“Guatemala’s sexy these days,” Molly said once to Ester—which seemed a strange thing, the wrong thing, to say. Ester mostly forgave her. Her senses were newly attuned, her oldest memories stirred. She began haunting the old neighborhood where she had lived with her parents. On the surface, Sexta Avenida remained the same—a scruffy downtown thoroughfare where vendors hawked cheap clothes and pirated tapes from sidewalk stalls, and hundreds of neon signs made a canopy over it all. But walking there now, Ester caught startling new glimpses. Her father standing on corners, waiting to cross. Through a shop window, her mother’s twenty-six-year-old face. Now she looked so shockingly young.

At home in the Zona 2 house, there was conflict. The end of their long-standing peace.

“Por Dios, Ester,” said Silvia, “what is that thing you’ve got on?”

“It’s a T-shirt, Tía.” A recent gift from a delegation, Ester’s T-shirt resembled the one Molly wore when they met.  

“Don’t be pert. What does it say?” Silvia squinted at the motto in English above Guadalupe’s bright head. “‘In Solidarity’? In solidarity with whom, if you please?”  

“With the people in need,” Ester said. “With the people who’ve suffered.”

“Oh, of course.” Silvia flicked at the Virgin’s image with her fingernail. “Of course we have nothing in Guatemala except injustice and need. Why don’t you tell your new gringo friends there’s more to our country than all this moaning and groaning?”

But Ester stalked off to her room.

In that year when she spoke to the visiting gringos, only once did a delegate’s question throw Ester completely off-guard. “Did your parents know they were in danger? Or did you ever know?” 

She studied the questioner harder: a student from some U.S. college wearing ripped jeans. She said, “Quizás no entiendo.” Then she said it in English. “Maybe I don’t understand.”

 “Did your parents consider stopping their work?” the young delegate asked. “You know, to save themselves? Didn’t you want them to stop?”

Ester never replied—reading her face, Molly said, “Well, I think that’s enough”—yet for days she could not shake the question. What had she wanted, when she was six? What had she fucking known? No one had said, This is all the time you’re going to get with your parents. It’s just about to run out. She had no way of guessing it, either. The civil war went on daily around her—political assassinations in the city streets, car bombs in Parque Central, the Spanish Embassy burned to the ground with thirty-nine protesters inside—but she’d been too small to make much sense of it. Hadn’t known that, in hindsight, such events might look like a sign her parents weren’t long for this world.

They had known, though. Her parents had known. Why else had they called Silvia to rescue them, that day at Lake Atitlán—to help them pass as perfect civilians, slip through the army checkpoint? And, since they knew, weren’t they scared? Clawing this memory back from the shadows, Ester could no longer tell. Either way, they’d gone on with their work. They had not reconsidered, had not changed their minds. Had not cared enough about Ester to try to stay in this world for her sake.

Of course they’d understood they were risking their lives. And Silvia—Silvia must have known, too. 

On her eighteenth birthday, Ester was led to the parlor and made to sit on the brocade chair while Silvia rang one of her little brass bells that brought Amparo running—today, with a long, flat white box. Silvia held it, stroking its lid with her many-ringed fingers till Ester imagined her soothing a small animal stashed inside.

“Ester, this is for you. Now that you’re growing up.” Silvia extracted an oblong of white tissue paper; from this she unfolded a christening gown ornate with lace and limp satin bows.  

Ester did not want to touch it. It wasn’t her gown; she hadn’t been christened. Her parents would not have allowed it. 

“This was your father’s,” Silvia said. “It can be yours, if you like.”

In her late teens, Ester seldom lacked words. But by naming Ester’s father as she’d never done, Silvia struck her dumb. 

“I have saved this and saved this for you.” Silvia kept proffering the white baby gown.

“Why now, Tía?” Ester managed to say. 

“Because you’re finally old enough, Ester, to understand a few things.” 

“He was my father,” said Ester. Embarrassing tears burned her nose. “I’ve been old enough forever for us to talk about him.”

“You can tell yourself anything, Ester.” Silvia let the gown spill over her knees. “But your parents—you never actually knew them.”

“I lived with my parents,” said Ester. “I knew them.” 

“My dear, are you forgetting? I lived with them, too. I knew your father his entire life.” Silvia kept saying your father like the most natural thing. “And that was no kind of life, in the end—not for your parents, or you.” 

She does hate them, thought Ester. She hates who they were. Now I’m pulling away just like they did, and she’s trying to draw me back in.

Silvia held the gown out again, its tail dragging the floor like a ghost. “It’s for your hope chest. For your child—for your children, someday.”

How was it fair, having children? To slam children down into this world? It wasn’t like they got consulted. They got slapped awake and taught to depend on their parents—taught to love them with that unfettered love children have. When all along such protection, such loving, could end in the moment it took two people to cross a city street. 

 “How do you know I’ll have children?” Ester heard herself say.

Light faded from Silvia’s eyes. “Ester, of course you want children. You must want to make something lasting. I’m afraid you’ve been losing your way. You’re forgetting who your family are.”

It occurred to Ester, there in the parlor, that she was sick of her family and their beliefs, and how they all ended in death. She was the grandchild of fascists, a child of leftist idealists, one force begetting the next, one living inside of another like a series of hollow stacked dolls. Now it came down to her, Ester Becker Velásquez, the last nested doll in that series. The hard, solid nub at the end of the line, which would not replicate further. She stood without accepting the gift.

“Está bien,” said Silvia in a brisk voice. “Está muy bien, está perfecto.” With each insistence on how fine it all was, she folded the gown into tighter squares. 

Faintly troubled, Ester lingered beside her. “I’m sorry, Tía,” she said.  

Since she carried herself as if she were dainty and light as a bird, Silvia never knew her own strength; when she gripped Ester’s hand, Ester winced. “Cariño,” said Silvia. Honey. “Oh, Ester, you’ll be so alone.”

“I’m always alone,” Ester said. But she could not free her hand. 

America, land of forgetting. Land of the newly blank slate. This much, Ester had gathered from American books and TV. Even so, American people surprised her—at her Midwestern college, at grad school. At the job in Chicago she took. 

“Oh yes,” people said, if they learned Ester’s parents had been disappeared. “I heard how that happened in Chile.” Or when some guessed that Ester was Spanish and she told them No, Guatemalan, they got confused. “So you’re South American,” they might reply. 

Had she still been working with Molly—or if she’d been someone else—Ester might have responded with certain facts. Your CIA invaded our country; they started our war. Your Presidents funded it. But soon it felt like relief to stop mentioning her country of birth. She’d 

left Guatemala to leave behind, too, all the old giants of childhood. To find her own breathing room. It was part of the choice she made at eighteen and continued to make in her twenties and thirties, returning home as required—for the funeral of Great-Uncle Vicente, for Silvia’s seventieth birthday party—but never long.

On one of these fleeting visits, her great-aunt Luisa got Ester into a corner. “Poor old Silvia. Who’s she got now? What a misfortune,” said Great-Aunt Luisa. “Raising two orphaned kids across two generations, only to lose both of you.”

“Come on,” Ester said. “She didn’t lose me. I’m not lost.”

The two of them were simply too different. Silvia had sealed up her grief in a vault and wouldn’t touch it, while Ester had spoken and spoken of it—always to total strangers. She’d seen her childhood tears replicated in tears those strangers shed. It was ass-backwards, thought Ester, an Americanism she’d come to relish. Silvia never mourned what she should have—what was hers, clearly, to mourn. She hadn’t let Ester mourn, either. The gringos, meanwhile, had been almost too eager to do it, cried almost too easily. Silvia has gone one way and I’ve gone another, Ester believed. What more was there to say? 

She could not have foreseen that morning when at age thirty-five, fresh from a phone call to Guatemala, she’d stumble into the kitchen to tell her fiancé, Reggie, “The world must finally be ending.”

“What’s up?” Reggie said. He was making them slow-drip coffee, their Sunday routine.

“My tía Silvia thinks—” Ester stopped, shook her head. “She thinks she’s been visited by the Virgin of Guadalupe.”  

“The Who of What’s This Now?” Reggie set down his mug.

“The Virgin of Guadalupe. She’s a saint of the working class, in Guatemala. You’ve probably seen her—the Virgin Mary, surrounded by all these big sunbeams?” Ester fell against the fridge door.

“I think I know who you mean.” Reggie frowned. He was a gringo, ten years her senior: divorced, with two adult kids. A partner in his legal firm. “Isn’t she supposed to be pregnant? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the anti-choice people use her in their campaigns.” 

“That can’t be right.” Flailing her arms, Ester knocked a magnet off the fridge door. “Guadalupe was a symbol of the United Farm Workers—you know, with César Chávez?”

Reggie stooped for the magnet and handed it back; Ester slapped it on the fridge. “I used to have a Guadalupe T-shirt,” she said, as if this proved anything.  

“I saw La Virgencita. Right here in my kitchen,” Silvia had announced on the phone. “I came down last night for a glass of milk, and there she was, over the stove.”

“Over the stove?” Ester repeated.  

“Above the stove. She was floating, up near the ceiling.”

Ester hadn’t known where to begin. “Tía Silvia,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “could you maybe have fallen asleep?”

There came a long crackling silence, indicating that feelings were hurt. Then Silvia said with great dignity, “I don’t fall asleep in the kitchen.”

“But could you have fallen asleep—elsewhere? In bed? And dreamed you went to the kitchen?”

Silvia chose to ignore this. “The Virgin of Guadalupe had a message for me. She’s not only for the poor, anymore. Not only for los indios. She said she’d come here for me.”

Ester stifled a groan. “You can’t just take Guadalupe.” Yet wasn’t that the problem with icons? Meaning got flung onto them; it got dumped out again and replaced. Anyone could appropriate them.

“La Virgencita gave me a gift,” Silvia said, unperturbed. “To find things that people have lost.” 

Now Ester did groan, a little. “Isn’t there a saint for that already?”

“St. Anthony,” Silvia agreed. In the past she’d have added, As you well know. Instead, she told Ester how she’d just found a set of housekeys that had been missing for weeks. “I wrote the name of the thing we lost on a piece of paper, like the Virgin told me. Then I put it down in the last place we saw them.”

“Oh, Tía,” said Ester. “That’s an old strategy. You look where you last saw the thing.” 

“No, not like that. I put my papelito down on the hall table, see? Where the keys ought to be. But I found them back under the pila.”

Why her eighty-year-old relation had been crawling around in the kitchen wasn’t a question Ester wanted to ask. She wanted, rather, to scream. Possibly she would have, except Reggie asked, “Do you think your great-aunt’s getting senile? Or has she had a stroke?”

Maybe so, Ester conceded. It might account, too, for Silvia’s sudden sweetness. She hadn’t clammed up or bickered when Ester expressed her very real doubt, but only kept gently asserting what she’d seen and heard. So Ester flew back to Guate, back to the Zona 2 house, where she found her aunt looking as she always had: a metal-colored beehive above her long face and a short string of pearls at her neck. Her hugs were also unchanged. Bracing her arms in right angles Silvia bent from the waist like a marionette, automatically holding you off. Receiving her great-aunt’s embrace was like entering a box made of bones. 

But the docility Ester had heard on the phone only accrued by the hour. Nothing could penetrate it. “Whatever you say, dear,” Silvia replied to Ester’s every suggestion. You need more sleep, Tía. More protein in your diet. We ought to get you to a doctor. 

Dr. Gálvez, the family physician, admitted to Ester in private that her aunt might have suffered a stroke. 

“Might have?” Ester said. “Can’t you tell for sure?”

Dr. Gálvez did not seem concerned. “Not without a great deal of testing. And there’s nothing discernibly wrong. It was probably just a small stroke. Your aunt has no physical ailments—no memory lapses, does she?”

“Only the incident that we spoke of. If you call that a memory lapse.”

“Well, then.” Dr. Gálvez closed up his file, a signal for Ester to go. “Give her some grace. She’s just old.”

What kind of doctor was he, to talk about giving grace? When Ester consulted the parish priest, she couldn’t make him worry, either. 

“Revelations come to those who are fit to receive them,” he said. “With age, certain people grow closer to heaven.” 

“Have you been to her house?” Ester said. “Have you seen what she’s done with the kitchen? She’s got it so tricked out with Guadalupe stuff, you can’t eat in there anymore.”

Ester never had liked that kitchen, where the dark-red tiles used for flooring across the whole house also plastered the walls. It felt like a big, hard-edged womb. Now those walls were festooned with banners. Queen of Heaven, they said. La Morenita, Empress of the Americas. At a barely safe distance above the gas burners hung a poster of Guadalupe, plus the ring of keys Silvia had found. These were flanked by photographs of the pope and the President of Guatemala. Holy cards and candles, to aid supplicants in their prayers, were arrayed on the kitchen counters. There was also a dish with strips of white paper in it. 

Wedding ring. Cell phone. My favorite sweater, people wrote on these strips. Word of Silvia’s powers had spread through their neighborhood, turning up scores of private losses boiling just under the surface. An elderly man from down the street wrote on his slip, Fifi, my precious dog. Silvia, who spent hours enthroned in the kitchen, advised him to fold that slip around Fifi’s leash and await the dog’s return. A girl who sang in the parish choir arrived in broken eyeglasses held together with tape. My brand-new glasses, she scrawled on her paper tag. “But I don’t know where I last saw them,” she wailed. 

“No te preocupes,” Silvia told her. “Put that papelito in your new glasses case. Put it where your glasses belong.”

None of this bothered Silvia’s priest. “Is it working, Ester?” he asked. “Is your aunt helping people?”

Ester shrugged: it was too soon to tell. Plus it seemed like giving false hope. “Pues me da escalofríos.” It gives me the creeps, she said.

The old priest at Silvia’s church—a source of terror throughout Ester’s youth—would never have put up with this. Ester recalled his humped and ornately caped back, turned on the congregation like a wall between them, the regular people, and the holiest things. He’d ignored through the ’80s and ’90s that Vatican II ever happened. 

His young replacement, however, just smiled. “The veil between our world and the next does become thinner at times.”

“Okay,” Ester said. In a different year, she’d have liked him.

She should have returned to Chicago—called it quits, cut her trip short. What else could she really do? Yet something was off, Ester thought. Over the course of the week, Silvia was slower to rise, slower to speak in the morning. Amparo, who’d become the spryer one of the pair, admitted that when Silvia called for her at night, she sometimes acted confused. Ester would schedule a follow-up doctor’s visit, if things didn’t shortly improve. 

On her fifth morning in Guate, Ester stumbled on Silvia wearing her flowered bathrobe, kneeling in front of the stove. It wasn’t quite six o’clock.  

“You ought to get up from there,” Ester said. “That can’t be good for your joints.” 

Silvia made no protest—she never did, anymore—but she remained on her knees, meeting Ester’s scowl with a mildness that would’ve been welcome in earlier days. It felt like a barrier now, one more denial to batter against.

“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” Ester swung her arm toward the shrine.

“You’re just tired. You’re just upset.” Silvia smiled her new, tender smile.

“I’m upset because this is a farce,” Ester said. “Or else you’ve gone mad. I don’t understand what you’re doing. What the fuck good does it do, if you can find lost things now?”

“Que vengas conmigo,” Amparo said a day later, from the threshold of Ester’s old study. “I think Doña Silvia is worse.”

Ester jumped up. “Is she ill?”

“Not exactly.” Amparo looked rattled. “No. It’s something I found.”  

Trailing her into the parlor, Ester focused on Amparo’s silver braids down her back, long and thin as antennae. When Amparo unlocked a drawer in the mahogany china cabinet, she released its familiar, dusty-sweet smell. Inside lay a bundle of blanched cloth and lace. 

“That,” Ester said. “I’ve seen that before.” 

Amparo wagged her head back and forth. “Look some more. Pick it up.” 

Ester lifted her father’s christening gown by its tiny, age-stiffened shoulders. She gave it a half-angry shake. The gown rustled sharply, like a small hornet’s nest; a dozen white paper slips showered down. There was writing on each one of them. Suddenly dizzy, Ester fell to her knees. She pinched a slip off the floor. 

Adrián. His name filled the whole paper. Written in Silvia’s hand.

On every one of these papers. Adrián. Adrián. Adrián.  

“It’s the room where she last saw him,” Amparo said. “They had coffee here, after dinner. You came to this house—all three of you did—one night that very last week.”

“Yes,” Ester said, clutching the gown, noisy with other strips caught in its folds—incantations of her father’s name. It felt like too little, or maybe too much. A travesty, or heart-breaking.   

She carried the christening gown into Silvia’s room, where her great-aunt sat in bed, cloudy-eyed, palms open on top of the quilt. Laying the gown in between them, Ester sank to the foot of the bed. She placed a paper tag—Adrián—in one of Silvia’s hands. 

“He’s not here,” Ester said. “We won’t find him. He’s not anywhere.” 

Silvia’s fingers curled around the white paper slip. “Ai, pobrecita,” she said. Poor little girl. Did she mean Ester? Maybe she meant both of them.

“Do you ever think,” Ester said, “that it wasn’t us who lost them? They lost us.”

Silvia looked back, her gaze clearing. She gave Ester the barest of nods.

There on the bed, Ester felt what had linked them all of these years: the strange curse of survival, the status of having been left. They were two remnants of the same shipwreck, adrift on a single lifeboat, and as for the ocean of grief underneath—no matter how one of them struggled, or how the other denied it—they never would touch its far shore.

“Why didn’t you stop them?” said Ester. “You loved them like I did, and you always knew what they were doing. Tía, why didn’t you try?”

“My dear, who could stop them?” Silvia sounded more like her old self. “Your parents were exactly like you. Once they knew what they wanted, there was no stopping them.”

As Ester lowered her face to the bed, Silvia’s hand came to rest on her nape. Light as a humming bird. “Ai, pobrecita,” she said again. “In a way, they were already gone.”