Page 39 of The Deepest Lake

Eva has forgotten my dialogue question altogether. Now she’s wound up, energized by her rant.

“She doesn’t like the story of how I got started in the business. You think agents were all clamoring to read a memoir by a teenager? Absolutely not. You think the New York parties I attended and the men I ‘dated’ the summer of 1980 didn’t matter? I could tell you anecdotes that would make your hair curl. She refuses to benefit from what I went through.”

ADARSHA.

“And none of that is to be shared, understand? Okay, so you’ll get me that essay. I’m serious. This goes beyond our relationship. We are a community. Everyone here creates.”

“Okay. I’ve got something halfway—”

Eva makes a flapping motion with her hand, like I should leave. I clutch the workshoppers’ pages to my chest.

“Let’s talk about it later today.”

“Perfect!”

ADARSHA.

“I have to take this!” Eva barks.

I don’t mean to mimic her volume, but I shout back, communicating my zest and my competence and my willingness to be a team player: “Great!”

13

ROSE

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Rose catches her breath only once she is settled in the back of the tuk-tuk, motoring up the dusty road to Casa Eva, still thinking about the end of Eva’s second memoir, both stimulated and bothered by it. Jules loved the book. Trust in Jules.

She looks down at her gray scoop-neck T-shirt from Old Navy and the white capris that seemed summery when she bought them but now just seem colorless. Is that how her daughter saw her? Colorless, conservative, boring. Not the type of person who would dare to get pregnant at fifty. Not the kind of woman who would have come to Guatemala alone, under normal circumstances. She sighs and gazes out at the landscape, trying to see it as Jules did—as an inspiring invitation to adventure.

On the steep hillsides to the left, patches of land are aflame. The smell of smoke is faint, not the intense choke and pall of massive wildfire. But she can see individual rising wisps and flashes of orange. The women were talking about it at breakfast. The farmers use some kind of slash-and-burn agriculture.

“Los incendios,” Rose calls to the driver, asking him about the fires. “¿Todo bien?”

“Fuera de control, a veces.”

Out of control, at times. But only “at times.” The driver sounds relaxed.

Rose thinks of California fires, raging out of control, devastating entire towns. This isn’t like that. It can’t be. Don’t underestimate Indigenous knowledge. She hopes the locals know what they’re doing.

Maybe Rose worries too much. She’s worrying even now about Eva’s baby, dead and gone for more than five years. Rose hasn’t nursed a child in over two decades but at this moment, imagining the pain of a lost infant, she feels a tingle in her chest, that familiar pinch and prickle before milk lets down. It’s been years since she thought about nursing problems, including her endlessly soaked shirts, no matter how many pads she stuck between skin and bra. It was like her entire body was just listening for Jules’s hunger, ready at any moment to open the spigots.

Maybe that’s what’s bothering her, too: the failure to explain the breastfeeding aspect, at the end of Eva’s story. If Eva had slept later than usual, and the baby weren’t alive to nurse, wouldn’t Eva’s milk be leaking into her shirt? Wouldn’t Eva need to express milk and possibly change her clothing?

Rose imagines holding the dead baby for an hour or more until dawn breaks, milk letting down, shirt soaking through. Then: going to the shower, to let the water wash away the milk and the tears. Standing under the scalding spray with puffy eyes—as hot as one can bear—an experience Rose knows well from the last three months. Then dressing again and waiting for the authorities to arrive. That’s how Rose would have done it. Instead, Eva wrote.

She spots three figures ahead, walking the road. Isobel, Diane and Rachel. They got ahead of her after breakfast.

“Stop,” she tells the driver. “I want to offer them a ride.”

Diane is the first to hop in. “Good! I wanted to be early.” She smooths down her white slacks, gold bangles sliding up and down her narrow wrists as she rearranges herself. Don’t wear valuables around the village. Few of them are being sufficiently careful.

When the noise of the tuk-tuk motor forces Diane to turn and shout over her shoulder, Rose can see what she overlooked at breakfast. Behind the dark glasses, Diane’s left eye is surrounded by yellow and pale purple bruising. Yet she’s in a fine mood. “We’ll beat everyone coming by boat. We can get our names on the sign-up sheet.”