Page 126 of The Deepest Lake

EPILOGUE

JULES

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Eighteen months later, I’m standing outside a bookstore called Women and Children First in Chicago, too nervous to enter. I had dinner with Mom at one of our favorite restaurants on North Ashland, but when she offered to come to the reading with me, I said no. I needed to do this myself.

“You’re sure? We can sit in the far back. She won’t see you.”

“I want her to see me,” I said. “That’s the point.”

“And you don’t need your trekking poles?”

“Mom. The doctor wants me to walk without them now.”

“Right,” she says with a strained smile. “But I’ll be parked nearby, reading in the car. Just in case.”

I know Mom has her own need to deal with all we went through, even beyond the way she has opened up with Dad and Ulyana, given interviews to newspapers, consulted with lawyers and phoned her new friends from the Atitlán workshop, who now understand all that she was concealing.

My list of needs is different. And tonight, I decided, I need to do this one thing, alone.

Now, as I stare at the chalkboard on the sidewalk—Eva Marshall reads from her new bestselling memoir, We—I am second-guessing my immature need for this trivial gesture of independence.

But that’s how the last year and a half have been. One small step and gesture at a time. First, three surgeries, which I was told weren’t many, given what I experienced. It turns out the infection at the site of my broken tibia developed into osteomyelitis. Trapped for so long with a festering leg, I was lucky to have avoided either the chronic form of the disease or a much swifter and more fatal case of sepsis.

Next, remembering that before I went to Lake Atitlán, I was preparing to move out and be on my own. And I will, soon. I didn’t expect to be hobbling quite this long.

“Are you going in?” a woman asks as I linger too close to the door.

“Yes,” I say. “Sorry.”

I take a seat in the back—just as Mom suggested—pulse thrumming in my throat as I listen to the moderator read through a bloated introduction of Eva and how she’s become even more popular in the last year.

When the news came out that I had been found, the media swarmed. A publisher even offered me the chance to tell my own story in a book. For five minutes, I was tempted. Then I realized that writing a memoir about Eva and me was not how I wanted to start my career as a published writer.

By now, the publisher is probably grateful, given how muddy the story became. My parents and I consulted lawyers about pressing charges and finally decided it wasn’t worth it. Barbara was in a foreign jail, and Guatemala showed no interest in extraditing her, even after an American journalist on Eva’s trail started looking into Barbara’s past and the suspicious nature of her husband’s death. Whatever Barbara may have done to him—in addition to some shady financial actions on both sides of the border—eclipsed my brief role in her troubled life. If I’d had any idea, I wouldn’t have been as sympathetic to her woe-filled memoir. She never admitted to hurting me in the rowboat, anyway, except to say it was a two-person tussle, both of us acting out of petty rage. I had no witnesses to prove otherwise. I only had my story.

In Eva’s version of events, she was indeed helping me heal from the attack, and she had my own words on her side. After all, I’d written an essay expressing my gratitude for what she was doing: butterfly from the temazcal chrysalis, et cetera. Not many people seemed inclined to believe I wrote those pages as manipulative fiction.

As for Mauricio, I knew he didn’t have many legal options for getting back at Eva. He called on his scary uncle for help. The upshot is that Eva no longer felt safe in Guatemala. She moved her entire operation to Nicaragua, and now it’s even more upscale. Guests fly in by helicopter. The cost of attendance has tripled. Meanwhile, Eva’s confession that she did in fact invent parts of her last memoir—but only due to deep grief—have only revitalized interest in that book. A film project is finally in the works. An A-list actress signed on, eager to portray Eva and her deceptions in all their psychological complexity.

I am wincing, thinking of what that movie will look like and whether I’ll have the discipline not to see it, when thundering applause in the bookstore forces me to focus.

The moderator has stepped away from the podium. He’s pointing to stage left, where I can just make out Eva’s blond hair—longer now—from behind a scrum of people. She’s trying to hand over something to another woman, who is facing away from me, blocking my view. Finally, I see what’s holding things up. Eva’s swaddled baby is fussing, even as the helper or nanny tries to grab hold of her.

“She has twins,” a woman next to me whispers, the admiration in her voice plain. “Adopted from Nicaragua. Isn’t that incredible?”

“Yes,” I say. “If she doesn’t get tired of them.”

“Tired of them?” The woman turns in her seat, trying to make eye contact. “Why on earth would she?”

“Because they won’t be cute forever. They won’t always do what she says. They won’t always be grateful.”

It’s the sort of thought I should have saved for Zahara. We still trade WhatsApp voice messages every week or so.

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