Page 43 of The Deepest Lake

I don’t want to admit that his uncle looks shady, so I just ask, “What does he do?”

Guatemala has more gang members than any other Central American country. There are fifty different gangs in the capital alone.

Mauricio pulls me closer and nuzzles close to my ear. “Don’t worry. I’m not going. Too many bad things happening there.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t like to think about it.”

Not thinking seems to be Mauricio’s defense of choice. Live in the moment. Put the worst of the past behind you and hope for the best. He doesn’t understand Eva’s memoirs or the workshops she leads. He’s not illiterate. In fact, he loves poetry. But he thinks these women are lucky. Most of them have the option of leaving past tragedies behind.

Of course, he has shared some memories with me. One was of seeing corpses lined up for display in the town plaza. Mauricio’s mother was murdered. Even since the Civil War ended, femicide has increased and many of his girl cousins continue to simply disappear. No one investigates. For Mauricio the search for meaning is a luxury. It’s not a lesson Eva teaches.

“But if she’s backed out, can’t we try Charlize again? Don’t lecture me about ‘development hell,’ Richard. This isn’t my first rodeo. And no, she’s not too young for the role. We look the same age.”

I’ve just come running to the balcony, having been told by Gaby that Eva was looking everywhere for me—never mind I was never farther than a thousand feet from the house, doing exactly the work she’d asked me to do.

But I’ve arrived at a bad time. Eva is talking with her agent, Richard, again, and she isn’t happy about the news. The movie deal for In a Delicate State has fallen through. I’m guessing it’s because an A-list actress decided it wasn’t a good career move to star in this particular story, with its dead baby at the end.

Eva is wearing a boatneck T-shirt, extremely low-cut. Her cleavage is rage-red. “You know I’ve got three mortgages, right?”

Ending the call, Eva holds up a finger—I’m not supposed to say a word—goes to her bathroom and comes out again, face and hair damp.

“I can come back,” I say.

“No. We’ve got writers on the way. Have you checked email in the last hour?”

“I was on the dock, reading manuscripts.” I catch myself, realizing that sounded salty, which isn’t what I intended. “A few of them are really good, by the way!”

“I can’t reach you on the dock. You should stay closer to the house where the Wi-Fi works best or no one will find you. I have ten women somewhere between their home airports and Guatemala City and Antigua, and you haven’t checked email?”

Twelve women, I think, not ten. But it doesn’t matter. “You told me that I should read the manuscripts and research the writers. I’ve made some notes—”

“Juliet May.” She runs a hand through her hair, nervously scrunching the wavy strands. “Don’t make excuses.”

It stings. And it should. I do make too many excuses. She can see right through me, beyond the issue of emails and workshoppers, to the very core of my failings.

“Well?” Eva asks.

If I don’t get a moment alone, I’m likely to break down in tears.

“Why don’t I get us two fresh coffees?”

When I come back, smiling as brightly as I can manage, we go over the participant manuscripts. One of Eva’s top concerns is deciding the schedule for who should be workshopped first, though evidently that’s fluid, too, and she has a habit of changing it around.

“Here’s the shorthand,” she says. “We have the Avoiders. They want to write about anything but the most important thing that happened. We have the Agreeables. They’ll follow my lead and it’s actually better if they haven’t started writing yet, since we’d just have to scrap their first efforts anyway. I’d rather get an email and we can talk about their idea. Win-win.

“Then we have the Forgettables,” Eva says. “Followed by the Difficults. Forgettables can be socially pleasant. Sometimes they’re repeat alumnae or older women who frankly don’t have much to write or say, but they sure love our little lakeside retreat. I’ll sometimes start with them as a way to control the energy level. Let the whole group wade in slowly. Calm the jitters. But the Difficults are something else. They’re brittle, unpleasant people or they’re writing difficult material beyond their capacity. Either way, they can ruin things for everyone.”

I mention the woman whose son hanged himself. Never mind that the event was so recent, as the writer’s cover note explained. It’s also the writing itself: a series of horror-filled flashbulb images with barely any narrative stitching it all together.

“She hasn’t started processing,” I say, wincing. Eva hates therapeutic jargon. But I don’t know how else to explain. “She could be a risk—to herself, I mean. Couldn’t she?”

Eva, who has been pacing, stops. “Juliet May, do you want to know how long I waited, following a particularly traumatic event, until I started writing my last memoir?”

“You . . . didn’t?”

“That’s right. I didn’t. Because I am . . .”

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