“Isabella, we’re ready. Aren’t you coming? We have to go. The plane leaves for the States at four, and you know how your mother hates to be late.”

“But I wanted to say goodbye to Olga,” Isabella said, her cosmetic bag in her hand.

“You’ll see her again,” her father said. That’s what he’d come to say, just as the thing penetrated her brain, did its damage, and ended it. “You’ll see her again, dear.” She didn’t hear the dear. But it was there, and he’d said it, and that’s all that was important. He’d called her dear and she’d loved her father so, it was good that he’d said it.

Perhaps it was that cold message in a dead brain that Olga heard as she left the police station and looked towards the south, distraught and frightened, rudderless as she would be now for the rest of her life.

TWENTY-SIX

Russell rang the bell on the landing. He remembered it from his childhood, a brass lion’s paw with a large motherof-pearl button. It was considered very modern when his great-grandfather had had it installed. He rang it twice.

He remembered very well coming up the stairs to the apartment with his mother. Sometimes they raced up the white marble steps together, more like brother and sister than mother and son. He realized, waiting for the door to open, that his mother had been just a girl then. He moved his finger off the button.

Olga answered the door. His aunt had sent Olga to take care of the family’s apartment, agreeing to take her back.

“Buenas tardes, Don Russell,” Olga said. She touched his arm as a sign of her affection for him, and her gratitude for what he’d done for her. She knew it was his doing that the family had taken her back and allowed her to resume her old duties.

He was shocked, but he didn’t pull his arm away. Instead, without knowing exactly why, he embraced her, then patted her on her shoulder, the one that scared people, the one that had been smashed under the tires of the truck on the road to the Cruz plantation. She had foolishly run after a cheap plastic ball; the truck driver had been drunk.

“The streets are dangerous now,” Olga said. “You have to be careful, Don Russell.” She smiled at him, showing her bad teeth.

“I hope my aunt called, Olga, and warned you I was coming?”

“Yes, Don Russell. I’ve cleaned your mother’s room, and everything is ready.”

He didn’t know what to say. No one but Olga seemed to mention his mother to him.

“Or you could have your uncle’s room, if you prefer?” she said.

“No. . . My mother’s room. Yes. That would be fine.” He’d told his aunt that he wanted to use the family’s apartment, without explaining why. He hadn’t intended to stay there, but wanted only to use it to meet Beatrice. He’d thought of the family’s apartment as safe — at least, safer than the Camino Real, or the Hilton where they’d been meeting.

Olga led him to his mother’s bedroom. The ceilings were high. The wallpaper hadn’t been changed since she’d died. It was yellow, with fleurs-de-lis. The room had big, beautiful French doors that opened out on to a narrow wrought iron balcony with a view of a statue of Ubico on a white marble horse.

Olga threw open the heavy curtains. The room smelled of wax and decay. He put his briefcase on the bed. Across the room was a blond bird’s-eye maple chest of drawers, with glass top and hair brushes.

He heard the bedroom door close behind him. He’d meant to tell Olga that he was going to meet a friend here, but she’d left. He turned back and walked to the chest of drawers, and looked at what were probably his mother’s hair brushes.

•••

1988

“Do you see, Mother, why I had to do it? I mean the Greek,” he said.

It was the last time he ever saw his mother. They were having lunch in Palo Alto. He had told her the whole story very calmly. He’d gone and put the pistol back with the others, and afterwards, when questioned about the incident, had denied everything. Even the police had come to the school, since the Greek’s father had insisted that they investigate.

But all the boys had backed Russell. No one—not one boy, not even the boy who had shared the Greek’s room—had said anything to the police. Russell had lied, telling the police he was asleep and hadn’t heard or seen anything.

But he told his mother everything that day at lunch. He wore his dress uniform, sky blue with a gold cord he’d gotten for academic achievement. His father had come to the lunch too, and he was sitting open-mouthed, not knowing what to say or do. His father thought that Russell was a criminal and probably insane, and that it was all Isabella’s fault. Now what would they do with him? (Later, he concluded it was the result of bad blood—those savages and outlaws Isabella was descended from.)

When they were walking back to his father’s car—his father still inside the restaurant, paying—Russell’s mother put her arm around him. They walked down the sidewalk alone together. The trees were shedding their leaves; the big wet golden leaves, with their dark spines, looked like etchings pressed into the sidewalk.

“You did the right thing, my love,” his mother said. “I know you’re a man now, and that’s all I ever wanted for you, to be a man. Someone who wasn’t afraid. Your great-grandfather was never afraid. That’s why he was a great man, and why we have what we have.” She said this last part proudly. “And my father was that way too. You have to be brave in this world.”

“Well, I’m not afraid, mother,” he said. “Not at all.” And he wasn’t, it was the truth. Later, though, he would have to go back and constantly redefine himself as fearless—pushing himself to risk everything, money or life, just to double-check, never satisfied with what he found. No proof of courage would ever be quite good enough.

“Well, it’s all settled then. Nothing to worry about,” she said.

“I love you,” he said. He didn’t get to say that like other kids did, but he said it now, holding her around the waist, because he considered himself a man now. At school, he never said it because he had no one to say it to. He never said it to his father, and his father never said it to him. It was true: they had, in the end, different blood. But he and his mother shared the same blood. Russell knew his father thought he was too much like his mother, too Latin, too “hot-blooded.” His father was a fool. Russell had known it from the moment he laid eyes on him.

“Mother, will we ever get a house here in the States? Maybe here in Palo Alto, and I could walk to school,” he said. But then his father caught up with them, and his mother never answered. His father was worried that she’d overtipped. He was always scolding her when she was spending her own money, as if he had the right to simply because he was a man.

•••

Russell touched the edge of one of his mother’s hairbrushes. He heard the doorbell ring, and turned away from the chest. He stopped for a moment and felt something odd pass over him, something that came to him in the sound of the bell, a loneliness finely defined, a longing that he’d pushed away until now. It was the feeling he had always considered a malaise, but now he finally realized what it was: it was the loneliness he had felt as a child. Was that what it had been all these years? Was it that sense of loss that had come to him so strongly when he came back here? Was it simply missing her? Was it just that this country reminded him of his true psychological circumstance, which had been so papered over back there in the States?

He realized, going to the door, inhaling the smells of the Cruz apartment, that he’d had an essential nature, and it had something to do with this country. Maybe his father had been right, always accusing him of being too much like his mother. As he walked down the hall and stopped in front of Olga, he knew that he would do whatever he could to help his mother’s country out of this crisis—it was what his mother would have wanted of him. All of his loneliness, his training and his education had been for a purpose. Finally, he saw his purpose and his destiny. He was a Cruz, and his mother’s son.