Page 16 of The Deepest Lake
Only now, reading public criticisms of Eva with all the detachment she can muster, Rose feels an uncomfortable new insight taking shape. It’s not just that “death is bad for business,” as Matt said ad nauseum as justification for Eva’s stonewalling. It’s also that celebrities were criticized whether they engaged or hid away.
For over thirty years, Eva was treated harshly by critics, trolls and everyday Goodreads reviewers. Any smart woman would come to rely on publicists and lawyers who’d tell her, “Don’t link your name to anything sordid. When in doubt, keep a low profile.” Rose hates to admit it, but it makes sense.
Rose checks her watch—still an hour before the party begins. Tonight, she’ll meet the woman herself. She opens her ebook and returns to reading Eva’s second memoir.
Unlike the punk-era narrative that appealed so much to Jules, this one involves no gritty setting or provocative setup, just a voice whispering in her ear. As if this woman, Eva Marshall, has simply pulled up a chair to tell Rose the truth. It’s a truth that hurts almost more than Rose can bear.
There was one thing I wanted more than anything in the world: to hold a child, my very own flesh-and-blood child, again.
Rose is so caught up reading that she doesn’t notice the passage of time until women’s laughter floods up the narrow alleyway, breaking the spell. She looks up to see a group strolling past the low front wall of the pizzeria: Rose’s fellow workshop participants, changed into evening wear—long skirts, pretty jeweled sandals, cardigan sweaters—heading toward Casa Eva. Rose never changed or freshened her makeup. Maybe she’ll get points for looking more natural.
By the time she’s settled her bill, she’s been left behind. She speedwalks to the main plaza beyond the alleys, where this afternoon’s line of red, green and yellow tuk-tuks has been reduced to only one. The other women are puttering up the road without Rose, crammed in groups of three and four into colorful, toy-like vehicles, another feature of these charming villages.
Charming, yet Eva and Company warned them, via the emailed instructions: Do NOT walk the road alone. Do not walk, even in groups, after dark. Do not go more than a quarter mile beyond Casa Eva. On the way back to town take a boat or a tuk-tuk, always with a partner.
Well, Rose has no partner for the five-minute ride up the mountain road.
“Hola,” she says, crossing the narrow street and swinging into the back of the sole tuk-tuk. “Buenas noches. Un minuto, por favor.”
She opens her bag, pawing through printouts of instructions, but there are so many she can’t find the address for Casa Eva. When she looks up, Rose notices an old, dark-skinned man with bowl-cut hair and a thick, boxy shirt—homemade, handwoven—looking back at her from across the narrow road. He neither smiles nor frowns. He takes a step closer, into the street. One of his eyes is filmy blue.
The tuk-tuk driver shoos him away. “¡Vete!”
“What does he want?” Rose says, forgetting for a moment to use Spanish. “¿Qué quiere el hombre?”
Maybe the old man is a beggar. Maybe he’s offering his services as a guide. Maybe he simply wants to share the ride.
The man steps closer, oblivious to an oncoming truck.
“¡Vete!” the driver shouts more forcefully. The old man steps back just in time to avoid being hit by the produce truck. But still, he doesn’t stop staring at Rose.
“¿Dónde?” the driver asks Rose, sounding annoyed.
“Casa Eva,” she says, hoping it’s enough.
“Casa Eva, adelante. Bienvenida,” he says, finally smiling into the rearview mirror. “Habla español muy bien.”
She smiles back, but the good feeling evaporates as soon as he guns the motor. The roads are bad here. Even a short ride feels reckless, all the more so in a tiny, half-open vehicle like this one.
She hasn’t been here one full day and she’s already doing what Jules would have done. What she did, allegedly. Rose is ignoring local safety advice, wandering around town and well beyond it, alone. That old man almost got run over; the same thing could happen to her if she keeps wandering around with her head in the clouds.
Also, she’s carrying too much cash. She feels for the bills in her pocket, the maximum quetzales she was able to withdraw. She was supposed to leave it in her locked cabin room, not travel with it on her person. Stupid.
Rose imagines Jules’s voice: It’s okay. Jeez. Really.
But it doesn’t feel okay.
The driver is watching her intently, instead of the road. He revs the engine faster.
After the first bend, the paving ends and the road disintegrates into a rutted track. Rose grabs hold of a silver pole attaching the seat to a sort of metal canopy. It looks like a vehicle from an amusement park. The tuk-tuk’s wheels bite into gravel, throwing up clouds of gray dust. It’s so thick she can no longer see the driver’s eyes in the mirror.
There’s a reason Rose never liked traveling to out-of-theway places, and it’s partly this: the feeling of having no control, of not even knowing when to be afraid. Before, she didn’t want to imagine every specific risk Jules was taking when she traveled. Now she has no choice but to imagine them, to see around every corner the way someone could get hurt.
6
JULES
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