Page 62 of The Deepest Lake
“Let me look into that,” she says. “May! It’s busy around here! Focus, please!”
Concha and Chef Hans enter. I’m in the way. Remembering Eva’s “permission” for me to retrieve my own journal, I head through the house, up to her bedroom and into the office corner near the French doors. Barbara uses this spot, and I’ve sat here once or twice, making printouts.
My journal is easy to spot. Even as I grab it, I know I’ll never write anything personal or authentic in it again.
Then I spot a box of recycled office paper under the desk. Blank paper isn’t abundant in San Felipe. I grab about thirty pages, fold it in over into a makeshift booklet—never mind that each page is already printed with old spreadsheets on one side—and push it into my backpack. Journal number one will be the decoy. Journal number two will be this: sloppy but private.
Then I go downstairs and use my final ten minutes of freedom to freewrite about how violated I feel, and how strange.
The rest of the day, although the workshops are fully in progress now—the whole reason I was excited to be here, really—I’m only half-engaged. As I watch Eva interact with the participants—shutting them down when they simply want to explain or ask a question, probing sensitive areas the women clearly don’t want to talk about and didn’t write about in the first place—I can feel myself judging, deciding, emotionally retreating. Giving up on the idea of a mentor. Giving up, perhaps, on the idea of writing memoir altogether, at least at my age. Cutting my losses.
At midafternoon break, I find myself standing in a shady corner of the yard, next to Eva, who is doing her stretches.
“It’s been a rough first day,” I blurt and immediately wish I hadn’t.
“What do you mean?”
“Beatrice and her son, hanging himself.”
“That wasn’t rough. We found her key scene. I gave it to her wrapped up with a bow. Now she just has to go write it.”
Eva is wearing a transparent blue shirt with wide flowy sleeves over a tank top. She always wears elegant clothes, but often, there will be just one thing wrong. Yesterday, after swimming, she put on her shirt inside out. Today, she’s misbuttoned the overshirt.
I point, finger an inch from her chest. “Your button.”
She bats away my finger. “It’s fine.”
The rough physical contact startles me.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Not today, May. Not today.”
I feel nervous. And when I ask myself why, the only answer I have is that Eva seems nervous. I think of one workshopper’s essay about her experience living with an alcoholic mother and how she learned to read her mother’s moods, tiptoe when she was angry, and never—never—say a critical word.
Eva is not an alcoholic. Eva is most certainly not my mother. I can’t blame her for my own anxiety. Though I can—the thought comes to me now—start googling, the first free moment I have, the price of a one-way flight home.
Home.
There’s always the moment on any journey when you start thinking of your own bed, familiar foods, liberation from the endless daily work of figuring things out—and that’s for normal trips, not trips that have made you question your worth and your sanity.
When Barbara barks at me around three o’clock to transfer the latest PayPal payments, I’m only too glad. It means I’ll miss the final workshopping session. The local Wi-Fi is too slow, so I have to go to town.
A half hour later, I’m at the share-space, a hot little eight-by-eight back room behind a travel agency, checking email messages from future workshop participants, sending a file that Eva asked me to rush to her agent and then taking a ten-minute break to continue my flight googling and check my bank balance. Predictably, a super-short-notice flight is wildly expensive. I have the money in my account, just barely, but that’s not adding in a shuttle, meals, a likely overnight in Antigua, and several auto-debits that will be hitting my account in the next two weeks.
For a moment, I consider emailing my parents to ask for money. They’d give it, of course. They might not even ask many questions. I’m the one who asks questions, such as, Your balance is so low you can’t fly home—cutting it a little close, aren’t we? And you’re really willing to waste money when you could just wait a few more days and get a cheaper ticket?
I’m rushing this. I can find a better flight. I can even leave Atitlán and kill some time somewhere else before I fly out, maybe somewhere less touristy than Antigua. This isn’t an emergency.
I close my travel searches and get back to work, checking Eva’s PayPal, as I’ve been directed to do. I usually do admin tasks without paying much attention to names or numbers, but because I’m procrastinating, not eager to be back at Casa Eva, I spend a few more minutes at the desk. I run my finger over the sticky soda-can rings on the desk while skimming: three hundred, one thousand, five thousand. I pause. A surprising amount of money is flowing through this account.
They are round numbers, not the amount we charge for either first deposit or full tuition and board. One of the biggest is from Wendy, the first alum I interviewed for a social media post. It’s one of the few with a memo line: Blessings for those beautiful children.
Most of these have to be orphanage donations, in quantities larger than I ever imagined. How much did Astrid say the total was this month? Three hundred dollars.
God, it’s hot in here. I feel a tickle on my hand and brush off an ant. I can see an entire line of them, crawling up the shaky table leg, attracted to the sticky soda rings.
It’s one thing not to deliver the latest donated shoes and clothes, another to do this—and even I’m not quite sure what this is. It would be way too easy to divert money given by grateful women writers into personal accounts, to cover the costs of keeping up Eva’s many houses.