It’s almost ten o’clock by the time the taxi pulls up in front of the building. A doorman with a gold name-badge that says “Hernán” opens the car door and, through the night air, carries my suitcase up the stairs from the street.
The lobby is small and sparsely decorated with two club chairs and a potted palm tree. A room off to the side houses a small bar, the bottles lined up against a mirrored wall like at an apothecary. Hernán places my suitcase on the floor by the front desk before stepping back a polite distance. I check in with the attendant on duty, who hands me a key for room 308. “It is the top floor,” he says. “I hope you will enjoy it.”
Hernán follows me up the flights of stairs, thumping my suitcase behind him. I could have managed it on my own, but I don’t want to offend him by saying so. At the door, I tell him thank you and try, as gracefully as possible, to hand him a folded dollar bill for his trouble. Hernán takes it, then starts back toward the stairs.
The room is plain but clean. It smells faintly of disinfectant. There’s a twin bed with a beige bedspread hanging low enough that it brushes the tile floor, a small television set on top of a white wicker dresser, a private bathroom with a standing shower, an air-conditioning unit perched in the window. The few times my mother and I have traveled, we’ve gone by car, and we’ve stayed in motels, and we’ve done that only if there was no way we could have pushed through the dark and our exhaustion to our destination. My mother never wants to stop and pay money to sleep. My room now isn’t much different from those—if anything it’s nicer—except for the fact that I’m in it by myself.
I lay my suitcase flat on the floor and turn on the air-conditioning, waiting as it gurgles to life. On the ground below, there’s a lighted alley lined with a row of trash cans, and across from it, apartment buildings with ironwork balconies, almost all of which are strung with laundry.
I’m about to step away from the window when I see something move. A guy holding a bucket filled with flowers scans the length of the alley, then settles himself against one of the trash cans, lowering his face into the petals. After a few minutes, he gets up and walks away, cradling the bucket against his hip.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to unpack, since I’m not sure yet how long I’ll be here. I don’t want to call any of my friends, since nothing has happened yet to tell them about. I’m not hungry. I’m not tired. I take a deep breath. I need to relax. I need to remember my plan. I told myself that as soon as I got here, the first thing I would do was find a phone book. That should be simple enough. I open the dresser drawers and in the bottom one, next to a pad of paper with the words “Hotel Centro” along the bottom edge, bingo. Okay. Out of my orange bag, I pull my father’s letters and lay them on the bed. His return address is in the upper right corner of each. I lay the phone book on the bed next to the letters and open it to the G’s. I feel my heartbeat speed up. I already looked him up on the Internet, of course, before I came, but I didn’t find anything. Not so much as a trace of him in the first thirty pages of Google search results. After that, I told myself just to wait. To exhibit some patience. As soon as I got here, I could get my hands on a phone book. I could see if he was listed and go from there.
I tuck my hair behind my ears as I scan the names. I almost can’t bear to look, but I can’t stand not to. I back away and jiggle my arms a little, like a runner getting ready to crouch down into the starting blocks. Come on, Mira, I tell myself. I approach the book again. Then I read: Gallardo, Ana. Gallardo, Benjamin. Gallardo, F. O. Gallardo, Ignacio. Gallardo, M. Gallardo, Tula. Gallardo, Tulia. Gallardo, Ynez. Eight Gallardos in all. None of them Gatún, and none matching the address I have.
It’s hard to imagine
my mother in this place, more than twenty years earlier. What did Panama look like when she lived here? Through the window, in the distance, there’s a sliver of what appears to be the ocean. In the space between two buildings, the tiniest patch of blue, glinting in the moonlight.
I can’t say why, but the sight of the water makes me think of the time, one summer, when my mother and I drove to the dunes along Lake Michigan, in Indiana. It was supposed to reach ninety-nine degrees that day, the latest in a string of four days that the temperature in Chicago had skyrocketed to near or over a hundred. Everyone in the city was going crazy, and my mother and I were no exception. We had taken to sleeping in the basement, where it was cooler, my mother stripping down to her bra and underwear and splaying herself on top of an old comforter she’d laid out on the floor. We spent an entire afternoon in the frozen-food aisle at Jewel, walking up and down, up and down, opening the freezer doors every so often to stick our faces in and pretend that we were looking for the perfect bag of peas or that we were actually considering buying French bread pizza. After a few hours of this nonsense, a manager strode toward us and handed us both paper applications, saying pointedly, “If you’re going to spend this much time in my store, you might as well be on the payroll.” My mother, I remember very clearly, said, “Thank you. That’s the easiest interview I’ve ever had,” and took the application, stuffing it in her pocketbook.
The next day, my mother had a new plan.
“We need to get out of here. We’re driving to the dunes,” she said when I came upstairs for breakfast. It must have been a weekend, if she was home from work.
“The where?”
“You know the dunes.”
“In Indiana? Yeah. I didn’t hear you. I thought you said we were going to the doom.”
“If we stay here any longer, that’s exactly where we’ll be going.”
She told me to wear my bathing suit under my clothes, and after that, we were off. In the car and on the road. I don’t remember anything in particular about the car ride, but I do remember pulling into a parking lot and walking into a huge, shimmering sea of golden sand. Mounds and mounds of it unrolling as far as I could see, rounded and windswept, the valleys lost in shadows.
“This is so cool,” I said. When I had said I knew what the dunes were, I meant by reputation only. I had heard of them, but I had never seen them in person.
“It better be cool. Or at least cooler than where we were. That was the whole point.”
My mother beckoned me to the beach, where hundreds of other people with the same idea were stretched out on oversized towels or splashing near the shoreline or kayaking farther out. We owned none of the usual beach accoutrements, so we just took off our clothes and got in the water, dunking ourselves under, heads and all, until we started to cool off enough that we felt sane again. My mother floated on her back for a time, her hands sculling silently under the water, her eyes closed against the beating sun, while I stuck my feet in the sand holes where it was shallow and then reached down and pulled up whatever I could grab hold of, sorting the silt and quartz crystals and rocks in my palm and saving some to take home.
Later in the day, when the sun was dimming, we sat up to our waists in the water and watched the swallows fly from their nests in the dunes and the dragonflies bat their wings overhead. A light breeze sent the sand at the top of the mounds swirling in the air.
“This was nice,” I told my mother, and I meant it. We didn’t often spend time together like that. The majority of our days were about more pedestrian concerns—getting dinner on the table, finishing homework, fixing the thermostat, that sort of thing.
“You liked it?”
“I liked it.”
She smiled and rubbed her eyes and looked out at the water. “You know, there are a million places in the world. But you only need to find one that makes you happy. As long as you have one, that’s enough.”
At the time, I thought she was talking about being there, but now I wonder whether she was thinking about Panama instead.
Three
Absorption
E
arly the next morning I go looking for breakfast in the hotel bar. I spent nearly the entire night awake, curled up on the bed, alternately thinking of what I would do when the sun came up and reading the guidebook and
Principles of Geology.
By the time I finally fell asleep on top of the sheets, the air-conditioning grumbling like a bad stomachache, it was almost four a.m.
Before bed, I called my mother. I figured out when I should have landed in Washington—three hours after I had actually landed in Panama—and dialed her at home. She sounded relieved to hear from me and glad to know that I had made it to my destination in one piece, no problems. She asked how the flight had been, and when I told her I just read and that they played a movie the whole way, she said that wasn’t fair, that they didn’t show movies on airplanes the last time she flew. She was making soup when I called. Lucy was watching television. “She watches crap,” my mother said. “Right now she’s watching an infomercial for gloves that are textured so they can peel potatoes.” I told her I would call her again tomorrow. “You’re not going to call me every day, are you?”
“Why not?”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I’m just using my cell phone. Until I run out of minutes, it’s not costing us anything extra.”
“Well, you don’t usually call me every day from school.”
“Maybe not every single day, but I get pretty close.”
“Mira, you already left me with a babysitter.”
“She’s not a—”
“She is. And that’s fine. But you don’t need to call me and check up on me every day, too. I can still take care of myself, you know.”
“I’m still going to call you tomorrow.”
“If you must.”
In the bar, the tables are empty, with menus propped up between the salt and pepper shakers. Along the counter an assortment of juices and coffee are lined up as though the employees are expecting a crowd. I take a seat at one of the tables, and a burly man with a thick mustache and fingers stout as sausages comes to take my order: a hard-boiled egg and two fried corn cakes—they’re called tortillas on the menu—with a Panamanian white cheese. He wipes his hands on a white towel threaded through one of his belt loops and tells me he’ll be back with my food in a minute.
When he leaves, I pour myself a cup of coffee from the silver urn on the bartop. It’s so strong, even after milk and three sugar packets, that I manage to take only small sips, and even then, I struggle to get it down. Halfway through the cup, a commotion erupts in the lobby behind me.
“Lady didn’t pay me!” I hear a voice yell in Spanish.
“I know. But that is the risk of this job. You know that. You have to calm down,” says another voice.
“
Oye,
this is a business!” yet another man chimes in.
“What we’re talking about is a business, too,
payaso.
” The first voice.
“Your business office is out on the street, not here in my lobby.”
I crane my neck but I can’t see anything.
“
Your
lobby? What? Now you own this building?”
Then I see him, the same guy from the alley the night before. He crosses the doorway—my little rectangular field of vision—in the direction of the front desk, his baggy pants dragging lightly against the tile floor. Hernán, the doorman, strides briskly after him as he says, “I am telling you again that you have to calm down!” and then the front bell rings repeatedly. There are some scuffling noises, but no more talking, before the lobby goes quiet again. I sneak to the doorway of the bar and peer out. The guy—he’s about my age, his hair bleached the color of butterscotch—is sitting, scowling, on one of the two chairs in the lobby with his arms crossed while Hernán kneels in front of him and appears to be whispering to him sternly. The front-desk clerk stands red-faced, staring at the two of them as if on guard for an attack he believes might still happen.
From behind me, I hear, “Your food,” and turn as the bartender places my plate on the table with a clatter. I linger for a moment before returning to the table.
I’m cutting off a second piece of the hot, crispy corn cake when the guy from the lobby strides into the bar and plops himself onto a stool at the counter. His light brown hair is curled against his neck, and he scratches it absently before he starts drumming his fingers on the lacquered bartop. He pushes himself forward across the counter, searching, I guess, for the bartender. A few seconds later, he spins around on the stool. Even with my eyes trained on my plate, I can feel him staring at me. I take another bite of my corn cake. He keeps staring. Finally, I look up. “The bartender is around here somewhere,” I say, in Spanish.
He grins, hops off the stool, and shuffles toward me.
“How’s your food?” he asks.
“Good.”
He pulls out a chair and sits across from me.
I rest my fork on the lip of the plate. I don’t feel scared of him, exactly, but I don’t know what to expect.
He slides the toothpick dispenser across the tabletop toward himself and turns it over, catching one of the slender sticks in his palm. “Do you mind?” he asks.
When I shake my head, he pops the toothpick into the corner of his mouth, the greater part of it dangling from between his lips like a slide.
We sit for a full minute at least, neither of us saying anything, although I can feel him watching me curiously. He never turns away. Neither do I. It’s like we’re in some kind of silently agreed-upon contest. The rest of the bar is almost impossibly quiet, not a single particle of sound floating in from the lobby or from the kitchen.
Finally, he says, “Are you staying in this hotel?”
I cock my head. “Maybe. Why?”
“Just wondering. I haven’t seen you around here before. The people who pop up out of nowhere are the ones staying here. The people who hang around all the time are employees.”
“That’s usually how a hotel works.”
“So I’m going to guess you’re staying here.”