Authoring Amelia

by Lia Conklin

  Her stepbrother lay in the adjacent bed tethered to IV tubes and other apparatus that Amelia could not discern. Although he too was also in a coma, his was induced. His face was bruised and swollen, making him nearly unrecognizable. Amelia winced at the sight. It was obviously a brutal attack. Yet again, the feelings she imagined she should have never came. She did not know this boy and never had wanted to, nor had he wanted to know her.

  It was easy to turn and walk away, yet she still had questions she needed answered. Hailing an approaching nurse, she asked about their condition.

  Her stepmother had been in a coma for three days due to a blow to the head but was expected to recover. Amelia’s stepbrother was in critical condition as well. He had undergone surgery to repair a ruptured spleen but was recovering well. It was unclear when either of them would be able to talk about what had happened. The nurse herself knew very little about the attack, only that they had been attacked in their home and transported by ambulance to San Pedro Sula.

  As Amelia left the hospital, she thought back to the phone call. There had been very little mention of her father, leaving it unclear as to where he was at the time of the attack. She was hoping her stepmother would be able to answer that when she came to. If she came to.

  Numerous scenarios ping-ponged through Amelia’s brain as she headed toward the hotel the taxi driver touted as “clean.” Between her preoccupation and exhaustion from traveling, once in her hotel room, she had little time to evaluate the driver’s recommendation. Without removing her clothing, she clambered into bed and fell asleep.

  Chapter 55

  A call to the hospital in the morning confirmed that neither her mother’s nor her brother’s conditions had improved. Before hanging up, Amelia secured a contact for ongoing updates on their conditions; nothing like the smell of a potential remitter to promote steady communication. There would be no reason to visit them today since there was no way they would answer any of her questions.

  Instead, she sat waiting for answers in a hot and stuffy police station. Every twenty seconds or so the oscillating fan in the corner gave her reprieve from the sticky, stale air and the odor of sweat from the elderly man sitting next to her. Dirt, or maybe it was mold, dappled the white-washed walls that provided a backdrop to the hundreds of flyers decrying the violence of the times.

  Defiant faces of young Honduran men and women peered from beneath “Wanted” headings, proud of their alleged crimes of murder, assault, rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, drug trafficking, murder, murder, and murder.

  Only three years previously, Honduras had become the murder capital of the world, according to the New York Times, with eighty-nine murders per every 100,000 people per year, above any country in the Middle East or Africa. And San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s most dangerous city, earned distinction as the world’s most dangerous city.

  So here she was, sitting in a police station in the world’s most dangerous city, looking into the sneering faces of the world’s most ruthless gang and drug cartel members. The fact that their faces were confined to two-dimensional space did little to comfort Amelia’s growing concern, for no longer could she deny that these thugs were out there, attacking, kidnapping, and murdering others—like her stepmother, her stepbrother…and her father? Where was he?

  A half hour later, Amelia sat at the disheveled desk of one of the police detectives. He was hunched over his computer, typing in the information she gave him with thick, tobacco-stained fingers.

  “Ah yes,” he said straightening up in his chair. “I remember now. A young man and his mother were brutally attacked outside the city. It says here the woman was bludgeoned with what appears to have been the back of a revolver, and the boy was beaten with a blunt object and apparently kicked repeatedly. The motive is unclear. There doesn’t appear to have been anything stolen, but the house was tossed. Without our victims’ verification of that, we have no reason to believe it was a robbery. It doesn’t appear to have been drug-related either, as the family was well-known and had a good reputation in their community. At this point it appears to be a random act of violence.”

  The detective’s account seemed to Amelia like any other account of violence she had heard over the past thirteen years. They were just as much strangers to her, and though horrific, she had no connection to their horror. She did, however, have one burning question, and as much as she’d like to deny it, an emotional stake in its answer.

  “And my father?” She asked. “Was he there during the attack? Does anyone know where he is?”

  The detective looked back at his computer screen and slowly shook his head. “There’s nothing in the report that indicates he was there. Witnesses are still being interviewed, so maybe we’ll have more information about that soon. But for right now, we have no information on your father at all.”

  Although Amelia was relieved, she was also burdened by the knowledge that she would have to seek out her own answers. That meant she would have to return to the house and community she had so gratefully left behind.

  Chapter 56

  As Amelia walked to the bus station, she heard the cry of “¡Hielo!¡Hielo!” It was not Don Ronaldo’s voice, but suddenly she felt the nostalgia that had so obviously been absent since her arrival. A handful of children raced down the street, unrestrained smiles stretching across dark, dirt-smudged faces, small fists clenching small treasures soon to be converted into a much greater treasure. Perhaps for the first time ever, Amelia sensed the beauty in the simplicity of the cry of “Hielo,” of little girls and boys giddy for cold sweetness on their tongues, for brightly colored skirts ill-matched to equally brightly colored blouses, and Orioles and Red Sox T-shirts sported by little bodies who no more knew those teams than what lay beyond their city block. She found herself walking in the opposite direction of the bus station, past nearly forgotten shops and homes and apartments of long-lost friends, until she stood before their first Honduran home.

  A woman was tending to the potted plants beneath the window, pulling a few vine-like weeds from beneath the lush leaves of the hyacinths that blossomed there. She did not notice Amelia, for if she had, she would have looked at her with the same surprise and curiosity every other person did as she passed. How could they know this had once been her home too? The woman emptied a small plastic container of water into each of the pots. It was obvious to Amelia that this woman knew how to take care of this home far better than her father had. The home had been recently whitewashed and the window trim painted a bright yellow. The house came nearly up to the sidewalk with thin interspersed patches of dirt and grass separating it from the passersby. Not quite a yard, but obviously groomed, with the appearance of having been swept not many hours before. She was humming, Amelia realized. Honduras was not just the home of beggars, starving children, murderous gangs and mangy mutts. People lived here. She had never appreciated that before this moment, as the strains of the familiar folk tune affirmed this truth. This was their home…this was their home. Another truth she could not deny.

  Nostalgia made way to haste, and soon Amelia was standing aboard a bus to her former mountainside home. She had thought of splurging on a second-class bus but would have had to wait another two hours. This third-class bus was what she was used to anyway, crowded with passengers of all ages, three to each torn vinyl seat, their purchases from San Pedro Sula stacked upon the metal baggage rack above their seats, set between their feet as they sat or stood, or clutched to their sides and bellies as space permitted. There were no chickens, Amelia realized. Most often there were, restrained by bands around their feet and tucked carefully under an arm or within a loosely woven produce bag.

  Amelia stood holding the bar of the baggage rack above her, keeping her knees loose to absorb the bumps of the road and the jolts of the bus as it stopped and started to let off and take on passengers. A constant stream of people walked along the roadside, heading into town or out of town, to the fields or from the fields, toward home or away from home. Large, woven reed
baskets were carried upon the shoulders and heads of women half the size of the burdens they bore. Children too old to be wrapped against their mothers in blankets dawdled behind or scurried ahead. Horses and Brahma cows stood staked to the roadside, munching on the tender grasses found there. A foal stood in the ditch, nuzzling its mother who lay on the grass, her belly distended…in death, Amelia realized as the pair disappeared from view. The foal would drink from his dead mother’s teats until they dried up and then be led away. His mother’s carcass would remain as carrion for the vultures that already hovered above. Life here hid nothing. Everything that existed, existed within the perimeter of each 24 x 24-inch bus window. Was there beauty in that simplicity too? If there were, Amelia could not see it.

  It was with this image of the foal nudging his dead mother’s teats that Amelia descended from the bus onto her old stomping grounds. Don Filipe’s shop, Tienda Don Filipe, stood to the right of the trail that ascended the small mountain to her former community. It was a convenience store of sorts: any number of sweets and goodies could be purchased there, as well as the staples of rice, seed corn, and dried beans. Children and teenagers were gathered at the open doorway, peering into the shop at the thirty-two-inch TV hanging in the corner. Amelia guessed it was a soccer game being broadcast, or perhaps una telenovela, a Latin soap opera, that usually commanded as large an audience as this current one.

  She began her ascent, this time superimposing her trek up the Bighorn Mountains over this Honduran Mountain as she had this setting upon that one just a few months before. She smiled. It was like seeing herself in a mirror seeing herself, remembering herself remembering herself.

  Her trip up the mountain wasn’t so much different this time than it had been all those other times in her life. She passed the church, but this time she did not need to enter. She debated a moment on whether or not to visit Hermana Rebeca, but realized even this memory, though one of her best, was sandwiched between events that made bile rise in her stomach. She would not visit Hermana Rebeca ever again, just as she would not visit this mountain ever again, once her business here was done. She passed the Widow Doña Beatriz’s house, the three youngest of her nine boys chasing each other around the yard with scrawny sticks, machine-gun fire exploding from their lips. Small dogs darted out from dirt-floor huts to yip, nip, and whine at her until she reached her home. Their dog did not come out to greet her. She wondered if it had been killed in the attack or if someone was taking care of it. She didn’t much care either way.

  As she stepped into the house, she smelled the musty odor of trapped humidity even before her first footfall landed on the shattered remains of a ceramic pitcher. The mismatched collection of plastic and ceramic cups, pots and pans, forks and spoons sprawled in a midnight orgy upon the dirt, kitchen floor. Carefully moving a few paces to the right, she found herself next to the overturned dining room table. She saw blood on the dirt near one of its legs and imagined it was her stepbrother’s. As there were no walls to separate the rooms of the house, only the beams interrupted Amelia’s view as she slowly turned to take in the slashed mattresses and bedding and mounds of scattered clothing. Violence had reined here, unmitigated violence—and fun. She could almost hear the laughter as her stepmother’s undergarments were tossed back and forth until they landed by her unconscious body on the dining room floor.

  Suddenly Amelia felt her stomach begin to churn. Tripping over strewn chairs, books, and memorabilia, she made it out of the house just in time to vomit alongside the rain barrel.

  As she rinsed out her mouth with a handful of rainwater, she caught a glimpse of red. It was a T-shirt worn by Oscar, one of the neighbor boys, as he tended to the goats in the nearby pen. Amelia had forgotten all about their goats and what might be happening to them. It was relieving to see the neighbors were keeping them milked and alive.

  She and Oscar had always been friends. He was two years younger than her and in spite of the fact that he had never gone to school, he was a smart kid with the goal of owning his own farm one day. He had the work ethic for it, but for every hardworking young man in Honduras, there were a negative number of opportunities. He would be forced to earn the average two dollars a week to barely support himself and his family, once he had a family of his own.

  In spite of what she had just experienced, Amelia felt delighted to see him and hurried over to the goat pen, a loose definition for the sticks and misshapen branches that formed a parody of a parallelogram. Oscar was crouched alongside one of the goats, squeezing squirts of milk from her teats into a plastic pail. He was so focused on his work that he nearly tipped the bucket and himself when Amelia greeted him from behind.

  “Shit!” he yelled in his rural brand of Honduran Spanish, both annoyed and delighted. “You scared the crap out of me. Whatcha doin’ here? Where’ve you been? How are you anyway?” He rattled off, grabbing the milk bucket, coming to a stand, and embracing her all at the same time.

  Amelia laughed. “Whoa! One question at a time! And put down that bucket before you spill it!”

  Setting down the bucket, Oscar took a step back and surveyed her for a moment. “You look more or less the same,” he finally said approvingly. “A few months in the U.S. hasn’t corrupted you overly much,” he added with a grin. Then suddenly somber, he nodded toward the house. “Who knows what would have happened to you had you been here.”

  Amelia had been thinking the same thing. She had seen the clothes she had left behind strewn around the house. It wasn’t hard to imagine herself in a hospital bed or even dead. “Why did this happen, Oscar?” she asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. People in this area knew more than they let on when the police were asking the questions.

  “Amelia, you’ve always been a bit oblivious to what went on around here. Not sure where your head was but safe to say it wasn’t here. Don’t you know what your dad was involved in?”

  A vision of Toby rattling on about the FBI flashed into her mind.

  “Involved in?” she managed to sputter.

  “Yeah,” Oscar grunted, casually leaning his shoulders against the misshapen walls of the pen. Amelia, too invested in his answer to contemplate whether or not the wall would support him, waited intently. “After Celayas was ousted by the coup d’état, your father became very active in the resistance movement. As a reporter, he was in a dangerous position. Did you know that twenty reporters have been murdered in the last two years? Once Celayas was returned to power, we thought the political killings would stop. That hasn’t been the case ’cause although Celayas is back, he no longer holds the real power. Foreign interests do.”

  “How…how do you know all this?” Amelia stuttered, looking at the eighteen-year-old unschooled boy standing in front of her with uncut hair and dirt-stained, tattered jeans.

  “Didn’t you ever listen to the conversations our fathers had with the groups of men they hosted? Weren’t you ever curious to know what they were talking about? I was there for every conversation. Amelia, this is my home. It will always be my home. It doesn’t matter how many murders there are, how many foreign countries buy up our land and exploit our resources and labor, or how many gangs and drug cartels sprout up out of this devastated economy. This is the only home I’ll ever have and I have a stake in it.”

  It wasn’t just a statement of fact, it was a critique and Amelia knew it was justified. She had never lived here, had never made this place her home. When she was not dreaming about her past life in Minnesota, she was plotting her return there. She had never once accepted that she would stay. It had merely been a prison sentence that her real life was waiting for her to serve.

  “Oscar, do you know where my father is?”

  “He’s not with you in the States?” he replied with surprise. “We haven’t seen him since you both left. Assumed he’d decided to ditch us. It’s been a sore spot with us,” he admitted.

  “No, he’s not with me,” Amelia replied. “He was detained at the airport in Houston. I’d assumed he came back
here after he was released. Are you sure he hasn’t?”

  “No. He hasn’t been back. Guess you aren’t the only one looking for him,” he added, his eyes glancing warily at the house.

  “Guess not,” she admitted. “It’s been good to see you, Oscar. Thanks for taking care of the goats.”

  “Just exploiting an opportunity like all the rest of humanity,” he joked with little humor. “Goat’s milk serves no one in the utter. Didn’t think your family would mind.”

  “No one to mind,” Amelia responded dryly. And they’re not my family anyway, she thought as she slowly walked away without a last glance. Forever.

  Chapter 57

  She didn’t feel as relieved as she thought she would as the airplane lifted from the runway. She would not miss Honduras, and the memory of her comatose stepmother and her unresponsive stepbrother would not haunt her. Not for long anyway. Yet, she felt as heavy lifting off as when she had landed. When the medical professionals at the hospital could offer her no reassurance that her stepmother and stepbrother would ever be able to answer her questions, she decided what she had learned from Oscar was all she was going to—from here anyway. She scowled out the window at the ragged rooftop line of the city. That life would go on without her, no matter how many thousands of miles she was away. No one would miss her as she missed no one. All wasted years. No, stolen years.

  The rooftops and tropical forests faded beneath her scowl, but a looming image in her mind grew more prominent as the plane ascended. She wanted to smash that image with her forehead: his face, responsible for thirteen stolen years and two bodies languishing in hospital beds. When would his reckoning come? And would she be there to revel in it?