Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

At last the bus arrived in downtown Cuernavaca. Miriam had a hotel reservation and an address in her pocket, but she had one more linguistic hurdle before she could truly arrive. According to the note from the school, one must haggle for taxis, agreeing on a fare before the trip. How did one do that without being conversant in Spanish? When she got to the head of the taxi line, she offered the driver a thousand pesos, then fifteen hundred, then two thousand, but he kept refusing her. She was on the verge of getting flustered and angry when she realized that they were talking about a difference of a few cents.

The cab plunged into the congested streets, and Miriam’s eyes felt drunk from what they were trying to take in-a castle, one of Cortez’s, decorated with a Diego Rivera mural, the zócalo, thronged on a Sunday afternoon, with a group of men in some sort of indigenous dress. Eventually, her driver turned down a grimy, nondescript street. Miriam’s heart sank. She had booked a room at Las Mañanitas, shockingly expensive by Mexican standards, the equivalent of an airport Marriott back in the States. It was to be her last splurge, her final extravagance. She had assumed the cost would guarantee quality and was dismayed when the driver stopped at a nondescript building. “Here?” she asked, then remembering. “ ¿ Aquí ?”

The driver grunted, all but threw her luggage on the sidewalk, and drove away. Suddenly a heavy wooden door was flung open and a trim blond man appeared, accompanied by two locals, who wordlessly took her bags. Ushered into an anteroom, she saw that the hotel was designed to be a glorious secret. It turned a blank face to the street, but it was situated on an expansive courtyard, with rooms ringing an emerald lawn where-of all things-white peacocks strolled. She felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz , exchanging the black-and-white of Kansas for the Technicolor of Munchkinland.

Oz made her think of the girls, their annual ritual of watching the televised version of the movie beneath an old quilt, which they threw over their heads at certain scary moments-the bellicose trees, the flying monkeys. Not the witch, interestingly, never the witch, although her early incarnation as Elvira Gulch unnerved them a little. But Margaret Hamilton had squandered her ability to scare them by appearing in those coffee commercials.

Miriam’s knees buckled, and she started to cry, just a little. How to explain, in any language, why she behaved this way? She had come to Mexico in hopes that she could stop explaining once and for all. She had come to Mexico to escape the phone calls, the ones where no one ever spoke. (“Dave?” she yelled into the empty air. “Who is this? Why are you calling me?” Once, just once, she had forgotten herself and said “Honey?” only to hear a sharp intake of breath.) She had come to Mexico to start over, and here she was, trapped in the same old life. Amazing, the levels of pain, the subtle variations, even after more than a decade. Miriam lived every day with a dull, chronic ache, like some permanent nerve damage she had learned to compensate for because there was no surgical fix. But no matter how careful she was, no matter how tenderly she protected these compromised joints and tendons, there were things that made the pain flare up, sudden and searing. Anything could trigger memories, even new experiences such as this, which she sought out hoping for a context in which the girls could not insert themselves. She looked at the white peacocks strutting across the lawn at a hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and burst into tears for the children who would have been delighted by them.

But the beauty of a first-class hotel, the whole point of paying seventy-five dollars a night when you could be just as comfortable for thirty, is that the staff is trained in unfaltering politeness. The señora must be tired after her long day of travel , the blond man told the hovering staff-in Spanish, yet Miriam could understand his Spanish, which was not as rapid, whose words did not run pell-mell into each other. She was escorted to a sparkling room, where a maid brought her fresh-squeezed orange juice. The maid then gave her a tour of the room’s amenities. Nothing was too small, too trivial, to be explained. She indicated a rug on the floor. For your little feet . She showed her a bowl of fruit. In case you have hunger . And, at last, she placed a small pillow on the snowy white bed and urged her to lie down. For your little head , Miriam translated. For your little head .

Miriam pantomimed her desire for a glass of water, which would have to be distilled or purified, even in this shining place. She then tried to ask if it was necessary to dress for dinner, if she could wear pants, going so far as to unzip her suitcase and show the uncrushable silk trousers packed on the top. Cómo no , the maid responded. Not why not but how not , Miriam noted. Another idiom to master.

“ ¿ Tiene sueño ?” the maid then asked, and Miriam started. But she was only being asked if she was sleepy, not if she had dreams.

She surrendered to the bed and when she awoke, night had fallen and the hotel lawn was full of people having drinks and dinner. She sipped a kir royale, nibbled toasted pine nuts, and tried to shut out the language she already understood, allowing only Spanish into her head and heart. She was here to learn new words, a new way of speaking, a new way of being. She had already learned a few things today, and been reminded of others she already knew. She would now have hunger, not be it. Use the first-person pronoun only for emphasis. And, most important of all, she would swap why for how. ¿ Cómo no ?

“Barb, I lost my story!”

The cry, all too familiar at this time of the afternoon, came from the usual source, a messy desk in a corner of the newsroom, a desk piled so high with papers and reports that its occupant would have been virtually invisible if it weren’t for her towering hairstyle. A tiny, formidably stylish woman, Mrs. Hennessey often lost her work on deadline, but seldom because of an actual computer crash or malfunction. Instead she had a habit of hiding her work in progress on the alternate screen or copying the entire story to a “save” key and then deleting it from the screen in front of her.

“Let me see, Mrs. Hennessey.” Barb tried to swing the computer around on the pedestal that allowed it to be shared by two reporters, but Mrs. Hennessey had cunningly blocked the lazy Susan by piling reference books around it, so she seldom had to share. Barb tapped away, checking the usual traps, but Mrs. Hennessey was right for once: She really had lost her work. When Barb found its ghostly twin in the backup system, it was just a blank template with a story header and the date it had been created, nothing more.

“Did you save as you wrote?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Well, I tabbed at the end of every paragraph.”

“The tab key doesn’t save . You have to execute the save command, Mrs. Hennessey.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Mrs. Hennessey had been around since God was a boy, to use a localism. A thirty-five-year employee of the Fairfax Gazette , she had started in the women’s section, as it was then known, and fought her way into the news section, where she had covered the education beat for the last two decades. Her seniority was unmatched, if only because the paper’s most promising reporters seldom stayed for more than two years. She also was rumored to be a Holocaust survivor, but her thick gold bangles hid whatever tattoos she might have. She was, in short, tough as nails, but she reverted to a kittenish, helpless quality when her computer let her down. Or, more correctly, when she let the computer down, refusing to take the simplest steps to protect her work.