stuff. It’s like poison.”
But Julie couldn’t stop reading. The other Guate Parents were the only people who understood what it felt like to be a mother, yet not a mother. An almost mother. Mothers in name only.
*
An envelope from the DNA testing company arrived in their mailbox on Monday, October 28, a few days before Halloween. Two points for Kate. Julie carried the legal-sized envelope with the Labcorp return address into the house and picked up the phone to dial Mark. “We got DNA!” she said to his voicemail. “Call me!”
She wanted to open the letter, but dreaded opening the letter. Instead, she opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of white wine. Normally she didn’t drink during the week, if only because her mother did, and Julie tried in every way to live her life differently from her mother. Tonight, though, belonged to her alone. To her and to Mark, and, fingers crossed, to her and to Mark and Juan. This was it.
She took her glass and the letter into the living room and parked herself on the couch. Setting down her drink on the coffee table, she took a deep breath, blew it out, and carefully unsealed the envelope with an index finger. “Labcorp,” the masthead read. Finally.
Official stamps crowded the margins. A bold-faced line said the lab results indicated 99.9 percent accuracy, the highest number possible, proof that Karla Inez Garcia Flores gave birth to Juan Rolando.
They’d passed the first legal hurdle.
Julie skipped the rest of the paragraph and jumped directly to a color copy of a Polaroid in the middle of the page. The image showed Juan cradled on Karla’s lap, both facing the camera.
Juan was dressed in a yellow onesie and white socks, too small to sit up without help. Karla supported him with her arms around his belly, so they formed almost a single being, and for a second, Julie imagined her son floating in the other woman’s womb, his body tightly curled, safe and protected.
The last thing Julie wanted to imagine was her son in another woman’s womb. She preferred not to think of her son in utero at all. Nobody had warned her, the impact of seeing her son with his mother. The image was physical evidence of Juan’s origins, a beginning that didn’t include Julie. He was only a baby, but in Karla’s face, Julie could see the man he would become. Karla was gamine and slight, enchanting. Adidas hoodie, hair parted down the middle and tied in a ponytail. Perfect except for one small flaw: her left eye drooped slightly. This Kate had not mentioned. Juan’s eyes were half-closed, as if his tummy were filled with warm, delicious milk, and he was ready for a nap.
Julie stood and walked to the kitchen. She needed to move, to shake off the mental picture of her baby with the woman who gave birth to him, their connection and closeness, their identicalness. She opened the fridge and stared at the contents, then closed it empty-handed.
She returned to the front window. Orange jack-o-lanterns glowed on the steps of the house across the street. On Halloween, like always, their doorbell would ring nonstop with trick-or-treaters. Next year would be different: she’d buy Juan a duckie costume and a basket shaped like a pumpkin. They’d go out early, down the hill to a few houses, then come home to open the door and give out candy.
At least he was only two months old. Too young to remember the cradle of his mother’s arms, the soft cushion of her body. Infants didn’t have memories from that age. Julie certainly didn’t.
The room had turned dark. Julie turned on the floor lamp. Squaring her shoulders, she picked up the letter from the couch and studied it again. At the bottom of the page, Karla had signed her name. Hers was a rounded, precise signature, the careful penmanship of a girl just learning cursive. Karla was eighteen, but maybe never had much reason to write. Kate said girls like her didn’t study past third grade.
So much to do. They’d just taken a giant step forward and must keep the momentum going to get grandfathered in before the shutdown. Julie grabbed her legal tablet and made a list.
Email Kate to bug lawyer.
Family Court. PGN. ASAP.
Book flights. Reserve hotel.
The list was short, and she couldn’t focus on it. She picked up the letter to study the picture again. Her son. He was exquisite. So small and so exquisite. Kate had said they’d be allowed to visit after DNA. Soon, Julie would hold Juan, her son, in her arms. She felt a pang of longing.
Her cell phone chimed. “Did we pass?” Mark asked.
“The DNA matched!” She read him the results, the 99.9% certainty, the irrefutable proof that Karla was Juan’s biological mother. “Her left eye slants on the side.”
“Probably a birth injury. Nothing genetic to pass on to Juan.”
“She’s young. Pretty.”
“As are you,” her husband said.
Julie pressed her lips together, silent. Before, Karla was a name in an email, an anonymous giver of life. Now, she had a face, a signature, a distinctive eye. Julie felt as if she were drowning in a swell of emotions: joy, sadness, gratitude, guilt, love. All from seeing Karla holding Juan.
After they hung up, Julie folded the letter into thirds and inserted it back into the envelope. In the family room, she opened the black metal file cabinet and stuffed the envelope in the manila folder labeled JUAN ROLANDO. The cold metal drawer clicked shut.
She’d tell Mark where to look if he wanted to read the report himself. She couldn’t bear to see the image ever again.
FOUR
SAN ROLANDO, GUATEMALA
SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER—JANUARY 1985
Three trucks carried the soldiers up the dark mountain road to San Rolando, a village in Guatemala’s western highlands. They rolled past corn and bean fields, past grazing pastures for goats and sheep, past rows of adobe houses with thatched roofs. The trucks lurched to a stop in the central plaza next to a stand of pine trees beside the whitewashed church. The tailgates clanked open and soldiers jumped out, fingers on the triggers of Galil rifles. The soldiers wore the maroon beret of Guatemala’s elite commandos, the Kaibiles. Their polished black boots were silent on the packed dirt.
They were there for revenge: Two weeks earlier, a band of guerrillas had come down from their camp and ambushed an army convoy. They’d killed twenty-one soldiers and stolen nineteen rifles. Somebody needed to pay.
The commanding officer stood in front of the troops. He was light-skinned and tall, Ladino to the village’s indigenous Maya. “I want every one of these traitors out here. Men in the plaza. Women and children in the church.”
Dogs barked as the units fanned out. Cold mist hung in the air.
A sergeant kicked in the door of the first adobe house. It fell to the floor with a thud. In two steps, the sergeant was beside a small cot covered with a gray woolen blanket. A farmer jumped up, his eyes darting to the doorway, where his machete hung on a nail.
“Where are the rifles?” the sergeant yelled.
The farmer’s voice was quiet, submissive. “Señor,” he said, “we have no rifles.”
The sergeant slapped the farmer’s face. “Where are the rifles?”
The farmer’s eyes shifted to the lumpy form of the gray woolen blanket. “Señor, we have no rifles,” he said again.
“Indio shit.” The sergeant jammed his rifle into the farmer’s stomach, bending him in two. Reaching down, the sergeant pulled off the blanket to reveal the farmer’s wife hunched over a baby, with a small boy and a girl curled up on either side. The sergeant yanked the farmer’s wife’s thick black braid and pulled her to her feet; her white cotton sleeping dress bulged over her pregnant belly. She swaddled the baby into a sling, tying on the bundle. The boy and the girl pulled on clothes.
The sergeant unhooked the farmer’s machete from the