Leo's Birds

By Michael Van Natta

Leo's Birds tells the story of Maria, a small-town family doctor wrongly accused of murdering two patients, and Leo, a construction worker trying to overcome the ghosts of his past. After Maria makes a daring escape from jail, her path crosses with Leo's in unexpected ways. The novel is an insightful exploration of the intertwining worl

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Write Place, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985807733

Michael Van Natta

Michael Van Natta has been active in the writing world ever since he turned a fishing guide into a novel of unrequited love. He has written six other novels, and countless short stories, including "Grant Park" (Abaton, 2008).

Book preview

PROLOGUE

When they died, and later at the double funeral, Leo discovered he felt both sad and happy. Murder-suicide does that, the priest had told him. That he felt dead, though, was no new thing.

At the church, three dozen officers in crisp blues sat uniformly on one side. A smattering of other mourners wrapped in gray found sanctuary in back, their muffled coughs and scrapings of shoes on the stone floor echoing off the high ceiling. The gaunt priest droned over the two closed caskets, telling lies about Leo’s drunk and abusive uncle, giving voice to a saintly tolerance embodied in life by his Aunt Millie. Young Leo thought once again about being on his own.

Two months before, on the very day of his sixteenth birthday, his aunt had driven him to the courthouse and filled out papers so he could get a social security card. He’d wanted to work. After the airplane crash and for ten years—ten terrible years—he’d lived with his aunt and uncle. At sixteen, he wanted to get away just as fast as he could. His Aunt Millie had wanted him gone, too. For your own good, Leo. He had no idea then that it would be their death that finally cut him loose.

Leo had wanted to get away and he wanted to take his Aunt Millie with him, take her away from the beatings and yelling and drunken stupor. It was what any sixteen year old would have wanted.

But his Uncle Burt fixed all that. A baseball bat to her head, the medical examiner had put in his report, quick if not painless. For Uncle Burt, it had been a bullet from his own Beretta .40 police-issue sidearm.

Somewhere inside, he’d known it was going to happen eventually. Leo had assumed it would not be a double but a triple funeral. Somehow he had escaped his fate. Again.

Temporarily, he told himself.

The summer before first grade he’d come to live with Aunt Millie and Uncle Burt. Two weeks before that, his mother had been killed coming back from a week-long vacation at Martha’s Vineyard when the airplane spiraled down into a cornfield east of Jefferson City. His father had been killed in that same wreck. And his older brother, George. And his older sister, Shelly. And his older sister, Sharon. Leo remembered the crash, remembered crying in his mother’s arms as the plane stuttered and limped toward the too-distant airport. He did not die in that crash. He’d not even been hurt. That he was not with them now made him feel no less dead himself.

There was no counseling, not in those days. Instead, he’d been shipped off to Kansas City to his nearest relatives who themselves were in the midst of their own headlong downward spiral. Through elementary and middle school, he survived somehow. Young Leo had kept to himself, kept his head down.

In high school, after the double funeral, the second funeral of his short life, his Aunt Fran from California, with tied-back hair and tie-died sundress, had come to live with him at the apartment he’d shared with his aunt and uncle. She would be gone soon, she said, back to the West Coast sun. She would not stay in a place with so much negative energy. Their agreement, bless her odd soul, was that she would continue to live there with him in Kansas City, if only in name. She’d be cool, she said, if he would be. He would continue working, he promised, and finish high school, at least. For her part, she would come to visit every three months or so. He agreed to her plan. There was nothing else in the offering. She flew back to California five days later and then all that remained of his former life was Pete, the Amazon Parrot. Pete, the witness.

It was the bird who would watch Leo grow into the man he would become. Leo had promised Fran he would be cool. It drove him to do the things he did. Leo would learn what it meant to keep his promises, what it took to go it alone. No one would ever catch on that he was living alone. He made sure of it. That his Aunt Fran was always too busy to show up at parent-teacher conferences, that Leo would forge her handwriting on a number of documents, that he’d graduate from Central Catholic High School with no one to cheer and congratulate him would be just part of the arrangement.

Pete had been traumatized by the violence. The large green and yellow bird, majestic-appearing and personable, even affectionate, had known a great many phrases, most of which had been taught to him by young Leo himself—words like, Have a great day! and Pete is hungry. In the aftermath, Pete would forget them all. For years thereafter, Leo would try to re-vernacularize the bird, but Pete would say only the one phrase. All that would remain of the parrot’s former gregarious nature would be the words that the cops had heard as they banged on the apartment door before they broke it down, a phrase that the bird had repeated as a litany, over and over again, as the officers took photographs and gathered evidence at the gruesome scene. Leo himself had been working at Mack’s Grocery Store that night. It shielded him from certain death a second time. That he could not find the heart to get rid of the bird remained a testament to some sort of underlying disorder.

Of that he was sure.

Leo had few other friends. He couldn’t afford friends who might tell someone about his unique living arrangements. And what friends he did have he’d kept at arm’s length. They would not comprehend keeping Pete after the tragedy. They would not understand that Leo was already dead and that Pete’s words were a relic of his dead past, a past he’d avoided but hadn’t.

Plus, he would have to explain the whole thing. How his uncle liked to swing the bat at a diminutive but defiant Millie. How he had hit home runs at the plate of his own family, dressed in uniform, his badge shining dully in the subdued light of late-night television. How, in final analysis, Pete the parrot had learned his words well. The words his uncle yelled night after night, yelled as often—more often—than Leo had repeated the phrase good morning to the bird.

For Pete, life had come down to one simple fact. Pete was witness. That the bird only knew how to say, Fuck you, Millie, did not surprise Leo. Leo didn’t know if he himself knew how to say more than that, but he was trying.

And trying counted, he thought, if you want to live when you’re already dead.

BOOK ONE

ONE

She dreamed her husband had been laughing at her, dreamed her daughter had been crying in his arms.

She awoke cold to the thin cry of a distant car approaching, the taste of bitter midnight heavy on her tongue. Frost would come before morning, maybe snow. She pulled tight the too-small nylon jacket. There were no mosquitoes, no flying insects, only creeping things—she could almost hear them below her, almost smell them burrowing in the soil. The whine grew louder. Course weeds jabbed at her thighs through her stolen jeans and she shifted, knelt to better watch for headlights above the dry field stand.

The car came steadily from the west, a police cruiser, the eleventh she’d seen, and passed two hundred yards from her refuge. As its tail lights faded, her attention focused on the distant orange glow above Lawrence to the east. She must move soon, she knew. Keep moving, that’s the key. She was tired, so tired, yet she found herself reluctant to sleep at night. At night, I move. She gathered her backpack—the one she’d stolen from the farmhouse—and started off east along the road.

They would find her. Her nightmares had found her and she just knew that no matter what she did, they would find her as well. Tears of shame overwhelmed the undercurrent of anger again, coming in waves like the wind on the wheat field where she had spent the last few exhausted hours, laying in a trampled-down depression made by a deer or some other animal. In the far distance to the south, along Interstate 70, semi-trucks made their way between Denver and Kansas City.

No previous experience had prepared her for this. Split-second decisions she could handle. Problem-focused action had always been her forte. But she little understood fear and anger. Shame was foreign. Only the intermittent pulse of crackling adrenaline seemed familiar, the hyper-vigilant throbbing of her blood every minute since she made her escape.

Luck was on her side three days before at the Mobley courthouse—she made the jump from the first floor bathroom window without spraining an ankle. Heart thumping, she walked as casually as possible away from the courthouse and turned left on Madison Street and into the back seat of Mrs. Salazar’s ancient green Dodge Dart.

Most people in Mobley, Kansas, knew her by sight. The short walk was the most worrisome part of the plan. Mrs. Salazar—dear Mrs. Salazar, who knew she was innocent, who provided encouraging words while she was in jail all those months—had come to her with the plan. The night before, at great personal peril, the cleaning lady had unsealed the wire-laden window in the women’s bathroom. Maria had been allowed to use this bathroom on many occasions while the trial crept forward. A female officer had always accompanied her inside but the officer came up pregnant and quit. By then, her bathroom breaks had become routine and taken for granted.

So when Maria opened the car door and got in, and Mrs. Salazar drove slowly away without a word or even a look, Maria breathed a sigh of relief. She was past the riskiest part of her escape. Immediately, she laid flat on the back seat. There, on the car’s floor atop an old sweatshirt, was a newspaper. She was shocked to see the headline: JURY STILL OUT IN SANCHEZ-KLINE MURDER TRIAL. She hadn’t seen a newspaper since her arrest four months ago. She could see the date: September 3, 1999—yesterday. The picture of a woman—herself—with long, dark, straight hair walking handcuffed through the courthouse halls next to her Stetson-wearing lawyer covered half the page below the headlines. She resisted the urge to pick it up and read it. She told herself to focus.

When the car reached the western edge of Mobley, Mrs. Salazar turned several times and then pulled over to the curb. Maria took a big breath and, as they’d planned, got out, walked east a half block, and went into the 7-Eleven—the very 7-Eleven where Fred Jespers had collapsed—the same Fred Jespers whose death had started this whole mess.

There was no one at the counter—the store was empty. She waited by the register. After a few seconds, the clerk, Harold Crenshaw, came through the double swinging doors and stopped dead in his tracks, a wide-eyed look of recognition changing to indecision on his face. Immediately, she turned and quickly exited, and walked at a fast clip up the street, west again, until she was out of Harold’s sight behind a white house. There, she re-entered Mrs. Salazar’s waiting car through the back door and again laid flat on the seat. Though her heart was pumping a thousand times a minute, neither she nor Mrs. Salazar spoke. It was as they’d arranged. In the distance across town, sirens blared.

Slowly—painfully so—Mrs. Salazar reversed her course and drove back east across town and then south to the interstate. For another three hours, Maria lay in back, worried that at any second the Kansas State Patrol would surround the car. Just past Manhattan, Mrs. Salazar pulled off the interstate and went north along a deserted highway. A half an hour later and after several more turns, she pulled to the shoulder and came to a stop.

This is as far as I can go, doctor, the woman said. My sister lives in Wamego. We are just east of Wamego, on Old Highway 24. Follow this road east. There is little traffic.

Maria got out. She turned back to nod to the woman who’d risked her own freedom for hers. She was surprised when the woman held out a handful of rolled up cash.

I can’t take that, Maria said. You’ve helped me so much already.

No, no, doctor. You saved my son’s life. I can never repay you enough. You take it. You will need it.

She did so. The woman was right. "Gracias."

I pray for you, the old woman said, her car already in motion.

For three nights Maria had been walking, hiding as best she could when cars came. A hundred fifty miles to the west lay the small town of Mobley, Kansas, population three thousand. It was there that Dr. Maria Sanchez-Kline had come to doctor the citizens two years before. She’d completed a prestigious program in a residency and then spent the next three furious months shuttling around the country interviewing, looking for just the right practice location. Mobley, though a small and isolated town, seemed so much like her own home town in Puerto Rico that she convinced her husband, Parker—after much pleading and arm-twisting—to pick up stakes and move.

She and her stock-trader husband with their then nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, had purchased their first home there. The town had welcomed her at first, bent over backwards to make her feel at home. The pleasant Family Realty woman found them a sprawling brick turn-of-the-century ranch house on nine acres north of town, and right away, she and Elizabeth planted a spring garden in the backyard. The mayor of the previously doctor-less town had taken them on tours to meet the movers and the shakers who greased the wheels and kept the small town economy going. Parker had gotten on famously with the mayor. In fact, Maria often thought, Parker had been accepted completely by the town’s elders. Only later did it become apparent to Maria that she—the young doctor—had just been tolerated.

As a Hispanic woman, she’d consciously made efforts to connect with the community as she was instructed in medical school to do, joining the chamber of commerce, the rotary club, and contributing to various city council meetings. If Parker had gotten on famously, she felt only fractious acceptance, despite her best efforts, her best intentions. Now, in the dark of furious night, she was convinced every man, woman, and child of Mobley was out here looking for her, stalking her like a wild animal, like a criminal.

I am a criminal, she thought. Suddenly, before she could take a single step eastward, heavy weariness beset her. After a look at the empty horizon, she lay down again, wrapped her jacket about herself, and drifted into an uneasy sleep where hazy, wobbling dreams lived.

It had been a glorious spring day five months ago. A benevolent April sun shined down on the small Kansas town. Only Dr. Kline seemed out of sorts. A mild flu-like illness had caught up to her. It had happened throughout her training and she accepted that it would continue to happen for a while when she finally settled down into practice. Ultimately, she would acquire the local immunity better than any other citizen but until then, there was a price tag.

She’d hoped by two years of practice it would be over and done with, and to tell the truth, each successive illness—bronchitis, sinusitis, viral cold—had become milder. And this flu, though bothersome, didn’t keep her from her duties at her clinic. As the morning drew on, though, she found she needed something to settle her queasy stomach.

Despite her profession, she eschewed pills herself. Her mother had always given her herbs and potions when she was young, and the old-fashioned ways never fully released their hold on her. She could have taken one of the many medications that lined her pharmaceutical sample closet, but instead, she found herself at noon walking through the door of the 7-Eleven seeking a tonic—a Sprite preferably—to ease her gastric disquiet.

She passed an obese, sweating man she didn’t know, thinking he might very well show up in her waiting room that afternoon. She made her way to where the coolers lined the back wall. As she was reaching for a green plastic bottle, she heard the clerk, Harold Crenshaw, call out in alarm.

Fred! Fred, what’s wrong? Dr. Kline, help up here. Dr. Kline!

She hurried to the front. Halfway there, she saw the man go down, heard a crash of counter displays that dragged down with him. She found him sprawled on the floor, drool emanating from his lips in a nest of scattered candy bars and beef sticks. As she bent to him, the man began jerking violently.

Call 911, she barked at the scrawny clerk who was backed up against a rack of cigarettes. Maria held the man as he shook, keeping his head from banging on the floor. Then there was blood—splatters of blood flying through the air, landing on her, on the counter side, on the floor, everywhere. She looked for a wound and saw with some relief that the blood was coming from the man’s nose. She reached for his neck and found a pulse. The man was taking gasping breaths. There were secretions gathering. He would need suction when the ambulance crew arrived. After a minute, his violent tremors stopped as suddenly as they started, and he lay still in Maria’s lap, gurgling with every breath.

His color is reasonable, she thought. Not pink but not too blue. Oxygen levels are probably okay.

The ambulance crew crashed through the door.

We need suction here, she shouted. And get a monitor on him. He’s had a seizure.

Derik Gallager and Mark Logan, both veteran EMTs, bent to the task. This is Fred Jespers, Logan said to Maria. He knelt and yanked the man’s work shirt up over his protuberant belly. Diabetic. Check his glucose, Derik. And he’s got a pacemaker. Logan pointed to the mound of flesh on the man’s upper left chest.

The paddles were applied and Maria saw a regular rhythm. Sinus at about ninety, she said. Her own heart, she knew, raced along near one twenty.

Sugar’s two forty-seven, said Gallager, who’d applied a test strip to the blood on the man’s nose.

She grasped the man’s jaw and shook it back and forth. Fred! Maria said. Fred, can you hear me?

There was no response. She pried open his eyelids. One pupil was small but the left pupil was more dilated. This, she thought, does not look good.

BP’s ninety over sixty, Logan said. Start a line now, doc?

Maria mulled this over for a second only. No, let’s transport. We can start one en route.

In a matter of minutes they had the man on a gurney, slid him into the back of the ambulance, and as Logan drove, Maria and Gallager went to work with the Infusa-set, trying to find a vein in the man’s forearm. Logan switched on the siren and Maria remembered with sudden clarity her first ride in an ambulance as a new resident at Broward General. Then, as now, it was the wailing siren that made it real, the siren that penetrated the cloud of surreal that surrounds events happening too quickly for the mind to follow anything but the tasks at hand.

The siren grew louder, moving from her dream to her consciousness, and she startled awake. To the west, peering over the tops of the wheat, she made out two cars with flashing lights turn off the highway and come to a lurching stop at the farm she’d just visited—broken into through an unlocked back window. She’d put about a half mile between herself and the farm, but it wasn’t enough now, was it? How had they discovered her?

She scrambled to the side of the small clearing and unzipped the Scooby-Doo backpack she’d taken from the smallest of the bedrooms. She stuffed the empty water bottle into it and noticed the two twenty dollar bills she lifted from the kitchen countertop. Breaking into the farm house had been a risk but she needed water and food and no one was home and . . .

In the distance, now illuminated by floodlights from the vehicles, two figures emerged. For a few seconds, she watched as the figures made their way slowly toward the empty house, their flashlights painting across the facade.

Damn, she thought. Silent alarm? Pushing her way through the dry wheat that stood between her and the highway, she wondered what else she hadn’t considered. Then suddenly she stopped. She turned and reversed her direction, scurried back past her sleeping refuge and out further into the field. Somewhere through the wheat would be a road. The highway, she knew, was certain capture.

Over the last three nights, traveling east, she’d kept to the fence rows along secondary highways and black-tops so she could quickly duck into the fields beyond. Sporadic traffic had passed, and as cars or trucks approached from the distance along the straight and flat pavement, she’d learned how to jump the fence without cutting her hands on the barbed wire. She discovered she had at least two minutes to accomplish the feat, and learned how far into the crop rows she should go to avoid detection.

She’d covered her entry into this field by trudging through an irrigation ditch. Still, they might decide to comb the fields. What if they send a helicopter? What about dogs? Her only hope was that the cops conclude nothing was amiss in the farmhouse. That they not discover her clothes—the courtroom dress she’d discarded there in favor of the jeans and flannel shirt she now wore.

Her ruse to throw off the cops, to make them think she went west—Mrs. Salazar’s idea—must not have worked. And now this.

Breaking into the farmhouse left her with a bad taste. She was dirty—three days and nights of trudging through dusty farm fields left her with dirt under her nails and matted hair—and for the first time she felt guilty. It was not the victim’s guilt she felt during the arrest and trial, nor the guilt the county attorneys tried to pin her with. This was real guilt that came to her for a real offense.

There was lightning to the north and distant thunder. Since the Monday morning courthouse escape, there had been no rain. Rain would make the going much more difficult, but it might cover her tracks better. Snow, though . . .

Her mind gave her a gift then. She recalled her father helping her put out milk and cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve years ago, when she was eight. Late at night, after the excitement of helping him and her mother wrap presents for her seven little brothers and sisters and tucking them under the tree, her father gently reminded her that Santa had many miles to travel and would need the charity of every little girl and boy to complete his task. And at the farmhouse, though she had not left gifts save her blue dress, she felt something akin to that whole childhood experience. As she pushed through the stand of wheat, she vowed she’d pay those unknowing people back someday, someway.

The crisp night wind made a rustling as it churned through the wheat. The comfortable sound of crickets chirping did little to ease the peril she felt. Somewhere in the distance, a bullfrog belched out rhythmic pronouncements. Maria became aware of the noise her own legs made with each step. The crop was dry, near harvest, and the going had not been too difficult, but soon she found herself tiring. She looked back and could only just make out the house. She guessed she’d put about another mile between herself and the authorities. But would they continue to look to the east?

TWO

Citizens are asked to call the number on the screen if they have any knowledge of the whereabouts of this woman . . .

How do you like that? Leo said to himself. He was sitting in his recliner with his legs up watching evening television. Billy was asleep in his closet of a bedroom and Vi sat on the old couch, working the Kansas City Star’s crossword puzzle. What’s that? she asked.

Some woman doctor killed some patients and then escaped from jail.

Vi didn’t look up. They’ll have her back by morning.

KSHB News had interrupted ER, Violet Rood’s favorite show, with news of the dramatic escape in western Kansas. A photograph of a pretty Hispanic woman with long, dark hair filled the screen. The cops were canvassing the state, the anchorwoman said. Dr. Kline is not considered dangerous, although the authorities do not know who might be helping her. Residents are urged to use caution.

She doesn’t look like a murderer, Leo said.

By the time ER came back on, the ending theme music had begun, and within seconds, it was over. Leo reached to the side table next to him and hefted a can of Budweiser. Law and Order was next. Leo didn’t think much of ER, didn’t particularly like doctors, nurses, or medical shows. But Law and Order was another thing altogether. He loved watching bad guys get theirs.

What does a murderer look like? Vi asked, absently.

Oh, you know, tattoos, missing teeth, big shoulders, blank stare, that sort of thing.

You mean like Rafe Edwards?

Leo said nothing. At the mention of Rafe’s name, he knew Vi had a point. His boss, Matterson, had a habit of hiring his construction workers from the half-way house connected to the drug courts. Leo didn’t necessarily agree with the policy, but Matterson said the men worked for nearly free, did all the heavy lifting, and it was his way of helping the community. No one else will hire them, he’d said more than once—often in defense when this man or that failed to show for work as scheduled. In Rafe’s case, he’d been re-arrested for possession but to his credit, came back to work to swing his hammer while awaiting the court’s actions. Rafe was no murderer. That was Vi’s point. He was just a big lump of a guy who had an addiction. He had a wife and three kids and was generally a nice guy, did what Leo asked of him. But at first glance, he was way more the picture of a murderer than the pleasant face he’d just seen on the tube.

I’m going to bed, Leo, Vi said, closing the newspaper.

So early?

It’s been a long day. On the way to the bedroom, she leaned over and kissed him longer than usual. You coming? She kissed him again.

Leo kissed her back and without looking, grabbed up the remote from the side table and pushed the button. He and Vi had started working on making a younger brother or sister for Billy, and Leo was in a fine mood. The television screen, though, failed to darken. The opening scene of Law and Order kept rolling. Leo tried just then not to read too much into this failing, but it was just one more piece of the immense, intricate puzzle that seemed to be growing before his interior vision.

I’ll be right there, he said, unsettled. He pushed the button again.

Don’t be too long. A coy smile played at her lips, and as she moved away from him, she allowed her hand to brush across his lap. Can’t keep a girl waiting, she said.

By the time Leo heard the bathroom water running, he’d punched every button on the remote, but the crime show continued as if it insisted that he watch tonight’s episode. He stood and walked over to the set, pushed the power button, and finally the screen frizzed and went black. Leo had come to expect things like this in his life. Nothing ever went as planned. He vowed to take the television in to get repaired first thing in the morning. To the extent that he could control things, Leo would.

He stretched in the silence of his house, thought of Vi putting on her filmy red negligee, and felt a growing anticipation. He was twenty-eight and healthy as a horse. And he was moving up. He had wanted to discuss the new house’s fireplaces and the electrical system with Vi, but just now things electric seemed to be taking on a new meaning. Their new house could wait until breakfast. Leo was, he knew, ahead of schedule.

He smiled to himself. Six more weeks, he said to Pete. He went about their soon-to-be-vacated, tiny two-bedroom house, turning off the lights. When he came to the door that led down to the basement, he stepped past it without looking. Leo hated basements, though he knew it was irrational.

In the basement were all the boxed-up relics from his past life, things that came to this house boxed up, items he hadn’t the courage to look at long enough to throw out. And thanks to Vi, most of their joint belongings were already packed up as well. Stuck into the grass of the front lawn was a For Sale sign with a bright red SOLD sticker. While Leo spent his evenings out at their lot by the river working on their house, Vi had kept busy boxing up all the non-essentials in preparation for the day when the house would finally be at a point where they could move in. And that point, he knew, was coming up soon.

After scanning the kitchen and the back porch, Leo came to the cramped living room again. He noticed Pete staring at him from his upper perch, giving him the eye.

Pete, his constant companion since he was a boy, scraped a talon over the cage bars, making a dull ring, like a telephone under a pillow. Leo walked across the room to the corner. Yes, Pete, he said. Yes, I hear you. He sniffed the air around the nearly five-foot-tall cage—the parrot spanned nine inches from beak to tail feathers.

Leo had acquired this cage back in July. He cleaned it and changed the papers twice a day, but despite his meticulous efforts, after a few months the bird smell got into the metal somehow. Leo made a note to get to Petco soon. Four times a year, Pete got a new cage.

He checked Pete’s water bottle and took note of the condition of the newspapers that lined the cage’s bottom. Everything seemed in order.

Pete did not say anything. Despite Leo’s best efforts to re-teach words and sentences to the bird, especially early on, Pete had become mostly mute. There was little danger tonight that he would squawk out the few words he did know. Pete only said those words when there was tension in the air, like when he and Vi argued, which, thankfully, was not often.

Leo pulled down the cover of the cage. As he did, Pete eyed him with a cock of his head.

Fat lot you know, Pete, Leo whispered. Pack your bags. We’re moving up.

THREE

Maria walked along the gravel roadside, pacing herself against the growling of her stomach and the undercurrent of thirst—which she tried not to think about—heading in a general eastward direction. There were stretches of road where the farmhouses were miles apart. She’d been walking all night and she was searching for a place to sleep. She easily heard vehicles approaching, but there had only been a few as the warming sun began its ascent into the morning sky. When she did get to the farmsteads, she circled through back fields, avoiding the frontage. It took longer, but she couldn’t risk being seen. A lone woman walking along a country road was too suspicious.

She tried to divert her thoughts from the toil of walking. An image of her father being arrested and taken away from her sprawling and ram-shackle home in Puerto Rico came to mind. She had been eight years old and the sight of the policía at her front door at six o’clock in the morning made her cry. Her mother had been crying, too, and pleading with the uniformed men. Her father, however, was calm—he even smiled, she remembered. Despite the handcuffs, he managed to kiss Maria on the top of the head. Don’t you worry, little one, he said. Papa will be back before you know he’s gone. The other seven children, younger than Maria, were all still asleep. True to his word, her father was back before breakfast.

When she was very little, she told her friends and teachers that her father wrote books. When she got older, her father made books. By the time she was ten, when her father and mother were killed in a car accident coming back from the horse races—murdered, she knew, although it could never be proven—he’d been arrested a total of seven times. Each time was for