Part Six: The Return
I returned to San Isidro Tlajomulco on a Wednesday afternoon in early spring, twenty years after the gate had closed behind me.
I drove myself. Not because I needed to — I employed a driver and had for years — but because I needed to be alone with the approach, with the twenty years of road I was covering in reverse.
The town had changed in the ways that twenty years changed small towns: some buildings new, some old ones gone, the church still anchored in the same place it had been for a hundred and fifty years. I drove through the main street and felt the specific uncanniness of the familiar made strange by time.
My parents’ house was on a side street off the market square. I had wondered if they would still be there — had done what research I could, had confirmed, through an investigator I had hired two years earlier, that they had eventually returned. My mother and father, both in their seventies now. Still in the house.
The house was older and more worn. The gate was rusted, the walls cracked, the garden that my mother had once kept with specific attention gone to overgrowth.
I sat in the car for several minutes.
I had prepared a version of this moment in my mind many times over many years. It had different shapes in different years — when I was twenty-five and the anger was the most present thing, it was a confrontation, a reckoning, a presentation of evidence against them. When I was thirty and the sadness had become more complex, it was something more ambiguous. When I was forty and had arrived at the balance sheet figure that belonged to a different story, it had been — I will be honest — a version involving a Mercedes and a cold smile.
I was not proud of the cold smile version, but it was honest.
I had earned the right to arrive at the house in a car that cost more than the house, and I had intended to use it.
I knocked on the door.
A girl opened it.
