Never the Hope Itself by Gerry Hadden

Author:Gerry Hadden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

But Xochitl did not appear again. With that support mechanism suddenly gone I felt an ever more urgent need to find Lazaro work. But I was starting to wonder whether he was up to it just yet. A month had gone by since he’d arrived and he still seemed unmotivated and adrift, hardly the go-getter that had impressed me back in Guatemala. I went online and read up on posttraumatic stress disorders. The literature seemed to describe Lazaro’s behavior perfectly. And a month was not much time to get over what he’d been through.

But as time went on he only worsened. He took to staying out very late and sleeping until noon. He had found a therapist but never went to his appointments. He would emerge from his room in the morning bleary-eyed and nervous. Nights filled with nightmares. Finally a friend and fellow reporter, Marion Lloyd from the Boston Globe, found Lazaro a job as a cameraman’s assistant for a TV soap opera.

“It’s not journalism,” I told him, “but it will provide some structure and money.”

He was without direction, working his way through the painful process of coming to terms with his near death, his new life, and all that he’d left behind, including his latest girlfriend, Sara, a print reporter for a Guatemalan daily. Work would keep him busy. It would be a beginning, at least.

One day soon after, Lazaro came into my office with some surprising news.

“I found my sisters.”

“You have sisters?”

“Two sisters, half sisters.”

“Where? In the mirror downstairs?”

“Here in Mexico City,” he said.

I had lent him a small digital camera, which he now turned on to show me a couple of pictures taken over the last few days. In one photo Lazaro was smiling in a kitchen with his arms around both of them. “They’re twins,” he said proudly. In another photo the three of them were on horseback in what looked like La Marquesa, the green hills that border Mexico City to the south.

“So this is what you’ve been up to recently. That’s fantastic. What are they doing here?”

“They left Guatemala many years ago, before I was even born,” Lazaro said. “But I had their names and was able to track them down. They received me warmly.”

That’s just what was missing, I thought. Lazaro’s life is going to take a turn for the better. But I was wrong. A few days later I saw Marion Lloyd from the Boston Globe.

“Lazaro’s been fired from the soap opera gig,” she told me over a drink.

“What the hell?”

“All I know is that he’d been ‘acting strangely’ on the set.”

When I got home that night Lazaro was watching TV in the living room. “Hey,” I said. “What happened with the job? Marion tells me they let you go.”

Lazaro just shook his head.

“Did something happen? You wanna talk about it?”

No, he did not.

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