Her father had died of throat cancer a year before in London. She had loved him very very much.

At that moment Isabella, only twenty-one, felt very young, too young for the shooting and too young for the child. Her father had said he would not die in this wretched country full of communists, and Isabella had cried. He had gone to London and died surrounded by English nurses. He had spoken to them in Spanish, and they had not understood a word of his confession. Whatever he told them went to the grave with him.

He had been close to many presidents of the republic, especially Araña. Perhaps it was about that—the things her father had done to keep people in power. He had helped with the Bay of Pigs invasion. He had died wondering why Castro had won the battle. He blamed Kennedy, but was very sorry when he’d heard he’d been assassinated, because Kennedy was a good Catholic.

“Did you hear me?” Isabella said.

“Sí, señora.”

“Not the records, Maria …the radio. I want to hear the radio. It’s noon, and they play the marimba at noon time. I want to hear it the way papa used to. Do you remember, Maria? With a gin and lemonade before lunch.”

“Sí, señora,” the cook, Maria, said. She passed Isabella, moving into the dark hallway with its yellow wallpaper from Belgium, past the room with the infant and Olga. Maria walked on towards the living room, all of them ignoring the sound of the gunfire. She walked to where the big old-fashioned wooden radio sat in the living room.

Isabella heard the sound of the radio suddenly. A BBC reporter’s earnest voice filled the hallway. Isabella had been listening last night, alone, drinking, waiting for her lover, trying to get some news. She had had many lovers since her divorce, but this one was important because he was the first she felt anything for. She was a modern woman and a failed Catholic. Antonio De La Madrid had called this morning and said that he couldn’t come to lunch as planned. There was no reason to ask why. It was the guerrillas; they were everywhere, he told her. He’d seen them on the road below his own plantation house. He didn’t dare leave his mother alone. He was only nineteen, but was the head of the house because his father lived most of the time in New York, where he raced horses. They had hired some American mercenaries and were hoping for the best, he told her.

“No. Not that,” she said loudly. She didn’t want to hear the BBC or talk of war. She walked towards the living room and stopped by her father’s office door. The door was closed. “Please, Maria, not that. I want to hear Marimba,” Isabella said, holding the doorknob to her father’s study. The music suddenly filled the hallway. Luna De Xelaju. The sound of the marimba, romantic and haunting, filled the house.

“Thank you, Maria,” Isabella said. She took her hand from the doorknob, then touched it again and opened the door to the office. For a moment she saw her dead father standing over his desk, the way he had been when she was a child. He turned and smiled, holding his lemonade and gin, his shirt sweat-stained from having been out all morning walking with the plantation’s administrator, his khaki pants muddy at the cuffs. He wore his never-really-care smile. “Dear, I know you can be brave. You were always brave when you were a girl. The bravest,” her father’s ghost said, and winked at her.

“I don’t know, Papa,” she said aloud. “I really can’t be, not really, I’m a woman. And you know how we are, pretty and all, but not for this sound of guns. Where is Roberto? Where is my brother? We need him; I have a child. A boy.”

“I told you not to marry that American. He was much too dry for you,” her father said, touching his blond mustache. He turned his back to her and looked at something on his desk. “He should be here with you. He should have lived here with us.”

“Could we dance, father? The way we used to. Remember?” she said. He turned around, smiling again, and she saw her father as she had seen him for the last time, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see him like that. She wanted to see her father of 1955. She opened her eyes again and he was there in a tuxedo, looking very fit and handsome and young.

“How’s this? The Italians call this monkey suit a ‘tight.’ Is your mother ready?”

“Yes,” Isabella said.

“Would you like to dance? I’ll tell you all about the party tomorrow when we get back,” her father said.

“And will everyone be there?” Isabella asked.

“Everyone that should be,” her father said, holding out his arms. She stepped into the room and she felt her father’s arms around her shoulders and she was dancing, and he was talking about how they were going to go to the beach at Tilapa when she came back from school in the States for the Easter holiday.

“I want to go to the party, Papa. Please!”

He held her away from him for a moment. “Look, Gloria! See your daughter.”

Isabella turned around, and her mother’s ghost was standing in the doorway in a party dress. Her hair, blonde, was done in the style of her day. Her mother had died in a car crash in Fresno, California, when she’d gone to visit her sister in 1962. She was hit by a traveling salesman from Chicago, who managed to walk away from his brand new Cadillac and ask her if she was all right. She said she thought so, but she died anyway in the ambulance. She spoke to everyone in perfect English until the very end. She had been educated at Columbia University, and she had always prided herself on her English. The last thing she thought about was that she’d left her handbag in the car, and that it was such a silly way to die.

“You have a child now. A child of your own,” her mother said. That was all she said.

The room went still; her parents abandoned her. There was nothing but her father’s empty desk. She went to it and took his revolver from the top drawer; for some reason, he’d always called it “the bottle opener.” She opened the action and saw the bullets neatly seated in their chambers. She snapped the action closed and walked out of the room with it in her right hand, the hand she’d used to play tennis at her school in the United States, where girls didn’t learn to shoot. She’d learned to shoot here, on the plantation. She was different from those blonde girls she’d lived with so long, the Helen Albrights and Madeline Thompsons of the Yankee world. Helen Albright had asked her incredulously if Isabella’s father rode a donkey, like she’d seen in the movies. She said no.

Because Isabella was so beautiful, the other girls respected her. But they were never her friends, not really. She made friends with another Latin girl from Chile, whose parents owned a bank, and who ironically had blonde hair just like the Americans. Once, on a train trip to San Francisco, the two friends listed a hundred things that made them different from the other girls. They never admitted that they were both in love with Jesus Christ, the way young American girls were in love with the Beatles.

I’ll kill anyone that harms my child, Isabella said, and closed the door. She never saw her father’s ghost again, no matter how hard she tried.

She could hear the rain falling as she walked back to the porch, and thought she would have to speak up if her brother called. But he didn’t call that day. He was sleeping with one of his maids, and he couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. (The maid had heard the phone ringing.) Isabella rang him again anyway, hoping he would answer.

The patio outside was drenched in a warm torrent; the yellow trumpet flowers planted near the kitchen house bent over slowly as they were pelted. Isabella finally gave up trying to reach her brother and walked to the screened-in windows to stand and think of what to do.

Why? she asked herself. Why. Everything when she was a girl had been so good. Her father was here, and her mother, and there was happiness and no war. And if her brother was a tall, irresponsible, charming boy, it made no difference whatsoever. But today it did matter, very much, and she felt so alone.