Betrayed (39 page)

Because Michael had offered, to be sure. Because he was confident and handsome and in authority.
And because I snap judged Joe by his appearance. And his employment
.

No, it hadn’t just been that.
Because he’s deliberately pushed me—pushed everyone—away. There’s something he’s hiding. Which is too bad because if he’d just let me, I could really like him
. It was the same unwilling conclusion Vicki had come to on the plane ride.

No, I do like him
.

How much Vicki had never really realized till now. Whatever Joe was, whatever it was he felt he couldn’t share of his past, she had come to trust
who
he was. The kindness and strength—yes, and faith—that crisis brought out of him, however he tried to mask it behind that brusque, remote facade he insisted on presenting to the world.

When this was all over, maybe she’d get a chance to thank him again. For being a friend. For opening her eyes to all she had and not what she’d lost.

This is my Father’s world
.

I am not alone
.

I am loved
.

Vicki reached into the box. Its contents were as soft and powdery as talcum powder. Tossing a handful outward, she watched gray flecks drift out over the valley below. Some orchid, some flowering tree would bloom just a little greener and stronger this spring. She tossed another handful.
Until I see you again, Holly. Oh, and say hi to our parents for me. All of them. Tell them I love them and . . . and I think I remember them
.

Her glance fell on Cesar watching silently beside her. Some of her own serenity reflected in his expression as he looked back at her. Holly’s friend. Peacefully, she held out the box. As peacefully, Cesar made his own toss. When the box was empty, Vicki shook it out into the breeze.

Then, because this moment would not quite be complete without it and the mountains and valley lay with such complete stillness around them and her instinct for stealth seemed suddenly unnecessary silliness, Vicki began to sing. Softly. Rustily. Words she hadn’t uttered aloud in twenty years. “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres. . . .”

Her eyes were shut tight again. It was twenty years ago, and her world was still whole. A soft, cool breeze was stirring the shelter overhead and wafting sweet fragrance to her nostrils.
I do remember!
A blonde toddler was scooping mud into the hands of their small Mayan companion, her contented hum adding to Vicki’s song.

“
This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair; in the rustling grass I hear Him pass, He speaks to me everywhere
.”

When an off-key whistle rose to join the chorus, Vicki thought it too was a memory. Then she stopped singing and registered with heart-jolting adrenaline that the whistle was still carrying the tune.

“It was you!” Vicki pushed herself to her knees, turning around under the broad fronds. The bronze features, the black eyes staring at her with shock, were a lifetime older but suddenly so familiar she couldn’t believe she hadn’t known them before now. “You were the boy!”

Chapter Thirty

“You were the boy who used to play with Holly and me,” Vicki said. “You used to whistle just like that when we sang. You do remember, don’t you?”

The caution that had Vicki hunkered down under this patch of elephant ears seemed suddenly far less important than what lay behind Cesar’s stunned look.

Only an explosion of monkeys leaping and screaming overhead startled Vicki into dropping her voice again. “We were playing in the woods just like this. You showed us where to go so we wouldn’t get lost.” It was all so clear now. “We were building a house out of bamboo and palm leaves. Holly and I were singing, and you were whistling. Then it started to get late. Holly was crying that she was hungry. And when no one came to look for us, we started back.”

She was almost through the curtain veiling the “before” of her past. In the small space, she clutched at Cesar’s arm. “Tell me you remember too. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

Cesar’s expression went from stunned recognition to incredulous joy. “Yes, of course I remember. You were—” The phrase he used was unintelligible. “And Ho-lee, she was—” Another unfamiliar phrase. “I cannot believe it! All these years I have wondered what happened to you.”

“Then you
were
the Mayan boy who played with us? Or at least—that wasn’t my name you just said or Holly’s.”

“It was your Q’eqchi’ name. The dialect of my village. I did not speak Spanish then. Nor did my village except for a few of the elders. Your sister’s name in Spanish would be ‘moonbeam,’ because her hair was the color of the moon at night. And your name—it means ‘little monkey.’”

“Little monkey!” Vicki’s indignant repetition was enough to provoke the real simians overhead to a fresh burst of chatter. An apprehensive glance showed a panorama as serene and empty as it had been, but she scooted back under the broad leaves, tugging Cesar with her, until the tangle of greenery closed around them. “Why a monkey? Moonbeam is a whole lot prettier.”

“Well—” Cesar pushed a fern away from his face—“your hair was the soft color of a baby monkey, and you laughed and chattered around the village as happy as a small monkey at play.”

Happy
. Yes, so Evelyn’s photos had shown a small Vicki. “I wish I could remember more clearly.”

“And I would know how it is that Ho-lee never told me she once lived here. She told me she knew nothing of Guatemala or the sierra. That song you sang—she sang it too, and though I do not know the English words, I whistled for her as I had heard it when we were children. But she said nothing. And her name. Ho-lee An-droos. It was not familiar. Though if I ever knew your father’s gringo name, I do not remember.”

“No, Holly wouldn’t remember. She was so little when we left here. I didn’t remember either until you started whistling.” Vicki didn’t even try to explain the dark veil of her past, the foster homes, her adopted parents. “Please, just tell me what you remember. Was it your village, then, that we lived in—my parents and Holly and me?”

“I remember everything,” Cesar said simply. “I remember when you arrived in the village. Now many foreigners come to the center and for the aid projects. But then we had never seen hair that was not black. Nor eyes the color of sky when the mists are gone. Nor skin as pale as a moonbeam. My mother gave you your Q’eqchi’ names. She worked for your mother. It was my task to watch for you and your sister to keep you from being lost in our sierras.”

“You mean, you were our
babysitter
? But you couldn’t have been any older than I was. I remember—” Vicki broke off. The small boy she remembered had been no taller than a five-year-old Vicki. But since then Vicki had dealt with malnourished children who looked years younger than their American counterparts. Even now Cesar was no taller and little heavier than Vicki.

“I was old enough that your mother was teaching me to speak and read in Spanish. In the refugee camp, they estimated I was eight years.”

“Do you know what my parents were doing in your village? Why they came? Were the people happy to have them there?”
Or did someone murder them for intruding into your world?

“Everyone knew why they came. To tell the world of what was happening in our sierras. The evil. The injustice. That was the name we called your father. ‘Truth-teller’ in Q’eqchi’.”

“And my mother?”

He smiled slightly. “She was called only ‘Truth-teller’s woman.’ Times were different then, and we did not speak her language nor she much of ours.

“But, yes, the people were happy your family came. At first because it had been a bad season on the plantations, and your father offered payment for the building of his house and for his pictures and for telling the stories of our people into his recording machine. My mother, who had lost her man to the fever on the plantations, was happy for corn and even meat to feed herself and her son.

“But then it was because Truth-teller and his woman were kind and did not treat us like animals as the Ladinos and the plantation owners did but as people of dignity like themselves. When children became ill, your mother cared for them so they did not die. Your father spoke for our people when soldiers came and the guerrillas too. I did not know then what a camera was, but he let me help in the making of his pictures.” Cesar paused. “Señorita Vee-kee, why are you crying?”

Vicki didn’t realize tears were streaming down her face until Cesar gently traced a finger through the moisture. With a shuddering breath, she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and face. “It’s just . . . I never knew my parents—who they were, what they were like. I feel as though you’ve given them back to me. I . . . I think I even remember them, a little anyway. But, if your people loved them, then how did they die? Who killed them?”

The softening of memory was wiped instantly from Cesar’s face. “They died as the rest of the village did. As my mother did. You do not remember? You were there.”

“
Where
? Where was I? And your village. I thought you told me it was destroyed by the army. . . .” Vicki’s voice trailed away as she recognized with horror what she’d just said. “Wait. My parents were in your village when it was destroyed? Holly and I were there? But the embassy said it was a robbery.”

Blackness was pressing in again. In that blackness was the pounding of boots and unintelligible shouts, the smell of smoke. Vicki’s heart was racing so fast she couldn’t breathe until the force of her will pushed the darkness away. “Where?” she got out through stiff lips. “Where was this village?”

A gesture indicated somewhere beyond Vicki’s shoulder.

Swiveling around instinctively, Vicki took in nothing but vegetation. “You mean,
here?
Close by?”

“I told you this was an evil place.”

Vicki hardly heard him. Before her resolve could falter, she leaped to her feet, pushing fronds and leaves out of her face. “Then I was right. I
have
been in these mountains before. Can you take me there?” A step landed in a tangle of lianas, and she grabbed at a palm frond. “That is, if you can find it again.”

“You think I do not know my own birthplace? I have not returned to this place since . . .
then
, even when others did. But I know these mountains as I know the animals in my care.”

Vicki was taken aback by his harshness. Loosening her foot from the liana, she turned around. Cesar too had risen, and she moved backward to keep from bumping into him. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just, all my life I’ve had this hole where my past was, wondering about my birth parents, how Holly and I ended up alone. And now I think I’m starting to remember, and I have to see it through. To know what really happened.”

Then Vicki saw the horror and fear back in his eyes, the quickness of his breathing, and realized just what she was asking. Unlike Vicki, Cesar remembered the past only too well.

 “Oh, Cesar, I’m so sorry! No wonder you didn’t want to come here. I didn’t think of how hard this would be for you. I shouldn’t have asked you. If you give me directions, I’ll go by myself.”

Closing his eyes, Cesar breathed in and out deeply, then shook his head. “No, I have already told you I will not let you go alone. It is a strange thing. Long ago I asked your father why he took his pictures. He said it was because truth set people free. I didn’t understand then what he meant; I thought it was because he did not speak our language well. But when I learned to speak and read in Spanish, I found what he said in God’s Word.”

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” Vicki murmured that long ago Sunday school lesson in English. She waved a hand for him to continue.

“I came then to understand what he meant. When the Truth Commission revealed to the world what happened in our mountains, we began to feel freedom. To know that if the past could not be erased, our suffering and pain was no longer hidden. That we were no longer invisible and could lift our heads in dignity. You are Truth-teller’s daughter. It is your right to see the truth. And perhaps for me too, it is time to go back.”

Squaring his shoulders as though he too were summoning his resolve, Cesar lifted the broad fronds aside to step into the open. He was no longer trembling, his features set in determination. Now it was Vicki who hesitated as he held the fronds out of her way.

“Don’t be afraid,” he urged, whether to Vicki or to himself. “God will be with us. And it is not far.”

They returned to their bikes, and Cesar turned onto a path that was even more overgrown than those they’d negotiated to this point, but its surface was packed firm. After a time, though the path had not changed, Cesar dismounted his bike. As Vicki followed suit, she watched him scan the forest around and above and behind him. His apprehension was contagious, and she found herself straining for every shadow and sound.

But the forest was silent, even unusually so, the monkeys that had traveled with them now gone. Vicki’s steps were automatic as she pushed the bike along, the grip of memory growing stronger. Surely she’d walked this very trail before. Picked the orchids curling down into her face.

Then Cesar wheeled his bike around a tiny cascade bubbling over mossy rocks into a small pool. The pool was cloaked with vegetation, but abandoned among the undergrowth, Vicki spotted a rusting five-gallon can and knew where she was. Villagers had climbed this path for the pure, clean drinking water of the spring.
She
had climbed here.

Cesar’s raised hand stopped them, but not even the caw of a parrot raised alarm, so they went on. The next time Cesar paused, Vicki saw sunlight dancing through the leaves and vines and tree trunks from open ground ahead. As though sleepwalking, she leaned her bike against a tree trunk. Somehow, she found her hand clutched tightly in Cesar’s, his palm as damp as her own. As the two slipped forward through the brush, Vicki was again the five-year-old returning home, hand-in-hand with her Mayan guide and playmate. A blonde toddler might have been clutching her other hand as they emerged into the open.