The Center of the World (17 page)

He reached for the end of the weapon and pulled it into his breastbone. He wanted to be shot in the heart, where the jagged pain pulsed; he wanted the gun to erase him. Will looked down at the dirt so that the boy holding the gun would not have to look into his eyes when he shot him. He wanted to spare him. He dropped his hands from the gun and leaned into the hard metal.

A flock of birds rushed through the trees, seeking shelter for the night, rattling leaves as they went. A tendril of wind rose up from the valley to the hillsides. Its soft warmth seemed to caress his chin, urging him to look up. When he raised his head, the armed group had stepped back, pointing their weapons down. They said something, brief, of sorts, but Will's languages had mixed like a deadly soup. He thought that he heard
kik'el . . . wach
. . . . Blood in his eyes? Live with the blood? They retreated in a swift choreography, an instantaneous decision to let him live.

When Will returned to the place where he had first stopped with his bike, he was not surprised that they had taken it. He would have done the same thing. He was, however, surprised that they had tossed his pack to the ground and left the new soccer ball. The white ball looked solemn, perched on top of his blue L.L. Bean day pack.

After arranging the ball on the side of the road, propped with stones, a headstone to Hector, he slipped his arms through his pack and walked. He would find another village and then he'd find someone with a truck or a motorbike who would take him to a spot where he'd he catch a bus. Jenkins would pay for this.

CHAPTER 25

A
fter the two children were put to bed, Kate and Will stood outside Marta's guesthouse.

The cobblestones had a sheen of moisture over them as if a cloud had settled on the streets overnight, slipping past the growling volcanoes on the edge of town. The sidewalk, stones embedded hundreds of years ago, hugged a tight line between the street and the thick walls of the buildings.

“The child is an orphan,” said Kate. She lifted her chin, pointing it like a scabbard. She had not wanted to talk about the massacre inside the haven of Marta's courtyard.

What was she doing? Kirkland had warned her about Will in the note. Why was she telling him anything?

“And because she's an orphan, and because there was a massacre, you ran with her. I get that part. But Kate, I've lived in the villages—their family connections run deep. There will be grandparents,” said Will.

“No. Manuela told me, both sets of grandparents were gone.”

Will closed his eyes. “There will be other connections— aunts, uncles, cousins. You've just lifted this kid out of her world, her language. They keep track of their ancestors like they were in the next room. They asked me—” Will stopped and his throat caught. “They asked me,
Where do you belong, where are your people?
If someone asks Sofia where her people are, what will she say?” He kept his voice steady, every word was as important as the next.

“My world is about language. For me it's like food or music or breathing. If you take away someone's language, it gouges a hole out of them. The Maya say that if you take away an entire people's language, their souls and their ancestors' souls are left bewildered. What about Sofia?”

“Do you think that I haven't thought about this? I'm trying to keep her alive,” said Kate.

Kate felt like she was in a dream without her clothes, standing at a podium ready to speak. Part of her wanted to run away, or make Will run away. But what was this new sliver of light that wanted to curl around Will like a vine?

She moved in the direction of the town center and he came with her. Walking side by side kept her from looking directly at him. Kate preferred the reprieve of furtive glances at him, then the cobblestones, and at other people on the slick walkway. Smoke from the stove fires trickled into the air, adding a rough texture to the dampness, mixed with an inadequate sewage system.

“I know what you must be thinking, that I must be a deluded gringo who thinks I can save a poor child. I know I'm not a savior and my life and culture could be vastly more destructive than hers. I don't want to extract her culture from her soul.” Kate moved to the left to let two Mayan women pass. They were merchants with tightly rolled fabric in baskets held on top of their heads.

Kate and Will came to the end of the block. Two more blocks to the right and they'd be at the center of Antigua. He turned to look at her, reached out his hands and took hers. She felt the tick of his energy, not his pulse, but another urgent strumming. “You don't know what I'm thinking.” He rubbed his thumb along her palm. “You've saved a child and you are the bravest person I've ever met.”

It felt like he was rubbing her torso, from breasts to the deep sea of her pelvis. Her nipples tightened.

“Did you know her mother?”

“Yes. Manuela was a student, a friend. I was teaching her English. She was teaching me how to carry a child in a long strip of fabric, how to select avocados,” said Kate. It was such a relief to mention Manuela's name.

“Do you know what she would have wanted for her child? If she knew that she and her husband and her family were going to be killed, what would she have wanted for Sofia?”

Kate pulled her hands out of his warm hold. “She would have wanted Sofia to live. If I bring Sofia back to the remains of her village, a witness to the massacre, what do you think would happen? What if the soldiers came for her? What if she fell into the black market adoption world? Do you know what it's like not to have a mother?”

 

 

The wind caught Will's hair, sun-bleached and dry from the mineral-rich water. He pulled the collar of his jacket up. Kate wanted to be inside his coat, curled up like a cat.

He turned to gaze at the yellow church steeple in the next street. “If you are determined to adopt, you need documentation that she's an orphan. Do you have anything at all like that?”

A motorbike rattled by with two passengers hanging on with impossible grace.

“No. I have nothing.”

“You have me,” said Will. That was all she had been waiting for and she stepped closer to him, putting both hands along his face.

They went to his room in a hotel where he had to ask for his key when he came in.

“Señor,” acknowledged the desk attendant, who looked like he had been sleeping on a roll of blankets.

Kate stopped, needing more. “I don't know your last name.”

He held her hand as they walked along the inner courtyard. In his other hand he held a fat square of wood that anchored his room key. “I don't know yours either. Will Buchanan.” He bowed. “And if there is any hope of you trusting me, you need to know what I've done.”

She was fire-walking, every part of her flesh tested and alive, waiting for the scorch that would come.

“Malloy, Kate Malloy,” she said, bowing in return. “And you can tell me what you've done.”

The room was more sparsely outfitted than hers; the adobe walls held the same winter chill. A piece of woven fabric hung on one wall, a straw crucifix on the other. They took off their coats and lay together as Will told her about his recruitment the year before, his love of languages, about Hector and the people of Dos Erres and how he had been sure that a tractor would be given to the village. And bit by bit, he told Kate about the day he carried the new soccer ball to Hector on his motorbike, the silence of the village, and the rebel fighters who cursed him with living.

“The massacre would not have happened if it weren't for me.”

A frozen glob in her chest melted. Here was someone who had dropped into the same hell that she had been living. The urge to press skin to skin took over.

She pulled at his clothing, undressing him, taking off her own sweater and shirt, sliding her pants down. She circled her hands around his chest that held the cavernous sorrow of the massacre, and let her breasts press down along his torso so that her own horrors could be relieved. How could they have been matched by massacres, each touched with the burning end of a stick in their hearts? Every movement, each groan came from the language that they now shared.

Kate placed her fingers on the center of his breastbone, wanting his sternum to crack open, releasing the black-winged birds, scavengers who had been feasting on his heart. She wanted sweet fresh air to fill the places that were stagnant with the horrors of Hector's village.

He kissed her along the soft hinge of her jaw, sucked on her earlobe; his hand held her spine, and moved to the swell of her hips. His secrets opened the raw places in her and she swam in his sorrows. Kate wanted him closer, to let their bones and flesh braid. She had found the only man who could match her, breath by breath.

CHAPTER 26

K
irkland was inextricably linked to Kate's escape with Sofia. She had handed off enough money to Kate so that she could live in Antigua. And Kirkland witnessed the massacre and this gave her hope that they wouldn't be forgotten.

At this very minute, Kirkland was probably back in Oakland, eating cheeseburgers, tossing back whatever beer was on tap, and sketching a plan in her small notebook that included whom to call to help Kate and Sofia, which politician would be most sympathetic, and how to bring them home.

Kirkland possessed all of the international political savvy that Kate lacked. She had connections with the resistance movement that continued to surprise Kate at every turn. She could send clandestine messages through couriers, contact Fernando as if he was on a special ethereal speed-dial. There might be no end to the influence that Kirkland had.

Since the night in Atitlán, after the massacre, Kate had entered a world beneath the surface, where she had to double-check every glance, ever on the lookout for threats to her or Sofia. She might be disappeared by the military, or get hauled into a prison and never be heard of again. Sofia could be kidnapped for profit. All of which made bushwhacking through the jungle, and acquiring the worst sort of parasites, minor league problems. Kirkland had understood all of this.

Kirkland came from the stock of people who had long tibias, fingers, thighbones. When Kirkland moved she was angular and stretched beyond where her body should be. Just thinking of her gave Kate a jolt of hope.

Kate was stalled by the corrupt, bureaucratic network that surrounded adoption on a good day, never mind with an orphan without papers. With Sofia on her hip, she headed for the door to the street for mundane shopping at the nearby
tienda,
shouting good-bye to Marta.

“We'll be back before dark.”

But she had gotten no farther when the iron knocker slammed against the heavy door.

“Would you mind getting that?” shouted Marta from the kitchen. Pans clattered and something metallic fell on the tile floor, reverberating through the courtyard. The woman was a cyclone of action in the small room.

Kate slid the horizontal slat of wood that gave her a peek at the visitor. It was Will. After spending part of the night with him she had not seen him in two days and she batted down an initial impulse to be angry. Where had he been? She wanted to touch him, beat him, and press against him.

She opened the door. As soon as Sofia saw him, she smiled and vibrated as though a switch had been thrown and she chattered in Kaqchikel, a floodgate opening. Will bent to Sofia's ear and greeted her, then turned to Kate.

“You need to see this,” he said. He lost his strained attempt at lightheartedness and his face had a sodden look, his facial muscles pulled back in preparation.

She stood aside and motioned for him to come in with one hand. She put Sofia down and the child clung to Will, patting his pant leg with her small hand. Will pulled a piece of paper from his jacket.

“I've been in Guatemala City. Don't ask me how I got this, but it's a State Department report about VJ Kirkland, foreign correspondent. She was killed in a one-car accident outside of Oakland.”

A rush of air escaped Kate's lips as if she'd been hit hard in the back, between her shoulder blades. “That's not possible. She could have only been back for a day. . . .” Every bit of courage that she possessed now rushed for the exits, leaving a vacuum. Her bones crushed inward. The atmospheric pressure threatened to snap her.

“Fernando told me she wouldn't be able to come back here, but . . .” Kate could only start sentences; the endings fell off into mist. She shouldn't have said Fernando's name, shouldn't have connected him to Kirkland.

“I can't tell you how I know this, but it's likely her death was not an accident. It was a message sent to other journalists, retaliation for her coverage of the massacre.”

This was not the world that she had known and not the world that she wanted to be in. She gasped for air, pulling it in to stem the leak that Kirkland's death had sprung.

Kate staggered against the wall. She heard the noise of Marta's machinations in the kitchen. Will pushed aside the plastic curtain.

“Would you keep Sofia for a bit? Kate has just gotten bad news from home.” But what did Marta know and what could they tell her? “One of her family has passed away, a cousin.”

Marta pressed her lips in a consoling grimace, tilted her head, and said, “That one has had it hard. Yes, of course. I'll assign the two little ones to stirring dried beans in the kettle. You'd think I'd taken them to a carnival when they did that yesterday. Go on now.”

Kate was rooted in the same place, tailbone pressed against the wall. Will took her hand and they ascended the stairs.

“Which room is yours?” he asked.

She pointed to the last room on the right off the balcony. There were four rooms and the Germans had taken the first two.

She would remember everything about this moment, how he tried to comfort her, how the picture of Kirkland killed in a car accident left her hollowed out. She would recall in vivid sensory detail the way his shoulder pressed against the door, the warm puff of his breathing, the curve of his neck. Who knew why this, why now?

They lay with each other as if they were old and married for decades, as if this is what they did when they came home at night, stretched out on the bed, telling each other about the day. They still had their clothes on, but Kate twined one leg around him, pressing into his side, resting her head on his shoulder.

She told him everything, starting with Manuela and her two small children and ending with how she picked up Sofia and walked away after the massacre.

He rubbed a circle over her heart with his palm, the dried riverbeds of her grief. The quenching rain of his touch shocked her.

Her face was wet. “I was someone else before the massacre, before I took Sofia. Sometimes I see my old self. There's a shadow of her in the mirror.”

“You did what I couldn't do—I couldn't save Hector. I don't know how you carried her across that mountain. I don't know how you did any of it.”

She sat up and pulled off her sweater. Will stood up and pushed a chair against the wobbly door, and flicked off the harsh overhead light. The glow from the courtyard windows illuminated them. She had let her hair fall over the tops of her breasts. In three steps he had pulled off his shirt; his pants fell away with a whoosh and they were together in bed.

A faint voice niggled at her—she should ask how he had learned about Kirkland—and yet the smell of his skin pushed any last remnants of language away. The press of his body, soft here, sharp there, mixed with their outstretched hands pressed hard into each other. Kate's body arched and opened.

When he left, it was dark. They had warmed the room as if their bodies had been furnaces. After the door closed behind him, Kate saw his socks on the floor, thick and dark. She gathered them up and slipped them under the covers, where she pressed them between her feet.

What did Kate really know about Kirkland? Maybe she had been exhausted, or distracted and driven off the road outside Oakland. She could have fallen asleep. Did she have too much to drink? Was the life of a foreign correspondent so rugged, so ungrounded by the lack of normal, mundane certainties of family and friends that Kirkland resorted to the comfort of drugs to cope? Or was this a clear message that Kate's present situation was far more dangerous than she could have imagined?

The military government didn't want the weight of world opinion against them. They didn't want a white woman and a small Mayan girl to emerge as witnesses to a massacre. If Kirkland's death had a message for Kate, it was get the hell out of there and take Sofia with her. Don't be distracted by the love of a man, the seductive curves of the banana trees, or the hypnotic beauty of the country and the people.

Message delivered and received. Except for the part about the love of a man like Will. That was going to have to be a big exception.