The Center of the World (21 page)

“Will,” she whispered. She touched her lips with her fingers to catch his name.

Jenkins straightened his jacket. “Good.” He joined the two men at the door and the three of them disembarked. They injected a red static charge into the air. If someone lit a match, they'd all explode. The flight attendants closed the doors again and the plane rolled out on the runway.

Sofia, who had rarely cried in the terrible weeks since her mother and brother were killed, now let loose. She screamed, pointing back to where Will had been, eyes bulging. Sofia stood on the seat, grabbed Kate's hair in one tiny hand, and stomped her feet in blind fear.

The passengers in nearby seats turned and stared, possibly wondering if the child would wail all the way to Texas, which was where this flight was headed. The flight attendants, three women, all turned to look at the blond gringo with the hysterical brown-skinned toddler screaming for her life.

After an hour of crying, Sofia was exhausted. Kate made a nest of her zippered sweatshirt and a pair of jeans so that Sofia could lie down and put her head on Kate's thigh. She waited until the child shuddered into sleep and her brown hands uncurled. Kate pulled a scarf over the girl's face as far as she could without waking or suffocating her. Then Kate turned her head to one side and closed her eyes. She dipped in and out of sleep, from wakefulness to the halfway place of visions, her chest ripped open. She could never tell anyone.

Sofia stirred, her eyes opened, and Kate patted her back, hoping to rub the girl back to sleep. Kate forced down the glob of fear in her chest and took shallow breaths.

In two hours, they landed in Dallas. At the immigration gate, the agent looked at her paperwork and said, “Welcome home.”

Was she home? The man she loved had been wrenched from her and she didn't know if he was alive. She wanted to smash something, kick a garbage can, howl out her rage.

She picked up Sofia and looked for the gate for Boston.

P
ART
T
HREE

CHAPTER 34

T
he clock ticked on the mantel of Kate's house. Her sit bones pressed against the unyielding brick of the fireplace hearth. How long had she been sitting here with Sofia and her father? Had she stopped talking? What did she tell them? Only what she knew. And what Will had told her. But what had she left out? Kate didn't know if she had told them about the way heat pumped off Will's body at night. Had she? She had not spoken his name in twelve years, even after it was safe to do so.

Sofia sat curled on their couch.
Stunned,
that would be a good word for her. Somewhere in the telling, Sofia found her soccer ball and pulled it close to her chest, the way a child does with a stuffed animal.

Sam was frozen. His glass of seltzer was still in front of him, on the coffee table, untouched.

“Did I say his name out loud?” Kate said. An old alarm ran through her body.

The question released her father. “Yes, sweetie, you said Will's name. I think you said it all. Or is there more?”

Her father knew about holding stories in; his tales of Vietnam came out only in bits that could fit on a postage stamp. There was always more, ready to launch him from his sleep as he screamed his way out of a nightmare.

“I can't tell you what it was like for Will, only what he did to help me bring Sofia out.”

Her father stood up. “I should have known something was wrong when I picked you up at Logan Airport. You looked like a soldier coming back from battle, that dark-eyed, nerves-incinerated look. But it didn't make any sense. And then there was Sofia.”

He turned to his granddaughter, extending his hands, palms up. “I fell in love like this,” he said, snapping his fingers.

Kate had imagined only the worst scenarios if she told them what happened, that the world would crack and shatter, ghouls would descend and take Sofia away. Surely Kate had broken laws. But now she felt scraped clean of barnacles, polished, with a breeze sluicing through her lungs, something fresh, off the ocean, filled with salt air.

Sofia let the soccer ball drop to her knees, roll down her shins, and trapped it between her feet. The ball had been an extension of her body since she first began playing, back when she was just seven. What rumblings could this have stirred in her? She must have questions, accusations. What tirade would erupt about the betrayal of her elemental truth of birth, kin, and blood?

“Did Martin know?” asked Sofia. Now he was Martin, not Dad. But why that question, of all things? Was this a first-layer kind of question?

“He found out about a year after we were married. He knew as much as you saw in his letter. He disagreed vehemently about not telling you. We almost split up over this. He loved you so much. . . .” Kate's chest tightened and refused to let out anything but a shudder.

“He knew about Will?” asked Sofia.

It was strange to hear someone else say his name, first her father, now Sofia. “He knew that I had loved someone, that part of me still loved him. He knew that much.”

Sofia stood up, flipped the soccer ball into the air with her foot, over her head, and it crashed into a lamp, sending it off an end table, miraculously cushioned by a rug.

“I lost everyone! It's not fair; why do I have to lose everyone?” cried Sofia. The full weight of the deaths crushed her. She spun on her heel and ran out of the room, up the stairs. The impact of the slammed bedroom door shook the glass on the living room windows.

Kate started to follow her.

“Don't,” said her father. “She needs to be alone. Some kinds of grief can't be let out in front of others.”

Kate sank back into a fat green chair.

 

Hours later, Kate emerged from the bathroom to find her father leaning against the wall.

“Is the Jenkins guy still there?” asked Sam.

“No. He was one of the last casualties of the war. About six months before the peace accord was signed, when Sofia was seven, a letter came. I didn't recognize the handwriting. The postmark was Baltimore. It said, ‘The horned toad is dead.' That was it, direct and to the point. Will must have had a friend take the letter north. I don't know anyone in Baltimore.”

Sam had a towel draped over one shoulder. “Good,” he said, squeezing his fists. He had on a white T-shirt and plaid pajama pants that Sofia had given him for Christmas. “The bastard. The CIA must have disposed of him, that's my guess. Or whatever private corporation had used him. A guy like that was too much trouble for them.”

He rubbed the stubble along his chin. “I can't wrap my head around what you must have been going through after you came home and how lonely it had to be, despite how it looked on the outside. You looked like a girl overwhelmed by being a new mother, finishing your degree, you know, all of that. When you didn't date anyone for years, I just thought, how could she have time for romance? And then there was Sofia. . . .”

Kate heard the faucet dripping. Sam turned his left ear to the sound and said, “I'll fix that tomorrow.”

She knew he would fix anything for her and Sofia, anything that he could.

“What happened to him? What happened to Will?” asked Sam.

CHAPTER 35

 

I
n the first year, Kate woke from nightmares feeling shattered from the sound of gunfire, pummeled by the black boots of the military, and sat bolt upright in bed. Then she'd run to Sofia's room, heart pounding, to make sure the child was still asleep, still there. She'd sink to the floor next to the child's bed, sometimes sleeping on the rug or sliding in bed next to the small girl.

Her longing for Will was palpable; she imagined his arm pulling her tight, his belly pressed hard against her back. The next day would bring the balm of safety, a trip to story hour at the library or any of the things that marked the territory as beyond the reach of murder on the stone streets of Atitlán.

When she was alone with Sofia, outside, it felt like Will was right there with them. She imagined telling him,
Look how big she's getting, how she laughs, how good it is to be here, just like we wanted.
He would press his lips to the back of her neck and wrap his arms around her and she would feel his sun-drenched chest press into her spine. These were the small tortures of longing and she paid the price with each imagining. Her last picture of Will, pounding on the window of the airport, hit by the gun butt and dropping to the floor, rushed back in. Her heart was gouged out again and again.

Only Marta's letter from Australia kept her sane. The letter arrived five weeks after her return to the States.

 

Kate wrote back to Marta but she never heard from her again. She still cringed at the threat that Jenkins made. If she tried to contact Will (which she didn't know how to do) or Fernando, the Horned Toad would have them killed, she was sure of it.

Was this her life now, hiding her heartache, telling no one about Will, ripped from a connection that felt truer than anything else she'd ever experienced? Was it only the high drama, the danger that had drawn her to Will? No. Her body ached with sadness, her bones and muscles were in a consistent state of weeping. She would have loved him anywhere, any time.

By the time Sofia was three, a glorious age, she had taken to English just as Kate had hoped. Kate decided to take the child for a dip in the warm shallows of the Mill River. This was a perfect spot for children, where the smooth river rocks pulled in the heat from the sun. If they tried to walk barefoot for long, they were reduced to skipping and yelping.

Kate took Sofia's plastic pail and filled it with water. It was August and they were in the midst of a heat wave. She poured the water over the smoothest rocks to cool them enough for the two of them to sit. As soon as they touched the water, she pulled off Sofia's jelly sandals.

When Sofia's feet hit the water, unbridled happiness rippled through her body. Sofia tossed back her head and laughed as she kicked, sending out arcs of water. When her balance on the rocks improved, she bent over and splashed with her hands. They played in the shallows, only inches deep. Sofia rearranged rocks and handfuls of dirt, struggling, intent on her artistry, the small hands still rounded on top. Toddlers were like that, small and round everywhere, as if they were boneless. Even the bottoms of their feet looked rounded, making it a miracle that they could walk at all.

Sofia grabbed Kate's hand and said, “Lay down in the water, Mommy.” They each reclined into the shallows, the round rocks at their backs, their hair set loose. Kate and the girl opened their bodies to the blue sky above and the water around them.

 

In the days after Kate arrived with Sofia at Logan Airport, her father seemed to catch whiffs of lies. He asked about Sofia's strange sounding language.

“Her language is an unusual form of Spanish”—not true—“but she's learning English quickly”—true. It was the first lie and each one that followed cut through a capillary in her abdomen, first one, then another.

“Tell me again where you adopted her?” Even as he asked this, Sofia was in his arms, changing him into a grandfather.

“The Chiapas region of Mexico. Remember, I told you. It was an orphanage.” The next lie. Slice, nick, bleed.

“But you were in Guatemala. Why were you in Mexico at all?” Her father was a bloodhound.

“I should have written to you, but the mail might not have gone through. I had to switch research sites. It turned out that I did most of my research in Mexico,” she said, remembering to look steadily at her father, to not flinch away.

“And what will you do when Sofia wants to meet her biological family? Most people want that,” he said.

“She was abandoned. There was no family on record.”

The first time she said Sofia had been abandoned, she felt a flutter go by her ear, a bird wing of ancient Maya who shook their heads. Inside her body, a band of tiny men armed with sharpened toothpicks stabbed along her ribs.

The length of fabric, the rebozo that had held Sofia to Manuela, had been rolled tight and stuffed into a plastic shopping bag on the top shelf of her closet. It ticked like a bomb, ready to blast all of them into oblivion.

By the time they landed in Boston, Kate had constructed the altered story of Sofia's origins. She had to keep her far from anything that would connect her with Guatemala. Her adoption papers said she was born in Mexico, adopted at an orphanage in Mexico, and Kate couldn't veer from this new creation myth.

Yet Kate knew the value of telling adopted children about their origins, the deep meaning in knowing where you come from, the irresistible pull of knowing the source of your life. Open any magazine, watch any talk show, and the pleading voices of adopted adults were there:
It is our life, we own it, do not keep birth information away from us.
Until Sofia came along, until shots had ripped through soft bodies, she would have agreed.

Kate fed Sofia a creation story of her own. She was careful and thoughtful with the story, giving Sofia the best memories that she could create. By the time that Sofia was three, she wanted to hear her story again and again.

They returned home from their Mill River water play, satiated with sunshine and the mineral smell of the river. After a dinner of rice and beans (this was a part of Sofia's diet that was not negotiable; the child could eat mountains of it) and a shower to dislodge plant matter from her hair, they settled into bed for stories.

Kate rented a house based on the proximity to the farm nearby. The farm was called Bramble. Its owners kept sheep, llamas, and one very small burro that was twenty years old. Kate wanted the comfort and nearness of the animals. She was intoxicated by the smell of hay, manure, the sound of the sheep and the braying of the burro.

Leverett was close to Amherst, where other dark-skinned children were not such an unusual sight. The university drew graduate students from around the world, from the southern hemisphere where darker skin was perfectly suited to the equatorial power of the sun. Here Sofia would be safe.

“I traveled very far to find you. I went to a town in Mexico called Chiapas and you were the tiniest little girl. You were a baby and you didn't have a family. You were waiting for me to get there. You had a birth mother but she was very sick and couldn't take care of you.”

“We can find her and make her better,” said the child.

Oh, of course the child would want to do that. Each lie left Kate exposed and needing to cover up another part of the trail. Leave no crumbs. Kate and the girl were nestled under a puffy quilt. The child was fresh and warm from a bath and three books. Kate took a breath. She had to do it. She didn't want Sofia imagining that a sick mother was out in the world.

“She got very sick and she died. So we can't ever make her better.” One lie and one truth.

Kate wasn't sure how she felt about lying about a made-up person's death. The lie was not about Manuela, it was about the fictitious woman in Chiapas and that was different.

A sudden image of Manuela on the ground, arms stretched in death toward her son, eyes open.

“Will you ever get sick?” asked Sofia. “I take care of you. I tell you to stay in bed and I bring you toast.”

Another lie needed to appear. Kate was unprepared.

“No. I am very strong. I am the strongest mommy in all of Leverett.”

“Did my brother get sick too?”

No, the child did not just ask about her brother. She had never said this before. How did this happen? Kate raced to think of other playmates who had brothers. Yes, that must be it.

“No, sweetie, you never had a brother.” She ran her hand along the pajama leg, patting her for emphasis.

Sofia shook her head in a dreamy way and lay back on her pillow. “A long time ago, when I was small, I have a brother who is like me. He has brown skin like me and toes like me. He is the same size as me.”

“When I found you in Mexico, there was only you, no little boy, no brother,” said Kate. The lies settled in certain organs, small drips of tar, minuscule at first. The lie about the twin brother took up residence in her liver.

Kate tucked her in, kissed her goodnight. “Sweet dreams.”

Kate was aware at every turn how unprepared she was for parenting, the responsibility of understanding the blossoming brains of toddlers, how telling them something too early could be devastating. How did people raise children without living in a state of panic, even under the best of circumstances?

 

Kate was Mommy. But there was someone else who Sofia called for in the troubled hours of sleep.
Mamá
. And sometimes the old Mayan word,
Wate
. Mother. The one word in Kaqchikel that Kate clearly understood. The first time Kate heard her, she put down her book and rushed to the child, who sat huddled against the maple headboard, a dazed look in her eyes. “I'm right here,” said Kate, pressing in close, putting her arms around Sofia.

“No, I want
Mamá,
” Sofia sobbed, not fully awake, her eyes tightly closed. “
Mamá, Mamá,
” she whispered until the pull of sleep was too strong. Kate stayed with her the rest of the night as Sofia called for Manuela.

Sofia's nighttime searching for Manuela came less frequently now and Kate prayed that on this night, after a full day of sun and water and happiness, she would sleep through the night. And she prayed that the class she was taking at UMass would help her understand what she needed to know about young children.

She had transferred to UMass and just finished her last class for her doctoral degree in water management and was slogging through her dissertation. But the class in early childhood development that she audited seemed far more interesting and complicated than water management. She wanted to know when children began to remember. She wanted to know if Sofia would remember her twin brother, Mateo, the massacre, and her parents.

She gleaned plenty from the class. There was preverbal memory, before the child has spoken language, when they remember sounds, smells, colors, tastes, touches, faces, and such. But those memories have to find special compartments to live in and most often they lodge in bodily locations like the stomach or the throat, or an overactive adrenal system guarded by a vigilant switch. When a child acquires spoken language, she can associate a spoken word with an object, such as a banana or a machete. That gives the brain a place to fetch the memory, so that if someone says “banana” the child goes to the banana place in her brain and there it is, in all of its yellow splendor.

Up to a certain stage (and Kate was not one hundred percent convinced of when or if she truly believed this), the child cannot differentiate between a dream, a storybook, a song, or a dusty day in the town square, or a jaguar swimming along the reeds of the lake looking for her mewling and disorderly cubs.

Kate asked everyone, “Tell me your very first memory. How old were you?” Lots of people had nothing to say about memory prior to age five. A few recalled events that took place when they were about four, and even fewer claimed to remember something in their third year.

In Kate's class, they also talked about the best way to make a child crazy—not that anyone wanted to make a child crazy but as a way to understand childhood mental illness, they deconstructed the path of crazy-making. Deny their experience, their reality, and tell them that what they know is not true. Sounds like a recipe for making them into little freaking psychos, said one guy in class. How awful, she had thought, how cruel. She wanted to raise her hand and ask,
Even if you pull them out of a pile of dead bodies, even after running through horrors of rain and cold for days, afraid to look back, even then should you tell the truth?

Kate wanted assurance that Sofia would not remember events when she was two, the way the moon hung ripe at the top of the volcano, and the birds that sounded like kittens that sang at the wrong time of the day. Was it stuck under her ribs, along her inner ear? Was it waiting to unzip her someday when she was brushing her teeth?

How do you keep a secret about images etched through the retina, poured into the brain, formed into thoughts, hot on the heels of felt emotions? How does this get sealed off? Kate knew the answer. One hundred years of psychology, mountains of self-help books told her how it works. The lie forms a scar tissue, woven into layers as tight as a basket. Kate felt the scars etching throughout her.