The Center of the World (27 page)

CHAPTER 48

T
hey took the first boat out of Pana. Kate had not slept, but waited for the first glimmer of daylight over the lake, listening to her own heartbeat, praying that nothing had happened to Sofia, that she was not stripped from her like her mother, or Martin. Like Manuela and her son. She did not want to live a life of protracted sorrow laced with guilt.

The water taxi eased out of the dock, the engine purring softly. Then, as the young boatman increased the speed, the front of the boat rose up and they sped across the lake. The boat was filled with people going to work, women with babies strapped to their backs in tightly wrapped fabric, men with their belts cinched around their slight waists, all heading for a long day of labor. Kate was bookended by her father and Fernando on the fiberglass bench. Midway across the lake, the motor sputtered and cut out. Something was wrong. No, not now, she had to find Sofia.

A sudden spray of water rose from the lake, for no apparent reason, as if they were moving—but they were dead still while the boatman fussed with the engine. The winged spray lifted up from the lake, unlike anything she had seen before, a mini-whirlpool reaching up, as tall as a woman. Where had the spray of water come from? The water droplets were velvet across her cheeks. Did no one else notice this?

She looked at her father and he wiped his face also. Had her mother caressed them both from the very thing that she had loved, water, a great body of water? How much louder does love need to shout? Was it just Kate wishing for her mother?

“Your mother would have loved this place. I never knew the lake was this beautiful—” He was interrupted by the purr of the engine.

As the boat docked, Kate wanted to fling herself onto the rough wood of the pier, but the boat was filled beyond capacity with Mayan passengers. Kate, Sam, and Fernando somehow managed to be at the end of the line to disembark. None of them had spoken since the driver had restarted the boat.

Kate had never traveled to the village where Manuela lived. Manuela said it was small and the road to it very steep. She met with Manuela only in Santiago.

Fernando asked the boatman where Santa Teresa was. There was pointing and gesturing in a mix of Spanish and Kaqchikel.

“It is beyond Santiago, about four miles,” said Fernando.

 

Santiago was more vibrant than Kate remembered. It had been a center of commerce before, but now someone had doused the entire town with Crayola colors. Stalls of fabric and leather, pottery and jewelry lined the steep street leading to the center of town.

Every Mayan face held traces of Sofia—the delicate curve of eyelids, the straight chisel of nose, the deepest brown eyes, black hair catching shards of sunlight. Kate's father, in comparison, looked large, with unfocused features, with skin so pale and mottled that it looked like he lived underground. Here they were the oddity. What had Sofia felt when she stepped off the boat and was surrounded by Maya? Did she think she could merge with them like a bird returning to her own flock? No, living in Massachusetts for twelve years had altered her plumage.

They walked through a haze of cooking smells, small cook fires here and there, the pat, pat, pat of hands forming corn tortillas. These were the smells before the massacre. Fernando told her once that for the Maya, everything that has ever happened exists in the present moment.

It had been hard enough to let that sink in twelve years ago when she was terrified for the toddler Sofia, but now, as she stopped to catch her breath, the smell of singed tortillas caught her, and all the past moments rumbled up from the lake, from Manuela, from the gunfire, from Will finding a way to get Sofia out—all flitted by her nostrils, and she felt her skull opening in a strange way. It took only a second for all that had gone before to collect itself into the whisper of smoke from the last woman on the far side of town cooking.

Kate caught the eyes of the small, birdlike woman who smiled at her. This couldn't be the Tortilla Lady from long ago, the woman who pressed warm rounds of flattened maize into her hands after the soldiers had pushed her aside with their guns.

Fernando and Sam kept going, oblivious to the churning of time and space in Kate. She hurried to catch up with them, but she turned to look back at the woman. Did the woman tilt her head toward the road out of town? Or had she just been looking down at something?

They climbed, ever upward, on a village road trodden by feet for so long that even the surface could not count the centuries. Sam looked back at the lake, a face-saving move to disguise a desperate need to keep his lungs from bursting. “It's okay, Dad, it's the elevation. It's hard for me too,” she said.

The road curled around in sharp S curves, and on one turn, a small boy sat on a boulder. He was dressed in jeans and a thin T-shirt. The boy hopped off the boulder and said in Spanish, “Please follow me. Sofia and her brother, Mateo, are waiting.” Kate stumbled and caught Fernando's arm.

Mateo? Sofia's brother? How could he be alive? Were all of the dead going to rise up? Would Martin meet them around the next turn? Would her mother lift up from her grave and paddle across the lake in her old canoe? Manuela's children had lived, both of them.

The air glittered with dust and the road beneath her feet seemed to melt and turn to wing, or bone, blood, or water. In front of her was the miracle that Mateo was alive and behind her was Sofia's childhood of longing for her brother. Kate teetered along a fulcrum point, one foot on each side, wavering, her knees ready to buckle.

Kate had never seen Fernando undone before. His face twitched as if he was reconfiguring. “You told me that the boy and the mother were dead.”

“Believe me, Manuela was dead. And the boy looked dead, I was sure of it. Things happened very quickly, I had only a moment to decide what to do,” she said. Her throat was dry and tight.

Sam dropped his pack on the ground, retrieved a water bottle, and handed it to Kate. “This is what everyone prays for in a war, that the dead are not really dead. I've wished back so many people from Vietnam,” said Sam. “What we have here is a miracle, or as close to one as I've ever seen.” He offered the bottle to Fernando, who declined, and put it back into his pack and hoisted it on one shoulder. “The war claimed one less victim. Score one for the good guys.”

Someone had to go first. Kate's lungs burned from the exertion of hiking the steep path. Sofia was just ahead in the village. And Mateo. In the thin oxygen, her pounding heart was background noise to her real fear. Here were the people who could accuse her of stealing one of their people, of taking Sofia away. Her accusers had lived in her dreams, in her skin, along the back of her neck. Now they stood ready to meet her.

The worst of the lies had been about Sofia's brother. What could be more elemental than a sibling? Why had she lied to Sofia about a brother? She could have said yes, there was a brother, but he had died. She hadn't wanted one more death to weigh on Sofia.

But she was wrong.

CHAPTER 49

 

T
he letter was in his pack. He read it over and over, until the paper began to shred.

Fernando knew how to find him, through the Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala City. Will was the main translator between the Maya and all the forensic anthropologists who sought to identify bodies from the war. French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Venezuelan, and all the English speakers relied on Will to speak with the Maya, to find the thousands of indigenous people who had been killed.

The international effort to heal the war would take a long time. Will wished that he had the patience of the Maya. Even after so many years, he hadn't been able to fully step into their understanding of time, their belief that time and place were inextricably linked, that there was no compulsion to hurry.

The letter arrived two months ago, from a lawyer in Massachusetts who sent the letter to Fernando.

 

 

The boy ran to Will's side, then to Mateo and Sofia to tell them that Kate was approaching. Will wanted more time to steady his heartbeat, which pounded so hard that the women washing clothes at the center of town must be able to hear it. Kate would be here in minutes. What if the years had changed them so much that only a war-torn fantasy remained?

He feared the worst, feeling as helpless as he did when he saw Jenkins next to Kate on the airplane, when what he loved was taken from him. He ran into the only building that might contain him, hide him. He pulled open the heavy doors to the church and collapsed inside, his chest heaving. He was not a religious man, but so many years among the Maya had given him the assurance that churches were a place of comfort.

CHAPTER 50

 

W
hy did Will duck into that church? Sofia was positive that she was in a ton of trouble with her mother. And with her grandfather. This was almost like running away from home, but not quite. She had been running toward home.

Well, not home. Her old home. But when her mother walked into the center of the village with her grandfather and the other man, her mother wasn't able to stop crying. And if her mother cried, Sofia cried, which was the way it had always been. It was some kind of automatic reaction.

Something changed and she didn't know if her mother could feel it yet. Sofia had grown older; a layer of childhood slipped off her and lay crumpled like a discarded snakeskin. Sofia, even in the shuddering hug of her mother, felt whole in a way that she never imagined before. She had found her brother.

Mateo walked toward Kate. He put one hand on each of her shoulders and faced her. Her mother wasn't a beautiful crier and her face pretty much crumpled up.

She said something to Mateo that Sofia didn't understand. “Manuela has been trying to tell me that you were alive,” said Kate. “All this time I thought that your mother was angry with me. I mean, in my dreams.”

“The ancestors speak in a language that needs . . .” Here Mateo's English failed him. “Translation,” he said finally. Mateo and Kate were going to get along just fine.

Sam huffed his way into the scene, clearly compromised by altitude. “Don't do that again, sweetheart,” he said, pulling Sofia into a hug. “I want to know how you got here.”

She'd tell him about the helicopter later. She wasn't sure when, but later.

Already the family was bigger, less defined than it had been before in Leverett. But what would it mean, this family that was bigger, blended, chopped up by war, and separated by languages and countries and then thrown together into something new?

Her mother stopped crying and sniffled.

“Mom, what happens now?” asked Sofia.

Kate wiped her face with the edge of her shirt. She looked soft and fresh as if she had just stepped from a swim in the river. She nudged Sofia. “Who is that man? He looks familiar.”

She pointed to Mateo's grandfather, Juan. Sofia would tell her later. Her mother looked like she was beyond absorbing any new information. This must be what it feels like to not be a kid anymore, when she could see her mother in this softer way.

“He is my adopted grandfather,” said Mateo. Oh, she was going to like having a brother. Mateo smiled at her. They already had a language of their own.

“He looks familiar. But now we thank the ancestors. That's what Manuela would do. After that, I don't even know where to start,” said Kate.

Mateo pointed to the church. “Will is in there. He is teaching me languages. He told me many things about you.”

Kate walked across the village center toward the church. She looked back once at Sofia and Sam. Mateo smiled encouragingly. Fernando was talking with the adopted grandfather.

Kate pulled open the door and stood, letting her eyes adjust, turning her head as she scanned the building. She put her hand on her lips as if she had seen a ghost. Then she stepped in and the thick door closed behind her.