The Indigo Notebook (12 page)

At closer look, I notice a man’s hand on her shoulder. The rest of him has been cut out of the photo in one uneven snip.

Wendell sees it too. He picks up the photo, and with absolute certainty says, “It’s her.”

Back in the cornfield, the corn leaves look like sponges, soaking up light. After spending all this time with Wendell, I notice the quality of light more. It’s the key to a good photo graph, he always says. The photo he holds carefully in his hands now is so blurred you can’t even tell where the light’s coming from. He keeps slowing down between the corn rows, pausing to study it.

In the distance, the girls are playing chase, screeching and laughing. Mamita Luz is working a few rows over from Taita Silvio, bent over with her machete. As we walk toward him. Mamita Luz stands up and stretches her back. “Feeling better,
hijo
?”

“Sí,”
Wendell says, stopping in front of Taita Silvio.

Quietly, I say, “Tell us the truth. The straight truth.”

He pauses, then nods, leaning on his machete.

Wendell holds up the picture.
“¿Mi mamá?”

Silvio makes the faintest movement, a hint of a nod.

“Is she the woman who disappeared sixteen years ago?” I ask.

“Sí.”
He sets down his machete.

“What’s her name?”

“Lilia.”

“What happened to her?”

He hesitates, then finally says, “She died. A car accident. I’m so sorry, Wendell.”

Wendell’s expression is unreadable. The photo trembles in his hand.

“And his birth father?” I ask.

He turns up his hands. “Who knows.”

I study his face. He’s lying. My voice drops. “You look a lot like Wendell. We know your wife can’t have children, but—”

“Listen, son. I wish I were your father. But I’m not. We went to doctors in Quito. The problem is not only with my wife, but with me also. Perfect for each other, aren’t we?” Avoiding our eyes, he picks up his machete and whacks at a weed.

Mamita Luz walks over, beads of moisture coating her round face. She puts one arm around each of us. Even her sweat smells like steaming bread. “Everything all right,
mis hijos?”

Wendell shakes his head, his gaze fixed on Silvio. Using
the basic vocabulary of Spanish 1, he forms a question. Amazingly, it’s grammatically correct, although the pronunciation leaves much to be desired. It’s a desperate, last-ditch effort of a question.
“Taita Silvio, ¿tiene hermanos?”
Do you have brothers?

Taita Silvio freezes midswing. Lowering his machete, he whispers, “No.”

“She’s pretty, don’t you think?” Wendell’s sitting on a stool outside the curing room, staring at the picture of his birth mother. “I mean, if you overlook the hairstyle.”

“Beautiful,” I say, which is a bit of an exaggeration, especially since I can barely make out her blurry features. But there
is
something soft and kind about her expression, the way she holds herself, something I see in Wendell, too.

Mamita Luz is sitting next to me, taking kernels off corncobs, and the girls are gathering blackberries at the far end of the yard. Taita Silvio hasn’t said anything for an hour. In the cornfield, he simply walked away, his machete at his side. Now he stands beside Wendell, looking at the photo and touching Wendell’s shoulder, as though it might break. “Keep the picture,
hijo
. I should have given it to you sooner.”

“Why do you have the picture?” I ask. “What happened sixteen years ago?”

Silvio shakes his head.

Mamita Luz frowns. “Tell him. He can handle it.”

Taita Silvio sighs a few words in Quichua, then takes a
long breath. “She—Lilia—came to town one day with—a man”—and here he glances at his wife and unspoken words pass between them—“a man who didn’t treat her well. She was poor and vulnerable. She kept to herself mostly. He didn’t want her to have friends.” Taita Silvio stops.

Mamita Luz continues. “And then her belly started swelling. She gave birth on November sixth.”

“My birthday,” Wendell murmurs.

Any lingering doubts about his birth mother’s identity disappear.

“We helped her plan the baby’s adoption while she was pregnant,” Mamita Luz says, her eyes glistening. “Lilia left the man and came to live with us. We were with her at the hospital when she gave birth. We helped her say goodbye to the baby boy, and a few weeks later, we brought her to a safe place. Not long after that we got news that she was riding in the truck with—that man. He was drunk. He crashed. Lilia died.”

Wendell listens closely as I translate. I can practically hear his thoughts. The only thing worse than a dead birth mother is a drunk jerk for a birth father. “And the man?”

Taita Silvio says something to his wife in Quichua. They’re arguing about something. Finally, he shakes his head. “The man no longer exists.”

Correction. The only thing worse than a dead birth mother is a
dead
drunk jerk for a birth father. I can feel Wendell’s heart slowly falling.

“He was my father?” Wendell’s voice cracks.

Again, Taita Silvio and Mamita Luz exchange looks and heated words in Quichua.

“What was his name?” Wendell pushes.

Taita Silvio stares at the ground. “I don’t know.”

“I need you to do a divination to find out,” Wendell says.

Taita Silvio looks surprised. “I’m not—it doesn’t always work.”

“We have to try. I’ll pay you.”

Mamita Luz’s apple cheeks are as stern as I’ve seen them. “The boy is strong enough to know the truth.”

Taita Silvio squints at the sky, blue except for a few wispy clouds.
“Bueno
. My wife and I have to go to Quito for two days. I’ll do the divination when we return.”

Now the girls are running toward us in a flurry of excited shouts. “Look at all these blackberries!” Odelia shouts, her sisters trailing behind.

Taita Silvio and Wendell glance up with identical expressions. The bright sunlight illuminates their cheekbones, accentuating the shadows underneath. Their mouths are set and turned up a little at the left edge. Their ears, small and protruding, are echoes of each other.

Odelia holds her handful of berries over her head. “Look at all my berries!” she shouts to the sky. And to Taita Silvo, “Can my star see me? Even though I can’t see my star?”

“Yes,
hija
, your star is always there,” he says. “Your star watches you. Your star thinks about you every day and every night, even though you don’t know it.”

…

That evening at home, beyond all comprehension, Layla is sitting on the sofa, watching TV.

I’m speechless. TV? Layla’s vehemently against TVs, calls them soul suckers. Once I find my voice, I squeak, “Where’d that come from?”

She glances at me, then back at the flickering screen. “Jeff bought it for us. There’s a satellite dish on this building, did you know? We get a zillion channels.”

I perch on the arm of the sofa. It’s a rerun
of Friends
, which of course I’ve heard of, because some things you can’t escape even in the tiny nooks and crannies of the planet.

She lays her hand on my knee. “Remember how you used to beg me for a TV when you were little?”

I nod. I gave up that dream long ago.

“It’s more for Jeff than for me. He doesn’t want to get behind on his sports viewing when he hangs out here. He keeps golf stats.”

I wonder if this will be the kiss of death for him. For Layla, golf is the epitome of all things evil the world. She always observes that no matter what country we’re in, whether jungly or desertic, the ritzy resorts have cleared a gigantic area and planted turf and dumped tons of water for irrigation, all because a certain portion of the world’s population can’t survive without this sport. I’m amazed she can even mention the golf-stat thing without a trace of sarcasm.

“So he’s really into golf, huh?”

“It’s actually an interesting sport if you give it a chance.
There’s this whole golf subculture, you know? I’ve been so judgmental about it in the past, but there’s something to it.”

I can’t think of anything to say.

“Anyway, he’s entitled to his hobbies. He doesn’t get my spiritual searching. In a grown-up relationship, differences can be healthy.”

I fiddle with my rings. She sounds like an advice columnist in a women’s magazine, the mainstream voice of reason. Since when did Layla call her spiritual-searching obsession a hobby? “Is he back in Quito now?”

She nods.

So I’ll have her to myself tonight. That makes me secretly happy.

We watch
Friends
and
Frasier
and
Sex and the City
and
Desperate Housewives
. At first, it’s fun. I see us from the outside, a bird’s-eye view of a mother and a daughter side by side on a sofa, watching TV, laughing at the jokes, sharing a bowl of popcorn, worthy of a magazine ad. After two hours, I find myself waiting for Layla to say,
Let’s paint the walls purple!
Or
Let’s blast Moroccan music and belly dance on the porch!
Or
Let’s have champagne and make crème brûlée!
But the only thing she says is, “Finally I’m getting it.”

“What?”

“The appeal of TV.” She hugs a pillow. “See, it’s a necessary escape.”

“Escape from what?”

“From life.” She seems pleased with her analysis. “From a boring life, that is. A life you’d need to escape from.” And she settles back into the couch and changes the channel.

Later, in my room, I unfold another letter. Wendell’s warned me this one would be extra-embarrassing.

I shuffle through all the times I’ve told Layla I hated her. Pretty much every time she’s made us move to a new country, at least in the past few years. In each of my notebooks, there are solid pages with line after line of
I hate Layla. I hate Layla. I hate Layla
.

At the end of my tirades, after some sulking in my room, I could never resist coming out, lured by the sweet scent of rose petal tea and the peppermint and rosemary essential oils she heated to make me feel better. She’d say some Rumi quote like, “Oh, love, remember that sometimes,
what hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest
.” Then we’d drink rose tea with lots of honey and she’d pull me into whatever she was into at the time—playing the didgeridoo or dancing to African music.

Soon the hate faded. But in my notebook, I never crossed out the lines of
I hate Layla
. And I never filled a single page with lines of
I love Layla
.

Even though, of course, I did.

“Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes!” Odelia belts out the song in the sweet, damp air, still fresh from dew. Wendell and I are touching our heads, shoulders, knees, and
toes for the tenth time today. It’s as though Agua Santa has a magnetic pull, won’t let us stay away. Taita Silvio and Mamita Luz are in Quito, visiting some of their “children” who’ve grown, and the girls insisted we come on a hike.

They’re taking us to a high lookout point, where you can see everything. “Practically the whole world!” Isabel has promised. A day without thinking about Wendell’s birth parents will be good. And mountaintop views always give me perspective on things—in this case, what to think about Layla’s new TV-viewing habit.

On the way up the hill, we pass some two-story cement houses, unpainted, like islands among corn plants. Dogs live on the roofs, barking and peering over the edges, silhouetted against the expanse of blue above. The higher we go, the bigger the sky grows, spotted with a few clouds like pearls, broken open and melting. You can see far into the distance, across the layers of hills that stretch into the mountains. The earth slopes and curves, rises and falls, joining here, separating there, with the mottled green fabric of leaves draped over it all.

The wind is wild, whipping at our shirts, pushing us this way and that. On the way, Odelia proudly points out eucalyptus trees, and has us smell the cough-drop scent of the leaves torn up in her hand. Isabel plucks tiny edible berries from flowered ground cover, and Eva gathers pale green water cress from streams for us to taste, smiling for the camera as Wendell snaps photos.

Eva motions to a tree whose huge white flowers dangle like
ornaments. “And
that’s floripondio
. In the old days, mothers used to put their babies under the branches if they were cranky. It made them sleep.” She lowers her voice dramatically. “Thieves use it too. They crush the petals and sprinkle them in your food. And then, you’re like a zombie, and they rob you.”

On and on the girls chatter, telling us tales and showing us plants and landmarks as they lead us up a hill toward the lookout point. We reach the top of the hill and look around, stunned at the view. On all four sides, rolling hills and valleys surround us, a landscape dripping with sun-drenched green. It’s as though a treasure chest has overturned, spilling out gemstones of every possible shade of green—jade and emerald and turquoise, all aglow.

Odelia points toward the next hill over. “Look! Inside that hill are tunnels that lead to a diamond palace,” she says. “Secret tunnels.”

Isabel widens her eyes. “And the devils try to make a deal with you to make you rich. In return, they take your soul and—”