The Indigo Notebook (26 page)

We feel all around the base of the wall, running our hands over the rough stone. The occasional insect scurries away from our hands, which gives me shivers. On instinct, I keep looking back over my shoulder, even though it’s too dark to see anything. There’s a ruffling sound, and my heart jumps. Footsteps? Bat wings?

“Here it is!” Wendell says, moving my hand over the top of a rock, about a foot or two in diameter, at the base of the wall. With a grunt, he pushes the rock aside. We stick our hands where the rock was. Our hands move in empty space. A hole!

“I’ll go in first, Z.”

“Let me. It could be a drop-off.”

“All the more reason for me to go first.”

“I promised your mom I’d take care of you.”

“I’ll be fine. I told you, I have a good feeling about this.” Without waiting for my response, he lowers to the ground and crawls in. I keep my hand on his legs, which go first, and then his hips and back, and then his shoulders, so wide they barely fit. He turns and twists to squeeze them through. His head follows.

And he’s in.

“Z, come on in! Careful. There are crystals everywhere.”

Again, there’s a rustling. I can’t tell if it’s coming from our tunnel or another tunnel. Or inside or outside the chamber.
I can’t tell if it’s people walking, trying to stay quiet, or if it’s bats, or something else. Don’t bears and mountain lions use caves as lairs?

Taking a deep breath, I crawl in, feetfirst, slithering backward, pausing to squeeze my shoulders through. Inside, I stand up slowly. Wendell’s hand finds my body—my left boob to be exact.

“Oops, sorry.” He lowers his hand to my waist and slips it around my back. I wave my arms around me. Above, my fingers touch crystals of all sizes jutting out from the ceiling, smooth sides and sharp points. I bend down and feel the ground below us, covered with slippery, pointy crystals.

Wendell’s voice: “I feel like we’ve been here before. But where’s the light?”

Of course. The candles! “There is light, Wendell! Taita Silvio told me they kept matches and candles here. In a basket. Think they might work after all this time?”

“Maybe Faustino still comes here and restocks the supply.”

I can only imagine Faustino coming in here to do something shady, like stashing smuggled jewels. I don’t know what Wendell thinks Faustino would do in here, and I don’t ask. Even after all that’s happened, he’s still hoping Faustino’s a decent guy. I think, instead, about the task at hand. “If
I hid
candles,” I say, “I’d put them right inside the entrance.”

We feel around, moving our fingertips over the crystal, all sharp tips and glassy sides. Within seconds, my fingers
touch the fibers of a woven basket and then smooth wax and a wick.

“Here!” I pass the candle to Wendell and feel around the basket. There’s a small cardboard box. I shake it. Could be matches. I slide it open and my fingers touch dozens of small wooden sticks. “Found the matches!”

I strike a match. Nothing. I try again.
Come on, come on
. After two more tries, a tiny flame appears, an orange glow that lights Wendell’s face and the space around us.

I look up and nearly drop the match. I gasp.

It’s one thing to hear about a chamber of crystals, and it’s another to be inside one. Even from this one flame, the light reflects and refracts thousands of times through thousands of crystals of all shapes and sizes. It’s like being inside a heap of snowflakes or icicles, a hollowed-out snowball in sunlight.

Silvio is right. It feels like flying.

Wendell lights a candle. The room is about as big as my and Layla’s apartment living room. All the surfaces—the walls and ceilings and floor—are pure crystal. I light another candle. I wish Layla were here.

“My dad used to do some caving,” Wendell says finally. “He’d dig this place.”

“Layla would, too. She’s into crystals.”

Somehow, the crystals defy the senses, don’t limit themselves to sight or feel. If they had a sound, it would be hammered dulcimer music, notes tinkling off the tips of every
tiny crystal. And the big crystals would emit low, mysterious harp sounds, deep and resonant as the calls of whales.

“Let’s roll the rock back over the entrance,” Wendell says.

“Hide out here until they give up looking for us. Then we can go explore and see if there’s another exit. It’ll be easy now that we have light.”

We pull the rock back in front of the hole and tuck my sweater around the edges so that no light can escape through the cracks.

Slowly, we move around, half-crawling, half-climbing, stepping very carefully between the jutting crystals. Some are the width of my pinkie, some the width of my torso. Impulsively, I hug the biggest one—the diameter of an old tree trunk—my fingers barely touching on the other side. Hugging a crystal! What will Layla think when I tell her?

If I can tell her.

If we ever get out of here.

We walk and crawl and climb to the far side of the chamber. In a little natural niche is a cluster of half-melted candles, white, in pools of wax. There are more than a dozen candles, melted down to different heights. They’re arranged in a perfect circle around a broken crystal base, about a half inch in diameter. It looks like some kind of altar.

Wendell takes the crystal from his pocket—the one he’s had since he was a baby. He presses it to the base. Perfect fit, clean break. He lights the remaining candles. I let my candle drip and press it into the pool of wax, standing it
upright. Wendell does the same. Now our hands are free and the room is swimming with reflections and refractions of firelight.

“Who made this altar?” I wonder aloud. “Taita Silvio? Faustino?”

“If we ever get out of here,” he says, “I’m gonna bring my mom and dad here.”

I do some quick calculations. It would probably take his parents a six-hour plane ride to get here, then a couple of hours by bus from Quito to Otavalo. Less than a day. They could be here by tonight. He might see them tonight.

If we get out of here.

I try not to think of our bodies decomposing and turning to skeletons and being discovered centuries later. Layla says that’s a good meditation to do—to imagine yourself dead. It makes you aware of the fleeting quality of life. Makes you live life more deeply. It still feels creepy to me.

“What about Her?” I ask, and as soon as it pops out of my mouth, I wish I could snatch it back.

“Who?”

“That sort-of-ex-girlfriend.” I feel pathetic. “Do you want to bring Her here?”

“God, Z, I haven’t thought about her since—well, since that e-mail. I wrote her back. Told her I met someone else. Told her I was moving on. And she said okay. Those were our last e-mails.”

Lowercase
she
. I can definitely tell the difference.

He stares, his face close and warm in the orange glow.
Suddenly, I understand why Layla cried at dusk at the desert dunes in Morocco and at sunset on the beach at Phi Phi Island. When something is really beautiful, part of you knows it won’t last long. And it’s almost as if you’re an old lady looking back at your life at that amazing moment.
Oh
, old lady Zeeta would say in her old lady voice,
I remember that time in the cave with Wendell when we had our first kiss
.

It’s about to happen, I know it.

The space between us is obvious, a magnetic field. And now, almost imperceptibly, the space is growing smaller and closer and I don’t know if it’s him moving or me moving, but we’re closer and closer and now we’re touching, my fingers brushing against his fingers and my breasts touching his chest, and now his arms are around my waist and mine around his. In one last movement, my eyes close and our lips touch.

You know how you listen to music sometimes, and it has a certain color and taste and smell and feel? This kiss tastes like cinnamon and caramel, with a hint of minty Altoids. It feels smooth and tender and round. It’s warm and golden, like bread or sunshine.

I forget I might move to Maryland.

I forget we’re trapped in a mine.

I forget armed men are after us.

I forget everything except this moment.

Layla’s right. There’s something to be said for candlelight.

A
fter kissing for a long time, Wendell and I lean back in a kind of seat-nook we’ve found, where the crystals are smooth and angled enough to sit on. It has to be late. How long have we been in here? Hours? It’s hard to tell without any natural light. I tuck my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and drift off.

I’m flying through a dark place. I look down and see the earth below me, all blue and green swirls. And I realize I’m hanging on to something, a small blue chair. And then I see a speck coming closer. Wendell, with his own blue chair. We hold hands and hold on to our blue chairs and head toward a crystal that turns into a star. We sit there together on our blue chairs, and I know that when we want to, we’ll fly with our chairs to another star, and another, and another.

…

Whenever I tell Layla about my dreams, she says,

It used to annoy me that she’d mess with my sense of reality. Who tells their kid that life could be one long dream?

But now, half awake, between the dream world and this one, I keep my eyes closed, and ask myself, Why can’t your dream become a reality? Why can’t you paint your own picture of life? Why do you think Layla has to do it for you? If you want to fly with Wendell on blue chairs, why not make it happen?

Some time later—maybe minutes, maybe hours—I open my eyes. Wendell’s staring at me, his face close.

I kiss him. “You know Don Celestino?”

“The blind man?”

“With the blue chair,” I say. “He told me once that he never feels scared because his blue chair’s always with him.”

Wendell considers this. “What made you think of him?”

“His chair was in my dream. Two blue chairs, actually. One for you, one for me. We were flying through space in blue chairs. And I knew that with our chairs, we’d always be at home, no matter where we flew.”

Wendell plays with a strand of my hair. “I wouldn’t mind flying around with you on blue chairs.”

Our faces are so close, I can make out every detail of his face, a small stray hair that he missed shaving, the tiny pulse moving at his neck, a nearly invisible scar on his eyebrow. I’m vaguely aware of hunger and thirst and needing a bathroom soon, but it’s easy to ignore all that with his face filling my field of vision. I brush a wispy eyelash from his cheek. “Did you have a feeling about this? Us, together?”

He smiles, almost shyly. “A hundred times, Z. Us, here. But I didn’t know if it was just wishful thinking.”

He’s tracing the contours of my face now. Running his finger to the tip of my nose, up my cheekbone, across my forehead, down my jawline, and back up again.

“Wendell, why did you go off and stay with Faustino? And leave me in the dark?”

“I don’t know. I guess I felt stupid about getting drunk and throwing up and everything. And you obviously didn’t like Faustino. But I wanted to like him. I wanted to trust him.” He cups my chin in his hands. “But Z, even though I tried not to think about you, I couldn’t help it. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw this.”

I swallow hard. “Can you see us in the future, too?”

“Actually—” And then he’s quiet, his head tilted, eyebrows furrowed. “Hear that?”

I hold my breath and listen. The scraping of rock on rock. The stone we put in front of the entrance is moving. I glance around the chamber, searching for a hiding place. Only glowing light and crystal, no dark corners.

The stone moves aside.

I’m squeezing Wendell’s hand so tightly my nails are digging into his palm.

A head of black hair appears.

Black hair laced with silver.

And then a face, Silvio’s face, and his shoulders and belly squeezing through.

“Taita Silvio!” we say at the same time.

His eyes take in the situation.
“Mis hijos.”
He makes his way toward us, nimbly. He knows exactly where to step and which crystals to use as handholds. “What happened?”

We explain, our words tumbling out somewhat incoherently. The emerald smuggling, the thugs, the guns, the zombie flowers, the poisonous creatures, and Faustino unconscious.

He nods, appearing to understand, and then he tells his side of the story, pausing every few sentences so that I can translate for Wendell. “The girls came to me, worried. They said you’d gone to get Wendell, and that the guys in the truck came shortly afterward. I ran up the road and saw a machine gun by the door. A set of keys lay on the ground beside it. I picked up the keys and headed inside. Empty, but their truck
was there. Sounds came from the garden, panicked cries. I found the two men there, on their hands and knees, looking for something. They were frantic, shouting about needing to find the keys and go to the hospital. They looked pale and were sweating, in shock.

“I calmed them down and pieced together what had happened. They described the snake that had bitten them, the arrow-shaped head, the Xs on the back. Each of their arms was already swelling, turning blue, blistering.
Jergón
was my guess. Pit vipers from the Amazon. ‘Listen,’ I told them. ‘The venom is very fast and very potent and you’ve already wasted time. You could lose your arms. I will give you herbs to slow the poison. And then I will take you to the hospital for antivenom.’

“‘Thank you, thank you,’ the men said.

“‘First,’ I said, ‘where are the boy and girl?’

“‘They’re fine,’ the younger one said. ‘We didn’t touch them.’

“The older one said, ‘They ran off.”

“I couldn’t tell if they were lying, but I had a feeling you were safe. Luckily, Faustino had the sense to keep the snakebite remedy
jergón sacha
in a pot beside his door. So I chopped up the root and mixed it with water. I had them drink it, and wrapped more of the root on their arms with a leaf. Then I drove them to the hospital in Otavalo, but they didn’t have any antivenom. So I drove them to Quito, just in time to save their arms from amputation. The younger one
turned to me and said,
‘Señor
, thank you for your help. There’s something I must tell you. The kids and Faustino are in the mine, locked in.’