Hard Red Spring (61 page)

She'd find out anyway, once she had an English dictionary. At least this way Jean could maintain some control of the information. “A laceration is a deep cut. A cranial laceration is a cut on your cranium. Your skull.”

“How did I get a cut on my skull?”

“I don't know.”

“Did I need stitches?”

“Yes.”

“Where? Where was the cut? Did you see it?”

“On the top of your head.” Jean pointed to her own scalp, making a line near the back. “Here. It's not even visible now, Maya. Your hair covers it. You didn't even know it was there.” Which was true. The scar was so faint, so hidden by Maya's thick hair, that Jean suspected her imagination in the moments when she thought she could detect it.

“Was it bad?”

Jean decided on half-truth. “It was mostly healed when I got you. I only saw the scar. Just a little scar, Maya. I knew a girl in graduate school who had a baby and he had a cut, too, on his head. From a cesarean section. That
means he had to be cut out of his mother's belly. It's very common. The doctor just slipped a little bit. It wasn't a big deal. Just a little cut that healed and his hair grew in and no one ever saw it.”

“So you think I was born that way? Cesarean?”

“Probably,” Jean lied. God, she hadn't meant to.

Maya accepted this explanation with a nod, closed the translation book, and poked at her plate with her plastic fork. “Is this vegetarian?”

Jean inspected their lunches, tortillas and beans with ambiguous green flecks that could never be accused of being meat. “It's okay. These people can't afford meat.”

Maya ate a few bites, chewing, thinking. She touched the top of her head tenderly. People were staring at Maya and Jean with side glances while they ate. Jean became so self-conscious that she did not notice the NGO from the hotel until one of the women handed him a plate.

“Hello,” Jean said when he walked by with his lunch.

He squinted at her. Rays of mock disapproval appeared around his mouth.

“Hello, tourist,” he said.

“Join us?” Jean asked, hoping for a happier conversation. Maya always perked up with a male audience.

But he only laughed. “Oh no. It's not good for business, talking to you.” He stood, chewing his meal rapidly like a rabbit. His eyes focused off to the sides, at their audience. Attentive, ready to bolt. Forking, chewing, swallowing all at once.

“We don't have to talk,” she said, too flirtatiously. She merely wanted to know who he was and why the proprietor did not want him in her hotel. A slight movement caught his eye and he noticed, for the first time, Maya. He looked from daughter to mother, twice.

“I don't like to linger,” he said. “Anyway, a tourist doesn't want to be seen with me. The wildlife will run away from you. Your film will come back all blurs.”

Jean stared at him, trying to get his meaning.

“Mom.”

She turned to her daughter, paused mid-chew, her mouth open and her tongue pushing chewed food out onto the table. Her hands up and waving frantically around her face.

“What's the matter with you? Stop it! Maya!”

Maya cried and pointed down at her plate, to the beans cleared away to
reveal a pig's tail. Curled, pink, and fetal. Maya wailed, spitting and making a scene. The NGO slipped away and the entire restaurant stopped.

“Murderers! They're all murderers!” Maya cried, lurching forward like she might vomit. “Baby pigs, mama pigs, whole pig families! Murdered!”

“Maya, calm down,” Jean hissed, trying not to add to the hysteria. “Use your napkin. Just spit it out in your napkin. Don't offend these people. Don't.” Before she knew what she was doing, she grabbed Maya's wrist, hard, to still her. “Don't make a spectacle of yourself. We must be careful,” she pleaded, but her daughter wailed, spit, and sucked helplessly at the air with the fury of an infant. “People stare at us constantly, Maya. Please don't make a scene, please don't give them any more reason to stare.”

—

It was not a proper market day, but many vendors still sold on the streets. Fruit and masks, packaged bread and masks, fabric and masks, Fritos and masks. Jean did not recall seeing the painted masks at the market before, but now they hung everywhere, and Jean had the odd feeling they'd been put out for their benefit alone.

“Do you want a mask?” Jean asked Maya, who wandered among the stands and fingered some, noncommittally. All colorful animal faces, clashing in the rising wind of an approaching rainy season storm. Jean watched her daughter closely, afraid she might try to steal from these impoverished people. Afraid of so many things, suddenly.

“I'll buy you anything you want,” she said, each time Maya paused.

Although the scene in the restaurant had been horrible and embarrassing, Jean felt more disturbed by her own reaction to it. During Maya's tantrum, she had seen the screaming, scarred infant in the orphanage photo. She had seen pain and helplessness, but still she had handled Maya roughly. Just reached out, grabbed her, shook her. Why? For once, she had not been afraid of Maya, but of all the Mayan people around them. Jean could not even guess what she thought they would do.

But still, Jean glimpsed progress in the scene. No fits, no accusations—at least none directed at her. She was thankful to be somewhat spared today. The tantrums were becoming rarer, but not easier. In fact, they made up for their infrequency with their severity. The last tantrum, the only one that summer, had been the most terrifying. It had taken place at home, the day Jean announced the trip to Guatemala. She presented the tickets, a surprise, not realizing Maya would miss the last two weeks of summer flag line training.

Maya brooded the rest of the day, bemoaning the unlearned drills, the lost time with her friends and Brett. Grilling portobello mushroom burgers on the deck, Jean went inside for a butter knife for the mustard. On her way out, Maya had rushed past her, on her way in, and bumped against her. Jean had stiffened, knife in hand, expecting the fall and the scream, but nothing happened. Maya disappeared inside. But then she came back out again, slowly, holding her arms crossed in front of her. She walked up to Jean and uncrossed her arms. There, on the tender undersides of her forearms, she had squeezed ketchup. A bright red line of gore that ended in a splatter where the bottle had given out.

Maya did not scream or throw herself to the ground. It was not an actual fit, more like a fit of the mind. She held her arms out for Jean to see and said in her martyred voice, “You cut me.”

They left the market by a narrow side street confined by high, dilapidated walls. The vagrants they passed maintained a silent dignity. Women, in their flowered costumes, crossed their path purposefully, like swooping birds. Maya lingered behind, bumping into walls, shuffling her feet in protest of this tour.

Jean powered on, thinking if she lost Maya in these back streets, maybe the girl would finally understand. She would panic and sob and realize where she would be without her mother. She'd be grateful, for once. It was a cruel idea, pounding in Jean's chest, compelling her to break into a run. She searched out dark alleys and sharp turns she could just disappear into. She imagined herself running and Maya not able to keep up in her flip-flops.

Less than a block away, Jean spied a dark figure crossing ahead of them. There and gone in five steps across the alley. Like Jean's own shadow preceding her. It had not been brightly colored, like the Mayan women. It had been tiny and dark, like a dancer cutting across a stage. Out one door and into another. The piled black hair, the long scarf trailing behind like a tail. Telema.

Jean froze. “Did you see that, Maya?”

“See what?”

“Did you see someone cross just now, in front of us?”

“I didn't see anyone,” she said, touching her scalp through her hair. The gesture had become obsessive by now, unconscious. “Can we go back to the hotel? It's going to rain.”

“Sure, Maya. Did I mention there are teenagers at the hotel? Maybe we can go back and meet them. Two boys your age.”

She perked up, lifting her face into a gust of wind. “Are they cute?”

~~~~~

Their flight to Jean's parents' house in Iowa left two days after Telema's ten-minute-long class. Jean had not been able to say goodbye, had not been able to find her anywhere. She had no idea where they now stood. They had been a couple for less than twelve hours and already Jean had managed to do something unforgivable. Had she said something insensitive while drunk? Jean could see that. Telema waving a loaded gun around, then becoming upset at Jean for a poorly chosen word.

Jean's mother, her face gleaming with age-defying lotion, greeted them when they pulled up in the rental car.

“Oh, Maya!” She bent to hug her granddaughter. “Dinner's ready, and I made it without meat. Just for you!”

Inside, it smelled like every meal her mother had ever cooked, very much like meat. Jean's father presided in the living room in his overstuffed recliner. “How are you, Dad?”

“Starving!” he gasped dryly, maybe the first word he had uttered in days. “And I'm not going to graze in the backyard like a rabbit.”

The drama stemmed from Maya, who found it upsetting if people ate meat in her presence. Or even if she saw leftover meat in the fridge. Jean told her mother repeatedly over the phone to just ignore the fuss, to eat whatever they wanted. But this was her offering to her granddaughter now. Everyone would sit around the same table and eat a vegetarian meal. But Jean knew right away that her father would only move from his recliner for what he believed to be a proper meal.

Once the three women sat down to dinner, the smell of the house finally made sense to Jean. Her mother had made a pot roast, minus the meat. Not minus, exactly. As the vegetables and mashed potatoes and gravy made their way around the table, it became clear to Jean that her mother had literally cooked everything with the roast, had even made a gravy from the drippings, and had merely hid the meat away at the last minute. It was also clear that she had no inkling this wasn't a vegetarian meal.

Maya, of course, had no idea. She ate the fat-glazed carrots and the smooth gravy happily, seeing no objectionable chunks. “This is fantastic!”

“Sweetheart”—Jean's mother beamed across the table—“how's school? Do you have a boyfriend?” She perpetually feared that, raised by Jean, her granddaughter would grow up to be “warped” like her mother. For this, she bizarrely, relentlessly encouraged Maya's involvement with boys. Clearly, to
be knocked up at the age of fifteen was preferable to being a successful, educated lesbian.

“Yes! His name is Brett.”

“And what does Brett do?”

“He plays football and basketball.”

“Oh!” Jean's mother clapped. Her heart-shaped, lopsided face looked like a Valentine made by a child. “He sounds wonderful! Good for you!” She smiled and smiled, beaming with the certainty that her granddaughter's boyfriend was popular and handsome.

After the fake vegetarian dinner, they all watched television together. In front of the screen, Jean, for the first time, forgot Telema. It was nice, for once, not to think at all.
Jeopardy!
turned out to be the only show the adults could all agree upon.

Jean's mother braided Maya's hair during the show. With surprising deftness in her elderly fingers, she wove circles around Maya's head. “You're going to look like an Indian princess, Maya. Just like that Disney movie.”

Jean closed her eyes and counted to ten, remembering the therapist's recent advice. Of course, Maya would never accuse her grandmother of being a racist, though she had disapproved of Jean adopting Maya in the first place. Interracial adoption was unnatural, she argued.
Those children need to be raised by their own
. Funny. Jean never imagined Telema and her mother could ever be in agreement on anything.

“A princess with lipstick?” Maya asked.

“Oh, I think I can spare some lipstick.”

“I wasn't allowed to wear lipstick until I was seventeen,” Jean observed calmly. She had only reached the number five in counting.

Maya crushed her palms into her mouth and laughed hysterically through her nose. “Mom says lipstick is meant to make your face look like your private parts!”

Everyone turned to stare at Jean. Her mother, mid-twist, her father mid-rock in his recliner. Eyes wide with scandalized amazement. Who was this daughter of theirs?

Maya patted the sculpted black crown of her hair cautiously, trying to discern its dimensions. “How does it look?”

“It's beautiful, Maya,” Jean said, just as her mother appeared with a can of Aqua Net and unloaded it with a toxic hiss from a safe distance.

“If you like it, I can do it just like this when you go to prom in a few years.”

“You'd come all the way to California to do my hair for prom?”

“Of course, Maya. Prom's the best night of a girl's life. I wouldn't miss it for the world. Now sleep carefully tonight and it will be just as beautiful in the morning!”

After Maya went to bed, Jean slipped into the basement to drink from a fifth of whiskey she'd hidden among old Christmas decorations. She knew she'd need it at some point. Her father, coming down to the basement refrigerator to gnaw on the hidden pot roast, caught her.

“Be easy on your mother,” he told her, chewing on a hunk he'd ripped away with his hands. “She has a weak heart, you know.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Her pacemaker's going to need a new battery after you leave. It always does.”

“What the hell does that mean? That's not how pacemakers work.”

“
I
know how your mother's heart works, Jean. And I know it's weak from loving you so much, despite everything. You have no idea. She tries and tries. She'd rather starve me than give you an ounce of trouble.”