The Indigo Notebook (2 page)

Around the next corner, our new home comes into view. Layla found this apartment online, fell in love with the old facade of peeling white paint, the blue iron gate in front, the flowered courtyard inside. Once the cab stops, she steps onto the sidewalk, into the yellow lamplight. She spreads her arms wide, like wings, beneath the swarm of moths fluttering above her. “Zeeta, love, this is it!”

“For a year,” I mutter. “What’s the point?”

“Lighten up, Z!” Layla heaves her giant backpack over her shoulders. “You’re amazingly, extraordinarily, phenomenally lucky!”

“I’m tired, Layla.” I pull my green cloak from my backpack and wrap it around myself, breathing in its familiar wool smell. We stand in the chilly night air, waiting for the landlady to answer the buzzer as the cabdriver unloads our remaining bags.

Layla’s eyes are dancing, her arms flailing, her bangles jingling. “You know, most kids would do anything to live your life.”

I nod sleepily. What kids have told me is they’d do anything for a mom like Layla. A mom who, when I was little and scribbled all over the wall with an orange crayon, whipped out a purple one and joined me. But when your mother is that weird, you can never be as weird as her. So you become the responsible one, the practical one. Even if that’s not who you are. You become the one who says,
Maybe you should get a job with health benefits this time. Maybe we should stay here another year now that we’re settled in. Maybe it’s time to register me at a school
.

But yin and yang is what it’s all about. That’s what one of Layla’s ex-boyfriends told me in Brazil, two countries ago. There must be a tension, a kind of tug-of-war that keeps us both from falling over the edge.

…

In the middle of the night, I wake up with my heart pounding, my insides on fire. This is life. I’m in it. Am I where I’m supposed to be? Is this right? Of all the places in the world, I am here. In Ecuador. Of all the ages, I am fifteen.

I unzip my sleeping bag, sweating. The clock says three-thirty a.m., the worst time to wake up drowning in panic. I feel raw, like my skin’s just been peeled off. I take long, slow yoga breaths, letting my belly expand. The floor’s hard beneath my body, just a foam roll-up mat and the sleeping bag. Bluish light seeps through the small window, maybe from the moon. My two ancient suitcases and overstuffed backpack loom like phantoms. Other than that, the room’s empty. And it smells strange. Not like sand and salt like our Thai beach house.

Empty apartments terrify me.

I give myself a desperate pep talk.
Remember, Z, it’s always like this. Hang in there. In a few days it’ll feel okay
.

I do more deep breathing and glance again at the red light of the clock. Almost four a.m. now. In Thailand it’s midafternoon. But this is more than just jet lag. These middle-of-the-night panics have haunted me for years now.

This is where you belong now, Z. Soon Ecuador will be your home
.

As I drift back to sleep, I think ahead a year, to when I’ll have to tear myself away from here, and already my chest aches.

…

The next morning I discover that the landlady has kindly stocked our refrigerator with a big container of blackberry yogurt and left a ripe papaya on the counter beside two sets of silverware. It makes me feel better that someone is looking out for us.

I eat breakfast at a tiny table on our balcony that overlooks the enclosed courtyard. My notebook is open and balanced on my knees. From time to time I put down my spoon and pick up my pen and jot down notes on this new home.

I started writing in my notebooks when I was eight. The first one was purple and lasted for our whole year in Guatemala. After that, I filled more and more notebooks every year, but I made sure they were the same color in each country, a small way of imposing order on my chaotic life. Just before we left for Ecuador, Layla and I stopped in a Thai stationery store to pick out my next notebook, a new color. I’d gone through purple, orange, blue, green, yellow, red, and white, and was wondering if I’d have to move to gray or brown, when Layla held up a deep purple-blue notebook and shouted, “Indigo!” I rolled my eyes and said, “It’s just dark purple,” but she insisted, “Indigo! It’s an official color of the rainbow! The color of the third-eye chakra! The sky at dawn! And twilight!”

Writing in my notebooks always makes me notice more things. Now I’m taking in details like the birds hiding in the trees, singing and twittering, and throngs of cheery potted plants lining the walls. The balcony wraps around the
courtyard, shared, I guess, by other tenants. Our apartment is tiny, on the third floor, up a treacherous, winding metal staircase. It took forever to drag our bags up here last night. The two bedrooms are more like closets, barely big enough to fit a bed.

The bathroom is even tinier, and not for the claustrophobic—sitting on the toilet, your knees press against the wall, which is just inches from your face. The landlady left a note:
Don’t touch the shower faucet with wet hands or you might get shocked
. A small towel was hung up for that purpose, I assume, beside the shower, over the toilet paper. The toilet paper makes me sneeze. It’s scented and embossed with tiny bears, and after use, has to be thrown into a minuscule pink trash can wedged beneath the sink. Each country has its different set of dangers, different set of quirks.

Layla’s still sleeping, so I eat some yogurt and fruit alone in the cool air, the bowl balanced on my knees. My seat is a wooden crate covered with a scrap of foam. The rusted nails sticking out have already scraped my calves, made pink crisscrossing lines. I make a note to borrow a hammer and pound them in. I have to be on the lookout for safety hazards.

In a new place, Layla’s priority is hanging up crystals of cut glass to catch the light and cast tiny rainbows everywhere. “It’s not just decoration, Z,” she says, if I point out that it might be wiser to address a gas leak or a broken toilet first. “It’s to help with chi flow.”

I finish the last of my yogurt, then wash my dishes and lay
them neatly on a towel to dry. Layla emerges from her bedroom, her hair a tangled, glowing mess in the sunlight streaming through the window.

“Morning, love.”

“Morning.” And then I decide,
This time will be different
.

This time will be different!

This time my life will change!

In a voice that sounds more like a command than a question, I say, “Why don’t you call Jeff?”

“Huh?” She lights a match and starts a burner for tea, coming this close to setting her hair on fire.

“The guy from the plane.” I lean against the small refrigerator. “For once, can you date a man who’s not an artist or a clown?”

“What about that poet in India?”

“Call Jeff.”

“Why, love?” She cuts moon-shaped slices of soft papaya and arranges them in a star on her plate, with a dollop of yogurt in the center. She smiles at it, pleased.

“Listen,” I say. “I have three years left before college and I want them to be normal years. Normal.”

“Give up wanting what other people have.”
She’s quoting Rumi. This line in particular always makes me gnash my teeth.

“Will you call him?” I push.

“Mmmm. This papaya is at the pinnacle of ripeness.”

I wipe the yogurt dripping from her chin. “Call him, okay?”

“I have no idea where his number is.”

I search her things for the business card as she drinks tea and eats her moon-star food on the balcony and marvels at the courtyard. “Look at those flowers! This is paradise!
Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.”

“Including Jeff,” I say under my breath. And then, in frustration, “Layla, I can’t find the card anywhere.”

“Then set me up with someone else, love. You pick.” The steam from her tea swirls around her face. She half-closes her eyes like a sleepy cat and recites in a murmur,
“I should be suspicious of what I want.”

Rumi again. I roll my eyes. How can you argue with a mystic who’s been dead for seven hundred years? I grab my bag—a woven red one from Guatemala—and stuff my indigo notebook in the side pocket, then head out, on a mission to find what I want more than anything: a normal life.

A
t nine a.m., the cobblestoned streets are bustling with people, many of them Otavaleño Indians. The women wear long dark skirts and shiny blouses and thick shawls with hundreds of tiny gold beads wound around their necks. The indigenous men have long single braids, and are dressed in regular jeans and shirts. And some people—who must be mestizos, according to my guidebook—look like they could be from anywhere in the world, wearing pants, shirts, blouses, and skirts that have probably been imported from China.

My guidebook says that the difference between being indigenous or mestizo doesn’t have to do as much with your skin color as it does with how you dress and wear your hair and what language you speak and your last name. I could
probably pass for indigenous if I dressed right, if I walked in that tall, proud way.

Strange how with a little thought and effort, you can change who you’ve been forever. If Layla made an effort, could she change? I keep my eyes open for Dad-like men to set her up with.

This town feels almost cozy, in its valley surrounded by towering mountains, all shades of dazzling green rising into gray stone peaks. The sun’s starting to heat up the morning air, reflecting off the cement buildings, some painted pastels, some bright blues and yellows. The stores look welcoming and cheery with their doors propped open—Internet cafés, bakeries, narrow restaurants with whole chickens roasting in the windows, little pharmacies, travel agencies.

It feels good to hear the musical rhythms of Spanish again. I’m finding I understand the language effortlessly, even though the last Latino country we lived in was Chile, five years ago. Of course, Spanish has always been one of my favorites.

I zigzag down streets, cutting across a big flower-filled square with a fountain and trees, past a whitewashed church, trying to follow my guidebook’s route to the daily craft market at Plaza de Ponchos.

The first local I talk to is a blind man in a blue chair with a small orange plastic bowl on his knees. “I like your blue chair,” I say, realizing as I say it that he might not know it’s blue, might not even know what blue is. Feeling stupid, I drop a few coins into his bowl and keep walking.

“Gracias, señorita,”
he calls after me.

Soon I turn a corner, and there it is, Plaza de Ponchos, a sea of tarps and tables spread with fuzzy scarves and sweaters and bags, flower-embroidered shirts, sparkly silver jewelry, woven rugs, heaps and heaps of colors spilling out everywhere. I weave through the tunnels of stalls that smell of wool fresh off llamas and sheep and alpaca, an earthy animal smell mixing with the exhaust of passing cars. Tourists are chatting with vendors, reaching out to test the itchiness level of a poncho, or holding up a brown sweater beside a gray sweater to decide which color looks best. Meanwhile, the vendors are cajoling in singsong voices, a mix of Spanish and heavily accented English, “All-natural dye, special deal for you, three for twenty dollars, come on, buy, buy, buy …”

And then, at the end of a row of scarves and sweaters, seated behind a table, I spot a great big woman with a million gold beads winding up her neck and coral beads snaking up her arms, all the way from her wrists to her elbows. She sits like a queen on a throne, her blouse shining with hundreds of tiny blue flowers and wide, soft lace at her forearms. But the thing that sets her apart from the other ladies is her smile. A smile that’s one hundred percent real, not the halfhearted smile of vendors just trying to sell you something. If you know you’ll only live a year in a place, you want to start being around a smile like that right away.

I’m not a naturally outgoing person, but I’ve learned to be. I’ve learned to walk right up to people who look interesting
and introduce myself—it’s the only way to make friends when you move around so much.

You make yourself bigger than life. You walk with your head high and your shoulders relaxed and a little swagger in your hips. You act like you never wake up at three-thirty a.m. in a nervous sweat. You exude a confidence you don’t have.

I smile at her and hold out my hand and say in Spanish,
“Buenos días
. I’m Zeeta.”

Without skipping a beat, her hand meets mine.
“Mucho gusto
, Zeeta. I’m Gaby.”

I forget my Dad-candidate search for the moment and say, “Gaby, what matters most to you in life?” because another thing I’ve learned is that you have to dive straight into the important questions, the kind that pierce through small talk and jump right into a person’s core. The kind that would otherwise take years to figure out.

“Breathing,” she says. “If I weren’t breathing, I wouldn’t be alive, would I?” She closes her eyes and takes a long, deep breath that looks as if it tastes like lemon sherbet.

“If you had one wish, Gaby, what would it be?” And after a moment, I add, “Except world peace or something noble like that,” because she seems like the type who would wish a selfless wish. “And besides more wishes,” I add, because she also seems the clever type.

“Happiness,” she says matter-of-factly.

“But I mean specifically, what would bring you happiness?”

She shrugs her big shoulders. “The way I see it, people
think they know what they want, and it turns out they don’t have a clue.”

She answers a few more questions, which I record in my notebook, and then she interrupts herself to call out to a passerby. His hand just barely grazed the soft alpaca scarves on her table, and she must have noticed. “Five dollars,
señor!
But I’ll give you a discount since I like your eyes!”

The guy smiles, and after a few moments of teasing and bargaining, he buys three for ten dollars. “I really do like your eyes!” she calls after him, giggling at him as he leaves, looking pleased.

She turns to me and says out of the blue, “Wishing is tricky, Zeeta.”

“Tricky?”