The Indigo Notebook (27 page)

“I suspected you’d found this room, that you were all right. But I guessed you were getting hungry and thirsty and scared. I took the keys to the garden and cave from his neck, and since I already had their truck keys, I drove back here. I wasn’t sure whether they had someone else guarding you, so I was quiet coming in. And here I am.”

“Gracias,”
I say.

“Gracias,”
Wendell echoes, and takes a deep breath. “Did you see Faustino on your way in? Is he okay?”

After I translate, Taita Silvio sighs. “He’s alive. His head wound is minor. His eyes are open, but his head is full of terrible visions. Two flowers are usually not enough to kill a person, only enough to drop them into a world of nightmares. Soon he’ll be all right.”

Silvio takes us on a small tour of the crystal chamber, shows us his favorite crystals, the ones that captivated him since boyhood. Wendell motions to the circle of candlelight. “Who made that?”

Taita Silvio flushes and rubs his hand over his face. “When I told you I never set foot on my brother’s property since the situation with Lilia, that wasn’t exactly true. I come here every year on November sixth.”

“My birthday,” Wendell says.

Taita Silvio nods. “The place where I broke off your
crystal. I light a candle every year and wish you well, wish that your life is happy, wish that you learn to use your powers for good.”

Wendell’s eyes shine in the light from the sixteen candles. “Will you teach me?”

“Nothing would make me happier,
hijo
.”

We make our way across the chamber, and again I have the sensation of flying, wings opening and closing in harmony. I can almost hear Layla’s voice quoting Rumi.

That’s what we are, Layla and me, each a wing. We need each other to fly. “I have to talk to Layla,” I say.

“And I should call my mom and dad,” Wendell says.

I can’t suppress my smile. “I have a feeling you won’t need to.”

We find Faustino leaning against the wall just inside the cave’s entrance. The door’s open, silvery blue moonlight streaming through.

“Are you okay?” Wendell asks in Spanish, kneeling beside him.

Faustino nods weakly. We walk with him through the garden, stopping at the cistern outside his house to wash the dried blood from his head. After feeding his animals and grabbing our bags, we head down the dirt road.

“We shouldn’t leave Faustino alone,” Taita Silvio whispers. He turns to his brother. “Come to my house,
hermano
. Eat with us.”

Faustino lowers his eyes and shakes his head. “I can’t.” But he comes anyway.

On the walk through the garden, Faustino says in a gravelly voice, “I thought you swore never to set foot on my land again.”

“I also swore never to let harm come to my nephew.”

Near the base of the hill, I see people walking toward us at the crossroads. Three people, their moon shadows stretching far behind them. Strange for people to be out at this time of night.

Closer, I notice they’re not wearing shawls and ponchos and skirts. They’re not Otavaleños. Even closer I see that they’re not Ecuadorians, either; I can tell from the way they walk. Two of them walk like Americans, that purposeful swagger. Gringos.

And the third person, she flies along beside them, as though she has wings.

Layla.

Her feet are bare and her white dress is billowing out
around her, holding the moonlight. A braid wraps around her head like a crown. The other two must be Sarah and Dan. Sarah’s wearing a sleeveless linen blouse and khaki pants and rubber sandals. She’s shivering, hugging her arms around herself. Dan, clad in khakis and a T-shirt, keeps one arm around her, warming her.

I look at Wendell.

He’s smiling, raising his hand and waving and then running toward them. Sarah and Dan and Layla start running toward us. Smack in the center of the crossroads, Sarah throws her arms around Wendell. She’s crying. And Dan’s crying. They hold their son for a long, long time.

Layla’s crying too, which doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is the force with which she hugs me. “I thought I’d lost you, love.”

“I thought I’d lost
you
, Layla.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Z.”

“Likewise.” Which really means, of course,
I love you, Layla
.

After the hugging and tears, Wendell puts his hand on Taita Silvio’s back. “Mom, Dad. This is Taita Silvio, my birth uncle.” He motions to Faustino. “And this is Faustino, my birth father.”

They all shake hands, and Dan says, in Spanish, “Thank you, Faustino, for helping to bring our son into the world.”

Faustino stares at his feet, until Taita Silvio claps his hands. “My wife would like to meet you all. Please come to my house.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Sarah says. Her Spanish is good too. “We don’t want to bother her.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Taita Silvio says, smiling. “She’s used to unexpected guests.”

The walk to Mamita Luz’s house feels surreal with the moonlight on the corn leaves and the strangeness of Wendell’s parents being here. It turns out they showed up at our apartment a few hours ago, at around eleven o’clock. Layla answered the door, frantic with worry. She’d read my note and had been using our landlady’s cell phone, trying to get ahold of Gaby all evening. Apparently Gaby’s cell-phone battery had run down. Finally, around midnight, after it had recharged, they reached her, and she directed them to Faustino’s house. They were on their way there when we found them at the crossroads.

We walk single file through the tunnel of corn leaves along the irrigation ditch, Silvio and Faustino leading the way, Wendell in front of me with his parents, and Layla behind me.

Moonlight skips over the narrow channel of flowing water beside us. I hear Layla’s footsteps stop.

I turn around.

She’s skimming the reflected light with her fingertips, as though she’s trying to soak it up.

“You know what’s weird, Layla?”

“What?” She glances up.

“You’re by a river in moonlight in the middle of the night.” I look at her significantly.

“And?”

“And you’re not quoting Rumi or anything.”

“That’s true.” She studies the water.

“Don’t you have the urge?”

She considers. “I feel an echo of an urge.” Her fingertips keep sliding over the water, searching, leaving silvery trails. “I hear echoes of what my old self would say.”

“What would she say?”

Layla closes her eyes, offers a small smile. “She’d say she bets the crystals in the cave are a kind of gypsum, maybe selenite. She’d ask if you knew
selenite
comes from Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon. She’d ask if the cave looked like crystallized moonlight.”

“Actually, it did.” I feel a giant wave of tenderness for her. “What else?”

“She’d say, who knows where the name gypsum came from, but it must have something to do with gypsies, like us, how we used to be, traveling around, chasing moonlight.” Her face is almost iridescent.

Quickly, before I can stop myself, I say, “You’re the mother I would choose for myself. The old you. The real you.”

She takes her hand from the water. Her fingers are dripping moonlight.

I keep talking. “And this is the life I would choose for myself. Traveling and exploring and filling up notebooks.”

She stands. We’re exactly the same height, something I never noticed until now.

The words pour out. “Layla, I know you like Jeff and you’ve changed for me and I feel selfish, but I want the real you back.”

She grabs my hands. Hers are wet and cool. “I don’t know how. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

I search for something to say to that. Rumi comes out. “There is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.”

She finishes for me. “And that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

A whistle pierces the night. It must be Silvio or Wendell, wondering what’s holding us up. I whistle back, and then we jog through the rest of the corn-leaf tunnel, to Mamita Luz’s backyard, where moonlit smoke rises from the chimney.

At the door, Mamita Luz and the girls throw their arms around us and immediately start chattering. Eva tells us they’re staying here until their father finishes an alcoholism treatment program. They seem thrilled with this arrangement, and even more thrilled to be awake in the middle of the night with three more foreigners. Odelia keeps bouncing and dancing and skipping in circles like an excited puppy.

Mamita Luz insists on calling Sarah and Dan
cumarita
and
cumbarigo
, literally comother and cofather, but also affectionate terms for friends. Sarah and Dan chat with her easily, talking about their two years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. Meanwhile, Silvio cleans his brother’s head wound with soapy water, applies some herbs, and wraps a
bandage around it like a headband. The girls pass around warm rolls as we tell Sarah and Dan and Layla what happened. We leave out the machine guns and the poisonous flora and fauna. We can’t get around the emerald smuggling, though.

Layla puts her hand over her heart, while Sarah bites her knuckle. Dan’s face turns red. He looks at Faustino and opens his mouth to say something, then shuts it. He puts one hand over the other, in a tightly clenched fist. I’m guessing he wants to yell,
How the hell could you let my son get involved in this?

Layla fixes Faustino with a hard gaze, a mix of fury and compassion. “What were you thinking,
señor?”

Faustino answers in slow Spanish. I whisper the translation in Wendell’s ear. “In the cave after I ate the flowers, I was a boy again, hiding in the cave from my father. A snake came and turned into my father and he was crying and saying,
Forgive me, son
. And then he left and a white bird came. She turned into Lilia. I said,
Forgive me, mujer
. And she kissed my cheek. Still, I felt full of poison, but then a bee came and I was sure it would sting me, but it thought I was a flower, and it drank and drank and flew off. And then I felt full of nectar and it was a good, golden feeling. And then Wendell came to me, and it was really him, asking,
Are you okay?
And I thought,
Maybe he thinks I am full of nectar. Maybe I am full of nectar after all.”

No one says anything for a moment, and I feel sure that Sarah and Dan must be thinking
What the—?!
, when Layla
takes his hand. “If you were poison in the past and you are nectar now, be nectar.” It’s as though they have their own language. Crazy mystical-poetry language. Then she looks at me and murmurs in English, “Sometimes the cold and dark of a cave give the opening we most want.”

Faustino turns to Silvio. “There’s something I don’t understand. All those years ago, why didn’t you take the boy? Lilia wanted to give him to you and Luz. But you said no. You told her to let him be adopted by foreigners. Why?”

Taita Silvio looks at Dan and Sarah and Wendell, who are still and alert, listening carefully. “I wanted him to be safe. I wanted him far away from you. And also—” He stops.

“What?” Faustino leans forward.

“I was afraid I would turn into our father. I wanted the boy far from me, too. I didn’t know if I was strong enough.”

“But look at all these kids around you.” Faustino sweeps his arm over the room. “You two are the father and mother of the town. Everyone knows that.”

“Now I know.” Taita Silvio pauses. “There’s something else. After Lilia asked us to take him, I did a divination. I saw something. Something like a string—a red one—stretching from the baby to a gringo couple. And I saw that this was good, that they belonged together.”

“Gracias,”
Sarah says, wiping her eyes, putting her hand over Wendell’s.

Faustino stands up. “I’m taking off for a while. In case those guys come looking for me.”

“I don’t think they will,” Taita Silvio says.

Faustino shrugs. “You never know. I’ll stay in Colombia for a few months until this blows over.”

Taita Silvio lifts the leather string with the two skeleton keys from his neck. “Your keys,
hermano
.”

Faustino puts up his hand. “Give them to the boy. The cave is his now.”

Silvio reaches out, grasps his brother’s hand. “It was wrong of me to hold a grudge for so long,
hermano
. I hope you visit us when you come back. You are welcome in our home.”

Faustino nods and starts out the door.

Wendell stands up.
“¡Espérate!
I have something for you.” He reaches into his backpack and pulls out the small bundle of translated letters. I take the remaining translations from my bag and tuck them into the red ribbon.

Faustino hesitates.

“He started writing these letters when he was eight years old,” I say. “They’re important to him.”

Faustino shakes his head. “Give them to my brother.”

A shadow of disappointment passes over Wendell’s face. Then he nods and glances at Taita Silvio, managing a halfway smile. “All right.”

Faustino takes a last look at Wendell. “Forgive me.”

And he’s gone.

O
nce Mamita Luz puts the girls to bed, Taita Silvio opens the letter in Spanish on top. It’s the last translation I did, before the pig market, which seems like years ago. “May I read it out loud?” he asks Wendell.

Wendell nods.

Taita Silvio reads word by word, in a drawn-out, labored rhythm, pausing to take a deep breath between sentences. He’s only had up to a third-grade education, I remember. But the nice thing is that when he reads so slowly, every word feels weighty with importance. And this way, Wendell and his mom and dad can understand the Spanish more easily.