The Indigo Notebook (29 page)

S
everal years ago, in the Ecuadorian Andes, my Otavaleño friend told me a fascinating true story. One day, a teenage boy traveled from Europe to my friend’s indigenous community, searching for his birth parents. The boy looked just like my friend, yet spoke no Spanish or Quichua. After a lot of digging (with the help of his translator girlfriend), he discovered he was my friend’s half brother, and was embraced by their family. I loved this story, and started weaving it into a novel.

More than a year later, I returned to Ecuador. One evening, I found myself in an adobe curing room with a
curandero
spitting fireballs at me (sound familiar?). When he asked me to imagine what I truly wanted, I was prepared to envision a successful pregnancy, which was what I’d spent the last five
years wishing for. My husband and I desperately wanted a baby, but had struggled with infertility. As I stood there in the darkness, soaking wet, wrapped in the hum of Quichua chants, it occurred to me: Maybe a successful pregnancy isn’t the key to my happiness. Maybe my baby is growing inside someone else, waiting for me. Maybe our spirits are connected. Maybe, somehow, they’ve been connected all along.

After returning from Ecuador, I began the adoption paperwork. Three months later, my husband and I saw a picture of our beautiful one-week-old baby. Over the next nine months, as the paperwork was processed, I wrote a draft of my novel and traveled twice to Guatemala to visit our son. He finally came home with us in December. For the past year, I’ve been finishing this novel, loving my son with every particle of my being, and feeling tired … but happy!

As I wrote Wendell’s story, I thought about the search my son might someday make for his birth parents. Maybe it will be a journey in his imagination, or maybe it will be a physical journey. I hope what he finds at the core of his journey is love, in all its surprising forms.

Laura Resau is the author of
What the Moon Saw
and
Red Glass
, winner of the IRA Young Adult’s Book Award and the Américas Award. With a background in cultural anthropology and ESL (English as a Second Language), she has lived and traveled extensively in Latin America. She now lives in Colorado with her husband and toddler son, whom she adopted from Guatemala while writing this novel. Laura will donate a portion of her royalties to Latin American indigenous rights organizations. Visit her on the Web at
www.lauraresau.com
.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used ficitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Resau

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Coleman Barks for permission to reprint
Rumi excerpts from
The Essential Rumi
, translated by Coleman Barks,
copyright © 1995 by Coleman Barks (HarperSanFrancisco,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Resau, Laura.
The indigo notebook / Laura Resau.
p. cm.
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Zeeta comes to terms with her flighty mother and
their itinerant life when, soon after moving to Ecuador, she helps an American
teenager find his birth father in a nearby village.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89384-1
[1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Single-parent families—Fiction.
3. Fathers—Fiction. 4. Ecuador—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R2978In 2009
[Fic]—dc22     
2008040519

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