The Indigo Notebook (7 page)

“These ladies should star in a laundry detergent commercial,” I whisper to Wendell.

He gives a half-smile, not moving his gaze from the raindrops meandering down the clouded windowpane.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask, hoping he won’t say his ex-girlfriend.

“Wondering if they’ll be happy to see me. I mean, maybe I’m someone’s dark secret.” He turns to me. “What about your father?”

“What about him?”

“Where is he?”

“Who knows. We never met.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Two letters. J.C.”

“Initials?”

I nod. “But I don’t know if they’re his first and last initials or first and middle or what.”

Wendell gives an encouraging half-smile. “At least it’s something.”

“I’d rather have a crystal. Something to hold on to. To sleep with under my pillow.”

He looks down. I bet he’s slept with that crystal under his pillow. “Think you’ll find him someday?” he asks.

I consider how much to tell him. “I’ve made up plenty of fantasies over the years,” I say finally, twisting my rings. “In Laos, I went through this phase where I convinced myself I’d run into him on the street. So I looked at every face that passed for some man who looked like half of me. I tried as hard as I could not to blink, because what if I blinked and I missed him? Soon my friends started asking me why I bugged out my eyes all the time, and then Layla started saving up money to get my thyroid tested, so I stopped. I let it go.”

I glance up, a little embarrassed.

His voice comes out low. “And now what do you think about him?”

“I’ll probably never meet him. Layla doesn’t know anything about him. But I think he must be a mix of all the parts of me that she doesn’t get.”

Wendell nods, poking at the torn seat fabric in front of him. “When I meet my birth parents, I think my weirdness will make sense.”

“What weirdness?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“No I won’t.”

“Forget it.” And he turns back to the raindrops.

When I was little and asked Layla about my father, she’d say something like, “Oh, my darling Zeeta, he’s a creature of the sea. A man of the moon. When he plays guitar, you fall into the place where everything is music.” It felt like a game, a quirky version of a bedtime story, but once I was older, it drove me crazy. On my thirteenth birthday, over the strawberry shortcake she’d made, I interrogated her.

“What’s J.C. stand for?”

She played with the whipped cream. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” I jabbed my fork into a strawberry.

She sighed. “I was nineteen, on a Greek island, drunk on a jug of red wine. There were a bunch of us on the beach that night—ragtag backpackers around a bonfire. I was looking at
the sea, feeling lonely, wondering what I was going to do with my life, when he emerged from the water. Like some sea creature turned human.”

I stabbed another strawberry. “Layla. Give me the truth. No fairy-tale crap.”

“This is it, I mean it. He sat in the sand next to me and talked about the ocean and sea turtle eggs and the moon.”

“Where was he from?”

She reached across the table, touched my cheek. “Love, I know it’s hard for you to accept. But I just don’t know.”

I leaned back, my stare icy. There had to be something, some key. It was just a matter of sifting through Layla’s infuriatingly vague, flaky memory.

“Well, did he have an accent?”

She rubbed her forehead. “He spoke English well. I couldn’t put my finger on his accent.” She was starting to crack. “Honestly, Z, I was young and I hadn’t traveled that much yet and I don’t know.” Her voice shook, her lip quivered, tears seeped out.

It made me happy. “Slut,” I whispered.

Layla was quiet for a long, long time. Finally, she wiped her face and said, “If I hadn’t had that night, you wouldn’t be here. And you’re everything, Z. The light of my existence.”

Later that night, I started feeling bad. I took the cake from the fridge and cut two pieces. I even lit a candle. “Hey, maybe J.C. was a college kid on summer break,” I said as a kind of peace offering. “Maybe he was a marine biology major with a minor in music.”

“Well,” she said, picking at the cake, “I guess it’s possible.”

So that’s what I decided. By now he must be director of a giant city aquarium, maybe even SeaWorld. He probably had kids—maybe my half brother and half sister. That Greek island trip was a little blip in the landscape of his wonderfully normal existence. And tragically, he was oblivious to its consequences.

The bus slows at the base of a steep, cobbled road that meanders up into the mountains. Far above, the gray peaks wear long, green robes, swirling into valleys, rippling into smooth mounds. Patches of leaves and grass and dark soil form a haphazard pattern, like scraps of velvet and suede and silk stitched together. White houses with tiled roofs spread in clusters across the hillsides. I spot a candy-pink house at the turnoff, which Gaby described as a landmark. She instructed us to walk up the hill for a kilometer or two, then turn left toward the houses.

“Let’s go,” I say to Wendell, slinging my pack over my shoulder. It’s heavy with fruit I picked up at the market to offer the locals as gifts. He follows me, bumping into people and saying
“perdón, perdón”
with his American accent. I’ll have to teach him to roll his R’s sometime.

We head uphill on the muddy road flecked with worn stones, bits of grass poking through here and there. The rain falls in tiny droplets, cold and silver, carrying the smell of wet earth. I whip out my hooded emerald cloak from Morocco and wrap it around my shoulders.

Through the mist, a woman in a black shawl passes, carrying a bundle of firewood on her back, followed by two men, water dripping from the edges of their hats. I say good morning in Quichua, as Gaby taught me.
“Alli punlla.”

“Alli punlla,”
they answer, surprised.

After they pass, Wendell makes a low whistle. “How many languages do you speak, Zeeta?”

“Over a dozen, but only well enough for pleasantries. Deep discussions about politics and the universe and long-lost fathers? Maybe seven.”

“You scare me,” he says.

He’s not the first guy to say that. I’ve given up on trying to figure out exactly what they’re scared of and how seriously they mean it. In every country we’ve lived in, boys my age—and girls, too, for that matter—have hung out with me because I’m exotic. Sometimes they confess their deep, dark secrets (which I promptly record in my notebook), but only because I’m an outsider and won’t judge them. And I’m always leaving again soon anyway. Most kids keep a friendly distance, as though I’m a fascinating yet unpredictable animal. Certain older people, like Gaby, seem to take it all in stride, and embrace me like a temporary granddaughter or niece.

We cross old, weed-filled train tracks, and Wendell whips out his camera and snaps a picture. “Perspective shots turn out great.” He turns to me, clicks, and carefully tucks the camera back inside his shirt. I wonder what his sort-of-ex-girlfriend
will say when she sees me in his pictures. I wonder what he’ll say about me.
Oh, she’s just this girl I’ll never see again. Just my translator
.

I’ve had my flings with tourist boys. The first one was when I was thirteen, in Brazil, and spent a blissful week body-boarding and holding hands with adorable French Olivier. Last year, on Phi Phi Island, I met an Australian, Patrick, with ice-blue eyes and freckles. For two weeks, we surfed and snorkeled and swam and kissed and went on long walks. Both times, for months afterward, I wrote them e-mails and listened to our music and mooned over their pictures and reread their notebook pages. Then their e-mails stopped. After the Australian, I finally faced the truth. For them, I was nothing more than a vacation-girl hookup, an exciting break from real life.

But this
is
my real life, this endless vacation.

I glance at Wendell. His lips are tender and curved like a Buddha’s lotus-flower mouth, and purplish-blue in the cold. I will not be his fling. Especially knowing he’s in love with a sort-of-ex-girlfriend.

Kids’ voices drift toward us, muffled through the damp air, squeals and laughter and shouts. Through the fog, I can just make out three girls running from a house to a pigpen and back again, playing chase. In their paths, chickens squawk as the kids barrel through.

I stride up to the girls. They look about four, six, and nine years old. The oldest one’s wearing a white embroidered
blouse, gold beads, a cardigan, and an
anaco—
a straight, wraparound skirt—while the littler ones have on jeans and Disney polar fleece sweatshirts with hoods. They have round, pretty faces, glistening eyes, cheeks pink with cold. At first they look about to run at the sight of us, but instead, on second thought, they giggle.

“Buenos días,”
I say.

“Buenos días,”
they reply shyly.

“I’m Zeeta. And this is Wendell.”

The oldest one says, “I’m Eva. This little one’s my
ñaña
Odelia, and she’s my other
ñaña
, Isabel.”

“Well,
chicas
, we’re looking for Wendell’s birth parents. He was adopted by an American family as a baby. Want to be our guides? Introduce us to the people in your town?”

The girls stare at Wendell and titter and confer in Quichua, and then Eva says, “Come with us. There aren’t that many houses. We’ll just take you to all of them.” The littlest, Odelia, takes one of my hands, and Isabel takes the other, and we set off down the road. They don’t seem to notice the drizzle, and soon they’re shooting off questions like fireworks.
Where are you from? Do you have animals? Are you two married?
I burst out laughing at the married one, but then remember that Gaby got married when she was fifteen. It isn’t so far-fetched to them.

They chatter and tell stories that I translate in snatches to Wendell—a rich man on the hill who made a pact with the devil, a greedy man whose hacienda was magically drowned in a lake, a woman named Mamita Luz who sounds like
everyone’s fairy godmother. Mother Luz. Mother Light. They particularly love talking about her. She’s the mother of all the children of the village, they say. She gives all children fresh-baked still-warm bread so that not a single child will ever go hungry. Her husband is Silvio, but everyone calls him Taita Silvio. Father Silvio. “We’ll go there after we finish,” Eva says, “to eat bread.”

Timidly, Odelia takes Wendell’s hand. “If you don’t find your mother, Mamita Luz will be your mother.”

After I translate, Wendell gives me a look full of questions.

I shrug, mystified.

The houses are spaced far apart, each with its pens of pigs, its slew of dogs, its cow or horse or donkey, and the occasional beat-up truck. Some buildings are cement, some adobe, some put together with an assortment of scrap wood. At the first house, three round, pretty women are working under a shelter that lets a little drizzle through. They’re taking hardened corn kernels off cobs, but they stop and smile when we approach. “Sit down, sit down,” they insist, pulling up extra plastic lawn chairs.

They’re pleased with the peaches I give them and amused that we offer to help them strip the corn kernels. We talk for a while, going over the same questions the girls asked us.
Wendell’s from Colorado. I’m from nowhere. No, we’re not married
. (I can’t help blushing at that one.)
The only animals in the picture are Wendell’s corgi-Lab mix and his ancient goldfish. No, not a single pig or sheep
.

Soon our fingertips are growing sore from the kernel
stripping. When we get to the part about Wendell’s birth parents, the women turn their palms faceup. “Only God knows.” The oldest woman gives us two eggs fresh from under her hen as a goodbye present.

At the next house, a family invites us inside. They’re eating around a long table, about ten of them, ranging in age from three to seventy, with the TV blaring a singing talent show. They accept a bag of strawberries and make us have a bowl of potato soup with them as we shout over the TV about Wendell’s search.

They speak among themselves in Quichua and, finally, shake their heads. “Sorry, we don’t know. Only God knows.”

Wendell doesn’t seem too disappointed, probably because everyone’s nice and feeds us and acts concerned. They’re all amazed that Wendell doesn’t speak Quichua, much less Spanish. “But you have our face!” they exclaim. “And you even wear your hair long, like us!”

All afternoon, we go from house to house. It’s the same with the next seven houses. People share food, talk, and ultimately claim that only God knows.

And now it’s sunset and for the past hour, little Odelia’s been pleading, “Now can we go to Mamita Luz’s? Now? How much longer till Mamita Luz’s?”

It’s almost dark, and we have to go back soon. “Okay,
chica
. Just for a few minutes.”

She claps her hands and does a little dance.

On the way there, I ask Eva, “What about your parents? They might know something.”

A cloud passes over her face. “Our
mamá
is out,” she says, her voice suddenly quiet. “She works as a maid in Otavalo all day.”

“What about your father?”

The girls look at one another.

“He’s sick,” Eva says.

“Yes, sick,” Isabel says.

Solemnly, Odelia adds, “Very sick.”

T
he girls lead us through a misty maze of paths and corn rows. Odelia’s a little hummingbird of darting energy, chatting nearly nonstop, her eyes impossibly wide. Isabel walks and talks a little slower, but somehow manages to get a word in edgewise here and there. Eva’s observant and protective like a mother wolf, warning us to watch our step over holes and rocks, her eyes flicking around, always on the lookout for unseen dangers.

We walk on a path by an irrigation ditch, a two-foot-wide channel of water with corn plants on either side reaching higher than our heads, making a tunnel over us, sheltering us from the drizzle. To our left, the cornfield ends in a backyard. From the wall of the house, a clay mound protrudes, a giant bump in the adobe.