Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (11 page)

“She doesn’t want you to say ‘Dad’?”

“She was speaking
Spanish
, okay? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

We both get quiet. For some reason it feels like we’re having a fight even though we’re not. I don’t want us to be annoyed with each other right now.

“Ken grabbed my wrist really hard when the lights went out,” I tell her, trying to make it so that we’re sharing our creepy secrets rather than just sitting there with them.

“That wasn’t Ken,” Roo informs me.

“What do you mean? How would you know?” Little Miss Know-It-All, I want to add.

“That guy grabbed me too. I had to bite his arm so he’d let go of us. And he had a hairy arm. Not like Ken/Neth’s.”

It’s true. Ken/Neth has practically no arm hair.

“You
bit
his arm?”

“Yeah,” Roo says. I can hear the shrug in her voice. “I’m a good biter.”

It’s true. She got kicked out of more than one preschool for biting.

“Well. Who was he?” I ask her.

Then below me I hear a familiar crinkle of paper and feel suddenly slammed with tiredness. That’s the sound of Roo pulling out The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter.

“Roo,” I say.

She doesn’t respond.

“Roo,” I say again.

She still doesn’t respond.

“Please put that away,” I order her. I don’t want to lean over and glare at her because then I’d have to see The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter.

“It doesn’t make sense, but I
know
it makes sense,” Roo says. “We have to break the code. We
have
to. Then we’ll know what’s up.”

“Roo, it’s time for bed.”

But Roo ignores me. Quietly she reads aloud the nonsense poem from Dad:

Just a messed-up version of the old nursery rhyme we always used to say to Roo when she was naughty (
There was a little girl / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead / And when she was good / She was very, very good / And when she was bad / She was horrid
). But the really freaky part is the drawings, all the little-girly flowers and vines and butterflies around the border. As though Dad had been magically transformed into an eight-year-old girl. Never in our whole lives has Dad ever drawn anything for us. He is a Very Bad Drawer. Mom’s the one who can draw.

“
I LOVE YOU LEFT RIGHT UP DOWN LOL! XOXO, DADDY,
” Roo reads from the bottom of the page. Also freaky. Dad would
never say
LOL
. He probably doesn’t even know what it stands for. And he’s never signed a letter
XOXO
. And he’s never called himself Daddy. He’s always signed off with something like, “Love, Your Crazy Old Stinky Bird-Brained Dad.”

I’m relieved to hear Roo putting The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter back in its envelope. I tug on the chain of the lightbulb and the room goes black.

“Mad,” Roo says, her little voice floating up to me in the darkness, “there’s something I have to show you tomorrow. When we get back here after the face massages.”

But I pretend I’m already asleep.

W
hen I step into the Selva Shop the next morning, Kyle doesn’t even look up. He’s sitting behind the counter, gazing down at the binoculars hung around his neck. I give the door an extra rattle, hoping that’ll get his attention, but he keeps ignoring me. I was excited to come here, but now I just want to sneak away, and I would, except that Mom told me to tell Kyle we’ll be gone this morning and would like to have our Spanish lesson this afternoon instead.

“Um,” I say.

Finally Kyle looks up.

“
Hola,
” he says coolly. As though he’s talking to any old tourist. As though we didn’t stand together in the rain yesterday beneath a blue umbrella flower.

“We’regoingtoLaLavathismorningsonoSpanishlessonokay?” I say super quick.

He gazes at me, his eyes dull, barely even golden right now.

“Okay,” he says as though he couldn’t care less.

Ouch.

“Well,” I say, “bye.” I turn and get out of there as quickly as possible.

I’m so bugged by him that I don’t even realize until we’re halfway to La Lava that I forgot to tell him we’d like to have Spanish class this afternoon instead. Oh
well
.

When Ken/Neth drops us off at the lobby of La Lava, Roo immediately asks Patricia Chevalier if we can see Dad. Patricia Chevalier gives her an exquisite smile.

“I apologize, sweetie,” she says, “but your father is working in the jungle today.”

Roo looks terrifically disappointed.

“Now, now, sweetie,” Patricia Chevalier tells her. “You are going to love your facial. Please, follow me. I will show you our world-class spa facilities.”

It’s weird to hear such nice words spoken without niceness. I wonder if Mom and Roo notice the not-niceness too. But Mom just smiles yogically at all of us before vanishing down a hallway to wherever Relaxation and Dumbation takes place.

Patricia Chevalier leads me and Roo down a white marble staircase right off the lobby, each step as wide as three normal steps. La Lava seems even more spectacular now than it did the first time we came. Maybe because we’ve been spending so much time at the crazy old Selva Lodge, but everything here seems a hundred times more elegant than anything I’ve ever seen. And the air smells like honey! And it’s the perfect temperature. And the sound of the waterfalls makes my heart feel smooth.

The marble staircase goes down and down. “Ooo, it is
so
pretty here,” Roo coos. “I want to drink these stairs—they look like
milk
!”

At the bottom of the stairs, Patricia Chevalier veers to the right,
around a curving white wall. Roo skips ahead a few feet and I hurry to keep up with her. I turn the bend just in time to see her crash head-on into a woman in a turquoise silk robe coming from the opposite direction.

Oh. My. God.

I can’t breathe.

Roo just crashed into
Vivi
.

Vivi looks shocked and Patricia Chevalier looks enraged. Roo lets out a shaky giggle and I fall back a step to hide behind Patricia Chevalier.

But Vivi stares right at me, which makes my vision go all blurry with nervousness. I remember the way she glared at the Spaniards in
Rosa of the Flowers and Knives
.

“I didn’t realize children were allowed down here,” Vivi says. Her voice is low, sort of rich and sort of harsh, different than it sounds in the movies.

“Oh, well, it is, you know …,” Patricia Chevalier fumbles. It’s
so
weird to see her acting this awkward. “… a … an … unusual … circumstance.”

Vivi breezes past Patricia Chevalier, still staring at my face. Then—get this!—she touches my forehead with her thumb.

Vivi. Touching me. I have goose bumps.

“I wish,” Vivi says, “I could just rip this skin right off you and put it on me.”

Patricia Chevalier gives a long, high, fake laugh.

“Thank you,” I whisper, though I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to say.

But it makes Vivi smile, and her smile is partway gorgeous and partway fierce.

“Thank me?” she says, her thumb still on my forehead. “Don’t,
chica
. I’m not joking. I’ve been waiting
three days
for my treatment”—
she shoots her glare at Patricia Chevalier, who blushes nervously—“and they’ve got me playing a twenty-one-year-old princess next, and I’ve got somewhere I have to be next Monday.”

“It’s only called a catfight if men are watching.” The words suddenly burst out of me. “Otherwise it’s a clash of goddesses.” My favorite Vivi quote from
The Secret Life of Cleopatra
.

“Well, how about that,” Vivi says, looking pleased. “Someone’s been paying attention.”

She half pats, half slaps my cheek and then drops her hand.

“
Adiós
, kiddos. Have fun,” she says before vanishing up the stairway in a swirl of turquoise silk.

Roo and I stare at Vivi’s back and then at each other. She’s
just
like Cleopatra! Nice and mean at the exact same time.

Now Patricia Chevalier seems eager to get rid of us. She hurries down the hallway, her face pale and her hands trembling. “It could have been worse,” she mutters to us, but then I realize she’s muttering into a tiny microphone clipped to the inside of her blouse.

“Here,” she says coldly, pausing at a beautiful wooden door carved with images of naked dancing women. “Ladies’ changing room. Your temporary lockers are labeled with your names. Put on the robes and wait in the Silent Lounge.”

Then she turns and marches away from us, her very high heels making those gunshot sounds on the marble.

It’s wonderful once she’s gone. Roo pushes open the naked-women door and we step into a room that leaves even Roo speechless for a moment. The floor is a whirling red and gold mosaic. There’s a row of golden sinks, and between each sink is a red bowl shaped like a pair of hands, and each pair of hands cups a floating pink flower. Across from the golden sinks there’s a row of showers carved from volcanic rock, the golden shower curtains pulled aside to reveal golden spigots gleaming against the black rock. The whole place is
fragrant with a smell somewhere between cinnamon and roses. In the middle of the room, there’s this enormous black cauldron filled with floating red flowers.

“The
walls
!” Roo exclaims, rushing toward the nearest one.

The walls, I notice then, are covered in a thin film of water, like a permanent waterfall, the soft swoosh running down black marble. When Roo touches the wall, the water parts around her hand. She looks back at me and squeals.

We have the place to ourselves. Even though there are two rows of wooden lockers, some labeled with names, no one else is around. We find our lockers easily,
MADELINE
and
RUBY
in red-ink cursive. Dark green terry-cloth robes hang inside them.

“Dang,” says Roo. “I want a silk robe like Vivi had!”

I look over at her, about to tell her she’s a spoiled brat.

“Just
kidding
!” she says. “Jeez!”

We take off our T-shirts and shorts and sneakers and put on the robes, then lock the lockers and hang the little golden keys around our wrists.

“So, what now?” Roo says, walking toward one of the water-walls and running her fingers along it. I follow her, hesitantly sticking my fingertips into the rushing water—who knows if we’re even allowed to touch it. I’m surprised by how smooth and soothing the water feels.

“Okay, so is this the so-called Silent Lounge?” I ask Roo, gazing at the pink velvet couches and wondering which of them might qualify as the “Silent Lounge.”

“Hmm,” Roo says thoughtfully, looking all around the room. Then she lets out a soft yelp and rushes off toward a dark, narrow doorway beyond the showers—a doorway I didn’t notice until this exact second.

I step behind Roo into a small room that feels
way
peaceful, no gold or red or pink here. It’s a very quiet, very gray room, lit only
by a few candles tucked into crevices in the volcanic rock walls. In the center there’s a low table with a pitcher and glasses. The table is surrounded by many gray cubes, large enough to sit or lie on.

“Well,” Roo says, “I guess this is it!”

“
Shhh!
” I say. Somehow it feels wrong to talk here. It feels like the kind of place where you shouldn’t make any noise at all, where you should move in slow motion, but Roo skips over to the table and pours whatever’s in the pitcher into two of the glasses.

We haven’t even had time to discuss the drink—is it iced tea? juice? water? and what’s that flavor? grapefruit? lavender?
basil
?—when we hear our names, very softly but coming from all around, as though the walls are talking.

“
Madeline. Madeline.
”

“
Ruby. Ruby.
”

It’s too dim to see where they came from, but here they are, one touching my elbow and the other touching Roo’s, two women in gray pajama outfits, separating us and leading us out of the Silent Lounge through two different narrow doorways. I know it’s silly, but I start missing Roo the second she disappears through her doorway.

I had no idea that getting a facial meant being blindfolded. But that’s the first thing this lady does after leading me down a short hallway and helping me onto a high bed and tucking the sheet in: She wraps something around my eyes so I can’t see. I get only a glimpse of the small, shadowy room (a pot of orchids in the corner, a gleaming gray wall) before my eyes are sealed.

“What’s your name?” I whisper, but I guess she doesn’t speak English, because she just strokes my forehead and puts on some weird music that sounds like lots of gongs being hit one after the other.

Then she spreads all sorts of things on my face, hot things and cold things, and then she rubs my face and then there’s all this steam
blowing in my face, and then she starts picking at the one tiny little zit I happen to have high up on my forehead where it’s covered by my bangs anyway.