Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (19 page)

As we continue up the volcano, Kyle and Roo murmur back and forth to each other in their own language. That language is partly Spanish, so of course I can’t understand much of it, and partly tracking, which I understand even less. Dad and Roo used to talk tracking all the time, but it’s just not my thing so I got used to tuning it out. Anyway, Kyle will point to a bent vine and say to Roo, “
¿Aquí?
” and Roo will say, “
Tal vez.
” Then he’ll point to a snapped branch a little farther along, again asking her “
¿Aquí?
” and she’ll say, “Yeah, because of the angle,” and he’ll “Hmm” thoughtfully in agreement.

Very quickly their tracking leads us off Invisible Path and into pure uninterrupted jungle, the old vine-tripped, branch-slapped, probably-poisonous-snake routine.

“He came through recently, yeah?” Roo whispers.

“That footprint looks at least two days old.”

“But look here! This one doesn’t seem as old.”

“Hmm.
No sé. Tal vez
.”

“That could be a hide, couldn’t it?”

“Could be,” Kyle says, turning his binoculars upward, “but not sure how it would be for high-fliers.”

I keep wanting to say, “
Hola
, is anyone wondering
my
opinion?” but in my heart of hearts I know this is too important for that kind of sensitivity, so I just follow behind and notice the colors of the jungle appearing as the day lightens until we don’t need Kyle’s mushroom anymore. It’s funny in a way, or weird, that all those years Dad taught Roo all these techniques for tracking birds and now she’s using them to track him.

“He came through here,” Roo says after a long silence. “Right through here, earlier today, this morning! See that?”

I peek over her shoulder and follow her pointing finger to a patch of mud. I don’t even see a footprint there. But, “You’re right!” Kyle says, gazing at the mud. “You’re totally right!”
Man
, I think, even though I know it’s an inappropriate thought,
I hope someday he’s that excited by something
I
say
.

I still can’t tell what it is they’re seeing, but whatever it is, I guess it means DAD, which makes my heart do acrobatics.

But not much has changed by midmorning. We’re still just bushwhacking through the jungle, no Dad in sight. It’s the second gray day in a row, which feels strange after the cartoon-perfect weather of the first mornings here. The humid air creates a soggy feeling in my brain. The weather seems to be affecting the birds too—the air
above us is still, almost no movement anywhere. The only birdcalls we hear are distant and muted.

I’m starting to get frustrated and impatient, sweaty and hungry. How in the world are we ever going to find Dad in this crazy jungle? It makes me want to scream. If only we could rewind back to a year ago, when everything was fine.

Roo and Kyle, though, don’t seem discouraged at all. They just keep talking quietly to each other, staring deep into the jungle, looking closely at everything, acting as though we’re about to find Dad any minute now.

I look down and step carefully over a moss-encrusted log, and that’s when they vanish. Because when I look back up, they’ve disappeared. One second they were up there ahead of me, and now they’re gone, absolutely gone.

But I can hear them, shouting and screaming. I run up to where they were a second ago, and when I see them there in the bottom of a pit I’m partly thinking I’d better stick with them, partly not thinking at all, and partly tripping over the same vine that must have tripped them, and then I’m sliding down the muddy wall of the pit, slamming into them as I land.

“Umph,” we all go from the impact.

Kyle looks at me with desperate, disappointed eyes. “Mad!” he says. “Why didn’t you
stay up there
? Then you might have actually been able to help us!”

Roo, who can tell I feel so terrible I’m about to cry, glares at him. “Shut up!” she says. We’re not allowed to say
shut up
. That’s the one thing Dad is strict about. He doesn’t care about bad words. But
shut up
—that’s bad, because it means you aren’t willing to listen. “She didn’t so she didn’t,” Roo informs him, “so that’s that.” I’m too ashamed to make eye contact with either of them.

Kyle backs up as much as he can in the tiny space and takes a
running jump at the muddy walls, grabbing for the vines and roots dangling over the top. But the pit is just deep enough that he can’t reach. He slams himself against the mud wall. “Stupid sinkhole!” he yells. Then, after a few minutes, he shrugs. He slides down to sit with his back against the wall and looks mad. Mad and sad. His silence is actually way worse than his yelling and jumping.

“I’m sorry,” I offer up shakily. I can’t tell if I’m more nervous about Kyle being mad at me or about the fact that we’re stuck in a pit in the middle of the jungle.

“It’s okay,” he says with an exhausted sigh, putting his face in his hands.

Right then Roo’s stomach growls so loudly that we all can hear it. It makes a ferocious sound, like an angry rodent.

“Jeez, Roo!” I can’t help but giggle.

“I’m hungry!” she defends herself.

“Poor Roo,” I say. “I’m hungry too.”

“Poor Mad,” she says, patting my stomach.

Have I mentioned that my little sister is my best friend in the whole wide universe and I love her so much that even when we’re stuck at the bottom of a pit just being near her makes me way less scared than I would be otherwise? Roo digs around in her backpack and comes up with a handful of grape Jolly Ranchers, which is a bummer.

“Ugh, I hate the grape ones,” I say.

“Me too,” Roo says. “That’s why they’re the only ones left.”

But she unwraps three of the Jolly Ranchers and hands one to me.

Kyle’s face is still in his hands. Roo shoves a Jolly Rancher between his thumb and finger.

“I guess we’d better save the other four,” Roo says gloomily, gazing
with longing at the hated grape Jolly Ranchers. “We might be here awhile.”

It’s not till Roo says that—
We might be here awhile
—that I begin to feel deeply scared.

“Please be quiet,” Kyle whispers, his first words in many minutes. His voice is dead calm, nothing like the cold angriness of before. “Something’s coming.”

My heart starts going quadruple time. Panicking, I grab Roo’s hand on one side and Kyle’s on the other. Roo’s is hot and sticky and friendly and squeezes back. Kyle’s is cold and wet and limp.

I strain my ears, try hard to hear whatever it is that Kyle hears, but all I hear are the sounds of the jungle, and they seem to grow louder every second. Or wait. I think I
do
hear something moving through the underbrush—a nightmare come to life—something approaching, approaching.
What is it?
My mind whirls—what’s coming, animal or monster or witch, or, worst of all, someone from La Lava? Yes, I can hear it, can make out footsteps coming toward us, can separate that noise from the jungle noise, and my fear deepens, knotting up my gut.

Then a figure appears above us and stops at the edge of the pit. It’s wearing a black hooded jacket, and its face is hidden by the shadow of the hood. It lifts its right hand as though to wave but then freezes there with its palm facing us. I can feel it staring at us. Its eyes and teeth glow white in the green light of the jungle. It’s like a robot, or an alien, the way it stands there so still and silent as it prepares to do whatever it’s going to do to us. I shut my eyes and hope as hard as I can that whatever it is will leave us alone.

It’s not till Roo says, “Hi, Dad!” that I open my eyes and notice the blinking green light around the figure’s right ankle.

“I thought this pit might slow you down,” Dad says, sitting on
the rim, dangling his legs over the side. He pushes his hood back to reveal newly gray hair. “I barely avoided it myself when I came through here earlier.”

All I can think is,
Oh my
gosh
! He’s being
normal
!
I mean, he seems just like his regular old self, stepping into our kitchen after a trip to the grocery store, getting ready to tell us about the Risky Item. (Dad had this rule that each time he went grocery shopping he had to buy one thing he’d never bought before—an unusual spice, a weird vegetable, a Russian jam, et cetera.)

“You’ve done a fantastic job tracking me today, kids,” Dad continues. “I’m impressed, no doubt about it.”

I glance over at Roo and Kyle, who are the ones Dad should be impressed with. They’re both grinning up at him like fools, and I realize I’ve been grinning up at him like a fool too. Dad’s just that way. There’s just something about him that makes you want to smile. And it feels like now that he’s here, everything’s going to be totally fine.

“Dad!” I find myself calling up to him. “We missed you so much!”

“Well, if you almost fell in it yourself, why didn’t you wait here to warn us about it?” Roo says, half angry and half giggling.

“Don’t even get me started about missing, Madpie,” Dad says to me, and his voice has such a great big huge sadness in it, such a ton of worry, that I’m relieved when he moves on to answer Roo’s question. “I have very important and pressing business to attend to today, Miss KangaRoo. I couldn’t just stand here waiting for three ragamuffins who shouldn’t be in this jungle anyway. But I did plan to circle back here, just in case. And it’s a good thing I did, right?”

Oh man, it is
so
great to hear Dad saying our nicknames!

“I guess so,” Roo says sheepishly. “But mainly what’s cool is that
this whole time we’ve been looking for you and now we found you! Or, I guess, you found us. Anyway, here we are!”

“Dr. Wade,” Kyle says, his voice high and nervous, and I realize that this entire time he’s been silent, “my name is Kyle Nelson Villalobos. I am a great admirer of your work.”

Dad smiles down at Kyle. I can tell he already likes him, which makes me happy.

“I know all about you, Kyle Nelson Villalobos. You’re talented, but you need to move through the rain forest more gently. No rushing, you know?”

Beside me, Kyle blushes. Kyle shy and embarrassed—imagine that!

“But you
do
have what it takes,” Dad goes on. “If you didn’t, I never would’ve been able to catch that bird with you less than twenty feet away.”

Kyle breathes in sharply, surprised, and Dad laughs. It puts a ginormous grin on my face, the sound of Dad laughing. His laugh is one of my favorite sounds in the world, and I didn’t realize until this second how horribly much I’ve missed it.

“Of course I knew you were there, my friend,” Dad says. “You know as well as I do it’s not only birds we birders can sense.”

Kyle swallows hard and then says in the tiniest little voice: “Why did you let it go?”

Dad stretches his arms up over his head and gives a big, bored yawn. “That’s a story for another day.” But I know he doesn’t really feel bored by Kyle’s question. It’s just that he doesn’t want to answer it.

“Dr. Wade,” Kyle says.

“James,” Dad corrects him.

“We know what’s going on,” Kyle continues.

I stare up at Dad, dying to know what he’ll say, what he’ll explain about everything. He peers down at us. He’s acting casual and jolly and normal, which fills me with good feelings, but when I truly look at him I see that his eyes are bloodshot and dart anxiously among our three upturned faces. I glance over at Roo to see if she’s noticing how Dad’s really feeling, but she’s just gazing up at him in her adoring away.

“You do, eh?” Dad says, his warm voice mismatched with his worried face. I keep staring at him, at the stress on his wrinkled forehead and in the tense corners of his mouth.

“We do,” Kyle says solemnly, “and we are here to help.”

“We broke the code in your letter yesterday!” Roo says.

Dad raises his big eyebrows. “Did you,” he says. “Only yesterday?”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Roo says, practically in tears. “I know I should have figured it out sooner, but I couldn’t!”

“No,” Dad says softly, “it’s my fault. I’m sorry. I was trying to hide it well, but not that well. I should’ve known—I was so shocked when you showed up here with Mom. I know I must have acted awfully strange, but I wanted to scare you away from this place. I was desperate for you to turn right around and head back home to safety. I’m sorry, girls. I’m so sorry. I haven’t been at my best. I should have done a better job with that and with the code and with all of it.” The fun, familiar version of Dad is quickly fading, and I’m already missing him again.

“You could never scare us away, Dad!” Roo announces.

“Roo and I,” Kyle says, ignoring Dad’s apologies, “we’re here to help. You know we can help. You know we have it too, Dr. Wade.”

This time Dad doesn’t correct him. I can tell by his expression that he’s busy thinking about other things. And I’m so
concerned about Dad that I barely care that Kyle didn’t mention my name.

“You want to help me?” Dad says thoughtfully, after a long moment.

“Yes!” Roo yelps.

“You promise you’ll do whatever I ask?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” says Roo.

“You’re brave, and willing to do what’s right?”

“Of course,” Kyle says, offended by the question.

“Okay, good,” Dad says. “Now, are you ready for your instructions?”

“Yes,” Roo and Kyle say breathlessly. But I know Dad, and I know he’s got something up his sleeve.

“First off,” Dad says, “I’m going to give you guys a hand getting out of this pit. Second, you’re going to march on down this volcano and find Mom. Third, you girls are going to throw a huge, earth-shattering fit and convince your mother that you have to go home to Denver right away. Make an excuse, be sick or homesick or whatever, but get her and yourselves out of here.”

My first thought is:
Yes, great idea, we
should
go home, back to somewhere safe and normal!
My second thought is:
Good luck getting Ms. Yoga Brain to pay attention to any fit we throw
. My third thought is:
Wait, is home really any safer than here—remember The Creepies?

“What!” Roo says, her good old Roo rage kicking in. “That’s not
helping
you! That’s just running
away
! And how in God’s name do you expect us to abandon our own
father
?”