Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (21 page)

Then I notice lots of little rainbows popping up from the tops of the palm trees, and all these orange flowers by the gate open their petals and blossom right before our eyes. Everything looks totally magical, and I wonder why I never noticed until now how amazing the moments after La Lluvia are. Even Kyle gets this silly smile on his face. Roo skips around, splashing through the courtyard to pick one of the big orange flowers and shove it behind her ear.

“Oh pretty!” Roo yells. Then, “
¡Hola, señora!
” she cries across the
courtyard, and I turn to see the witch standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at us from behind her black lace veil. I’m so filled with excitement that the veil doesn’t even creep me out right now. “
Es muy bonito después de La Lluvia, ¿verdad?
” Roo calls to Señora V, and I’m going,
Seriously, where the
heck
did she learn all that Spanish?

I look over at Kyle to ask him what Roo said and when he taught her that and why he didn’t teach me, but he’s standing there looking at me and I forget what I was going to say.

“You believe we can do this,” he says. I’m not sure whether it’s a question or a statement.

“I do,” I say, believing it completely at this particular radiant moment, the image of the Lava Throat still vivid in my mind. And then I get this funny little feeling, remembering that
I do
is exactly what people say at weddings.

By the time I look back over to where Roo is prancing around in front of the witch, the orange flower already looks wilty, like a dirty dishrag flopping over her head.

That night at dinner, Mom tells us that Kyle and Señor and Señora Villalobos will be sharing our table at the Gold Circle Investors’ Gala on Saturday. Patricia Chevalier asked Mom where we’d like to be seated and Mom thought it would be more fun to be with people we know, even though otherwise we might have lucked out and been seated with actual famous people. I shoot Roo an Oh-My-Gosh-Are-We-Really-Going-to-Try-to-Mess-Up-the-Gold-Circle-Investors’-Gala glance but she’s so good at keeping secrets that she doesn’t react at all, not even to sneak a look back at me.

“Oh yay!” Roo says. “Everyone together! I can’t wait to have a fancy dinner with Dad plus all of us!”

“Daddy,” Mom says with a gigantic smile, “will not be sitting with us. He has other obligations at the gala.”

“What?” Roo pouts. “That’s dumb.”

Mom just shrugs gently. And I have to say I’m pretty freaked out by that gigantic smile on her face. It’s a huge, blank smile. A Yoga Smile. Her eyes seem focused inward, like she’s radiating all that empty bliss outward with her mouth but not with her mind. Plus: It’s weird to hear her refer to Dad as
Daddy
. She never does that. She’ll say
Dad, or your father
, or
James
, or
Jimbo
, or
my beloved birdbrain
. But never
Daddy
, which is too babyish, she always said. And why does she have to smile like that when delivering the bummer news that we don’t get to sit with Dad? A cold, clamping sensation seizes my stomach. Am I just paranoid from all the crazy stuff that’s been going on lately, or is Mom truly under some kind of yoga enchantment that’s totally draining her brain?

Anyway, I do a little experiment: I inform Mom that Roo and I are going back into the jungle before dawn tomorrow because we had such a great time watching the sunrise with Kyle this morning. If Mom were her normal self, she’d ask a bunch of questions about that—what was it like, and what animals did we see, and do we really have to wake up before dawn again, and aren’t we tired. But instead, she just nods and says, “Lovely, lovely.”

Surprisingly enough, it’s Ken/Neth who distracts me from Mom’s freakiness, by asking how our Spanish is coming and clapping when Roo, and then even I, say a few little things in Spanish. The truth is: Ken/Neth is nice. I never said Ken/Neth wasn’t nice! Maybe he’s an amazing actor and it’s a big show he’s putting on. I try once again to be scared of him, really I do. I try to imagine that he’s dangerous. I remind myself that he could very well be a spy from La Lava. I make an effort to feel creeped out by his stupid, innocent-seeming jokes. But it’s just so obvious to me that he’s a genuine goofball who doesn’t know anything about anything. And frankly, right now it’s kind of comforting to have an adult around
who’s actually paying attention to us and asking us questions and at least trying to make us laugh, while Mom on the other hand just keeps making occasional meaningless comments about Relaxation and Dumbation, saying things like, “I did Downward Dog for five minutes today—do you understand how hard that is?” And inside I’m going,
No, I have no idea how hard that is, nor do I ever want to know
.

As we’re strolling across the concrete courtyard back to our rooms after dinner, the night all velvety except for the fluorescent-pink
SELV L DGE
sign, Ken/Neth stops us.

“Ruby. Madeline. Sylvia,” he says, turning to face us.

“Yeah?” Roo says.

“I just want you to know that you are three of the strongest, most amazing women I’ve ever come across.” He says it in this super-sincere, intense way. “You’ve been through so much this year, and you are all so … strong and amazing. You amaze me.”

“Thanks,” we all sort of whisper. I feel myself blushing in the darkness, and at the same time I wonder why he can’t seem to think of any words besides
strong
and
amazing
.

Then he starts walking again and we start walking again.

“Sorry if that was weird,” he says, more to Mom than to us, “but I really mean it. You guys are just amazing.”

“Thanks,” Mom says, “for those uplifting words, Ken. We appreciate it.”

He did mean it, I know he did, and you know what? He’s totally right. It’s about time someone came out and said that to us.

“What’s that?” Mom says a little later, when she comes to tuck in Roo.

“Nothing,” Roo says, shoving the glowing golden feather under her pillow. She’s been lying on her bunk, holding the feather up
to the light and squinting at it in preparation for The Big Search tomorrow.

“Seriously, what is it?” Mom says. She walks over and reaches under the pillow.

“No, no, no!” Roo practically screeches. But the feather is already in Mom’s hand.

“Re-
lax
!” Mom says. She suddenly sounds like her old self. Smart and determined and concerned about us. And I’m flooded with relief. “Where’d you get this?”

“I don’t know. In the jungle,” Roo says.

“Where did she get it, Mad?” Mom says. Her voice is very stern.

I shrug indifferently, as though I don’t know a thing about it. “In the jungle, I guess.” Mom stares at me for a few more seconds, but I keep my eyes flat and secret. Man, I’m doing such a good job. Usually I can’t hide anything from Mom. Usually I’d just start telling her everything. I guess I’ve been learning from Kyle and Roo.

Mom gazes at the soft shimmering feather for a moment, and then the enormous Yoga Smile spreads across her face again.

“Well,” she says, “okay.” And I’m immediately disappointed that she gave up so easily. If she weren’t all spacey now, she’d never let this kind of thing go. She
has
to know, or at least part of her has to know, that she’s holding a Lava Throat feather! She loves Dad, and Dad loves birds, and Dad taught her a
lot
about birds over the years. If only she hadn’t been yogafied. Then she’d keep asking us questions until we’d have to tell her what’s been going on. Part of me wishes she would ask and ask and ask, and then once she knew everything she could tell us exactly what to do.

She bends down and crawls into bed beside Roo, handing the feather back to her.

“It’s a very beautiful feather, Roo,” she says brightly.

“I know,” Roo says, clutching the feather. “Hey, bedtime story, please?”

But Mom’s bedtime stories just make me miss Dad’s bedtime stories. Dad’s are always long and complicated and wonderful. In comparison, Mom’s are pretty much disappointing. Dad can make up wild adventures and fairy tales, while Mom can only tell stories from real life.

I tune out the story Mom tells Roo about her first trip to Latin America when she was seventeen and instead try to write a poem. But I’m having trouble writing anything tonight. It’s almost like there’s too much to put into a single poem. The color of the mud in the jungle, the way it felt to be walking there in the early-morning dark, the glowing mushrooms. Seeing Dad. I keep having trouble so what I end up doing is drawing the volcano in my journal, the perfect shape with a wisp of smoke coming out the top.

Finally Mom leaves, and for maybe the first time ever since The Weirdness, I don’t feel a ping of sadness as she closes the door behind her.

“Y
ou know the drill,” Roo says in the morning after Kyle’s knock wakes us.

Yet another phrase from Dad. He loved to say that.
You know the drill
.

We’re so focused (and, in my case, stressed out) this morning that neither of us comments on the crop of yellow flowers growing from Roo’s toes. But Kyle’s words about the fungus flowers keep playing through my head—
a sign of being close to the goddess of the volcano, close to the goddess of the volcano, close to the goddess of the volcano
—as Roo hops around the room, getting dressed, sticking the golden feather into her pocket.

“You better be good today,” she warns me as we exit our room and step into the predawn darkness, where Kyle awaits us with his transparent bird net in hand. Man, why does Roo have to talk to me that way, as though I’m the little sister?

Then again, it
is
true that I’m way more likely to get freaked out when we’re out there in the jungle trying to do something that’s probably impossible.

By the time day breaks, we’ve veered off Invisible Path and have been walking for what feels like weeks. It’s even grayer and heavier than yesterday morning. Roo, a few feet ahead of me, keeps putting little skips of excitement into her step. I couldn’t skip right now if someone paid me. The thrilled feeling that struck me yesterday during La Lluvia has faded. The heaviness of the day makes it especially ominous to be heading into the depths of the jungle. I try to distract myself by paying attention to the flowers we pass—weird spiky-looking pink flowers I’ve never seen before (maybe the extra-humid weather is making them blossom?), and also those big orange flowers that appeared after La Lluvia yesterday, all wilted and dead now, faded carcasses on the jungle floor. I spot poisonous-looking flashes of bright red and yellow as bugs and frogs, and probably snakes too, move amid the trees. The jungle seems ferocious to me today, and with each step my sense of threat increases, until my heart feels like a continual whir of motion, no beats at all. Meanwhile, Roo keeps rushing perkily through the jungle behind Kyle as though she’s done this a million times before.

Was it really only two days ago that we set out into the jungle to beg Dad not to capture and kill any LTVTs? Was it really only
yesterday
that we set out to offer him our help in capturing LTVTs? And here we are, and the gala is tomorrow, and we fly home on Sunday, and it feels like our entire future depends on us finding an LTVT, like,
now
.…

“So,” I say, the first word any of us has said in a long time, “I know we need to capture
it
today”—Roo and Kyle have taken to calling the bird
it
, so I guess I better too—“but how exactly are we going to do that? Are we just going to, sort of, wander around the jungle?” I don’t mean to sound quite as negative as I do, but I can’t think of a more positive way to say it.

Roo sighs with irritation at my questions. I can tell her exasperation
is only a show, though. In truth she’s buzzing with so much energy that nothing could bother her.

“Weren’t you
listening
?” she says. “We’re going to find
it
, easy-peasy.”

Okay, sure, easy-peasy, finding a basically extinct bird in a crazy jungle, whatever, but what I want to discuss is
methodology
, as Dad would say. No matter how brilliant a bird-tracker you may be, it’s not as though this is a straightforward task. I wish I felt calm, logical, smart. I wish the day weren’t so gosh darn
humid
, filling my brain with fog. I wish I weren’t just gazing out into layers upon layers upon layers of jungle where hundreds of Lava Throats could hide without anyone having any idea. I think back to Kyle’s Polaroid, the bird ready to spring into life and fly out of the photograph. How will we ever find, much less catch, a pigeon-sized creature like that in all this chaos and vegetation?

“Easy-peasy?” I repeat sarcastically. “Yeah, the way a Herculean labor is
easy-peasy
.” Herculean labor: another of Dad’s favorite phrases, and pretty impressive for a twelve-year-old to use if I do say so myself, though Kyle doesn’t seem to notice.

“Remember what Dad always says about tracking!” Roo scolds me. “
You have to notice the tiniest things in the world. You have to think like a bird.
”