Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (7 page)

Roo is still standing where Dad left her, staring at his back and making little whimpering sounds. Noticing the noise, Dad turns around and walks over to her. He puts his hand on her head, the exact way he used to. But rather than smiling, Roo just looks
worried. After a few seconds, she wriggles free from him and runs back across the room toward us.

“Madeline,” Dad says, finally turning his attention to me. He never calls me Madeline. I wish he would call me Madpie. I wish a lot of things.

“Hi, Dad,” I say. I feel weird.

“Hi,” he says so softly I can barely hear it.

I feel like I need to do something, say something, to make this all seem less weird.

“It’s really pretty here,” I say, straining to sound normal. “We missed you a ton.”

I guess those were the wrong things to say, because Dad just stares down at me (sadly? madly?).

Mom crosses the room to him. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “Jimbo,” she says again. Her voice is very tender. “Can we talk, just the two of us, for a little while?”

Patricia Chevalier clears her throat.

Dad clears his throat.

“I’m sorry,” Dad tells Mom. “But things are extremely busy right now. A lot of very urgent work to do. It’s absolutely essential that I get back to it immediately.”

Mom lets go of his shoulders. She’s still crying. But now I can see that she’s also angry.

“You are
not
this way,” she practically hisses. “You need to tell me
what’s going on
.”

“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Dad says, and he does sound sorry. But he ought to be calling her Via.

Right then the room is hit with a crazily loud sound, a huge whoosh of noise—a rockslide would sound like this, or an avalanche, or the end of the world—and I scream.

“What
is
that?” Mom shouts.

“The monsoon,” Ken/Neth yells. “Every afternoon at 3:08! You could set your watch by it!”

And that makes me feel like we truly are on another planet, a planet where the weather tells the time.

After that no one says anything for a while; we just stand there in the white marble room in our three little clumps—me and Roo, Mom and Dad, Patricia Chevalier and Ken/Neth—listening to the pounding rain.
How
can it be so loud? There aren’t even any windows here.

“I suppose we should be going, then?” Patricia Chevalier screeches over the noise with a bright smile. “Perhaps the Flynn-Wade family can have another visit later on.”

Dad always used to call us the Flade family. It tickled our funny bone, to call ourselves the Flades. But right now Dad doesn’t say a thing. He just sinks back down into the metal chair.

As I turn to leave I know I’ll never forget this, the sight of our father sitting in that metal chair, elbows on the glass table, holding his head in his hands while the monsoon thunders all around him.

W
e do order fried bananas—actually, fried plantains—at the Selva Café, but it’s not as though we feel very happy about that, or about anything else. The four of us are just sitting here on the white plastic chairs at the white plastic table, not saying anything. It’s a
very
quiet night at the Selva Café, a single waiter serving our table and one other. After trying a few times to get a conversation going, even Ken/Neth finally understands that we all just want him to Be Quiet. Mom’s eyes are super bloodshot and the tendons in her neck are super tense. She looks kind of scary, to be honest. She’s not even trying anymore to pretend for me and Roo that she’s okay, the way she did during The Weirdness. Not that Roo’s paying attention anyway—she’s simply munching away on fried plantains. I’m pretty shocked she can eat so perkily, considering what’s happened today, but as Dad liked to say, Roo has the appetite of a superheroine.

Since three sides of the Selva Café are open air and look right out into the jungle, I spend the whole meal staring into the trees and
imagining Dad popping out from among the vines to tell us he was just playing a practical joke on us today: “I can’t believe you thought I was serious! Don’t you remember how much I love practical jokes? Hey, don’t tell me you’ve already finished the plantains! Let’s go to the pool after dinner.”

It’s still partly light outside, and it feels like this weirdo day is going on forever and ever, and all I want is for it to end, and I know I’ve never been as unhappy as I am right now.

It used to be that whenever I felt sad or angry or jealous, Dad would explain that just a few little chemicals were creating the feeling. He said: Just a few little chemicals, no big deal, easy to ignore.

He also said: Did you win the lottery?

And I said: No.

And he said: Yes you did! You won trillions of lotteries! First you won the lottery of the Big Bang, and then you won the lottery of evolution, and then you won the lottery of me and your mother being assigned to the same dorm in college, and then you won the lottery of our ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends being fools, and then you won the lottery of us falling in love and getting married. Not to mention the lottery of the United States of America and a loving middle-class family.

And I said: Oh.

And Dad said: So I don’t want to ever,
ever
hear you say that you’re unlucky or unfortunate or
anything
. Understand?

And now I’m sitting here in the Selva Café, wondering: Do I still have to feel lucky all the time, even after The Weirdness?

After the dinner plates are cleared, we sit in silence as Mom slurps the last drops from the mango daiquiri Ken/Neth ordered for her.

“Well,” she says, the first word any of us has said in a long time,
“I guess I’ll be doing that Relaxation and Restoration yoga retreat after all.”

“Relaxation and
Rejuvenation
,” Ken/Neth corrects. “Why, that’s great, Sylvia!”

“It sounds like just about what I need right now. Besides, it’s not as though I have any other reason to be here,” Mom says, her teeth clenched.

What about being with
us
? I want to yell.

“Except of course to spend time with the kids,” Mom says, as though she’s reading my mind, “but it’s important for them to have Spanish lessons anyway.”

“Spanish lessons?” I say. This is the first I’ve heard about any Spanish lessons.

“Wha?” Roo says.

“Oh,” Ken/Neth says, “did I not mention that the Villaloboses can hook us up with a babysitter who also teaches Spanish? I’ll go tell them after dessert that we’d like their babysitter starting tomorrow morning.”

Um,
hello
, I’ll be thirteen in September—I can take care of me and Roo, obviously! But I don’t say anything out loud. We’ve already had this fight a bunch of times. I am
so
sick of babysitters. Mom sometimes tries to call them “companions,” as though that’ll trick me into not realizing what they are. We had two different babysitters in Denver this spring, sometimes a spacey college girl and sometimes a cranky old lady.

“Your minds are so malleable now, girls,” Mom says, pushing her empty daiquiri glass away. “You need to take advantage of that. Now’s the time to master a new language. It’s too late for me to learn Spanish. I’m not even going to try.”

“Malleable?” I say.

“So we can say things to each other in Spanish and you won’t understand?” Roo says.

“Flexible, capable of learning easily,” Mom says to me, and then “That’s exactly right” to Roo.

Okay, well, this trip just got more awful, if that’s even possible. Dad doesn’t care about us anymore, Mom would rather do yoga than be with her daughters, Ken/Neth is annoying me more with each passing second, nobody seems to think I’m old enough to baby-sit Roo, and now we have to study Spanish?

“Hey, Roo,” I say, “let’s get outta here.”

She looks at me. Mom let her order coconut ice cream, which hasn’t come yet.

“First can I—” she starts, but I glare at her and she goes, “Okay, yeah, let’s get outta here.”

“Sure, whatever you want,” Mom murmurs, not even noticing that I’m trying to be mean by abandoning her at the dinner table.

But even once Roo and I are back in our room, away from Mom and Ken/Neth, I don’t feel much better, because now Roo is being annoying.

“Poor Dad,” she says. “This is bad.”

“Poor Dad?” I say. “More like poor jerk.”

“Dad’s not a jerk!” Roo protests. “He’s just having problems is all.”

“Yeah,
jerk
problems,” I say.

“Please stop saying that word.”

“You mean
jerk
? Jerk, jerk, jerk.” I can’t help myself. I know I’m being terrible—it’s just that I’m so sad.

“We have to figure out what’s going on,” Roo says, ignoring me.

“He loves birds more than he loves us, that’s what’s going on,” I inform her. “He didn’t want to spend time with us today because he
had to
work
! Not that it’s been seven months or anything since he last saw us.”

“It’s got to be some kind of a code,” Roo whispers, still ignoring me.

“I guess all this time he’s cared more about birds than about us,” I say, so filled with self-pity that it takes me a second to register what Roo said. “What’s got to be some kind of a code?”

“When he put his hand on my head,” Roo says, more to herself than to me, “it was a code.”

“Ruby Flynn Wade,” I say, borrowing the severe tone and use of the full name from Mom, “what the heck are you talking about?”

“At least, I’m pretty sure it was a code,” she says.

“A
code
?”

“See, usually he’d just rest his hand there, but today he squeezed my head,” she murmurs thoughtfully.

“He
squeezed
your head?” For some reason I don’t seem to be able to do anything but echo what Roo says.

“Yeah, like a BE CAREFUL squeeze. Or like a I’M-STILL-THE-SAME-AS-EVER-BUT-I-HAVE-TO-PRETEND-I’M-NOT squeeze,” Roo says, her eyes meeting mine.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe squeezes can contain that much information. I wish I did. Roo’s eyes are so filled with hope, though, that I’m not about to say anything.

“We’ve just got to figure out
what exactly
Dad is doing in the jungle,” Roo informs me.

Thankfully, Mom opens the door to our room just then, so I don’t have to respond to Roo, don’t have to disagree or argue with her.

“My daughters,” she says. I can tell she’s trying very hard to seem cheerful. “My precious, priceless daughters, are you ready for bed?”

As we brush our teeth and put on shorts and T-shirts for sleeping, I can’t stop thinking about what Roo said. Is it possible that Dad
was
trying to communicate with her? That there
are
things he wants us to know but couldn’t say in front of Patricia Chevalier and/or Ken/Neth? That we
do
need to find out what he’s doing in the jungle? That maybe he
is
his same old self but has to pretend he’s not? That by being so cold to us he’s actually trying to
tell
us something?

But the problem is that I’m not nine years old anymore, and I know life doesn’t work like a mystery novel. It’s usually just what it looks like it is, and what it looks like now is that Dad has become a crazy workaholic who cares more about jungle birds than about his own family.

We get into bed and Mom tucks us in—well, maybe
tuck
isn’t the right word, since it’s so hot you don’t even need a sheet, and also it’s really Roo she’s tucking in, not me, because I’m too old for that. I’m in the top bunk since heights are the one thing I’m not scared of that Roo is. Also she sometimes still wets the bed—at least, she’s been wetting the bed since The Weirdness started—and I don’t want to get caught sleeping beneath that whole situation. So Mom is curled up on the bottom bunk with Roo, and when I peek down I can see their two pairs of feet sticking out, Roo’s little feet and Mom’s pretty feet. I bet Patricia Chevalier’s feet aren’t half as pretty as Mom’s.

I pull out my poetry notebook, because that’s what I do every night since I made my New Year’s resolution, and try to write a poem about arriving at the jungle today, but it just makes me really, really tired to think all the way back to my first sighting of the volcano, not to mention everything that came after. Ugh.

Down below, Roo is asking Mom what an omen is, because Ken/Neth said that thing about the crisscrossing rainbows we saw from the plane being an omen, and I’m going,
Wow, how can she still be thinking about that?

Mom says: “An omen is a sign.”

“Like a stop sign?”

“No, like a sign of something to come. Something that’s going to happen.”

“Something exciting?”

“Well, it could be something good or something bad. Just … 
some
thing.”

“So Ken thinks something bad is going to happen?”

It bugs me to hear Roo say the name Ken so easily, as if she’s used to it.

“No, monkey, I’m sure he was talking about the
good
kind of omen.”

“Can we visit Dad again tomorrow?” Roo asks.

Mom is quiet for a second. “Maybe later in the week,” she says softly. Somehow Roo knows to keep quiet and not argue about that right now. “Good night, okay, girls? You’ll have a fun day tomorrow with your new Spanish tutor.”