Red Glass (22 page)

Ángel nodded. “That’s where my mother found me when I fell.” He paused. “I have to know for sure if she’s alive or not. Either way, I have to know.”

We got off the bus in what looked like the middle of nowhere, a place thick with trees and sunshine reflecting off a hundred different shades of green. In the valley below us, mist gathered in pools.

Somehow, Mr. Lorenzo located a trail that we had to follow through the woods. It was just wide enough for the three of us to walk shoulder to shoulder. Beneath our feet, mossy rocks and gnarled tree roots jutted up. On either side of us, layers of green stretched as far as I could see. Every once in a while, Ángel pointed to a big tree, or a lichen-coated boulder, and said, “I think I remember that.”

Light poured through the leaves, dancing and flashing over the mud. Through the branches, flowers dangled like bright bells. I veered off the path to have a closer look at an orange flower, its stamens and pistils spraying out like a fountain.

A hand clamped over my arm and pulled me back onto the path. It was Mr. Lorenzo, his eyes wide. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “
Mire
, Sophie, you cannot leave the path.”

“Why not?”

He rubbed his hand over his face.

I looked at Ángel and back at Mr. Lorenzo. Ángel stared at his feet.

“Sophie,” Mr. Lorenzo said hesitantly. “I don’t mean to worry you, but—”

“But what?”

“There could be land mines buried beneath those flowers.”

“Land mines?”

“Left over from
la violencia.
Many people, many children, over the years have stepped on them. Lost arms or legs in the explosion. Some have died.”

I continued walking, tiptoeing now, down the center of the path, as though balancing on a tightrope. As we walked, a strange thing happened: white flowers fell, tiny white blossoms dropping from trees.

After a while, my heartbeat calmed and my shaking stopped. “Ángel,” I said. “When was the last time you saw your mother? In the flesh.”

“These are heavy things, Sophie,” he said after a pause.
“Cosas pesadas.”

“I know.”

Mr. Lorenzo studied Ángel’s face. “I thought you didn’t remember that day. You were so little—only four or five.”

“I remember,” Ángel said. “It’s jumbled in my head, but I remember. Me and my mother went to my grandmother’s village to help harvest corn.”

Mr. Lorenzo shook his head. “I never should have let you two go alone. Not with the rumors about what the army was doing to villages in the mountains.” His face looked raw, exposed. “I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”

Ángel stared straight ahead. “So that night, we’re in her house, and word comes that the army is on their way. My grandmother wants us to go back to San Juan, but the last bus already left. She says we should walk back, but my mother’s afraid we’ll run into soldiers. Next thing I remember, we’re in the woods, next to a giant tree with a secret hollow that I like to play in. My mother’s burying a little bag of money my grandmother’s been saving. For a new washbasin. It’s all she has. By now it’s almost dark and I can barely see my mother digging.

“She’s about to shovel the dirt back on top, and I ask her, ‘What about your jewels? Are you going to bury them, too?’ She ruffles my hair and laughs. Her laugh sounds like a stream over rocks. The last time I heard her laugh. She takes the jewels from her neck and tucks them into the money bag, and drops it into the hole.

“Next thing I remember, we’re back at the house, in bed. I’m snuggled against my mother. I feel her awake, and she’s so warm and sturdy I know she’ll protect me from anything. Suddenly I hear machine-gun fire. And smell smoke. And hear the soldiers yelling and people screaming. My mother wraps me in a blanket, hugs my grandmother, and runs into the forest with me, to the tree hollow. She tucks me inside, and tries to crawl in after me, but she’s too big. ‘Don’t look outside,’ she says. ‘Don’t make noise. I’ll be hiding nearby.’

“She kisses me and I hang on to her braid. She unclenches my fingers and pulls away. Then she covers up the hole with branches. I put my hands over my ears and through my hands I hear screams. For a long time. I try not to make noise while I cry. I smell smoke, terrible smoke that makes me gag. Then there’s the roar of trucks, loud at first, then fading. I wait for my mother to come. And wait and wait. All night I wait. I wait for the roosters to crow like they do every morning. But the light comes and they never crow.

“I remember wandering around the forest, calling for my mother. Then I see it: what’s left of our village. At first, I can’t make sense of it. Nothing is where it used to be. My grandmother’s house is burned to the ground. So are the neighbors’ houses and the animal pens. Just ashes and charred wood and stone. Dead chickens and goats and dogs. Things start spinning. All the broken pieces of the world. Someone picks me up. Doña Remedios. She presses my face into her shoulder. I close my eyes and see my mother.

“For the next year, until we leave for America, I see my mother everywhere. I see her through the window of a bus. I see her carrying a bundle of firewood at the roadside. I see her in a crowd at the market. She’s always there, in the corner of my eye, and always, she slips away.”

At the edge of the forest, we saw a cluster of houses pieced together with wood and mud and topped with thatched roofs, each house linked to the others by a maze of paths. Beneath a blue sky, chickens pecked at weeds sprouting from crumbling house foundations; nearby, a fat pig rested in the shade of a tree. The place had an empty, abandoned feel. There was something in the air, an odor of sadness. No hint of breeze. The air held impossibly still, like a dream.

We walked toward a violet-blue house at the end of the clearing. The house was strangely cheerful; bright red flowers in old tin cans cluttered the patio, and a spray of bougainvillea climbed the wall. In the shadows of a tree, an old woman was picking bananas and dropping them into a basket at her side. She wore a colorful blouse, loose and thick, embroidered with elaborate zigzags and flowers, and tucked into a long wraparound skirt that made me think of festive things, like rainbow sprinkles and jelly beans. Her hair was braided in two thin silvery ropes and pinned to her head. The moment we spotted her, she tilted her head and turned to us. Then she waved and motioned for us to come.

When we came closer, her face broke into a smile. “Don Lorenzo! Husband of Flor Blanca! Is that you?” She looked at Ángel. “And you, all grown up.
Mi querido
Ángel!” Before he could say a word, she hugged him and then examined the wounds on his face. “Looks like you got a bit beat up, but you’re healing fine.” She patted his face with her rough hands. “Ángel. The child who would do great things, go far in life. And you have. And you will do even more.” She spoke Spanish slowly, in the same choppy tones as the Mayan woman I’d met on the bus.

Mr. Lorenzo shook her hand lightly. “Here to serve you.”

“You see?” she said. “I may be old, but I never forget my friends.”

She looked at me. “And you,
señorita
?”

“I’m Sophie.”

“Oh, how good you came all the way here for your
novio.
”

I blushed at the word
boyfriend.

She held my hand in hers for a moment, then turned to Ángel. “Now, Ángel, you are here for your mother?”

He nodded.

“I will bring you to her.”

My heart leaped. Ángel stared at her, speechless. Mr. Lorenzo stood frozen beside him. Afraid to speak, afraid to break the spell, we followed the old woman down a narrow path through the forest.

Your Heart in My Heart

We wove in between tree trunks and birdsongs and cricket chirps. Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel walked in a daze, one foot plunked in front of the other. Doña Remedios’s steps were slow and sure, as though she knew every bump in the trail. Thick calluses protected her bare feet, and she stepped on twigs and stones without flinching. Once in a while, she pointed out a plant and told us what it was good for. She paused beside a bush with tiny leaves and rubbed them between her fingers. “Now, my daughter, smell this. This is what I use to cure people of
susto.
”

“¿Susto?”
Fright didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could take medicine for.

“Sí, susto,”
she said. “When the army came, we saw the soldiers do terrible things. The fear stayed with us. The fear made us sick.”

She handed me some crushed leaves and I breathed in the sharp, strong odor. I passed them to Mr. Lorenzo. He sniffed, and said, “I haven’t smelled this in ten years.”

Ángel said nothing, but I knew he was listening because he broke off a leafy branch and tucked it under his arm.

After walking for a few more minutes, Doña Remedios stopped by a plant with wide, light green leaves. She stroked them with expert fingers. “This root saved many people after the army burned their homes and chased them into the mountains. The people were dying of thirst because soldiers guarded the streams.” With a stick, she dug around the base of the plant and extracted a brown root, thick and clawlike. Then she pulled a knife from a sack at her waist and peeled off the brown skin, revealing white flesh. “Here, daughter, drink the water.”

I chewed and sucked the moisture out. It was juicy all right, but gave me only about a spoonful of water. How many of these would you need for a whole glassful? “Why did the soldiers do this?” I asked.

Mr. Lorenzo answered, his voice solemn. “They wanted to get the guerrillas. The army said the guerrillas were like fish. Fish that they wanted to kill. And the Mayan lands were their pond. The army decided to drain the pond so the fish would have no place to swim. So they burned villages and crops and killed people and stole their animals.”

Doña Remedios nodded. “What he says is true.” She picked a fuzzy leaf from a low-growing plant. “Now, look, daughter. This I use to cure people’s aching heads and aching bones. Their heads hurt because they are filled with bad memories. There is no room for good thoughts. And their bones hurt because sadness weighs them down.”

I glanced at Ángel. He was walking with the same glassy stare. I wondered what he was thinking about. Maybe he was feeling as if he were in the middle of his favorite dream, the one where he found his mother. Maybe he didn’t want to say anything that might wake himself up.

“Almost there,” Doña Remedios said.

We turned a bend, and there, ahead, was the light and space of another clearing. An expanse of grass and wildflowers rose into a hill. And scattered over the hillside, dozens of small crosses, some the color of the ocean, some the color of the sky. Tin cans of flowers encircled the base of each cross. A swallow flew across the graves, dipped, landed on the arm of a cross. It was too beautiful, the sunshine lighting up the petals and tips of grass, a butterfly floating from flower to flower. It did not match what was buried underneath.

Ángel spoke, his words heavy. “My mother isn’t alive, is she?”

“Of course she’s alive.” Doña Remedios tapped at his chest with her thick finger. “In your heart.”

Ángel pressed his lips together and stared at the graves. Mr. Lorenzo put his arm around Ángel’s shoulders.

Doña Remedios took his hand. “Remember what I told you that morning when I found you?”

Ángel’s voice was a whisper. “That she turned into flowers.” He sounded unconvinced.

Doña Remedios nodded. She led us to a lopsided cross painted blue-green. Three cups of white calla lilies leaned against the base, secured with smooth stones.
FLOR BLANCA TOJIL YOC
read a wooden plaque, scratched in uneven letters.

We stood, motionless, under a tree with mottled copper and green bark, its leaf shadows moving over our faces. A musky sweet smell filled the air, maybe coming from the tree’s fruit, which hung like golden ornaments. Mr. Lorenzo dropped to his knees and closed his eyes and whispered something under his breath, a prayer, maybe. Eventually, he stood up and put his arm back around Ángel, who hadn’t budged. “She loved guavas, remember, son?” He plucked some fruit from the tree and handed one to each of us. “Remember how she blended them with sugar and water? How she passed cups around during coffee harvest?”

I bit in. It was impossibly sweet. Like the coffee berries Ángel had tasted after he fell down the mountain. How can there be so much sweetness when you know what’s buried underneath?

Ángel held the guava in his hand, running his fingers over the smooth skin. Without his shades, his eyes seemed so exposed I could barely stand to look. “Are you sure it’s her?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes, love. With my own hands I reburied her. You see, a few years ago, they found a big grave. A place where the army dumped the people they’d killed. As the healer, I could name the bodies. I knew who had a tooth missing here. An arm broken there. A cracked rib. A smashed nose. Old wounds, from childhood. Your mother, she broke her right arm once.”

Mr. Lorenzo spoke in a brittle voice. “She fell from a tree when she was eight.”

Doña Remedios continued. “And her left finger was crushed.”

“A heavy grindstone fell on it,” Mr. Lorenzo said. “Just a year after our marriage.”

Doña Remedios nodded. “And she was missing two teeth.”

“An infection.” Mr. Lorenzo looked at Ángel. “While she was pregnant with you, son.”

“All of these things I remember clearly.” Doña Remedios knelt down, sitting on her heels. “The little misfortunes of life. All of these things have stayed in my head. I saw the remains of your mother, son. I saw the old wounds that had healed long before her death. The scars on her finger bones, her arm bones, the spaces in her mouth. And the new wounds. Bullet scars on her skull, her thigh, her shoulder blade.”

Mr. Lorenzo lowered his head and put his hand on Ángel’s back.

Doña Remedios waved her arms toward the graves. “Look. Now our neighbors are back where they belong, in peace. Every week I put flowers on their graves. Their spirits are happy.”

Strange that being around death can make you feel so alive. So quiveringly, tinglingly
not
dead. And yes, there were bones beneath our feet. Land mines and ashes of homes. But around us were crickets and fruit trees and flowers and sunshine and warmth.

I turned to Doña Remedios. “Those plants you showed us, can they really get rid of the bad memories?”

Doña Remedios plucked another guava. “They help with the pain, but something else helps more.”

“What?” I asked.

Ángel was watching her expectantly.

“When people know the truth. When people come to the grave and say goodbye. That is what finally makes their hearts feel good.”

I looked at Ángel. A tiny white flower rested on his shoulder, one that had clung there since our walk. I picked it up and offered it to him. Flor Blanca. White flower. On his shoulder, silently, this whole time.

And with that gesture, something inside him changed. His frozen face melted. He leaned over his father, pressed his face against the flannel shirt, and together, they cried.

The next day, in crisp morning sunlight, Ángel and I stood on a rickety bridge, surveying the map that Mercurio had drawn. Mr. Lorenzo was spending the day taking care of loose ends: wiring money from his bank in Tucson, paying the hospital bill, buying food for our trip back. Ángel and I planned to spend the day looking for the jewels.

I looked at the
X
on the map. I felt like a heroine in one of Juan’s tales, on the brink of finding the treasure. I used to feel it wasn’t fair we didn’t live in a kingdom riddled with pots of gold and fairies and heroines on quests. I’d ask Juan why we got ripped off, stuck in a boring world without magical treasures. He had said, “Maybe the real treasure is something more important than gold.” I’d pouted and said, “But I want a real treasure.” He’d kissed the top of my head. “You’re my real treasure, Sophie.”

Ángel and I peered over the rail at the stream. It was about thirty feet wide, but hard to tell how deep—probably at least six feet in the middle. Ángel pointed below. “That’s where the
X
is,” he said. “See anything?”

Little moving blobs of light opened and closed over the water. Tree leaves and branches and sky slid over the surface. I squinted, but all I saw were shadowy forms of stones at the bottom. No jewels. “I don’t see them,” I said finally.

“Let’s go down and look from the shore,” Ángel suggested. He was trying to stay hopeful. We shuffled down the steep embankment from the road to the water’s edge.

The night before, in the hotel room, Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo had shared one narrow bed, and I’d taken the other. In the dark, over the fan’s rushing and clicking, we’d talked about our plans. Mr. Lorenzo wanted to go back to Dika and Pablo as soon as possible, but Ángel refused to leave without the jewels. I suggested we look for them the next day. “We’ll find them,” I said confidently. “Don’t worry.”

Now, as Ángel clung to my hand, I hoped I could deliver my promise. We walked along the pebbled bank, scanning the water, peering beneath the leaf reflections.

“Rest here, Ángel,” I said, motioning to a flat boulder. “I’ll go in.”

“I can go in, lime-girl.”

“You’ll get your bandages wet. Let me do it.”

So he perched on the rock, bending his legs up and folding his arms over his knees.

Like bits of an old dream, I remembered my fears of pesticide runoff, leeches, amoebas, poisonous fish, sharp rocks, rusted metal. I looked at the sparkles on the water, the shades of green and blue mixing on the surface, and then focused my eyes underneath, on the hidden things.

I hadn’t packed a swimsuit. A little playfully, a little nervously, I said, “Close your eyes, Ángel.”

He put his hands over his eyes, making a show of pressing tightly. I glanced up at the road. No one had passed in the last fifteen minutes. I pulled the white dress over my head. I folded the emergency money inside the dress. Then, quickly, I stripped off my bra and underwear, and dropped them in a heap on the white fabric.

Despite the sunshine, the air felt cool. The breeze moved over my skin, light, like fingertips. Goose bumps popped up, my nipples contracted. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Back in Tucson, I’d been too embarrassed to even roll up my sleeves and expose my pointy, wrinkled elbows.

I waded into the water and gasped at the coldness. Once it was up to my shoulders, I called out, “Okay, you can look.” But Ángel’s hands had already lowered. He smiled shyly.

I didn’t give myself a chance to blush. In one quick movement, I undid my ponytail, shook out my hair, and dove under. Tentatively, my eyes opened. Stones, green leafy things, darting schools of fish, tiny creatures moving around me. I rose to the surface, breathed in deep, then dove again, searching the bottom. It felt like a different world, this underwater place, the muffled sounds, pulsing blood, bubbles of breath, the tinkle of sand and pebbles, the light, hazy and filtered.

Again and again, I dove down, until I finally saw it, a gleam of red light over a rock. I moved toward it, saw my hair floating, my magnified hand reaching out, the fingers like someone else’s, clasping the beads. I splashed through the surface, and held the necklace triumphantly in the air for Ángel. The red spheres were bursting with light. There was something magical about this, finding jewels in the darkness.

Suddenly I understood what Juan meant about the treasure. It didn’t matter that these were not rubies. The glass held the final laugh of Ángel’s mother. It held Dika’s hopefulness. It held the promise of light.

Ángel stood up on the rock, beaming.

“How many more, Ángel?” I called out.

“Three.”

I draped the strand of beads over my head, and dove under again. Nearby, I found three others, waiting in their red halos. I looped them around my wrists.

Once I emerged, I checked the bridge and road for people. Deserted. I waded out of the river, dripping with water and glass. I squeezed out my hair and put on my clothes and climbed onto the rock beside Ángel. I started to take off the necklaces, and he said, in a low, quaking voice, “Keep them on.” We sat on the warm rock and he touched my arm. His hand on my skin, and then mine on his. Gingerly we touched, moving around his healing wounds, in a sunlit, underwater world.

We spent all day by the river, snacking on quesadillas, napping, eating guavas, and napping some more. A day outside of time. Ángel said he used to play in this very spot as a child while his mother washed clothes in the river. He rediscovered a path that he remembered leading back to the
centro
of town. So at sunset, when it was time to go, we decided to follow it. The trail was overgrown, covered by leaves so thick almost no sunlight peeked through.