The Center of the World (23 page)

CHAPTER 38

 

S
ofia had once imagined a monster. Before her mother married Martin, she often slipped into bed with her mom when Monster showed up. In the warm double bed, under the safe tent of blankets and comforters, she had been safe from the seething anger of Monster.

Then Martin became part of them and for Sofia, more was better. A mother and a daughter were not enough, not quite a family. But at night when Monster came, Sofia was embarrassed to glide in along her mother's side of the bed with Martin on the other side. She had done it once and she felt the wide-awake, awkward bodies of her mother and Martin, trying not to move, all three of them laid out like logs in a summer fireplace.

The next day, Martin brought home a bag from the Guild Art Store. He always shopped there for his students at the middle schools. Sofia went to a sitter for two hours after school and then Martin picked her up.

“I've got something for you,” he said. He opened up the bag and pulled out a pad of newsprint, a box of thin-point markers, and a stack of tissue paper in about a million different colors.

“Would you like to draw a picture of Monster?” he said. “It won't be as scary if we see Monster now, in the kitchen, with all the lights on.”

Her mother never asked her what Monster looked like. “I guess so,” she said.

“What color do you need first?” he said, dumping the twenty-pack on the kitchen table.

Sofia wasn't sure if Martin knew what he was doing. How much did he know about monsters? If she drew a picture of Monster, would it come right off the page and grab her?

Since the day they had found Martin at the Laundromat, Sofia had liked him. And her mother was happier; she laughed more with him.

“Brown,” she said. “I want brown.”

What did Monster look like? She had mostly seen his shadowy parts and his eyes.

“He has brown eyes,” she said, drawing two misshapen circles.

“Are they brown all over or do they have any other color in them?” asked Martin.

Sofia looked at Martin's eyes, which were brown, but speckled with bits of lighter brown. Then she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass door and saw the white part of her eyes. She came back to the table and drew eyes that were mostly brown with some white. She stopped.

“He could get very scared—I mean scary,” she said.

Martin picked up a wad of multicolored tissue paper. “You could put something around Monster, like a fence. Or you could put him in a box. Here, let's rip up some strips of tissue paper and see if this makes a way to keep him so he won't be scary.”

Sofia took yellow paper and rippled long strips of it. “We need a glue stick. I know where Mommy keeps it.” Sofia opened a drawer beneath the phone where scissors, rubber bands, scrap paper, and other supplies lived.

Martin leaned over the paper and watched. Sofia corralled Monster.

“Do you need anything else to feel safe when Monster is around?” asked Martin.

Sofia picked up a black felt marker. She drew the head and gave him black hair, then arms, and added red claws, then a body, but he started to look more like a teddy bear and that wasn't right.

“Where does he live?” asked Martin.

Sofia hadn't thought about this before. She grabbed a green marker and drew steep hills behind Monster, peaks that looked like triangles pointing to the sky. She took a dark blue marker and made a circle around his feet. “This part is hard. I can't draw water very good.”

Sofia heard her mother drive up, the familiar whine of her car. She tossed her marker down and ran for the door.

“Mommy, Martin helped me draw Monster! Wait until you see him.” Sofia liked the feeling of all three of them together, the bulk of them.

“This looks like a major art project,” said her mother. Kate carried a paper bag of groceries from Stop & Shop. She set the bag on the counter and leaned in to look at the drawing.

Her mother's face crumpled. Something was wrong with the drawing. Was she mad? What had Sofia done wrong? Without saying anything, her mother turned away.

“I forgot something in the car. I'll be right back.”

Was she in trouble? Sofia moved to the window and looked out to the driveway. Her mother sat in the car, with her hands over her face. Martin came up behind Sofia and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Let me go talk to her. This isn't about the drawing . . . you didn't do anything wrong.”

CHAPTER 39

“W
e have to talk, Kate,” Martin said after dinner, after she apologized to both Sofia and Martin. She said she was upset about work, not them at all, and no, not the drawing, which she liked very much. After Sofia finished her spelling homework, took a bath, and after she and Sofia snuggled in bed together reading
A Wrinkle in Time,
Kate found Martin, waiting for her in the TV room. It was the farthest room from Sofia's bedroom but they still whispered.

They sat in the corner of the couch, a wedding present from her father. Martin pulled her feet into his lap and held them in his warm hands.

“This monster drawing has something to do with where Sofia comes from. Do I have that right?”

Should she tell him? Wouldn't it be better if no one here knew except for her? Wasn't it best if she contained all the horror?

“Yes,” she said. “She's not from Mexico. She's from Guatemala.”

Martin still had paint under his fingernails and he frequently smelled like glue and paper.

“And this is a big secret because . . .” Martin opened his hands, palms up, expectantly.

“Because she was a war orphan, and . . .” Kate's heart beat faster, and rain clattered on the windows. She remembered the way Fernando shook his head so slightly when the soldiers had been in his café. She smelled the beans and tortillas coming from Fernando's kitchen.

“Kate, stay with me. Where did you just go?”

She jumped. It was hard traveling from Guatemala to Massachusetts so abruptly. “There was a massacre, I was there, I was a witness, and Sofia was the only survivor. I took her and ran through the mountains. The picture that Sofia drew is a lake surrounded by volcanoes. The monster is a conglomeration of death, or of those who brought death to the people. I'm not an art therapist, but I'm pretty sure I'm at least in the ballpark.”

Martin bounced back on the couch as if struck. “Wait, what mountains? What do you mean, you ran with her? What does Sofia know?”

Her breath was labored, as if she carried a child straight up a mountain. “Only what I've told you before this, what I've told my father, what I've told everyone. That she is adopted.”

She saw the alarm in his eyes, his eyebrows squeezed toward the center. “How did you adopt her? How did that work? Were you in danger?”

She was right to tell Martin. He was her husband, her good husband. But could she tell him everything?

“She's from a village that was attacked by the military. Her mother was a student of mine, I knew her, and Sofia's brother. They were mowed down. . . .”

Slowly, she told him everything. About Kirkland's fatal one-car accident, Fernando's steadiness, Marta's friendship, and how a former Peace Corps worker helped her. She told him about the desperation she felt, the danger of places for war orphans like
casas de engordes,
and how Sofia was a witness, the documents that she was given, the race to leave with Sofia.

“What was his name?” asked Martin.

“Who?” she said, but she already knew who he meant. Martin had heard the unspoken story, the part that Kate left out.

“The Peace Corps guy, the one who helped you. I think you loved him. I think he loved you.”

They were now stretched out on the broad couch, her head on his chest. She rose up on one elbow. “How did you know?”

Martin wiggled his fingers through her hair. “Guys are like elk. We can smell another bull elk long after they're gone.”

A veneer of shellac crackled off Kate, bringing her closer to Martin.

“I swore that I'd never say his name because it might still be too dangerous. He's working on the peace and reconciliation program now that the war is over. They help relatives find the mass graves of their families. I know this sounds ridiculous here in Massachusetts, where our biggest worry is a bit of corruption over in Boston, but I won't say his name.”

Jenkins was dead, but had he put in a plan B for Will?

“How do you know that he's working on the peace and reconciliation program?”

“Because he called once. Well, once that he spoke to me. He's with someone else now.”

She left out the part that Will had called just days before the wedding.

Martin placed one hand on the small of her back. “And Mr. No Name was in love with you and you loved him. And your heart was broken. That's what I always knew about you, that your heart was pretty beat-up when we met. But what I need to know is, do you have enough space for me?”

Kate pictured all four chambers of her heart, squeezing and pumping. They'd been married for over a year. Surely her heart should be filled to the brim with love for this good man.

“Love makes the heart expand, not contract. I have a lot more room in there than I had before I went to Guatemala,” she said. And this was true, except it didn't entirely answer the question.

Martin didn't press her further and she wanted to take his silence for a kind of agreement. This must be what love is like under normal circumstances, steady and warm. With Martin, there was the everyday glue of life, the evenings spent with Sofia after dinner, her homework spread out on the table, the morning scramble for work and school, the soccer games, waking up together, warm breath on her shoulder.

Now that Martin shared the horror of her experience at the massacre, she felt closer to him. He saw her and she didn't realize how much she had longed for being seen. When they made love later that night and for the next two nights, Kate was shocked at how powerfully she responded. Part of her had been waiting, just waiting to be revealed.

 

The new depth of their closeness lasted for days. It was Kate who initiated lovemaking, weightless with the release of her secrets, or most of them. She had taken a chance telling Martin about Guatemala and yet he had seen her and still loved her.

She was shocked at the difference now, stunned that all this time he had been the one asking and reaching for her while a strange distance had pushed against her. Will had moved on to someone else and so had she.

She wondered how Martin could have loved her when he hadn't really known her. If truly pressed, she had heard a persistent voice that had found his love disingenuous. But no longer.

Now she raced home from her job, fueled by a euphoria of discovery, of being seen and heard, the folly of not understanding what had been right in front of her, the man sleeping in her bed. Sofia, while not privy to their conversation, still reverberated with the change. She asked to go to Emily's house a bit more, and asked for Emily to come to their house. She was no longer required to add her chemistry to Martin and Kate to keep the whole unit afloat. Everyone's muscles softened around their bones and their blood ran sweeter.

After the soccer game on Saturday, Sofia went to Emily's house for an overnight. Martin had taken over as assistant coach and he'd just returned from dropping off the girls at Emily's. When Kate heard his car pull in, every part of her welcomed him. But when he opened the door, she saw the change like the snapping of a green branch, jagged and raw.

“What is it? Is it Sofia?” She stood in the archway to the kitchen. Her heart pulsed.

Martin's body had rearranged; something rumbled beneath the surface of his skin. “I think you should be honest with Sofia. She needs to know where she's from, what Manuela was like, what language she spoke. A part of her will be bewildered unless she knows this.”

Had he said bewildered? Hadn't Will said something like that about language, that stealing a people's language leaves the soul bewildered? Why did the two men she loved say exactly what she already knew to be right?

“Look, I know I'm the stepfather here and I haven't entirely found the guidebook yet. I'm trying to figure out what this means, when I get to say something parental or when to follow your lead. But this is wrong. . . .” he said. He had a tinge of rosiness on his cheeks that combined incongruously with the dark shadow of stubble from not shaving that morning.

Kate ran one hand along the tiled edge of the kitchen counter. “No, no, Sofia loves you. You're a great stepdad. Have you seen how happy she is?” She wanted to mitigate whatever was coming with a rush of assurance. Had she not told him enough that he was wonderful?

“I love her too. And I love you. But I can't pretend that I'm okay with not telling Sofia about her past, about her parents and where she's from.”

All the ease left Kate; the soft places that had just unfurled called in the troops. She reached into a cabinet, grabbed a glass, ran tap water, and then, unable to bring it to her lips with her shaking hands, set it back down again.

“Do you think this was an easy decision for me, an idle, unprocessed conclusion?” She heard her voice retreating into a rarely used academic firmness that she didn't want to use. “There were lives at stake. There could still be repercussions.. . .” Why had he grabbed on to this?

“Kate, no matter how hard, how awful, she owns this history. She deserves to know. I understand that you couldn't tell her everything at once, but you knew her birth mother, her twin brother, and the people in her village. This is, in all ways that I can think of, wrong.”

Martin pressed his lips together and closed his eyes. He ran his hands over his face. “I loved my mother and father. They weren't perfect, but I always knew they loved me. Except they kept something essential from me and they were wrong. They weren't protecting me from knowledge about my birth mother. I could have understood it. They were protecting themselves.”

“This is not the same thing! The scope of what happened in her village kept reverberating out. They killed Kirkland, they might have killed Sofia,” said Kate.

“You have also stolen something from her,” he whispered.

“I love Sofia more than anything on Earth.”

“We all know you love her. That isn't what I'm talking about, or maybe it is. I need to wrap my head around this, and I'm going away for a few days,” he said.

“What? You're leaving! This is your solution? I knew I shouldn't have told you. Now you hate me.” She felt like she was in a slow-motion car crash and it was her fault.

He stepped closer and held both of her hands. “I'm not leaving you. I'm just leaving for two days. I'll be back Sunday night. Sofia will be back here around lunchtime tomorrow. This is all too important for me to skip over and pretend that it's okay. I'm going to stay at my old roommate's cabin in Vermont.”

Martin was true to his word. He returned on Sunday evening to a clamorous welcome from Sofia. Kate hadn't slept. She didn't know what he would do.

“It's okay, Kate. This is your call. I've made my peace with this.”

Years later, she would learn what his peace meant. He had put a plan in place with the lawyer. He wrote the letter to Sofia that burst open their world.