The Indigo Notebook (13 page)

“So we’re not allowed to go there,” Odelia breaks in, “because—”

“A bad man lives on that hill,” Isabel interrupts. “And he turns into a snake at night and goes into the tunnels with the devils and—”

“Don Faustino.” Eva jumps in eagerly. “We’re not allowed to go to his house. He made a deal with the devil. That’s why he’s rich.”

“Once,” Isabel says, “our cousin’s friend’s brother went there on a dare and his dogs bit him and Don Faustino just watched and know what he said? He said, ‘That’ll teach you not to mess around on my property.’ The dogs bit him all over, and just when they were going for his neck for the kill, Don Faustino pulled them off.”

“And you know the strange thing?” Eva says.

“What?” Of course, I’m taking all this with a giant grain of salt. I’ve heard these kinds of stories in most small towns we’ve been to, all over the world. The rich man who made a deal with the devil. An envied outcast.

“He’s the brother of the nicest man in town. Taita Silvio.”

I
n the scant shade of a small tree, Wendell and I wait for the bus. He asks in a strained playful voice, “You think my birth father is a snake man who hangs out with devils?”

I smile. “The guy’s probably a harmless hermit.”

“What about him siccing his dogs on that kid?”

“Could be a rumor.”

Wendell stares at the mountain Imbabura, looming high. “Let’s go to his house.”

I reconsider. “Well, maybe it’s not just a rumor. Obviously Taita Silvio doesn’t want you to meet him. Why else would he lie?”

He pulls the crystal from his pocket, rolls it around in his hands. “Either way, I have to know.”

The bus comes chugging along, a blue one with a cloud of gray smoke trailing behind. It stops and the doors open. I climb on first, with Wendell right behind me. The door’s just closing behind us when, without warning, Wendell grabs my hand and says, “Get off.” He pushes open the door and pulls me out after him. We stumble onto the asphalt, and I struggle to regain my balance.

The driver calls out, “You coming?”

Wendell shakes his head vehemently, and the bus pulls away.

Is he crazy? He said there were weird things about him. Apart from his letters, I don’t actually know much about him, come to think of it. This is the kind of thing Layla does from time to time, if she has an ominous dream or sees a particular sign. “Three dead bees in a row this morning!” she said a few months ago in Thailand. “One in my dream, one that slammed into our window, and one on the way to the bakery. That’s it, I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the day.”

Has Wendell had a sign? Or some kind of feeling? Like whatever made him give me the
be careful in the water
warning?

Hands shaking, Wendell takes out his camera and starts fiddling with the knobs, refusing to meet my eyes. “I just—I just saw this thing I wanted to take a picture of.”

He’s a terrible liar.

“What thing?” I ask.

He looks around and his gaze settles on a crushed plastic Inca Kola bottle in the weeds. “That. It’s an artsy shot.” He lowers to his knee and snaps a few photos.

Obviously, he’s lying. Maybe he saw someone on the bus who he didn’t want to see? Maybe he’s claustrophobic and the bus felt too crowded?

About twenty minutes later, when the next bus comes, we get on without incident. Wendell tries to act like his regular self. He talks about some landscape photos he wants to take, but he seems distracted, fiddling with the curtain’s tassel, eyes darting to the window.

Halfway there, our bus slows. At first I figure it’s to pick up or drop off passengers. But then I notice voices rising into a kind of high-pitched frenzy. Something’s burning—engine exhaust, rubber, fuel. I turn across the aisle toward the opposite windows, where all the passengers are peering outside, eyes open, mouths dropped. I follow their gaze. First I see the flashing lights of the ambulance and fire trucks, and then the bus, blue and turned on its side like a carcass, the front end smashed into a huge semitrailer. A crowd of dazed people are streaming off the bus, some hunched over, helped by medics, as stretchers are being loaded into three ambulances.

I turn to Wendell. The color has seeped out of his face. He stares like he’s seen a ghost.

“That’s the bus we didn’t take,” I say. “Isn’t it?”

He nods.

The police direct our bus to keep moving through. I study Wendell. “You knew.”

His eyes are glassy. “You think anyone died?”

“You
knew
.”

“Maybe you should translate a couple more letters, Z. The two most recent ones.”

I race to the corner coffee shop, order chamomile tea and caramel-filled pastries, and shuffle through the unread letters in my bag. I find one from age fifteen, typed, red ink on white paper.

There’s another recent one, from age sixteen, scribbled on notebook paper with torn edges. The handwriting is fast and furious, written at jagged, desperate angles.

I read the letters three times, and when my hands stop shaking, I translate them.

Then, like I always do when I feel like I’ll explode with emotion, I start writing in my notebook. After three lines, I slam it shut, frustrated.

I don’t want to write.

I want to talk.

To Layla.

I want to tell her about Wendell, and the accident, and the snake man, and everything else.

When I get home, the door’s unlocked. She must be home. But she isn’t cross-legged on the floor painting, or staring at a plant on the porch and writing a poem about an unfurling leaf, or kneeling at the crate coffee table and soldering stained-glass mosaics. That crazy energy is missing, the whirlwind that usually sweeps me up. Usually she beams a smile at me, packed with chi, and says something along the lines of, “Hello, my gorgeous daughter. What did the universe shower you with today, love?”

And I always say something like, “Dog shit on my flip-flop.” And then she laughs a tinkling laugh, and somehow we get around to talking about whatever we feel like talking about and drink passion fruit juice on the patio. It was a warm, cozy space we created together, Layla and me, now that I think about it.

She’s on the sofa, watching TV, her school folders in a neat pile on the crate coffee table. “Hi, love.”

“Hey, Layla.” I open my mouth to tell her everything,
but then I notice her eyes glued to the screen. I press my lips together.

We watch some
Desperate Housewives
together in silence. During the commercials, she opens the folder marked Lesson Plans and makes some notes. This past week, I popped into one of her afternoon classes and found the classroom silent, the students with their heads bent over textbooks, copying exercises into their notebooks, while she sat behind the desk watching them, her eyes oddly blank. In Thailand and Brazil, whenever I stopped by her classroom, students were dancing on the desks, or impersonating the Simpsons in ridiculous wigs. They were usually laughing so hard the teachers in nearby classrooms complained. But Layla never got in too much trouble. Her students always had the highest test scores of any classes and always gave her the best evaluations.

During an SUV commercial, she looks up from her papers. “Jeff’s such a good influence on me, you know?”

“So you really like him?” I say, pushing the Wendell stuff to the side for the moment.

She smiles, a slow smile that manages to reach the corners of her lips but doesn’t quite make it to her eyes. “I feel like a grown-up with him. It’s weird, but good, you know? And safe. I finally understand your need to be safe.”

“Really?”

“Lately, when I’m trying to sleep, my throat feels like it’s closing up. It’s like I can’t breathe, like I’m back in that water, drowning. That’s how you feel when you wake up in the middle of the night, isn’t it?”

“Try deep belly breathing,” I suggest.

Layla looks sad. “It’s not too late to give you a piece of a normal childhood, Z.”

“Layla, you don’t have to do this for me.”

She tucks her knees under her chin. “If I’d died in that water, what would have happened to you? I mean, I don’t even have a will. Jeff made a whole list of things I need to do. Legal and financial things. Things he did for his daughters.”

Desperate Housewives
comes on again, and Layla looks back at the TV, the ghostly blue light flickering over her face. “You’re happy about Jeff, right, Z?”

“Of course, Layla.”

“Because it was pure destiny that dropped him in my path. And he says the same thing about me. He says that his life felt all small and closed up after the divorce, after his girls went to college. And now, he’s exploring this whole adventurous side of himself.”

“That’s great.” My voice sounds small and far away.

She turns up the volume and pats my knee. I wonder if that’s something she picked up from Jeff. She never used to pat before. I wonder if soon she’ll be saying things like, “Oh, my!”

I sink back into the sofa, which isn’t so much a sofa as wooden fruit crates with foam cushions, covered by Layla with fabric scraps from her old, holey skirts. What does Jeff think of them? Can he appreciate all the history behind them? One skirt’s from Laos, one from Thailand, one from India—flowered silk prints that have frayed and faded in the sun.

We eat a dinner of leftover soup in front of the TV. After washing the dishes, I pick up the worn red book from the crate-table, run my fingers over its soft, old spine. “Want to read Rumi?”

“I’m kind of tired for that, love,” she says through a yawn. “Have you noticed that TV has the magical effect of sleeping pills? My insomnia lifesaver. Worlds better than chamomile tea.”

I flip to one of Rumi’s dog-eared pages, silently read the two underlined words.

A sign, I decide. Why not? Someone has to be on the lookout for signs. “Layla, I’m going to Wendell’s. I might just spend the night there. We’ll get an early start tomorrow to Agua Santa for the divination. I’m taking Rumi and the water-colors with me, okay?”

“Okay, love. Enjoy.” And she goes back to staring at another rerun of
Frasier
, and you can almost see her soul, like a wisp of smoke, stealing away, little by little.

I half-walk, half-run to Wendell’s hotel, almost as if something’s chasing me. By the time I get there, it’s about eight at night. People are gathered on the streets near the main squares, outside lit-up bars and restaurants.

Upstairs, in his doorway, Wendell greets me in a white T-shirt frayed at the neckline and a pair of basketball shorts.
He doesn’t seem surprised to see me; in fact, it’s almost as if he’s been expecting me. His hair’s wet and loose and falling down his back, and he smells fresh, like orange shampoo. He sits on one bed and I sit on the other. “I was wishing you’d come by,” he says.

“Did you have a feeling about it? A good one?”

“Actually, I did.”

I smile, pleased, and pull the most recent two letters from my bag. “Here you go.”

He takes them, sets them carefully on his lap. “And?”

“I think you have an incredible gift.”

“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No.” Then I add, “But I think you should ask Taita Silvio to teach you how to use it.”

He leans back and puts a pillow over his face. His voice comes through, muffled. “I want my birth father to teach me.”

“Why not Taita Silvio?”

“He’s always hiding something. Once you peel off one layer of lies, there’s another underneath.”

“But if you’re so desperate to understand this gift you have—”

“This
curse I
have.”

“Silvio can help you.”

He tosses the pillow up, catches it, tosses it again. “For years I’ve had this crazy reunion scene in my head, like the last scene in a sappy movie, you know, with hazy lens filters and tearjerky music. I show my birth parents the crystal and
they tell me the secret of how to make these visions go away. It’s always them, my birth parents.”

He takes a deep breath. “Now I know I’ll never meet my birth mom. Never. So at least I want that other piece to be true. The part about my birth dad.” He tucks the pillow behind his head. “This sounds incredibly stupid when I say it out loud.”