The Indigo Notebook (14 page)

“No, it doesn’t. I get it.” And I do. He’s gotten fixated on this idea of happiness, blinding himself to other possibilities, the way I stubbornly cling to my idea of the Normal Magazine Family.

A motorcycle passes on the street below, and after the engine’s roar dissipates, Wendell says, “Hey, Z, want to go to Faustino’s house tomorrow? After the divination?”

“Maybe.” Honestly, it sounds like a terrible, dangerous idea, but I’m pretty sure if I say no, he’ll just go alone. “So,” I say, changing the subject. “I was thinking of an evening of water-coloring and Rumi.” I toss the Rumi book onto his bed.

He opens to a random page and reads aloud,

“Hey, let’s go dancing!” As this flies out of my mouth, I realize it’s exactly the kind of thing Layla would say. The old Layla, as though a piece of her spirit has crept out and
slipped into me. Or maybe it’s that I really like dancing and it’s not just because Layla drags me out to dance with her.

“I can’t dance,” he says.

“I’ll teach you. Get dressed.”

As he changes in the bathroom, I survey his room. It’s small, but with high ceilings that make it feel big. The old wooden floors give off a faint smell of pine oil and make our words echo a little. His backpack is stashed neatly against the wall by the door. A Spanish-English phrasebook and a small spiral notebook with verb conjugations copied over and over sits on the nightstand beside a stack of photos. Pictures of the sort-of-ex-girlfriend?

“Can I look at your pictures?” I call through the bathroom door.

“Yeah, they’re just pictures of home,” he calls back. “Nothing exciting.”

The first one is two middle-aged people with light eyes and hair, the man slightly balding, the woman with short grayish-blondish-brownish hair. They’re standing in front of a house with a garden of waist-high wildflowers, purple and pink and yellow, spilling out toward the edge of the photo. They look friendly, beaming simple, genuine smiles. The kind of people whose one wish, without a moment’s hesitation, would be world peace.

I flip through the rest—a dog with short legs and a long body and its tongue out, huge and close and glistening with saliva, ready to lick you. A picture of light streaming into a blue room with a green bed, a boy’s room, with a few band
posters and a big framed picture of mountains—the Andes, maybe?

I picture Wendell before I got here tonight, alone on the tight sheets of his hotel bed, repeating Spanish phrases and flipping through photos in a lonely circle of lamplight. I imagine his mother imagining him alone. I imagine his sort-of-ex-girlfriend imagining him alone. But maybe she isn’t even thinking of him. Maybe she doesn’t care.

The bathroom door opens and Wendell emerges, his hair still loose, but combed now. He’s wearing jeans and a slightly wrinkled button-down shirt. He looks good. “Ready, Z?”

“Ready.”

O
n the way to the
peña
, I tell him about the TV, and how Layla is changing for me, trying to give me a different life.

“Why would she think you’d want a different life?”

“Because I’ve always begged her for precisely that.”

“Why?” He says this in the tone of voice you’d use with someone who’d just dumped money in a shredder.

“I always envied people with normal lives, normal families, normal homes.”

He considers this as we walk down the dark street, from one puddle of streetlamp light to another. Most of the stores are closed, their garage-style doors pulled down, only a few pharmacies and tiny convenience stores still lit. Finally he says, “Where’d your idea of normal come from?”

“Better Homes and Gardens
, 1990 to 1995.”

He laughs.

“Seriously. My grandmom’s magazines. I read them while I was recovering after nearly dying from malaria.”

He stops walking. “When was this?”

“In India. I was twelve. Layla freaked out and her parents paid for our flight to Maryland. We stayed with them for six months. The best months of my life.”

My memory of those months in Maryland feels like soaking in a warm bath, and afterward, being wrapped in three giant, fluffy towels that were dried in a real clothes dryer with one of those scented dryer sheets stuck in to make it smell good. It’s a floating feeling, an eyes-closed, comfy, blankety feeling, the feeling of not having to worry about anything.

Everyday tasks were impossibly easy. The electricity always worked. Water always came out of the faucet like magic—even hot water. It took me a while to get used to sitting on a toilet seat rather than squatting over a hole. To flushing with a silvery handle rather than dumping down a bucket of water. It thrilled me to stand on the cushy bath mat, watching toilet paper whirl down the shiny, bleached bowl.

After a week, I came out of the bathroom, where I’d spent hours in a reverie, and announced to Layla, “I want to stay here forever.”

“Forever’s a long time,” she said, laughing. “You’d be bored out of your skull, darling.”

“I mean it. I want to stay.”

“Get better, love. Get better and then we’ll see.”

“But you’ll think about it?

“Sure. But please, please get better, okay?”

Once I was well enough to go out with my grandparents, I was even more seduced. Safe, it was so safe you didn’t have to think. You could stroll across the street knowing that cars would actually stop at the stoplight. You didn’t have to jostle in and out of crowded buses spitting black exhaust. There was an intense, clean quiet over the neighborhood, a distinct lack of begging children with oozing sores.
This is heaven
, I thought.

Within a few months, Layla was utterly miserable, drinking peppermint tea—which supposedly helped her chronic headaches—all day long. She pitched a tent in the backyard, claiming she couldn’t stand the closed-up, frigid house. She slept there, and during the days hung out on the porch sipping tea and cringing at the lawn mower sounds. She refused to go to the giant stores with us, insisted they gave her a stomachache. When I came home with an iPod that my granddad bought me from Best Buy, she threw her arms around me and burst into tears. “What if you turn into one of these kids, Z? All they care about are their cell-phone rings and iPod tunes.”

“That’s not true.” I liked the neighborhood kids, especially the twin girls next door. We hung out at the pool together, spent hours giggling and listening to one another’s music on the lounge chairs, sucking on red-white-and-blue Bomb
Pops, reapplying pomegranate lip gloss and icicle-silver eye shadow. “They’re my friends.”

She wiped her eyes. “Well, your friends should be dropped in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. See what the Yanomami think about those ninety-dollar pants and name-brand shirts.”

I should have seen that as a warning, her talking about the Brazilian jungle. And she’d started going online to Latin American ESL job sites, jotting down notes in her notebook. Still, I ignored it.

And then one evening, at the kitchen table, Layla reached for my hand and took a deep breath. That’s when I knew. I knew before she opened her mouth.

“I got tickets to Brazil, Z. Supercheap, a last-minute deal. I couldn’t pass it up.”

Two days later, with my carry-on full of Grandmom’s old
Better Homes and Gardens
, I sat on the plane to Rio, my iPod blasting, writing page after page of I HATE LAYLA.

Wendell listens, absorbed, as I ramble on about how I was forced to leave the paradise of suburban Maryland. We’re passing through the park now, where a few couples cuddle on benches, gazing at each other, kissing, grasping at the other’s skin and clothes as though one of them could slip away. I pick up our pace and try not to look at them.

“So, Wendell,” I say, feeling suddenly awkward, “what do you and your family do together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, do you go to the mall?”

He laughs. “They’re morally opposed to the mall. You know, rejecting consumerism and all that.”

“Oh. Then what do you all do?”

“Hiking. Biking. Plein air painting.”

“Hey, do you go to this restaurant—my grandmom took me there—it was across the mall parking lot, between Best Buy and Old Navy.” The air-conditioning in that restaurant was so strong that I broke out in goose bumps within seconds of entering, and the waitress was so unearthly friendly I thought her smile would leap off her face. “Applefleas!” I’m proud that I remember the name, proof I have an insider’s scoop on everyday American life.

“Applebee’s?” He grins. “Nope. No chains. We go to little hole-in-the-wall ethnic places. Family-owned. Peruvian, Indian, Vietnamese.”

“Oh.” I try to hide my disappointment.

He elbows me. “If you’d spent your life as a regular at Applebee’s, you wouldn’t speak a zillion languages. You wouldn’t be with me now. I’d still be wandering around the market saying,
‘¿Mamá? ¿Papá?’
”

I laugh. “Someone else would have helped you.”

“It was meant to be you,” Wendell says. “The second time I saw you, in the market in that orange outfit, I thought,
This girl flies while the rest of us walk
. It’s like you don’t have the same chains that the rest of us have holding us to earth.”

“Not by my choice. It’s always been Layla.”

“It’s you, too. Why would you want to give that up? It
would be like clipping your wings. It would be like going from the life of a bird to the life of, I don’t know, a cow or something.”

“A cow?”

“Yeah. A cow.”

“Hmmm. A cow.”

This whole bird thing makes me think of something, a foggy memory. A dream. Actually, a bunch of dreams. Disturbing dreams I had in Maryland while recovering from malaria.

In one dream, I was floating down a river of warm water, so comfortable, when a bird floated by. It was dead. And then I realized I was dead too.

In another, the twins and the other neighborhood kids and I were at someone’s house on a fluffy couch. We were watching TV and waiting and waiting. I stuck my hand down between the cushions and found a bone, and then another. Pieces of a bird skeleton.

And another: I was walking on a path with a big crowd of people. My legs were really tired and I looked around and wondered why no one was flying. I wondered if there was a rule against it or if people there just didn’t do it or what. So instead of flying, I kept trudging along.

Now it hits me full force, the creepy feeling I had waking up after those dreams. It was like a smoke alarm in the distance, coming through a fog or heard underwater, a warning I tried to ignore.

…

Inside the
peña
, it’s dark, with spotlights darting around and dry-ice smoke drifting. Onstage, a band plays
cumbias
and people dance, crowded onto a small dance floor. Everyone looks dressed up, the girls in short, flirty skirts or tight jeans and heels, a few girls in indigenous clothes, glittery and elegant.

I wish I’d worn something nicer. My T-shirt is snug, but pretty unsexy—PEE-PEE ISLAND in pink letters over a palm tree. Layla and I bought matching ones in Thailand, mine purple, hers orange. And I’m wearing loose green cotton pants, tailor-made by our neighbor in Phuket in bulk—five pairs for me, five for Layla, at five bucks a pair, in a rainbow of colors. Our practical pants, Layla and I call them. Baggy with a drawstring—more loungewear than going-out wear.

Wendell and I sit down at a table made of thick, dark, worn wood and order drinks.

I expect he’ll get a beer since that’s what all American teenagers get when they’re in countries that don’t card. Surprisingly, he orders a bubbly water, so I do the same.

“No beer?” I ask.

“I swore to my mom I wouldn’t touch alcohol here.”

“Another condition? Along with the babysitter?”

“Yep. You’re seeing me in all my mama’s-boy glory.”

“It’s cute,” I say.

“Cute?” He looks unsure if he wants to be cute.

“I mean, it’s cute your mom cares so much to make you promise. And that you’d actually do it.”

When the bubbly waters come, he says, “My treat. For all your help.” He opens his wallet, and there, exposed to the world, is Her.

The sort-of-ex-girlfriend. In a worn photo, cloudy behind the plastic. She’s all made-up, her blond hair washed and blow-dried and straightened and her eyelashes curled and doll-like. She isn’t particularly pretty, more the kind of person you’d assume is pretty because she has all the necessary pretty things—smooth skin and arched eyebrows and glossy hair. But she doesn’t look interesting. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t want her to be interesting.

“So that’s Her,” I say, tapping my finger over her face, noticing how scraggly my fingernail looks against her perfect, polished face. Her fingernails aren’t in the picture, but I’d bet my Pee-Pee Island shirt they’re freshly manicured.

“Yeah,” he says. “Zeeta—”

“So tell me,” I interrupt, embarrassed. “Is She a cow or a bird?”

He laughs. “If I had to choose”—he takes a sip of seltzer—“I’d have to say a cow. But pretty darn good-looking,” he adds.

I study the photo. “For a cow,” I say, shutting his wallet and clicking my bottle against his.
“Salud.”
I wink, and after a few sips, I grab his hand and drag him onto the dance floor. I teach him how to move his feet and spin me, and surprisingly, he only steps on my foot once. He seems to get the rhythm immediately, and after a couple of songs, he spins me around as if he’s been moving to this music all his life.

“How is it,” I yell over the music, “that you can’t walk through the market without knocking something over, yet you’re twirling me around like an expert?”

“We always have music on at our house. My dad wanted me to be in touch with my heritage, which meant blasting Latino music.”

We dance and sweat and laugh and grow pink-faced and lose ourselves in the rhythms and darkness and moving spotlights. I’m flying, and Wendell’s flying next to me, and it feels good. As I fly, I think about Layla. The old Layla. How she flew through life with me in tow. But maybe I wasn’t straggling behind, holding her back. Maybe we were flying through life together, hand in hand. Maybe this is who I am. Maybe this is the life I’d choose for myself, even if Layla weren’t around.