The Indigo Notebook (19 page)

Wendell stares, suddenly sober. “Then what?”

Faustino breathes out, long and forceful. “After she gave birth to you, Silvio and Luz brought her to the family where she used to work as a maid. She didn’t have any family, just her employers. She’d lived with them since she was a child, except for the months she lived here in Agua Santa. I went to talk to her, to apologize for hitting her, to swear I wouldn’t do it again. She said she’d drive around with me and hear me out.”

He whips a switchblade from his pocket, snaps open the knife. “Then we started fighting. I was getting angry and trying not to hit her, but she was provoking me.” He slices through a branch blocking the path. “I was drinking, yes, but not that much. We were on a twisty road and I was going faster and faster. Getting angrier and angrier. And then there was a curve, and it was too tight, and the truck went off the edge, into a tree.” He cuts another branch, then closes the knife slowly. “At the funeral, Silvio told me, ‘My brother no longer exists.’ That’s the last thing he said to me. Sixteen years ago.”

After I translate for Wendell, we stand in the garden, insects humming around us, a surreal sound track. It feels like a strange dream, dark and bright at the same time, slippery and full of contradictions, the way dreams can be sometimes.

“My brother is right,” Faustino says. “I’m not a good man.
I’m like my flowers. Maybe on the outside I look good. A nice house, a nice truck. But on the inside …”

He takes the flower from behind my ear. “Belladonna. Beautiful, isn’t it? Eat a few of its leaves and you’ll take a trip to hell, monsters and death everywhere. Eat a few more and you’ll die.”

I put my hand to my ear, hoping no poison has absorbed through the skin. As I translate for Wendell, the thick scent of flowers becomes suffocating.

“My flowers are like this,” he says. “That is why I love them.”

I grab Wendell’s arm. “Thank you, Don Faustino. This is … fascinating.” I drag Wendell away as he calls out,
“Gracias
, Faustino.”

Faustino shouts after us, “You can call me
Papá
, son. If you’d like.”

And then, “Come back soon.”

And then, “Please.”

“I
think he’s jus’ lonely.” Wendell’s zigzagging down the hill, stumbling every few steps.

I roll my eyes.

“He’s not so bad, Z.” His words slur together.
Eeesnotsobaaadzeee
.

“He’s not? Let’s see. There’s the gun, the deadly creatures, the poisonous flowers.”

“Yeah, but the dogs’re nice. An’ the garden’s wiiicked, duuude. An’ he din’t try to kill us.”

“He told us himself he isn’t a good person.”

“Ohhh, come ooon.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for next time. Maybe he wants to get something from us first, like money, before he kills us.”

“He’s jus’ es-es-entric, Z.”

“You didn’t find him kind of creepy?”

“Duuude, I wanna go back an’ take pitchers in that garden.”

“I think we should stay away.”

And then Odelia and Isabel and Eva run up, arms open, and fly into our arms, nearly knocking Wendell over. “You made it!” Isabel cries. “What happened?”

“Well,” I begin, “we just talked and saw his … yard and some … pets of his.”

They look at one another, confused. “He didn’t sic the dogs on you?”

“No,
chicas
. But you should still stay away from him, okay?”

“What happened to him?” Odelia whispers, motioning to Wendell, who’s sitting on a rock, head between his knees, looking suddenly green.

“Drunk,” I say, and then, escorted by the girls, I lead him downhill, my arm around him, tucked under his armpit, holding him steady on the long trek back to the bus. This morning’s arm-in-arm walk was much better.

Then he hadn’t been stopping to puke every few minutes.

I hold back Wendell’s hair as he dry heaves over the toilet in his hotel room. I force him to drink three tall glasses of water before he collapses onto the bed and falls into a slack-jawed sleep. On the adjacent bed, I write about Faustino in my notebook, flicking my eyes to Wendell’s chest every few minutes to make sure he hasn’t stopped breathing or choked on vomit.

After a few hours, he wakes up, clutching his head and mumbling that he needs to brush his teeth and take a shower.

“Want me to stay?” I ask, embarrassed that he’s embarrassed.

“No thanks.” With his head down, he disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly.

On the way home I stop by Gaby’s. She offers me
tostado—
big salty, greasy kernels of toasted corn—and I realize I’m famished. Between mouthfuls
of tostado
, I tell her everything except the vomit part, to save Wendell’s dignity.

She listens like a wide-eyed owl. After turning it all over in her wise mind, she comes up with some possibilities.

One, Faustino is a little
con la luna—
“with the moon,” or crazy—and an alcoholic but harmless.

Two, he’s “with the moon” and an alcoholic and
not
harmless.

Three, he’s not “with the moon”
or
harmless (but maybe an alcoholic), and he’s either a criminal, a kidnapper, a drug dealer, or a thief. Or a mix of all of the above.

She leans back in her chair, her hands folded over her belly, like a round, Otavaleña Sherlock Holmes, a knitting needle protruding from the corner of her mouth in place of a pipe. “Somehow he has more money than everyone else. Yet he’s not a vendor. And he doesn’t have kids working abroad and sending back money. So there must be some other thing, and chances are it’s illegal. Take Silvio’s advice. Stay away from him.”

“But Wendell wants to go back.”

She tosses a handful of
tostado
into her mouth, crunching and musing. “You have to let people make their own mistakes, discover the truth for themselves.”

“But I’m supposed to protect him. I promised his mother. And I don’t want him getting hurt.”

She digests that and says finally, “If you think he’s in over his head, tell his parents to come get him.”

“He’d kill me.”

“Better than him getting killed.”

W
hen I get home, Layla’s in her bedroom, standing over her small purple suitcase, a hand on her hip, lips slightly pursed, pensive.

“What’s up, Layla?”

“Pack your bags, love. We’re going away for the weekend.”

First, I’m stunned.

And then, upset. I need to fix things with Wendell first.

Layla’s flying around the room, in a packing whirlwind. Just the two of us, flitting off like birds for a bit. Maybe a couple of days away could be a good thing. Wendell and I can miss each other and talk on the phone, and then when we see each other again, it will be a warm reunion. And I like the idea of girl bonding time with Layla, away from the TV.
Maybe I’ll try talking with her, like Gaby suggested. “Where are we going?”

She drops a strapless top in the suitcase. “A gorgeous hacienda in the mountains. The pictures online are amazing.”

I lean against the doorframe. Usually our vacations involve five-dollars-a-night youth hostels, sharing a dorm room with ten scraggly backpackers. Or camping on a beach under a tarp. “We have enough money for that, Layla?”

“Don’t worry, love.” She throws in her orange bikini. “It’s Jeff’s treat.”

Why is my stomach sinking? “He’s coming?”

“It’s his idea. We thought you two should get to know each other better.”

I dig my fingers into the wooden door. “What about getting your work visa? That should be the priority now. Not taking a vacation. You can’t work here much longer with no visa.”

“Well”—she hesitates, sizing up a yellow ruffled peasant shirt—“that’s something we want to talk to you about on the trip.” She tosses the blouse onto the bed, the reject pile.

My heartbeat quickens. “Tell me now.”

“Look, love, I told Jeff how much you begged me to stay in Maryland. And he suggested we go back with him. He has some friends who are teachers. They could help me find a job there. He lives less than an hour away from my parents. They’d be ecstatic.”

The room starts spinning. “What?” I hear myself squeak, as if I’m outside myself, watching the scene from above.

“It might end up being just a visit, but if we want to, we could stay.” She folds a pair of pleated khaki shorts I’ve never seen before.

I find my voice. “But remember your headaches? Remember how miserable you were there?”

She stares at me, a pair of flip-flops dangling from her fingers. “This is our chance for a normal life, love. I’m excited about it. I really am. This time I can make it work. I know I can. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

I open my mouth to let everything spill out, to tell her I miss the old Layla, to tell her I liked our old life. Then the buzzer rings.

“That’s Jeff!” she says. “Get packed, Z.”

As she goes to let him in, all I can think about are dead birds.

We ride in Jeff’s SUV through valleys dwarfed by green mountains spotted with houses, the occasional potato stand and shack selling Coke and snacks on the roadside. It’s impossible to tell the outside temperature since the digital thermostat’s set to sixty-eight degrees.

During the ride, Jeff comes up with a plan for turning Ecuador into an efficient, well-oiled tourist machine. “Look at this trash burning on the roadside. Now in Virginia—”

Inside his head, he’s probably planning out a PowerPoint presentation entitled
What Ecuador Could Learn from Virginia
.

Layla just nods, as though she agrees with him.

I remember conjugating
aguantar
with Wendell.
Ya no aguanto
. I can no longer bear it. I close my eyes and think of what Layla should be saying.
Would be
saying, if she were still herself.

“Jeff,” I begin, “the thing is, not every country has enough money to dump their trash in the middle of the ocean. I mean, at least here it’s in your face and you realize all the waste you’re creating.”

Layla’s lips purse in disapproval, sitcom-mom style. At
me
.

He forces a personable grin. “Good point.” He turns to Layla. “Your spunk runs in the family, honey.”

What spunk? Layla’s spunk is nowhere to be seen. She’s always been the one lamenting how we’re trashing Pachamama, Mother Earth, slashing through the river of her veins, gouging deep into her flesh with oil wells and mines.

When Jeff stops at a gas station and goes inside for a pack of chips, I say, “Layla, why aren’t you acting like yourself? Why don’t you say what you think around Jeff?”

“I’m just being polite, Z. Acting like a grown-up. Maybe you should try it.” She puts on her sunglasses and reclines the seat. “Can you grab some peppermints from my bag?”

An hour later, at the hacienda, the concierge carries our suitcases to a suite on the second floor of the enormous, white-pillared, red-roofed mansion surrounded by red bougainvillea and expanses of trimmed grass. Jeff and Layla take the big room, and I take the adjoining one.

The decor’s trying a little too hard. Folk art’s plastered over
the walls: woven rugs featuring chubby indigenous girls hugging baby llamas, dried sugarcane-leaf mats like the ones in Mamita Luz’s house, some clay pots dangling from fibrous ropes.

I plop on the bed and call Wendell. After one ring his voice mail picks up. Disappointed, I leave a message with our hotel’s phone number.

We eat a bland chicken dinner at the hotel restaurant, and then, while Layla and Jeff drink espressos, I walk back to my room up candlelit stairs and through candlelit hallways.

I flip through some channels on TV and then flick it off. I try writing a little in my notebook, but all that comes out are rambling questions about Wendell, the same ones over and over.
Where are you? Why aren’t you calling? Are you okay? Is it something I did?

I throw down the pen and toss the notebook on the bed. After only one day, the vacation is dragging on for eternity. The place is nice, I have to admit, nicer than anywhere Layla and I’ve stayed before—giant, fluffy beds, a whirlpool tub in the bathroom, soft mood lighting. Luxurious, but I can’t enjoy it.

Finally, I try to sleep, but the mattress feels too pouffy, and anyway, my muscles are all tensed waiting for the phone to ring. Then I remember Wendell’s letters, tucked in the pocket of my bag. Just a few left to translate. I pull one out, unfold it. Ink drawings of swords and dragons and knights lace the edges. This must be one of the earlier letters, before he started getting the weird feelings.

In a circle of yellow lamplight, I read slowly, savoring it like a love letter. There’s something thrilling about being inside Wendell’s head, even if it’s his nine-year-old head.

I translate it carefully, considering every word choice, the order of every phrase, drawing it out. Then I stare out the window, into the darkness. There was a time when I, too, thought my father was king and that one day he would find me and take me home to our cozy palace, where he and Layla and I would live in domestic, royal bliss. Over the years, the king evolved into the Normal Father and the palace into the Normal Home.