The Indigo Notebook (21 page)

He hangs back, about twenty feet away, and yells something at me in Quichua. Then he turns and staggers in the other direction. Once he’s far enough away, I collapse, kneeling in the dirt. Being fifteen years old and confronted with this monster is scary enough. I can’t imagine how it feels to a forty-pound five-year-old who only comes up to his waist. Even though they’re obviously used to this—running from this man who is supposed to love them—that doesn’t make it any less scary.

I force myself to stand and head toward Mamita Luz’s. My heart’s beating wildly the whole way, along the irrigation ditch, beneath the arc of corn leaves. Wendell must have had a feeling about this, must have felt helpless. All he could do was warn the girls. Now I feel helpless, thinking of a million things I should have said to that terrible man, things I should have done.
How dare you try to hurt a child!
I should have drop-kicked him. Tackled him. Tied him to a tree with a sign reading I HIT INNOCENT CHILDREN and refused to let him go until he swore to never do it again.

When I reach Mamita Luz’s house, I knock on the door, my hands and legs still shaking.

“Who is it?” Eva’s thin voice calls out.

“Zeeta.”

She opens the door, looking worn out, like a very old lady. Wordlessly, she closes the door behind me and heaves a thick wooden bar across it. Mamita Luz is sitting by the oven with Odelia in her lap and one arm wrapped around Isabel. Odelia’s sobbing in scratchy gasps and gulps of air. Across Isabel’s face, paths of dried tears streak through the grime. Eva’s quiet, but beneath her stooped shoulders and crossed arms is a hard ball of anger.

Mamita Luz murmurs in a slow river voice, “You girls are treasures. Your father should treat you like the treasures you are.”

A few other kids are in the corner, playing marbles on the dirt floor, talking softly. I stand awkwardly by the wood
column, still feeling guilty that I didn’t do something to their father, anything.

Mamita Luz nods at me in a sad greeting, then turns back to the girls. “When Taita Silvio gets home, we’ll tell him what happened and he’ll go talk to your father. You’re safe now.”

Once Odelia’s sobs stop, Mamita Luz says, “Eva, please go cut some
ortiga
. Zeeta, go with her.” She hands me a knife. “For the
ortiga
.”

I hold the knife tightly, ready to use it on the girls’ father if he dares to come here. Eva grabs a bag and leads me to a clump of nettles at the side of the house. The sun’s halfway to the top of the sky, the light still fresh, the heat just starting.

Carefully, Eva cuts the stems with the knife, trying to avoid the sharp hairs. Strange how something that can sting you can also heal you.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“What happened, Eva?”

“Papi’s drunk. He got mad at Odelia. She was playing while he was sleeping and woke him up, and he told her to shut up and started beating her with the stick. But it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t her fault. She’s only five. She was just playing.”

Eva’s crying now, wiping her tears with her arm as she cuts the
ortiga
. “And he kept hitting her harder and harder and then Isabel tried to grab his arm to stop him and he started hitting her, too, and we told Odelia to run. And I grabbed his
arm and told Isabel to run and then he hit me and started chasing after them and I held him back long enough for them to get a head start and then I ran too, and luckily he’s drunk enough he kept tripping and couldn’t catch us. And last time he did this, Taita Silvio talked to him for a long time and for a while he didn’t hit us, but he was in a really bad mood this time and got drunk and …” Her voice fades. She straightens up and slings the bag of
ortiga
over her shoulder, sniffing. “Ready?”

On the way back, I ask, “What about your mother?”

“She works as a maid in Otavalo all day to make money for us. She has to, because our father spends all our money getting drunk on
trago
. Mami leaves when we wake up and gets home after we’re asleep. And she tells me to look after my
ñañas
. I try, but I can’t protect them.”

I put my arm around her. “You protected them. You brought them here. To a safe place.”

Inside, Mamita Luz boils the
ortiga
, lets it cool, and examines Odelia’s legs. They’re crisscrossed with red welts and scrapes from her father’s stick. How can that man have three daughters when Mamita Luz can’t have children of her own?

If Wendell hadn’t been adopted, if Faustino had been his father, would his childhood have been like this? In constant fear, running to save himself? Would he have been one of the regulars at Mamita Luz’s house?

She sits Odelia on a chair, with her little legs resting on another chair, and lays the damp herbs across her skin,
murmuring in Quichua. She heats up lemon balm tea and takes fresh, warm rolls from the oven and gives them to the girls. By the time they finish the food, they’re nearly back to their usual selves, playing marbles in the corner with the other kids.

Mamita Luz turns to me, shaking her head. “Nothing makes me sadder than unwanted children,” she whispers. “I feel helpless.”

“But you’re doing so much for them. You give them a safe place to come. You treat them like treasures.”

She sighs and takes out a big bowl and scoops a gourdful of flour from a giant sack. She adds water and a pinch of salt, and begins kneading rhythmically, as though she’s playing a cello, throwing her entire body into the movements. “Sometimes I wonder, if I’d had children of my own and poured all my attention on them, what would have happened to Odelia and her sisters? Where would they have gone? All these years of wishing for our own children, and now, when I’m comforting these girls, I understand. I know that this is where I need to be. And I feel at peace.”

I nod, thinking how badly Wendell wanted to find his birth parents. Now he’s found his father, who appears to be a creep. I think how badly I wanted a normal family life, and now that it’s within reach, the idea of it makes me want to cry.

“Here,” Mamita Luz says. “Want to help?”

I pluck a lump of dough from the bowl and imitate her
movements, trying to make my rhythm match hers. It’s tiring. After just a few minutes, my arm muscles feel sore.

“We visited Faustino last week,” I say.

“Yes, the girls told us. What happened?”

“Wendell moved in with him.”

Her kneading slows and a shadow passes over her face. Her hands rest, buried in the dough. She looks at me, a long, serious gaze. “When one of my children is in danger, I sense it. Even before little Odelia and her sisters came running here today, I felt it. And now I feel it just as strongly. Wendell is in danger.”

I
’m determined to protect Wendell. And Gaby’s right, I could use Taita Silvio’s help.

A half hour later, Taita Silvio comes in, and Odelia leaps into his arms, burying her head in his shoulder. Isabel tells him what happened in a small, serious voice.

“I’ll talk to your parents later today, once your father’s sober, my daughters.” His face looks pained. “Now, why don’t you stack the firewood? Small pieces in one pile, big pieces in the other. I’m going back out with Zeeta for more wood.”

The girls begin stacking, and we move away. “I think Wendell’s in trouble,” I whisper. I don’t want to panic the girls.

“I know,” he says. “Come with me to gather more firewood. We can talk on the way.”

I grab a head strap and machete. Machetes at our sides, we walk down a path behind his house, along cornfields and past wildflowers and tall grass, heading toward a piece of his property at the base of the Hill of Tunnels. After a fifteen-minute walk, we’re inside the woods, the light dappled through shifting leaves. A few birds flit around. We have to watch our footing on the sloping ground.

“I try to find dead branches and trees,” Taita Silvio says, scanning the forest. “This was my father’s property, this entire hill. Years ago, I told my brother he could have the hill as long as I could have a small bit of forest on this side to gather firewood.”

I sense there’s a story behind this, probably related to the fallout Faustino told us about. I wait to see if he’ll tell me more.

“I’ve been coming to this forest for firewood since I was a boy.”

“And you saw your star friend?”

He smiles. “Yes. My star friend. He was always there for me, in the same spot, sometimes hidden by clouds, but always there.”

I find a fallen log, dry but not rotted, and start chopping.

Meanwhile, Taita Silvio has found a dead tree. He breaks off branches, talking slowly and thoughtfully. “My star friend was predictable. Not like my father. He was like the girls’ father in some ways, especially toward the end of his life, when we were teenagers. When he was younger, he was a powerful
curandero
.”

I slice my machete blade through dead bark. “How could someone hurt his own children? Especially a healer?”

“Power is a tricky thing,
mija
. It can lift you up high on its wings and up into the sky where you feel invincible. But sometimes you forget the bigger thing that makes you fly. Without God, without love, you fall. You stop being grateful and humble, and you fall.

“And when you try to fly again, you forget how. So you drink liquor because for a moment when you drink you feel that you’re flying, but you always fall again. And you drink more and more to try to recapture that, to try to forget your heavy, hard life. And the power leaves you, but still you crave it. You get angry at your family, you hit them, you yell. You cannot bear it. This is what happened to my father.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because I have to say something, although
sorry
seems too flimsy a word.

Taita Silvio arranges his pile of wood on the rope, ties the frayed ends together, and heaves the bundle onto his back, secured with his head strap.

I’m almost done with my pile, my shoulders burning from the effort, bits of bark clinging to my sweaty arms.

He helps me finish, and adjusts the bundle on my back. “Tell me if it’s more than you can bear, daughter, and I’ll put more on mine.” On the way home, he motions back to the hill. “That’s where my brother and I used to hide from our father. In the tunnels under that hill.”

I think of what Faustino said, his earliest memory, hiding
in a crystal cave. And what the girls said about the devil’s palace inside. “Any devils in there?” I ask.

He laughs, shifting the wood on his back. “Most of the tunnels are just dark, damp caves. But one of the chambers is special. We crawled through a small hole to get to it. It’s made of crystals, the walls and ceilings and floors. You feel like you’re flying in there. You can forget the rest of the world and feel safe.

“Usually our father stopped chasing us before the tunnel. But we could find our way to the crystal chamber in the dark. We knew the secret. All right turns, the first right turn every time. We would run through the tunnels and then move the rock aside and scamper in. Even if our father managed to follow us all the way back, he could not touch us in the room. The crystals’ powers were too strong. They made the hole smaller so his big belly couldn’t fit inside. Sometimes my brother and I slept there. We kept candles and matches there in case we had to spend the night. Back then, we were close.”

I’m itching for my indigo notebook, wanting to write all this down. Instead, I try to remember every little detail. Layla would be enthralled. She’d do anything to be inside a crystal cave.

I would, too, I realize.

We pass a fresh spring pouring out of some mossy rocks, making a trickling, gurgling sound. Silvio bends down under all the weight and plucks some watercress. We munch
on the tiny, crisp leaves and scoop mouthfuls of water from the spring. He lifts his pant leg and shows me shiny scars up and down the flesh. “I look at what my father did to me and I feel sad. I swear every day that I will stay humble and grateful and always show love to my wife and our children. But my brother, he looks at his scars and feels anger. Our family’s blood has power, but one must learn to master it.”

“Can Faustino divine the future too?”

“Who knows. Maybe drinking
trago
helps him ignore the visions.” He tosses a pebble into the water, making a small splash and widening rings. “That’s what my father ended up doing, and what I suspect my brother does.”

Is that what Faustino’s teaching Wendell? To drink himself into oblivion? I pick a handful of watercress and study the tiny leaves.

“My brother is a man full of anger.” He tosses another pebble into the water. “And this is why he is involved with bad people doing illegal things.”

I suck in my breath. What am I even doing here? I should be with Wendell. “What things?” I ask warily.

“We don’t know exactly. Maybe drugs. Whatever it is, it is dangerous for Wendell.”

My stomach clenches. I shift the firewood bundle and adjust the strap across my forehead, ready to keep walking. “What should we do?”

“My brother is dead to me. This is the first time I’ve spoken of him in sixteen years.”

We head back along the path, toward his house. I’m walking fast, despite the twenty-pound load on my back, the strap digging into my forehead. I’ve already wasted valuable time. Silvio is having trouble keeping up. I don’t care. I’m sweating and breathing hard, and suddenly, I’m tired of Silvio’s secrets, furious that he’d let a rift with his brother get in the way of Wendell’s safety.

“Listen,” I say, “Faustino told us why you stopped talking to him. Why didn’t you tell us?”

He wipes some sweat from his cheek. “I didn’t want Wendell to hate his father. I thought his fantasy would be better than the truth.”

“You were wrong, Silvio.”

“Perhaps.” He sighs. “You know, as boys, we swore to each other that we would never beat our children. Then he beat Lilia while she was pregnant, before the child had even seen the light of day. That angered me. And scared me. It made me wonder if I was capable of doing the same thing. It made me want to never have children, so I would never have to find out.”