The Indigo Notebook (8 page)

Odelia points and jumps up and down. “Mamita Luz’s bread oven!” And then she and Isabel are running, unable to contain their excitement, pulling me along, with Wendell and Eva right on our heels. And sure enough, as we come closer, the rich, warm smell of baking bread surrounds the house in a sweet cloud. Smoke’s rising from the chimney, swirling into the raindrops. In front, sprays of pink bougainvillea are climbing the walls, emerging from tangles of blackberry bushes heavy with shiny berries. A few chickens peck around in the mud among red and orange potted flowers in old tin cans. The house is a cheerful oasis in the rain.

The girls knock on the heavy wooden door, Odelia bouncing in anticipation.

As we wait, Wendell turns to me, shivering. It’s grown colder now that the sun’s setting. “Ever feel extra alive?”

I think of how Layla felt more alive than ever the first time she traveled. “When we move,” I say slowly. “The first month or two, there’s that time when I notice everything—all the colors and sounds and smells—they seem magnified.” I don’t mention that this in-between time is also the time my middle-of-the-night panics are worst.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s how I feel now. Freezing my butt off, but alive.”

The door opens, and there stands a woman, middle-aged, round as a soft roll. The girls rush into her arms and she wraps all three of them up like a blanket. She reaches out for my hand and Wendell’s, and holds them for a moment, beaming.
“Mis hijos!”
My children!

She ushers us inside, to a room on the left—a kitchen—where three other children, two boys and a toddler girl, are sitting by the fire, pulling apart pieces of steaming bread and munching with delight.

They stare at us, curious, until finally a brave boy says,
“Buenas tardes.”

As we introduce ourselves, the girls put their hands in mine and Wendell’s, firmly, claiming first dibs on their new friends.

For a moment, Wendell and I stand, savoring the heat, gazing around the room. The ceiling is high, with exposed beams, and covered in straw. There’s hardly any furniture in here, just two large wood pillars with spoons and pans and ladles hanging from nails. The walls are rough, pink clay with bits of straw and old corncobs poking out. Small benches and stools line the walls, ready and waiting for more kids to come. An old guitar leans in the corner, with reed flutes of different sizes on a stool beside it.

In the center of the room, a hearth fire pit holds hot coals beneath a bubbling pot of tea, something lemony. The woman dips a steaming cupful for each of us, and motions for us to sit on a bench. In one sweeping motion, without a fuss, she takes a blue wool poncho from a nail on the wall and drapes it over Wendell’s shivering shoulders.

Then she floats over to a hole in the wall that’s hiding an orange fire glow and an iron rack. Inside, on a giant metal pan, are little balls of dough, just beginning to turn golden. And farther back, I glimpse the blackened wall of the inside
of the bump we’d seen from the outside. She feeds more wood into the oven and then plucks some rolls from a pan beside it. Smiling, she drops one in each of our hands, and sits down with us. After we’ve eaten our rolls—which are so otherworldly delicious I’m sure we’ve stumbled straight into a fairy tale—she drops second rolls into our hands and announces, “I am Mamita Luz.”

She’s staring at Wendell, maybe sensing he doesn’t speak Spanish or come from here.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, sipping my tea. Lemon balm, it tastes like. With tons of sugar. “Thank you for the bread. I’m Zeeta and this is Wendell. He’s American.”

Wendell pipes in with
“Gracias, gracias,”
in his rough accent.

She smiles appreciatively, and stares at him, curious.

Wendell says, “Zeeta, thank her. Tell her that this is the best bread I’ve ever eaten. Ever.”

What he really means:
Please, please, be my birth mother
.

When I translate the bread compliment, she laughs and crinkles her eyes. “How could I not share bread with you? You are my son.”

I blink. It can’t possibly be this easy.

But then Mamita Luz motions to me. “And she is my daughter.” And to the girls. “And they are my daughters.” And to the boys. “And they are my sons.”

Once I translate, Wendell’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Zeeta, can you ask her if she’s had any kids by birth?”

Mamita Luz shakes her head slowly in response. “My breasts
have never fed milk to a baby.” She pats her great bosom with no self-consciousness. “Instead, I am blessed with all these children, the children of the village, and more, like you two. And instead of mother’s milk, I feed my children bread.”

Wendell’s face falls.

I want to reach out and hold his hand. Instead, I open my indigo notebook. “When is the moment you felt most alive, Mamita Luz?”

She looks around the room, at the children eating, stuffing their cheeks like chipmunks and talking and laughing with their mouths full. “I wanted children with all my heart. But God did not give me any. For years I felt half dead. Then, my husband built me this oven, just like the one my grandmother had. I started baking bread. And children started coming. Soon, every day my kitchen was full of children, happy and full. One day I looked around and realized I was no longer half dead. No, I was more alive than ever.” From the huge, steaming pot, she ladles more tea into our cups. “Now,” she says, “what brings you two all the way out here?”

I’m speechless. It’s true, this woman has stepped straight out of a fairy tale. Finally, I say, “Mamita Luz, Wendell was adopted sixteen years ago. Do you know who his birth parents might be?”

She smiles wistfully. “Who are the people who nourish you and love you?”

After I translate, he says, without hesitation,
“Mi mamá y papá.”

“And now you have another mother, me, Mamita Luz. And you have Pachamama, Mother Earth, always below your feet. So many mothers. If you don’t find what you think you’re looking for, don’t be sad. There are ties stronger than blood,
hijo
.”

And then, as though an internal alarm clock has buzzed, triggered by a certain golden bread smell, she whisks over to the oven. With a long wooden paddle like a flat oar, she pulls out the next batch of bread as the kids gather around her, eagerly watching.

I note that she’s evaded our question, but there’s no time to push her for more information. It will be dark soon and Layla will be wondering where I am. We down the last drops of tea and say goodbye to the kids. Mamita Luz ushers us to the door, where it’s dusky blue outside, just the faintest light silhouetting the mountains.

“Come back tomorrow when my husband is here. He will want to meet you.” Wendell starts taking off the poncho, but she firmly pats it back on his shoulders. “Wear it home and bring it back tomorrow,
hijo
.”

Mamita Luz walks us to the end of the path, to the road, a shawl draped over her head. She holds Wendell’s hand for a moment and tilts his face, studying it from all angles. Rain droplets lace her eyelashes, like tiny crystals in the streetlamp’s glow. She wipes the water from her cheeks. “Go now, children.”

…

Wendell and the girls and I walk down the path through the corn, over the irrigation ditch, to the main street. A few streetlamps spot the darkness with flickering pools of light. Odelia clings fiercely to her sisters’ hands, telling us about a monster who lives in the shadows. As we near the inter section with the road that leads downhill to the bus stop, I notice someone at the edge of the road in a weedy ditch. A man, talking and singing to himself and clutching a nearly empty bottle.

Odelia stops in her tracks, refuses to budge.

Eva and Isabel have stopped too. The girls whisper in Quichua. Odelia starts crying.

In a slurred voice, the man calls out, “Is that you, daughters?”

Isabel bites her lip.

“Come here,” he yells. “Who are you with?”

Holding hands, the girls move closer to him the way you might approach a vicious dog.

“What are you doing with my daughters?” Spit flies from his mouth. “You trying to steal them?”

I take a step back. “They’re helping us look for my friend’s birth parents. He was adopted from this town.”

He nods, squints at Wendell. “How old are you, boy?”

“Sixteen.”

He grunts. “There was a woman.” He takes a swig. “She had a baby. No one ever knew what happened to the boy.”

“And the woman?” I ask.

He coughs and spits out a shiny clump of mucus. “After a while, she disappeared too.”

As I translate for Wendell, I resist the overwhelming urge to hold his hand or touch his shoulder.

“What’s the woman’s name?” I ask the man.

“Who knows. She wasn’t from here.”

I translate for Wendell. He says nothing, only licks the rain from his lips.

“What about his father?” I ask.

Suddenly, the man stands up and waves his fists in the air. “You’re trying to steal my daughters, aren’t you?”

The girls back up. Isabel’s crying now too. Their father’s moving toward them, staggering, punching the air.

Wendell steps between him and the girls.

Eva whispers to me, “I’m taking my
ñañas
to spend the night with Mamita Luz. Come back tomorrow.” The girls run down the street, their father shouting after them.

Wendell and I stay still for a moment, hearts pounding, unsure what to do.

Meanwhile, the man is stumbling after the girls, but they have a big head start that keeps widening. Finally, the man falls down at the roadside and sucks the remaining liquor from his bottle.

Wendell takes my hand and we walk quickly to the intersection and turn right. Once we reach the hill, we run.

W
e sit, not talking, as the bus moves down the dark highway, following its headlights. Romantic ballads blast from the speakers.

Finally, Wendell says, “Think the girls are okay?”

His breath is warm. It still smells like sweet, lemony tea.

“They’ll be safe at Mamita Luz’s,” I say.

“I was sure she was my birth mom. From the second she opened the door.” He presses his lips together. “Like I’d
seen
her before.”

The blaring music forces our heads close, so that my eyes are just inches from his. “Maybe you just
want
her to be your birth mother.”

Wendell plays with a loose thread at his shirt hem. “I bet we’ll find something out when we come back tomorrow.”

I’m doubtful. “We could just try another village.”

“I have to give back the poncho. And there’s that mystery woman.”

Right. Let’s not forget the ranting of an incoherent drunk man. Carefully, I say, “Remember, we have limited time and lots more villages.”

“I have a feeling about this place, Zeeta. A few more days. If nothing shows up by then, we’ll move on.”

Although this whole thing is rapidly turning into a waste of time, we did have a fun day together in this village, and the girls are very cute, and I wouldn’t mind some more of Mamita Luz’s bread, so I say, “All right.”

We stay silent for another song, and then he says, “Zeeta, I have some letters.” He hesitates. “Can you translate them into Spanish?”

I get the feeling this is something big he’s asking me. “Sure.”

“No one’s ever seen them before.”

“What are they?”

“Since I was eight years old, I’ve been writing letters to my birth parents. Mostly on birthdays and holidays. I have about twenty now. I want to give them to my birth parents.”

A large woman toting huge bags squeezes past us in the aisle. I lean close to Wendell to avoid being bumped. Ever notice how the touch of certain people, even accidental, can send tingles through your whole body? For a second, Wendell’s arm grazes mine, and a warmth floods into me. Layla would probably boil it down to chi. She went through a
phase a few years back in Morocco where all she wanted to do was sit around holding hands and sending chi back and forth.

After the woman passes, I say, “It would be an honor to translate your letters,” and I keep my head close to his, nearly touching, feeling the chi flow in the dark, lemony-sweet air.

We stop at Wendell’s hotel room for the letters. It’s Colonial, painted buttery yellow with white trim around tall French windows. A doorman with a gold tooth greets Wendell by name on the way in. Inside, from behind a desk, a pudgy middle-aged woman in a suit shoots him a giant smile. “Wendell! Good to see you!”

“Hey, Dalia.” He gives a quick wave and keeps walking.

“You’re popular here,” I say as we enter the lobby, a huge pillared space with an indoor garden bursting with orange bird-of-paradise flowers. The wooden floors shine with pine wax and smell like a forest.

“She’s the owner. The friend of a friend of my mom I told you about.”

“
Que pleno
. You’re lucky.”

“Not really. She’s basically my babysitter.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“When I told my parents I was going to Ecuador, they were excited. They thought they’d come along, too. Then I said I wanted to go alone. At first they said no, but then my mom e-mailed all their old Peace Corps friends and found someone who knew someone who ran a hotel here. And here
I am. On the condition that I tell Dalia the babysitter everywhere I go. That and call home every day. A little oppressive.”

“I still say you’re lucky.”

While he runs up the polished marble stairs to his room, I wait in the lobby on a worn velvet chair, watching a tiny bird flit around the garden. I try to imagine Layla going to all that trouble to make me safe.

During my childhood, regardless of the country, I ran wild after school. The only rule—recommendation, really—was that I had to be home by dark. In the evenings, when Layla was feeling too mellow for dancing under the full moon or forming an impromptu drum circle, she read me her favorite books of poetry over and over. Mostly Rumi, but also Thich Nhat Hanh and Khalil Gibran. One night, I asked her why I didn’t have rules like the other kids. Why didn’t I have to do my homework right when I came home from school? Why didn’t I have to change out of my school uniform to keep it clean? She kissed my cheek. “That’s why we read together, Z. So that you get chock-full of wisdom. So you know for yourself how to live.” She gave me another jasmine-scented kiss, her hair tickling my face. “Rules are an illusion.”