by Laura Resau
She handed me some crushed leaves and I breathed in the sharp, strong odor. I passed them to Mr. Lorenzo. He sniffed, and said, “I haven’t smelled this in ten years.”
Ángel said nothing, but I knew he was listening because he broke off a leafy branch and tucked it under his arm.
After walking for a few more minutes, Doña Remedios stopped by a plant with wide, light green leaves. She stroked them with expert fingers. “This root saved many people after the army burned their homes and chased them into the mountains. The people were dying of thirst because soldiers guarded the streams.” With a stick, she dug around the base of the plant and extracted a brown root, thick and clawlike. Then she pulled a knife from a sack at her waist and peeled off the brown skin, revealing white flesh. “Here, daughter, drink the water.”
I chewed and sucked the moisture out. It was juicy all right, but gave me only about a spoonful of water. How many of these would you need for a whole glassful? “Why did the soldiers do this?” I asked.
Mr. Lorenzo answered, his voice solemn. “They wanted to get the guerrillas. The army said the guerrillas were like fish. Fish that they wanted to kill. And the Mayan lands were their pond. The army decided to drain the pond so the fish would have no place to swim. So they burned villages and crops and killed people and stole their animals.”
Doña Remedios nodded. “What he says is true.” She picked a fuzzy leaf from a low-growing plant. “Now, look, daughter. This I use to cure people’s aching heads and aching bones. Their heads hurt because they are filled with bad memories. There is no room for good thoughts. And their bones hurt because sadness weighs them down.”
I glanced at Ángel. He was walking with the same glassy stare. I wondered what he was thinking about. Maybe he was feeling as if he were in the middle of his favorite dream, the one where he found his mother. Maybe he didn’t want to say anything that might wake himself up.
“Almost there,” Doña Remedios said.
We turned a bend, and there, ahead, was the light and space of another clearing. An expanse of grass and wildflowers rose into a hill. And scattered over the hillside, dozens of small crosses, some the color of the ocean, some the color of the sky. Tin cans of flowers encircled the base of each cross. A swallow flew across the graves, dipped, landed on the arm of a cross. It was too beautiful, the sunshine lighting up the petals and tips of grass, a butterfly floating from flower to flower. It did not match what was buried underneath.
Ángel spoke, his words heavy. “My mother isn’t alive, is she?”
“Of course she’s alive.” Doña Remedios tapped at his chest with her thick finger. “In your heart.”
Ángel pressed his lips together and stared at the graves. Mr. Lorenzo put his arm around Ángel’s shoulders.
Doña Remedios took his hand. “Remember what I told you that morning when I found you?”
Ángel’s voice was a whisper. “That she turned into flowers.” He sounded unconvinced.
Doña Remedios nodded. She led us to a lopsided cross painted blue-green. Three cups of white calla lilies leaned against the base, secured with smooth stones. FLOR BLANCA TOJIL YOC read a wooden plaque, scratched in uneven letters.
We stood, motionless, under a tree with mottled copper and green bark, its leaf shadows moving over our faces. A musky sweet smell filled the air, maybe coming from the tree’s fruit, which hung like golden ornaments. Mr. Lorenzo dropped to his knees and closed his eyes and whispered something under his breath, a prayer, maybe. Eventually, he stood up and put his arm back around Ángel, who hadn’t budged. “She loved guavas, remember, son?” He plucked some fruit from the tree and handed one to each of us. “Remember how she blended them with sugar and water? How she passed cups around during coffee harvest?”
I bit in. It was impossibly sweet. Like the coffee berries Ángel had tasted after he fell down the mountain. How can there be so much sweetness when you know what’s buried underneath?
Ángel held the guava in his hand, running his fingers over the smooth skin. Without his shades, his eyes seemed so exposed I could barely stand to look. “Are you sure it’s her?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes, love. With my own hands I reburied her. You see, a few years ago, they found a big grave. A place where the army dumped the people they’d killed. As the healer, I could name the bodies. I knew who had a tooth missing here. An arm broken there. A cracked rib. A smashed nose. Old wounds, from childhood. Your mother, she broke her right arm once.”
Mr. Lorenzo spoke in a brittle voice. “She fell from a tree when she was eight.”
Doña Remedios continued. “And her left finger was crushed.”
“A heavy grindstone fell on it,” Mr. Lorenzo said. “Just a year after our marriage.”
Doña Remedios nodded. “And she was missing two teeth.”
“An infection.” Mr. Lorenzo looked at Ángel. “While she was pregnant with you, son.”
“All of these things I remember clearly.” Doña Remedios knelt down, sitting on her heels. “The little misfortunes of life. All of these things have stayed in my head. I saw the remains of your mother, son. I saw the old wounds that had healed long before her death. The scars on her finger bones, her arm bones, the spaces in her mouth. And the new wounds. Bullet scars on her skull, her thigh, her shoulder blade.”
Mr. Lorenzo lowered his head and put his hand on Ángel’s back.
Doña Remedios waved her arms toward the graves. “Look. Now our neighbors are back where they belong, in peace. Every week I put flowers on their graves. Their spirits are happy.”
Strange that being around death can make you feel so alive. So quiveringly, tinglingly not dead. And yes, there were bones beneath our feet. Land mines and ashes of homes. But around us were crickets and fruit trees and flowers and sunshine and warmth.
I turned to Doña Remedios. “Those plants you showed us, can they really get rid of the bad memories?”
Doña Remedios plucked another guava. “They help with the pain, but something else helps more.”
“What?” I asked.
Ángel was watching her expectantly.
“When people know the truth. When people come to the grave and say goodbye. That is what finally makes their hearts feel good.”
I looked at Ángel. A tiny white flower rested on his shoulder, one that had clung there since our walk. I picked it up and offered it to him. Flor Blanca. White flower. On his shoulder, silently, this whole time.
And with that gesture, something inside him changed. His frozen face melted. He leaned over his father, pressed his face against the flannel shirt, and together, they cried.
The next day, in crisp morning sunlight, Ángel and I stood on a rickety bridge, surveying the map that Mercurio had drawn. Mr. Lorenzo was spending the day taking care of loose ends: wiring money from his bank in Tucson, paying the hospital bill, buying food for our trip back. Ángel and I planned to spend the day looking for the jewels.
I looked at the X on the map. I felt like a heroine in one of Juan’s tales, on the brink of finding the treasure. I used to feel it wasn’t fair we didn’t live in a kingdom riddled with pots of gold and fairies and heroines on quests. I’d ask Juan why we got ripped off, stuck in a boring world without magical treasures. He had said, “Maybe the real treasure is something more important than gold.” I’d pouted and said, “But I want a real treasure.” He’d kissed the top of my head. “You’re my real treasure, Sophie.”
Ángel and I peered over the rail at the stream. It was about thirty feet wide, but hard to tell how deep—probably at least six feet in the middle. Ángel pointed below. “That’s where the X is,” he said. “See anything?”
Little moving blobs of light opened and closed over the water. Tree leaves and branches and sky slid over the surface. I squinted, but all I saw were shadowy forms of stones at the bottom. No jewels. “I don’t see them,” I said finally.
“Let’s go down and look from the shore,” Ángel suggested. He was trying to stay ho
peful. We shuffled down the steep embankment from the road to the water’s edge.
The night before, in the hotel room, Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo had shared one narrow bed, and I’d taken the other. In the dark, over the fan’s rushing and clicking, we’d talked about our plans. Mr. Lorenzo wanted to go back to Dika and Pablo as soon as possible, but Ángel refused to leave without the jewels. I suggested we look for them the next day. “We’ll find them,” I said confidently. “Don’t worry.”
Now, as Ángel clung to my hand, I hoped I could deliver my promise. We walked along the pebbled bank, scanning the water, peering beneath the leaf reflections.
“Rest here, Ángel,” I said, motioning to a flat boulder. “I’ll go in.”
“I can go in, lime-girl.”
“You’ll get your bandages wet. Let me do it.”
So he perched on the rock, bending his legs up and folding his arms over his knees.
Like bits of an old dream, I remembered my fears of pesticide runoff, leeches, amoebas, poisonous fish, sharp rocks, rusted metal. I looked at the sparkles on the water, the shades of green and blue mixing on the surface, and then focused my eyes underneath, on the hidden things.
I hadn’t packed a swimsuit. A little playfully, a little nervously, I said, “Close your eyes, Ángel.”
He put his hands over his eyes, making a show of pressing tightly. I glanced up at the road. No one had passed in the last fifteen minutes. I pulled the white dress over my head. I folded the emergency money inside the dress. Then, quickly, I stripped off my bra and underwear, and dropped them in a heap on the white fabric.
Despite the sunshine, the air felt cool. The breeze moved over my skin, light, like fingertips. Goose bumps popped up, my nipples contracted. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Back in Tucson, I’d been too embarrassed to even roll up my sleeves and expose my pointy, wrinkled elbows.
I waded into the water and gasped at the coldness. Once it was up to my shoulders, I called out, “Okay, you can look.” But Ángel’s hands had already lowered. He smiled shyly.
I didn’t give myself a chance to blush. In one quick movement, I undid my ponytail, shook out my hair, and dove under. Tentatively, my eyes opened. Stones, green leafy things, darting schools of fish, tiny creatures moving around me. I rose to the surface, breathed in deep, then dove again, searching the bottom. It felt like a different world, this underwater place, the muffled sounds, pulsing blood, bubbles of breath, the tinkle of sand and pebbles, the light, hazy and filtered.
Again and again, I dove down, until I finally saw it, a gleam of red light over a rock. I moved toward it, saw my hair floating, my magnified hand reaching out, the fingers like someone else’s, clasping the beads. I splashed through the surface, and held the necklace triumphantly in the air for Ángel. The red spheres were bursting with light. There was something magical about this, finding jewels in the darkness.
Suddenly I understood what Juan meant about the treasure. It didn’t matter that these were not rubies. The glass held the final laugh of Ángel’s mother. It held Dika’s hopefulness. It held the promise of light.
Ángel stood up on the rock, beaming.
“How many more, Ángel?” I called out.
“Three.”
I draped the strand of beads over my head, and dove under again. Nearby, I found three others, waiting in their red halos. I looped them around my wrists.
Once I emerged, I checked the bridge and road for people. Deserted. I waded out of the river, dripping with water and glass. I squeezed out my hair and put on my clothes and climbed onto the rock beside Ángel. I started to take off the necklaces, and he said, in a low, quaking voice, “Keep them on.” We sat on the warm rock and he touched my arm. His hand on my skin, and then mine on his. Gingerly we touched, moving around his healing wounds, in a sunlit, underwater world.
We spent all day by the river, snacking on quesadillas, napping, eating guavas, and napping some more. A day outside of time. Ángel said he used to play in this very spot as a child while his mother washed clothes in the river. He rediscovered a path that he remembered leading back to the centro of town. So at sunset, when it was time to go, we decided to follow it. The trail was overgrown, covered by leaves so thick almost no sunlight peeked through.
A few minutes into the trail, it started to snow.
Not snowflakes, but flowers, those tiny white flowers. We stood perfectly still beneath the branches and let the white flowers cover us. We felt the rhythm the forest breathed: trees growing, leaves uncurling, petals forming, sap flowing, roots spreading. The little worlds inside fallen trees, fungus and insects making soil. Giant ants slicing up leaves, carrying the pieces to their nests. Life, death, life. And on and on and on.
The flowers fell and fell and I thought, They have to run out, but they kept falling.
Night came, suddenly. One moment there was green light, the next minute, purple shadows melting into darkness. We walked hand in hand now, one foot tentatively in front of the other, stepping over tree roots whose outlines we traced with our feet. Our hands were outstretched, grazing branches and tree trunks. Did our journey last a minute? An hour? A lifetime? For parts he led, parts I led, until we reached the end, where a huge, brilliant moon was just rising over the hills.
The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that I can’t see.
—THE LITTLE PRINCE
Proposals
On the bus ride back, Ángel sat next to me in the window seat, sleeping most of the time, and Mr. Lorenzo sat across the aisle. This time, the VCR played all G-rated movies. During Babe—Pablo’s favorite movie, about an orphaned pig—I kept thinking about him, remembering which parts made him smile, which parts made him squeeze my hand.
Meanwhile, every so often, something would remind Mr. Lorenzo of Dika and he’d lean across the aisle. “Psst. Oiga, Sophie, don’t you love how Dika yells at characters in movies?” A few minutes later: “Isn’t it maravilloso that Dika knows every cashier at Albertsons by name?” And then: “Did you know she knows even their children’s names?” Then: “And she gives them advice!” He mimicked Dika’s shrill voice. “Oh, Mr. Perkins, you tell to your daughter this ex-husband is bad news!” He laughed. “You must to talk with this crazy uncle, Sheila. You must!” And on and on, Dika this, Dika that, until the credits were rolling.
Then he tapped my shoulder. “Sophie,” he said. His voice had turned serious.
I looked at him. “¿Sí?”
“Sophie.” He took a deep breath. “You are like a daughter to Dika. So you are like a daughter to me. You are almost family now. So may I tell you something?”
“Okay,” I said hesitantly.
“This is something that used to weigh heavy in my heart.” His face grew somber. “Many years ago, after my wife’s death, I went to peace rallies to protest the army’s massacres of Mayans. And the army came to punish me for that. They broke into my house one night. Gracias a Dios, they did not take my son. He was seven years old.”
His voice dropped to a gravelly whisper. “They blindfolded me and threw me in a truck bed and brought me to a bare room. All night they beat me. Each time, just before I blacked out, I saw a picture of my son. As an orphan. The last round of beating was the worst. They told me they would kill my son if I denounced the army again. After the last blackout, I came to at the roadside, where they’d dumped me. It was just before dawn. I was too weak to stand. I rolled onto my back and watched the sun rise. And once the sun was up, I heard my wife’s voice. ‘Take our son to a safe place.’ I looked around, but she was nowhere. From her voice, I found the strength to stand. A month later, my son and I headed north.”
I thought of the scars on Mr. Lorenzo’s back, the cigarette burns, the knife cuts. I felt as if my chest had just been cracked open, the way surgeons break their patients’ ribs before open-heart surgery, leaving everything exposed.
“Don’t be sad, Sophie,” he said. “Remember what Doña Remedios said? That people’s hearts feel good after the
y say goodbye?”
I nodded.
“Well, my heart feels good now, Sophie.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“Mire, Sophie,” he said. “I heard my wife’s voice again. For the second time since her death. She wishes me to marry Dika.”
I blinked. Now that my chest had split wide open, it was as though hummingbirds were flying in and out, and dragonflies, and butterflies—thousands of shimmering, beating wings.
He cleared his throat. “Sophie, do you give me your permission to marry her?”
“My permission?” My heart fluttered the way her heart would flutter.
“Because you are like a daughter to her.” He looked like a little boy, so eager and earnest. Dika would be ecstatic. I pictured her in a frilly white dress, low-cut, with necklaces nestled in her cleavage. Her hair freshly bleached and curled, topped with a glittering crown. The deep joy on her face matching Mr. Lorenzo’s.
“Yes,” I said. “You have my blessing.”
He kissed my hand.
“Have you told Ángel?” I asked, glancing over at Ángel. He was still asleep, his head leaning against the window.
“Ángel feels good in his heart now, too. He wants Dika to be his second mother.”
This would make Ángel some kind of distant step-cousin. I imagined us all eating Thanksgiving dinner together, a jumble of turkey and tamales and special beef balls, for years and years to come.
A day later, in the chill of early morning, Mr. Lorenzo and Ángel and I stood in the back of the truck as it bounced around the curve to Pablo’s village. We passed the hill with the cross and the nursery school and everything that Pablo had excitedly pointed out on the way. It felt like years ago. A different Sophie had first turned that curve, a Sophie on the verge of transformation. Rounding the curve now, I felt strong. Sophie la Fuerte.
Almost there. The church steeple came into sight. The cluster of houses in the distance. I missed this place. I missed Ñola’s heeheehee laughter and Dika’s and Abuelita’s crazy antics and the smell of Pablo’s hair.