“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”
I had my arms around her, and she put her face on my shoulder.
I continued to call her name, and now Manuel came up, crying terribly, and Erik and Yolanda crowded around us too.
“Yes, I’m here,” my mother said. “We’re together, my Monster.”
“Mom,” I said. “Oh, Mom.” My face in her neck, I held her as tight as I could. I ran my hands down her shoulders and arms, I felt her legs, I looked for injuries. I wrapped my arms all around her and didn’t stop hugging.
It was hard to loosen my grip so that the others could get to her and she could speak.
“I found it, Terrible Creature,” she said in a weary voice. “Manuel?”
He bent toward her in the dark and crossed the pale beams of the flashlights.”Yes, Juana.”
“I found it,” she said, sighing.
“Yes.”
She looked back to me. “I found what he was looking for.”
I nodded. “What Tomas de la Rosa was looking for.”
“Yes, darling.”
Behind me I could hear Yolanda let out a noise.
“Where did you go? How did you get lost?”
“I couldn’t get out,” she said. “I had some … trouble with the weather. And I was hurt. There was rain for about five days—I couldn’t see much—and I fell into this flood and made a mess of myself. As you can see, with this leg. Lost my backpack, too, in a marsh. And then I got here, but when I did, I didn’t have anything but my flashlight, and nothing to drink but rainwater. So I just became tired, and I sat here, and—waited.” She swallowed. “But now you’ve come.”
“Mom, just sit up—I want to take a look at you.”
“I found it, you see.”As she pushed herself forward into a sitting position, I saw that her face, with the bruises, looked unwell. And I’d been right about her leg. It was twisted; she’d injured it in a fall days before, and the wound had probably become more severe since she had made it here. “I found that thing he wanted—and it was already excavated.”
“I think this is enough talking,” I said. “We have to get you out—”
But she wouldn’t listen to me. “It was already—cleared. Opened. Someone was here before me. Not too long ago. And they didn’t loot the site.”
“Who could have been here?” Manuel asked.
“It could have been—no, that’s impossible. I have no idea, and it doesn’t matter. Because I still did find it. It’s so funny, really, because it’s not what we thought at all.”
“What is it?” Yolanda asked.
“Is that—is that you, Yolanda? Come all this way?”
Yolanda stepped into the light shed by the Maglite, and her hat cast a large bird-shaped shadow on the wall. “Yes, it is, Juana.”
“Well, you’ll be interested in this, won’t you?”
“I think that I will.”
“And is that—that’s not, you are not going to tell me that’s Gomara standing behind you, is it, Lola?”
I laughed.”That’s him.”
“Oh, well, nothing would surprise me now.”
“Hello, Dr. Sanchez,” Erik said.
“Yes, hello, Gomara. Don’t worry, I will thank you with as much effusion as I can muster—later.”
“Can’t wait, Professor.”
Manuel crouched beside my mother and began looking at her leg.
“And I thought you were too frightened of the jungle,” she said to him.
“There were other things that frightened me worse.”
“Yes, well—coming here turned out to be a fairly bad idea. But really, it was that disgusting storm that ruined everything. And I didn’t want to turn around, you know. Not when I was getting so close. So I slipped and hurt myself, and my leg’s only become more of a nuisance since then. I made it to this place about three days ago.” She paused. “You’re not mad, are you?”
“I’m not mad.”
“How did you get here?”
Manuel described how I’d found her journal in Antigua, and the transcription of the Stelae in it.
“Ah,” my mother said. “My diary—that’s—not something I expected.” She looked at me. “Did you read everything in there?”
“It’s so waterlogged now, the journal,” Manuel said, half-lying. “You can barely read anything in it.”
“But you already knew why I came here,” she said to him, abruptly.
“I did.” He hesitated. “It’s because he died.”
She touched her fingertips to his face. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s all right.”
“You know I love you, though?”
“Yes.”
“And she knows, then? I can tell.”
Manuel glanced up at me, then back at my mother. “I think so.”
“Knows what?” Yolanda said.
Yolanda’s face beamed at us through the torchlight; her eyes were glistening and dark beneath the brim of her hat.
“Knows what?” she asked again.
I looked at my mother, who bent her mouth down at the corners and nodded.
“That Tomas was my father too, Yolanda,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Tomas was my father,” I repeated.
Yolanda wouldn’t understand at first. She stared at the ground, and then up at my mother, who confirmed it for her with her eyes. Then my sister took in a hard, ragged breath.
“In one way he was your father, Lola,” Manuel said then. His voice sounded strange and raw and full of love.
I wondered how it had been for him to look at my face and see there features that—I now understood—resembled those of the broad-cheeked man that he had for so long hated.
But I just said: “You’re my Dad.”
“Of course he is,” my mother growled. “There was never any question of that.”
Yolanda glanced up at the blue shadows on the cave wall and tightened her jaw.
“Yolanda?”
“My father betrayed my mother,” she said, after a second.
“Yes, that’s so,” my mother said. “And I played my part, too.”
“And that’s why you didn’t want Lola to write me anymore, isn’t it?”
Yolanda asked. “Or see me. Because you didn’t want to be reminded of your mistake.”
My mother nodded. “Yes.”
Manuel, Erik, and I had gone perfectly silent. Yolanda tried to clear her throat, but let out a small howl instead. Tears began streaming down one cheek.
She didn’t speak for nearly a minute. We all watched her, waiting.
And then she said: “The truth is, we’re all a disaster, aren’t we?”
My mother closed her eyes. “I guess that’s right.”
Yolanda continued to stare at the wall with that furious face. But she looked as if she were deciding something.
“I don’t want to be angry anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t help me.”
“So don’t,” my mother said.
Yolanda turned to me. “I really wanted to make you pay before I helped you.”
“Yolanda.”
She touched her forehead, shielding her eyes with her fingers. “But I—I just should have remembered the good times.”
I started to cry.
“I don’t care about the rest of it,” she said.
“Yolanda—Yolanda,” I said, trying to get it out. “We’re family, whether you like it or not.”
She hesitated. The entire cave went silent again except for the sound of the water; the blue light from the jade flickered across our faces.
“I don’t mind it,” she said, when she was able; she worked very hard to get hold of herself.
I moved over closer to her and slipped my fingers inside her hand. And then she reached out and took hold of my other hand and my arm in a hot tight grip. She was quaking and trying to smile, though I was the less composed of us both.
While we held onto each other like this
, Erik was not exactly sure what to do. Still standing a ways off, and clearing his throat, he raised his flashlight away from us. It flickered over to the thing in the room. He trained the torch on the blue jade object, shining the beam over the worked stone, the box shape, its strange contents.
“God,” he said. “Will you look at that?”
“I told you, Gomara,” she said. She looked away from Yolanda and me, and she sounded hoarse. “It’s not what we thought. It’s not what anyone has ever thought. But when you think about it, it does make sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“The answer to our questions about the Stone.”
“What is it?” we all cried.
“If you give me a second, I’ll tell you.”
Yolanda, Manuel, and I turned toward my mother. And now, with some relish despite her damaged leg, she began to explain to us the mystery of the Queen Jade.
CHAPTER 60
For the ancient Maya, as I’ve said already, caves were sacred places, where the living and the dead might communicate with the other world. Burial grounds were located often enough in these subterranean spaces, filled with mummies and relics and bones, so that the ghosts of the ancestors could travel with ease to Hades.
This cave had been similarly used.
Erik’s flashlight, and then mine, and Yolanda’s, passed up and over the blue jade object against which my mother rested. This huge jade rectangle was a coffin, fashioned out of one solid piece of blue jadeite that had been carved elaborately on all sides. Friezes of roses and geometric shapes, dwarves, warriors, the faces of priests, of witches, glistened in shades of cobalt and turquoise on its every inch. It stood approximately three feet high, had a width of about two feet, and was once covered by a solid slab of yet more jade that had been removed and placed to the side of the cave by some mysterious previous excavator. The sarcophagus was filled with the body of a thin ancient girl. She looked to me like a girl. She had been preserved and was the color of bog oak, and her bones had the texture of old amber. Her hands were a collection of fossilized twigs; her face, with its tint like wet teak, did not have a peaceful expression. Her legs had been long but now were aged into sepia branches and roots, like those of the thin young trees we passed by in the jungle. Her head was a delicate parchment dome. And her concave chest was room for a nest—but not of bird eggs, as we first thought.
Instead, this girl, upon her burial, had been draped and adorned and laden down with jades that were carved like diamonds and marked with gorgeous signs. She was heaped with jewels that glittered in blue flames all around her body. The gems were carved into the shapes of not just diamonds, we saw—but also roses, as the Aztecs had done with their emeralds, and tiny idols, and huge pearls, and raw large chunks chased with silver and gold. At the center of this treasure lay one large, flat pendant of the blue jade, which hung on a strand of small jade pearls. The pendant was carved with markings that I thought I recognized.
I picked it up and held it to the light; the hieroglyph turned red and gold inside the illuminated blue rock.
I knew this was the symbol for jade.
“But which one’s the Jade?” Yolanda asked.
“You’re not understanding yet,” my mother said. “It’s her. She’s the Jade. The body’s of a woman, in my judgment. And I know absolutely that the manner of burial is for a female.”
“The Queen Jade,” Erik said. “You’re telling us the Queen Jade is this woman.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “Look on the wall—to the left, it’s all there.”
The flashlights all turned in tandem to illuminate that section of the cave where faded hieroglyphics had been painted in shades of blue, red, black, and green.
They said:
“What does that mean?”
“Well,” Erik said, “if your mother’s right, and I translate this liberally, I can make out—
My queen, my beauty
[]
[]
[]
world
[]
arms
[]
lost—
but nothing else. Not in this light.”
“I know that,” Yolanda said. “I know those words.”
“They’re famous, aren’t they?” my mother said. “It’s a very old poem.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Can you be certain?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” my mother said in a firm voice.
Yolanda approached the wall, reading the signs. Then, standing very straight in the dark and holding onto her torch, she began to half-sing, half-talk the poem to us while my mother murmured along:
My queen, my beauty
What have I done?
Why have you left me?
To live in this world
So cold and so empty
My treasure, my charm
Do you forgive me?
Stay safe in my arms
Where I can kiss you
Where you will stay warm
I lost you
I lost you
I’m lost, too
I’m lost, too
I’m lost
without you
My darling
“The Jade, as it turns out,” my mother said when they had finished singing, “wasn’t a stone, or a magnet, or a talisman. Jade—the word, the hieroglyph—was always a name. The name of this girl. That hieroglyph never signified a stone—we got that meaning from the translation of the Legend. But Balaj K’waill lied to de la Cueva. There’s a flaw in the translation. The king was obsessed with his wife, not a jewel. And that song is the one he sings to her after her death. And we never knew.”
“This is—outrageous!” Erik said. “It’s even better than what they’re finding in the Sierras.”
She tilted her head. “What are they finding in the Sierras?”
“I’ll tell you later, Dr. Sanchez.”
My mother raised her eyebrows at Erik, decided not to pursue his hint quite yet, and then turned toward me again. She kissed me three times on the cheek.
“So, that’s the answer, my Creature,” she said. “And you came all the way here to find me.”
“I found you,” I said.
Then she turned up her gaunt face at Erik and tried a smile.
“Impressed, Gomara?”
“Very, Professor.”
“I hope that you will hereafter regard me with nothing but absolute awe and total, devastated respect.”
“Um—I’ll work on it.”
“Good. For now, maybe you could pick me up and help haul me out of this nasty cave. And then, if you will be so kind, perhaps you could take me to the hospital, as I’m not feeling so very well.”
Erik walked toward her, brought his arms under hers, and lifted her up, which was no easy task. We left the cavern and burial site, dragging ourselves again through the narrow hot passageways and the standing water, and past the slithering chirping beasts. We found ourselves back in the warm black forest, where we’d have to spend another night before we would reach the city again.
CHAPTER 61
After we set up camp in a clearing off the mouth of the cave, Erik looked after my mother’s wounds and gave her some painkillers while Yolanda and Manuel and I unpacked the gear from our bags. The three of us hunkered in a patch of turf, circled by the onyx trees, and by the light of our torches pulled out our tarps, our food, our water, fuel, and our nets. Yolanda and I shot knowing and nervous glances at each other, and I kissed Manuel several times all over his face. Then I turned back to Yolanda and took a good long look at her as she unfolded one of the hammocks. Her hat was still on, slanted to the side. The flashlight showed that her face was scratched, but not so badly. Her shirt was firmly buttoned up, and beneath her collar bulged a piece of jewelry. I bent over and kissed her, too.
“All right, all right,” she said, keeping her cheek turned up so I could kiss it again. “We’ve got a lot to do before we can get any sleep, so it’s no time to get all womanish
and emotional.”
“I thought I might have seen you getting a bit emotional back there in the cave.”
“It’s true, my dear,” Manuel said.
“If I were, I can probably be excused, seeing as how I just discovered I had a sister. But considering all that we’ve been through, I actually would rather gloss over the painful parts concerning fathers and disillusionment and other family shockers for the moment, thank you.”
She was in truth starting to look very pleased despite all that, even as she lowered her eyebrows and told me to concentrate on finding that magnesium stick for the fire.
“Maybe you can come and live with us,” I said.
“Live with you?”
“Why not?”
“Well.” She sighed, rummaging through Erik’s pack, and then brought up the stick. “I’m sure there are a thousand reasons.”
“Name one.”
“That’s easy. I’m not sure I remember you being the best roommate.”
“I might be a little better at it now.”
“I doubt it. But—now that you mention it, perhaps I could try it for a month or two, here and there. It will have to depend upon how long I can stand it.”
“I’ll let you dress up like the Cyclops and jump at me from the closet,” I said.
“Oh, thanks—but I think I’ll have to devise new forms of torture for you. Still—if—just thinking out loud—we really are going to spend more time together, there will have to be some changes.”
“Changes?”
Manuel chuckled. “Here it comes.”
“You obviously have no idea how to make your way around a jungle.” She lifted up her chin, goading me. “You’ve spent far too much time in libraries.”
“I don’t think—”
“I’ll have to whip you into shape. Teach you how to ford a river without nearly killing everyone around you, for one thing. And for another, I’ll have to give you a lesson in how to write a decent letter.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. I’m good and afraid of you now.”
“As you should be.”
She looked at me with a long solemn face, until an involuntary smile began to ripple over her mouth, and mine too. Hiding her face with the brim of her hat, she grunted out a few more critiques about my character and my camping skills and then gathered together twigs and leaves and threw them into the center of the turf. Next she began to flick her magnesium until the flint sparked. I kept my eye on her—and once the flames began to strain against the shadows, I noticed that beneath the collar of her shirt glimmered a few blue stones.
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