Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green

by Helen Phillips

  “Well,” Ken/Neth says cheerily, pretending Roo wasn’t just rude to him, “I guess I’ll head over to La Lava now!”

  “Where’s Dad?” Roo says, her tone still rude.

  “Oh, you’ll be seeing him very, very, very soon,” Ken/Neth promises. Then adds, “Adiós, amigos. Or should I say amigas.”

  Ken/Neth heads out of the pool area toward the parking lot, so at last it’s just me and Mom and Roo. My Three Girls, as Dad called us. And boy, does it ever feel great being with my sister and my mom and no Ken/Neth, the three of us just lying here on lawn chairs relaxing in the sun, but then of course Roo jumps up and cannonballs into the pool. I don’t feel like getting in. It’s a hot, hot day and the pool water just feels warm and soggy. Mom reaches over to hold my hand. She smells like coconuts. It’s comforting to feel her strong, familiar hand. Her palm is a bit wet with sweat, but so what. It’s nice to know that Mom’s hand is still Mom’s hand, even after The Weirdness and everything. I’m glad we’re at the Selva Lodge, where I don’t have to worry about anyone I know seeing me hold my mom’s hand even though I’m almost thirteen. Soon, though, Mom falls asleep and her hand slips limply out of mine, which makes me feel kind of lonely.

  Roo’s in the shallow end of the pool, playing some sort of underwater headstand game with these kids who don’t speak English. Or Spanish. Or any language I know of. I can’t tell where they’re from. Mom smiled at the other parents in greeting, but we haven’t heard anyone speaking English since we got to the Selva Lodge.

  “Don’t you wish this was our own private pool?” I said to Roo earlier.

  “Kind of,” Roo said, but I could tell she didn’t. She likes other people. Wherever she goes, Roo always has oodles of friends. Sometimes I’ve been jealous of her, but mostly I just admire her for being that way.

  “Rooooo!” I howl loud enough that she can hear me underwater. “Come here!” Because she loves me, she clambers up out of the pool. As she pitter-patters over to me, I tell her, “You’re getting sunburned!” Which is not exactly true. She does look a tiny bit pink, but mainly I just want her to play with me and not with Random Kid #7.

  “Okay,” I order, holding up a towel. “Dry yourself off. Then I’ll put some sunblock on your back.”

  “Mom put tons of stuff on me already,” Roo protests, but at the same time she obediently turns her back to me.

  It makes me feel right at home, to be hanging out with Roo and taking care of her. It’s my favorite activity, being Roo’s sister.

  “Uh-oh,” I say as I squirt the last globs of coconut sunblock into my hand. “It’s all gone.”

  I knew all along that we were almost out of sunblock, and knew that this would mean we’d have to go to the souvenir shop to buy more, and knew that going to the souvenir shop with Roo would be fun.

  So we prance across the courtyard, but as it turns out the Selva Shop is weird and not that nice. For one thing, there’s no one in it. No customers, no employees. It’s hot and dim. The floor is concrete, and there are lots of metal shelves with hardly anything on them. There’s one shelf holding a single hot-pink shirt, XXL, with neon-green lettering, Fui al Volcán Pájaro de Lava, and on the back, ¿Y tú?

  “Found it! Found it!” Roo says from across the shop, waving in the air our exact favorite kind of sunblock. We always want to smell like coconuts. It seems like a miracle that they have it here. “How much is it?”

  “How would I know?” I say, before realizing she’s talking to someone else.

  I squint into the dimness behind the counter, and can just make out a figure as it stands up.

  It’s a guy. A teenager. Suddenly I wish I were wearing my new two-piece and not this old bathing suit, and then I feel embarrassed for having that thought. Anyway, I pull the ugly hot-pink T-shirt down from the shelf and stroll to the counter with it.

  “Excuse me, but what does fui mean?” I say. (I know what Volcán Pájaro de Lava means, obviously, and I can figure out that ¿Y tú? means “And you?” So I guess I have learned a thing or two in Spanish class.)

  The teenager shrugs and I discover that (a) he doesn’t speak English and (b) his eyes are golden. I’m not kidding. Seriously. Golden.

  Roo waves the sunscreen in front of him. She really can be kind of obnoxious sometimes.

  “Ho-la,” she says. “¿Cuánto?”

  He shrugs and says, “¿Cuarto?”

  “Cuarto? What’s that? Does that mean ‘four’?” I blabber. This guy makes me nervous.

  “It means ‘room’. He wants the room number so he can charge it,” Roo informs me. “Cuatro is ‘four’.”

  How does she know all that?

  “¿Cuarto?” the guy repeats.

  Roo holds up four fingers. “Cuarto cuatro,” she rhymes with a grin.

  He nods and marks something in a yellow lined notebook and then stares over our heads into space with his golden eyes.

  So. I guess that’s it.

  “Um, adiós?” I try.

  “Hasta luego,” Roo yells before running back out into the courtyard.

  “Hasta luego?”

  I rush to catch up with her. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Don’t know,” Roo says.

  “What does it mean?”

  “See ya later, alligator.” She starts skipping. She skips all the way to the pool and then, without stopping, skips right into the water, the coconut sunblock still in her hand.

  I’m about to follow Roo when I’m grabbed up in a hug from behind. For a weird half second I think it’s the guy from the Selva Shop—until I notice the freckly arms of my mother.

  “Where were you guys?” Mom whispers into my ear, her voice almost hysterical. “I woke up and you were gone! I’ve been looking for you. You can’t just run off like that. It’s dangerous here!”

  “Dangerous?” I say, looking around the courtyard, its barrels full of flowers. “What’s so dangerous here?”

  “Oh, you know, the regular,” Mom says, laughing with relief, but I can tell she’s still upset. She leads me toward the pool. “Poisonous snakes, rabid monkeys, hungry jaguars.” She sounds half teasing and half serious.

  “JAGUARS? For real?” Roo yelps from the pool.

  Ever since The Weirdness, Mom’s been a little weird too. Or I guess paranoid is the word. At least, that’s the word I heard her use with Aunt Sarah over the phone. “Sometimes I even wonder if the phone is being tapped,” Mom had whispered. “But I know I’m just paranoid. I miss James is all.” Mom was the one who first started to notice strange sounds and movements around our house in Denver, back in March or so. Roo and I heard her complaining to Aunt Sarah about those too, and after that, we started to notice the strange sounds and movements. We called them The Creepies. Like, sometimes when you walked into a room it felt as though there had just been a shadowy face at the window. And yeah, was there maybe a soft clicking sound in the background when you put your ear up to the phone? Roo got excited about that, because all of her detective books have tapped phones in them. But me? I just got nervous. And paranoid. And extra lonely for Dad. Like Mom—who, ever since The Weirdness, sometimes grabs me and Roo up in a hug and squeezes way too hard.

  “We were in the Selva Shop, Mom,” I tell her. “Buying sunblock. Because we ran out, and you always say it’s dangerous not to wear sunblock.” I think this might be the sarcastic way teenagers supposedly talk to their parents. I immediately feel bad about talking to Mom that way.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right,” Mom says, pulling me over toward our lawn chairs and smiling at me. “According to moms, everything is dangerous.”

  It’s then that I notice an odd thing happening: Roo is clambering up out of the pool, and a short woman wearing a black dress and—get this!—a black lace veil is standing there with a towel in her wide-open arms. A creepy feeling flashes through me. I don’t mean to be rude, but if someone told me to shut my eyes and picture a witch …

  Roo runs straight into the witch’s arms and squirms
happily around inside them as the woman dries her off.

  Oh great. So now Roo trusts witches too, the same way she trusts every single person she’s ever met. I look to Mom for the Bad Girl frown she gives us when we do something stupid, but instead, she’s just beaming at Roo.

  “Señora Villalobos!” Mom says. “Do you ever have a way with children!”

  What? How does Mom even know this lady?

  “I love all children,” the witch replies in a hoarse voice that comes out from behind the black lace veil. Heebie-jeebies for real. “But especially children like this.”

  And what’s that supposed to mean?

  “Apparently you’ve already met my Ruby,” Mom says, “and here’s my Madeline.”

  The witch sinks down into a lawn chair with Roo in her lap. Is Roo, like, a golden retriever or something, that just loves anyone? And why is Mom okay with a strange lady grabbing Roo?

  “This one,” the witch says in a very serious way, wrapping her arms around Roo. I notice her slight accent. “She has it.”

  Mom laughs, and I really can’t tell if she’s laughing awkwardly or excitedly.

  “Both my girls have it,” Mom shoots back, and the witch turns her head toward me for less than a second before returning her attention to Roo.

  Boy, I wish she’d lift that veil up. It’s really freaking me out. And I really wish she’d let go of my little sister.

  “Madeline,” Mom says, “meet Señora and Señor Villalobos, the owners of this lovely lodge. Ken and I were lucky enough to meet them when we checked in. They’ve had this place for over fifty years—can you imagine?”

  Only then do I see the very skinny, very old man in the white linen suit perched at the other end of the lawn chair. It’s almost as though he was invisible until the exact second when Mom said his name. He has a bright orange handkerchief in his left breast pocket. He nods kindly at me and for some reason I feel the sudden pressure of tears behind my eyes. Like, if I cried right now he wouldn’t mind. He’d understand. I blink fast to make the tears go away.

  But the tears disappear quickly enough seconds later, when Ken/Neth throws open the gate to the pool area and comes toward us with a humongous grin, balancing a bunch of paper plates and napkins in his arms. Mom waves at him across the pool.

  “Hey there, señoras and señoritas,” he says. I guess he doesn’t notice Señor Villalobos, just the way I didn’t. “A special treat for everyone!”

  As usual nowadays, Ken/Neth’s annoying cheerfulness gives me a stomachache, but at least he’s not a creepy old witch.

  “What is it! What is it!” Roo says, jumping out of the witch’s lap and grabbing Ken/Neth’s arm the way any kid would grab her dad’s arm. My stomachache gets worse.

  “Jungle tacos!” Ken/Neth announces in a fake-dramatic voice.

  He arranges the tacos on a low plastic table beside Mom’s lawn chair and Roo and Mom crowd around him.

  “I’m very glad you’re here, Señora Villalobos,” he says to the witch as he lays out paper plates. “Tengo una pregunta.”

  Even I know that means “I have a question.” But Ken/Neth seems to get stumped after that, going “Uh … uh … ah … uh” and fumbling around with words until he just says, “I’m not positive how to say what I need to say in Spanish, so I’ll just use English, okay?”

  “Of course,” the witch says, standing up to face him. Is it just me, or is she giving him the evil eye from behind that veil? I feel like I can hear the glare in her voice.

  “My contacts at La Lava have invited Señora Sylvia to join them free of charge for a yoga retreat that’s taking place this week. The theme is Relaxation and Rejuvenation,” Ken/Neth says, talking very loudly and smiling overenthusiastically at Señora Villalobos, as though she’s having trouble understanding him.

  “Oh no!” Mom says. “Oh no. I could never accept such a gift!”

  “This is the first she’s heard of it,” Ken/Neth explains. “It is a generous gift, and I want her to be able to take full advantage of it. Believe me, this woman has earned it!”

  “No, really, I can’t accept! James told me how much that place costs,” Mom says firmly, “and besides, I’m down here to see him. We just want to spend the whole week with Dad, right, girls?”

  “Yeah!” Roo yelps. I’m really glad I have Roo around to express everything I feel but am too shy to shout about.

  “Wait, wait,” Ken/Neth says. “You don’t have to do it, of course. It’s merely an invitation. You can sleep on it. But just in case, I’m wondering if Señora Villalobos knows of any local babysitters who might be able to keep an eye on the girls during the day?”

  Outrageous!

  “We don’t need a babysitter,” I mutter angrily. I’m twelve-almost-thirteen and perfectly capable of babysitting both Roo and myself. But everyone chooses to ignore me.

  “Sí, tengo a alguien muy bueno,” the witch says.

  Ken/Neth looks delighted with himself for understanding what she said. Big whoop.

  “Muy bien, muy bien, muy bien, muchas gracias, señora,” he says. His bad accent hurts even my ears, and under her veil, the witch cringes from the sound of it—at least, that’s what it looks like to me.

  Then the witch says some words at Roo in Spanish. Roo nods, but it was really hard, fast Spanish, impossible to understand, and I know Roo is nodding just to be polite. And then, without another word, the witch heads toward the pool gate in a swirl of black lace. Señor Villalobos follows her like a ray of light. I’m not sure Ken/Neth ever even noticed him.

  “Hey, so where’s Dad?” Roo practically yells, jumping up into Ken/Neth’s face. “I want to see Dad!”

  “I’ve spoken to the folks at La Lava,” Ken/Neth says, “and we’ve got a three p.m. appointment.”

  Um, hello, since when did we have to make an appointment to see our own dad?

  “Huh?” Roo says. “An appointment? To see Dad?”

  Have I ever mentioned that I love, love, love my sister?

  “Three’s right around the corner, girls,” Mom says. “We’ll just eat these tacos and then head over there.”

  Roo rolls her eyes but sits down by the table.

  “He’s very excited to see you,” Ken/Neth adds. “Very, very excited.”

  At that my heart does a little jumping jack. Dad—very, very excited to see us!

  “Well, here goes, girls,” Ken/Neth says, saying girls in the exact same tone Mom uses. Puh-lease. He picks up the first taco and hands it to me, as though I’m the guest of honor. “You first, Madeline. Give it a try.”

  The taco smells rich and wonderful, like salsa and chocolate at the same time, and suddenly I’m very hungry. I take a bite and close my eyes, and there’s this amazing crunchiness, followed by the crispness of lettuce and then an almost fruity taste, mango maybe—Mom’s favorite fruit, and a treat we only get to have once in a while back in Denver. The taco is so good that I forget to be annoyed by Ken/Neth or anything else.

  “You like it?” Ken/Neth says. “Come on, Roo-by. Your turn.”

  Roo goes up to him like an eager little animal and eats a bite of taco right out of his hand.

  “Gross!” she yelps. “Gross! Gross!” She spits it out, into his other hand.

  “Oh good lord,” Mom says. She reaches her hand out for Roo’s chewed food. “I’m sorry, Ken. No one but a parent should have to deal with such things.”

  Mom is one hundred percent right. No one but Mom or Dad should be doing what Ken/Neth’s doing.

  “No problemo,” Ken/Neth says, smiling. Why is he never, ever in a bad mood? He pops up out of his seat before Mom can get to him and strolls over to the trash can, where he wipes Roo’s chewed bite off his hand with a napkin.

  “What the heck was that?” Roo says when he returns.

  “Ask Madeline,” he says in his most annoyingly jolly voice.

  I shrug. “Don’t know.”

  “But you liked it?” He smiles.

  “She loved it!” Mom s
ays.

  “Okay, so what is it?” I say.

  “You really want to know?” Now he’s grinning hard.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Try to guess.”

  “I don’t know. Celery.” Although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t celery.

  “Guess again.”

  “Mango. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, partly, but guess again.” Man, Ken/Neth’s grin is really bugging me.

  “Come on, tell us what’s in the tacos,” Roo begs.

  “You don’t want to guess anymore?” He grins.

  “NO!” Roo says.

  “Mad?”

  I fake-yawn.

  “Fried grasshopper,” Ken/Neth announces.

  “Ha,” I say.

  “I’m serious,” Ken/Neth says. “They’re a specialty here, savory jungle grasshoppers fried in coconut oil and served with this bitter chocolate sauce and mang—”

  And I realize, oh my god, he’s not joking.

  I stand up and walk over to the pool and do a cannonball right in the middle of Ken/Neth’s sentence. I let myself drift way down to the bottom in a little curled-up ball and stay there for a long time, coming up just once in a while to take a breath before sinking back down again. I swear to myself that I won’t speak to Ken/Neth for the rest of the day. Making me eat bugs! Arranging an appointment with Dad! Whatever! All I can say is that I am dying to see Dad and be done with stupid Ken/Neth forever.

  When I finally come back up for good, the tacos are gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  “All aboard!” Ken/Neth hoots as Mom and Roo and I load into the gleaming white golf cart he brought over from La Lava. Mom is wearing a dress the color of an orange tulip and big, round blue earrings. She looks beautiful. Roo and I clustered around her earlier as she dusted silvery powder across her eyelids. Like a lot of other things at the Selva Lodge, the mirror was a bit crummy. It made us look like three blobs. Mom looked like a prettier blob, though. I’m glad Dad will get to see her looking this wonderful.

  I’ve never ridden in a golf cart before. Dad gets mad whenever we pass golf courses in Colorado because you ruin tons of habitats when you plant all that grass. But I have to say I’m realizing that a golf cart is a pretty nice way to travel. You get to feel very close to the jungle, and there’s just the right amount of wind blowing over you. Besides, Ken/Neth tells us there’s no golf course at La Lava—it’s just that golf carts are the best way to cover these not-too-huge distances—so we don’t even have to feel guilty.