“Who knows if she’s even nice,” I say, which comes out sounding meaner than I meant it, but Roo is already on to the next thing.
“Hey, check out the outdoor dining room! Oh wow. Look how all the chairs are gold and all the tables have floating lily pads in the middle!”
I crane my neck over the banister, like Roo, and gaze at the tables glimmering with crystal and silver—and yes, floating lily pads in glass bowls.
“Man, why aren’t we staying here?” Roo whines. “I wanna stay here! I thought La Lava was paying for our whole trip.”
Mom gives Roo her You’re-Being-a-Brat face. “We’ve already discussed this, Ruby. You know kids can’t stay here.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Roo says, “but what’s their problem with kids?”
“You want to know what their problem with kids is?” Mom says.
“Yes,” Roo says, putting her hands on her hips.
“You really want to know?”
“Uh-huh,” Roo says, tossing her head.
“Kids are loud and lively and a tad bit crazy,” Mom says, “and when people are paying thirty thousand dollars a week to stay somewhere, they’re buying utter and complete freedom from loud and lively and a tad bit crazy, okay? In fact, you’re lucky they even let your little tushie on these grounds in the first place.”
“Thirty thousand dollars a week?” I echo.
“Well,” Roo harrumphs, ignoring me, “can’t we at least eat here tonight?”
Ken/Neth just stands there grinning, apparently finding all of this extremely amusing.
“Tonight we’re going to get fried bananas at the Selva Café!” Mom says, trying to make the silly old Selva Café sound like something special.
“I want to stay here,” Roo mutters sadly into the marble banister.
“This place is for obnoxious rich people,” I inform her.
But the truth is I agree with her one hundred percent. More than one hundred percent. La Lava Resort and Spa is my favorite place. Of the places I’ve been. Which isn’t that many. But still.
Right then Patricia Chevalier appears behind us, and I have a little freak-out inside myself, hoping she didn’t hear what I just said.
“This way, please,” she says in her gorgeous voice, leading us off the viewing balcony, through the honeysuckle archway, and down the long white marble hallway. Her stiletto heels make mini gunshot sounds on the marble. Once we get about halfway down the hallway, there are no more open-air archways—instead, there are numbered golden doors on both sides.
Two old ladies wearing sunglasses, lipstick, and silk robes come strolling toward us.
“Madame, Madame,” Patricia Chevalier greets them, bowing slightly to each and saying a few words to them in what I think is French. But they look up at her in this weird, angry way, like they think she’s a phony or something.
Suddenly I find my chin in the fingers of one of the madames, who has a tight grip like an eagle claw, and she’s saying something in (I’m pretty sure) French and showing me her big bloody teeth (I guess it’s just the red lipstick). I’m stuck there for a moment with my face in her hand, and then she lets go and continues onward.
I’m going Huh? and looking back down the hallway after them, when Mom, who speaks French, says, “You should be honored, Mad. Those French women think you have great skin. She just said, ‘This is the skin I want! This exact skin! And I can’t wait another second!’ You know the French are the best judges of female beauty.”
Patricia Chevalier glances over at me. Is it just me or are her eyes sort of cold? But her mouth is set in a brilliant smile.
“Youth,” she says. “Right, Mrs. Flynn?”
“Sylvia, please,” Mom says. “Just Sylvia.”
Patricia Chevalier stops at the end of the white marble hallway. I wonder if Dad is behind the door to the left or the door to the right, and my heart starts doing jumping jacks.
My dad is So Great. It has been So Hard without him.
But rather than opening either door, Patricia Chevalier looks up at this little device thingy on the ceiling and the wall itself starts to slide away (!!!), making a gap just large enough for one person at a time to step through.
Roo squeals and yanks on my hand. A secret door! Secret doors are one of her top favorite things. Not that she’s ever seen one in real life.
Ken/Neth steps through first, followed by Patricia Chevalier. I peek around them to see what’s on the other side of the wall. It’s a small, windowless white marble room. A man is sitting on a metal chair at a glass table, hunched over, holding his head in his hands. This man is much skinnier than Dad, and his hair is almost entirely gray, and he’s wearing those white pajama-type things like all the employees here, and I wonder when the heck we’re going to be able to see Dad.
Then the man looks up, and my heart trips over itself.
The man is Dad.
“KEN!” Dad cries out in this excited, desperate way, standing up from the chair and raising his arms, looking like he’s about to leap across the room and hug Ken/Neth.
Before I can figure out why Dad is so excited to see Ken/Neth, Patricia Chevalier steps in front of Ken/Neth and the brightness drains from Dad’s face, and his arms fall back down to his sides. He still hasn’t seen us, since we’re hidden behind Ken/Neth and Patricia Chevalier in the dim, narrow opening, and it’s driving Roo crazy, so she pushes through them and bombs her way across the room toward Dad. I’m stuck just standing there watching Dad’s face when he sees Roo.
Nothing has ever upset me as much as this:
When Dad sees Roo, his face fills with fury. I had no idea Dad could make a face like that. He’s never in my entire life ever made that face.
He doesn’t open his arms to the hot little cannonball of Roo the way he always used to. Instead, she just crashes into his legs and stands there looking up at him.
“Um, Dad, hello?” she says. Then, “Dad! Hi! We love you!”
He’s staring at the doorway, where Mom and I are stepping out from behind the others.
“Sylvia,” Dad says, and his voice gets a little funny, like he might cry, but when I look back at his face it’s still furious. “Why are you here?”
It sounds more like an accusation than a question. Mom stares at him, shocked, her tulip dress hanging limply.
Excuse me, but didn’t Ken/Neth say that Dad was “Very, very excited” to see us?
And now Dad is acting like we’ve done some big terrible thing by coming here?
Also, why did he call her Sylvia? Dad always calls Mom Via, as in short for Sylvia, “my road to good things,” he liked to say, because via I guess means “road” in Italian.
“Hug your wife,” Patricia Chevalier says, her voice smooth and sweet, and I’m grateful that at least someone around here is trying to make this go the way it should. “She came all this way to see you.”
Dad glances at Patricia Chevalier, who nods at him, and then he takes five mechanical steps toward Mom. She grabs hold of his waist and pulls him toward her and nuzzles into his chest. This is the way my parents hug whenever they see each other at the end of the day, and I’ve always liked to watch them, because it makes everything seem safe and cozy and good, and for a second I feel all those lovely feelings, until I notice that this is just a weird version of that normal hug, because Dad isn’t smiling down at Mom the way he usually would, and his face is still furious, and it starts to really freak me out.
Mom pulls back just a bit and looks up at Dad.
“Jimbo,” she whispers, her oldest nickname for him. “What’s going on?”
But Dad just shakes his head silently, maybe even sadly, as he gazes down at her.
Mom lets go of him and I can see that she’s crying quietly. And it’s awful.
Inside I’m going, What the heck? Maybe I didn’t expect it to be perfect, but I sure didn’t expect it to be this bad. This is So Much Worse than I ever could have imagined.
Roo is still standing where Dad left her, s
taring at his back and making little whimpering sounds. Noticing the noise, Dad turns around and walks over to her. He puts his hand on her head, the exact way he used to. But rather than smiling, Roo just looks worried. After a few seconds, she wriggles free from him and runs back across the room toward us.
“Madeline,” Dad says, finally turning his attention to me. He never calls me Madeline. I wish he would call me Madpie. I wish a lot of things.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. I feel weird.
“Hi,” he says so softly I can barely hear it.
I feel like I need to do something, say something, to make this all seem less weird.
“It’s really pretty here,” I say, straining to sound normal. “We missed you a ton.”
I guess those were the wrong things to say, because Dad just stares down at me (sadly? madly?).
Mom crosses the room to him. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “Jimbo,” she says again. Her voice is very tender. “Can we talk, just the two of us, for a little while?”
Patricia Chevalier clears her throat.
Dad clears his throat.
“I’m sorry,” Dad tells Mom. “But things are extremely busy right now. A lot of very urgent work to do. It’s absolutely essential that I get back to it immediately.”
Mom lets go of his shoulders. She’s still crying. But now I can see that she’s also angry.
“You are not this way,” she practically hisses. “You need to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” Dad says, and he does sound sorry. But he ought to be calling her Via.
Right then the room is hit with a crazily loud sound, a huge whoosh of noise—a rockslide would sound like this, or an avalanche, or the end of the world—and I scream.
“What is that?” Mom shouts.
“The monsoon,” Ken/Neth yells. “Every afternoon at 3:08! You could set your watch by it!”
And that makes me feel like we truly are on another planet, a planet where the weather tells the time.
After that no one says anything for a while; we just stand there in the white marble room in our three little clumps—me and Roo, Mom and Dad, Patricia Chevalier and Ken/Neth—listening to the pounding rain. How can it be so loud? There aren’t even any windows here.
“I suppose we should be going, then?” Patricia Chevalier screeches over the noise with a bright smile. “Perhaps the Flynn-Wade family can have another visit later on.”
Dad always used to call us the Flade family. It tickled our funny bone, to call ourselves the Flades. But right now Dad doesn’t say a thing. He just sinks back down into the metal chair.
As I turn to leave I know I’ll never forget this, the sight of our father sitting in that metal chair, elbows on the glass table, holding his head in his hands while the monsoon thunders all around him.
CHAPTER 4
We do order fried bananas—actually, fried plantains—at the Selva Café, but it’s not as though we feel very happy about that, or about anything else. The four of us are just sitting here on the white plastic chairs at the white plastic table, not saying anything. It’s a very quiet night at the Selva Café, a single waiter serving our table and one other. After trying a few times to get a conversation going, even Ken/Neth finally understands that we all just want him to Be Quiet. Mom’s eyes are super bloodshot and the tendons in her neck are super tense. She looks kind of scary, to be honest. She’s not even trying anymore to pretend for me and Roo that she’s okay, the way she did during The Weirdness. Not that Roo’s paying attention anyway—she’s simply munching away on fried plantains. I’m pretty shocked she can eat so perkily, considering what’s happened today, but as Dad liked to say, Roo has the appetite of a superheroine.
Since three sides of the Selva Café are open air and look right out into the jungle, I spend the whole meal staring into the trees and imagining Dad popping out from among the vines to tell us he was just playing a practical joke on us today: “I can’t believe you thought I was serious! Don’t you remember how much I love practical jokes? Hey, don’t tell me you’ve already finished the plantains! Let’s go to the pool after dinner.”
It’s still partly light outside, and it feels like this weirdo day is going on forever and ever, and all I want is for it to end, and I know I’ve never been as unhappy as I am right now.
It used to be that whenever I felt sad or angry or jealous, Dad would explain that just a few little chemicals were creating the feeling. He said: Just a few little chemicals, no big deal, easy to ignore.
He also said: Did you win the lottery?
And I said: No.
And he said: Yes you did! You won trillions of lotteries! First you won the lottery of the Big Bang, and then you won the lottery of evolution, and then you won the lottery of me and your mother being assigned to the same dorm in college, and then you won the lottery of our ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends being fools, and then you won the lottery of us falling in love and getting married. Not to mention the lottery of the United States of America and a loving middle-class family.
And I said: Oh.
And Dad said: So I don’t want to ever, ever hear you say that you’re unlucky or unfortunate or anything. Understand?
And now I’m sitting here in the Selva Café, wondering: Do I still have to feel lucky all the time, even after The Weirdness?
After the dinner plates are cleared, we sit in silence as Mom slurps the last drops from the mango daiquiri Ken/Neth ordered for her.
“Well,” she says, the first word any of us has said in a long time, “I guess I’ll be doing that Relaxation and Restoration yoga retreat after all.”
“Relaxation and Rejuvenation,” Ken/Neth corrects. “Why, that’s great, Sylvia!”
“It sounds like just about what I need right now. Besides, it’s not as though I have any other reason to be here,” Mom says, her teeth clenched.
What about being with us? I want to yell.
“Except of course to spend time with the kids,” Mom says, as though she’s reading my mind, “but it’s important for them to have Spanish lessons anyway.”
“Spanish lessons?” I say. This is the first I’ve heard about any Spanish lessons.
“Wha?” Roo says.
“Oh,” Ken/Neth says, “did I not mention that the Villaloboses can hook us up with a babysitter who also teaches Spanish? I’ll go tell them after dessert that we’d like their babysitter starting tomorrow morning.”
Um, hello, I’ll be thirteen in September—I can take care of me and Roo, obviously! But I don’t say anything out loud. We’ve already had this fight a bunch of times. I am so sick of babysitters. Mom sometimes tries to call them “companions,” as though that’ll trick me into not realizing what they are. We had two different babysitters in Denver this spring, sometimes a spacey college girl and sometimes a cranky old lady.
“Your minds are so malleable now, girls,” Mom says, pushing her empty daiquiri glass away. “You need to take advantage of that. Now’s the time to master a new language. It’s too late for me to learn Spanish. I’m not even going to try.”
“Malleable?” I say.
“So we can say things to each other in Spanish and you won’t understand?” Roo says.
“Flexible, capable of learning easily,” Mom says to me, and then “That’s exactly right” to Roo.
Okay, well, this trip just got more awful, if that’s even possible. Dad doesn’t care about us anymore, Mom would rather do yoga than be with her daughters, Ken/Neth is annoying me more with each passing second, nobody seems to think I’m old enough to baby-sit Roo, and now we have to study Spanish?
“Hey, Roo,” I say, “let’s get outta here.”
She looks at me. Mom let her order coconut ice cream, which hasn’t come yet.
“First can I—” she starts, but I glare at her and she goes, “Okay, yeah, let’s get outta here.”
“Sure, whatever you want,” Mom murmurs, not even noticing that I’m trying to be mean by abandoning her at
the dinner table.
But even once Roo and I are back in our room, away from Mom and Ken/Neth, I don’t feel much better, because now Roo is being annoying.
“Poor Dad,” she says. “This is bad.”
“Poor Dad?” I say. “More like poor jerk.”
“Dad’s not a jerk!” Roo protests. “He’s just having problems is all.”
“Yeah, jerk problems,” I say.
“Please stop saying that word.”
“You mean jerk? Jerk, jerk, jerk.” I can’t help myself. I know I’m being terrible—it’s just that I’m so sad.
“We have to figure out what’s going on,” Roo says, ignoring me.
“He loves birds more than he loves us, that’s what’s going on,” I inform her. “He didn’t want to spend time with us today because he had to work! Not that it’s been seven months or anything since he last saw us.”
“It’s got to be some kind of a code,” Roo whispers, still ignoring me.
“I guess all this time he’s cared more about birds than about us,” I say, so filled with self-pity that it takes me a second to register what Roo said. “What’s got to be some kind of a code?”
“When he put his hand on my head,” Roo says, more to herself than to me, “it was a code.”
“Ruby Flynn Wade,” I say, borrowing the severe tone and use of the full name from Mom, “what the heck are you talking about?”
“At least, I’m pretty sure it was a code,” she says.
“A code?”
“See, usually he’d just rest his hand there, but today he squeezed my head,” she murmurs thoughtfully.
“He squeezed your head?” For some reason I don’t seem to be able to do anything but echo what Roo says.
“Yeah, like a BE CAREFUL squeeze. Or like a I’M-STILL-THE-SAME-AS-EVER-BUT-I-HAVE-TO-PRETEND-I’M-NOT squeeze,” Roo says, her eyes meeting mine.
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe squeezes can contain that much information. I wish I did. Roo’s eyes are so filled with hope, though, that I’m not about to say anything.
“We’ve just got to figure out what exactly Dad is doing in the jungle,” Roo informs me.
Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green Page 5