Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green

by Helen Phillips

  “No,” Mom says, “it’s something else entirely. Something you’ve never done before.”

  “A hot-air balloon ride?” Roo guesses. She loves hot-air balloons.

  “No.” Mom deepens her yoga smile. “It’s a facial!” she says with a joyous sigh.

  “A facial!” Roo echoes, imitating Mom’s joyous sigh. Then, “What’s a facial?”

  “A massage for the face,” Mom explains in her new, super-calm voice.

  Ken/Neth butts in: “La Lava wants to treat you two girls to papaya-and-cilantro facials in its world-class massage facility!”

  Hello, La Lava brochure. I hate it that all the other people in the Selva Café probably think he’s our dad, and probably think we look like a Very Nice Family. It makes me want to glare at my rice and beans, so I do.

  “Papaya and cilantro?” I say, as though I’ve never heard of anything more disgusting.

  “Papaya and cilantro!” Roo exclaims.

  “Good, I’m so glad you’re excited,” Mom says, giving Roo her deepest yoga smile yet. But I don’t get a piece of that smile, not even a crumb. “It’s an incredibly generous gift. Patricia Chevalier scheduled your facials for ten a.m. tomorrow. That’s when Relaxation and Rejuvenation starts, so we can all head over together in the morning.”

  “What about Spanish lessons?” I blurt out.

  Mom turns her smile on me, only now it’s a surprised smile. “Mad, I didn’t know you enjoyed Spanish so much! I’m sure Kyle can tutor you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “¡Ay, que bueno!” Roo says cutely. “Hey, we can visit Dad when we go there for our face massages, right?”

  “Maybe,” Mom says, looking at Ken/Neth and giving a tired little sigh. He—ugh—rubs her shoulder. As politely as possible, Mom scooches a few centimeters away from him.

  Just then the fried plantains arrive and Ken/Neth moves his hand (phew!). I’m sitting there, simply trying to enjoy my plantains and not be grossed out by the insanely enormous moths flocking to the lights above us, when Mom starts acting all blissed-out again.

  “So,” she says, her normally energetic voice gone all soft and breathy, “today, during Relaxation and Rejuvenation, I was thinking about Lava-Throated Volcano trogons and how depressed your dad got when they were declared extinct.”

  Ken/Neth starts to look uncomfortable. What, does it really bother him that much when Mom mentions something having to do with Dad?

  “I was just thinking how beautiful they were,” Mom continues, “and how we’re here in this beautiful place of theirs but they aren’t anymore. And I’ve always loved birds that mate for life. James was furious to think that when he was a kid he could have seen a Lava-Throated Volcano trogon in the flesh but for his own kids that possibility no longer existed.” Even though she’s saying sad things, Mom’s voice remains weirdly tranquil.

  “Well, that’s a real upper, Sylvia,” Ken/Neth says in a joking tone, but it falls way flat.

  “I’d do anything,” Roo says, gazing dreamily out at the jungle, “to see a Lava-Throated Volcano trogon!”

  And right then, at that exact second, the Selva Café plunges into darkness.

  Startled yelps come from all over the restaurant, and you can hear kids calling out for their parents in different languages—Dad! ¡Mamá! ¡Papá! Mom! Da!

  In the darkness, someone grabs my wrist. At first I think it’s Roo until I realize it’s an adult hand, a large adult hand, much larger than Mom’s, and strangely cold. It must be Ken/Neth’s, though I never noticed he had such thick fingers.

  There’s some shuffling to my right, I hear Roo muttering in Spanish, and my wrist gets yanked and then dropped.

  Seconds later, a candle is lit in the far corner of the room, followed soon by another, a third, a fourth. Once there’s enough light, I see that Ken/Neth is already back in his seat, across the table from me and Roo.

  And the witch and Señor Villalobos are standing behind Roo’s chair, gazing down at her in the candlelight. I can see the witch’s frown through her black lace veil. Creepy! At least Señor Villalobos is smiling his gentle smile. Roo looks up at them and grins nervously.

  The witch hisses something at Roo in Spanish, but of course I can’t make out a single word. I’m glad it’s not me she’s hissing at. Roo loses her grin and lowers her eyes.

  Now that there are so many candles the room feels bright again.

  “Well, how ’bout that,” Ken/Neth says cheerfully. “Never a dull moment in the jungle, right? Hey, another order of fried bananas, anyone? Más plátanos, por favor, señora.”

  But without electricity, no fried plantains. Duh.

  “His face looked so strange,” Roo says from the bottom bunk. I’m in the top bunk, writing a haiku in my notebook, nice and easy because it’s just three lines, five plus seven plus five syllables.

  “Listen, Roo, I’m trying to write a poem here, okay?” I say, losing count of the syllables.

  “His face looked so strange!” Roo repeats, annoyed.

  “Whose face?” I ask, annoyed right back at her for interrupting my haiku, which I just started a few minutes ago when the electricity came back on and we could finally turn off our flashlights. I kind of go into my own world when I’m writing a poem. Roo is usually very respectful of my writing. I never show my poems to anyone besides her, and she’s a big fan, so she’s good at being quiet when I’m trying to concentrate.

  But tonight she’s not going to let me finish my haiku.

  “Dad’s face,” she says as though I’m the biggest idiot on planet Earth.

  “Dad’s face?”

  “You didn’t see him? I thought you saw him too!” Roo says. “How could you not see him? Right before the electricity went out, he was there, coming out of the jungle. I saw his face, and it looked strange!”

  What the heck are you talking about, you crazy little bean? I want to say, but I’m not mean enough to actually say it. “It was pretty dark out there,” I say instead. “I’m sure it wasn’t Dad. He’s at La Lava.”

  “It was Dad,” Roo says, so confident she doesn’t even need to raise her voice. “It was Dad. He looked … weird, though.”

  I sigh and close my notebook. “Weird how?”

  “Weird like … scared.”

  Dad scared? I couldn’t even picture it. Dad just wasn’t ever scared.

  “Okay, Roo,” I say. I don’t believe her.

  “You don’t believe me,” she says. Roo is very smart that way. “I can’t believe you don’t believe me!”

  “Dad is never scared,” I remind her.

  “I know!” she says. “Exactly! That’s why it’s scary!”

  The word scary reminds me of something important I forgot to ask Roo amid the chaos of lighting candles and finding flashlights.

  “Hey, what did Señora Villalobos say to you when she was standing there behind your chair after the electricity went out?”

  “I don’t know,” Roo says.

  “You don’t know?” I know she knows.

  “I don’t know,” Roo says again, “but I think she said, ‘Don’t say that.’ ”

  “ ‘Don’t say that’? Don’t say what? What did you say?”

  “I don’t know. I said ‘Dad’ when I saw Dad.”

  “She doesn’t want you to say ‘Dad’?”

  “She was speaking Spanish, okay? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  We both get quiet. For some reason it feels like we’re having a fight even though we’re not. I don’t want us to be annoyed with each other right now.

  “Ken grabbed my wrist really hard when the lights went out,” I tell her, trying to make it so that we’re sharing our creepy secrets rather than just sitting there with them.

  “That wasn’t Ken,” Roo informs me.

  “What do you mean? How would you know?” Little Miss Know-It-All, I want to add.

  “That guy grabbed me too. I had to bite his arm so he’d let go of us. And he had a hairy arm. Not like Ken/Neth’s.”

>   It’s true. Ken/Neth has practically no arm hair.

  “You bit his arm?”

  “Yeah,” Roo says. I can hear the shrug in her voice. “I’m a good biter.”

  It’s true. She got kicked out of more than one preschool for biting.

  “Well. Who was he?” I ask her.

  Then below me I hear a familiar crinkle of paper and feel suddenly slammed with tiredness. That’s the sound of Roo pulling out The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter.

  “Roo,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Roo,” I say again.

  She still doesn’t respond.

  “Please put that away,” I order her. I don’t want to lean over and glare at her because then I’d have to see The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter.

  “It doesn’t make sense, but I know it makes sense,” Roo says. “We have to break the code. We have to. Then we’ll know what’s up.”

  “Roo, it’s time for bed.”

  But Roo ignores me. Quietly she reads aloud the nonsense poem from Dad:

  “There was a little girl

  Who had a little world

  Right in the middle of her pretend

  And when she was trill

  She was very, very trill

  And when she was smart

  She was silly.”

  Just a messed-up version of the old nursery rhyme we always used to say to Roo when she was naughty (There was a little girl / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead / And when she was good / She was very, very good / And when she was bad / She was horrid). But the really freaky part is the drawings, all the little-girly flowers and vines and butterflies around the border. As though Dad had been magically transformed into an eight-year-old girl. Never in our whole lives has Dad ever drawn anything for us. He is a Very Bad Drawer. Mom’s the one who can draw.

  “I LOVE YOU LEFT RIGHT UP DOWN LOL! XOXO, DADDY,” Roo reads from the bottom of the page. Also freaky. Dad would never say LOL. He probably doesn’t even know what it stands for. And he’s never signed a letter XOXO. And he’s never called himself Daddy. He’s always signed off with something like, “Love, Your Crazy Old Stinky Bird-Brained Dad.”

  I’m relieved to hear Roo putting The Very Strange and Incredibly Creepy Letter back in its envelope. I tug on the chain of the lightbulb and the room goes black.

  “Mad,” Roo says, her little voice floating up to me in the darkness, “there’s something I have to show you tomorrow. When we get back here after the face massages.”

  But I pretend I’m already asleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I step into the Selva Shop the next morning, Kyle doesn’t even look up. He’s sitting behind the counter, gazing down at the binoculars hung around his neck. I give the door an extra rattle, hoping that’ll get his attention, but he keeps ignoring me. I was excited to come here, but now I just want to sneak away, and I would, except that Mom told me to tell Kyle we’ll be gone this morning and would like to have our Spanish lesson this afternoon instead.

  “Um,” I say.

  Finally Kyle looks up.

  “Hola,” he says coolly. As though he’s talking to any old tourist. As though we didn’t stand together in the rain yesterday beneath a blue umbrella flower.

  “We’regoingtoLaLavathismorningsonoSpanishlessonokay?” I say super quick.

  He gazes at me, his eyes dull, barely even golden right now.

  “Okay,” he says as though he couldn’t care less.

  Ouch.

  “Well,” I say, “bye.” I turn and get out of there as quickly as possible.

  I’m so bugged by him that I don’t even realize until we’re halfway to La Lava that I forgot to tell him we’d like to have Spanish class this afternoon instead. Oh well.

  When Ken/Neth drops us off at the lobby of La Lava, Roo immediately asks Patricia Chevalier if we can see Dad. Patricia Chevalier gives her an exquisite smile.

  “I apologize, sweetie,” she says, “but your father is working in the jungle today.”

  Roo looks terrifically disappointed.

  “Now, now, sweetie,” Patricia Chevalier tells her. “You are going to love your facial. Please, follow me. I will show you our world-class spa facilities.”

  It’s weird to hear such nice words spoken without niceness. I wonder if Mom and Roo notice the not-niceness too. But Mom just smiles yogically at all of us before vanishing down a hallway to wherever Relaxation and Dumbation takes place.

  Patricia Chevalier leads me and Roo down a white marble staircase right off the lobby, each step as wide as three normal steps. La Lava seems even more spectacular now than it did the first time we came. Maybe because we’ve been spending so much time at the crazy old Selva Lodge, but everything here seems a hundred times more elegant than anything I’ve ever seen. And the air smells like honey! And it’s the perfect temperature. And the sound of the waterfalls makes my heart feel smooth.

  The marble staircase goes down and down. “Ooo, it is so pretty here,” Roo coos. “I want to drink these stairs—they look like milk!”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Patricia Chevalier veers to the right, around a curving white wall. Roo skips ahead a few feet and I hurry to keep up with her. I turn the bend just in time to see her crash head-on into a woman in a turquoise silk robe coming from the opposite direction.

  Oh. My. God.

  I can’t breathe.

  Roo just crashed into Vivi.

  Vivi looks shocked and Patricia Chevalier looks enraged. Roo lets out a shaky giggle and I fall back a step to hide behind Patricia Chevalier.

  But Vivi stares right at me, which makes my vision go all blurry with nervousness. I remember the way she glared at the Spaniards in Rosa of the Flowers and Knives.

  “I didn’t realize children were allowed down here,” Vivi says. Her voice is low, sort of rich and sort of harsh, different than it sounds in the movies.

  “Oh, well, it is, you know …,” Patricia Chevalier fumbles. It’s so weird to see her acting this awkward. “… a … an … unusual … circumstance.”

  Vivi breezes past Patricia Chevalier, still staring at my face. Then—get this!—she touches my forehead with her thumb.

  Vivi. Touching me. I have goose bumps.

  “I wish,” Vivi says, “I could just rip this skin right off you and put it on me.”

  Patricia Chevalier gives a long, high, fake laugh.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, though I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to say.

  But it makes Vivi smile, and her smile is partway gorgeous and partway fierce.

  “Thank me?” she says, her thumb still on my forehead. “Don’t, chica. I’m not joking. I’ve been waiting three days for my treatment”—she shoots her glare at Patricia Chevalier, who blushes nervously—“and they’ve got me playing a twenty-one-year-old princess next, and I’ve got somewhere I have to be next Monday.”

  “It’s only called a catfight if men are watching.” The words suddenly burst out of me. “Otherwise it’s a clash of goddesses.” My favorite Vivi quote from The Secret Life of Cleopatra.

  “Well, how about that,” Vivi says, looking pleased. “Someone’s been paying attention.”

  She half pats, half slaps my cheek and then drops her hand.

  “Adiós, kiddos. Have fun,” she says before vanishing up the stairway in a swirl of turquoise silk.

  Roo and I stare at Vivi’s back and then at each other. She’s just like Cleopatra! Nice and mean at the exact same time.

  Now Patricia Chevalier seems eager to get rid of us. She hurries down the hallway, her face pale and her hands trembling. “It could have been worse,” she mutters to us, but then I realize she’s muttering into a tiny microphone clipped to the inside of her blouse.

  “Here,” she says coldly, pausing at a beautiful wooden door carved with images of naked dancing women. “Ladies’ changing room. Your temporary lockers are labeled with your names. Put on the robes and wait
in the Silent Lounge.”

  Then she turns and marches away from us, her very high heels making those gunshot sounds on the marble.

  It’s wonderful once she’s gone. Roo pushes open the naked-women door and we step into a room that leaves even Roo speechless for a moment. The floor is a whirling red and gold mosaic. There’s a row of golden sinks, and between each sink is a red bowl shaped like a pair of hands, and each pair of hands cups a floating pink flower. Across from the golden sinks there’s a row of showers carved from volcanic rock, the golden shower curtains pulled aside to reveal golden spigots gleaming against the black rock. The whole place is fragrant with a smell somewhere between cinnamon and roses. In the middle of the room, there’s this enormous black cauldron filled with floating red flowers.

  “The walls!” Roo exclaims, rushing toward the nearest one.

  The walls, I notice then, are covered in a thin film of water, like a permanent waterfall, the soft swoosh running down black marble. When Roo touches the wall, the water parts around her hand. She looks back at me and squeals.

  We have the place to ourselves. Even though there are two rows of wooden lockers, some labeled with names, no one else is around. We find our lockers easily, MADELINE and RUBY in red-ink cursive. Dark green terry-cloth robes hang inside them.

  “Dang,” says Roo. “I want a silk robe like Vivi had!”

  I look over at her, about to tell her she’s a spoiled brat.

  “Just kidding!” she says. “Jeez!”

  We take off our T-shirts and shorts and sneakers and put on the robes, then lock the lockers and hang the little golden keys around our wrists.

  “So, what now?” Roo says, walking toward one of the water-walls and running her fingers along it. I follow her, hesitantly sticking my fingertips into the rushing water—who knows if we’re even allowed to touch it. I’m surprised by how smooth and soothing the water feels.

  “Okay, so is this the so-called Silent Lounge?” I ask Roo, gazing at the pink velvet couches and wondering which of them might qualify as the “Silent Lounge.”

  “Hmm,” Roo says thoughtfully, looking all around the room. Then she lets out a soft yelp and rushes off toward a dark, narrow doorway beyond the showers—a doorway I didn’t notice until this exact second.