I’m just floating along, drifting up staircases, feeling safer than I’ve felt in a long time, when Vivi suddenly stops.
“You!” Vivi shouts, turning to look at me head-on and pointing right at my heart. Startled, I seize up all over again. “You are something else, kiddo.”
“You sure are,” Ken/Neth murmurs in agreement. And here’s what’s crazy: He sounds like he means it.
CHAPTER 20
We don’t have to force Ken/Neth to look up the second time either. He does it calmly, even willingly, raising his head to gaze at the face-recognition device until the wall slides open.
I can’t describe the feeling I have as that white marble wall moves aside and the people I love appear in the dim room beyond.
They’re standing in formation, ready to attack, Dad and Mom in front flanked by Roo on one side and Kyle on the other, Señor V and Señora V behind. So ready are they to rush whatever enemy is coming for them that they actually fall forward a few steps, too shocked to believe that it’s me standing there, along with Vivi and Ken/Neth, his head hanging in what seems to be shame.
Roo is the first one who stops staring speechlessly.
“Mad!” she says. “You look so freaky!”
I’d totally forgotten about the blood drying on my face.
“Who did that to you?” Roo demands, scowling at Ken/Neth.
“Miss Perfect,” I say, “and Mr. Beautiful, her mate. When I was helping them escape.”
“Miss Perfect is ALIVE? And she ESCAPED? With her MATE?” Roo shrieks joyously.
With that they break formation and burst out of the shadowy room—Roo racing ahead of everyone else, and Kyle right behind her (Kyle!), followed by Mom and Dad and the Villaloboses. They all blink in the warm light of the hallway as they surround me.
“Well, yeah,” I explain, “I got her and Mr. Beautiful from this cage, and then I held a sliding wall open with my foot, and they went flying out.” It feels weird to describe it that way, as though I knew what I was doing all along. As though I wasn’t just bumbling around.
Mom uses the edge of her ball gown to wipe the blood off my face. “My little monkey!” she whispers. “My mockingbird, my frog!” which is a lot more normal than my beautiful, beautiful girls, and I have to say it’s a big relief. Kyle is staring at me all disbelievingly, and Dad puts his hands on my shoulders and calls me Madpie, and Señora V says something in Spanish that I can’t understand but I think it’s a compliment, and Señor V grins deeply and silently at me.
“I sent my chauffeur off with all the other evacuees,” Vivi announces, “but my limo’s out front, so let’s get outta here.”
But I’m distracted by Roo wrapping her arms around my waist and telling me how my guard was so peeved that I snuck away, but how Ken/Neth told him, “Oh, the kid in the green dress? Don’t waste time looking for her—she’s the wimpy one, she’d never try anything.”
I look over at Ken/Neth, standing off to the side, and I’m seriously shocked to see that he’s smiling. I’m pretty sure it’s not a mean smile. I’m pretty sure it’s an I-wish-I-had-what-you-have smile, an I’ve-done-bad-things-for-money-but-all-I-really-want-is-a-family-like-yours smile. And you know what? I want to feel other things toward Ken/Neth; I want to feel anger, I want to feel betrayed and tricked and mad, but right now all I feel is pity.
Ken/Neth senses me looking at him and steps toward me. I spring backward, clinging to Roo, suddenly frightened.
“Oh,” Ken/Neth says sadly, as though I’ve wounded him. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you jump away when I get close. But of course I understand.”
Everyone goes silent and stares at Ken/Neth. The beak-gash on his forehead is dark with clotted blood. There’s dried blood on the collar of his white shirt. His orange tie is cockeyed. He looks a little like a maniac.
Then he falls to the floor in front of Dad, his hands on Dad’s feet, and I’m going, Wait, is Ken/Neth bowing to Dad, worshipping Dad? Or is he trying to hurt him in some new way?
But then I see that Ken/Neth is pulling something out of the breast pocket of his tuxedo, something black and plastic, and I see that he’s lifting Dad’s pant leg to reveal the green flashing light, and then he’s bringing the plastic key up to the tracking device.
The tracking device falls off Dad’s ankle, landing with a dull clunk on the marble.
“Let me just say,” Ken/Neth mutters, slowly standing up and looking at each of us, though not at our faces, only at our feet. “Let me just say this one thing. Sometimes … a situation can spiral out of control. Sometimes you just … go along step by step, trying to do what makes the most sense at each turn. Someone approaches you, asks you to do something … offers you compensation that makes you feel like you’re worth something. You tell yourself you’ve always been a person of good intention. You … somehow believe that’s still true. You even start to feel like you’re the best version of yourself when you’re around the family you’ve been sent to keep an eye on.… Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re just an incredible actor or if you really do get a kick out of these kids, if you really do think their mother is a great lady. You convince yourself you’re just doing what you have to do … and then suddenly you find yourself in a face-off with a bighearted twelve-year-old kid, and bam, there you are, the bad guy … even though you never meant to be.”
For a moment no one speaks. I have absolutely no idea how to respond to Ken/Neth.
It’s Roo, of course, who breaks the silence.
“Whatever, Mr. Candy,” she says, using his last name like it’s an insult.
And then, almost as though nodding along with Roo, the volcano lets out a gentle grumble, like the sound of a giant whispering good night.
And I’m lucky enough to catch the sunbeam-bright glance that passes between Señor V and Señora V, the glance and the smile and the nod. I know it as though they’ve spoken it aloud: The volcano bird has returned, and all is well in the realm of the volcano goddess.
Roo skips down the hallway ahead of everyone else. She runs out the massive golden doors of the lobby, up to the white limo parked on the white pavement right in front of the golden entryway. She tugs hard on the door of the limo, which opens easily, springing her backward. Then she dives onto a row of velvety green seats. I follow her. Kyle’s behind me, and then Señor V and Señora V, and finally Mom and Dad, hand in hand. We get ourselves all settled in, and I couldn’t be happier to be here with these people.
I look back to check on Vivi, who’s standing in the golden entryway with Ken/Neth.
“The Washington Post,” she’s threatening him. “The L.A. Times. The New York Post. The AP. Everyone. And of course CNN, CBS—believe me, I don’t have a single qualm about ruining your life. So you better not cause these good people any more trouble. I’ll keep your name out of it if you stay out of it starting right this second, okay?” Then her voice deepens, and I start to get this feeling like she’s doing a monologue from one of her movies, but from a movie that has yet to be made. “I will not stop until you and your people are out of here for good. Thanks to my active friend Volcán Pájaro de Lava, it may not be too hard to keep you cowards away. You tell that disingenuous little boss of yours, and whatever bosses there are above her, and whatever bosses there are above those bosses, that my eyes will be on you, on all of you, wherever you may be across the globe, and if you ever kill, or attempt to kill, one of these birds ever again, I will bring the wrath of the just world down upon your heads!”
Ken/Neth mutters something I can’t hear, his shoulders hunched. Whatever it is that he says, it satisfies Vivi, who nods briskly and makes a twisted, bitter face before spitting on the golden threshold of La Lava. Then she strolls over to the limo, leaving Ken/Neth alone there in the huge doorway.
And when Ken/Neth lifts his arm to wave, it strikes me that he wishes he were here in the limo with us.
I’m still looking at Ken/Neth as Vivi hops into the driver’s seat. She slides open the window dividing
the back from the front.
“Dang,” she says, twisting the key in the lock and fiddling with various controls, “how does this thing work?”
She twists the key even harder and suddenly the limo springs to life.
“BINGO!” Vivi says, clutching the wheel.
I take one last look at Ken/Neth, who’s standing there even now with his arm up in a wave.
As Vivi steers the limo down the pale silky pavement that leads out of La Lava, I glance at Kyle—we’re sitting next to each other, his knee touching my knee, a point of warmth—wondering if he’s wondering about me the way I’m wondering about him. His eyes meet mine. We give each other a small nod. I don’t know how to describe the feeling that shoots through me when I nod at Kyle and he nods at me.
But Vivi interrupts that moment when she lets out a loud cowboystyle “Yippee!” We’re passing through the enormous metal gate that used to guard La Lava. There’s no guard standing watch anymore and the doors seem to be malfunctioning—they’re stuck halfway open after the chaotic evacuation. La Lava is no longer separated from the rest of the world.
Roo echoes Vivi’s happy shriek, and Señora V does too. An odd thing to hear emerging from behind an old lady’s black lace veil, but that’s just the kind of old lady Señora V is.
Outside La Lava, the darkness seems almost friendly as we glide through it. Vivi rolls the windows down, and it’s only now, as the dangerous odor of the volcano gives way to the warm fragrance of flowers, that I realize how strongly the air smelled of sulfur all evening.
“Hey, you know what, Vivi?” Roo says. “You’re fantastalicious!”
“Well,” Vivi says, “I don’t know about that, but I haven’t had this much fun since Madonna and I went skinny-dipping in Cinque Terre. It’s delicious to drive a limo, that’s for sure! I can’t believe I’ve never tried it before.”
“Man,” Roo sighs, “it’s awesome not to be stuck in that room anymore.” She barely pauses before perkily asking, “So, where does everyone think Miss Perfect and Mr. Beautiful are now?”
I’m proud that she’s adopted my nickname for the male bird. I knew she’d like it.
“I bet they’re already way past the sky-blue waterfall!” Roo says, answering her own question.
Across from me, Dad has his arm around Mom and is gazing at her with this amazed look on his face, and Mom is gazing right back at him in the exact same way. Her face looks sharp and smart and full of thoughts—just the way it always used to, back before yogafication.
“Via,” Dad says, and it feels nice to my ears to hear Dad call Mom the nickname he’s always called her.
“Jimbo,” she says, and there’s that sound of tears in her throat, and I’m starting to blush a little now that Kyle is seeing my parents get all gushy and nicknamey with each other.
“I wasn’t sure we’d make it, Via,” Dad says quietly. “I can’t believe we’re all here. Ever since January—”
Then he stops, I guess because it’s too hard to go on.
But Roo jumps across the limo into his lap and says, “You have to tell us everything! Tell us everything that happened. Because we were confused.”
Dad looks exhausted. He sighs and slowly shakes his head as he hugs Roo.
“The early weeks here, back when I was under the impression that all La Lava wanted me to do was track and catalog the native bird species,” he says tiredly, “those weeks were phenomenal. The best bird-watching I’ve ever done.”
He pauses and looks around the limo at us.
“My wife and daughters,” he continues, “can probably imagine how thrilling, how unspeakably thrilling, it was for me to spot a Lava Throat, to realize it was a Lazarus species. Easily one of the greatest moments of my life. After a couple of days, I managed to capture a bird for research purposes. I was just going to hang on to it long enough to measure it, put a tracking device on its ankle, make a few notes about its appearance, take some photos.”
Dad pauses again, this time for long enough that I keep wanting to say, Um, hello, Dad? Keep talking, please.
“It was devastating,” Dad says, his voice husky. “They tore the bird away from me. They threatened me, and then they killed it right before my eyes. I think they wanted to prove to me how ruthless they could be. Watching that Lazarus bird die …” He trails off.
Mom strokes his hand.
“And then,” Dad says, his voice rising with rage, “to learn why they’d killed the bird, the most idiotic, superficial reason in the world.”
“How did they even know they could make a skin treatment from the bird?” Mom asks. “It’s not as though that’s obvious.”
Then suddenly Dad starts telling us everything, talking as fast as possible, like he can’t wait until he’s done speaking. What he found out was that La Lava itself had stumbled onto the miracle treatment—one of their hired scientists happened upon a dead LTVT deep in the jungle last fall. Everyone at La Lava had heard the local legends about the volcano bird’s ability to restore youth, so going on a hunch, La Lava’s biochemists created several treatments from different parts of the bird. It was just a lark, an experiment, but they decided to charge their wealthiest client—a rock star—an arm and a leg for this extra-special onetime treatment. They started with the bird’s ground-up bones—and they were more shocked than the rock star when it worked, truly worked, unlike every other youth serum ever created. He looked fifteen years younger, his skin fresh and taut. Only the bird-bone substance had this effect; the substances made from other parts of the bird’s body were useless. The rock star started spreading the word among his friends like gospel, and the reservations were rolling in like never before. Reservations from the wealthiest, most noteworthy people in the world, movie stars and rock stars and billionaires, and the management of La Lava realized it stood to make an astronomical amount of money if it could just get its hands on one LTVT every couple of months—many treatments’ worth of the substance could be produced with a single skeleton. But of course the illicit source of the miracle substance had to be kept dead secret. That was when they sent their business consultant Ken Candy to get in touch with the Bird Guy. They needed Dad to capture LTVTs while simultaneously working to locate the elusive females and nests in the hope that they might breed the birds in captivity. As long as their attempts at synthesis and cloning were fruitless, they were forced to rely on the Bird Guy for their supply. But they quickly learned they couldn’t buy Dad’s compliance with money—they could only buy it with threats to us, to Mom and Roo and me. Dad could only hope they were bluffing about their plans to harm us. He could only hope they were lying about our house in Denver being under surveillance. Unsure whether their threats were idle or not, he had to give in to La Lava’s demands.
“They were spying on us,” Mom murmurs.
“I know,” Dad says, shutting his eyes and rubbing his temples. “The girls told me.”
“And there was Ken,” Mom adds. “There was always Ken.”
Dad just nods wearily at that.
“So …,” Roo says, hesitating a bit, “how many birds did you, you know …?” I can tell she’s trying to avoid using a word like sacrifice. She doesn’t want to make Dad feel worse than he already does.
“I captured the bare minimum of LTVTs necessary, three total in six months,” Dad says, his voice pained. “It was pure torture—with each bird I captured, I knew I might be capturing the last one on the face of the earth. I let the birds go as often as possible, knowing that the longer I waited, the more likely the bird would have the chance to reproduce. I only brought them in when La Lava was at the edge of desperation and full of threats.”
“Oh, Jimbo,” Mom says.
But Dad just keeps going, eager to get to the end of his story. In early July, he tells us, La Lava ran out of bird bone, and their attempts to produce the stuff artificially were going nowhere, and they were frantic to get more before the gala—it would be disastrous for them to have furious clients making a public fuss a
t the investors’ event. They were dying to get the treatments up and running again, get over that hump, keep the ball rolling, bird or bust. They just had to make it through the gala with happy investors and happy clients. This was particularly important to them, Dad explained, because Vivi was there, a superstar who could be the new face of La Lava.
“Ha!” Vivi scoffs from the front of the limo.
They were willing to do anything at all, take any risk, to make sure they got a bird before the gala. Suddenly, though, Dad stopped spotting any LTVTs at all, and he started panicking and hating himself for being confident he’d find a bird whenever he needed one, and then we showed up, and he could no longer even hope we were safe. La Lava proved to him again and again how vulnerable we were, how easily they could harm us if they chose to—during a facial (those hands on my throat, Dad looking in at the window!), during yoga (I knew they were doing something to Mom!), during dinner at the Selva Café (when the electricity went out and Roo swore she saw Dad watching!).
It all clicks together and this very shaky feeling trembles through me. We were in even more danger than I ever realized.
Right then Kyle grabs my hand (man, I’d recognize his hand anywhere, the super-clamminess of his palm), and even though we’re learning all these freaky things about what went down, even though I shouldn’t have anything on my mind except how lucky we are, still I can’t help thinking, Jeez, this whole me-and-Kyle-holding-hands thing is seriously becoming a pattern. The world’s most awesome pattern. His hand squeezes, saying hi to mine, and my heart does a few cancan kicks.
Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green Page 25