The Girl in the Glyphs

by David Edmonds

  “Evil is in the wind,” hissed the old woman.

  She took my arm and led me back to the Place of the Speaking Rocks, and once more I stood before the girl in the glyphs. “The story is not yet finished,” said the woman.

  “How does it end?”

  She exchanged glances with the old man, shook her head as if to say things weren’t going to end well, and the two of them faded into the forest.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Don’t go.”

  Stan shook me awake. “Jen, are you all right? You were talking in that Indian language.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. No cloud forest or buzzards and no old Indian couple. Only Stan in his cut-offs and Duke T-shirt. He said he’d fix breakfast—something he never did—and helped me up. The pain brought me to tears. My stomach felt as if I’d been drinking swamp water. Yet somehow I managed to take a hot shower, get dressed, and get makeup on my face.

  But I almost threw up at the sight of bacon.

  Afterward, Stan drove me to my gynecologist’s office in Tyson’s Corner. When they saw my face and how I could barely walk, they hustled me into a room. Then came the urine and blood tests and the probing and patching up and questions I didn’t want to answer.

  No, I told them, I did not want to file charges.

  My doctor, a middle-age African-American woman, sat in front of me and rattled off the diagnosis—a urinary abrasion caused by the roughness of the attacker. A lumbar sprain. A yeast infection. The onset of Chlamydia.

  She prescribed medication for the infection, drew more blood for an HIV analysis, said I’d need a follow-up in six months and a year, and suggested I see a rape counselor. Then she sighed and pushed her chair closer. “When was your last menses?”

  “Should have started about a week ago. Why?”

  “And when was your last, ah, sexual contact…before the attack?”

  I took in a deep breath.

  “It’s all right, Jennifer, I know you and your husband are separated.”

  “Well, I’ve been seeing this other man.”

  “Protection?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t like the way this conversation was heading.

  She fixed me in a firm gaze. “Listen, Jennifer, your pregnancy test came back positive.”

  Chapter 42

  My mom, Ix-Guadalupe Chicmul Cruz-McMullen—Lupe for short—was waiting back at the house, done up like an aging flamenco dancer in dangling earrings and dark hair pulled back in a bun. Like me, she’d gone through many makeovers since our village days, morphing from poor little Indian girl in traditional clothing to frumpy-looking minister’s wife to what she was now—stylish, slim, forty-something, and dressed in black.

  I cried in her arms. She cried. She explained to me again how the earth is alive, how every living thing is connected and every action and movement creates a ripple that eventually gets around to us all. Which explained why I was battered, fucked up, and pregnant with Alan’s child. She mixed me an herbal tea and then helped me explore a lop-sided Newtonian law of opposites that left me on the short end of everything—as if fate handed me Alan and the discovery to make me happy, and then bowled me over with evil.

  “Bad things sometimes happen to good people,” she said in her Indian-accented Spanish. “There are books on the subject. Tapes to listen to.”

  She pushed her chair a little closer.

  “Listen, mija. Could you be mistaken about Alan?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t even think straight.”

  “You should talk to him.”

  Later that afternoon, I lumbered into the garage, thinking to empty the suitcase I’d brought home. A nasty odor permeated the place, like a dead rat. The winds of April rattled the aluminum doors. I reached for the suitcase, carefully, so as not to strain my back, and was trying to open it when something slammed into the window.

  I jumped. What was that? Something blown by the wind? I reached down again—and this time heard a groan, like someone in pain. Like Fuentes.

  Inside my suitcase.

  I raced out of that cursed place so fast I stubbed a foot on the kitchen threshold and went sprawling onto the kitchen floor. “The garage,” I yelled to my mom. “Someone’s in there.”

  She grabbed a butcher knife and crept into the garage. I followed with Stan’s baseball bat. We checked the shelves and cabinets and even the trunk of my Volvo.

  Nothing. No one.

  No stench either. Forget the suitcase, I told myself. I’d empty it later.

  It stormed all night. I lay in bed thinking about the old woman’s words—Evil in the wind. Thunder rumbled. Things brushed against the window. I caught another whiff of decay, like sodden leaves in the jungle, and somewhere in the world between awake and asleep, a theory began to emerge: evil had come to me because I had no protective spirits. None from Christianity because I’d long since rejected my father’s religion, and none from the Mayan beliefs of my mother, which I also rejected. So all the good spirits had abandoned me and left me stuck in a world with no protection, no guardian angels.

  Which explained why Lieutenant Fuentes appeared at the foot of my bed.

  Somehow he’d survived the slashing, the shooting, the vultures, the sharks of Lake Nicaragua, and made his way ashore and managed to get into the United States without a visa and break into my bedroom. Now he was glowering down at me, his clothes drenched with lake water, blood oozing from his neck, flies swarming about him, machete in hand.

  “Bitch! This time I’ll get you.”

  My screams woke Stan in the next room and my mom down the hall. They rushed in: Stan in silk pajamas, my mom in black. Stan tried to assure me it was only a nightmare.

  “Not a dream. He was standing there, beside my bed.”

  Stan pulled me over to the bed. “See, no blood and no water.”

  No lieutenant either. They searched under the bed, in the closet and behind the curtains, but he was gone, hiding in the crack between the spirits, waiting for me to fall asleep again.

  My rape counselor turned out to be a squeaky-voiced psychiatrist who diagnosed my condition as panic disorder and agitated anxiety brought on by more than I could absorb. Which made perfect sense. How could anyone absorb a major discovery, a rape, a killing, an apparition, Indian ghosts, abandonment by two men, and a pregnancy all at once?

  She wrote out a prescription.

  Yes, she said, it was safe for pregnancy and yes, it would help me sleep.

  So I took my meds that night, turned out the light, and climbed into bed.

  And there he was again, covered with flies, blood oozing from his neck.

  “Take the entire bottle,” he said, “It’ll help you sleep.”

  He crawled into my bed, bringing with him the stench of rotting flesh.

  Again my screams brought Stan and my mom into the room.

  “That thing followed you home,” my mom said. “We have to destroy it.”

  Stan rolled his eyes the way my dad used to when my mom threw corn to the wind.

  “What does he want?” I asked her.

  “He wants you, mija.”

  She asked Stan to return to his room. As soon as the door closed behind him, she went to the bathroom and flushed the medicine. Then she hurried to her room and came back with a leather pouch that contained candles, corn, herbs, and an assortment of other items.

  “Get me something that belonged to him,” she said.

  “But I don’t have—”

  “Of course you do, mija. In your suitcase.”

  Chapter 43

  I followed her down the hall, through the kitchen, and out to the garage where my Volvo was parked next to Stan’s Porsche. Wind rattled the double doors. I pointed out my suitcase in a dark corner, resting on the concrete like a red coffin, the lieutenant inside.

  Waiting to pop out with his damn machete.

  “I’m scared,” I said to my mom.

  “Por Dios, mija. It’s only a suitcase.”

  She padde
d over in her bare feet, yanked up the pull handle and rolled it into the light.

  “Are you going to open it or do you want me to?”

  I squatted down and unzipped the cover, slowly. My mom took it from me, turned it upside down and dumped the contents on the floor—mildewed clothing, hiking shoes, Alan’s effigy witch—and my flattened backpack, as dingy as a relic from the grave.

  There too was my Swiss Army knife, still caked with the lieutenant’s blood.

  She took the knife, told me to bag the rest for disposal and meet her in the kitchen.

  I bagged everything except the gown I’d worn to the embassy party. No way could I throw that away. Couldn’t throw away Alan’s little witch either. So I put the gown aside, fastened the witch to my wrist and found my mom waiting in the glow of candlelight at the kitchen table.

  Herbs burned in a plate, filling the room with a sage-like aroma. Wind howled outside the balcony doors. The stove clock told me it was almost midnight, which seemed appropriate for witchcraft. A pot of water simmered on the stove, and the knife now lay in a little pool of pink water in a saucer.

  She pointed to Alan’s effigy witch. “Cuál es ése?”

  “A charm.”

  She touched it as if to test its power, nodded her approval, motioned me into a chair and handed me a glass of cloudy liquid. “Drink it, mija.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just drink it. It won’t harm the baby.”

  I gulped it down. The taste was as disagreeable as the boiled tree bark from my childhood. A pleasant warmth came to my stomach. The sensation spread into my arms, through my torso and down to my legs. The room grew misty, as if fog had entered the room. I grew sleepy, and from far away came my mother’s voice, speaking in the Mayan language of our ancestors.

  “Sleep, child…let your dreams take you back to the cave.”

  “But I don’t want to—”

  “He will not hurt you. I will not let him.”

  I closed my eyes and found myself back in that awful cave. The air reeked of bat dung, foul and menacing. From outside came the howl of monkeys and the squawk of predators. A vulture flapped through the doorway and turned into the lieutenant.

  I stepped backward with my flashlight and bumped into my mom.

  “I am here, child. Do not fear.”

  More buzzards flapped around the cave. Lightning flashed. I heard thunder and an awful scream, and Fuentes pleading for mercy, my mom ordering him back to his world of darkness. Then, for reasons that made no sense, I was a child again, snuggled in the safety of my grandmother’s lap, crying.

  “Don’t cry,” she said to me in Yucatec, holding me tightly.

  Her arms were still around me when I awoke, except they were my mother’s arms. The digital clock on the stove read 12:45. “What happened?” I asked, shaking.

  She picked up the knife, wiped away blood with a paper towel, then set the towel afire and dropped it into a bowl.

  It burned. Candles flickered. The wind howled. She burned two more pieces of paper towel, chanted words I didn’t understand, then stepped onto the outside balcony and let the wind take the ashes. When she came back, she dropped the knife into a pot of boiling water on the stove, turned on the lights and blew out the candles.

  “He is gone,” she said. “You are free.”

  The phone jangled me awake the next morning. I rolled over and took it, hoping to hear Alan’s voice. But it was Elizabeth Alvarado, calling from Managua.

  “What happened? They told me you’d fallen into chichicaste. Did you go to the cave?”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “No, Elizabeth, I finished my project and came home.”

  “The gringo’s not around either. Is he with you?”

  “You know very well he isn’t, so why are you asking?”

  “Because I’m told the two of you are like an item…that the two of you spent an entire week on Ana Maria. Was it for love…or to keep an eye on Zapateras?”

  “I’m dressing for work, Elizabeth.”

  I hung up, called the receptionist at my office, told her I was down with a bug and asked if I had messages. “About two dozen,” she answered in a nasal voice.

  I sat a little straighter. “From anyone named Alan?”

  She said to hold on and came back a few seconds later. “Sorry, Jen, no one named Alan.”

  I climbed out of bed, made coffee, and fought back morning sickness and the pain I felt over Alan. How could he look into my eyes the way he’d done when we were making love? Whisper the words he did? No one was that good at pretending.

  I picked up the phone and punched in his home number.

  No answer. Nothing but that damn recording.

  I fell into the habit of lighting a candle each morning and throwing a few kernels of corn off the rear balcony. Silly superstition, my father would have snorted, though it was difficult for me to see how this ritual was any more or less superstitious than a Christian prayer. I also thought about Catherine Cohen and wondered if I should call her family.

  “No,” Stan told me. “Let the embassy handle it.”

  That evening, he put on a Beethoven sonata and dragged up a stool. Outside, the rain was falling. He rubbed my leg and gave me a crooked little smile that meant he wanted more than conversation. I took his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m just not ready for this, not yet.”

  “Damn it, Jen, sooner we get back to the way things were, faster you’re going to heal.”

  “Listen to me, Stan, even if we get back together—and it’s a big if—things would be different. “I’m going back for my PhD at Columbia. I’d have to move there.”

  He stood, shuffled around a bit, and came back. “I can live with that.”

  I went to bed wondering how he could talk about making up while my heart was crying. I couldn’t even understand why the sun came up in the morning.

  Early the next morning, while I was tossing corn off the balcony like a Mayan priestess, the phone rang. I let it ring. Phone calls brought nothing but misery. The ringing stopped, but when it started again, more abrasive than ever, I picked it up and heard a woman on the other end identifying herself as the assistant to Holbrook Easton at the US Embassy in Nicaragua.

  Which made me want to throw myself over the balcony.

  “Mr. Easton asked me to call,” she said in her official-sounding voice. “You missed your appointment with him last week. He was expecting you. Are you well?”

  I told her my chichicaste lie and asked if they’d followed up on my report.

  “We’re trying to, but we haven’t been able to locate Lieutenant Fuentes. No one knows where he is. Not even his wife. As for your allegations about Ms. Cohen’s disappearance, all the parties you named say they know nothing. What we need is eyewitness corroboration.”

  “What about that old couple on Maderas? They saw what happened.”

  “Well, that’s the other problem. There used to be an old couple living on the volcano, but they were murdered about the same time as Ms. Cohen’s disappearance.”

  “They weren’t dead a week ago. Why don’t you send someone up to search?”

  “We did. All we found was a vacant cabin.”

  Chapter 44

  The Smithsonian Institute

  Office of Native American History

  Aweek after my return, I inspected myself in the mirror, concluded my bruises and burns could be concealed with makeup, and decided to go to work. But my mind was so abuzz, I didn’t notice the traffic light on the way to the metro station.

  The cop who wrote the ticket showed no sympathy.

  My mood brightened when I came out of the metro and gazed upon cherry blossoms in full bloom. Spring in the nation’s capitol. Another block, more cherry blossoms, and there stood the magnificent Smithsonian—or at least one of its many building. I passed through the entrance, took the elevator to the third floor, pushed through the double doors, and found myself amid flowers, balloons and office mates swarming around as if I were a
returning hero.

  Someone had even posted a WELCOME HOME JENNIFER sign.

  Diane, as bronze-skinned and almond-eyed as ever, had put on her traditional Cherokee clothing for the occasion—moccasins, headband, and ribbon shirt over her long slit-to-the-thigh skirt. “I can hardly wait to hear about the embassy guy,” she whispered.

  Our photographer, Niro Difalco, who didn’t have a drop of Indian blood, had painted his face with war-markings, probably with lipstick. “Good job with the glyph photos,” he said in his raspy smokers’ voice. “You should be our photographer.”

  And Etienne Breaux, a three-hundred-pound former linebacker for the New Orleans Saints, who claimed to be a mixture of Attakapas Indian and African-American, and who was more scary-looking than Dreadlocks with his pony-tail and a dysfunctional left eye, patted me on the back. “Way to go, girl. Congratulations on your promotion.”

  “What promotion?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Victoria resigned. Took another job. They appointed you acting director.”

  I squirmed. No wonder everyone was so friendly.

  I socialized awhile, repeated my chichicaste fibs, and asked Niro to show me the photos.

  “On your desk.”

  I excused myself and went to my office. A pile of work lay on the desk—phone messages, scribbled notes, mail, and even Father Antonio’s memoir, but nothing from Alan. Not on voice mail either. Damn him. Was I just another lay?

  The photographs were there too. Glyphs and temple ruins from Altagracia. Blanca standing beside her battered Datsun. Glyph Man and Glyph Woman at the Place of the Speaking Rocks. But no Indian couple. Not a trace. Nada, zilch.

  Another week went by and still no word from Alan. The embassy didn’t call either, but I received another annoying call from Elizabeth. Even more annoying was Stan, who’d moved his clothes and CD player back into my townhouse.