by Laura Resau
We turn onto the dirt shoulder of the highway that circles downtown Otavalo in a kind of asphalt moat. Occasional trucks barrel by at top speed, their headlights emerging from the darkness like passing comets.
I think of Wendell. He smelled good yesterday, all sweat and sunshine and that boy smell, fresh, like laundry detergent and cotton.
I met lots of gloriously average American kids on our last trip to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. I envied them, secure in suburbia. They didn’t think twice about having a real living-room sofa and an actual bed and two family cars. Some had even kept the same best friend since kindergarten. Why couldn’t my life be small and neat and contained like a single-serving pack of Frosted Flakes?
I wonder if being with Wendell will make me feel part of this world, if I can get absorbed in it, the way you do in certain movies. I want to turn his life around in my hands, examine its textures and colors, breathe it in, imagine it’s mine.
After an hour of walking, the faintest indigo light of dawn illuminates the horizon. Layla and I turn up a cobbled street to a small village. “Look! Roses!” she cries. “I forgot to bring them, but the universe put them in our path.” She plucks some salmony pink blossoms from the roadside and tucks them in my bag.
The sky’s growing lighter and lighter, the stars disappearing, the moon fading. “Hurry, Zeeta! We have to do this exactly at dawn.” We half-run through the center of town, a little cement-slab plaza, and then through a gate and into the woods. A big wooden sign reads CASCADA DE PEGUCHE. Peguche Waterfall. The woods are dark, all green shadows, full of birds waking up and starting their songs. Water’s rushing somewhere below the path.
The tree shadows seem a little ominous, and again I remember Wendell’s warning. I glance at Layla, wondering whether I should mention it. No, she’ll just make us come back tomorrow loaded with amulets and charms. Another day of waking at four a.m. seems entirely unappealing.
“So, Zeeta,” Layla says, breathless. “Tell me. What are the qualities of my ideal man?”
“A homebody who saves for retirement. And lives in the same place for years. And whose idea of excitement is barbecuing with neighbors. And whose expertise is not making flower balloons.”
“Hmmm,” she says. “Sounds excruciatingly boring.”
The running water’s growing louder and louder, drowning out our words, and I try to let it drown out Wendell’s warning, which keeps running through my head. We make our way along the path, the moon barely lighting the way, as Layla whispers Rumi in rhythm with our steps.
“Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?”
The trail curves, and we emerge into a huge clearing. There it is, water tumbling down a towering cliff, shooting its spray everywhere, fine droplets of mist wrapping around us. It’s the kind of sight that really does take your breath away. Otherworldly, straight from the set of a fantasy film—The Chronicles of Narnia or one of the Lord of the Rings movies. A shower of liquid diamonds. We stand on the wooden bridge spanning the river and stare. The water’s falling from a height of a ten-story building, straight down the side of a cliff, pounding the pool below. It makes me feel very small and very fragile.
“Wow!” Layla says. “Que pleno.”
“Que pleno,” I agree.
“All right, let’s do this.”
I squint through the mist, at the white water churning, violent and relentless. “Layla, I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
She kisses my hair. “Oh, my little worrywart.” She crosses over the bridge and makes a left, along a steep embankment, toward the base of the waterfall, where huge rocks glisten between the path and the water’s edge.
I follow, feeling nervous and giddy. Later, I’ll complain about being woken up in the middle of the night, but secretly, I’ll relish the memory. You hardly ever remember the normal days where you get up at the normal time and do the normal things. No, what you remember are the times you got up in the middle of the night to see an eclipse or a meteor shower or a sunrise or to bathe in a wishing waterfall. Especially when it’s tinged with a sense of danger.
Layla tears off her clothes and drops them in a heap on a rock. I pick them up after her and fold them neatly, tucking them inside the plastic bag. I drape the towel over my arm, ready. Barefoot, she creeps across the rocks, clutching a handful of rose blossoms, toward the pool beneath the water fall. She clings to the slick crags, half-crawling toward the water’s edge. I’ve seen her naked countless times before, cleaning the apartment or lounging on the sofa, idly sketching ink doodles on her arm or leg or belly as though she were a blank canvas. To her, life is the ultimate artistic masterpiece, and it’s up to you, the creator, to make it as wildly dazzling as possible.
She’s chanting now, her voice mingling with the waterfall, and I catch a few words here and there, easily filling in the rest.
“Soul of my soul of the soul of a hundred universes,
Be water in this now-river …”
I watch her, my muscles tense. The center of the pool looks deep, with more rocks hidden underwater and strong, whirling currents.
She makes it to the water’s edge.
And then, she disappears.
At certain rare moments, time loses meaning. A second becomes a lifetime. Or a day becomes the blink of an eye. Layla’s time underwater feels like years. It feels like I’ve been crying and mourning her for decades. Like I’ve lived a lifetime without her, with her drowning and dying and leaving me alone to live a bland, beige, tasteless existence.
But all of that’s happened in the course of a few breaths, because I haven’t moved and the moon hasn’t budged in the sky and the morning light hasn’t come, and everything is still half-draped in darkness when her scream rips through the waterfall’s rush.
“Layla!” I call out.
No response, only the pounding water.
Hot panic shoots through me. “Layla!” I scramble across the rocks on my hands and knees. “Layla!”
I strain to see through the darkness and spray, looking for any sign of her—an arm, a leg, a lock of blond hair. Nothing. Only the white foam and mist and relentless beating of water on water. The waterfall is nearly deafening, a world of rushing water. I wonder if the scream I heard was my own. “Layla!”
I crawl closer, climbing over the stones, grasping at their jagged edges that dig into my palms. Vaguely I notice the rocks tearing into the soles of my feet, the flesh on my knees. I move closer and closer, wiping the mist and water and tears from my eyes, scanning the water for a glimpse of her skin.
When I’m a few feet from the edge, I see it, her hand flying up from the dark water. Her face appears next, terrified, only to be sucked back under. I grab a fallen branch with one hand and hold on to a sharp rock with the other, and lean over as far as I can, extending the branch.
Her arms thrash through the chaos of spewing water, her fingers clutching at the slippery stone. “Layla!” I shout. “Grab on!”
Her hands reach out and, yes, thank God, they grasp the branch.
I pull her in, straining with all my might. Once she’s close enough, I reach out my hand and hang on to her. My fingers dig into her flesh as she climbs weakly up the rock. She lies on the stone, gasping and coughing and gagging.
I put a towel over her and wait for my heartbeat to calm, my shaking to stop. I’m soaked from the waterfall, my clothes stuck to me and my face damp with mist and tears. I lick the blood from my palms.
Layla’s whole body is trembling, heaving. She’s crying, too, a raw, animal crying.
I hug her, rocking her like a small child. After a while, she says, “I’m so sorry, Z. I’m so sorry.”
“Shhh, it’s okay, Layla.” I hold her close.
“No, it’s not. I’m going to change, Zeeta. I swear to you, I’m going to change.”
Of course, she won’t change. We’ve had near-death experiences before, and after the initial freak-out, she’s back to her usual self before long. Last year, off the coast of Java, her boyfriend of the month had made a sailboat with salvaged parts and taken us on a three-day cruise. On the second day, at dusk, a tropical storm started brewing. The wind and rain blew with terrifying force. I’d never felt that humans were so flimsy and insubstantial. It seemed inevitable we’d be swept away.
Below the deck, Layla and I cowered, holding each other. Layla was moaning nonstop. “Oh God, Z, what have I done? What have I gotten us into? Oh God, I’d give anything to be in Maryland now. To be with Mom and Dad and you at the kitchen table. Playing Monopoly. Or Chinese checkers. Boggle. Scrabble. Backgammon. Oh God …”
The boat broke in half, and miraculously, we didn’t die. Sometime after midnight, the storm ended, and we found ourselves floating in a tiny lifeboat in shark-infested waters. For a while, I sat there, soaked and shivering, stunned at the regular rhythm of my heart, still beating. Then I started warming up and thinking about Maryland, and how we’d be going there, and how we’d spend heavenly evenings playing Chinese checkers.
As the lifeboat rocked, the boyfriend fell asleep, but Layla and I stayed awake, watching the clouds clear little by little, revealing more stars than I’d ever seen before in one place. She said,
“When the ocean surges,
don’t let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest!”
I resisted snapping that the last thing we needed was a chest full of ocean water. Instead I said, “When are we leaving for Maryland?”
For some reason, Layla was sticking her head over the side, tempting whatever toothed creatures lived under the water. “Look!”
I peered out, cautious. Lights glowed far below the surface. It was a strange sensation, like looking out the window of an airplane at night and seeing points of city lights.
“Luminescent squid,” she whispered reverently. “What a rare, beautiful thing has happened to us, Zeeta! How many people on this planet get to see glow-in-the-dark squid?”
I fixed my eyes on hers. “Last I heard, death by starvation and dehydration isn’t pleasant.”
“Don’t worry, love,” she assured me. “We’ll be saved.”
Sure enough, by sunrise, some fishermen came across us and brought us to shore and fed us fresh fish and papaya juice for breakfast on a little wooden table. Layla pronounced it the best meal ever and whispered in a kind of prayer,
“Some nights stay up till dawn, as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.”
Needless to say, we didn’t go to Maryland.
On the way back from the waterfall, I can’t bear how Layla’s limping down the path like an old lady with her shoulders hunched over, her wet hair plastered to her face, as if the water beat the life force out of her.
Halfway down the path, I say, “Hey, why don’t we both bathe with the rose petals off the trail here, where the river’s calmer?”
“Really?” Her voice is hoarse.
“Yeah. You can wish for a nice, boring guy and a nice, boring life where you don’t get sucked under waterfalls at dawn.”
She doesn’t laugh. She gives me a long, serious look. “That’s what I’m going to wish for, love. That’s my gift to you.”
We veer off the path, through scratchy bushes, which don’t bother us since our flesh is already torn up.
The river’s still flowing strong here, but we find a nook behind a tree root where the water swirls in a gentle pool. By now it’s light, a fresh light, slanted and misty and dappled through the leaves. Layla takes off her clothes, exposing red scratches crisscrossing her legs, and bruises and welts starting to form over her torso. Five beet-pink spots mark her forearm where my fingers clung to her.
She dips into the water, hanging on to the tree roots with one arm. She rubs rose petals over herself with the other, her lips moving in a silent prayer, some petals clinging to her, others floating down the river.
Once she comes out, I take off my clothes and lower myself into the icy water. I gasp as I completely submerge myself. Then I straighten up, the water waist-high, and rub the petals over my goose-bumped skin. I focus on my own wish, as much as I can with my shivering.
I wish for a home, a real home, a home that we live in for years, a normal home with a normal father and a normal mother.
The petals eddy in the current and float downstream. As I climb out, teeth chattering, I hear the echoes of two warnings—the first, Wendell’s voice, Be careful. And the second, Gaby’s—We don’t know what we want. The first has, oddly enough, proven itself true. And the second? The second I try to let go downstream with the petals.
Chapter 7
As we leave the forest, Layla announces, “That was one of the scariest moments of my life.”
Supposedly, her number-one scariest moment happened in an airport. “Being scared,” she always says, “drops you to a deeper place, where you make life-changing decisions.” In this case, the life-changing decision was to raise me alone. She was nineteen, and had been traveling for a year on her own before college, and it made her feel more alive than she’d thought possible. She was in Italy when she discovered she was pregnant with me. She hadn’t realized she was pregnant until four months in. She’d never had regular periods, and she didn’t have any morning sickness, until she began to notice that she’d developed a strong aversion to blue cheese. Plus, her belly was starting to bulge. My father was not in the picture.
But that wasn’t what she found scariest.
Her parents bought her a plane ticket and told her to come home to Maryland and move in with them. At the airport, she was almost to the front of the line with her giant backpack when she had a flash of what her life would be like raising a baby with her parents in suburban Maryland.
That was her scariest moment, imagining that future.
It was as though all the months of no morning sickness hit her full force. She ran to the bathroom and threw up.
Then, feeling better, she returned to the line. Again, just as she reached the front of the line, a wave of nausea overtook her and she ran to the bathroom. This happened five times, until she missed her flight.
She returned to her pensione in Florence, and felt fine except for the blue-cheese aversion. Over the next month, she rebooked her flight three times, and every time she was overcome with nausea at the airport.
“The universe was redirecting my path, Zeeta,” she says solemnly whenever she tells me the story. “Sometimes it has to resort to painful things to put you on the right path.” She called her parents and told them she was going to travel the world with her baby. “And then, I felt happy,” she says, triumphant.
She gave birth to me in Italy. And then we moved to Nepal, where she hired a nanny to watch me while she taught English. Supposedly, I was an incredibly easy baby. When I needed something—a diaper change or a feeding—instead of crying, I politely called out, “Agoo? Agoo?” Within a year Layla was ready to leave again, and she chose Tunisia. And thus began our wandering life.
All thanks to the vomit that wouldn’t quit.
“There’s something pink stuck to you,” Wendell says, pointing to my chest, right above my shirt’s neckline.
I look down and peel it off. “Oh. A rose petal.”
He tilts his head, eyeing me curiously. The morning’s cool, and he’s wearing a cream alpaca sweater with brown llamas encircling the neck. Gaby probably flattered him into buying three sweaters for twenty dollars. Light’s pouring through the café window, lighting up a patch of dust motes and settling on his sweater’s soft fuzz. “How’d a rose petal get there?”
“Long story,” I say.
“You’re mysterious, Zeeta.” Steam from his coffee is rising and swirling near his face before dissipating. I’m extra-appreciative of these deta
ils after the brush with death this morning.
I sip my coffee, my red bead bracelets clicking with the movement. Today I’m wearing all red and pink silk, inspired by the rose-petal ritual, feeling lucky that Layla’s still alive. After a moment, I say, “Okay, the long story involves hiking to a waterfall. And a near-death experience.” I raise an eyebrow significantly. “In water.”
Wendell looks alarmed. “Are you okay?”
“It wasn’t me. It was Layla. She nearly drowned. But then I helped her find her true love with rose petals. All before six this morning.” I stop there, trying to keep my tone light. A description of nude river bathing seems too much. And most of all, I just want to forget those horrible images of Layla helpless in the churning water. Even thinking about it gives me that same choking feeling as my middle-of-the-night panics.
“Wow. I’m glad your mom’s all right.”
I stare at him. “How’d you know?”
“Know what?” he stalls.
“You told me to be careful in the water.”
He studies a spot above my head. “I guess you mentioned it to me yesterday, and it sounded kind of dangerous.”
“I didn’t know about it then.”
“I bet I overheard your mom talking about it on the plane.” He shifts in his seat, uncrossing one leg and crossing the other. “So, what about our quest for my birth parents?”
I stare at him another moment, then give in for now and tell him Gaby’s advice about going to Agua Santa.
His eyes widen. “Sweet. A real lead. Let’s go tomorrow morning.”
“Wendell,” I say, opening my notebook, “what are you really looking for?”
“My birth parents,” he says, confused.