by Laura Resau
I glanced at Pedro and saw that he had followed my gaze to the spider’s web. After a moment he looked back at me and smiled, and for some reason I felt sure he was thinking the same thing I was.
“Now,” said Abuelo, “when will we hear about the spirit waterfall?”
Abuelita raised her eyebrow, curious.
“Yes, tell us!” Pedro’s mother said, stroking his hand.
Pedro and I looked at each other. How to begin?
First we tried to explain the feeling that it was another world down there, how on the surface there’s nothing more than a soft rushing sound, but once you go below you see its wild power. You know that it’s always there, immense, existing right under the surface—whether you’re sleeping or eating or working. You can ignore it, forget about it, until you let yourself really listen. And you get the feeling that everyone has a waterfall inside themselves, inside their deepest caves. Maybe we each have to make this trip inside to really know who we are.
Pedro and I tried to tell them this, but the only words we found were “It’s really big” and “It’s really loud” and “The water was flowing really fast.” Words felt too flimsy to explain that power.
The next day, I walked along the cornfield to Pedro’s house for the first time. It looked a lot like my grandparents’ place, a small cluster of shacks, only more run-down. Loose planks dangled by nails, shutters hung lopsided, and chunks of cement had fallen off the sink basin. His mother was washing clothes under a lime tree when she glanced up and smiled at me—the same wide smile as Pedro’s, identical except for her two blackened teeth.
She wiped her hands on her apron and greeted me with a light handshake. “Ah, Clara! Pedro will be so happy to see you!” She motioned to the biggest shack. “Go in, Clara. Make yourself at home.”
A sheet hung over the doorway. “Hi,” I said, and pushed aside the sheet.
It was dark and cool inside.
“Welcome to my mansion, Clara.” Pedro grinned. He was sitting propped on a narrow bed covered in a fuzzy beige blanket with a giant peacock design. Above the headboard was one small square window with clear plastic taped around the edges. The floor was made of packed dirt and the walls of logs. Sheets hanging from the ceiling divided the house into rooms. In the dining room were two dented folding chairs and a metal card table and not much else. In the other room, a bare mattress sat next to a wooden crate of folded flowered dresses and checked aprons—his mother’s room, I guessed.
I moved close to his bed. “How do you feel?”
“Better now that you’re here. All night and all morning half of my body felt strange. Like hundreds of little men were inside it, stabbing me with tiny swords.”
“And now?”
“Now it just feels like ants crawling around in there.”
“Good.” I felt shy suddenly. I was used to spending time with him in the woods, not inside four walls.
“Have a seat.” He motioned to two chairs in the room—wooden ones with green paint chipping off.
“Can I just sit next to you?” I asked.
He started scooting over to give me room.
“You don’t have to move over,” I said. I took off my sandals and sat down next to him, leaning my back against the headboard. The bed was creakier than the one I slept in, and even lumpier.
“I want to play you a song, Clara, but I need you to strum.” He held up his right hand, which seemed a little swollen. “See? This hand is useless for a few days.”
I rested the guitar on our laps. He moved his fingers over the guitar’s neck while I strummed. It was the song about me coming out of the shadows in the middle of the night.
…I give you a song when you appear,
The mystery of love…
After the last note faded, I said, “Let’s play another.”
“How about a protest song?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes,” I said, and I meant it. “A protest song.” Over the past few days he’d explained the words of some protest songs to me, and it seemed to me that they weren’t too different from love songs. True, the songs talked about big life things like being poor and leaving home to find work and getting hurt by unfair government rules. But don’t these things have a lot to do with love between two people? The thread of love between Dad and his parents was nearly broken because he left his village to make money. Same with the connection between Pedro’s father and Pedro and his mother. Pedro and I had promised each other, after we’d made up from our fight, that our thread would stay strong no matter what.
A single framed picture hung on the wall across from the bed. It was a faded picture of three people in front of tall green cornstalks. The woman, a younger version of Pedro’s mother, was holding hands with a little boy in a palm hat. On the other side, the boy held the hand of a man in a matching palm hat. The adults weren’t smiling, but they had proud expressions. They looked hard at the camera, furrowing their eyebrows and pressing their lips together in concentration, as though they were trying to look into the future. The little boy had a huge white smile and was looking up and off to the side, toward the mountains. A single crack ran down the middle of the glass like a lightning bolt.
After we finished the protest song, I asked, “Is that your father?”
Pedro nodded and laid the guitar down at the side of the bed. “A few years ago I ripped that picture off the nail and threw it at the wall. Then I hid it in a box and refused to tell my mother where it was. ‘I don’t have a father,’ I told her. Just this morning, I hung it back up.”
“Why?”
“I wanted you to see me together with him.” He ran his fingers along the satin edge of the peacock blanket. “In the cave, when it looked like I might die, I thought of my father. I thought that I wanted to know him. I wanted him to know me.”
I pushed my bangs behind my ears so I could take in every detail of Pedro’s face as he talked, even though I knew his face pretty well already from sketching it so much. At least half of my sketchbook was filled with his different expressions, but no single one that captured who he was. He didn’t look much like his father as far as I could tell, except for his strong cheekbones.
“Are you going to try to find him?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “What if he wants to see me but he’s ashamed to? Maybe I need to make the first move.”
“I could look up his phone number on the Internet and you could call him,” I offered.
“Maybe,” he said, and looked thoughtfully at the picture. He leaned over and picked up the guitar. We started playing another song, a song that was part love song and part protest song, woven together like a palm hat.
“Do you have any pictures of Marcos?” I asked.
He shook his head. “All that’s left of Marcos is his music.”
“And his ideas,” I said.
I knew that back in Walnut Hill, I would hear Pedro’s music, and it would remind me to search past the way things look on the outside to find their inside. His songs would make me think of all the threads of love in the world, and the ways they’re all interconnected, like spiderwebs. Maybe that’s what Abuelita meant about Marcos changing the world by changing Pedro. And through Pedro, changing me.
On the day Pedro could finally limp over to our house, we sat in the kitchen as Abuelita and I patted out tortillas and laid them on the clay comal over the fire. Abuelo took a deep breath and said quietly, “M’hija, you know what day tomorrow is.”
Of course I knew, but I’d been trying hard to forget. I’d been changing the subject whenever he and Abuelita brought it up. I picked up a flattened circle of tortilla dough and placed it on the comal. My tortillas were perfect now. It had taken me all summer, but finally, they were just the right thickness.
Pedro sat massaging his leg in silence. The smoke was drifting into his eyes, making them shine.
“Clara, perhaps Pedro can help you pack after lunch,” Abuelita said gently. “Tomorrow at sunrise we must leave t
o catch the bus.”
I flipped the tortilla with my fingertips and watched it puff up in the center. My palms still had strips of white cloth around them where the top layer of skin had been scraped off. Somehow my fingertips had come through fine, probably because they’d gotten so tough after a summer of making tortillas. I picked the tortilla off the comal and quickly dropped it on top of the pile of tortillas in the basket. By the time I came back next summer, my fingers would be soft again. I wondered if I’d have to start all over to create the calluses.
“Is this enough tortillas, Abuelita?”
She gave me a long, thoughtful look. Then she nodded and sat down in her little chair. We ate lunch in silence—chocolate-chile chicken with tortillas and rice. Even though it was my second favorite, I barely touched it. My throat wasn’t working right—the food seemed to take forever going down, and once it got into my stomach, it sat there like a stone.
Pedro wasn’t eating either, I noticed. He watched the fire and didn’t even blink when smoke drifted into his eyes again, making them watery and red. Finally Abuelita took our plates and said, “Why don’t you start packing up now, mi amor? I’ll wash the dishes.”
Pedro walked outside with only a slight limp now, but instead of coming toward my room, he headed straight down the path toward his house.
“Pedro! Aren’t you going to help me pack?”
He didn’t turn around, just shook his head and limped down the path. “Pedro!” I shouted again, and started running after him. But he kept walking fast and wouldn’t turn to look at me even when I’d caught up to him.
So I stopped and watched him go. I tried to memorize him, to take a picture of him with my mind as he disappeared through the tall cornstalks.
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed, trying to imagine Yucuyoo existing without me here—this musty room, the hidden waterfall, Pedro’s music on the mountain. Back in Walnut Hill, Dad and Mom and Hector were probably asleep, and my room was sitting there empty. There was the mall just a mile away, with its giant parking lot lit up by fluorescent lights, and a mile farther, my school with the empty desks and clean blackboards and thin gray carpet. In two days I would be there, filling those spaces, and Yucuyoo would be far away—a jumble of sounds and smells and images—slowly fading.
At dawn Abuelita came into my room and placed her hand on my forehead. “Clara, mi amor, it’s time,” she said, stroking my face. I pretended to be asleep so that she would stay with her hand on my head and keep talking to me softly.
After a few minutes, she shook me gently. I dragged myself out of bed, put on jeans and my art sweatshirt, and tied my hair in a ponytail. Outside I splashed water onto my face and brushed my teeth in the blue half-light.
While we drank cinnamon coffee in the kitchen, Abuelo handed me my father’s carved gourd. He’d filled it with roasted coffee beans and tucked it into a woven palm basket, along with a wooden stirrer and five chunks of cinnamon chocolate. “Now you can show your mother and brother how to make hot chocolate, m’hija. And the gourd and coffee beans are for Enrique. Tell him we hope the wind blows him our way again.” His eyes were shining. One brown and one green.
Abuelita handed me a bag of seeds. “Who knows if these herbs will grow in your home?” she said.
“Oh, they’ll grow,” I said. “Dad will help me plant them. He can make anything grow.” It was true. Mom always said he could make even a rock sprout roots and buds. And Dad would treat these seeds with more care than ever, I was sure. Some of the herbs he might not have smelled for twenty years. I could remind him of their names, even their names in Mixteco. After all the flowers and stones and seedpods he’d given me over the years, now I could give him something important back.
“Good, mi vida. You and your father plant these at your home, and every time you water them, think of us. Watch them grow and think of us. Know that they are alive, and that so are we, far away.” She unbraided her hair and pulled out the faded orange ribbon, the one that Nana had given her. She stood behind me and carefully wove it into my ponytail, forming a single braid. She tied the ends firmly.
The ocean was welling up inside me again, only this time the tears were more sad than happy. “Thank you.” I started walking out of the kitchen to get my bags before the tears could spill over.
Just then, when I was halfway through the door, Loro cried out, “¡Hasta luego!” See you later!
I’d almost forgotten to say goodbye to him. I stroked his green feathers and wiped my eyes and whispered, “Hasta luego.” One of his feathers had fallen to the floor, and I picked it up and stuck it in my braid.
“Ahh, he said see you later,” Abuelo said. “He knows you will return next summer with the rains.”
As I left the kitchen Loro called after me: “¡Ánimo, Clara!”
Everything looked blurry through my film of tears while we gathered the bags from my room and carried them down the dirt path. Every few minutes I looked back, thinking that Pedro might come limping through the wildflowers. Every time I heard a sound—Is it Pedro? The sky had begun growing lighter in the east. A few minutes after we crossed the stream, just at the edge of the patch of trees, we heard the faint rumbling of the bus. It was coming around the bend in the mountains above us.
We started running through the woods, the bags bouncing against our backs, slamming against our thighs. Maybe we would miss it! And there wouldn’t be another bus until the next morning, and then I would miss my flight, and I could stay longer, and say goodbye to Pedro. But Abuelo sprinted ahead, waving his hat and whistling at the bus. The driver slammed on the brakes in a cloud of gray exhaust and waited for Abuelita and me to catch up.
I looked back again, to see if Pedro had come. I was squinting into rays of light through the branches. The sun had risen all the way.
Through the trees I caught a glimpse of red—his pants! He was running fast, only limping a little. By the time he reached us, all my bags were loaded. Abuelita and Abuelo had already settled in their seats, and the driver sat up front, wiping his forehead with a red bandanna.
Pedro was completely out of breath, and his cheeks were as pink as I’d ever seen them. He handed me a little package wrapped in a banana leaf. “It’s for you. A tape of my music,” he said. “Felipe let me use his tape deck. We stayed up all night recording it.” Then he gave me an envelope. “This is for my father. If you find his address, could you send it to him?”
I nodded. I couldn’t find words. Everything was rushed. I wanted to tell him so many things. Last night I’d imagined a long hug and a passionate kiss. But now, all the passengers were watching us and waiting, looking restless. The driver revved the engine.
“Don’t disappear, Clara,” Pedro said.
“I’ll come back.”
We touched hands.
Inside the bus I held the tape in my lap and watched Pedro grow smaller. Finally he turned and limped back into the woods, alone. Abuelo put his arm around me and Abuelita smoothed the orange ribbon in my braid and said, “You will see him again, mi vida. Next summer, in the full moon in June. When you come with your father.”
I would play Pedro’s tape hundreds of times over the fall and winter and spring. I would sit in the dark and watch the rabbit in the moon and let Pedro’s music enter me. I would feel the mountains in my bones, the stream in my blood, the sound of the waterfall in my pulse. I would feel the fresh herbs dripping rainwater down my arms, the warmth of hot chocolate, the sweet copal smoke, the taste of mango juice, the color of his voice, the smell of goats.
Clara
Dad and I walked through a carpet of crisp fall leaves, up a mountainside in Maryland. Treetops rustled in the breeze, all reds and yellows against the blue sky. “Espérate, Dad,” I said. “Let’s sit for a minute. I want to sketch something.” We sat on a rock by a small stream and sipped from our water bottles. Dad flipped through our Medicinal and Edible Plants book and examined wands of blue flowers growing at the stream’s edge. I opened my sketchbook to
a fresh page. I’d torn out the pictures from Yucuyoo and given them to Dad. The rest of the book was nearly filled with pictures for Pedro. The pages still smelled of woodsmoke from Abuelita’s kitchen, and some were wavy from getting wet in afternoon rainstorms.
I looked around for something to draw and spotted, in the sunlight, a spider’s web, stretching across the stream from a tree branch on one bank to a branch on the other. With the tip of my pencil, I drew the thin threads. I’d learned in biology class that spider’s silk is stronger than steel of the same weight. I sketched the web, its circles widening, connected with spokes like those of a wheel.
I glanced at Dad. He had that excited, triumphant look in his eyes that meant he was close to figuring out the name of the wildflower. I studied his face, all lit up, and saw a piece of Abuelo shining through. And then I noticed Dad’s comfortable silence, his steady breath, and I heard a piece of Abuelita.
Samantha had asked me to go over to her house that day, and when I told her I was going hiking with my dad, she said, “I wish my dad hung out with me.” Over the summer, her parents had decided to divorce, and her father had moved out.
When I’d first gotten home from Mexico, Samantha had thrown her arms around me and cried, “I missed you!” and then she’d burst out sobbing. She talked and talked about how miserable and lonely she was. I held her hand and felt her fear, sharp as a scorpion sting, and her sadness, a deep ache. Then I felt the heron lifting her up, little by little, out of her pain. After a while, Samantha’s gasps calmed into a long sigh. “I don’t feel so bad now,” she said. She wiped her tears and hugged me and whispered, “Thanks, Clara.”
What she was really thanking me for was letting my soul touch hers. And it wasn’t just mine. I thought of the bits of Abuelita’s and Abuelo’s and Pedro’s spirits leaping around inside me like flames and sparking Samantha’s soul.