The Center of the World, page 11
Fernando placed both palms on the table and took a large breath. “They are the fattening houses for stolen babies. They are sold into the adoption system. The international demand for young children is strong and war breeds orphans. The black market for orphans looks for unprotected children.”
Kate felt the soft pat of Sofia’s hands on her ribs.
“But who would adopt a child from the black market?” She hiccupped with a powerful convulsion in her throat.
Fernando glanced at the door, constantly checking.
“There are many routes for a black market child, but by the time that a North American or European came face-to-face with a young child, they would see all the papers in order, and they could believe that everything was legal.” He paused. “Or the child could be sold as a servant in Guatemala City. Or the military could take the child for other purposes. . . .”
“Stop,” said Kate, hiccupping madly.
Kate pictured Sofia’s dark eyes, her small hands, and her sleek black hair. The child’s scent filled her, as if she was sitting in her lap at that very moment. A fear gripped her that was unlike anything she had felt before, unlike helicopters or soldiers, or the pain of carrying a child up a mountain.
“What if I adopt her?” she said, for the first time. “Many people come to Guatemala to adopt children and surely there are legal routes and not from the casa de engordes.”
Fernando pushed back in his chair. “This is something you should spend a long time considering. But you do not have a long time before your presence here is noticed by the wrong people.”
She left Fernando with the mandate to make a choice. Should she adopt Sofia to save her? She walked into the side-street open markets, filled with color, fabric, fresh coconuts, and a dense cloud of food aromas.
She had seen the face of evil in Santiago and it would never wash off her. The tiniest bits of it had crawled under her skin and gripped her bones. But she could stand between Sofia and the bits of evil.
Were there other Maya selling goods in Antigua who knew of the massacre? The question more likely was who would not know of a massacre? If she told them that she had rescued the girl from the massacre, would they understand, or would they insist that the girl stay among the Maya? Would the temptation of getting money for an orphaned girl prove too great for someone if she returned the girl?
If she told any of the gringos, could she trust them? There had been talk of infiltrators, even Americans, who gave information to the military government. Kirkland had sounded so outlandish when she suggested that the CIA were involved, too much like a conspiracy theorist. Now she wondered if Kirkland was right. And maybe, just maybe, Kirkland could help her.
CHAPTER 17
The western sky turned dark in the sudden advance of the storm. The thick roll of clouds looked like an army thundering into the town. The active volcanoes on the outskirts of Antigua glowed and sent up a steady snake of smoke against the indigo bank of clouds.
When Kate was in sixth grade, her parents had taken up using a pressure cooker after friends returning from a trip to France brought them a gift. “Everyone uses them in France,” they said. The back-and-forth motion of the rocker, clicking away with regulated shots of steam, made all of them uneasy, especially the family dog, Ben, who had panted in anxious time to the pressure-release rocker. The following year, the pressure cooker was sold at their annual yard sale, to everyone’s relief.
The volcanoes that squatted at the edge of Antigua continued to relieve the gas and heat boiling beneath the cone, ticking away with shots of fiery heat, much like the family’s old pressure cooker. Kate longed for the simple fears of childhood—would the pressure cooker explode with lentils, splattering them on the ceiling? As a geologic metaphor, the active volcanoes of this small city were perfect. Guatemala boiled and glowed red with the syrup of molten rock and at any minute, all hell could break loose. Earthquakes and molten explosions rocked in syncopation to the instability of both land and politics.
Kate hadn’t felt earthquakes in the highlands around the lake where the ring of volcanoes were dormant. Aside from her initial entry to the country, when she had stayed in Antigua for only a few days to catch her breath, she had spent little time in the old colonial city.
The ruins of the massive earthquake that struck Antigua in 1976 still dotted the city. The cathedrals remained only partially repaired, walls were in tumbled disarray, cracks in buildings went untouched, and the narrow streets still tilted at precarious angles. And yet the beauty of the city was undaunted, still dappled with flowers in every courtyard, still serenaded by flocks of brightly colored birds.
She slept with Sofia snuggled next to her despite the second twin bed in their room. Mayan children slept with their mothers, never more than an arm’s length away. One look of fear in Sofia’s eyes as she lay in the strange bed alone had been enough for Kate. She put the child into her own bed with her.
At first Kate tried not to move at all with the small girl pressed against her. After a few more days, they had found a rhythm, a dance, with Kate eventually getting more sleep. When she woke now, it was to stare at the child, watching the tiny movements of her eyelids as REM sleep visited her dreams.
Kate was asleep when the bed shook, jumping in a strange side-to-side jig that matched the sway of the walls, the door frame, and the cloth that hung over the door. Everything in the guesthouse clattered and tapped, the massive adobe walls groaned. Earthquake.
Kate scooped up the girl in a blanket. She had not accounted for the dizziness, her own equilibrium rolling with the room. The urge to run was overwhelming, compounded by the fear of going to the wrong place, being crushed in the street by falling roof tiles or entire walls.
She lunged for the staircase, which rolled like liquid. She had nothing with her except for Sofia: no shoes, no money, nothing. And then, suddenly, stillness and silence. She was in the center of the interior courtyard, both arms wrapped around Sofia, panting like a terrified dog.
Marta stumbled out of her apartment on the ground level, her brown hair tousled, wearing only her husband’s T-shirt.
“Are you all right?” she said. “That was big. I’ve not felt a tumbler that big before. They’ll be aftershocks. I’d better go check my boy; he’s a deep sleeper, but something might have tipped over in his room.”
Kate didn’t move, frozen in her island of safety, nearly crushing the wiggling child. Sofia was fully awake, eyes wide, drinking in all of Kate’s terror.
Marta started for her son’s room, then stopped, looking back at Kate.
“I said, are you all right?”
Kate’s teeth chattered and her body shook. She wanted to reassure Marta, to say something, but when she tried, she got to the letter g, and could not get past it. “G-g-g-.”
Marta crossed the distance between them and pulled her arm around Kate. “Here, come over here, you two. If the gas lines are still connected, I’ll make us some tea. But even a devoted tea drinker will check on the kiddos first,” she said with a wink. “You need a blanket. You’re okay. Sh, sh, shush. It’s going to be okay.”
No one had said that to Kate since the massacre, and the words sounded like crystals illuminating the night. Whatever she imagined for Sofia was shaken into clarity by the earthquake. She would adopt Sofia. She would protect her from earthquakes, amoebas, and men with automatic weapons. All the missing parts to her decision were knocked into place by the trembling earth.
Marta brought a pot of strong tea to the courtyard. “I can’t sit with you, although you look like you need a companion. I’ve got breakfast to make. Can you manage?” said Marta, pausing to put her hand on Kate’s shoulder.
“We’re already better,” said Kate. There it was, she already said we. They were a pair.
But there would be a cost, and it was little Sofia who would pay the price. Until now she had not allowed herself to consider the full impact that Sofia would endure. If there were extended family, then yes, that cord would be severed. The subtle richness of the culture, gone. Language, gone.
There was a list of more precious things that Kate couldn’t know, that Sofia held in her two-year-old body, in the secret chambers of her nose and the folds of her lungs where the warm scent of her mother and brother lingered. Would there be a day when a miraculous combination of scents merged, when Sofia was a sulky thirteen? Would all the elements of her mother, the warm corn scent of her breath, the oil of her dark silken hair combine to bring Sofia to a screeching halt and shatter her from incomprehensible longing?
Kate didn’t know when memory began; she was just a scientist who studied water. She had been looking for some essential element in its creation, its use, the way we craved it, the way we can’t live longer than seven days without it, the way her mother loved to float along a wide river. She had come to the deepest lake in Central America to see if the answer would rise up like a giant sea creature and quench her.
But here is what Sofia will never see again—the night sky over Lake Atitlán.
Kate had arrived in August when the rainy season still drenched the land. It was not until a night in October that she looked up and saw the red glow of Mars, twinkling like a ruby. Was it a plane, a satellite? No, she was told, she was simply seeing the sky for the first time over Lake Atitlán, where a paucity of electricity revealed the clarity of the stars without the gauze of ambient light. It was filled with a brilliant light show unlike anything she had seen before.
The universe unfolded over the lake, shining with outlandish abundance. The reflection in the lake magnified the show. Other stars had colors as well. Who could have known this? Blues, greens, and yellows. She watched satellites scuttle across the sky as clearly as headlights on the California freeway.
It had taken her weeks to find a fisherman from the village who understood enough Spanish to agree to Kate’s request. She hired the man to take her out at night during the dark of the moon, in his cayuco, to the center of the lake. She brought a blanket and she lay down on the bottom of the small dugout canoe and watched the stars until she became dizzy with the feeling that she could touch them and float away. She could almost feel her mother with her, arms folded under her head as she embraced the night sky.
This is what Sofia will yearn for in the hidden world of preverbal memories, the complete wonder of a sky thick with stars, bouncing off the still waters of the lake, held snug by a ring of volcanoes, and the cocoon of Manuela’s arms as she held her. There was no denying the depth of what Kate would take away from Sofia.
Kate’s mother told her once that a parent’s love for a child was unlike anything else she had ever known. So unlike romantic love. When Kate was fourteen, before the cancer exploded into their lives, her mother told her, “When you were five and played with your friend Hannah on the porch, I lay in the hammock and watched you. And I realized that I had never loved anyone as much as I loved you. There was nothing like it in the universe.”
Kate had listened with discomfort. Now, her mother’s words lanced her heart. How can she be a thief of all things that Sofia loved? How could she not?
CHAPTER 18
The next day, Kate headed to Fernando’s, the only other haven in Antigua. Nothing in her life prepared her for what she needed to do next. If she was going to get the child out of the country, she needed help.
She pushed open the door to the café and found a corner table. Fernando was not there; a young boy served her a tepid cup of café con leche. Without Fernando’s steady grace, she felt like the ground was once again moving beneath her. Sofia was under Marta’s generous wings back at Casa Candelaria.
A man emerged from the inner garden when she came in. He walked through the door that separated the two rooms. He was a young gringo, probably an American hitchhiking through. He stopped the young boy, placing a hand on his arm, and spoke in a low musical voice, unhesitant in his Spanish. He ordered a plate of beans, tortillas, and rice.
He picked a table near a window, closer to the front door, and settled in with a Guatemalan newspaper. He looked like every other traveler in this difficult country; well-worn running shoes, jeans, a small day pack, an extra layer of grit over his skin. Where was Fernando?
Kate felt the young man watching her and caught his expression in a reflection from a faded glassed print hanging on the wall of the café bookstore. She glimpsed a three-quarter profile, darkened by shadows, giving him an air of sadness, the part that he might not want to show. He dipped his tortillas into the beans with local expertise. Maybe he’d been here longer than the average traveler.
Kate dropped her eyes so that he wouldn’t catch her looking at the glass. She stood up and walked across the room and picked another picture on the wall to examine, this time a painting of the Agua Volcano on the outskirts of Antigua spewing a dragon’s spiral of steam. Maybe he wasn’t North American; perhaps he was Australian, French.
She longed for home and wanted to feel only grass and sky and clean water, to take Sofia to a park where other children would squeal and laugh. She wanted to talk about the earthquake because it was astounding, but here in a land of daily carnage, danger, and massacre, an earthquake was hardly worth mentioning. She felt like a bomb ready to go off. If Fernando wasn’t in, she’d come back later. She returned to her table to finish the coffee.
Kate tipped her cup to her lips, taking in the last drops. She closed the book that she’d purchased the last time from Fernando’s slim supply of English books, a worn copy of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, slid out of her chair, and slung her string bag over her shoulder. The room was dim and the glaring sunlight streaming in the door disoriented her.
She passed the man and glanced at him, tipping her head a fraction of an inch. Gringos tended to acknowledge each other; the tribe of travelers assumed something about others who looked like them, who had time to idle in a shop, drink coffee in the middle of the day. She smiled. Kate was one step away from the outer world with all its bright light when something desperate reflected in his eyes, something tied down with boulders. Like the eyes of the man who had pulled her down to safety before the massacre.
She turned, as if a gravitational field caught her, and in doing so, her knee caught the edge of his table, connecting with a jagged piece of wood, a splinter ready to pierce whoever came too near. The sharp stab to her knee shocked her.
“Shit,” she said, grabbing her knee.
“Hang on there,” he said, springing from his seat. “What happened?”
He stood between her and the door and his silhouette against the sun forced her to put her hand over her eyes, shading them from the light that framed his body. Kate looked down at her knee and saw the first few layers of skin buckled up accordion style. Dots of blood emerged, ballooning out.
“God, this hurts. I can’t believe that kids do this kind of thing all the time. Scrape their knees, I mean. No wonder they cry.” Tears had sprung to her eyes.
He reached out his hand. “Come on. Let’s take a look at that.”
His hand was warm, lightly callused, with nails in a clean, squared-off style, but still subject to slight variations. And he was American, his accent was clear enough.
“You broke the skin. You should get antiseptic on that right away. Or get bottled water and wash your knee off. Don’t let it get infected, not here.”
He was late twenties, or even in his thirties, but she sensed an elemental difference that she couldn’t put her finger on. The red bubbles of blood rose to the surface and flowed down her shin.
He’d been in the tropics long enough that his hair was lightened by the sun, a mix of gold and brown; parts of his hair were so curly and stiffened by sweat and dust that she imagined grabbing on to it like a handle. They stepped out to the sidewalk with its wide slabs of stone, facing the large park in the center of town.
“Did you feel the earthquake last night?” she said. Then she froze. A jeep filled with young soldiers rumbled along the side of the park toward them. The air buzzed around her in charged particles. She stumbled backward with an unbearable urge to hide. She couldn’t keep responding like this every time she saw soldiers, but panic overwhelmed her.
The gringo glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sound. Without thinking, she stepped forward, so that his body covered her from the street view, and embraced him, wrapping one arm around him in an iron grip. He hesitated and then placed his hand on the back of her head, pulling her closer. When she turned her head away, he pressed his lips to her ear and whispered, “Don’t run.” As if she wanted to, as if he knew.
Kate registered a full-body shock. The instinct to run still blasted through her and all of her urgency pushed hard against this man who smelled like black beans and cheese with a hint of coffee. A column of ribs pressed into her. The jeep slowed as it neared them; the soldiers hooted and whistled in unmistakable male camaraderie. What if they stopped? What if they got out of the jeep, guns slung over their arms?
The driver accelerated, squealing around the corner. The man released her and backed up, hands palm up.
“I take it that you didn’t want to see those guys, but don’t you think you might have taken unfair advantage of me?” he asked with a smile.
Kate leaned against the outside of the café, her face hot. Had she just grabbed this man and wrapped her arms around him? Had this man just held her and nuzzled her neck?
“Your knee,” he said. “Let’s get it cleaned up. The soldiers are gone. You’re okay.”
Fernando said to be careful, not to trust anyone. But this man had just helped her, had shielded her from the militia. She needed to tell Fernando that she had decided she would take Sofia with her. She licked her dry lips. “I’m Kate. I think I should thank you but I’m not sure. Should I apologize?”
His shoulders softened and he smiled. “Nope. I just took the kind of liberties with you that would have gotten me into all kinds of trouble in Brooklyn. But it was all I could think of. I’m Will.”
