Cracking the Sky (9 page)

Dr. Peters said, “It will be worse for you than it was for Mathew. It would be . . . best if she does not die. That might be very hard.”

The waitress appeared with three plates, sliding them expertly in front of us. I didn’t want to eat until I bit into a sunshine-bright cherry tomato. After I finished the burger, I looked from one man to the other. “If I do this, will I get your recommendations for the diplomatic corps?”

Dr. Meera was watching me with a measuring gaze. “It’s a tough job. Tell me why you want it.”

“My parents were in the Peace Corps. They taught me you save the world globally. It’s time to get past all this my country first stuff, or none of us will have a country.” They were dead now. I didn’t say that. We’d all coughed up all our background just to get into the program. So if they’d read it, they knew. That’s how I was getting through school, on their death payments.

“If you succeed, I’ll put in a good word.”

“Does that mean if I keep her from getting killed?”

Dr. Meera smiled sadly. “You will not have control over that. If you stay sane.”

*

The next morning, summer drizzle slicked the paths and made jewelry of the spiderwebs. Kay caught up with me, a little breathless. “You abandoned me, where the heck did you go?” And then, after she got a better look, “You’re white. Are you sick?”

I’d been warned not to talk about it. Silence was a skill I’d need if I got into the corps anyway. “Just a bad dream.”

“You’re taking this too seriously. Dr. Peters said we’d flunk if we got too attached to our host. You don’t want that.”

I almost burst out laughing and hurried to change the subject. “How did your talk with Bani go?”

“Good, I think. I had a bunch of questions prepared, and she answered most of them. She was very polite. Tomorrow, her people are going to a camel fair and they hope to get new cams they can mount right on their heads and on the camel’s headgear to send pics up to GeoSearch. For kids to use, like in class. Almost what we’re doing, but with gear on camels.”

“Cool. Do you like the camels?”

She nodded. Back in the classroom, sitting on hard seats, we breathed in the industrial world while we got ready to trade it for the developing and destroyed parts of the Earth. I was suddenly proud of us, all of us. We were making a future. Most of the other students looked excited. The paramedic was a new one, younger, with a scar on his chin.

And then I was scared again, swearing I wouldn’t see Valeria die, that it would be okay. Why hadn’t the teachers talked to me before I talked to Valeria? I could guess. But Dr. Peters had goaded me into asking her to show me what she was afraid of, hadn’t he? Was that ethical? And did they tell me everything they knew?

Dr. Peters thumbed the switch and I smelled Valeria and the jungle. She was breathing hard, jogging. The back of her knee hurt. She ran along the side of a paved road with no cars on it, with banyans and cieba on the far side, a canopy of dark green against a pale blue sky dotted with high thin clouds. She felt me come into her—and I felt her close down and then open again. She spoke. “Buenos días, my friend.”

Her voice was almost laughter. She didn’t seem as angry as she had sounded yesterday. I wanted to ask her about it, but of course, conversations were one-way.

“Yes, it is a pretty day, my gringa friend. That means white girl.”

From what I knew, the term wasn’t complimentary.

“I will show you my fears today,” she said. “They might fire me for it, at least if you tell them. But no one but you can hear me, right?” Her breath was fast from the slow jog and the heat. “We are alone.”

She slowed, let her heart slow until I could no longer feel it overtake mine. Her stride became a ground-eating walk, something she did with no complaint even though I felt actual physical pain with every step she took. It made me wonder if she felt the pain like I did, or if she had somehow learned to go through it and past it and beyond it.

Personally, I wanted an ibuprofen, and it wasn’t even my leg that hurt.

“I am going to show you my grandmother’s house.” She spoke English, out loud, since that was the only way I could hear her. The road was empty; a few birds and maybe a monkey overheard her. “My grandmother’s life. And then I will show you my mother’s life, and then my life. And then maybe we can talk about hope the way you talk about it in America. This isn’t what I’m supposed to do, but then I’m not good at doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m no good girl like they usually pick for this. But after talking to you, I hope you are a little like me.”

I could feel her—she was proud of herself and apprehensive as well; she felt like I felt when I suspected that something I was about to do would get me into trouble. Only I hadn’t felt like this for a long time, hadn’t taken risks, had done just what I was told, like sending my report to the Good Doctor Peters on command and doing everything else on command because I thought that would get me what I wanted.

If this was real diplomatic work—watching a situation that might hurt someone you like and not being able to do a thing about it—it sucked. Mom and Dad had always said it sucked, even though they went back every day.

Valeria turned down a thin track. Ruts showed a car or a scooter or something wheeled with an engine used the road. She walked down the middle, swinging her arms. Her hands were free; no machete. A pack pulled her shoulders back, but of course I couldn’t see it. She started singing in Spanish, her voice high and clear. She felt wary, but not afraid. She rounded a corner and stopped in front of a short, circular home with no walls—an honest-to-god thatch hut—beside a small cenote. An orange tree had been planted beside the hut, the fruit ripening. A banana palm and three or four other non-native trees also looked healthy. A white plastic bucket tilted on its side by the cenote suggested they were hand-watered. Three brightly colored pots with herbs sat by the hut. Another whole line, maybe a dozen more pots, sat under a makeshift shade of tied colorful tourist saris—the kind you can buy for five dollars each in the beachside markets. These pots held blooming flowers that might have been found in an American grocery store: miniature roses and sunflowers and orchids. While there might be enough shadows inside to hide someone, I rather doubted it.

Whatever wheeled transportation used the road, the only thing here now was a broken bicycle completely missing both wheels.

I guessed we’d come all this way for nothing, but Valeria didn’t hesitate, or even stop singing. She simply went around the back and followed a thin trail into the jungle. After a few minutes, she stopped and smiled, watching a small woman so old her back humped and her hair had thinned to mist. The woman balanced on her toes, her slender brown arms reaching into a tree. Before she turned, she pulled down a spray of yellow and orange flowers. Valeria sounded proud as she whispered, “That’s my grandmother. She makes her living selling flowers.”

There weren’t enough flowers in all the pots for any kind of living.

“And I bring her some money every week. Otherwise, the jungle feeds her, too.”

It sounded romantic, but I imagined it wasn’t. The two women broke into excited, fast Spanish that I didn’t have a prayer of following, so I watched the old woman’s face. Wrinkles had folded her cheek and chin to the texture of figs and nearly hidden her eyes from the world. Even though her body moved slowly, her tongue kept up with Valeria’s and they seemed happy to see each other.

Valeria passed her a handful of bills. The amount never came up, and the older woman simply shoved them in her pocket. After, Valeria gave her a long hug. I couldn’t see the grandmother’s face, of course, not at that point. I smelled the flowers—still in Valeria’s grandmother’s hands, and felt the love between the two women so hard that it stung my eyes.

I had never known one of my grandmothers, and the other I certainly wouldn’t have known enough to find on a path in the jungle. I’d seen her at a handful of family events.

When we were nearly at the corner and about to turn down the track, Valeria said, “I would have liked to take you swimming. Her cenote is very sweet. But there is only an hour left, and I want to show you how my mother lives, too.” She turned for a last look back. “See how happy she is? She works hard, works every day. She hardly has anything. That thin old dress and two more, plus one I gave her that she says is too nice to wear until her funeral. But she is happy. More happy than me, or I bet than you. I know she is happier than my mother. Almost no one lives so simply any more, even here. The deeper you go in the jungle, the more there is peace like this. Old women are mostly left alone. But if I lived alone out here, I would be raped.” As if she heard my silent protest she said, “Even today.”

With that she turned and started a fast walk down the pathway. “I’m not going to tell you more until we see Mom. I want to be able to ask you about it when we talk on the phone tonight.”

For the next twenty minutes, she hummed or was silent, and I smelled the jungle and noticed the unfamiliar sounds of birds and, once, the loud engine of an old gas-guzzler jeep with tires half as tall as me and a green roll bar that had one corner crumpled.

She whispered, “We’re here,” moving her head back and forth slowly as if panning her vision. “No one else is here, so we’re safe. We won’t be long. Watch closely.” It took me a moment to realize she was doing that for me, helping me see what she wanted me to notice. In that moment, it dawned on me how much a host could provide, or hide, from a rider. If she had a gun strapped to her leg—or her machete in her backpack—I wouldn’t know unless she looked at it or someone around remarked on it.

The small house looked slumped. It was mostly white now, but chips of stucco had fallen off, revealing that it had once been green, once brown, and maybe even once yellow. The wooden windows were rotten and one was gone entirely. Three bikes and a scooter stood chained to a post just outside the door. One was missing a back wheel. Three gasoline cars rusted happily to the ground on the potholed street, all of them past driving, and one past having any color at all. If this were a poor neighborhood in America, there would have been litter around the house, too, but the open dirt was so neat it might have been swept. Plants struggled in shady spots.

Valeria slipped through the ragged screen door. The living room was a small rectangle with two chairs that belonged in a dump and a small, neat wooden table with a lamp. “Madre?”

The woman who emerged from the bedroom looked older than Valeria’s grandmother had. Although she moved a little better, her forearms were bruised and the skin under her eyes looked like the opening of a dark cave. Although her Spanish came fast, I caught the gist of it. “Why are you here now? It’s the middle of the day. I thought you were looking for a job.”

“I found one.”

“So why aren’t you working?”

“There’s a schedule.”

I lost track of the next comments from the older woman, a stream of something about food and the neighbors. Her bruises fascinated me. They ran up and down her arms and on the back of one hand. Her eyes and her tone and the way she carried herself tucked inside her hunched shoulders screamed of a hard life. She raised her voice. Although I couldn’t follow it all, I got the idea the older woman meant to get Valeria out of her house without making her mad. Valeria felt hot and angry and embarrassed. Under the embarrassment, still fear. But for her mom or for herself?

The door opened and a tall young man came in. For a brief moment I expected him to be Valeria’s drug-dealing brother, Raul. But the woman called him Mario and took a step back.

Valeria’s heartbeat sped up and she glanced toward the door.

Mario looked at her and spoke in English. “Valeria. How nice. But you should leave now.”

Even though I felt her hands shaking, Valeria stiffened. She spoke slowly, maybe for my sake, or maybe to counter her racing heartbeat. “This is
my
home,
my
mother. I belong here more than you.”

His cold smile exposed brown teeth. He said something that sounded like “not anymore,” and then he reached inside his pocket and handed her a thin package, something wrapped in paper. “Take this to town.”

She didn’t ask what it was but stepped back again, her back now to the wall. She shook her head. “I will not.”

He held it out.

She didn’t want to take it, but she did. I was the problem. If she took what must be drugs, she could be arrested or caught. But she couldn’t tell him I rode her.

He grabbed her hand and shoved the packet in it.

The door behind him opened and two men came in. When they spotted Valeria, they stopped. One of them looked like he wanted to eat her. Really. His eyes were angry and hard and he was not at all happy she was there.

She gasped. I’d had thought she was afraid before, but this was worse.

He hit her. Her/me. I’d never been hit, never expected to feel the whipsaw of human flesh crushing my cheek against my eye and nose, feel the way flesh gives under the force of hatred.

She fell.

I didn’t. I screamed, my body jerked into the cold hard classroom. My heart beat fast. I blinked and touched my smooth cheek, completely disoriented by the fluorescent light mixing with the pale outside light from the one window and shivering at the change in temperature. I had been told to do something if this happened? What? I shivered too hard to remember.

Oh. I finished the fall I’d started—like an interrupted moment—and hit the tile, moaning.

I caught a glimpse of Dr. Peter’s face wearing the wrath-of-god look. It seemed directed at the universe, and not me. The faces of my classmates turned toward me, blinking and shocked.

Dr. Peters jerked his head toward the paramedic, who picked me up and carried me from the classroom. My face scraped against his dirty yellow coat, which smelled of old smoke and sweat. “Send me back,” I whispered. He didn’t respond, except to tuck me in even closer to him and keep going. Down the hall, he punched for an elevator, and kept holding onto me until we stepped inside. He set me down then, and looked into my eyes. “Are you okay?”