The Center of the World (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

K
ate got the call while she was at work. The worst thing about being promoted in the Fish and Wildlife Department was that she spent two days of the week at the central office. Being indoors that much sent her happiness level below the tolerable line. Where it hovered until she could get back in the government-issued 4WD Ford pickup and head for the maze of dirt roads that skirted the Connecticut River. Or whatever was left of her happiness level, more like a blanket of cold, wet wool wrapped around her since Martin died.

For people who claimed to love the outdoors, those who worked for Fish and Wildlife had created terrible interior settings. When other workplaces had long ago upgraded from the old-fashioned flickering fluorescent tube lighting, their office maintained it. All the cracked Naugahyde furniture of the world had been shipped directly to their address.

Kate spent three days of the week along the wide river, which she loved more than anything, with the exception of her daughter, Sofia. And Martin, she had loved him. She never imagined that someone like Martin would come into her life, especially after Guatemala. Sofia had been eight when they married, after Kate had softened to the sweet unexpectedness of him. “Martin is a goodness generator,” Sofia announced when she was eight, speaking with the unsullied clarity of a child.

Sometimes Kate felt Martin riding next to her in the truck, cracking jokes about the gearshift with electrical tape wrapped around it. His dark hair would have needed a haircut. As soon as she left the main roads, she parked the truck along the earth berms that flanked the river and talked to him, telling him about the university coaches who were recruiting Sofia.

“Martin, I want to be sure they care about Sofia, not just her crazy shots on goal. Please, could you tell me the best thing to do?”

Today she was headed to the Oxbow of the Connecticut River. The wide river was blessedly quiet on Wednesday afternoon, free of the weekend boaters with their roaring motors. The October light glittered off the maples with their Crayola-orange leaves. Martin would have loved this kind of day. He might have slipped a note into her lunch bag that said
Remember to see how many kinds of orange are in the hills
.
I love you.
Today, there had been nothing in her paper bag except a cheese sandwich, which she was unable to eat.

Kate pulled off the road and drove down the steep dirt road to the Oxbow, missing some of the ruts but hitting a big one that shook everything in the truck.

Her phone vibrated in the passenger seat. Fish and Wildlife had just equipped all the staff with cell phones. She wished that they had spent the money on better lighting in the office. Kate looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Martin's lawyer. She hadn't spoken with him since the last time they looked at the life insurance policies that Martin had put in place. Had she forgotten to sign something? She flipped open the cell phone.

“Hi, Vincent,” she said, turning off the truck engine.

“Hello, Katherine,” he said. “Sorry to call you at work, but this is important.”

Kate realized that she didn't know much about Vincent, that every time she was in his office, the air was tinged with death, pockmarked with the deepest sorrow. But he had a family; photos on his green walls offered glimpses of two preadolescent girls with teeth that looked too large for their mouths.

“How are the girls?” she asked, desperate to slow down whatever train of bad news Vincent had.

“The girls are good; one is at a swim meet and the other is talking her mother into getting her ears pierced at the mall. I don't understand body piercing,” he said.

Did he wish that he could say more about malls and daughters? Kate felt a twinge of sympathy for him with his ear-piercing daughter.

“I have just carried out instructions from Martin, something that he put in place about six years ago. It has nothing to do with his will. This is a separate document.”

A dragonfly landed on her windshield. It was a Violet Dancer with a slender purple abdomen, resting briefly on her wiper blades. Whoever named dragonflies must have been a poet.

“Are you still there?” he said.

Kate took a breath. “I'm here. You're using your bad news voice, so I'm going to walk down to the river before you tell me that Martin had two other wives or something like that.”

Kate opened the door of the Ford cab, left the keys under the mat, and walked twenty yards to the quiet curve of the boat launch. Her work boots rested in two inches of water; tiny waves rippled near the eyelets of the laces. Maybe she could hear bad news if the river held her.

“Okay, go ahead,” she said.

She heard Vincent shuffle paper. “Martin left instructions for me to give your father a document that tells Sofia about the origins of her birth. I have just carried out his instructions. Martin left a three-page letter describing what he knew. Sam said Sofia was coming to the post office to look at the letter. We're going to need to talk.”

“What do you mean, origins of her birth?” Black dots swam past her eyes.

“He told me everything that he knew, everything that you had told him. He told me about Guatemala and the forged papers. That the adoption was technically illegal.”

Kate stepped out of the river. “You gave this to my father?”

She tried to picture Sam reading about everything that Kate had hidden for the past twelve years. How could she ever begin to explain to him about the horror of the massacre, picking up Sofia and running?

“Yes. This letter may be very alarming to Sofia, which is why Martin insisted on giving it to Sam first. And Kate, this is a very big problem. I'm not a specialist in immigration law, but I'll do some checking. Call me when you're ready.”

Kate was sure that Sofia would go straight home and wait for her. She knew her daughter.

Her phone rang again. It was her father. “I know,” she said. “I'm on my way home.”

 

Sofia saw her mother after the lie erupted. Kate was in the green work truck, heading north on Long Plain Road, and the late-afternoon sun lit up her tan skin, her golden hair. Sofia squeezed the brakes on her bike and pulled onto the sandy shoulder. She twisted around and saw that her mother had stopped; the truck sat shuddering on the berm with its turn signal blinking.

Her mother turned around and pulled past her. With odd slow motion clarity, Sofia saw her mom's tight hands gripping the steering wheel, her face crumbling, and braced for trouble. Her grandpa must have called her, or maybe it had been Vinnie the lawyer.

Sodowski's Farm Stand, closed for the season, was within sight. They had gone there hundreds of times for ice cream, hot dogs, or the special Polish Plate. Her stepdad always said, “Give me the multiple meat special,” which made her feign gagging each time.

Sofia pulled back onto the asphalt and followed her mother, turning in as she approached the farm stand. She didn't know if she should lean her bike next to her mother's truck as she would have always done.

Sofia dropped the Schwinn on the ground and one wheel kept spinning. Her mother opened the door of the truck and stood with a hand on the door frame.

“So who am I?” Sofia said. Her voice shook. “Mom, what's going on? Where am I from?”

The two women, the green truck, and the bike formed a planet, a universe tilting on the gravel parking lot.

“You are my daughter. I picked you. You've always known that,” said Kate, gripping the door.

“That's not going to work anymore. I'm not six. I just read the letter from Dad. I've got it here,” Sofia said, pulling the envelope from her back pocket.

“I know. The lawyer called me this afternoon. Then Grandpa called a minute ago.”

“Why did you create this big story? What difference did it make if I came from Guatemala or Mexico? We all knew I was adopted.”

Sofia had on her blue nylon soccer pants with a white stripe up the side. She was ready to charge at Kate, ready to pass and run, corner kick, take a header and smash it into the goal. Her muscles were so charged that she might incinerate on the spot.

“Martin didn't know everything. Remember, he came later, after we had been here for years. By then, there were some things that had settled far back into a space that I couldn't easily reach. I was afraid . . .” Kate stopped. “How could Martin do this to us? I thought he understood.”

Sofia wanted him to be here so that she could rage at him too. If he had known, why didn't he tell her? And why didn't her mother tell her?

Kate took off her sunglasses. “I made your father promise. Don't blame him for not telling you. I was wrong. He knew keeping this from you was wrong and he agonized over keeping the secret.”

“What else is a lie? Is everything that you've told me made up?”

Kate closed the door to the truck and it made a solid, defining sound.

“You're from the Mayan highlands of Guatemala. You are not from Mexico.”

“Who are my biological parents? What happened to them? Why didn't they want me?”

Her mom had a fleck of spittle on her lower lip, something that Sofia would normally tell her about. She might even reach over and dab it with her own finger. But not now.

“They aren't alive. It wasn't about them not wanting you. They loved you. They were killed, all of them.”

Sofia balled the letter into her palm. A breeze grabbed a strand of her smooth black hair and whipped it across her dark eyes. She felt the muscles in her face quiver and she fought them, refusing to give in.

“Who in my family was killed?” she whispered.

“Your parents. Your grandparents had died earlier. And others in the village.” The words sounded old and damaged with dry rot, like a box of papers confined to the dark recesses of a basement, all stuck to each other with the adhesive of decay. “And your brother.”

The blood left Sofia's hands and feet and retreated to her torso for the upcoming disaster. She held her body in a new way; all the existing bits of her re-organizing along with the truth, changing even her skeleton. The new parts fell into place along her arms. Her feet had already widened, so they could hug a steeply terraced hillside along the mountains of Guatemala.

“Let's go home and let this settle in. I know this is a shock. I'll tell you everything,” said Kate.

Could her mother tell the truth after so long? More than anything Sofia wanted to sink into her mother's embrace. If only she'd step one foot, just one foot forward, she would feel the warm touch of her mother's arms.

Sofia stepped back, out of reach. “You aren't my mother,” she said.

From the mouth of an adopted child one would think this would be expected from time to time, but Sofia had never said these words, even in anger, even when grounded for a week, even when Kate had refused to let her attend a party where the parents were openly absent when she had been fourteen. The razor-like quality of the words visibly struck Kate. Her mother bent at the waist with her hands over her face and then sank to the ground, knees landing without mercy.

Hurting her mother was new and Sofia was unaccustomed to the power and the pain of it. She picked up her bike with so much strength, so much anger, that she could have tossed it over the row of trees on the edge of the parking lot. She spun the bike around and rode away from home, as far away as she could imagine. She leaned into her handlebars, standing, pedaling as though her life depended on it. A bank of clouds slid over the last of the sun, and dusk settled into the river valley.

CHAPTER 3

K
ate sat on the gravel parking lot, paralyzed. This is what the worst day of her life felt like, far worse than she had imagined for twelve years. Was this worse than the day the hospital called for her when Martin was killed? The pileup of worsts threatened to bury her.

As she pulled her knees in closer and rested her arms and head on them, the wind blew in from the east. When the wind blew easterly, sweeping across the Atlantic, nothing was right, like a north wind ruffling the waters of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. Kate drove to Leverett and the black asphalt dragged at the wheels of her truck, sucking with a deep, slow gravity that made her sweat. Her daughter needed time to ride out the fury of betrayal. But she expected to see Sofia's bike in the driveway when she pulled in.

The urgency that drilled up Kate's spine pulsed red with crackling heat. The house was empty, untouched since their usual morning ritual of
Are you going to practice, what time will you be home, will you start rice for dinner? Yes, Grandpa is coming over, yes he's sick of chicken too but that's what we're having, good-bye, love you
. They had almost reached a wonderful mundaneness after Martin's death. Almost.

She tried to keep the panic out of her voice when she called Sofia's friends. She could not reach her daughter anywhere. Her friends had not heard from her.

In her daughter's bedroom, the scent of Sofia's shampoo mingled with stale pizza hit her like a bomb.

She rang her father, knowing that he'd be home by now. “Dad, she's gone, I mean she hasn't come home. Is she there?” She gripped the cordless phone in Sofia's room.

“What in God's name were you thinking? Please tell me that our girl wasn't taken illegally out of Guatemala. Please tell me the truth, and no, she's not here,” he said.

This was the price she would pay, like a criminal who had murdered someone and held on to the secret for years. Finally, without the mitigating forces of a good-intentioned confession, the past was exposed, laid naked and guilty before those she cared about more than her own life.

Her husband had reached from the grave, freed from his unwilling promise to her, and set an avalanche in motion. She wanted to scream at Martin, pound him senseless.

“Kate! Say something,” her father said.

She wanted her own mother with the same unbearable longing that erupted at times of celebration and sorrow. Would Kate have been a better mother if her own hadn't died when she was fifteen?

“Stay there. She'll come to your house before she comes here. But call me the minute she gets there. I just need to know that she's okay,” she said.

 

What mattered now was finding Sofia so that she could explain how it had happened. The awful wound was lanced. Kate wanted to keep the flow of deceit pouring out of her body, disposing of it like sewage. She longed to say the words
I lied to save you, to protect you, and I had to make you believe it.
But she'd have to find her first.

Why would Martin have done this? They had nearly split up over the disagreement of telling Sofia about her parents. Once Martin had discovered the deception, they had been married for a year, and he had looked at Kate as if he had never seen her before, this woman who would lie to her child about the most elemental essence. She had begged him, made him swear that he wouldn't tell. In exchange, she told him everything about Guatemala. And almost everything about Will. She had loved Martin and felt the sureness of his love for her, but the injury of this disagreement had lodged into them.

Four hours later, she heard a car pull into the driveway. She was at the front door before the silver and blue police cruiser fully stopped.

No, not Sofia too, not killed, not hit by an unaware driver, a drunk or distracted motorist, not mangled on her bike, not like Martin, not because of Kate.

As the officer opened his door, the interior light of the cruiser illuminated Sofia's face, her head turned to the side.

“Sofia?”

“Usually I call parents to pick up their kids when they're intoxicated, but Sofia is on my daughter's soccer team, so . . .” He turned his palms up and his uniformed shoulders rose slightly.

Kate searched his face for some feature of familiarity. Had he been among the lawn-chair parents, cheering the girls on from the grassy sidelines? She didn't recognize him. Sofia was on the varsity team for the first time this year and she was one of the younger and certainly smaller players.

“Is she okay?” Her chest was shredded by hours of fear.

He opened the back door to the cruiser. As he did, it struck Kate that Sofia had been confined, unable to get out of the car if she had tried. He held out his hand to Sofia, blocking Kate with his wide backside.

“Here, take my arm,” he said.

The smell of beer and vomit hit Kate like a solid wall.

“This was your solution?” Kate said, louder than she had intended, a shriller tone than she had ever used with Sofia. Now that the secret life was exposed, what new voice would emerge, rusted over, oxidized down to the primer?

Sofia stood up, head pulled back and bobbling. Her eyelids were swollen, her eyes bloodshot from crying. Kate wanted to hug her and choke her simultaneously. She was alive, this is always what mattered, the core of it, that Sofia would survive, and it had all been worth it. Now Sofia had to survive with the truth and with Kate's betrayal. Betrayal; too strong a word. Not strong enough.

A quick appraisal showed nothing broken, just a disheveled fifteen-year-old sodden with drink for the first time. “Where is your bike?” asked Kate. She had not been able to bear the sight of Martin's mangled bike, bits of his shirt somehow tangled in the wheels. She had asked her father to have it taken away.

Headlights caught the three of them, then a car pulled into the driveway behind Kate's. It was Sam in his Jeep Cherokee. Kate reached out to touch her daughter, pull her back into how they had been before, how they had always been. Sofia recoiled and turned her head as her grandfather approached—long legs, deep furrowed brow, brown Carhartt jacket with frayed cuffs.

Sofia ran to him in a sloppy, childlike gait, the alcohol robbing her agility. He folded his arms around her, nearly carrying her. “My bike,” she said between sobs, “it's gone, everything's gone.”

Kate started toward her, but Sam held up one hand and said, “I might be very good at just two things—delivering the mail and sobering up teenage girls. You remember, don't you, Kate?”

Sam tucked Sofia under one arm, keeping her upright until they made it to the front step, and then opened the door with one arm and went inside.

“She'll be okay. I'm sorry about your husband,” said the cop.

Kate pressed her lips together and nodded at him as he left. She made it to the porch before she slid to the floor, exhausted.

 

Kate had been a freshman in high school when her mother and father told her about the cancer. Every cell in Kate's body had been fully occupied with negotiating high school. She didn't have enough space left over for her mother's cancer.

She had to figure out who to be friends with, where to sit at lunch, what expression to put on her face as she walked the halls from one class to another, what to wear, what to say, should she raise her hand in class or engage in passive resistance like some of the other kids? Should she take the school bus or walk home?

“Will you have to go to the hospital?” asked Kate. Her parents looked concave, leaning against each other on the brown plaid couch. She thought her mother might be sick for a few months.

“Yes, I'll have treatments there,” said her mother, reaching for a slight tear in her jeans, slipping her pointer finger into it. Her mother found a soft thread and plucked at it, like a bird searching for twigs to build a nest.

Her father still wore his mailman uniform. At least it wasn't summer. With his long legs and knobby knees, he looked ridiculous in uniform shorts.

“We'll get through this,” he said.

But they hadn't. Kate's mother transformed into being sick with such ferocity that for several years after her death, her illness blotted out any memories of her before the cancer. All she had left was the rapid descent, the Olympic luge ride with no stops, through surgeries, chemo, to a hospital bed at home and a parade of home health care people, then hospice, then gone. The luge had dumped her out.

Kate had been alone in the house when the phone call came from the man who made the headstones. The difference between life before her mother's death and after fell hard, like a lead wall. Kate was fifteen.
I'm too young for this, too young,
she had raged.

“I need to double-check on the spelling of the deceased's name.” His voice was old, but Kate was becoming older by the second, losing every sweet morsel of childhood.

“You want to know how to spell Elizabeth?” she asked. Who doesn't know this, how hard could this be? They had cremated her body, but still her father had wanted a headstone. They had picked pink marble, no, her father had chosen pink marble; she had hated it.

“E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H.”

“Thank you,” he said. “There are many ways to spell names these days. You can't imagine.”

Kate felt herself sliding through the phone lines into the mire of cemeteries. She struggled to gain a foothold in the kitchen that had once been so warm, so delicious.

“And the short phrase that you and your father selected, may I check that also?”

Whatever life she had before, shopping with her mother, the canoe trip on the Connecticut River where they had argued over the merits of the J stroke and then both fallen asleep on a sand bar after lunch—all of this fell away, beyond her reach. What was she now?

She swallowed hard again and again to get past the clot in her throat. She and her father had labored over what to say on the gravestone. Nothing was enough or right. How did they find words for her? Or were the words about them and not her at all?

“She rode on the river with her face to the sun,” said Kate.

“Yes, that's what I thought. I can do this in two lines or three. Three looks better to the eye,” he said.

“Three,” she whispered, impaled by the number. There used to be three of them.

When she hung up, she opened the fridge and took out a beer, one of her father's Dos Equis, the bottle with the red and gold label. She slid open the silverware drawer and found the opener in the green plastic divider. She yanked off the metal cap.

Her parents had allowed her sips of beer or wine before and she had taken half-hearted slugs of beer on overnights with her girlfriends. But this was the first beer of her new life without a mother and she drank it with determination, then relief, as it poked holes in the sorrowful blockage in her throat.

She drank another—now she was filled with amber carbonation that soothed her and woke up the frozen places. She left the two bottles on the counter. Her father had stopped buying food, no one did the laundry, and he had forgotten to sign her report card. Would he notice his missing beer? Would he notice the empties right in front of him?

Trent's house was half a mile away if she took the road, closer if she walked the trail behind their houses. It was Thursday and he would be home. He was older, a senior, who had begged her to say yes, to let him push his hand into her pants, even in the midst of her mother's rapid-fire dissolve.

Trent's rottweiler, Jasmine, thundered off the front deck and announced Kate's arrival, wagging the stump of her dark tail. Trent came to the door and she walked to him, tossing back her hair, slipping her hands along his waist.

“I've been drinking beer,” she teased, “and I'd like another. Do you have any more?”

He pulled her into the house, where the hours of parent-free time opened up for them. They had until six, when his parents came home from the university.

They went into his bedroom and closed the door. She took off her clothes and when the air first hit her skin, she was shy, but only for a moment. Trent dropped his nylon track shorts and kicked them aside, pulled off his T-shirt with one hand and then hooked a thumb under the waistband of his white underwear and slid them off, hindered only by the obstacle of his already hard penis.

Kate climbed on the bed, lay back, and said, “Do you know how this goes?”

He clambered on the bed, on his hands and knees over Kate. “Yes. Are you sure about this, Kate?”

She reached up and felt the cool firmness of his flank, a strip of gooseflesh along part of his butt, and fell into a space that opened ever wider for her, with all its jagged edges of broken glass and welcome comfort. Kate wanted to blot out the wet grief with sex, and Trent obliged her.

For one full year her father went fallow. He went to work every day at the post office, stamping, weighing, packaging, selling boxes and envelopes. When he came home he fell into his recliner with a beer or two or three as if he had only been pretending all day at work. Even at fifteen she could see that what he wanted more than anything was to turn away from everyone, including her.

Her parents had never had to tell her to do her homework or even ask her if she had any. Back when she had been in junior high, the three of them settled in on a routine after supper. Her mother graded papers from her biology classes at the high school, her father cleaned up the dishes, and Kate spread out her homework on the kitchen table. Three people in a home make a family, but two made a crippled atom, as if her mother's death left them in nuclear decay.

When she came home from Trent's house, the scratchy drone of the television led Kate to the man who had been her father. He was a deflated version of her old dad, the one who built the tree house with her, showed her how to fix the tires on her bike, and claimed ownership of all things grilled. He had dissolved into the brown recliner, with three cans of beer lined up in front of him. Three beers in one hour; that had to be a new record. He had been in the war in Vietnam and said drinking wasn't good for him.