The Center of the World (4 page)

CHAPTER 7

 

G
rowing up, there had always been a double take when strangers looked at Sofia and her mother, back and forth, trying to figure them out. She didn't match her mother. Her brown skin against her mother's pinkish complexion told a story and it was well woven in her for as long as she could remember. She was adopted and she'd always known it.

When she was seven, she noticed that her best friend Emma and her mother matched. When she watched Sesame Street, Elmo asked her to find the two shapes that matched, the two fruits, the colors that matched. If the puppets had asked her to find the mother and daughter who matched, she would have picked Emma and her mother. They both had wheat-colored hair, the dried part of the wheat. And their eyes were blue with flecks of green.

“Why are you two the same?” Sofia asked Emma's mother one night after a sleepover. She didn't want to sound stupid, but she didn't know how to exactly ask something more complicated. They had cereal bowls in front of them and they were kicking their feet in the breakfast alcove.

Emma's mother stood a bit straighter as if it helped her think better. “Because Emma is my birth child. She shares the same genes that her father and I have. Things like light hair and blue eyes are recessive genes, which means they aren't the normal, dominant qualities. That makes us the masters of the recessives.”

Emma's mother was a professor at Smith College.

Emma rolled her eyes. “Mom, we don't have any idea what you just said. Sofia, you are adopted.”

“I know that,” said Sofia. She dipped her spoon into the cold cereal.

“My mom's stuff in her body poured into my body. I have my dad's ears. Some of him poured into me too. That's why we match,” said Emma.

“My mom and I both like the double swirl cone at Dairy Queen. We match,” said Sofia.

“Yes, you match your mother perfectly in that way,” said Emma's mother with some eagerness.

Later, curled up on the couch together, Sofia told her mother about matching and not matching. Her mother said, “You've always known you were adopted. Genetically speaking, you are from a man and a woman in Mexico. I've shown you where Mexico is on the puzzle map. Something went wrong and your mom had to give you to people who could take care of you. Remember, I told you how sick she was? But I was searching for you for a long time and it was magic that a birth mother who could not take care of her baby happened along just as I was searching for you.”

Sofia pictured her mother's white arms plucking her from a sea of babies and scooping her up. As soon as Sofia landed in Kate's arms, she got on an airplane and flew to the airport in Boston where Grandpa was waiting for them. But she must have learned some things from the people in Mexico, like how to sit up, crawl, and stand, before her mother Kate found her. Had they taught her anything else?

Sometimes she remembered another self, a mirror image with the same hands, feet, and legs covered with dust, and below, cobblestones, round and wet.

“I remember the cobblestones,” said Sofia.

“No,” said her mother. “There were no cobblestones in Chiapas. You are adding memories from other places, memories after I found you and when I brought you home. There are cobblestones in Boston and we have been to Boston several times.”

A sliver of a muscle twitched along her mother's nose that meant sadness. Sofia hadn't been able to tell why the cobblestones would make her mother sad. After that, she didn't try to tell her mother about her brother anymore.

When they found the cat, she could tell the cat all about the boy in her dreams and the cat listened. She also understood being small, like Sofia.

 

If anyone was to ask her about soccer, she would have to say that she learned it from the small cat that they took in when she was five years old. She and her mother bought a used washing machine from someone who was moving. As they considered the white appliance, a small black cat jumped on her mother's shoulders and meowed a long story. Not just meow, meow, meow, but a long cat saga, with vowels and short urgent high notes.

The guy selling the washing machine said, “We can't take the cat with us. We're moving to Vermont. We'll have to put her down if no one takes her.”

Sofia hadn't been sure what
put down
meant but knew it wasn't good. Just to check she asked her mother, who had turned her head to look at the cat on her shoulder.

“It means they will have the cat destroyed,” said her mother.

Sofia was stunned. Every part of her body melted with a huge sadness about the world, but mostly about this cat. Her mother knelt down on one knee next to Sofia with the cat still in place on her shoulder. The cat kept her claws retracted and touched Kate's face with one paw while still telling her desperate tale.

“But that won't happen because we're going to take her home with us.” Her mother looked up at the man. “We'll take the cat and the washing machine. I'll have to come back with a truck for the washer, but we'll take the cat now.”

Sofia felt her body come back together. She inhaled the power and sureness of her mother. She liked this part of her mom, who was unlike the other moms. She could count on her to tell the truth, even if it hurt.

The cat kept her given name, Bear Cat, although there were other names: Little Bear, Black Bear, and Bear. She was small, like Sofia. The vet always said, “She's one of the smaller cats that have come through here. She's a beauty, though. I'd say she's about eight years old.”

When Sofia went to their pediatrician, Dr. Dumont usually said something about percentiles and how Sofia was in the 60th percentile for height and weight. Small like Bear Cat. And fast.

 

She missed her stepdad fiercely. What had stopped him from telling her the truth, even if her mom hadn't wanted him to? If he were here right now, they'd get in his truck and drive and talk until they got to their special place, The Blue Bonnet Diner, across the river in Northampton, and they'd have their special breakfast, eggs and bacon and toast. They had gone to The Blue Bonnet Diner after Bear had died right after Sofia had graduated from junior high. The small black cat had politely waited for Sofia to emerge into the light of high school.

It felt like the wattage in all the lightbulbs had dimmed since Martin died.

 

Sofia found Martin for her mother while they were washing clothes at the Laundromat. When the second washing machine broke, Sofia saw a man with pillowcases bursting with laundry. He whistled a song as he plucked the stuffed sacks out of the back of his bright red truck, tossing them like cotton balls on the sidewalk. The tune that he whistled pulled at Sofia's chest; it sounded like a bird song that she had heard long ago but she couldn't think where.

It had been midsummer and scorching hot. His T-shirt had sweat marks under his arms; dark red smiles. He looked up at Sofia and her mom, who stood in the doorway, and he said, “You two are the prettiest matched set I've ever seen. The way you both smile, the way the light catches in your hair.”

Sofia looked up at her mother, who raised an eyebrow at the man, as if to say,
Oh, come on now
.

“No, really. Here, let me show you.” He pulled out a drawing pad the size of a book and faster than Sofia knew was possible, he drew a picture of the two of them like they were right out of a storybook, a mother and daughter on a summer day with a big sack of laundry. Soon the three of them sat together on the broad granite step to the steaming Laundromat, looking at the drawing, sipping ice tea.

“I'm Martin,” he said. “I'm the new art teacher in Amherst.”

Sofia knew right away he was the one for them. Not because he was an art teacher, but because he saw them as magical storybook people, really saw them and drew them on paper. And because of the way her mother leaned back against the door frame and laughed. She must have heard the bird song also.

When she learned later that Martin was adopted too, she knew he was the perfect future stepdad. He would understand Sofia and maybe someday she would tell him about the brother in her dreams. But she never had.

She wanted Martin to be there with them when her mom told them about Guatemala. He might have said, “Come here, Sweet Pea, and sit next to me.” She knew just where she would have sat, on the blue and white rug that they bought at the Christmas Tree Shop, her back up against the couch, her shoulder pressed against his leg. He would have anchored her.

P
ART
T
WO

CHAPTER 8

K
ate put her notebook, pens, and envelopes in her small L.L. Bean day pack. She had two things to do today and one of them would determine if she could stay in Guatemala for one more term. The letter she was going to write to Dr. Clemson, her graduate adviser, had to be compelling. She pulled her hair back with a clip, grabbed the key to the room, and stepped out onto the inner balcony of the Monja Blanca Hotel.

In her first letter to her father four months ago, she had written, “Monja Blanca means
White Nun
. Pretty funny, huh? It's also the most revered orchid of Guatemala.” Was there finally enough distance from the bad teenage years that her father would find the humor in white nun? The weekly rate for her room was $23—surely he would find that astounding.

In the inner courtyard, Pedro, the owner of the hotel, shook out his hammock. Scorpions loved dark places like pillows and blankets. Rule number one: Always shake out shoes and clothes before putting them on. Kate waved at Pedro as she came down the stairs and headed for the front door.

This morning she imagined her mother's voice saying,
If you don't ask, you'll never get what you want.
Instead of collecting water samples before the English class that she taught, she'd write the letter, making the case for an extension for one more semester. She couldn't possibly finish her project in four months. Teaching the English class was the second thing on her list today.

One of the problems with staying for another term was that she'd have to pay tuition at UC Davis in order to stay enrolled, and she didn't have it. Her father would help if she asked him, but she wanted him to see that she was taking care of herself. She knew that people in the upper echelons of academia worked off grants, and in a first flush of professionalism, she'd ask her adviser to use his grant money to pay her tuition as well as living costs in Guatemala.

Her mother would have been proud of her.

Her father was not expecting her home for Christmas. Since her mother's death, the holidays had been a painful reminder of what they'd lost. Maybe being apart would be less agonizing for both of them.

Tomorrow she would take the hour long boat ride across the lake to Panajachel and leave the letter at the Chisme Café, the main gringo hangout. The first traveler going north would be commissioned to take the letter and post it when he or she crossed the border into the States.

Phoning was so complicated that Kate didn't even contemplate it. There was one phone in Pana and its availability was sporadic. It was difficult to remember that this was nearly 1991, that people chattered away on phones in the U.S., and that the United States Postal system ran smoothly and inexpensively.

Santiago Atitlán was the largest village on Lake Atitlán in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala. It was a center of Mayan commerce, as opposed to Panajachel, which even in the midst of the long civil war was still drawing backpackers from North America, Australia, and Germany. Kate had been in Guatemala just long enough to be startled when she saw another North American ambling in unmistakable bravado. She was here to study water, not to stay stoned all day, smoking marijuana. She stayed high enough on the crystalline beauty of the lake, ringed by bougainvillea, banana trees, and wild orchids.

She walked along Calle Principal and turned right along the cobbled street that led to the central plaza. Two Mayan women walked by her, carrying an impossible load of firewood on their backs, supported by a strap around their foreheads. The firewood had to account for half of their body weight. The Mayan people were small, making Kate feel like a giraffe. She winced as the women walked by, imagining carrying the load on her own back.

The women of Santiago wore long red skirts, one solid piece of fabric wrapped around their waists, held in place by a woven belt. The men wore thick cotton pants that stopped abruptly a few inches from their ankles. Kate tried not to romanticize the indigenous people. She knew that beneath their colorful clothing, they struggled with crushing poverty.

The day would soon warm up. December in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala was their coldest month, but by noon, Kate could peel off her thick sweater as the temperatures hit the seventies.

Kate stopped walking; something was wrong. Santiago was a hub of Mayan commerce, and yet the town was silent. What was going on? People walked the streets, Mayan women carried massive firewood bundles on their backs, men carried huge sacks of avocados from their dugout canoes, but they were all silent. Even the small children spoke in muffled tones. She was sure it had to do with the swaggering soldiers in their camouflage pants, but she wondered if something larger was going on.

Kate felt a kind of static electricity prickling her skin, and the sensation made her shiver. She constantly double-checked her perceptions in Guatemala. Was she colliding into culture shock once again, reacting with a gut-inverting spasm, or was this merely another day? Who knew what was normal or what was not? Was it a special date on the Mayan calendar, a 260-day system with religious holidays floating unrestrained by repetition, or was it a standard and unremarkable day? Their calendar had its own way to divine the Earth's revolution around the sun and did not entirely correlate with the Gregorian calendar.

By the time Kate had walked several blocks from Monja Blanca, to the center of the town, she saw that it was not the mutable idea of time that had her on edge today; it truly was the presence of the militia.

She hated that the soldiers were so young, even younger than she was at twenty-four. She'd been in Guatemala for four months and the sight of a seventeen-year-old soldier with an automatic weapon was as terrifying to her in December as it had been in August when she had arrived. But she was an American researcher, a graduate student, and while the politics of Guatemala were reprehensible, she felt a sense of immunity as long as she kept her head down and worked.

The plaza was quiet this morning, only the sounds of chickens coming from courtyards. The cedar trees in the plaza looked out of place next to the palm trees. Perhaps the tortilla lady would be here today and Kate could get fresh tortillas before she went to the restaurant for
café con leche
and serious letter writing.

Kate had grown fond of the tortillas that were cooked every morning by the same woman in the central
mercado
. Women sold stacks of cloth, bananas, avocados, and dried corn in the small stalls the size of a broom closet. Each woman staked out an area under the verandas that lined the buildings. This morning, the soft clucking sound of chickens was as loud as the soft murmur of the women.

She made sure to pass by the tortilla lady each day. The anticipation of the palm-sized tortillas, still warm from the pan, was her primary thought when she came to a corner and bumped into four men dressed in alligator-green fatigues and black boots that came just shy of their knees. The boots looked hard, like they could bite. They wore sunglasses and carried guns with ammo slung diagonally across their torsos. One gun touched her, its oiled menace grazing her chest.

Kate stopped and jumped back, and a gasp escaped from her mouth. Being white had offered a degree of protection. But a reporter from
Newsweek
had been killed near the border with Mexico and the word on the street was that the military were to blame. Not like it could be proven, but that's what everyone said.

She did not want to be mistaken for a journalist, not like VJ Kirkland (who hated being called VJ), the foreign correspondent from the
San Francisco Chronicle
who was somewhere in the country. Kate had met her several times before, when she was still in California. They had talked about her research in Guatemala, and Kirkland said that the newspaper was thinking of increasing her assignment to Guatemala.

Here in the village, Kate made a huge point of telling people that she was a teacher (not exactly true) and that she was studying water, just water. To cement her teacher status, she agreed to teach English one day per week. She was due to meet her students before noon today, at the church.

The militia had carte blanche and everyone knew it. They could do anything they wanted. They had guns, an inequitable source of power. One of the soldiers smiled. The other three looked like they had stopped smiling a long time ago.

“
Lo siento,
” she said.
Sorry for what?
Sorry that right now everyone on the street was watching and trying hard not to look like they're watching. Everyone is wondering, will this be the day that even the protection of white skin falls away? Had things just ratcheted up a notch?

One of the skinny, unsmiling soldiers placed the butt of his gun dead center on her left breast, and used it to push her aside. She had on a thick sweater, but still, it felt like he had placed his hand on her and she was suddenly naked. Kate stumbled from the broad flat stones of the walkway and tripped into the street. The soldiers had never touched her before. Kate wanted to go back to the hotel and take a shower.

The four men walked past her and the sound of their boots was sharp and crisp. Something larger must be happening and, as usual, she didn't know what it was. The air crackled around the soldiers, sputtering and fuming as if they formed a clattering engine that had to be fed. She had to shake it off. Kate refused to turn around to look at the men, even when she heard them laugh. Her body was ready to run, but she forced herself to walk, head up, until she got to the tortilla lady. The warmth from the small stove pulsed out to her.

The woman was a foot shorter than Kate, who at five foot five was no giant. The sides of her brown face caved in where she had lost teeth. Her entire frame was birdlike, her eyes deep and dark. Her black hair was partially covered by a red cloth wrapped around her head. And like all the women and girls, she wore a showstopping shirt, a
huipil,
with intricately woven designs against a blue background.

Kate's hands trembled as she reached into her pocket to retrieve some coins. Without speaking, the tiny woman gave her three tortillas instead of the usual two. As Kate tried to press the coins into her hand, the woman shook her head. She had seen everything with the soldiers. For the first time, Kate felt a door open and she stepped in. The price of entry in this case had been shared humiliation by the soldiers. Her nose filled with the scent of burning wood and singed tortillas. She smiled at the tortilla lady. The food tasted like a medicinal tonic, like it could obliterate the clatter of the militia.

Kate had time to get her coffee in the Tolimán Restaurant, named for the dormant volcano that loomed over the town, before she went to the church for the English lessons. She sat on the veranda of a café facing the plaza and pulled out her notebook. The letter flowed, all of her adrenaline fueling her argument for staying longer so that her research about the lake and water usage patterns could continue. That would settle her nerves, sitting at a table and asking Dr. Clemson for something that she wanted. As she sat in the December sun, the warmth of late morning gradually penetrated her bones.

There, she felt it again, something unsettling in the air. Of course, it had to be the soldiers. In her daily explorations, she had noticed insects skating across the lake without breaking the tension of the water, oblivious to what the deep, black waters held. She was just like them, skating across the village, never understanding the depth of life that brewed below her. When she took a boat to Pana, the gringo gossip center of Lake Atitlán, she'd find out if something was brewing.

Kate put her pen down and finished her sweet
café con leche
. This was how she imagined the air felt before a tornado: green and dangerous. Not that she'd ever seen a tornado in Massachusetts where she grew up, but she could imagine. She stuffed her letter and pen into her bag and glanced up and down the street. The persistent scent of wood-burning fires flavored the air, mingled with aromas of cooking black beans and tortillas from the confinement of courtyards.

She heard the faint rumble of a vehicle long before she saw it. Cars and trucks were not frequent and their entry into the town required notice. This was a military truck with two men hanging on to the sides with one-armed bravado and two men riding inside, rifles adorning each man. Now they had doubled the normal number of militia in town. Great. And this was Friday. She hoped they did not plan on staying for the entire weekend, keeping everyone on edge.

She wiped a spill of coffee from the small metal table with the edge of her sweater. Time to pack up and head for the church.

Kate cut through the center of the plaza. She brushed past a cedar tree and a palm tree on a stone path that zigzagged through the center, stepping over dog and bird droppings. Despite everything—the soldiers, the loneliness of being foreign—Kate had never felt as alive. She was not ready to leave the beautiful, crescent-shaped lake.