The Center of the World (9 page)

The first ray of sunlight struck her sandals and highlighted a dark blotch. She rubbed it with her hand. Something had soaked into the leather straps and made a home between the fat cells of the cowhide. Was it blood from Santiago? It had soaked in before the torrential rains. Did she have blood on her sandals from stepping into the pile of bodies? She rubbed her stained sandals with dirt, sickened at the thought and afraid that the stain would scream and betray her.

This is how a coyote lives, dodging among the shadows on the outskirts of town, looking for a vulnerable morsel to eat. Unlike a coyote, she had to take a chance on someone. She and the child needed water and food. Kate once again wrapped the child carefully with the long fabric and hoisted her on her back. She was tiny, small-boned with little birdlike features. The child looked frozen, stunned into her state of speechlessness. Kate imagined the intestinal cramping that the girl must have, and yet she had not whimpered or cried in pain, only from the roar of the helicopters.

Kate smelled the welcoming smoke of a hearth fire and longed for the polluting billows. She wrapped her hair tightly and stuffed it under the hat, not that it would hide her whiteness, her otherness, but the shock value of her blond hair could at least be shuttered. She had to ask for help.

Kate picked the house on the farthest edge of the village, hoping to cause the least amount of commotion. She stepped on a brittle stick and village dogs began to howl. She approached the house, cinder blocks covered with stucco, and announced herself.

“
Buenos días,
” she said, not realizing how dry her throat was until the words emerged like dust-coated gravel from her throat.

An old woman rose up from a darkened corner. There were no electrical wires running to this house to bring lights, refrigerators, no hum of North America at all. The roof was corrugated metal.

In her best present tense Spanish, Kate said, “I want to buy tortillas and beans, please.”

The woman's face was creased heavily, her eyes hooded by the weight of her eyelids pressing down. She came only to Kate's shoulder and did not respond.

“Please, for the baby and me.”

The old woman disappeared into the house. Should Kate follow her? No, she had not been invited and she was certain that she should stay outside. She swayed slightly and sank to her knees to keep from falling. She had walked two days with the child, her quadriceps were on fire and the muscles along her shoulders screamed. If she sat down, she wasn't sure if she could get up again.

Before she left California, if anyone had told her that the nights in Guatemala were anything but tropical, she would not have believed it. It was December and the altitude made the nights bone-chilling. She longed to be indoors with a door that could be shut.

The old woman returned with a small sack of flour. She nudged a fire into flame near the pathway to the house, brought a heavy frying pan out and put it on the fire. She dug her hand into the sack and extracted a fist full of flour and put it in a bowl. To this she added water, and she formed a ball. She patted and patted, slapped the ball and slammed it from hand to hand until the perfect tortilla emerged, the size of her palm, which she dropped into the skillet. With one hand she motioned to Kate to sit on the ground.

Kate tried to sit in exactly the same way as the Mayan woman, with her legs tucked modestly to one side. The old woman took a wooden scoop and dipped it into a plastic jug of water and handed it to Kate, who drank without hesitation. Then she brought the scoop to the girl's lips. Sofia drank more delicately than Kate could have imagined, placing her small brown fingers along the edge.

Kirkland had told her to go to Antigua and she had no other plan following Kirkland's directive. What would she do with Sofia in Antigua? She only knew that both of them had survived.

CHAPTER 14

T
he local bus, aptly called the chicken bus, offered a jarring and arduous ride from Sololá to Antigua the next day. Kate kept a scarf wrapped around her head and huddled with the child in the last row for the four-hour trip. Wooden bench seats held six across, with no aisle, so people moved to the back to let others on more easily.

This was one of the Higueros buses, named after the family who owned them. This particular bus had a large image of Mighty Mouse painted on the hood with the grill painted white for teeth. As the bus filled to capacity, stopping at every village and in between, the mix of warmth and the smells from people and chickens lulled Kate into memories of the farmyards near her home in Massachusetts. And home always smelled like her mother, before she smelled like medicine and death.

Kate offered Sofia the tortillas that she had wrapped in paper. Could she ever tell the girl about not having a mother, about the cliff of beer and marijuana that she had tumbled off in high school, how no one spoke of her mother for fear of hurting her and how much more that hurt her? How her father feared that he would lose Kate too, and how she finally surfaced again in her second year of college when she peered through a microscope and looked at water?

We are surrounded by things we can't see, she had thought, stunned by the world of organisms that live beyond our sorrows and our love. If she could look at her present life from above, in a familiar microscope, she'd see a woman with an orphan on a Mighty Mouse bus.

Climbing up the steps of the vehicle had reawakened the muscles in her legs that now felt damaged, beaten and bloodied like a boxer on the losing end of a fight. She had only been able to take one step at a time. Not only her muscles screamed, but her hip joints and her knees. Once seated, she did not plan on getting up until Antigua.

She longed to know more about Manuela; she saw the image of the young mother with her dead child every time she closed her eyes.

Kate wanted Manuela and her mother to speak from the land where dead mothers went. What should she do with this child?

 

The bus arrived in Antigua. The streets of the small city were paved with rough cobblestones and the bus shook so hard that she feared the axles would snap and the sides would fall off. Despite the clattering arrival, Antigua was a regal, colonial city that always made Kate feel like she had stepped into a museum of an ancient, yet ruined civilization. They passed the Arch of Santa Catalina, her favorite landmark, gleaming egg-yolk yellow, that allowed cloistered nuns to pass unseen from one building to another. Other Spanish churches had fallen prey to a series of earthquakes that left piles of stone rubble still in place, frozen in time.

The bus stopped at the large market on the edge of town, filled with stalls of fruits and vegetables. Kate made her way to a guesthouse that was somehow stuck in her brain. Kate had heard of the Casa Candelaria Guesthouse when she'd been through Pana. She'd been told that it was recently opened and cheap, a good place to stay in Antigua.

She hoisted Sofia into the rebozo, hung the pack on the front of her body, and left the bustle of the marketplace. Two blocks to the left of the market and one block right, toward the center of town. The uneven cobblestones sent sparks of pain along her strained calf muscles. She nearly missed the name, a humble three-inch-tall sign, freshly carved in wood: CASA CANDELARIA. Kate gripped the iron ring and knocked against the thick wood door. Someone opened the sliding peephole and peered out.

The door swung open and a young woman stood in the entryway, a child clutching her knee. “Hello! Are you looking for a room?”

An Aussie accent. Hair braided and piled on her head, held with a clip. Freckles. Jeans. A crooked smile. And young, maybe not as young as Kate.

“Yes.”

“Come in, come in. I'm Marta,” she said with an expansive sweep of one arm.

Behind Marta, a courtyard billowed with orchids, orange and purple bird of paradise, and one banana tree. To the right was a long table with a basket of skeleton keys. Room keys. This was the reception desk.

“This is our first venture at running a guesthouse,” said Marta. “The rooms are upstairs. Have you just arrived in town?”

Of course there would be questions and Kate was prepared.

“Yes, today.”

Kate climbed the terra-cotta-tiled stairs as if she had gained sixty years; her calf muscles were pulled as tight as steel cables, and her thighs weren't much better.

“Are you injured?” asked Marta, watching Kate's snail's pace up the wide curving stairway, holding on to the wood banister.

Kate paused to catch her breath, wincing. “No, I mean yes. I went on a long hike. Too long. I wasn't prepared for the level of difficulty.” As if it had been a black diamond ski slope and not an escape through the hardest terrain she had ever hiked.

The young Aussie woman picked up her thumb-sucking child and stood in the doorway as Kate inspected the small bedroom with two beds. The woman pulled the clip out of her hair and released a dark thick braid that reached between her shoulder blades. The child tried unsuccessfully to grab it. The room was on the second floor and faced the inner courtyard. The bathroom was next door with a shower and a toilet. The idea of hot water almost brought Kate to tears.

Kate looked at the beds and felt the sense of protection offered by the thick walls and filtered water. She had not bathed or slept in three days.

“My husband is still in Australia but he'll be joining us soon. He had to go back to handle the sale of our house. We always wanted to come to this part of the world. Our families think we're daft, coming so far away when our son is so young,” said Marta.

Australians were known throughout the area as the greatest of travelers, letting their high school graduates take a gap year to roam worldwide.

She wanted only to collapse on the bed, but it was soothing to hear Marta's voice, to hear about families whose worst troubles had to do with moving too far from home.

“Are you here to adopt?” asked Marta.

“What?” Kate couldn't imagine what she must look like or smell like. Adopt who? Kate lowered herself to the bed.

“I was wondering if you were here to adopt a child. I just assumed—a white woman with a small Mayan child. Or have you already adopted? She's a beautiful little girl.” Marta tilted her head toward Kate's passenger on her back.

She was doing exactly what Kirkland had told her, which was to get out of the area, as far away from the massacre as she could. What made Marta assume that she was adopting? Of course Kate knew about adoption. It was hard not to notice the white couples with their new babies sitting on the park benches in Antigua.

It was easier and less expensive to get a child in Guatemala than in Asia. The market was booming. But adoption for Kate? Ridiculous. She was too young, too much of a graduate student. What could she possibly know about mothering a child? She only wanted to bring the child to safety. Marta's blond child, now hugging Marta's knees once again, popped his thumb out of his mouth long enough to say “Baby,” pointing at Sofia. Kate looked down and the dark stain on her sandal shimmered with a grisly mandala.

“I'm just here to get some medical help for her. Her village was very far into the highlands. You can't imagine how tired we are. We'll take the room.” She tucked one foot under the bed.

Marta put her hands on her hips in approval. “Oh, I knew you would. I had a feeling about you. How long will you be staying with us?”

“I don't know yet. The medical process can be lengthy. Can I leave it open-ended with the rental?”

“Of course. And what do we call the beautiful girl?”

“Sofia. Her name is Sofia,” said Kate, knowing that this was the name Manuela gave for the outside world, not her true Mayan name. She had never learned her true name and the lack of it stabbed at her.

CHAPTER 15

B
y the next morning, Kate's intestines were boiling with activity. She took the girl to the local clinic and had both of them treated. As long as she didn't try to climb steps, or step off the curb, her legs didn't bellow in protest. Walking on flat surfaces worked. She was positive that Sofia's intestines were compromised by parasites, amoebas, or any of the other troublemakers that could have hitched a ride. Kate wasn't absolutely sure if the child was ill or if everything in her intestines had turned to water from terror, but she decided to err on the side of pharmacology. At least Kate had the power to fix basic digestive distress.

Were all two-year-olds this small? The girl wore the traditional skirt, a piece of handwoven cloth wrapped around her waist and held with a cloth belt. The highly embroidered
huipil
that was worn as a blouse was essentially a piece of fabric folded in half with a hole cut out for her head. If the child wore this outfit in Antigua, every indigenous person would know exactly where she was from and Kate didn't want the location of the massacre, or her connection, broadcasted.

Kate had to venture out once with the child in her brilliantly colored cloth, woven by Manuela, because she had nothing else for the child to wear. She went to one of the two stores in Antigua that sold western clothing for kids. Western meaning non-Mayan, but made in Guatemala. Kate bought a white peasant blouse with puffy sleeves, a skirt, a wool sweater, and some amazingly small underpants. The only available shoes looked like they would fall apart within the week. She bought two pairs of shoes, sandals and little sneakers, and several pair of socks.

Then she went to the central square of Antigua, a city that retained the colonial architecture of the seventeenth century despite massive damage from an earthquake fourteen years ago. The small city was impossibly beautiful. The central park was dominated by a fountain that, even now, flowed and calmed whoever paused along the park benches. Water poured from the breasts of four statues, graceful hands supporting each breast, water cascading from them into the large pool. Water, like breast milk.

The street on one side of the square was dotted with a handful of shops, prepared to sell ice cream, coffee, and cold beer to the tourists. Kate headed directly to the café with the bookstore in the entry room. Casa del Sol Café. She pushed the dark wooden doors, opening them like a fan. The notion of finding Fernando and his café had beamed like the North Star.

She asked a waitress for the owner. A Guatemalan man approached her. Was he a ladino, the Guatemalans who are a mix of Spanish heritage and indigenous bloodlines? Or stranger yet, Mayas who have abandoned their indigenous heritage. Until this moment, it hadn't mattered to her to understand this.

He was thin, older than Kate, and wore a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, dark pants. The man gave away nothing in his attire, no hint of who he might be. It looked as if he had decided to reveal nothing about himself, to strive for a kind of neutrality. He pulled out a chair and nodded to her.

She came to the point. “Is there a message here from Kirkland for me? I'm Kate.”

His eyes held something familiar, a weary kindness that reminded her of her father. “Yes, I know who you are. I am Fernando. Kirkland said you would look earnest and afraid.” He smiled. “And blond. She said to give you this.” His English was flawless. He handed her a sealed envelope. If she were not feeling the pull of illness and fatigue, she might have noticed how beautiful his hands were. Kate took the envelope and unfolded the slip of lined paper.

Story phoned in. You can trust F
.

She folded the note and slid it into her pocket and trembled with a sigh of relief. Would Kirkland have been as terrified as she had been, bushwhacking through the dark with helicopters spraying gunfire? The child on her back stirred and poked an eager arm out to Fernando.

The man was slight, dark hair combed neatly. “Sit and have something to drink. You do not look well. Your travels have been difficult.” He had chosen a table in the inner courtyard. He signaled to the waitress for a bottle of Coke and pulled a chair close to hers.

“I've known Kirkland since she started reporting in Guatemala. If there is something that I can do to help you, I will.”

The sweet darkness of the Coke mingled with her saliva, then etched her throat with the explosion of bubbles. Kate had never been a fan of soda, not for health reasons, but because carbonation of any kind gave her the hiccups. But in Guatemala it was easier to find soda than it was to find clean water. There had been a massacre just five hours from Antigua, helicopters had shot at flapping cloth on the hillside; at the end of the world, would we all be sipping Coca-Cola?

“For now it's enough to know that Kirkland is okay. I was worried about her. When I left her—”

Fernando held up a hand. “I know what happened and it is better for you not to say it.” One of his feet tapped on the tile floor, a fluttering heartbeat, belying his motionless hands folded on the table.

Kate's head pounded. “I'm probably sick from drinking the water.” How long would the medication take to work its magic? Fernando reached out his palm to her forehead and said, “May I?”

Kate nodded.

His hand was cool, amplifying how hot she was. “You have a fever. I will walk you back to your hotel. Do you have medicine?”

His gentleness was dissolving her. This felt like the end of her first half marathon that she had run as an undergrad. What do you do at the end?

She placed both hands on the table and pushed hard to stand up. She could not remember ever having to concentrate so intently on her leg muscles and she could not remember someone placing a hand on her forehead since her mother had died. Was that possible? She was shocked by his tactile expression of concern, as if she was a small girl who needed to stay home from school. They both stood up. Terrible groaning sounds came from her intestines.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

“I hiked with the child from San Marcos to Sololá. I may have gotten lost several times.”

Fernando's eyebrows squeezed toward each other. “May I carry the child?” he asked, nodding toward Sofia. “You are exhausted.”

“No!” Kate swung around with fevered awkwardness, knocking the empty Coke bottle to the tiled floor. The bottle hit the tile and spun, echoing on the earthen tiles.

Kate was stunned at her response, and at the silence that filled the café. Fernando bent down to pick up the bottle and set it upright on another table.

“The bottles are deceptively thick and strong. We use them in building materials. Have you seen them, stuck into concrete walls? I will walk with you and you will carry the child.” He motioned to the door with his arm. He lowered his voice. “Trust no longer comes easily once you have tasted savagery. Kirkland told me of the massacre. She thought you would have had an easier time of it getting to Sololá.”

She was too sick to apologize, to thank him, to do anything but walk by his side as she carried Sofia, stumbling along the rough cobblestones. His kindness was a foreign language that she could not entirely decipher. When she stepped off an uneven curb, she nearly fell, saved by his well-placed touch along her elbow.

At the door to the Casa Candelaria, he said, “Please rest with the child. You have been dropped into our troubles too abruptly.” He smiled at her and left. She put her forehead against the massive door, breathing deeply, until the weight of Sofia burned in her arms. Miraculously the child had fallen asleep. How was this possible? Had Kate ever fallen asleep in her mother's arms? She wrapped her hand around the iron knocker, raised it, and knocked twice, each time fearing that her head would explode.

Marta opened the door, took one look at Kate, and said, “Off you go now, the both of you. Sleep will do you wonders. I swear by it.”

She climbed the stairs to her room, feeling that at any moment her strength would give out. She placed Sofia on the bed, curled in next to her, and fell asleep.

 

Later, Kate bathed the child in the shared bathroom on the second floor. How did women take care of children when they themselves were sick? It seemed impossible. She used part of a T-shirt for a washcloth, noticing the scrapes and scratches that Sofia had suffered as a result of their exodus from Santiago. She enunciated each noun that they encountered.

“Soap, water, sink, faucet, floor, water . . .” she said, smiling at the girl as she wrapped her in a large towel.

“Wahdur,” said the child. “Wahdur.” The child trilled the
r
at the end and it sounded crystalline, like music. Her first words since the massacre. No, not her first. She had cried for her mother, the memory of which tore at Kate. The child had not become mute. Kate was filled with images of Sofia and her brother playing at Manuela's feet in the church, in the marketplace, as she sang songs to them.

Kate had never heard anything as beautiful as the sound of her voice. So this is what Sofia's voice sounds like in English. Kate turned on the faucet again, letting the water cascade over her fingers. “Yes! Water. Wonderful water.”

She held Sofia on one hip and let the girl lean forward and mimic Kate's water play. Then Kate took the child's old clothing and dunked them in the sink. The soiled skirt,
huipil,
and belt sank into the water. Sofia's forehead drew into troubled lines when she saw her clothing in the sink. Her lip trembled. She turned her dark eyes to Kate, as if to say,
This is not right. My clothes should not be drowned in this strange sink
.

Kate pulled a chair into the bathroom and let Sofia stand on it. Together they gently washed the clothing, wrung it out, and hung it over the rusted shower rod. Kate longed to sleep again, to let the medicine do its work with the parasites in her system. It had never occurred to her that there must have been days that her mother had the flu or a miserable cold and yet she had still taken care of a young child. How could she not have known this? In her fevered state, the idea seemed revelatory.

Kate paused and wondered what to do with the cloth. Should she burn it? The bullets had shredded a section of it. She would ask Marta for a scissor and cut off the destroyed bits. For now, letting it dry and folding it up would be enough. Then she helped Sofia on with the new clothes. Kate sank to her bed and held her head in her hands. Simply bathing and dressing Sofia left her exhausted.

 

The medicine took several days to fully work. Sofia had tremendous powers of recuperation while Kate spent the best part of two days in a cycle of sleeping for several hours and then waking in a lurch, not knowing where Sofia was. She woke once and scanned the room for the child and nearly fell out the door when she couldn't find her. Kate leaned over the courtyard balcony and yelled, “Sofia!” Even as she did, she saw Marta, her child, Felix, and Sofia, digging in the dirt of the raised flower garden. The blaring sensation from her legs had calmed down a few notches.

“Go back to bed. We are busy with gardening here and the children are helping me. Go,” said Marta, with a flutter of her hand.

Kate returned to their room and sank into her bed. In the gray light of early morning, she awoke to Sofia's body pressed to hers. The child's eyes were open, Kate was certain, but they were such dark pools that it was like looking into sunglasses.

Sofia sat up and pressed closer to Kate, her back against Kate's hip. She began to sway, moving to a song that she hummed. Kate did not want to move for fear of closing this window into the child. Sofia held her arms up and let her small hands flutter staccato style down to the bed. She opened her arms wide and looked up and hummed and spoke in either Kaqchikel or the universal babble of toddlers.

Kate's throat constricted and her lips began to quiver. Sofia knew all the hand motions to “Itsy-Bitsy Spider”; she remembered the day that Kate sang to them, when Manuela was too sad to learn English. Kate lay on her side and hot tears ran off the ridge of her nose. When she had to sniffle or else stop breathing all together, Sofia turned her head mid-song and patted Kate along her bottom ribs, just two pats, the touch of which was unlike anything Kate had ever felt before. Kate sat up and sang the song with Sofia.