The Falling Woman (4 page)

I opened them to darkness and silence. No lights, except for the pale crescent moon that hung low over the dark valley. No freeways, no houses, no neon. The cool breeze that fanned my face carried the scent of distant campfire smoke. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and the rapid beating of my own heart.

I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.

I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father's death.

I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet's engines. I tried to imagine my mother's face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.

When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with each dream. She drove up in a jeep to take me away to an archaeological dig. She roared up on a motorcycle and took me to live with her in Berkeley. She rode into town on a black horse and we galloped away into the sunset. Details changed: she wore khaki, jeans, Mexican costume, ordinary dress. But always the dreams were bright and clear, and always the ending was happy. Fifteen years ago I stopped dreaming.

It was Christmastime. The air had been scented with burning pine; the wine had sparkled in my mother's glass. I was fifteen years old, and 1 sat on the carpet by the fireplace. Robert, my father, sat in an easy chair beside me. My mother sat alone on the love seat, an ugly antique with carved wooden arms and upholstery of heavy tapestry cloth. She had flung her left arm carelessly across the back of the love seat and the sleeve of her shirt, a baggy shirt that was a little too large for her, had fallen back to show the white scars that marked her wrist. Her skin was tanned around the scars.

Robert and my mother were talking politely. "Are you staying in town?" Robert asked.

"At the Biltmore," she said. "I'll be heading back to Berkeley tomorrow. I've been in Guatemala for two months now, and I have much too much to do."

At the time, I wondered what my mother could possibly have to do. She seemed out of place in my father's house, but I could not imagine where she would be in place. She seemed a little nervous, glanced at the clock on the mantel often.

"Where were you in Guatemala?" I asked.

"Near Lake Izabal," my mother said. "Excavating a small site. A trading center. We found some pottery from Teotihuacán, up by Mexico City, some from farther north." She shrugged. "We'll be arguing for months about how to interpret our findings." She grinned at me—a brilliant, open smile very unlike the polite smile with which she had greeted Robert. "After all, archaeologists need to do something in the winter."

"Would you like some more wine?" Robert asked, cutting off my next question. He moved quickly to refill her glass.

He changed the subject then, talking about the house, his business, my schoolwork. When my mother finished the glass of wine, we exchanged presents. Her package for me was wrapped in brown paper, and she apologized for the wrappings. "The Guatemalan market offers a limited choice in wrapping paper," she said in a dry tone that seemed to imply that I had been to Guatemala and knew the market quite well.

I unwrapped a shirt made of a heavy cloth woven of burgundy and black thread. On the pockets and back, a stylized bird surrounded by an intricate border was woven into the cloth. "You can watch the women weaving these shirts in the market," my mother said. "That's a quetzal bird, the symbol of Guatemala. It's called a quetzal shirt."

I pulled the shirt on over my T-shirt. It was loose on my shoulders, but I pulled it tight around me. "It's great," I said. "Just great."

"It's a little large," Robert said from his seat by the fire.

"I'll grow into it," I said, without looking at him. "I'm sure I will."

There was more polite conversation—I couldn't remember it all. I remember Robert congratulating her for her second book—just out and getting good reviews. My father said good-bye at the door. I walked my mother to the car. It had rained that day and the streets were still wet. A car passed, its tires hissing on the pavement. The Christmas lights that my father had strung along the front porch blinked on and off: red and blue and green and gold.

I stood beside my mother's car. When she opened the front door, the interior light came on and I caught a glimpse of the clutter on the backseat: two more packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, a dirty canvas duffel bag adorned with baggage tags, a straw hat with a snakeskin band that held three brilliant blue feathers. My mother sat in the front seat and closed the door.

"Where are you going to spend Christmas?" I asked her. "I'll spend Christmas day with friends," she said.

"I'll be driving back to Berkeley the day after." I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.

"Can I come?" I asked quickly. "I won't be any trouble. I thought maybe ..." I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.

The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.

"Come with me? But your father ..." She stopped. "You'll be spending Christmas with your father."

"I want to go with you," I said quietly. "I need to."

I watched her face in the changing light. She was no longer frozen: her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned down, weary, unhappy, maybe frightened. Her hand clenched the steering wheel and the lights flashed red, blue, green. "I'll be leaving soon," she said. "Another dig. I can't ..."

The dream had gone wrong. I stepped back from the car. "Never mind," I said. "Forget it. Just forget it."

"Here," she said. She reached in the backseat and pulled a blue feather from the band in the straw hat.

"This is a quetzal feather. They bring good luck."

I stood in the driveway, holding the blue feather as she backed the car away from the house. The colored lights reflected from the wet pavement, and her tires hissed as she drove away. I threw the feather down on the pavement. When I looked for it in the morning, the wind had blown it away.

I woke to the scratchy sound of a stewardess's voice over the loudspeakers. "Please fasten your seat belts and return your seats to their upright position. We are now landing at the Mérida airport. We hope you have a pleasant stay in Mérida, and thank you for flying Mexicana." The voice repeated the message in rapid Spanish. I understood a few phrases in the flow of words, vocabulary from the high school Spanish I had taken long ago.

The man in the seat beside me smiled at me and said, "Feeling better?"

I nodded, smiled the mechanical smile, and turned to the window to avoid conversation. Through the window, I looked out on a dusty-green carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns, streaks and patches of gray-white. As the plane came in for a landing at Mérida, the carpet became trees and scrubby bushes; the pockmarks, small fields and roads. I could see thin lines of black slicing through the carpet: roads heading for the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean coast. Then the plane was down and I could see only the runway and the terminal.

I felt disoriented and peculiar. The world outside the plane window looked flat and unreal, like the image on a TV screen. The sun was too bright; I squinted, but it still hurt my eyes. The plane pulled into the shade of the terminal and the other people on board were stretching and talking and pushing into the aisles, eager to get somewhere. The man who had been sitting beside me was standing already. He glanced at me. "Can I help you with anything?"

"No," I said. "No, thank you." I did not want help. I wanted to be left alone. When he did not move away, I began rummaging beneath the seat for my purse. By the time I found it, he had given up and was heading away down the aisle. While the other passengers filed out, I took a small mirror from my cosmetics case and looked at myself. I was pale. When I lifted my sunglasses, I could see the dark circles below my eyes.

I sat for a while, letting the rest of the passengers crowd toward the doors. I followed the last one out.

As I stepped out onto the boarding stairs at Mérida, I realized that no one was going to stop me. I had flown away from home, from my job, from my former lover. No one had stopped me. I hesitated, squinting into the bright sun. The boarding ramp seemed very high; the terminal, far away. Remembering my vision of falling, I clung to the handrail, unable to take the first step down the stairs.

"Is there a problem, señorita?" asked the steward standing beside me.

"No," I said quickly. "No problem." The metal stairs made tinny noises beneath my feet. I could feel the heat rising from the asphalt as I walked to the terminal.

I stepped into the shade of the terminal, my head up, my smile in place. I waited for my suitcase to roll by on the belt, letting the crowd surge around me. I tried to catch familiar words in the babble of Spanish, but had no success. I grabbed my suitcase when it rolled past and stepped outside the terminal.

"Taxi?" asked an old man standing beside a dirty dark blue Chevrolet. I nodded and told him in my best high school Spanish that I wanted to go to the ruins, but he refused to understand.
"Sí,"
he said. "To Mérida." He wore a straw hat pushed back on his head, and when he smiled he showed broken teeth stained with nicotine. "Downtown," he said.

"No," I said. "To Dzibilchaltún." I stumbled over the name and the cabby frowned.

The young man from the plane appeared beside me and put a hand very lightly on my shoulder. "You want to go to Dzibilchaltún?" he asked, then spoke to the cabby in rapid Spanish. The two of them argued for a moment, then the man from the plane said to me, "He'll take you there for seven hundred pesos. OK?

And if you are in town, you must promise to look me up. My name is Marcos Ortega. You can usually find me in Parque Hidalgo. Look for a hammock vendor named Emilio. He's my friend. He'll know if I'm around." His hand was still on my shoulder. "Promise?"

I nodded and gave him a smile that was almost real. As I drove off in the cab, I looked back to see him standing at the curb, staring after me with a curious expression.

The streets of the city of Mérida are narrow and winding, little better than alleys. The houses and shops crowd tightly together, forming an unbroken wall of peeling facades painted in colors that might have been brilliant once: turquoise, orange, yellow, red. The sun fades the paints to muted shades, gentle pastels.

I saw the city in glimpses from the backseat of the cab: a row of shopfronts, each painted a different shade of blue, all peeling. A dim interior seen through an open doorway and a hammock swaying within. A group of men lounging on a street corner, smoking. A small park with a statue in the center. A fat woman leading a small boy down the narrow sidewalk. A row of stone buildings with carved stone facades bordering on the edge of a park. Trees crowned with red-orange blossoms. My cab narrowly missed a motorbike carrying a man, a woman, a baby, and a little girl, then swerved around a buggy drawn by a weary-looking horse. Finally, we headed out of town along a wider road.

The highway ran straight through a landscape of yellowing trees and scrub, broken now and then by a cluster of small huts. We passed a crew of men who were repairing the road; the cabby tooted his horn and passed them without slowing.

I thought about telling the driver that I had changed my mind: he should turn around and go back to Mérida. But I could not explain that in Spanish and he was already turning off the highway onto a side road.

My hands were in fists and I forced them to relax. I tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm down.

I had screwed up royally this time, and I knew it. I was arriving with no warning in a place where I was not wanted. I had been stupid to think that I could do this. I felt sick.

On one side of the road, spiky plants grew in unbroken rows. On the other side, the trees and scrub towered over the cab. The cabby did not slow for potholes; the cab jolted and bumped over rocks and raised a cloud of dust. We passed a cluster of battered stucco houses. The driver slowed to let chickens scatter before us, then drove through an archway and down a dirt road to a cluster of palm-thatched huts that looked even more dilapidated than the stucco houses.

The dust settled slowly. The place seemed deserted. Washing—three T-shirts and a pair of jeans—hung on a line by one hut. The tarp that shaded a group of folding tables flapped lazily in a light breeze.

The cabdriver opened the door and said something in Spanish. I hesitated, then climbed out to stand beside the cab. "Where are the ruins?" I asked.
"Las ruinas?"
He frowned and waved a hand at the huts.

I saw a white-haired man duck through the curtained doorway of one of the huts, squint at the cab, and start walking toward us. The sun burned on my face. I tried to smile at the white-haired old man, but I was glad my sunglasses hid my eyes. "You may want the cab to wait," the man said. He stood, his hands in his pockets, in the scant shade of a tree. "Not much to see here and it's a long walk back to the bus stop on the highway."

"Isn't there an excavation here?" My voice was just a little unsteady.

The old man did not take his hands from his pockets. "That's true," he said. "But there's still not much to see."