The Indigo Notebook Page 3

  He looks pretty clean-cut, no tattoos or piercings, yet no name brands flaunted in your face either. His long braid is striking, the most alternative thing about him, and I wonder if kids at school consider it hippieish or elfin or exotic or what. His grades in school? Hard to say, but he’s definitely smart—alert eyes, observant, curious. And his way of talking—at least based on our brief conversation on the way to the café—includes no “dudes” or “f-in’” as a universal adjective.

  His eyes plod over the menu, his lips moving.

  “Need me to translate?” I ask.

  “No thanks. I took two years of Spanish, so I can read it okay. It’s the listening and talking part that gets me. All the words run together, you know?” The corner of his mouth turns up. Endearing.

  When the waitress comes, we order pastries and coffee with lots of milk and sugar. I haven’t said I’d help him yet. First I want to find out what I’d be getting myself into. I open my indigo notebook, pen poised, and ask, “So, what do you know about your birth parents?”

  “Hardly anything.” He pauses, then says quickly, as though he’s just mustered up the nerve to jump into ice-cold water, “I think they’re alive, at least my birth mother, because she relinquished me.” His eyes flicker to the TV blaring a comedy show in the corner. “I hate talking about this.”

  I nod, trying to look professional. “Names?”

  He shakes his head. “Spent all week trying to find records. No luck.”

  I twirl my pen like a baton, a skill I picked up years ago in my school’s parade practice in Chile. “Pictures?”

  Again, he shakes his head.

  I stare. “How do you think you’ll find them, Wendell?”

  He puts his face in his hands.

  Immediately, I wish I’d softened my words. I’ve caught him in an in-between place. A time when emotions are raw and unclothed. I can relate.

  He takes a breath. “I thought this was a smaller town. And I figured they’d look like me.” He glances at the other people in the café, most grinning at the TV. Several of the men have long black hair and fine, sculpted faces and tea-colored skin, just like Wendell. “Everyone here looks like me.” He looks disoriented, like when you wake up to a sudden, bright light.

  “Don’t worry.” I keep my voice airy. “By the time you go home, all white Americans will look the same.”

  He laughs. “My mom and dad—I mean, my real mom and dad—my adoptive ones, that is”—he taps his spoon on the table, a nervous rhythm—“they think my birth mom came from a village just west of Otavalo. But they don’t know the name.”

  I want to take the spoon from him and press his hands together.

  He pulls something from his pocket: a small crystal, the size of his thumb. The thing he was looking at on the plane. Carefully, as though it’s an eggshell, he places it in my hand. “They told me this was wrapped in my blankets.”

  I examine the crystal. It’s a translucent, five-sided cylinder, coming to an uneven point. Parts are cloudy, parts clear.

  Crystal, I scribble in my notebook, surrounding the word with question marks. A pretty feeble clue.

  “Let’s let our unconscious minds ponder this a bit,” I say, echoing one of Layla’s ex-boyfriends in Phuket, a self-pronounced psychotherapist who lived in a tent on a beach and offered free advice like a hermit sage.

  Wendell and I sip our coffee and munch on flaky pastries layered with sweetened goats’ milk and he asks about the places I’ve lived. I recite the laundry list of fifteen countries. He asks me about each one, about the food and the people and the landscape, and when I get to Thailand, I linger on how Layla and I used to catch a tuk tuk to the market and eat coconut ice cream doused with condensed milk and sprinkled with crushed peanuts.

  Now he’s pulling out an old-fashioned camera and screwing on a lens and filter. “I’m listening,” he says. “It’s just that your face is all lit up. And the sun’s hitting your hair at the perfect angle. You can see these reddish highlights.”

  I keep talking, asking him more indigo-notebook questions, a little self-consciously now that he’s clicking the camera at me. After we finish our third cup of supercreamy sweet coffee—which leaves me wound up—we stand, stretching.

  Again, he smiles that halfway smile. “So.”

  “So,” I say.

  “Are you in?”

  I make a mental list of pros and cons.

  The cons are obvious. The task seems fairly hopeless: wandering around villages searching for people who may not want to be found, based on a crystal and vague directions. He can’t even pay me. I’ll have less time to give English lessons to the market vendors to make money. Less time to get our apartment in shape. Less time to make sure Layla gets her visa and other necessities. I could be wasting mountains of time on this boy. And even if by some miracle we succeed, he’ll leave and I’ll never see him again.

  He’s staring at me, waiting, looking earnest and hopeful.

  I move on to the pros. He notices things like red highlights in my hair. His funny little half-smile makes me happy. I like being near him.

  Is that enough?

  There’s more. He could tell me tales of his normal life, which is probably the closest I’ll get to living one myself.

  And even more. He understands how it feels to be pelted with questions you can’t answer—like what you are, or where you’re from—questions that chip away at you little by little until you feel like a pile of tiny pieces that could blow away in a breeze. How it feels to be always searching for some magical glue that will hold your self together.

  The deciding factor comes straight from my gut or my heart or somewhere very irrational. It is this: If we find his parents, maybe one day, as utterly impossible as it seems, I’ll find my own father.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  “Thanks!” He looks truly grateful. “So, what next?”

  “I’ll ask around and see if I can figure something out. Meet you back here tomorrow? At ten?”

  “Sure.” He puts his camera strap over his shoulder. “I guess I’ll head back to the hotel.”

  I want to draw out the conversation. “Which hotel?”

  “Hotel Otavalo.”

  “That’s fancy.” I’ve passed it on the way to the ATM. It even has a doorman.

  “The owner’s giving me a major discount. Friend of a friend of my mom kind of thing. I couldn’t afford it otherwise. My parents paid for the plane ride and I emptied out half my savings account for the lodging and food.”

  “Oh.” I always feel wistful when people mention savings accounts. Layla’s and mine disappears every year when we fly to a new place, a major contributing factor to my middle-of-the-night panics.

  I feel like I should hug Wendell goodbye, or at least shake his hand or make some parting physical contact. For a few moments we stare at each other, and right when it seems on the verge of too long, I notice he’s started looking through me, at something faraway behind my eyes. A strange look has come over his face. “Zeeta—” He stops.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He rubs his hands over his face. “See you tomorrow.” He tosses a five-dollar bill on the table. “Be careful tomorrow morning.” His voice is falsely casual.

  “Careful?”

  “In the water.”

  And before I can say, What water?, he half-runs out the door.

  Chapter 5

  I weave through the crowds already milling around the market, toward Gaby’s booth. All the coffee and sunshine is making me sweat like crazy. Early mornings here are usually cool, but once the sun reaches a certain point overhead, if there are no clouds, it suddenly becomes blazing hot. Pan-flute music floats from the booths, notes mixing together in wavy melodies over excited voices of vendors and tourists. Markets always make me feel like I’m in the middle of a party, the perfect place for my happiness to spiral out when I’m in a good mood.

  And I am in a good mood, a very, very good mood, for the first time
since leaving Thailand. But doesn’t it seem like even when you’re in a very, very good mood, there’s always one little nagging thing, like a tiny stain on a brand-new shirt? In this case, it’s Wendell’s strange look and his parting words about water.

  Did I mention water to him? I fast-forward through our conversation. No, nothing about water. Finally, I decide to ignore the water thing and rewind to the part about the reddish highlights.

  I’m practically skipping, when I pass the blind man in the blue chair. His name, I’ve discovered, is Don Celestino. As usual, I drop some coins into his orange plastic bowl. He knows my name by now, and somehow always recognizes me, even before I say a word. By my smell? The sound of my footsteps? The way I drop the coins in his bowl?

  “Thank you, Señorita Zeeta,” he says. “Que Dios te bendiga.”

  We chat a bit, and I ask him if he’s run across any eligible bachelors for Layla (he hasn’t), then I make my way through the crowd to Plaza de Ponchos. I spot Gaby, one eye on the sewing in her lap and one eye on the crowd, searching for customers to charm.

  “What happened to the lost boy, Zeeta?” she asks eagerly.

  I plop down onto a wooden chair and fill her in.

  As I talk, she makes tiny, fine stitches on a white blouse, an elaborate blue flower pattern laced with silver thread. “A crystal, eh?” She nods, lost in thought. “You should go to Agua Santa first. Just west of here. Famous for its curanderos.” She knots a strand of blue thread and surveys her work. “There they use special rocks to heal. They say each of their rocks has its own powers and personality.” She raises her eyebrows and lets her needle hover in the air like the point of a question mark. “But Zeeta, what does this boy hope to find?”

  “His birth parents.”

  “Yes, but I mean really, what does he hope to find?”

  At home, Layla’s lying on her back in the middle of the living room with her arms and legs outstretched like a snow angel.

  “Hey, Layla. What’s up?”

  “Waiting for a seed to be dropped.”

  “Being a sheet of paper?” I ask. “A spot of ground?” We have fifteen years’ worth of inside jokes. I learned this Rumi verse by heart when other kids were chanting patty-cake:

  Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

  Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

  Where something might be planted,

  A seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

  I’m grateful she’s doing this in the privacy of our home. One afternoon in India she climbed up a tree in a public square. It was an especially sweltering day, and as she put it, “It looked all cool and sacred and dappled up in the branches.” A policeman found her, told her it was forbidden, and demanded she come down. She tried to charm him into letting her stay.

  It didn’t work.

  He slapped her with a huge fine. Until her next paycheck, we lived on the random scraps in our cupboard. One night, over a meal of onions and rice and weak tea, I exploded, “Why, Layla? Why couldn’t you just think, Oh, what a nice tree, and keep on walking?”

  She touched my hair. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

  I pulled away. “Then do it in our own living room!”

  Now, here she is, rolling onto her stomach, extending her body into yoga boat pose—in our own living room, as requested.

  I reward her with a smile. “I met a guy today, Layla.”

  “¡Que pleno!” she says, which we’ve discovered means “Cool!” in Ecuadorian Spanish. We usually speak in English but throw in bits of slang from wherever we happen to be. I particularly like que pleno. It literally means how full, which makes perfect sense. When something’s cool, you feel full, like you can temporarily forget about the missing piece of yourself.

  She stands up, stretching. “What’s he like? Do tell!”

  “He’s American, kind of clueless, but cute. He was adopted from here. I’m helping him find his birth parents.”

  “Que pleno.” She winks.

  My face grows warm. “I’m just helping the guy.”

  Layla leans over and ruffles my hair, a gesture that might incorrectly lead you to believe she’s maternal.

  “So did any seeds from the Absolute fall?” I ask, changing the subject.

  “One of these days,” she says. “Someday soon.”

  Layla always lights candles for regular dinners. She says they bring us into the present moment, but I think it just makes it harder to see our food. Tonight, after she twirls her first forkful of spaghetti, she says, “So, Zeeta, love. I figured we could go to the sacred waterfall tomorrow for my birthday. I got directions and everything.”

  “A waterfall?”

  “The one that fulfills your wishes, remember?”

  I nod, remembering Wendell’s comment. The hair on my arms stands up. How did he know? And he said to be careful. What did that mean? If I tell Layla, she’ll make us burn incense and lug along her bag of protective amulets: green jade, red jasper, a handful of crystals, and a trusty head of garlic.

  Instead, I make an excuse. “I already told Wendell I’d hang out with him tomorrow morning.” I take a bite of salad.

  “No problem. We’re leaving at four. Back by eight a.m. at the latest.”

  “Why so early?” I moan.

  “It’s an hour’s walk to the waterfall. We have to do it at dawn.”

  “What’ll we do there exactly?” I already feel tired just thinking about it.

  “Bathe in the waters to purify our spirits.” Her eyes widen into an otherworldly look. “Clear our minds, focus on what we truly want. Let the universe manifest it.”

  “I think I’ll just watch.”

  Layla ignores that. “And something our landlady told me,” she says, leaning in, waving her fork, excited. “If you bathe with rose petals, you can make your ideal man fall in love with you.”

  “Can I choose your ideal man?”

  “Ha! Dream on!” She drains her last sip of beer. “Your turn to do the dishes, love,” she says, and whizzes past me into the bathroom, swishing her skirt.

  “It’s always my turn to do the dishes.” If we ever let it be her turn, the sink would be filled with a mountain of cockroach-infested plates coated with crusty, moldy stuff.

  “Mystics are experts in laziness.” She’s quoting Rumi again. “They rely on it, because they continually see God working all around them.”

  “More like because you continually see me working all around you.”

  I fill the sink with soapy water, plunge in my hands, start scrubbing a pot. We fall so easily into this banter. We’ve been doing it for years, playing these roles. Zeeta, the Down-to-Earth One. Layla, the Dreamy One. But isn’t real life trickier and stickier? In real life, beliefs ooze like honey from one shape to another. Of course, I never admit this to Layla.

  Despite my cynicism, like it or not, she’s formed my sense of reality. So I do my own secret rituals, carry hidden talismans. I practice restraint, flowing into the social norms of our current town. Still, bits of Layla in me burst through here and there: tangerine outfits, silk scarves in my hair. At least they’re clean and ironed, I tell myself.

  I rinse the soap from the dishes, set them in the drying rack, wipe the counter.

  “Hey!” Layla calls out from the bathroom. “You can wish for that Wendell guy.”

  “I’m just his translator, Layla! It’s purely professional.”

  “Whatever. So, are you coming to the waterfall?”

  At the mention of water, my insides tighten again. I’m not telling her about Wendell’s mysterious warning. It worries me, though. I’m definitely not letting her go alone in the middle of the night to swim around naked without someone to watch out for her.

  I roll my eyes. “Fine.”

  Layla’s a kite and I hold the string. I’m the heavy one, the one stuck to earth. I wonder if she resents that I keep her earthbound, knowing that if one day I let
go, she could fly away. Which is maybe another reason why I say I’ll go to the waterfall, to keep hold of that string.

  Chapter 6

  “Psst.” Layla’s voice rips into my sleep. “Wake up,

  My eyelids creak open. I’ve just had my usual three-thirty a.m. panic and finally gotten back to sleep, only to be woken up again. The clock’s red light blares 4:11 a.m. I groan.

  “Come on, Z,” Layla says, shaking me. “Get dressed! The sacred waters await!”

  “Ten more minutes,” I mumble.

  “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,” she whispers.

  “Don’t go back to sleep.

  You must ask for what you really want.

  Don’t go back to sleep.

  People are going back and forth across the doorsill

  Where the two worlds touch.

  The door is round and open.

  Don’t go back to sleep.”

  “It’s too early for Rumi, Layla.”

  But by now my grogginess is fading, and I toss back my covers and drag myself from bed. Twenty minutes later we’re walking through the cold night, black except for a sliver of moon. I’m wearing my cloak with a hood and toting a bag of extra clothes in case Layla gets cold. She’s wearing a thin cotton T-shirt and a long, gauzy skirt—underprepared, as always. At least she thought to pack a towel and flip-flops in her bag for after the ritual.

  “Sure you know where we’re going, Layla?”

  “Of course. It’s just outside the city.” She tucks her hands under her armpits, shivering.

  I toss her a jacket.

  She kisses my cheek. “Oh, love, this is why I bring you along.”

  I wonder at what precise moment in our past Layla became the child and I became the grown-up. When did I start bringing a coat in case she got cold or crackers in case she got hungry? As long as I can remember, it’s been me. And before that? Maybe we were just cold and hungry more often, which Layla probably felt was adventurous since it made us extra-appreciative of our next meal and snuggling under warm covers at night.