The Indigo Notebook Read online

  “I mean, deeper than that. Like, what made you come here now, at this moment?”

  He shrugs. “School’s out and I had enough money saved up from my after-school job.”

  I push harder. “But Wendell, there’s something, I know there is. What’s the precise thing that made you throw up your hands and say, ‘That’s it, I’m going to Ecuador’?”

  He laughs. “You’re psychic, aren’t you?”

  “I think you’re the psychic one.”

  He shifts his eyes.

  I tilt back in my chair and wait.

  “Well, there’s lots of reasons,” he says finally. “Layers of reasons, you know?”

  “So what’s one layer then?”

  “Well, for example, there’s this girl,” he says.

  “Oh.”

  “She’s my ex-girlfriend, but I think we’ll get back together.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, She—” There’s a certain way guys talk about girls they’re completely smitten with. She, infused with awe. She, with a capital S. “See,” he continues. “She said I was—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—She said I was too—”

  “What?”

  “She broke up with me because I was always afraid She’d break up with me. She got sick of it. She said I had abandonment issues. So I decided to come here and find my birth parents and go back home and be a brand-new person and She’d be so impressed She’d want me back.” He stares at a deep scratch in the table. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Hmmm,” I say. That’s the best response when you don’t know what to say. Other people assume you’re having deep thoughts. And usually they just keep talking until you can swallow your disappointment and compose yourself.

  “Okay, Zeeta, now that I spilled my guts, give me more details about this rose-petal thing.”

  I look him straight in the eye. “I stripped off my clothes and rubbed rose petals over my wet, nude body in magical waters.” I raise an eyebrow. “And made a wish.”

  As expected, he flushes and looks away, at the mountains. But then he asks, in a low voice, “Think it works?”

  “Our landlady says it does.”

  He moves his head closer across the table. “Will you take me there, Zeeta?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to wish for Her back.”

  “Maybe next week,” I say, a little meanly. “I don’t feel like getting up before dawn again this week.”

  “Thanks, Zeeta.” He pulls the sweater over his head and wraps it around his waist. That’s another thing about Americans—they don’t wrap sweaters around their shoulders like most people in the world do. But the around-the-waist way shows off Wendell’s broad shoulders under a snug white T-shirt. I try to ignore it. The shoulders are off-limits. They belong to Her.

  Outside the café, we stand looking at each other for an awkward moment. He takes out his camera and moves the knobs around and snaps a picture of me. “There’s another one,” he says, squinting at a place on my neck. And this time, now that we’ve forged a friends-only bond from the ex-girlfriend talk, he takes the liberty of reaching his hand to the tender space on my neck behind my earlobe and plucking off the rose petal himself.

  I swallow hard. “Is the ex-girlfriend thing the deepest layer?”

  “What?”

  “The deepest reason for coming? What you’re really searching for?”

  He looks at the sky and at the sidewalk and everywhere but my face. “I guess. Well, hasta mañana,” he says quickly, with a terrible accent.

  “Hasta mañana, Wendell,” I call after him.

  I spend the afternoon at the food market, buying ingredients for a pot of hearty soup for Layla’s birthday dinner. Thirty-five years old. She says she’s officially old now that she has to round up to forty. Supposedly she’s found three white hairs, although when she plucked one out and showed it to me, it just looked light blond. “Look!” she insisted. “It’s a different consistency!” I’ve decided that cooking together will cheer us up, peeling and chopping and frying and letting the sizzling smoke wrap around us like a cocoon. She’ll forget about the waterfall and the alleged white hairs and I’ll forget about Wendell’s sort-of-ex-girlfriend.

  She’s spending the day with the Taoist surfer clown in Quito to apply for her work visa, but she plans to be back in time for dinner. “It’s not a date,” she promised this morning. “It just so happens he needs to renew his visa. But don’t you think it’s pretty responsible of him to renew his visa?”

  I head home, into the setting sun, one bag full of tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, potatoes, dried lentils, quinoa, and onions. And in the other bag, inside knotted, doubled plastic, is a raw, bloody chicken, just chopped into four parts by a market lady’s enthusiastic butcher knife.

  Wherever we live, Layla and I try to cook the local food, most of the time at least. When we’re lazy or just settling into a new place, we fall back on spaghetti, the old standby. Here in Ecuador, potato-chicken soup seems to be the staple, with heaps of fresh cilantro. People eat plenty of canguil—popcorn—as a side dish, but I can’t seem to cook it without either burning it or having kernels pop out all over the kitchen. Yesterday, our landlady smelled the charred popcorn and, out of pity, brought us over a bowl she’d made herself.

  I’m walking past the Internet café, the bag handles digging into my palms, when I spot Layla. Her flowing white dress is what jumps out from the crowd first. The dress is thin cotton, backlit by the evening sun, a little see-through. She refuses to wear a slip, even though I beg.

  And then I notice she’s walking next to someone.

  Very close. Maybe even touching.

  And it’s not an elderly person or a little kid or a clown.

  It’s a middle-aged guy.

  A few paces closer, I recognize him. The man from the plane. Handsome Magazine Dad.

  He’s nodding and listening to Layla, who’s telling him a story, her arms spiraling in flamboyant gestures. He’s tall, stooping down to listen to her. He’s dressed in a tasteful light blue button-down with tan leather shoes and pants as white as his teeth. Today he’s stepped out of an ad for a family vacation at a giant, international hotel, like a Marriott or a Hilton.

  Now Layla’s waving her hand and bouncing toward me, as he jogs to keep up with her. “Zeeta! It’s Jeff. On the way to the bus stop, the universe stuck him right in my path!” She gives me a meaningful look.

  “Hi, Zeeta,” he says, holding out his hand, giving me a firm-yet-warm shake. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Likewise,” I say, suddenly tongue-tied, as though he really is a magazine model or some other celebrity. Which he is, in a way, for me at least. He could easily be the star of any Normal Family fantasy. It’s strangely thrilling and a little nerve-racking to see him standing so close to Layla.

  She beams. “We spent the day together. I know I said I’d go to Quito for my visa, love, but I’ll do it another day.” She looks so proud, about to burst. “And you’ll be happy to know I ditched the surfer clown.”

  I’m practically speechless. “Great, Layla!”

  “What serendipity!” she says, turning her face up to Jeff’s. “Did you know that the word serendipity comes from Serendip? An old name for Sri Lanka. These travelling princes of Serendip went on a quest, but they kept stumbling across marvelous discoveries. And their discoveries turned out even better than what they’d been looking for.”

  She’s starting to sound flaky and weird and soon she’ll start quoting Rumi. I bring the conversation back to earth, mustering up my most normal smile for Jeff, hoping Layla will seem less zany by association. “So,” I sum up, “Layla was looking for a bus and she found you instead. That’s great.”

  “It’s serendipitous for me, too,” he says, looking fondly at Layla, as though he’s barely restraining himself from tucking a stray piece of blond hair behind her ear. “I was on a dating quest.” He grins. “For a quiet homebody type. And instead I meet this gorgeous world tra
veler. And I’ll tell you something”—he drops his voice, letting me in on a secret—“we’ve been having the best conversation I’ve had in years.”

  Unbelievable. I silently thank Layla for not scaring him. For refraining from suggesting they find a grassy hill to roll down, which she’s been known to do with men she’s just met. She really is trying. I wonder how long it can last.

  Jeff touches her bare shoulder. “Listen, I need to get back to the bank and do a little work tonight.” He turns to me, flashing his white smile. “Zeeta, I’m coming back to Otavalo for the weekend. How about on Saturday we all have lunch together? Restaurante Americano. One o’clock. My treat. Bring a friend if you’d like.”

  It takes them ten minutes to say goodbye, with all the blushing and smiling and tittering. Finally, Layla and I walk home, her carrying the bag of veggies and grains, me carrying the raw chicken.

  She talks the whole way home, giving a Why Jeff Would Be a Good Boyfriend monologue, even though she doesn’t need to convince me of anything. I’m sold.

  “You know, Z, he’ll be good for me. Nutritious, like quinoa.” She pulls out the small plastic bag of tiny, light brown, doughnut-shaped grains. Studying them, she says, “Quinoa’s the only grain that has all the essential amino acids, that’s what our landlady told me.”

  She drops the quinoa back in the market bag. “It’ll feel strange at first, trying to be a new person and being with a different kind of man. But I’ll do it for you, and for us, because the waterfall this morning was a wake-up call. I need to change. It’s time. And Jeff will be my guide in the realm of responsible grown-up stuff, don’t you think? I’m excited about it. I really am. He’s good-looking, isn’t he? In a conservative way. You know, I really think he’d look great nude. He’s muscular, have you noticed? Apparently his big thing is working out at the gym. I’d love to paint him. Don’t worry. I won’t ask him to model for me right away …”

  As she goes on and on, I nod periodically and try to wrap my mind around the significance of all this.

  Maybe the near-death experience really has changed her.

  Maybe the sacred waters really have worked.

  Maybe my life has, miraculously, just veered onto the normal course.

  For years, I imagined this moment, the moment my life would turn off the twisty, mountainous, forested, pebbled road to the wide, clean, SUV-filled highway. And now it’s actually happening. My stomach is jumping around and I’m picturing me and Layla laughing at a kitchen table in Virginia, and Jeff serving us pancakes and saying, What shall we do today, ladies? The neighborhood pool? A barbecue on the deck?

  “So what do you think about this Jeff thing?” she asks. “Aren’t you happy?”

  “Of course.” Gently, I add, “And please try to be normal with him.”

  “How?”

  “For starters, lay off the Rumi quotes. Tone down your outfits. Just be normal.”

  In silence, we walk toward our apartment, contemplating our possible new life, squinting into the setting sun, Layla swinging the bag of veggies and quinoa, me swinging the bag of bloody chicken.

  Chapter 8

  The bus to Agua Santa looks as though it might have been elegant thirty years ago—faded red velvet seats, ragged gold curtains with fraying tassels. The smell of diesel and damp wool fills the close space. A few other passengers sit scattered on the bus, mostly indigenous Otavaleños. The women are dazzling, sitting straight and elegant in their shiny, white embroidered blouses with lace sleeves, and cream wool shawls. These are everyday clothes, what they wear to work the fields and feed pigs and butcher chickens and wash dishes.

  “These ladies should star in a laundry detergent commercial,” I whisper to Wendell.

  He gives a half-smile, not moving his gaze from the raindrops meandering down the clouded windowpane.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask, hoping he won’t say his ex-girlfriend.

  “Wondering if they’ll be happy to see me. I mean, maybe I’m someone’s dark secret.” He turns to me. “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who knows. We never met.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Two letters. J.C.”

  “Initials?”

  I nod. “But I don’t know if they’re his first and last initials or first and middle or what.”

  Wendell gives an encouraging half-smile. “At least it’s something.”

  “I’d rather have a crystal. Something to hold on to. To sleep with under my pillow.”

  He looks down. I bet he’s slept with that crystal under his pillow. “Think you’ll find him someday?” he asks.

  I consider how much to tell him. “I’ve made up plenty of fantasies over the years,” I say finally, twisting my rings. “In Laos, I went through this phase where I convinced myself I’d run into him on the street. So I looked at every face that passed for some man who looked like half of me. I tried as hard as I could not to blink, because what if I blinked and I missed him? Soon my friends started asking me why I bugged out my eyes all the time, and then Layla started saving up money to get my thyroid tested, so I stopped. I let it go.”

  I glance up, a little embarrassed.

  His voice comes out low. “And now what do you think about him?”

  “I’ll probably never meet him. Layla doesn’t know anything about him. But I think he must be a mix of all the parts of me that she doesn’t get.”

  Wendell nods, poking at the torn seat fabric in front of him. “When I meet my birth parents, I think my weirdness will make sense.”

  “What weirdness?”

  “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “Forget it.” And he turns back to the raindrops.

  When I was little and asked Layla about my father, she’d say something like, “Oh, my darling Zeeta, he’s a creature of the sea. A man of the moon. When he plays guitar, you fall into the place where everything is music.” It felt like a game, a quirky version of a bedtime story, but once I was older, it drove me crazy. On my thirteenth birthday, over the strawberry shortcake she’d made, I interrogated her.

  “What’s J.C. stand for?”

  She played with the whipped cream. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?” I jabbed my fork into a strawberry.

  She sighed. “I was nineteen, on a Greek island, drunk on a jug of red wine. There were a bunch of us on the beach that night—ragtag backpackers around a bonfire. I was looking at the sea, feeling lonely, wondering what I was going to do with my life, when he emerged from the water. Like some sea creature turned human.”

  I stabbed another strawberry. “Layla. Give me the truth. No fairy-tale crap.”

  “This is it, I mean it. He sat in the sand next to me and talked about the ocean and sea turtle eggs and the moon.”

  “Where was he from?”

  She reached across the table, touched my cheek. “Love, I know it’s hard for you to accept. But I just don’t know.”

  I leaned back, my stare icy. There had to be something, some key. It was just a matter of sifting through Layla’s infuriatingly vague, flaky memory.

  “Well, did he have an accent?”

  She rubbed her forehead. “He spoke English well. I couldn’t put my finger on his accent.” She was starting to crack. “Honestly, Z, I was young and I hadn’t traveled that much yet and I don’t know.” Her voice shook, her lip quivered, tears seeped out.

  It made me happy. “Slut,” I whispered.

  Layla was quiet for a long, long time. Finally, she wiped her face and said, “If I hadn’t had that night, you wouldn’t be here. And you’re everything, Z. The light of my existence.”

  Later that night, I started feeling bad. I took the cake from the fridge and cut two pieces. I even lit a candle. “Hey, maybe J.C. was a college kid on summer break,” I said as a kind of peace offering. “Maybe he was a marine biology maj
or with a minor in music.”

  “Well,” she said, picking at the cake, “I guess it’s possible.”

  So that’s what I decided. By now he must be director of a giant city aquarium, maybe even SeaWorld. He probably had kids—maybe my half brother and half sister. That Greek island trip was a little blip in the landscape of his wonderfully normal existence. And tragically, he was oblivious to its consequences.

  The bus slows at the base of a steep, cobbled road that meanders up into the mountains. Far above, the gray peaks wear long, green robes, swirling into valleys, rippling into smooth mounds. Patches of leaves and grass and dark soil form a haphazard pattern, like scraps of velvet and suede and silk stitched together. White houses with tiled roofs spread in clusters across the hillsides. I spot a candy-pink house at the turnoff, which Gaby described as a landmark. She instructed us to walk up the hill for a kilometer or two, then turn left toward the houses.

  “Let’s go,” I say to Wendell, slinging my pack over my shoulder. It’s heavy with fruit I picked up at the market to offer the locals as gifts. He follows me, bumping into people and saying “perdón, perdón” with his American accent. I’ll have to teach him to roll his R’s sometime.

  We head uphill on the muddy road flecked with worn stones, bits of grass poking through here and there. The rain falls in tiny droplets, cold and silver, carrying the smell of wet earth. I whip out my hooded emerald cloak from Morocco and wrap it around my shoulders.

  Through the mist, a woman in a black shawl passes, carrying a bundle of firewood on her back, followed by two men, water dripping from the edges of their hats. I say good morning in Quichua, as Gaby taught me. “Alli punlla.”

  “Alli punlla,” they answer, surprised.

  After they pass, Wendell makes a low whistle. “How many languages do you speak, Zeeta?”

  “Over a dozen, but only well enough for pleasantries. Deep discussions about politics and the universe and long-lost fathers? Maybe seven.”

  “You scare me,” he says.

  He’s not the first guy to say that. I’ve given up on trying to figure out exactly what they’re scared of and how seriously they mean it. In every country we’ve lived in, boys my age—and girls, too, for that matter—have hung out with me because I’m exotic. Sometimes they confess their deep, dark secrets (which I promptly record in my notebook), but only because I’m an outsider and won’t judge them. And I’m always leaving again soon anyway. Most kids keep a friendly distance, as though I’m a fascinating yet unpredictable animal. Certain older people, like Gaby, seem to take it all in stride, and embrace me like a temporary granddaughter or niece.