Song of the Shaman (17 page)

“Sheri, it’s Ellie…We’re waiting for you at the third gallery. Janis said you went to find Zig. I hope everything’s okay. Please call me.”

She sounded annoyed. Sheri pressed delete. The second message played; Ellie’s voice was now completely agitated.

“It’s Ellie again. We have to cut the tour short and leave the museum. If it’s warm enough we’ll eat lunch in the park out in front of the building. Please give a call as soon as you get this message.” She pressed delete again, dropped the phone in her bag.

“Come on Zig, let’s go.”

OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM in the gloomy daylight Zig’s classmates were perched on the edge of wood benches in the park, quietly eating their lunch. She waited for the looks she was bound to get and the dialogue she was about to have. Ellie sat with a sandwich on her lap, talking to Janis, who listened with patchy interest. Ellie stood up abruptly when she saw Sheri and Zig enter the park.

“Ellie, I am so sorry.” She didn’t waste a moment apologizing. “I got your messages shortly after I found Zig.”

“What happened? We were worried about you, Zig.” The sharp wind blew her thin straw hair in every direction. She looked cold and anything but concerned.

“He had a question for the reference librarian that couldn’t wait.” Sheri took a knit hat out of his coat pocket and pulled it on his head. Zig just stood there, eyes downcast.

“We missed a lot of the exhibit and were asked to leave because you didn’t stay with your group, Zig,” Ellie said in a controlled, peeved tone. Sheri nudged Zig.

“Sorrrry,” he said reluctantly. She hoped he would look sheepish, but he obviously didn’t care.

“I’m terribly sorry, Ellie. Is there anything I can do? Will they let us finish the tour?”

“No, unfortunately. We’ll have to try again another day.” Ellie threw the rest of her sandwich in a garbage can with an air of disgust. She walked over to the children.

“Okay, 5-B—line up!”

Zig ran to his posse, only now they all shunned him. With sidelong glances they watched him, the way kids do when one of the clan is in big trouble, not wanting to be party to it. No one said a word to him. He stood at the very end of the line, his hands in his pockets. Sheri felt horrible. She was sure this would have repercussions at school. Yet she was calmer this time; she didn’t stress over what the results of his brazenness would be. Her thoughts instead turned to the scene in the museum library, the relief of finding her son safe, the wonder of him speaking Spanish to the handsome curator, the amazing likeness of her doodles to the Nrvai shaman drawings. She unzipped her bag and touched the folded copies from the reference book, as if the pages were alive.

After they got off the subway Sheri walked behind her group of children back to Excelsior. Zig was still ostracized and hung back a bit, separated from everyone except his core followers—Daniel and Kwami. They skipped beside the incorrigible class troublemaker, drawn to the element of danger and freedom he represented. He was the best bad boy they ever knew. Sheri walked close enough to catch snippets of their conversation.

“Guess what?” Daniel said to Zig. “We don’t have any homework since we didn’t finish the tour!”

“Ms. Dodson will probably throw me out of the school, so I won’t have to do it anyway.”

Sheri was alarmed by his remark.
Did he do all this on purpose, to try to get expelled?

“I bet she won’t!” Daniel protested.

“She might. She’s mean and ugly,” Kwami added, emphasizing the “ugly.”

“I don’t care. I hate this school anyway,” Zig admitted.

“You weren’t even gone so long. That woman kept talking and talking.” Kwami rolled his eyes and his head in a circle.

“And you missed the scary sculpture,” Daniel added.

“Yeah! A bunch of naked dead bodies kneeling on the ground like this.” Kwami collapsed on his knees in the middle of the sidewalk and crossed his hands behind his back.

“With rope tied around their wrists and the rope went up to the ceiling,” Zig said, kicking a paper cup to Daniel.

“Hey—how’d you know?” Daniel kicked the cup back. Zig did not answer. The boys were quiet for a few moments. Zig took off his hat; cowlick curls popped out.

“Since there’s no homework we can all have a play date!” Daniel said.

Kwami looked disappointed. “Shucks…I have piano after school.”

“Mom, can Daniel come over for a play date? Please?”

She stared into his pleading eyes. Any other mother would severely punish their child for the downright craziness Zig put her through, but Sheri was still staggered by what he had discovered. Something propelled Zig to break the rules, drove him to single-handedly investigate her drawings. He seldom asked for play dates, and she knew he was feeling rejected.

“I’ll check with Daniel’s mom.”

Zig glowed at her.

DANIEL CAME HOME WITH ZIG, and the boys spent the afternoon cloistered in his room. Sheri put some frozen chicken nuggets and bite-size pizzas in the toaster oven, listening to the muffled sounds of them comparing cell phone features and rap music ringtones. While they played she went into her bedroom and left the door slightly ajar. She spread the photocopies Miguel had given her out on her bed. Again her pulse raced at the sight of the photos and illustrations. Several of them looked almost exactly like her doodles. The text next to the illustrations was entirely in Spanish. At the bottom of the page were Miguel’s handwritten notes for Web sites with more information. Sporadic sword fighting and melodramatic warrior role play carried on in the next room. She quickly booted up her laptop and went online. The first Web site showed the same page she had from the museum—in both Spanish and English. She clicked on English and began to read:

Inverted figures, as seen here in a drawing done on paper by a Nrvai awa, or shaman, represent serious imbalance in the health of the patient. Illness is considered to have a somatic, social and ecological character in the local belief structure.

Sheri scrolled through the page until her eye caught a paragraph on the philosophy of illness:

Good or bad health results not from the presence of or absence of pathogens alone but from the proper or improper balance of the individual. Health is harmony, a coherent state of equilibrium between the physical and spiritual components of the individual. Sickness is disruption, imbalance, and the manifestation of malevolent forces in the flesh. In general, physical ailments that can be treated with herbal remedies are considered less serious than the troubles that arise when the spiritual harmony of the individual is disturbed. In such cases, it is the source of the disorder, not its particular manifestation, that must be challenged.

ACROSS FROM HER BED was a walk-in closet. She switched on the closet light and opened the accordion doors. On the floor in a corner under the hem of an evening gown was an old cardboard box taped shut. The tape was yellow and stiff; the glue had worn off and the flap was loose. She slid the box out into the middle of the room and sat down on the floor, chipping the tape off like old paint. Inside was a mishmash collection of memorabilia. Her high school prom corsage, summer camp emblems and stickers, a long flannel bag containing her recorder, old perfume bottles, a spiral notebook with eighth-grade poems, her elementary, middle, and high school yearbooks. She chose the middle school yearbook. Inside one of the pages was a faded piece of construction paper folded into quarters. The paper had once been badly crumpled and smoothed out. She removed the paper and unfolded it carefully; sections had torn apart in the creases from age. The page opened to a drawing she made long ago at home, sick in bed, one she saved from the trash when her mother wasn’t looking. The crayon colors were dull and patchy, but the pencil lines were still clear. She remembered spending so much time drawing the upside-down figures, the domes with crisscrossed lines, the tree symbols and arcs of flame. A single stroke divided groups of drawings; only some of the figures were colored. She got up from the floor and lay the torn pieces of paper next to the ulu drawings from the library. They were one and the same.

THE BOYS CHUGGED DOWN the snacks she had made, and soon Daniel’s babysitter came to pick him up. Afternoon turned into evening; Sheri and Zig passed it mostly in silence—Sheri studying Zig, contemplating everything that had occurred, and Zig anticipating the consequences of his actions. At dinner they both picked at their cold mashed potatoes.

“Are you still mad at me?” Zig asked.

“I don’t know what to feel.” Sheri took a sip of water and longed for wine.

“I was right about the symbols, wasn’t I?”

“Well, it was a pretty amazing coincidence.”

Zig looked at her defensively. “There’s no such thing as ‘coincidence.’”

They both fell silent again.

“I’m baffled about a lot of things, Zig. First you disappear, then I find you with a piece of my journal, speaking Spanish to that museum
guy—”

“Miguel likes you. He said your drawings were fascinating.”

“Never mind that. The whole class missed out on the tour. Ellie was quite upset.”

“Who cares?” he mumbled under his breath.

“
I care!
And so should you. That was a selfish thing to do, and your classmates had to suffer because of it.”

“They were glad to get out of the homework.”

Sheri thumped her fist on the table, rattling the dinner dishes. “You listen to me. The school wants to medicate you because you keep getting out of line. I thought you were responsible enough to behave. Now I know you’re not. I don’t want to give you that stuff unless I have to. Ms. Dodson will probably ask if you’re taking the Ritalin. I can’t afford to put you in another school, Zig. It’s almost the holidays and the public schools around here are awful
and—”

“Mom, when I was an Indian I used to chew all kinds of roots and herbs
…
I bet they were more powerful than…what’s it called? Ridden?”

“Ritalin.”

“Oh. I thought you said
ridden,
for like, ‘getting rid of somebody.’ Psssh. That’s nothing. I think Kwami takes it. And if Kwami can take it, I can take it.”

How’d she end up with such a swaggering, smart-mouthed kid? Ridden. She started to laugh. He joined in too, but it was a cautious laughter, as if they were whistling in the dark. Sheri hugged him tight.

“I don’t want you to take any more medicine than you need to. In fact, you need a neb treatment tonight.” She looked at the clock on the stove. “It’s almost ten already? Hurry up and get to bed!”

AFTER ZIG FELL ASLEEP she spent the night Googling and devouring all she could find about the Nrvai Indians. From travel sites to scholarly papers, she scoured Web sites and images of these indigenous men, women, and children. The Nrvai settlements were near the Panamanian border, along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. It all made sense. Guabito was the small border town in Panama where she was adopted. Someone must have brought her from Costa Rica to that orphanage in Panama, the place that had a fire and closed down shortly after she was adopted. Each picture she found was like peering into a faded mirror. There were glimpses of features that favored Zig: the slight body frame, chiseled cheeks, but in particular the eyes—not only the shape of the eyes but the expressiveness of them; the sparkling clarity, keen and penetrating, that could cut right through you. He had her eyes.

Her mind spun with revelations.
Could it be true? Was this a link to her past, her true identity?
It was starting to creep up inside her again, the unresolved years of grief that terrified her. She grabbed her carbon pencils and drawing pad, the only things that could save her when darkness fell on her mind. Sheri drew long into the night through crashing waves of tears, her paper stained with teardrops and smudges of black.

THE SOFT MORNING LIGHT buttered the living room walls and followed the curves of Sheri’s body as she lay curled like a baby on the sofa. She awoke with a start, but her memory was soon restored. She picked up her drawings, put them in a duffel bag along with Zig’s audio tape, and set them at the apartment door.

At 9:30 a.m. she walked into the research library at the National Museum of the American Indian, where Miguel was unlocking a glass cabinet filled with old books. They saw each other at the same time. He came right over, staring, studying her face.

“Sheri! I was hoping you’d come back.”

He was more mature and striking than she remembered.

“Hi, Miguel. I’m sure you heard what happened with the Excelsior school tour.”

He rolled his eyes. “Rules are ridiculous here. Zig asked questions those tour guides never could’ve answered.”

“That’s sort of why I’m here. With all the information you gave me I…I hardly slept last night. Maybe you can help me.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a handful of drawings.

Hours passed like minutes in the library. Miguel piled reference books, articles, microfilm, notes, and monographs on the table—every text available on the Nrvai settlements in Central America. He took great interest in the similarities between her art and the shamanic drawings. Wheeling a cart with audio equipment into his tiny cubicle, he played Zig’s tape over and over again. Several of the words sung were matched to the Nrvai language. Miguel’s honesty and openness moved her to let her guard down. She told him about her upbringing, her adoption, the silence surrounding her origins, the little information she had found, and how she started drawing as far back as she could remember. Every day for five days Sheri came to the library while Zig was at school, and like a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand bit pieces she tried to fit the borders of her origins together. A gaping hole in the middle remained.

On the fifth day her research hit a wall. Miguel suggested she take a break, and they went outside for a walk. Just behind the museum was Battery Park. She thought she knew all the parks in the city, but as she strolled along the barren, winding paths that led to the Hudson River, she realized she had never been there before. The famous World Trade Center sphere that had survived September 11 was displayed, not unlike a scene from
Planet of the Apes,
in the entrance to the park, an eternal flame nearby keeping vigil. Triple-decker Statue of Liberty ferries were docked at the shore as frosty visitors filed on. The steely river was turbulent, the wind bracing. Her body ached from storing up information; the muscles in her back and shoulders refused to relax, and it hurt her eyes to blink. Miguel walked beside her with an athletic gait. She couldn’t conceal her disappointment, and he didn’t ignore it.