The Center of the World (7 page)

The child wiggled in her arms and pressed her hands into Kate's chest. The alley was narrow, not more than six feet wide, with a well-worn dirt path down the center. She leaned against a wall of painted concrete blocks to steady the tremors in her legs.

“Where should I go?” Kate was hollowed out, her brain ticking slower and slower.

Kirkland grabbed her by the elbow and moved her along the alley, away from the carnage. “Get your passport, money, and whatever you can fit in a small pack. Do not, I repeat, do not make it look like you are moving out with luggage or whatever you have. Make your way across the lake. Go to one of the villages like San Marcos and head for the road to Sololá and get to Antigua. Ride in the back of a truck if you have to. Get the hell out of here. And the kid?” Kirkland was panting, as if she had just run a race.

The child was Manuela's daughter. She only meant to pull the child out of the line of fire. But what now? What does one do with a child who has been pulled out of a war zone?

Kate shifted Sofia to the other hip and the glint of mucus showed on her lips. Kate wiped Sofia's nose and lips with the rebozo. The child's eyes were so dark, nearly black, that she couldn't tell if she was focusing on Kate or not. Sofia no longer had a mother. She was a free-floating daughter, like Kate, untouched by gravity.

“She's coming with me, just to get her to a safe place.” As soon as the words left her, she wondered where exactly that safe place might be.

Church bells rang out in alarm and birds who had thought they could snooze for the night in the tower exploded into the air, shooting off like buckshot into the moonlit night.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before. They're ringing the bells to gather people. Oh my God, have they lost their minds?”

Kate shifted the baby on her hip. Who knew children were so heavy? Every bit of Spanish was excised from her throat as fear gripped her by the shoulder blades. “Good baby, good girl, that's right, okay, okay.” If the child cried out, what would she do?

“Kate, pay attention to me. Go back to your hotel, grab your essentials and leave. Do you understand me? If you are taking this child with you, then you need to do it now. I don't know what's going to happen next here.”

Kate nodded. It was a relief to have someone give her directions. She wanted to be home, to feel her father's steady voice in the next room, to be ten years old again, paddling along the river with her mother. Her jaws shook, rattling her teeth together.

“I'm writing this story. I'm giving an eyewitness account to the
Chronicle
. They're not getting away with this. I want the world to know about them. . . .” Kirkland's voice caught on a swollen ledge. At the end of the alley, two Mayan men ran by.

“You're going back out to the square? What if they shoot you or drag you away and rape you, then shoot you? Come with me. I can't do this alone.”

The church bells continued to ring.

“I have to stay. There's a café in Antigua that has a bookstore. I'll leave you a message if I've made it out of here. Otherwise, contact the newspaper and they'll take it from there.” Kirkland rummaged in her pockets, pulled out a pen and small pad of paper, and wrote a number.

“What do you mean, they'll take it from there? They'll dig up your body?” Kate didn't care about justice or politics. She was terrified and she needed Kirkland to go with her.

Kirkland put her arm around Kate's shoulder and gave her an awkward hug. “Just shut up.” She dug in her jacket and pulled out a wad of quetzals. “Take this money too. Get out of here and do whatever it is that you're going to do, but get going.”

Kirkland turned and trotted off without looking back to Kate, going back the way they had come, straight back to the square where everyone was headed. The temperature in the alley dropped, wrapping a damp arm over her. Kate switched the girl, once again, to the other side, feeling the unfamiliar burn in her arms from holding a child, and headed to the hotel. She hugged the sides of the buildings. When she got to the doorway of her lodging, she dashed inside, up the stairs, past the small scorpion that still clung to the adobe wall, and used her key to get into her room.

Kate set the child down on the bed. Sofia's eyes were huge and a steady stream of tears rolled down her cheeks. She slid off the bed and walked to the door, keeping her eyes on Kate.

“
Mamá, mamá,
” she said.

“No, please, stay here. We're going in just a minute.” The child backed away and then stood as still as a statue.

Kate grabbed her passport, money, a clutch of papers from her research, another pair of jeans, a jacket, and a few shirts and rammed them into the pack. She prayed that she could remember how to tie the child on her back in order to carry her.

“We're ready now,” she said, forcing a smile. She picked up the girl and sat her on the bed. It took three tries to get it right, always hovering over the bed in case she dropped Sofia. With the girl tied to her back in a little marsupial pouch, she pulled her hair up into a slouchy sun hat. The water samples dotted the room like so many insects peering at her with academic insistence.

“Good-bye,” she said to them.

By the time she got to the dock and talked a man into rowing her to San Marcos, she wished she had taken her running shoes. She would continue to regret this for the next two days.

CHAPTER 12

T
he fisherman spoke no Spanish or English, but he motioned for her to lie down in the narrow canoe. Instead of the traditional clothing, he wore jeans, cut off mid-calf, a length that worked better for the fishermen, less likely to wick up the water from the bottom of the boat. As Kate huddled on the roughly hewn wood, she wondered why he had been at the dock in the middle of the night. The gunfire of course; everyone was on full alert in the village.

The moon was brilliant, glittering over everything. Her outline would have stood out as odd and thus noteworthy. The girl curled to the front of Kate's body and they nestled on the bottom of the boat for the trip across the lake. Sofia was used to being held snug to her mother's body and at least this one act might be familiar to her, pressed against Kate. The cold from the water drove through the wood and into her body. Something acrid made its way up Kate's throat, bubbling up from a core of terror in her belly. What was she doing? She felt like she was running without a map of any kind. Was she hurting or helping Sofia?

With an engine, a boat could make the trip across this section of the lake in thirty minutes. In a
cayuco
, the heavy dugout canoe, how long would it take? Kate did not have her watch on, and although her own internal clock was reliable to within ten minutes, she had no idea how long the silent paddle across the lake lasted, only that as they approached San Marcos, she could hear music. People were still awake and the world had not yet ended.

The man pulled the boat into a thick forest of reeds and got out first, dragging it to shore so that Kate could jump out with only the lower inches of her pants getting wet. The man said something in Kaqchikel that she desperately wanted to understand. He pointed up the mountain and brushed his arm along as if to say
That way
. Kate knew if she took the road up the mountain, she would get to Sololá, and from there she could get to Antigua. But she had only ever taken a bus from Pana, never from San Marcos. Did she really want to be on a road tonight, vulnerable to soldiers who had been out drinking on a Saturday night, or others who would be screeching in to add to the trouble in Santiago? Were there animals that came out only at night that could hurt them?

Not far from the shore, hopelessly drunk people spilled out of a gringo bar. She needed to buy food and water. What would people think of her carrying a child? Would someone stop her and remark about the child? Kate suddenly understood a secondary purpose of tying a child to your back; the girl was swaddled so tightly that she was immobile with only her head and one arm poking out. Why wasn't the child crying? She tried to remember if she had seen any Mayan children wailing in protest and she could not.

Two men turned to look at her with hooded eyes, the way men would when a new woman walks into a bar. She bought two bottles of water and some tortillas. The air in the bar was thick with smoke: tobacco, marijuana, and the sweet smell of wood burning.

No one here knew of the killings. She could tell by the wild oblivion that she saw, the head-splitting decibels of the music, the sweat-drenched bodies that pumped and whirled, spilling out to the patio paved with terra-cotta tiles. Should she say something? Should she tell them about the shootings? She adjusted the fabric sling with Sofia.

Kirkland's words rang in her head.
You are a witness. The child is a witness.
She had heard that the CIA had undercover people keeping track of the alleged guerillas among the villagers. They called them
orejas,
ears. Were there ears in this bar? Kate had honestly thought those had been unfounded conspiracy theories by paranoid people who saw conspiracies everywhere. It hadn't mattered before.

Could one of these people dizzy with drugs and dancing actually be stone-cold sober and observing? Was it the man at the bar who turned to look at her, as he ordered another beer, his shirt soaked with sweat? Or the fair-haired, whirling dancer, her batik skirt wrapped low around her hips, beckoning? Unbelievably, someone had a CD of Whitney Houston's music. “So Emotional” wailed from the speakers. The last time Kate had heard this song had been in June, before she could have imagined the horror of sorting through dead bodies.

If the child had not been on her back, Kate might have grabbed the least intoxicated person and told them that all hell had just broken loose across the lake and it might happen here too. Instead, she slipped out of the bar and headed out of town, stopping by trees, waiting, listening. Was anyone following her? No, she was sure that she left without notice.

The outline of the mountain loomed against the night sky. If she didn't let fear overpower her, she might be able to do this. But the truth was, it was not just an abstract, internal fear that nipped at her heels. It was blood, murder, and soldiers. It was Manuela and her villagers from Santa Teresa dead. She wasn't cut out for this, she wasn't brave enough. She knew about science and water; she knew nothing about running from the military in a third world country. But she knew about motherless children, she knew that they needed watching, that the world could feel cruel to them. And she could get Sofia to a place where people might know how to help her.

She would stay slightly off the road, but keep it in sight so she wouldn't get lost. She'd be there by dawn and catch a chicken bus to Antigua. Two thick clouds moved across the moon, slicing it in half. She kept twenty, thirty yards to the side of the dirt road, wincing with each step, fearing scorpions and snakes. Clouds moved across the sky, obliterating the moon. The darkness was so complete that she could not see the ground beneath her feet. The deep breathing from Sofia meant that the girl had mercifully fallen asleep. For hours, she moved slower and slower until she stopped, her breath shuddering.

Put one foot in front of the other. Think of anything except the carnage in Santiago, except the high altitude tug on her lungs. Do not let panic pull you down. What had she ever done to prepare for this?

Kate had a string of boyfriends in college. Not a string, but three. One from the ranch lands of Montana, another from southern California, and the last, Greg, from Davis, a homegrown guy who lived just down the road from the university. But when she imagined any whiff of them leaving her, growing disinterested, she broke up with them, citing any difference that could be amplified enough to justify a breakup.

The idea of them leaving her was intolerable. She did not want to be the one left behind, abandoned. When she had phoned her father to tell him about breaking up with Greg, he said, “Don't let this become the echo of your life.” She had been shocked and at first, angered by his comment. Would the fear of being abandoned truly be the echo of her life?

Carrying the child in the rebozo made her shoulders scream in protest, yanking her back. When the breeze blew the large fronds of the banana trees, it sounded like rain. She had often been tricked by the sound, expecting rain where there was none. In Davis, she had longed for rain in the dry foothills. She had convinced Greg to go camping near the coast, to feel the welcome moisture on her skin. He had teased her, called her “Boston” when in fact she had rarely gone to the seaport city. As she plodded along in the dark, she thought of sleeping together in their warm sleeping bags along the coast of California. Anything to keep her brain sharp right now, anything to keep her attention on something other than the extra effort that it took to hike at this altitude carrying a child.

How did she lose the road? Was it when the first rustle of leaves announced an unlikely wind from the north? The Maya didn't trust a north wind; it was an indicator of trouble or disturbance that could take any form: weather, illness, domestic unhappiness. They paid respectful attention to the wind that poured across the lake and in the final analysis, the lake was annoyed by a north wind and it ruffled in irritation. Did she lose the road when the dark clouds rolled across the sky in military formation, or when the first rain began to fall, a light mist, then torrential within the hour?

Water poured off her hat. Kate pulled the child around to the front to offer her more protection. She stopped near the base of a broad-leafed tree and pulled out what remained of her research papers. She stuffed them around the girl for insulation. She could no longer see the glint of the moon in the child's eyes, so she patted her face and murmured to her in Spanish, “
Bueno,
Sofia,
bueno
.” The child had not spoken since the hotel and the silence rattled Kate almost as much as the darkness. Had the shock of the gunfire blotted out the memory for the child, or would it be etched in stone?

Her feet were the coldest part of her body. She pictured her Nikes back at the hotel, warm and snug, a likely home for the scorpion by this time. She wore the sandals from Chichicastenango, the ones that had been fitted to her feet by the shoemaker in his stall. The soles were made from old tire treads and the top was rich leather with bands crisscrossing over her feet. They had been so perfect until this night.

What if the soldiers came looking for her? What if someone at the gringo bar said that they had seen the woman and the child? Every step she took crackled and exploded with noise; they could be following her and she'd never hear them. She had to keep going, to put as much distance as possible between her and the lake.

The rain fell harder still, as impossible as that seemed. The sound of so much water crashing on the dense vegetation was deafening. Every surface in the mountain jungle pinged from the rain, clattered, shook in a collectively deafening roar. If she was not soaked by the torrents that fell from the sky, she was splashed by rain that splattered off the ground, seeking any dry spot on her. It was now impossible to see any remnants of the trail and the dirt moved like marbles beneath her feet. Mudslides were a constant danger in the rainy season. Entire villages had been buried in mud, the land resculpted. But this was not the rainy season and surely the ground could absorb the runoff.

She formed a mantra and repeated it from beginning to end for hours.

She never had to be brave before, not in this way. Her mother's death had not made her brave. It had scattered her into pieces. She had seen her mother's bravery though, the quiet power and determination to stay alive, the iron will that had startled even the doctors. Had Kate been brave when she left Massachusetts and her father for the West Coast? No, that was something else, an attempt at a geographic balm.

The terrain was unbearably steep and she had never carried a child before. Her center of balance was thrown off and the weight of the child threatened to pull her off her feet, ricocheting from the mountain. Kate had long since lost sight of the lights from San Marcos and if music still boomed from the gringo bar, it was muffled by the rain.

Her foot smashed into a stump, then another. The Maya must have been clearing trees in this area for the smoky woodstoves in each house. Kate very nearly crashed into a lean-to shelter, left by the men who had been working here. Her face brushed against the palm thatch roof. Good enough for tonight, good enough to keep the rain off them. One entire side was open but three sides were loosely covered with something, she couldn't see what. Water gushed through the shelter along the ground.

Kate couldn't put the child down so she kicked a series of short logs into a corner until she had enough to squat on. She untied the drenched knot of fabric and put the child on the island so that she could grab several more pieces as well as an abandoned piece of palm thatch.

This was impossible. What had she been thinking? A blanket of despair fell over her, as wet and dark as the night. The adrenaline that had been pushing her forward abandoned her, leaving her slumped in a heap. She felt small, a dot of a human crushed between mountain and sky.

Through the night Kate sat huddled in the corner with the girl in her arms. They both drank from the plastic bottles. She leaned into the corner of the shelter and for brief moments fell precipitously into dreams where she held on to a slippery raft on an endless lake with angry waves.