Twenty

COUGHING THROUGH CLOUDS of copal incense, Lindsey threads her way among the chaos of vendors seated on the sweeping stone stairway of the Chichicastenango cathedral for market day. She slips between two women with bundles of lilies and exotic blooms, babies peering from the striped shawls tied over their shoulders. While women and girls of all ages tend their wares spread on blankets, creating with their different village blouse patterns a wildly colorful carpet, here in town the men loiter about in Europeanized dress of cowboy hats and shirts, taking care of the important male schmoozing, smoking, and drinking of coffee or aguardiente spirits.

Lindsey can’t resist a final purchase of some plump avocados. She hurries down the last steps and across the plaza to find Newman with the jeep ready in front of their hospedaje. He’s bending down to talk with a graying woman in traditional garb, standing beside assorted bundles and two young children.

He straightens as Lindsey approaches.

“Hola. Did you connect with Melani?”

“Finally.” He beams and gives a thumb’s-up, then turns back to the Mayan woman, gesturing. “Señora Vargas, Señora Friedland.” In English, he explains that the woman is headed with two of her grandchildren to a village along their route today.

Lindsey smiles and tells the woman they have plenty of room, gesturing to cover the gaps in the Mayan’s Spanish vocabulary.

She gives Lindsey a grateful, gap-toothed smile and quickly shoos the boy and girl into the narrow back seat, as Newman crams her cloth-wrapped bundles on top of their bags in the back cargo space. She starts to climb in beside the children on the cramped seat, but Lindsey touches her arm, gestures her toward the passenger front seat.

“No, no, Señora!” The woman looks appalled, starts again to get into the back.

“Por favor, Señora!” Lindsey insists, and Newman hands the grandmother into the front seat, where she adjusts her skirt and straightens her back, smiling. Lindsey squeezes in beside the kids, and Newman hands over the last of the baggage onto her lap, a wooden crate with two chickens oozing feathers between the slats.

As he climbs into the driver’s seat and eases into the congested cobblestone lane, one of the chickens squawks and darts her head out to cock an eye at Lindsey and peck her hand. The kids laugh, as the grandmother claps her hand over her mouth in dismay.

Newman turns his head and meets Lindsey’s gaze. “You okay back there?”

She laughs. “This is nothing compared to some of the bus rides I’ve been on. You know, the ones where you’re standing for eight hours with maybe one foot contacting the floorboards between the livestock and produce and fifty people in the aisle? And there’s a couple dozen votives and assorted saints hanging in the windshield?”

He glances aside at Señora Vargas, who is now looking rather smug, waving to everyone on the street. He looks back at Lindsey, and a slow smile spreads over his face.

“Oooph. Where are we headed?” Lindsey yawns and stretches against the Jeep seat, blinking drowsily at the dense green canopy closing over the dirt road, serrated leaves filtering the morning sunlight. Newman woke her up before dawn to drive east of Guatemala City, out of the highlands and into the fringes of the jungle sprawling toward the Caribbean coast.

“A surprise. You’ll need your walking shoes.”

“Well, how about a hint?” Lindsey’s cranky with a stiff neck from dozing in the Jeep. “Is it a mile, or an all-day trek?”

He laughs, reaching over to tousle her hair. “Wake up, sleepy head! I guarantee you’re going to love this. Trust me.”

Lindsey, irritated, pulls away. “Don’t—” Then she shakes her head.

“Hey. What?” He shoots her a look, eyebrows raised, then turns back to dodge a pothole in the rutted road as they jounce along.

Lindsey shakes it off. “Just a Nick flashback.” She reaches to touch Newman’s arm. “He’d get so high-handed, always wanting to run the show.”

“Look, I just wanted to surprise you. This is a really special place we’re going to, but if—”

She leans over to put her hand over his mouth. “I was letting my old buttons get pushed. Guess I still have some stuff to work through.”

He nods. “Don’t I know it! Look at me jumping into defensive mode, like I’m ready to dodge some bomb Kimberly’s lobbing my way.” He mock-cringes.

She chuckles.

Sobering, he asks, “Was it the same for you, Lindsey? It crept up on you? It must be different for women, that physical fear with the abuse. Did he hit you?”

Lindsey closes her eyes, heaviness of the old darkness pressing in on her, and she doesn’t want to go there. She takes a deep breath. Newman wouldn’t ask if he didn’t want to know, so she tells him about some of it—the way Nick worked it, kept her always off balance between fear, hopelessness, and glimpses of light. How year by year the cloud she was living under kept getting denser until she felt the life nearly squeezed out of her.

She tells him about that final realization—Nick storming around the house in one of his rages, punching the wall while she was cowering in the locked bathroom. And how she’d suddenly straightened to take a good, long look in the mirror.

“That’s when I knew I had to change. I couldn’t change Nick—I’d tried it all, and he wouldn’t even meet me a quarter of the way. When I looked in the mirror and saw myself becoming my mother, that’s when I knew I had to get out, find myself again.”

Newman reaches over to squeeze her hand. “You really got the double whammy, didn’t you? Growing up with your dad, and then believing Nick was different? And now you have to watch your mother staying stuck in that same old dance.”

She squeezes his hand back. “She was so alive when she was young, Newman. Always singing. I try to remember that, but it hurts to look at her now. How she’s given herself away for the security—whatever the hell that means.” She clears her throat. “But I want to spend more time with her. She’s so frail, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have a mother.”

She bites her lip then, turning to him. “I’m sorry, Newman, I wasn’t thinking. Your mother….” died of breast cancer. Again, Lindsey’s grateful to be alive, a survivor.

Newman squeezes her hand. “It’s okay. Maybe what you’re going through with your mom is harder in a way.” He pulls his hand back to the wheel to negotiate a particularly rutted patch of road. “But I do miss her. Miss her for Melani’s sake, too. She never got to meet her grandmother.”

“Tell me about her?”

He hesitates, opens his mouth, closes it again, then blows out a breath.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

He shrugs. “Somehow being here in Guatemala, it’s got me thinking about her. She was so beautiful, strong but quiet with it, like these Mayan women.”

“They are amazing.”

He clears his throat. “Hey, we’re here. I’ll… tell you about her later.” Clearly he wasn’t ready to talk more, so Lindsey sat back, settling into the light and shadow flickering over them as they turn off into an even narrower, rutted dirt road. Then they break out of the dense foliage into a dirt clearing with a wooden hut, a straggle of sheds, and some vegetable patches.

Barking erupts from behind the flowering-vine-festooned hut, and a shirtless man rounds the corner, calling back two scruffy brown mutts bounding toward the parked Jeep. He tilts back his straw cowboy hat and peers toward them, then a white smile flashes. “Señor Zender! Bienvenidos!”

After introductions to a shy wife and children who emerge from the hut, Newman arranges to leave the Jeep here while they take their knapsacks with picnic provisions down the trail behind the house. Newman’s being mysterious again, refusing to reveal their destination.

They pass a tilled field of orange dirt, morning sun starting to bake it, then the dense tropical forest closes over them again in sliding tones of green, sparked by an occasional flash of red or yellow parrot feathers and the hanging clusters of white, purple, and orange blooms. Leading the way, Newman suddenly holds up a hand and makes a hushing gesture.

He steps back, and Lindsey peers around him to see a tapir ambling down the path toward them. The shy creature, like a cross between a giant pig and an elephant with its floppy long snout, pauses to fix a look of gentle curiosity on them. After a moment, it turns into the underbrush, disappearing in a surprisingly silent movement, given its size.

“Almost there.” Newman gestures her ahead of him.

She rounds a curve of the trail, then stops short. The riotous foliage opens before her into a clearing where someone has been at work hacking back the engulfing vines and brush. An upright stela slab of dark stone nearly blocks the path, its carved Mayan face beneath an elaborate plumed headdress staring Lindsey down.

She takes a startled step back. “Wow.”

Newman comes up behind her and lays a hand on her shoulder, squeezes lightly. “Hernando came across it a couple years ago.”

“Incredible.” Lindsey steps forward again and touches the cool stone, pushes aside a trailing vine to trace the lines of the ancient carving.

“There’s a German group that started excavating, but so far they haven’t done much. They don’t want tourists finding out about it yet.” He tugs her forward into the clearing, gestures across at a stone structure barely emerging from the lush greenery. Stepped stone climbs up the near side to a wall that disappears into the forest, a sprawling strangler fig having displaced a tumble of building blocks along its length.

Lindsey hurries across the rough clearing toward the structure.

She climbs up the tall steps, twice the height of an ordinary stairstep, and sits on the rough, lichened stone atop the wall. Slanted light beams ray down through the tree canopy, epiphytes and vines festooning the branches that spread like graceful candelabra toward the morning sun.

Newman climbs up to sit beside her. His voice hushed, he says, “This is a good spot to meditate. How about we sit with some silent mantras? If we keep our eyes open, we’ll see what we invite in.”

Lindsey stiffens, again remembering Nick, the way he’d try to dictate the “right” way to see. But then she lets out a breath and resets. Newman’s offering her the gift of this special place, and he’s obviously got something more up his sleeve. So far, with him, the exhilaration of discovery has outweighed the comfort of linearity.

She takes some deep, quieting breaths, silently reciting one of the mantras he’s taught her as they’ve practiced morning meditation on the trip. Lindsey’s been caught in the paradox of struggling to find the place of no struggle, striving to quiet her “brain whirl” while surrendering striving—more of those Zen-der twists? Now, with Newman beside her, welcoming his core calmness flowing through her as she learns to expand into new levels of perception, she finds herself in that place of peaceful ocean waves even as her eyes stay open, vision blurring to absorb the abundance of green life.

Time warps and bends into an infinite loop. And she somehow steps through it, or that doorway moves over her stillness, and she’s in the presence of… the ineffable. All-encompassing, and she is that larger being. The shimmering contours of an eternal, maternal divinity enclose Lindsey, infuse her, and she’s throbbing with the power of that compassionate connection to everything, everyone. She—Lindsey—all her former definitions melt into that union, and for a moment her ego voice panics into chittering protest.

“Hush,” a deep, calming voice inside her soothes, father/mother love cradling her from without and within.

Suddenly a streak of blood-red flashes through the rich, nourishing green. Lindsey blinks and gasps. Newman’s hand reaches to touch hers where it rests on the warm grainy stone, grounding her back in this place.

Lindsey blinks again, draws in a deep breath as another flash of bright yellow, punctuated with a crimson dot, sweeps through her visual field. She gives herself a shake, focuses, and sees a toucan perched on a branch at eye level across from their own wall perch.

The bird, with its sharp black, red, and yellow clown markings, tilts its head to check them out. Apparently finding nothing alarming, it reaches its oversized beak that looks like a ripe banana, and plucks a round red fruit or nut from the clusters hanging off the branch. It flies past again, the crimson orb vised in its beak.

As if at a signal, the air is alive with a flock of toucans, all swooping back and forth to pluck the red fruits, their sweeps of bold color intoxicating against the green backdrop. Lindsey hardly dares to breathe, for fear of breaking the spell.

A new player enters the clearing. The dark, lithe figure drops from an upper branch, hurtles downwards, then throws out a long, wiry arm to grip a branch and swing, landing on another branch. It leans forward to pluck some leaves and stuff them into its mouth, tilts over the edge of balance and drops, catching itself to swing by a long ropelike tail.

More spider monkeys follow the first, the troop of babies and adults sweeping through the branches they treat with a casual flair as their original jungle gym. The long-limbed acrobats scamper up trunks, leap from branch to branch, swing off by their tails and fly across to another tree, all of them passing and crossing each other in a complex aerial ballet. And all the while they’re grabbing fistfuls of leaves and munching.

The bright toucans are still flying past these black monkeyshines, weaving a tapestry of living color. Newman’s hand grips hers, joy reverberating, fountaining up to spill over them with the warmth of sunlight breaking through the leaves.