I have never been this far into the jungle. Never been this far from civilization, period. And suddenly, I feel as though I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Beyond the tangle of trees that line the banks of the narrow river, a flash of dazzling white catches my eye. The pit of my stomach hollows.
We must be nearly there now.
I squint past the strangler figs into the impenetrable forest as our canoe glides quietly through the murky water, my view obstructed by a choked patch of leafy bamboo.
“What did you see?” Lucas asks, casting a glance over his shoulder without interrupting the motion of his paddle.
I shrug, covering my apprehension with nonchalance. “Nothing.”
I didn’t think I’d ever lay eyes on Lucas Baranquilla again. Yet here he is, a dozen years later in a different country, just as irritatingly self-possessed as the last time we met.
He runs his fingers through his tousled dark hair, evaluating me with the slightest flick of his sharp eyes before turning back to the bow. I do appreciate that he’s made no attempt to charm me. Though some recognition of the Herculean effort I exerted to come this far, this fast, at his behest, might have been nice. It’s a long way from Manhattan to the Mexican jungle, and he has to recognize he’s the last person I’d want to make the trip with.
Then again, maybe not.
Regardless, he’s met my thorniness with cool tolerance, as though I’m a temperamental child with whom he must have patience—a requirement of his job, no doubt, seeing as he’s my uncle’s attorney, and, I suppose, mine now. God only knows what astronomical fee we’re paying him. Not that he looks much like an attorney with his deep tan, ripped jeans, and faded red T-shirt. I see a hint of a tattoo on the inside of his muscle-bound bicep, too. It wasn’t there last time I saw him, though I do remember another one clear as day.
I take a deep breath to wipe the thought from my mind, but the air is so thick it sticks in my lungs. Like the city in August if you swapped the trash smell for the aroma of damp soil and lush vegetation. I brush aside a strand of blond hair that’s come loose from my ponytail and point, reaching for my high school Spanish. “La casa de mi . . .” My voice trails off as I fish in vain for the word for uncle.
I don’t dare glance in Lucas’s direction. Don’t want to see him smirk at my almost certainly botched pronunciation, don’t need him to translate for me.
Our river guide tilts his straw hat back on his head to peer up the hill where my finger points. “Sí, señora.” The air whistles through the gap where his two front teeth should be.
I slap a mosquito that has settled on my thigh, leaving the smashed carcass in a halo of blood, then wipe my palm on my faded jean cutoffs, willing myself not to think about the consequences a mosquito bite can have in the tropics.
Unseen birds call to one another with unfamiliar songs as we navigate our canoe through swirling eddies beneath trees that reach toward one another across the water like long-lost lovers. Our guide points to what appears to be a bumpy log at the river’s edge. “Cocodrilo,” he says.
I inhale sharply, instinctively lifting my dripping paddle from the water.
“Crocodile,” Lucas translates with a grin.
“Thanks, I got that,” I return, eyeing the other logs floating in the river.
We glide around a bend and without warning we’re dumped into a lagoon the size of a city block. I raise a hand to shade my eyes from the sudden glare of the sun, finally catching sight of the colossal villa that rises from the misty jungle like a wedding cake.
Xanadu sits in a clearing atop a hill, beyond a monumental fountain and a series of intricately terraced gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, where a dock stretches into the lake. The reflection of the afternoon light on the ivory façade is so bright, I can’t make out much detail beyond the wide columns and rows of arched windows at least three stories high, but the scope of the place is stunning.
“Damn.” Lucas trails his paddle through the water as he stares up at the villa.
The pictures I googled of it online yesterday didn’t take into account the juxtaposition with the landscape, didn’t prepare me for the sheer size of the thing. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve seen a palatial estate; though I grew up about as far from fancy as you can get, working as a model has put me squarely in the path of the world’s wealthy for half my life at this point. My fiancé’s parents have a house in Connecticut that must be at least fifteen thousand square feet, not to mention their Hamptons and Aspen homes. But this level of opulence, here of all places, is truly awe-inspiring.
I glance down at the square-cut diamond on my finger and the pit in my stomach deepens. Is he still my fiancé? God, it’s been an awful year so far—and it’s only January eighth. But I can’t allow myself to dwell on that now.
I blink up at the riverside Babylon, half expecting the vision to shimmer and fade like a mirage. No wonder my uncle Paul—Shiva, I have to remember to call him here—named the place Xanadu. I carried a copy of the Coleridge poem in my wallet for years, though it was unnecessary: I can still recite the whole thing by heart, as could he the last time I saw him.
Eight years ago. It was Halloween, and I’d just turned twenty-one. I remember my party-girl roommates being dumbfounded that I’d willingly traded a night of costumed revelry for a lecture on spirituality at a Brooklyn theater. I didn’t tell them who Paul Bentzen was to me. I shrank from the idea of anyone knowing he was my father’s brother; didn’t want to face the questions I couldn’t answer about why we were estranged.
At least publicly, he was still Paul Bentzen then and at the height of his fame, before the bad press tarnished his shine, on tour promoting his latest book with a series of lectures at sold-out concert venues. Living the Life You Deserve, it was called. People lined up from all over the world to hear him talk about how to find stillness and true connection in an ever faster and more isolated world.
I listened to his lecture in a daze, just as transfixed by him as the seekers and believers in the audience. It was impossible not to be. He was in his late forties at the time, his tall frame draped in white linen, wavy silver-blond hair loose about his shoulders, ice-blue eyes flashing as he preached like a Viking Jesus about radical affirmation and the beauty of surrendering to God. My Russian Orthodox mother had dragged me to church for liturgy and dogma every Sunday until I left home at fourteen, and while I feared retribution for my many sins, never once did I feel my heart swell the way hers did gazing up at the stained-glass windows above the altar. But Paul’s was a different God; an accessible God of love and light, of forgiveness and acceptance. It was no wonder he’d amassed a loyal following of millions with his books, podcasts, and workshops.
As I sat there with three hundred other lost souls listening to him speak, my heart ached with the realization of how much I’d missed him over the past decade. His sporadic visits between travels in far-flung locales had been the bright spots in my otherwise dingy childhood, his million-watt smile temporarily diffusing the gray clouds that always seemed to hang over our saltbox house. Even my reticent father seemed lighter when Paul was around. I remember falling asleep at night to the sound of their voices filtering through the thin walls as they sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and debating religion, politics, and philosophy, quoting at one another from dog-eared esoteric tomes.
I listened in awe as Paul told me stories of tracking poachers in Kenya and recounted tales of being chased by wild boars in Indonesia and pirates off the coast of Sri Lanka. My dad couldn’t deal with crowds or loud noises, but Paul took me to see the fireworks in DC on the Fourth of July and to the state fair in Raleigh, where he rode every ride with me and ate just as much cotton candy as I did. It was shortly after this experience I expressed to my mother that I wished he were my dad instead, and she slapped me across the face.
After Paul finished answering questions that evening in Brooklyn, I stood in line at the back of the auditorium with everyone else to get my copy signed. I hadn’t seen him since my father’s funeral, when I was eleven, and wasn’t sure he’d know me, though our familial resemblance was stronger than ever. When he glanced up from the book he was signing to get my name, his eyes blazed with recognition and he broke into a radiant smile.
“Sveta!” he cried, standing abruptly. Bystanders looked on with interest as he leaned across the table to hug me, impervious to their stares. As we pulled apart, I found my eyes had misted and he was waving over a beautiful young woman with caramel skin and long raven hair, who couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me. “I’m taking a break,” he told her. She took me in with gleaming gray eyes, a hint of suspicion in her curiosity, and I recognized she was more than just his tour manager. “This is my niece, Sveta. My brother’s daughter.”
Her gaze softened and she gave me a warm smile. “Kali,” she said, pulling me in to kiss me once on each cheek before enveloping me in a musky floral-scented hug. “So nice to meet you.”
I don’t remember exactly what Paul and I said in the quarter hour we spent sitting on a threadbare couch in the greenroom of the theater. I know he asked about my mother, who was still cleaning houses in South Florida and proud as ever. I recall being touched he’d followed my career and seen my latest spread in Italian Vogue. He encouraged me to continue writing poetry, asked whether I still remembered “Kubla Khan,” and we recited it together. When Kali appeared in the doorway signaling our time was up, he invited me to meet him at the Plaza for dinner, but I had to catch a midnight flight to Japan for a job.
He reached out a couple of times after that, inviting me to visit the California retreat center he was operating before he exiled himself to this jungle in the wake of the accusations that tainted his name. Out of loyalty to my mother I never went. I still don’t know why she cut him off after my father’s death; her lips are sealed as tightly as a clamshell. She’s not an easy woman, my mother. But she’s also not a person who does things without reason, and she loves me like a mother bear loves her cubs: not softly, but biologically.
I’m so lost in thought that it takes me a moment to register the six-foot-high pile of sticks at the river’s edge, a white shape barely visible atop it. My breath catches in my throat as I realize what I’m looking at.
My brilliant uncle, the bestselling author who inspired a spiritual awakening in so many, the last living member of my father’s family, is wrapped inside that shroud. This pile of sticks on the bank of a river that snakes through the Lacandon Jungle is his funeral pyre.
Lucas looks from the pyre to me, his nearly black eyes creased with concern. Or perhaps he’s simply squinting into the sun.
An unexpected wave of emotion crashes into my chest. I drop my damp forehead into my hands, staring past my knees to the muddy, dented metal bottom of the boat. I don’t know what I’m so afraid of. I knew he was dead; I knew I was coming here for his funeral. But seeing his body wrapped in white gauze, so small in relation to this lake, this rain forest, that house—so vulnerable, about to be burned before my eyes . . . I didn’t expect this.
I realize I’m sheltered. Out of touch, overly privileged. That is to say, American. We don’t take care of our own dead anymore.
I vividly remember the uniformed pallbearers carrying my father’s flag-draped casket from the hearse through the dappled shade of the orange and yellow sycamore trees to the grave site. After the funeral, I was tortured by dreams of his broken body tumbling onto the grass, his beloved face unrecognizable in the wake of the blast that killed him. I was a child, of course I was afraid of death. But I’m an adult now. I know intellectually that death is a natural part of the life cycle, and Paul of all people would understand this inherently.
Get it together, Sveta.
I won’t be a coward. I will face this uncomfortable moment and live through it, as he instructed in Surrender, his first bestseller.
As we navigate past the pyre toward the dock, I force myself to raise my eyes and rest my gaze on the white gauze figure atop the pile of sticks. Blinking away the blur of unwanted tears, I grip the side of the canoe and bid my uncle farewell.