The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [44]
Esperanza was just stepping out of the cab, and when she saw the kids she fell back against the seat, just as if she’d been hit with twenty-eight pounds of air. For the next ten minutes she looked blanched, like a boiled vegetable. She couldn’t take her eyes off Turtle.
As we hiked up the trail I fell in behind Estevan and made small talk. Lou Ann was in the lead, carrying Dwayne Ray in a pouch on her back and holding his molded-plastic car seat over her head like some space-age sunbonnet. Behind her, ahead of us, went Esperanza. From behind you could have mistaken her for a schoolgirl, with her two long braids swinging across her back and her prim walk, one small sandal in front of the other. The orange plastic canteen on her shoulder looked like some burden thrust upon her from another world.
Eventually I asked Estevan if his wife was okay. He said certainly, she was okay, but he knew what I was talking about. A little later he said that my daughter looked like a child they’d known in Guatemala.
“She could be, for all I know.” I laughed. I explained to him that she wasn’t really my daughter.
Later, while we sat on the rocks and ate baloney sandwiches, Esperanza kept watching Turtle.
Estevan and I eventually decided to brave the cold water. “Don’t look,” I announced, and stripped off my jeans.
“Taylor, no! You mustn’t,” Lou Ann said.
“For heaven’s sake, Lou Ann, I’ve got on decent underwear.”
“No, what I mean is, you’re not supposed to go in for an hour after you eat. You’ll drown, both of you. It’s something about the food in your stomach makes you sink.”
“I know I can depend on you, Lou Ann,” I said. “If we sink, you’ll pull us out.” I held my nose and jumped in.
The water was so cold I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t just stayed frozen up there on the snow-topped mountain. The two of us caught our breath and whooped and splashed the others until Lou Ann was threatening our lives. Mattie, more inclined to the direct approach, was throwing rocks the size of potatoes.
“If you think I’d go in there to drag either one of you out, you’re off your rocker,” Mattie said. Lou Ann said, “If you all want to go and catch pee-namonia, be my guest.”
Estevan went from whooping to singing in Spanish, hamming it up in this amazing yodely voice. He dog-paddled over to Esperanza and rested his chin on the rock by her feet, still singing, his head moving up and down with the words. What kind of words, it was easy to guess: “My sweet nightingale, my rose, your eyes like the stars.” He was unbelievably handsome, with this smile that could just crack your heart right down the middle.
But she was off on her own somewhere. From time to time she would gaze over to where the kids were asleep on the blue bedspread. And who could blame her, really? It was a sweet sight. With the cottonwood shade rippling over them they looked like a drawing from one of those old-fashioned children’s books that show babies in underwater scenes, blowing glassy bubbles and holding on to fishes’ tails. Dwayne Ray had on a huge white sailor hat and had nodded forward in his car seat, but Turtle’s mouth was open to the sky. Her hair was damp and plastered down in dark cords on her temples, showing more of her forehead than usual. Even from a distance I could see her eyes dancing around under eyelids as thin as white grape skins. Turtle always had desperate, active dreams. In sleep, it seemed, she was free to do all the things that during her waking life she could only watch.
We went back at that time of evening when it’s dusky but the headlights don’t really help yet. Mattie said she was stone-blind this time of night, so Estevan drove. “Be careful now,” she warned him as the three of them climbed into the cab. “The