Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (23 page)

But now it’s past noon, and the gala starts in a matter of hours, and there are no more skips in Roo’s steps. Instead, she scowls up at the trees and gives an occasional fear-of-heights shiver as our route steepens. Kyle looks as exhausted as I feel, his skin almost grayish, his golden eyes bloodshot. The jungle seems extra weird, extra claustrophobic. With every passing second I get more and more worried, more and more scared. I try not to think about what will happen to Dad, what will happen to Roo and Mom and me, if we don’t find an LTVT, but the thought hovers there like a dark fog, making it hard for me to breathe and sometimes even to see.

Anyway: My bladder is about to explode. I’ve been holding it for a
long
time, first because I didn’t want to distract anyone from The Mission, and then because we got going up this super-steep part with practically a cliff on the right-hand side and it was clearly not a good place for that kind of thing. I was planning on dealing with the situation as soon as we got to a less-steep place, but there doesn’t seem to
be
a less-steep place, and I seriously don’t think I can make it another step without using the so-called bathroom first, even though I hate asking Roo to stop in a place that’s making her fear of heights come out.

“Okay,” Roo says generously. “I have to pee too.” I flash her a weak smile of thanks. Whenever I’ve had to pee in the jungle over the last few days, Roo’s always stayed beside me, because I’m basically a wimp, and not all that happy about having to crouch down where any sort of exotic scorpion could bite my bum at any second, and it makes me feel better if Roo’s there, because she’s most certainly not a wimp.

“Fine, I’ll go on ahead a bit,” Kyle says impatiently. “Be fast.”

I take a look around for a possible place to go, but since there’s a steep slope stretching down to our right and up to our left, Roo and I have to squat exactly where we are.

“Darn!” I say, trying to crouch enough to pee but not enough that my bum touches any of the underbrush, which, let me just say, is a truly tricky balancing act.

For the first time ever, Roo seems to be finding it more upsetting to pee in the jungle than I am. She keeps glancing over her shoulder at the drop-off on the right side.

“Darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn!” I say the whole time I’m peeing, because that’s the kind of thing that would usually amuse Roo. But she doesn’t even crack a smile. She just looks petrified. And it makes me realize how lucky I am that I’m always the one who gets to be scared while she’s always the one who has to be brave and try to buck me up. It’s hard being the brave one.

It’s right then, as we’re retying the drawstrings on our jungle pants, that it happens. Maybe because of the warm liquid seeping into the loose dirt, maybe because of something going on deep inside the volcano, who knows, but suddenly a chunk of the slope breaks away beneath Roo’s foot. She shrieks a colossal shriek, and I give her a solid push up onto safe ground before I go slipping, sliding, catapulting downward.

First I hear voices, faraway echoes, someone screaming my name in a dream.

Then I open my eyes to find myself surrounded by hazy green darkness. I blink a couple times but it’s still dim. I feel vines—vines beneath my back, vines in my fists, vines at my ankles. I’m half lying, half sitting in the half darkness, my legs sinking slightly into thick black mud. I can actually
hear
the mud, a soggy sucking sound. I turn my head, look up and around to try to figure out where I came from, but all I see are layers upon layers of identical hazy dim green jungle rising all around me. Then I hear something else. It’s a bubbling sound, and it’s not coming from the mud. About a yard
beyond my feet, there’s a narrow little stream running over the black mud.

But
—wow
—my eyes suddenly attach themselves to something across the stream, something terribly bright in all this haziness, something dazzling.

It’s a pile of glimmering round objects as red as blood lying just inside a rotted-out tree trunk. I’m squinting at it, trying to see what it is—a crop of rare mushrooms? the guts of an animal? the world’s hugest rubies?—when I get slammed from behind in this totally backbreaking way, the wind so knocked out of me that I can’t even scream in pain before I get slammed
again
!

Behind me, Roo moans and Kyle grunts.

“Ow!” I yell. Although I’m so happy they’re here that the pain fades pretty quickly. “You came after me?” I say, twisting around to look at them.

“Of course!” Roo says merrily, though her face is bleached white with fear. Jumping down that drop-off is probably the scariest thing she’s ever done. I can’t even describe how much I love my sister right this second.

I wait for Kyle to say something too, such as “No problem, Mad. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth,” but when I look over at him I see he’s not thinking about me at all. Instead, he’s staring at that bright red pile across the stream.

“
Dios mío,
” Kyle murmurs.

Even I know that one.
My god
.

A weird expression spreads across his face—excitement or terror, I can’t quite tell. Roo follows his gaze and her eyes widen until I can see the whiteness all around her irises.

“No
way
!” Roo breathes, staring hard at the thing across the stream.

As usual, they’re in on something I’m not in on.

“Uh, excuse me,” I say, “do you guys know what that is?” And why does Roo always understand everything while I’m always left in the dark? And why do I always have to be confused at the wrong times?

“Shhh!” Roo hisses. “It’s probably nearby.”

“
What’s
nearby?” I whisper.

“Do you understand,” Kyle says, his voice even softer than mine, “that no one
ever
sees this? Like,
no one
?
Ever?
Not even your
dad
?”

“Sees what? What
is
it?” I try to speak as softly as Kyle but it’s impossible.

“Eggs,” Kyle mouths, his face brilliant with delight.

Eggs?

I squint, trying to see the red blobs better. I had no idea eggs could be that color, or look so moist and shiny. Or that they could glow.

“The sacred red eggs Señora V told me about!” Roo whispers in awe. “
Eggs as red as blood!
”

Well, no one ever told
me
anything about any sacred eggs. When the witch mentioned them she must’ve been speaking Spanish, murmuring under her breath to Roo, because I’ve never heard a word about any bloodred eggs.

“Wait a sec,” I whisper back. “You mean the eggs of—”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Roo mouths silently.

LTVT eggs!
LTVT eggs!
Maybe even the last LTVT eggs in the entire universe …

Very slowly, on all fours, Kyle crawls through the stream toward the nest. Roo follows, also crawling, and I do too, pretending it’s not at all annoying to crawl through this thick black clinging mud.

“Four eggs!” Kyle says, stopping to crouch a yard away from the rotted-out trunk. The nest emits a strange, slightly metallic smell.
We all stare at the eggs. Somehow they just make you want to stare at them. “
Four
eggs!”

“Shhh!” Roo scolds him, grabbing a handful of mud and spreading it across her face. “Hide yourself. Lie down. Be silent. Think like a bird.”

Much to my surprise, Kyle nods obediently. He smears mud across his face and lies down near the nest, imitating Roo, the bird net in his hands. When they lie there like that in their green uniforms, they practically vanish into the jungle, becoming part of the dimness, only the whites of their eyes giving them away.

“You!” Roo mouths at me. “Hurry!”

Yet again I let myself be bossed by my little sister, and soon enough I too look like part of the jungle floor. I even start to
feel
like part of the jungle floor, lying there frozen with mud on my face, gazing upward into all those leaves and branches and vines, the cool green light, the layers turning every last sunbeam green. Whenever a bird swoops by overhead, I look for a flash of gold, a rush of blue, staring and hoping, my eyes dizzy with greenness. But: No gold, no blue, and frankly, even though it’s pretty cool we found these eggs, I’m not sure how much good they’re going to do us. What we need is a real, live LTVT by six o’clock tonight. After a while I notice that both my legs have fallen asleep. But when I start to wiggle them to wake them up, Roo looks bullets at me, so I just have to stay here, unmoving.

I’m still on the lookout for gold and blue when I notice a brown bird circling down amid the layers of jungle. It’s definitely the dullest, most boring bird we’ve seen since we left the United States. It looks like any old bird you’d see in Denver, about the same size and color as a pigeon, and I think,
Poor bird, it must feel so unpretty compared to all the splendid birds around here. Especially the LTVT
.

The bird keeps descending toward us, toward the nest, and
then—get this! get
this
!—lands on Roo’s camouflaged stomach, and stretches its neck out toward the tree trunk as though it’s checking on the eggs.

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume the nest belongs to this bird. Or maybe, just maybe, Roo and Kyle are sadly mistaken, and those
aren’t
LTVT eggs?

Roo lies there, as still as dirt beneath the bird, barely breathing, and I slide my eyes over to Kyle’s eyes, and his eyes are gleaming with shock and amazement, and I’m wondering why he’s so excited about a bird that’s not the bird we’re looking for, when suddenly the bird realizes something fishy’s going on. It turns to look at Roo’s mud-covered face and spreads its wings up high and threatening, preparing to attack Roo—like it’s going to peck her eyes out—and I realize with horror that this bird wants to
kill
my sister! And I’m trying to move my fallen-asleep body so I can save Roo from getting blinded, and Roo is blinking very fast, and the bird rises up ferociously and rushes at Roo’s face (and right then I see that it
does
have a golden throat—there’s kind of a slight golden tint to the feathers there) and then the bird lands on Roo’s neck, and nuzzles up against her ear.

“Wait, is that a—?” I ask Kyle, my voice at normal volume, because it really doesn’t seem like there’s anything that could scare this bird away right now, considering the way it’s winding itself into Roo’s hair and smiling, at least as much as a bird can smile.

Kyle sits up and nods slowly, stunned, the bird net limp in his hands. “A female,” he says. “Impossible to find. One of the rarest things on the planet. Even my grandparents haven’t ever seen one. I’m sure your dad hasn’t either.” He shakes his head and wipes a smear of mud off his forehead, leaving an even larger smear.
“But that’s not what’s weird. I mean, yeah, that’s weird, but this is
weird
.”

He gestures at the bird, which is now cooing into Roo’s ear. Roo giggles as though she’s being tickled.

“Mad, that’s a
wild animal
. A famously
elusive
wild animal.”

“I know,” I say.

“You realize this is a miracle, right?” he asks me.

“Roo’s a miracle. Always has been.” Man, for all my wanting to be a heroine like the girls in my fantasy novels, Roo is so clearly the special one with magical powers. “She’s the special one,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” Kyle says, “but you’re the one who found the eggs.”

His voice is full of admiration, and I’m going,
Are you
serious? Kyle is going to give me credit for finding the eggs just because I lost my balance and rolled down the side of the volcano like an idiot? I would love to take credit, really I would, but I can’t. I just can’t.

“That was an accident, Kyle,” I say.

“No,” he says, “the volcano doesn’t allow for accidents of that sort.”

Oh great. Now he’s starting to sound like his grandmother. But hey, I should probably take whatever compliments I can get from Kyle.

“Okay,” I say awkwardly. Then I change the subject: “The males are a lot flashier and prettier, aren’t they?”

Roo and the bird are clucking and cooing at each other. Roo looks utterly, insanely happy.

Kyle shrugs. “Flashier, yeah. Prettier? I guess it’s a matter of opinion.”

I like Kyle extra much in that instant—he truly thinks the boring brown female plumage with just a bit of gold hidden away is prettier than the super-spectacular male plumage!

The bird hops up to Roo’s head and prances around. “Ooo, head massage!” Roo sighs.

“This,” Kyle says, shaking his head, “is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah,” I say, staring at my sister. “So … what next?”

“Well,” he says with a dazzling grin, “I guess we have our bird.”

Roo, who I thought had been completely tuning us out, jumps right in: “We’ll go to the gala tonight and show them what’s what, isn’t that right, Miss Perfect?”

And I’m like,
Wow, that’s really cute that Roo’s new nickname for me is Miss Perfect, plus I guess I
am
the one who found the eggs and all
, until I realize she’s talking to the bird.

When Roo stands up with Miss Perfect on her head, getting ready to follow Kyle downward, Miss Perfect lets out a long, loud cry, a sound so human it makes goose bumps pop up on my arms. The bird cranes her neck back toward her nest, her radiant bloodred eggs, and her body curves with longing.

“I’m sorry, Miss Perfect,” Roo says, close to crying herself. “I’m so, so sorry. But you understand. This is all for their sake.”

And I know it seems impossible, but Miss Perfect bobs her head as though she’s nodding in agreement with Roo—a nod of solemn understanding. The bird turns away from the nest and buries her head under her wing for a moment. Then she releases her head and holds her neck up stiffly, proudly. I think about La Lava taking Dad away from us, and get that hot feeling of tears behind my eyes.

“Will the eggs … be okay on their own?” I stop myself from saying
Will the eggs survive?

“I don’t know,” Kyle murmurs. “They can go half a day at most, I’d guess, before there’s permanent damage.”