Questions pricked at me, and soon I was tearing through page after page.
Now that the intercom has broken the spell, my phone tells me that I not only burned through my free period, but the one after that, gym. Maybe that’s why Ms. Scofield—the school counselor—is calling me: detention for cutting class.
I pull the book up to my nose, an old habit. It smells faintly of old ink, of paper that was once too close to moisture and...something else. My mind hunts for the memory, but it escapes me.
One more minute. I’ll go to Scofield’s in a minute. The hunt for the memory the book’s smell evokes takes me down blind alleys and lands me almost eight years ago, in the faraway village where my mother grew up.
* * *
When I was ten years old, the women of Colinas went across the street from my grandmother’s house to see Don Isidro, the local curandero, one by one. They came back pale, clutching sweater fronts together with one hand near the neck and looking behind them, as if haunted. They whispered of being shown to the back room, where Don Isidro stayed when he came to visit. In a rustle of skirts and sisters they told the tale of what he’d said to them. “He’s no good, just like I thought, he’s running around,” and, “Three branches from the willow, braid them together and...”
Inevitably someone would describe in detail what Don Isidro did during her top-secret visit, although the others reminded her she wasn’t supposed to. He took a long puff of a big cigar and blew the smoke into a teacup, watched the pattern as it rose, then read a candle like it had her life story written in the flame in a way that sent her into uncontrollable shivers.
They shooed me away when they noticed I was listening. These were predictions and prescriptions I wasn’t allowed to hear.
We were there in my mother’s “back home” for six months. Long enough for Don Isidro to visit Colinas twice, once with enough time to see my mother. His visits were prized, and time with him was allotted by some unwritten math that only my aunts seemed to understand.
When I asked my mother what the curandero said, she replied, “He says we’ll cross the border on a Tuesday. And that we’ll make it through.” That was all she’d tell me, although I could tell there was more. Maybe something about my father who’d died when I was little. A message, perhaps. That night I dreamed of sneaking to see Don Isidro myself. In my dream, I crawled into a teacup and floated in smoke, up, up, out of the cottage and following the spines of the mountains all the way to North America.
I resented being excluded from my mother’s solo visit to the gnarled old cottage where the curandero’s mother lived. Don Isidro came to stay with his blind, ancient mother every once in a while as part of his rounds. No one quite knew how far afield his rounds took him, but the news of his arrival back in town spread like wildfire through the dry brush at the foot of the cordillera. By the afternoon of the day he’d arrived, he was completely booked for his whole weeklong stay. Everyone went to him with a covered head and a basket of fruit, bills carefully folded in an envelope tucked in a pocket like he was some priest in a cathedral for dark spirits, not a dude in a ramshackle cottage by a canal running with icy water from the mountains.
Although the whole fuss about him was irritating, I was grateful for my mother’s buoyed spirits after her visit to him. She had looked defeated for weeks at that point, like we’d never get back to the United States. Which was crazy, because the US was home. I’d gone to the States as a baby with my mother and grown up on Nickelodeon and Five Guys. When my mother picked me up from school in fifth grade and said, abruptly, “We need to go back home,” it had taken me a long beat before I understood she meant the country she’d grown up in, not our basement apartment. “Abuela’s sick. We have to go.”
Once we’d gone, we’d been stuck there. Stuck as my grandmother grew skinny in a matter of weeks, as my mother and my aunts washed her, faces lined with purpose. Stuck as everyone shuffled in wearing black and wailed in the front room with the big TV that looked like it was from the 1950s, and which had long been repurposed into a display case for knickknacks. Stuck after that, too, while the sisters decided what to do with the house, hinting it was time for us to go so the mud-walled place could be sold.
Stuck when we couldn’t get a visa to come back to the US because we’d overstayed our last one.
My mother had tried bribes and long lines, but we didn’t get a visa. She signed away her rights to her share of her mother’s house for enough money for us to take a plane to Mexico and then paid a guy to smuggle us in. On the US side the guy who’d led us across stuck us in a room with peeling wallpaper and told my mother he wouldn’t let us out until we paid him more. But he did let us out.
I never did find out how my mother paid what he asked for, because by that point all she had was a ten-dollar bill in a fake pocket she’d sewn into her bra.
* * *
I shake the memory away. Scofield is definitely going to give me a detention. But it might just be worth it. The book was so engrossing, the descriptions so alive and intoxicating, that it was as if it had bewitched me to keep reading. An alchemist is not a curandero, but there were similarities between the book and my memories of Don Isidro. Maybe it wasn’t the smell that reminded me of my mother’s visit to Don Isidro, but the magical ether that seemed to run through the two things.
They were the same, the alchemist from the book and old Don Isidro, in ways I couldn’t identify on a test, in ways I felt somewhere behind my throat. But not entirely. The alchemist falls in love with a showgirl and creates the most magical theater in all of London, where people for hundreds of miles come to be mesmerized and amazed, just like the women of my mother’s town were amazed. Who knows what Don Isidro was up to, why he left and roamed and came back unexpectedly. Maybe he ran a secret magical theater too.
I pull myself up off the library floor, take out my ponytail, and scrape my hair back with ragged nails into what I hope is a semblance of a respectable, visit-the-school-counselor look, then put my ponytail back in. Teachers and counselors never get tired of telling you not to judge a book by its cover, but that’s basically all they do, reading the superficial tea leaves of absences or rumor to figure out who to haul down to the office. As if they could know any of us in the hundreds of faces they deal with every day. I bet she has a checklist. I’m stressing it, but she just got to the Ds and that’s why she called me in.
Although probably not.
Ms. Scofield’s office is two doors away from the main office. I know there’s no reason for the actual office to make me nervous, but it does. And so does being this close to it. I knock on her door gently.
“Luisa, is that you?” I hear through the thin, plastic-y wood.
I turn the knob, open the door. “Hi, Ms. Scofield.”
“Thank you so much for coming. Come in, come in.” She moves her hand like she’s fanning herself.