MARIA DARK FLEW
north, from one America to the other, with a bag of treasure between her feet.
The man beside her spoke Spanish into a cassette recorder. He seemed hardly to
notice the lightening at their wings. The plane lurched, then continued to
glide; orange strobes reflected on the clouds that surrounded them. A flight
attendant cruised the aisle, checking seatbelts.
“What time will we land?” Maria
asked her.
“We’re in a holding pattern over
Philadelphia”, the woman said. “This
storm is turning to snow in New York.”
“You mean we might land here?”
Maria asked.
“We might”.
Lightening spit the sky, and for
one instant Maria wished to be on the ground anywhere: Philadelphia, Miami,
Machu Picchu. The she thought of Sophie and Nell, waiting at JFK, ready to
drive her home to Hatuquitit; almost absently Maria reached into her bag for a
talisman to guide the plane safely north. Her hand closed around the gold
goddess she planned to give Sophie. She felt like the mysterious stranger going
home, bringing storms with her.
“Pretty,” said the man beside her,
admiring the small statue. “Is it Incan?”
“No, she’s Chavin,” Maria said.
During their excavation at Chavin de Huantar, she and Aldo had found several
statues like her, and Maria, thinking of a present for Sophie, had commissioned
a local goldsmith to copy one.
“That belongs in the national
museum,” the man said reproachfully.
“She’s a replica. A present for my
sister, “Maria said. Aldo had taught her that foreign archaeologists were
always suspected of trying to remove antiquities.
“That’s too good for a present,”
the man said. He flinched at a crack of thunder, then resumed recording.
Maria
figured he thought she had robbed a grave. She’d have to tell Sophie about it;
it would add to Sophie’s pleasure in the goddess. Sophie would want details:
the fact that the man wore thick glasses and had hairy nostrils, the fact that
he began every other recorded sentence with “And furthermore.” From his litany,
Maria pegged him as a low-level lawyer for the local government.
Sopie
and Nell would be at the airport by now. Just before leaving the mountain,
Maria had called Sophie; the connection had been terrible, full of static, but
Maria thought Sophie had said she and Nall would come alone. Like the old days,
Maria thought. Before Maria married Aldo, before Sophie married Gordon and had
Simon and Flo, before Nell married Peter and became their sister- in-law and
Andy’s mother instead of just their best friend.
The
plane had been veering right, circling for forty minutes, but suddenly Maria
sensed it change course. Heading for home, she thought she could smell north.
She opened the hand clutching the statue for one quick look. The goddess was
fine and slender, nearly as beautiful as Sophie.
For one
moment Maria wondered whether Hallie would meet her at the airport. Of course
she would not. Sophie had a ringleader’s Knack for setting a scene, assembling
a party. Sophie would know that their mother had no place at this homecoming.
Hallie wouldn’t think it seemly to stage a big welcome for a daughter who had
left her husband to his glamorous dig, to Chavin mysteries, to thin mountain
air, who had left him to all those things forever- and for what?
To return to a place where she hadn’t lived for seventeen
years, where her mother’s house sat on a hill over-looking meadows bordered by
Bell Stream on the east and the Hatuquitit Correctional Institute for Women on
the West. To return to a town settled by Puritans who had called the Native
Americans “fiends of hell.”
To find
work in a place where archeologists taught at colleges or lectured at local
Native American museums instead of making discoveries destined for display in
the Smithsonian or the British Museum. Hallie would never understand why her
only child to escape the ordinary world would want to return to it.
Or so
Maria thought as the plane from Peru rode the storm’s front edge northeast and
became the last flight to land before JFK closed down.
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