Wyatt

She wrote back, asking for time to think, and wrote again two months later -- he had begun to worry, although she'd always procrastinated on this sort of thing -- inviting him down to talk.

The airport there, in San Jose, was so small and primitive that the terminal had only three spaces for aircraft. He looked for her while he waited in line, and couldn't read the expression on her face. Puzzlement, or apprehension. But when he had given the reason for his visit ("tourism", though it didn't seem quite right) and when his passport had been stamped, and when the official had said "Enjoy your stay", Ada had pushed forward to the front of the waiting crowd. She put her arms around him and pressed herself into him and said,

"Wyatt. Wyatt. All those years. How I've missed you."

That night, in the bed they shared, she said "uncontrollable passion", and laughed, and drew him down to her, and Wyatt remembered these, her ways. Her joy in him was unchanged.

"You were right," she said. "That time you came back to Lawrence to try to talk some sense into me. We have no choice."

The next day they drove her father's ancient Land Rover up the Pan-American Highway, and turned off at a dirt road and bucked and swayed their way up that savage, decayed mess, full of holes and rocks and mud, for hours.

She lived with her father Thomas and her stepmother Maria. There was no room for him in the house, not because it was too small, but because Ada was embarrassed to have her lover under her father's roof. He slept in the place she called her "tree house", a huge hollowed-out stump with a small room in it, which had been her playhouse when she was growing up. He spent most of his time outdoors or in the real house, but at night he slept on the table in the little room. There was no space on the floor. In the morning Ada would come and wake him, and they would sit on the stoop holding hands until Maria called out that Clover was awake. The treehouse was too small to live in and after a few days of this she asked her brother Henry to loan Wyatt the little cabin he owned near the Meeting house. Occasionally Henry rented it to hippies travelling through, and Wyatt insisted on paying the going price, only about five dollars a night. After dinner she and Wyatt would ride the mile and a half there on horseback, and she would stay a while. Usually she would nap after they'd had sex, and then go back to the house, riding her horse. This went on until the night they fell asleep and didn't wake. She galloped off at dawn and found her family at the breakfast table.

"Don't think about me," her father said. "You should move over there. I see you looking out the window, trying to see the place. It's where your heart is. I understand."

So she moved in, bringing Clover with her, and for the first time Wyatt had a family. During the day, when Ada was helping at the Quaker school, Wyatt would tend Clover, and sometimes take her along when he investigated the forest. It was as Ada had said -- endlessly interesting. He didn't need a machete to get through; it wasn't impenetrable. The trees were tall, and spaced apart, and there was less underbrush than the woods back home. The shade was deep, with only scattered spots of sunlight, and few plants grew on the floor, where the light was dim. The real action was higher up, where the contest for a glimpse of sun was waged. The boles of the trees soared a hundred or two hundred feet, some smooth, others covered with vines and epiphytes and bromeliads, adorned with vegetable matter not their own. Above, an irregular roof of leaves. No glimpse of sky, except occasionally where an old forest giant had fallen and left a clearing for new growth to pioneer. These rare gaps were raw blemishes, not damp and dim and cool, but bright and hot, and improbably crowded with plants struggling with each other for every inch of space and glint of sun.

He rarely saw animals, but there were bugs, and butterflies, and every kind of vegetation, with every imaginable kind of leaf. Once in a couple of hours a mixed flock of birds came through, and he'd be busy trying to see all the species, to look them up later. A minute or two, and they'd have moved on, their calls receding into silence.

There were birds that don't flock, but in the deep shade they were difficult to spot. They sat and blended in. Even the most brilliant merged with their surroundings. Even the quetzal. Wyatt began taking Clover to the preserve every morning, hoping for a look at this bird. Ada had described it to him, and Wyatt had seen the color plate in Birds of Costa Rica. And then one day she wore that two-foot-long green feather woven in her hair, and Wyatt was in love with a bird he had never seen, a famous bird. He had fallen the way a boy falls in love with a movie star. The bird that is spoken of with the adjective "resplendent" before its name. The inspiration for the phoenix.

He saw it finally through a gap in the trees -- a male, sitting on a branch, with those incredibly long tailfeathers trailing below. He was in a spot of light, with the scarlet breast showing. The rest of him, including his crest, and those tailfeathers, was a brilliant iridescent emerald. Wyatt watched until he took off, and flew down and to the right, the tail coverts floating sinuously behind. Wyatt waited, hoping to see again. When he turned, Clover had vanished.

He called, and looked around himself in a circle. He waited and watched, and prayed, though he don't believe in prayer. The choices were to wait, to run for help, or to start searching alone. He ran along the trail in one direction as far as he thought she could have gone, calling her name. He ran back the other way, calling again, and heard a giggle. She was hiding behind a large leaf, a few feet off the trail. She was very pleased with herself when Wyatt picked her up.

"Clover," he said, "don't ever, ever do that," and held her close until she struggled to free herself.

From then on, he tied a string around her waist and held the other end when they were in the forest. She was never any trouble, except when she was tired. She was curious, always looking around her, even though she was a toddler. She could stare for minutes on end, wholly absorbed in deciphering the holes in the leaves, or the manner in which the ants cut up and carried away their loads. From the beginning her powers of concentration were uncommon. When she got older, and interested in mathematics, and began to work on proofs and problems, they would call her for dinner and the response would be silence. When Wyatt spoke to her from the door of her room she wouldn't hear. They learned that when this happened they only needed to leave a plate of food on the table, and she would wander downstairs after everyone was in bed and she finally, after all those hours of work, had wakened from her train of thought. The next day, she always asked, "Why didn't you call me for dinner?" and never believed them when they said they had.

Maybe his memory had tricked him into remembering her more that way than she really was. Maybe she wasn't unique. Wyatt had never spent time around a child so young. He had no one to compare her to. But he believed she was like her mother in that absorption. In other ways, though she was not his daughter, she was like him more than like Ada. Clover had the detachment Wyatt had always tried to cultivate. With her, though, it was inborn. She was an odd child, but lovable and happy and good-natured. It was later that she became withdrawn.

When Wyatt wasn't traipsing with Clover, he helped Ada's father with his farm. Since he didn't know anything about dairying or farming, and Thomas was getting old, Wyatt did much of the heavy work, and enjoyed it, although Thomas kept telling him not to. But after years of sitting behind pianos, or touring, or recording in studios, physical labor was a delight. And he wanted to help Thomas, because Thomas was always willing to stop whatever he was doing and help Wyatt.

Thomas looked like a Quaker: plain blue clothes, simple scuffed boots, a beard of biblical proportions. They'd abandoned the broadcloth clothes and the wide-brimmed hats, but he wore the modern equivalents -- denim, chambray, and an old felt hat. He never pretended. What he was, he was in plain sight. He seemed almost to have no interior. He gave his attention to simple things: the health of his animals and plants, the soundness of the roof on his house, how much longer he could drive before he needed gasoline. His most complicated concerns were the happiness of his wife and daughter and son. He didn't think about himself. He was a happy man.

One morning they'd been looking together at an old barn he was considering buying and tearing down for firewood.

"Too much work," he pronounced. "Too well built."

He liked Wyatt to drive, so he could watch the countryside. They were halfway home when he said, "I hope you're not taking advantage of my daughter. I've been here so long I don't understand people like you. Are you sincere? If she's hurt again, it will last a long time. This divorce, you know."

"Sir, I love your daughter. I would never hurt her, not if I could help it."

"That's what I hoped."

Wyatt downshifted, and the engine raced. He shifted back up into third. "There's something I want to ask. Ada's afraid you think she had an affair with me, you think that's why the marriage broke."

"No. It never occurred to me. She wouldn't do that."

Wyatt helped him with the cows in the morning, their breath like clouds and like bellows, their hooves thudding like horseshoes, but more dully, on the cement floor of the milking shed. They looked and acted incredibly stupid, but they radiated a contagious calm. He felt the heat of their bodies when he hooked the machines to their udders. He grew used to their sweet stink.

He helped with the coffee harvest as well. He didn't have the knack for finding all the berries on a plant -- sometimes they were hidden at the bottom of the bush -- so his job was bagging. The workers dumped their baskets, and Wyatt bagged the berries and carried them to the trailer. When it was full Wyatt drove to the factory where the beans were sorted, washed, and extracted. These were long days and at the end of the harvest Wyatt was ready for a break.

He had been wanting to see other parts of the country. There were no cars for sale in Monteverde or Santa Elena at the time, so he caught a ride down to the capital. He was gone a week, and glad to get back home.

The kitchen, where Maria spent most of her time, was on the left of the hall. When Wyatt came back from San Jose she met him at the door and handed him the baby and pulled him into the kitchen. Wyatt sat there, at the great table, with Clover in his lap. Maria hurried from cupboard to drawer, getting a plate and a bowl and utensils. She had a pot of stew going on the stove. She ladled it into a bowl and set it in front of him, with cheese and bread and butter on the plate.

"So good you are home. Ada stayed here while you were there. She will be happy to see you."

He hadn't touched the food yet, admiring the table. A single slab of wood three inches thick, it had to weigh hundreds of pounds. Everything in Thomas' house was built to last for centuries. Wyatt didn't notice this the first few days, because Ada was all he thought about, even when she wasn't in front of him. But when he got over his hypnosis, he saw how thick the table was, and then went looking around the house. The house and furniture were as plain and durable as that table. One day when no one was home he jumped up and down in the middle of the main room. Not a shiver. Not a sound. It was like jumping on rock.

The top of the table had been sanded and varnished. A few scratches and dents marred it, and made it more beautiful.

"Eat," Maria said. "You come from far."

He lifted Clover onto the table and picked up the spoon. Goat stew, with vegetables from Ada's garden. There were tomatoes and carrots and potatoes and celery and corn, and others Wyatt didn't recognize. Flecks of pepper floated on the surface.

Maria watched. This was her favorite thing to do: feed someone, and watch them as they ate, and talk. When Wyatt wiped the sides of the bowl with his bread, she refilled it.

"This is better than anything I ate in San Jose," Wyatt said.

"You nice man. You bought car?"

"Yes. It's outside."

She excused herself to go look. "Toyota Land Cruiser," she said when she came back. "Good car. Henry has Land Cruiser."

"Yes. A good car for bad roads."

"What is the thing in back?"

"A keyboard."

"Que?"

He pantomimed piano playing. "An electric organ. So I can practice my music."

"Ah! Good. I want to hear."

"I'll be glad to." He wiped his mouth. "Please excuse me. I'm sleepy. I'm going back to the cabin."

"No. You sleep in Ada's room. She is home soon. I play with Clover."

She smiled at the girl and fluttered her lips. Clover giggled. They were both laughing when Wyatt fell asleep.

Wyatt roused when he heard Ada's voice through his dreams. They were seated around the table eating dinner. Even her brother Henry was there. Ada was at the far end, her current reading next to her plate. She always had some great thick book within reach. He'd seen her stumbling home not paying attention because she was absorbed in reading. Sometimes she walked right past the house. She said she'd even gone by, turned around, and done the same thing going the opposite direction, passing the house a second time. She wasn't in the least embarrassed about it; she laughed along with whomever she told this to.

"Hello," Thomas said. "Get a plate and join us."

"Maria already fed me. I won't need to eat for at least two days."

"You bad man," she scolded. "I give you good food."

"Yes. It was good. So good I ate too much."

He sat at the other end from Ada, next to a girl with long blond hair and green eyes. Around her neck were what used to be called love beads. She wore a peasant blouse and porcupine quill earrings.

"This is Dawn," Henry said. "Dawn, this is Wyatt."

Dawn nodded and smiled. She had a wide mouth and large, even white teeth. Her eyes squinted when she smiled.

"She was renting the cabin before you," Ada said.

Dawn smiled at Ada.

"How was your trip?" Henry asked.

"I wish they'd mark the roads. I went past the turnoff and got to Limonal before I realized my mistake. Then I came up the back way, and it's worse than the regular road."

"How did the car stand up to it?"

"Great. I'm the one who feels damaged."

"You did pretty well to get all the paperwork done in a week. Where are you going with the car?"

"Both coasts. The big volcanoes. Braulio Carillo. For starters."

Dawn spoke. "I can write a list of cheap places to crash."

He had heard her story from Ada. Dawn had been wandering the country for six weeks before she drifted into Monteverde, liked it, and decided to stay. She'd rented the little cabin from Henry for a while, before moving in with him, ostensibly as his housekeeper. This was the subject of a lot of gossip and speculation among the Quakers and Ticos both, and it was clear to him that Henry was keeping his mouth shut for a reason. He was being too careful, never doing anything in public that might be interpreted as intimacy. He didn't even look at Dawn when he was talking to her. He was trying hard too hard.

"Thanks," Wyatt told her. He'd had been planning to camp, but he could keep the list in the glove compartment in case of rain.

Ada came outside to look at the car. "I'm not coming to the cabin tonight," she said.

"Are we living here now?"

"Not we. Me. Father told me what you asked him."

"Oh. He said it never occurred to him. That you wouldn't do that."

"How dare you?"

"What? You were worried, and the subject sort of came up."

"He's my father and this is my family, and I don't want you trying to fix my problems. Or embarrassing me."

"Ada -- "

"I lived with Owen for over six years, almost seven years, and that's what it was like. I couldn't control anything. I don't want to be here, I like the U.S. better. I don't like living on my father's charity, but I don't have any money, so I have to depend on him. I had to depend on Owen for money, too, and I'm tired of it, I always seem to end up relying on other people. I don't want an old boyfriend coming in and being my white knight."

"But -- "

"You'd better go," she said. "I can't even see straight. I'll talk to you in a few days."

"Ada? Ada!"

She was closing the door. Everybody changes, even you, Wyatt thought.

He drove home with an empty passenger seat. The car had a cassette player and he sat in the turnout below the cabin and listened to Van Morrison for a while: Slipping and sliding / All along the water fall, with you / My brown eyed girl, / You my brown eyed girl / Do you remember when we used to sing... So hard to find my way, / Now that I'm all on my own. / I saw you just the other day, / My how you have grown and rewinding the tape each time at the end of the song so he could listen again. There was nothing better to do but think of what he might do next, so he did that, too, while he listened. Maybe he would drive down to the Osa peninsula. It was far away and hard to reach. Timing the river crossings to miss the tides would be an adventure.

He stumbled the hundred yards or so uphill on the path in the dark, continually straying off and feeling his way back on with his feet. When he saw the dim bulk of the cabin he stepped carefully up, past the rotten bottom step. There were a dozen stairs, and the bottommost was the treacherous one.

The headlamp was on the board next to the door. The place was depressing in the light from the bulb: one small room, a woodburning stove in the far corner, and the stone sink and tap along the back wall. Kerosene lamps hanging on nails, one of them from the ceiling, where Wyatt had to be careful not to bump it with his head. No refrigerator. A large cupboard with the plates and food -- bread and cheese and other things that didn't need to be kept cold. The rickety table and chairs that, with the bed, consumed half the room. The tiny bathroom was concealed behind an old wool curtain.

He pulled the quilt off the bed. If he had to sleep alone, he'd sleep on the veranda. At least the air would be fresh and he wouldn't feel cramped.

He had dozed when the sound of someone on the path woke him. A circle of light bounced on the ground, disappearing for a second or two at a time, and getting closer.

"Who's there?"

"It's me," Ada said. She climbed the steps and knelt next to him. She kissed him. "I'm sorry, sweetheart." Her cheek was wet against his.

"If you don't tell me the boundaries, I won't know where they are."

"There aren't any boundaries. There aren't any rules. Sometimes I wish there were. But there aren't, and with you, that makes me glad."

"Then why -- "

"Shush," she said, and lay half on top of him, her arms around his neck. "I don't want to talk. I might get angry again."

She'd always fallen asleep easily, and that hadn't changed. Now she started to, so Wyatt roused her and they went inside. She kissed him again and said, "Hold me."

She rose early that morning -- that, too, was unchanged; she was still an early riser -- and in rising woke him, and they sat on the veranda with their feet on the top stair, listening in the darkness to the birds calling each other. Day came as a slow dissipation of the gloom. Sunrise is quicker in low latitudes, but their little house was among the trees, on the steep side of a mountain sideways to the dawn, and the light filtered in. When it was finally day he said what he was ready to:

"Ada, we have to make some plans. We can't live like this. One shitty room. No electricity or hot water. I'm not used to this. You hate it as much as I do. Everybody here has the comforts but us. And what about Clover? Doesn't she deserve better?"

"I'm not ready to talk," she said.

"Well I am. We can't go on ducking it."

"Wyatt, I just ended a marriage. Years of my life, gone, and I'm back where I was, but with a child to take care of, and I am not ready. You are going to have to be patient. Very patient. I know what you're saying is true, but this is happening too soon and too fast, and I need time."

"This is -- "

"No. You have to trust me. And I want you to remember, always, that I never stopped loving you. I forgot, but I never stopped. I love you, and I know you want us to be permanent, and I think I want that too, some day. But you will have to wait."

He needed space, and comfort, and a place to practice his music without having to borrow a room from Thomas. His career, which had been improving, now collapsed again. He worried that his house, and his possessions, weren't being well taken care of, though his friend Buzz reassured him in weekly letters that everything was in good shape. In Monteverde there wasn't even privacy for an argument: at her father's house there was always someone around, and at the cabin, strangers walked past on the trail at inopportune times. Not that Ada was easy to argue with; she usually ignored his outbursts. His needs became a rash he couldn't cure. No matter how much he tried not to be irritated, he couldn't. Some food would rot, or the latrine would need mucking out, and his anger would return. But when he looked at Ada, he could only think that it was easy to be beautiful when you had money, but she was beautiful when she had nothing, and didn't even know she was. Then he would be ashamed of his childishness. The world was a harsh and unforgiving place, and he had been lucky to find her, who never in her life had an evil thought, never hated anyone, and wanted to live in peace. Wyatt loved her for what she didn't know about the world, until she learned it, and which she then chose to overlook and live and act as she had before she knew it. Living was a process of suffering, evil, and cruelty, and life itself little more than loss and pain. He loved Ada because she didn't believe this when he first met her, and later when she had suffered, could no more be embittered or damaged than she had been before. What he wanted was simply to be left alone, to live a life of love, and for him this was only possible with her. He had met no other woman with whom he could have this.

They lived together for another half year, and after the one time she never lost her temper. Whenever Wyatt spoke up she asked for patience and apologized for delaying.

They ate dinner with her family several nights a week, and used the shower nearly every day, and in general were a burden. Thomas and Maria never gave any hint that they might feel imposed on. In general, the cabin was a difficult place to keep the child, and they found themselves spending increasing amounts of time at Thomas' house. This pleased Maria, who loved Clover, and was constantly offering to tend to her. Ada often left Clover overnight, both because it was a constant effort to watch her and make sure she didn't wander onto the veranda and fall down the stairs, and because Ada would not have sex with Wyatt when the child was with them in that tiny room. The nights they were free of the child they fucked for hours. In the end, it was this that solved their problem. He'd skipped the birth-control discussion with Ada. It was a subject that never came up with other women -- all the ones he'd known were on the pill. It didn't occur to him that in this, as in so much else, Ada might be different. She'd been on the pill in college, with him. He didn't know that she considered herself infertile, and thought Clover was a lucky accident, that she had no need for birth control.

The two of them living together scandalized most of the Quakers. When Wyatt saw this, he understood why Henry played cool in public with Dawn. The only opinion Ada cared about was Thomas's, and Thomas was unconcerned. But the coldness from some of the others was obvious. Ada said it would pass. She only wanted to go on from day to day, putting off thinking about what they should do. Wyatt wanted a future: the wedding rings, children, plans, a house together, the tax breaks, the official recognition of permanence. The business partnership that marriage entailed. The shared enterprise. Wyatt wanted this all locked up. He wanted to dispose of the issue and get on with their life. It was his big gig: you showed up on time, gave it your best, and stayed to the end.

Sometimes she'd say something that gave him an opening, as when she yearned aloud to get back to the United States, if she could only could find a way.

"That's easy," Wyatt would say. "Marry me."

She would reply, "I've already failed at that one."

Then they'd argue -- politely, because arguments with her were more like discussions -- and she'd say, "It's all I can do to take care of me and Clover."

"I'll help."

"No. Either you'll try to train me, or I'll try to train you. I've had enough of that."

He tried talking about their ostracism, and she wouldn't listen. Nothing moved her, until she found out she was going to have another child. Then she shrugged, and sighed, and agreed. She admitted later that she was glad to have a reason. She'd been burned on marriage once, so she needed a nudge. The pregnancy did it.

They were married on the lawn of the Meeting house, in front of her family and friends. They began with silence. Wyatt had memorized the words, and knew that the ceremony is a promise between the two people. Quakers are like that, he'd found out: there's no officialdom. They didn't have many ceremonies, and the ones they did were do-it-yourself. But Wyatt thought there was probably a customary minimum time before one of you spoke, and he didn't know how long it was, and he wanted to hear Ada say the words first, so he waited. She surprised him with the brevity of her silence. Within a minute, looking into his eyes, and with none of her tentative, questioning tone, she said:

"In the presence of God and these our friends, I Ada take thee Wyatt to be my husband, promising with divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful wife for so long as we both shall live."

He answered, "In the presence of God and these our friends, I Wyatt take thee Ada to be my wife, promising with divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful husband for so long as we both shall live."

Then Wyatt put on her finger the same ring he had given her in Los Angeles, which she'd returned later. She put a ring on his finger. They signed the certificate, and everyone else signed the back of it as witnesses.

They sat down to a meal at the picnic tables, and Henry announced that he and Dawn were planning to get married. Maria said, "So we going to have two more grandchilds."

"How did you know?" Ada and Dawn asked, and looked at each other.

"I am old lady," Maria said. "I like to see the little babies come into the world." She laughed then, and said in Spanish, "Lucky guess."