T. Parker - The Jaguar

She placed both hands over her womb. She was breathing quickly but not deeply and she was light-headed in the breezeless heat. Panic kills. Dad.

She stared at the two paths. The roots of the left path were worn as smoothly as the roots of the right. The right path had a thin layer of white sand, as did the left. Both were of equal width. Both led through thickets of almost indistinguishable trees and plants. They looked like twins staring back at her. Then she thought she saw something. She knelt down slowly to one knee, balancing herself on her fingertips. This made her dizzier, so she took deeper breaths, and faster. She blinked to clear the sweat from her eyes. In the filtered light she saw the footprint on the right path. It was just a small crescent shape, a partial heel, maybe, with the faint zigzag of a sole pattern within it. In front of it was a larger mark, once an oval, perhaps, marked with the same pattern. Going in her direction, she thought.

She stood and fought off the dizziness with deep fast breaths. She felt a fresh eruption of sweat on her face. Who are you? When were you here? Minutes ago? Days? Were you going to the cenote or somewhere else?

She had heard that there were villages in this direction, east, and a hotel, and a marina. She didn’t know the names of them or even what country they might be in. She looked straight up as if the sun could give her some clue but it wasn’t visible through the thick copse overhead.

Traveled or less traveled. Frost. All the difference. Some help that is, in the middle of a jungle.

So now what? She had to decide and she knew this, but how? On the basis of what? On the basis of who she was and what she was. What else was there to reckon by? Erin had always believed that human nature and human beings were fundamentally good. Not always but usually. Thus she now told herself that another human being might be some kind of help to her, or at least not a hindrance or a threat. In her life she had seen generosity and selflessness, and sacrifice and goodwill. She had seen their opposites too, but if she had to choose right now, she would choose to believe that people, given a chance, would do the right thing. Mostly.

She stepped over the footprint and followed it down the fork leading to her right. What a strange feeling to have lost the known and then to follow what she only believed. Soon she was halfway there, she thought, based on memory. But how good was it? She looked for more shoe prints and she saw a few but these were yards apart, as if the walker were a giant striding through high grass.

Finally she saw something she recognized, a lightning-blasted fig tree, blown to splinters by the bolt, the splinters black and upraised in the green density around them. She had seen this with Armenta and now it seemed a sign that she was going to find the cenote and Bradley, and in a few short hours they would be in the airport in Chetumal, boarding a plane to home and freedom.

Closer to the cenote the trail widened and she remembered this place, too, where Armenta had said that the trees grew taller and more fully because they were drawing on the same ground water as the cenote. She broke into a trot and allowed hope to spark inside her like the beginning of a fire. Then she had to slow again, short of breath and her legs getting heavy.

Through the trees ahead she saw the first glimmers of the pool. The water was fired with sunshine this time of day and the surface looked flat as a golden mirror. When she came to the last heavy stand of trees she stopped and stepped inside them and waited for her heart to settle. She could only see a small part of the cenote from here and she knew that Bradley would be hidden, but she was disappointed that he was not the first thing she saw, that he didn’t just step from the foliage into a column of sunlight and smile at her. Was this another lie of his? Another betrayal?

When her breath finally slowed she approached the pool, staying along the rim of the trees. Closer the cenote looked perfectly round, as if it had been drilled from solid gray rock. From here, with the sun at her back, she could see the last lip of rock before the water, and it was worn smooth by hundreds of years of people swimming and drinking and filling their vessels with the cold, clean water that was always here. There were crude stone benches set back from the pool, ancient gray-black slabs balanced upon others, and even these were polished smooth by centuries of human touch.

She saw the place where she had stood when she threw the plate into the pool. She imagined the treasures piled up somewhere down in the black water-the Mayan gold and silver, their statues and calendars, the gems and jewelry and valuables plucked from ancient history right up to the Corvette and the musical instruments-and the bones of the sacrificed spiking it all. Nothing ever moves down there, she thought. No flow. No current. No tides. Just stillness forever, amen.

She scanned the far side for signs of her husband but saw nothing. So she stepped out into the open and walked toward the water. When she got up nearly to the edge of it she could see the whole lovely pool. The treetops rimmed the perimeter but directly over the water the sky was clear, and behind her, to the west, the sun angled its rays onto the surface and turned the water to gold. In this gold the reflected trees stood upside down, their trunks rooted to their sponsors at the waterline.

“Bradley?” she asked quietly. Then a little louder, “Brad?”

She watched and waited. A puff of breeze scattered the tree trunks on the water, then they reformed, inverted again. She looked back down the trail and saw just jungle. She started off along the lip of the cenote, walking counterclockwise around it. She saw a pink rubber sandal with a broken thong sitting on the rock. A small ball of foil. A clear plastic bottle cap.

The cenote was not large and in a few minutes she was standing directly across from where she had started. She squinted across the golden surface at the sun-charged jungle.

“Bradley? Brad? ”

She walked the rim again. When she was three-quarters of the way around she stopped again and looked around. She felt watched. He wouldn’t let her dangle this long, would he? For what possible reason?

Her heart fluttered lightly and she had the terrible notion that he was not here and had never been here and never would be. The idea made her dizzy. Vertigo and nausea. She looked ahead and took a deep breath. Just then a wad of what looked like white printer paper flew from the jungle and landed on the rock, not twenty feet in front of her. She watched it bounce erratically along the rough surface and quickly stop. It almost rolled into the water. She looked into the foliage from where it had come and saw the palm fronds flickering in the breeze.

“Who are you and what do you want?” She waited and heard nothing. She wondered how long it would take to run back around the cenote and down the path and all the way back to the Castle. Because this was clearly not her husband. A child playing a game, maybe. A trickster taunting a leper for the fun of it. “You don’t scare me.”

With her heart banging against her ribs and her knees wobbling like a stack of empty cans, she lifted the dress and reached into her pocket. She let the dress drop back down, then took her first step toward the round white thing. Halfway there she could see that it was almost certainly a sheet of paper, wadded up tightly. She thought she saw dark markings on the wrinkled facets, letters perhaps or small portions of a larger drawing. But they might be creases. The wad teetered in the breeze.

She stood over it and looked into the jungle, but saw no one. She looked behind her. She looked up into the trees. Then she knelt and with her free hand picked up the paper and stood back up straight. She unfurled it without looking down, alert to the world around her. When it was flat and open she glanced at it and knew what it was.