tight around me. "It's great," I said. "Just great."
"It's a little large," Robert said from his seat by the fire.
"I'll grow into it," I said, without looking at him. "I'm sure I will."
There was more polite conversation—I couldn't remember it all. I remember Robert congratulating her for her second book—just out and getting good reviews. My father said good-bye at the door. I walked my mother to the car. It had rained that day and the streets were still wet. A car passed, its tires hissing on the pavement. The Christmas lights that my father had strung along the front porch blinked on and off: red and blue and green and gold.
I stood beside my mother's car. When she opened the front door, the interior light came on and I caught a glimpse of the clutter on the backseat: two more packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, a dirty canvas duffel bag adorned with baggage tags, a straw hat with a snakeskin band that held three brilliant blue feathers. My mother sat in the front seat and closed the door.
"Where are you going to spend Christmas?" I asked her. "I'll spend Christmas day with friends," she said.
"I'll be driving back to Berkeley the day after." I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.
"Can I come?" I asked quickly. "I won't be any trouble. I thought maybe ..." I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.
The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.
"Come with me? But your father ..." She stopped. "You'll be spending Christmas with your father."
"I want to go with you," I said quietly. "I need to."
I watched her face in the changing light. She was no longer frozen: her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned down, weary, unhappy, maybe frightened. Her hand clenched the steering wheel and the lights flashed red, blue, green. "I'll be leaving soon," she said. "Another dig. I can't ..."
The dream had gone wrong. I stepped back from the car. "Never mind," I said. "Forget it. Just forget it."
"Here," she said. She reached in the backseat and pulled a blue feather from the band in the straw hat.
"This is a quetzal feather. They bring good luck."
I stood in the driveway, holding the blue feather as she backed the car away from the house. The colored lights reflected from the wet pavement, and her tires hissed as she drove away. I threw the feather down on the pavement. When I looked for it in the morning, the wind had blown it away.
I woke to the scratchy sound of a stewardess's voice over the loudspeakers. "Please fasten your seat belts and return your seats to their upright position. We are now landing at the Mérida airport. We hope you have a pleasant stay in Mérida, and thank you for flying Mexicana." The voice repeated the message in rapid Spanish. I understood a few phrases in the flow of words, vocabulary from the high school Spanish I had taken long ago.
The man in the seat beside me smiled at me and said, "Feeling better?"
I nodded, smiled the mechanical smile, and turned to the window to avoid conversation. Through the window, I looked out on a dusty-green carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns, streaks and patches of gray-white. As the plane came in for a landing at Mérida, the carpet became trees and scrubby bushes; the pockmarks, small fields and roads. I could see thin lines of black slicing through the carpet: roads heading for the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean coast. Then the plane was down and I could see only the runway and the terminal.
I felt disoriented and peculiar. The world outside the plane window looked flat and unreal, like the image on a TV screen. The sun was too bright; I squinted, but it still hurt my eyes. The plane pulled into the shade of the terminal and the other people on board were stretching and talking and pushing into the aisles, eager to get somewhere. The man who had been sitting beside me was standing already. He glanced at me. "Can I help you with anything?"
"No," I said. "No, thank you." I did not want help. I wanted to be left alone. When he did not move away, I began rummaging beneath the seat for my purse. By the time