Waking before dawn, the woman shushes the children into their clothes. Shoes for walking. Hats. Sunscreen. Knowing the breakfast buffet would not be open, she tucked some things away for them the day before. Now she pulls tiny yogurts from the mini-fridge, napkin-wrapped pastries, an apple for her daughter, a banana for her son.
She needn’t have bothered, though. Their guide takes them to a place he knows—a truck stop coffee bar—and they eat again. Hot ham and cheese sandwiches this time, and giant chocolate milkshakes for the kids.
In the car, the woman devises games to pass the time. I Spy with My Little Eye (of course), though they cannot spy much beyond a row of trees on the left and a never-ending construction site on the right. The Train of the Maya, their guide explains. The workers have been building it for two years. But every time the shovel goes in, they find something—a bone, maybe, or the top of a wall—and must wait for los arqueólogos to dig it out. Finally, when they are ready, in goes the shovel and . . . another bone. The top of another wall.
The woman has the children take turns drawing on a pad of paper. The boy tries three times to draw an iguana, and his father, whose turn it is to guess, makes an exasperated comment that causes the boy to cry. (The boy cries easily; some would say it is his one imperfection.) Their guide glances back at them. The woman stares out the window and pinches her arm. She does not allow herself to turn around. Later, she looks back at the boy and winks. He wipes his eyes and smiles at her, and she gives him the pad and pen. “Draw whatever you like, sweety. The game is over.”
The woman hardly knows, sometimes, how these can be her children. Her son makes friends easily, like his father. He plays sports—every sport there is— and is good without trying. He is blond and freckled and smiling. He looks just like a boy the woman fell into terrible, unrequited love with at that same age. If you asked her, the woman would say she hasn’t thought about that boy in years. The girl is vain and reckless and mischievous. She sings songs of her own making in public, dancing up and down the aisles of grocery stores, pouting and blowing kisses to herself in storefront windows. The woman pretends to be mortified but, in fact, is in awe. Her daughter will become, she is sure, everything the woman has ever failed to be.
They arrive midmorning, and it is already hot. They follow their guide to a scant patch of shade and stand shielding their eyes and listening dutifully. The guide tells them of the Mayans, of still-beating hearts lifted from bodies, heads severed and displayed on pikes—violent superstitions, meant to coax crops from the chalky limestone. But the crops failed, despite it all. The people slipped down into the pages of history.
The woman has wanted to come here for years. Her husband has always protested—rightly, she sees—that it will be too hot and boring for the children. The girl’s hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat; the boy drags his shoes in the dust. They want water and snacks and souvenirs from the trinket-vendors. They want what they always want: whatever is next.
The woman lets them go, running her fingers over the carved jaguars and feathered serpents. As a child, she herself had wanted to be una arqueóloga. She could have told you about Viking burial customs, recited whole passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Standing here now, though, she feels none of the old excitement. The wars, the sacrifices, the building up of temples. What was it all for? She falls in with a group of French tourists and pretends she is one of them, that she understands more than every fourth word. Feeling suddenly ridiculous, she jogs to catch up to her family.
Their guide is on the ball court, showing the children a video on his phone— an anthropologist’s approximation of the game once played here. It was a sort of proto soccer, the woman had thought, but she sees now that isn’t right. The figures, fitted with strange armor, do not touch the heavy rubber ball with their hands or their feet. They scoop it up and sling it from the crooks of their necks and the curves of their inner elbows, launch it neatly from the planes of their hips. It is indescribably beautiful. What punishing, tedious practice to learn movements like that, the woman thinks.
The video ends, and she squints in disbelief at the high stone rings the ball was meant to sail through. It hardly seems possible. Death to the losers must have been some motivation.
“That’s not true, mom,” her son informs her later, between gulps of warm soda. “It was the winners who were killed. But they still wanted to win . . .” and at this the boy raises his eyebrows and nods knowingly, “. . . because it was such an honor to be sacrificed.” He is so pleased with himself, imparting this wicked bit of information, that the woman can’t help but smile. But she finds she must look away quickly. And she does not have the heart, ever after, to confirm or deny the truth of what he has said.
In the car, sighs of thanks for the blast of cold air conditioning. “Now we go to the cenote,” their guide announces, text messages from his wife and children pinging across the surface of his phone as he pulls up the map.
“Say-now-tay,” the woman repeats to herself, not “see-note.” She likes to get things like that right.
Cenotes, the guide tells them, are everywhere in the Yucatan. The soil is porous and falls away, and the holes are filled by underground rivers. For the Mayans, they were sacred, home to goblins and spirits, where Sukan, the giant snake who guarded the aquifers, awaited his sacrifices. The woman smiles politely. Her daughter is unwrapping sticky marshmallow candies. Her husband and son are asleep in the back seat, mouths agape.
The outbuildings of the hacienda-turned-restaurant are filled with vendor tables and tourists changing into bathing suits. “You can eat first or you can swim first,” their guide tells them, gesturing down one path and then another. The kids want to swim first. And why not, thinks the woman. They will eat a good lunch.
They change and are directed to an outdoor shower—obligatoria—a dirty string that, when pulled, unleashes a torrent of frigid water. The girl balks, and the woman orders and then coaxes and then threatens her, as her son and husband stare at them from the entrance to the cenote. Finally, they are all clambering down the slippery wooden scaffolding.
Placing one foot in front of the other, tracking the movements of her children and gripping their hands in hers, the woman is hardly aware of her descent. They reach a small diving platform, and people are running and jumping into the water below. Stone walls dotted with ferns loom above them, framing an oval of clear blue sky. As negotiations begin over which of the children will jump in first with their father, the woman continues past them, her eyes drawn to the jade water. As if in a trance, she slips herself in. It is cold. Not the bracing cold of the ocean but the deeper, throbbing cold of secret subterranean places.
The girl and her father jump first, and then the boy, their gasps and shouts giving flight to birds. The woman watches them as if they are some other person’s family.
It is discovered that there are tiny black catfish in the cenote. The girl sees them first. Arms flung lavishly around her father’s neck, she pauses and says, matter-of-factly, “Daddy, there are lots of little fishes in here.”
“So there are,” he smiles. “Well, don’t tell your mother.”
“Tell me what?” asks the woman, bobbing nearby. But some part of her has already heard. She forces herself to turn back slowly toward the algae-slick steps, as if a manufactured nonchalance can make her fear untrue.
But it is true. She is afraid of fish; afraid of the water. It is one of the things she pretends is amusing about herself but about which, secretly, she is ashamed. On their honeymoon, convinced by her husband to snorkel, the woman found herself shrouded in a curtain of striped barracuda—their unblinking eyes seeing without seeing, their jaws full of haphazard teeth—and that was it for her, for snorkeling. She’d spent the rest of the day squinting out across the water, making sure that her newly minted husband had not been taken by the sea. It had been a question, ever since then, whether she could be taken seriously by him.
But these catfish are languid and otherworldly. They glide among the swimmers as if crossing the cenote in another time, in a parallel universe. The woman is strangely unbothered by them. As the sun climbs to the center of the oval of sky, she joins her family and jumps, again and again, curled or flung or somersaulting, into the water, until she cannot tell up from down and hears nothing but her own sharp shouts ringing in her ears.
They dry themselves and change. The heaviness between the woman and her husband has broken and flown away. They eat Sopa de Lima with fresh tortillas and heaping platefuls of Pollo Pibil. They sip strong coffee in tiny cups and green and yellow Jarritos through paper straws. Florescent skulls and masks and embroidered huipils are fussed over and denied to the children. They are too full to run, but their steps are light as they reach the car.
“Who had fun on Mommy’s adventure?” the woman’s husband shouts as he lifts the girl high, dissolving her into fits of giggles.
“Thank you, Mommy!” they scream. The boy squeezes her hand three times.
The girl peppers her face with soft kisses.
She puts them in the middle seats and joins her husband on the back bench, resting her head in the crook of his neck. They make their way back through the gridlock, past the heaps of sand and gravel that will one day be the Train of the Maya.
Dawn Goulet is a Chicago-area writer who drafts legal opinions by day and fiction for fun, in spare moments between making soup, observing rabbits, going on adventures with her family, and taking Jim the Dog to visit his dog park fan club. This is her first publication.