Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  FROM: Ricardo FAX: 809-682-0800

  Mi amor, yesterday, after faxing you and calling you (Did you get my message? So sorry to have missed you!), I ran into the new liaison person for the clinic, Starr Bell—yep, that’s her name. Texas, what can I say. She said it’s crazy for me not to have access to the phone and fax, and so now I have my own key to the main office, so I don’t have to be on their schedule to fax or call you.

  Don’t know what to make of her, Starr, that is. She’s youngish (midthirties?), attractive, a take-charge person. Everyone seems to like her. She’s done a lot to calm things down. Perfect Spanish, thanks to a Mexican nanny, she told me. Drives a pickup and comes loaded up with food from the capital. Ms. Santa Claus with a cowboy hat. She totally supports our green center. Says we can create a model community here, count on Swan’s support. Swan’s the drug company she does PR for. Starr actually knew Emerson from an on-site internship she did with HI back when she was in college (our Haitian outhouse initiative) and so when Swan was looking to sponsor a community project of some kind, she suggested us. I guess Swan always does some sort of goodwill project when they go into an area. I mean, even Tera can’t find fault with that.

  Speaking of whom, how’s the weekend going?

  This place is beautiful, I mean absolutely hands-down gorgeous. Shangri-la, if it weren’t for the poverty. Really bad. So, our Centro Verde del Caribe is a godsend, as I think it will create jobs and also encourage locals to stay on the land and make a living at farming.

  Our little casita was one of several built by Swan for their staff, but they’re fine about letting Bienvenido and me stay in it. So, mi amor, I’m living in the lap of luxury: electricity from their generator, on-and-off hot water, and get this: a lighted toilet seat, works with some sort of solar battery, though how and why it got here, nobody knows. But just so you don’t get too jealous, remember, you wouldn’t get much writing done here—solitude is in short supply. Only time I’m alone is nights Bienvenido is gone or when I wake up early, sip coffee (toasted and ground by our neighbor), watch the sunrise, and miss you.

  Anyhow, please don’t worry. Tell me about Helen, how everything is going. Thanks for getting those leaves. Wow, my wife is turning into quite the gardener! Please call the boys and tell them I’m fine. I’ll call once I’ve got a better phone setup. Take care of yourself. Remember, te adoro, mi amor querida, Ricardo.

  ON SATURDAY, TERA, of course, wants to go over to see Helen and hand-deliver the pamphlets she brought. They have met several times before, and one meeting with Tera and you’re in her clan, especially if you’re female and have had a hard life. Alma was going to drop by anyhow with a flan she made for Helen, but she exacts a promise from Tera that the pamphlets are to stay in her bag and not come out until they can talk to Mickey privately.

  “Who’s Mickey?” And then, before Alma can tell her, Tera breaks out with the Mickey Mouse song. “M-i-c K-e-y M-o-u-s-e. So does Mickey wear his ears?”

  Alma loves it when Tera acts goofy. “His real name’s Michael, Michael McMullen. Helen’s son, a character.”

  “Michael McMullen …” Tera puzzles over the name. “It sounds so familiar. Maybe from meeting Helen before?”

  Alma shakes her head. “Helen’s last name’s Marshall. According to Claudine, the McMullen comes from Mickey’s wife. He changed his name to hers.” It is strange when simple salt-of-the-earth folk end up having lives as complex and troubled as those of Alma and her friends. Were Helen not sick, Alma would pelt her with questions about why her son changed his name, why he doesn’t call her Mother, why he periodically falls off the face of the earth.

  They drive over to Helen’s, releasing their trail of hydrocarbons in the air, when they could just walk across the back field. But Alma vetoes that suggestion. There is a north wind blowing, and flans are tropical critters.

  Mickey’s out in the front yard, unloading wood from a rusted blue pickup. He stops when they pull in, doesn’t come forward to greet them, doesn’t go on with his work, just stands there, watching. The here’s-looking-at-you routine. “Is that Mickey?” Tera wants to know.

  “Uh-huh,” Alma says under her breath, her heart quickening again, some Pavlovian reaction triggered by this guy, who has unnerved her both times she has seen him before. It’s not attraction, at least she doesn’t think so. It’s the same feeling she gets with people who stand too close when they talk to her. Some psychic trespassing going on. Mickey’s still wearing that plaid shirt, except now he’s donned a down vest, in deference to the north wind, she supposes. It is wicked cold, even Tera says so.

  “I’ll bring in the flan,” Tera says, “Can you grab the pamphlets?”

  “Let’s leave them here for now,” Alma suggests. Watching Mickey watching them, Alma just knows pamphlets are not his thing. “Hi!” she calls out as she gets out of the car, as if he’s some strange dog she wants to be sure won’t bite before she leaves the safety of her vehicle behind. “Brought Helen a flan and my friend to visit.”

  Again a time delay in which he stands and watches, having received her words, an envelope he’s not going to open yet. “Just keep walking into the house,” Alma tells Tera under her breath, which in this cold shows up as a plume of white breath like a cartoon character’s balloon, so it’s dumb trying to be discreet. Besides, it’s too late. Tera is making a beeline over to Mickey. Alma swears her best friend looks for trouble. And what can she do but follow.

  “Ta da!” Tera imitates a drumroll and lifts the cake lid from the flan. “Flan!” And by God, the man laughs. Tera can be so cool sometimes.

  Tera introduces herself.

  “Tera?” Mickey asks, like there might be something wrong with her name.

  Tera gives him a firm nod. “From Teresa. And you?”

  “Mickey.” Mickey grins, daring her to make something of it.

  Of course, Tera does. “Mickey? Like in Mickey Mouse?” She grins back, a little taunting game going on between these two.

  “Is Helen inside?” Alma steps in, worried that Tera might start in on her Mickey Mouse routine.

  Time lapse. Message received. Time lapse. Mickey nods. “Thanks,” Alma says, nudging Tera, who—Alma can tell—is intrigued by this odd guy. But Tera takes Alma’s cue and starts down the path. Alma falls in beside her, both women looking straight ahead, holding in their laughter, that unspoken female communication going on between them—Just keep walking, don’t turn around, we’re being watched—both feeling that old chagrin at how men always seem to have the last word, their eyes sizing up your butt as you walk away.

  INSIDE, HELEN IS SITTING in a big chair by the fireplace, a fire going. This is the first time in ages that Alma has come in the front door, because in the past, even when she drove, she’d go around to the back door into the kitchen, where Helen almost always was sitting.

  Alma can feel it in the air, like a season turning. The kitchen era is over. Soon the time of the living room shall pass. How long before Helen is confined to her bed, where she has let it be known she wants to die? How long before she’s part of Snake Mountain where she wants her ashes scattered? “In the summertime, when it’s convenient,” she told Alma a few days ago. “Oh, Helen,” Alma had scolded, “let yourself make a few demands!” But Helen explained that the top of a Vermont mountain in winter with gale-force winds blowing wasn’t her idea of a pleasant funeral. Besides, she wants to stay on Snake Mountain, not be blown clear down to New York City.

  “Hey! Look at you, all cozy!” Alma says, bluffing it. Helen looks terrible. It’s as if now that people know about it, her disease can have a go at her, no holds barred. Her skin is deathly pale and seems to hang on her, a size too big. Her bones poke out, and for a split second Alma’s heart stops because what she is seeing is the skeleton Helen will soon become. But then the skeleton smiles, and Helen is back again!

  “Mickey made me a nice little fire. It’s been so long since I had a good fire.” She’s feeling around for her walker, so she mu
st sense there is company, as she never stands up to greet Alma anymore when it’s just the two of them.

  “Don’t get up, Helen! I brought my friend, Tera. She’s here for the weekend. You remember Tera, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean, don’t get up?” Helen fusses. “Of course, I remember Tera!” And then, as if to prove it, she reels off a brief bio of Tera, full of glowing highlights Alma has told her, with all the complaints Alma has ever made about her best friend left out. Alma tells Helen everything, or used to, until this new knowledge turned her friend into this new person: a person who is going to die on her.

  Alma was always bringing up Helen in her sessions with Dr. Payne. Why did this old woman mean so much to her? Usually, Dr. Payne tossed the question back: why did Alma think Helen was so important to her? But one time, he told her straight out what he thought. Helen is the mother Alma never had in childhood.

  “You’re paying this guy a hundred bucks an hour to tell you stuff like that?” Richard had said, a look of total incredulity on his face. “How about she’s your friend. You like her. Period.” It was Alma’s own fault for telling Richard, but then she was always running Dr. Payne’s observations by him. She supposed she shared Richard’s deep mistrust of people who charged money to heal your spirit.

  Whatever the reason, it did seem that with Helen, all Alma’s usual safeguards were out the window, and she loved the old woman without a whole lot of second guessing, no periodic flaring up of mistrust or dislike. Oh, now and then Alma felt a little bored, because there was none of the exciting, edgy stuff that was usually going on with other people. But it had taken her by surprise that she could love someone without the usual big-brand bonds: not Lover or Husband, not Son or Daughter, not Familia or Boss or some other powerful person. A 100 percent unimportant, generic person. Helen was living proof. It was a revelation.

  “Alma made you this flan,” Tera is saying, maybe as a way of letting Helen know why she, Tera, is not giving her a full frontal hug. One of Tera’s hands is occupied. Still, a half hug from Tera is a mighty thing. Helen’s fragile little figure totters—she never did find her walker, tucked behind the box of kindling—and Alma catches her just in time to help her back down into her chair.

  “This fire is yummy, Helen,” Alma says, feeling its warmth radiate right down into her cold bones. “I wish I’d known you loved them so.” She wonders if this will be one of her regrets months from now, how she never came over and made Helen a nice fire. “You feel like having a little flan now, Helen?”

  “How did you know?” She’s pretending again. Helen hasn’t had much of an appetite all week. Every day, Alma has dropped by with a dish, and after seven days, her repertoire of recipes is close to used up. Helen always takes a few nibbles in Alma’s presence, but Alma can tell Helen can’t keep stuff down. Some pain medication she’s on, no doubt. Alma has asked Mickey about it, but each time he just looks back at her, that watchful look that makes Alma want to withdraw the question. “She’s okay,” he always says.

  Alma takes the flan from Tera to serve up in the kitchen, since she knows where everything is. The place is surprisingly tidy: the dishes are done; the floor looks mopped. Mickey is running a tight ship, good for him. Alma opens the cabinets and finds the small plates with their dainty, chipped flowers, so old-fashioned, so Helen; the brass utensils with rosewood handles that Mickey got for his mother somewhere during his world postings, with the Marines—so Alma learned a few days back; the tray with the peeling decal that once said home sweet home but now reads like a phrase written in a foreign tongue, HOM EET OME. Alma is taking it all in: everything, everything making one sound, ticktock, ticktock. She turns on the water and lets it get hot and holds her hands under it, until it’s scalding, until she can’t stand it. So much for conservation, this trick she has for making something else hurt when her heart’s about to crack.

  Finally, she has got everything on a tray, ready to go, and the back door opens. It’s Mickey, clapping his hands together, like he, too, feels the cold!

  “I don’t see how you do it without a coat.” Alma shakes her head, startled into this confession by seeing him responding like a regular person, not a man she can’t understand and is half afraid of.

  Instead of explaining himself, he looks down at her tray. “You got one for me?”

  “Of course,” Alma says, pleased to pass herself off as a good cook, which she supposes she is, a big frog as long as she sticks to her little pond of six, seven recipes. She sets the tray down, and when she goes to pull open the fridge to get the flan, there on the door, stuck on with a magnet, staring back at her is a picture of a boy, Mickey, unmistakable, the eyes, the grin. He’s holding up some certificate that he’s obviously proud of, too young for it to be a high school degree. Maybe some scout thing, who knows? It’s a picture Alma has seen hundreds of times before, Helen has had it here for a while, from before she went totally blind, Alma assumes, because why else stick a photo on your fridge if you can’t see it. How odd to be in the presence of the man who was once this boy, the kind of perspective she seldom has with people.

  “I won that calf.”

  Alma smiles. “How’d you do that?”

  “A 4-H contest. Had to write five hundred words on the four Hs: head, hands, heart …”

  He can’t remember the fourth H. Alma tries to help him out. What other major body part starts with an H? She gives up.

  She bends to look more closely at the photo, and sure enough she can make out the long, makeshift buildings, the grandstand, the stalls for animals, the usual fairgrounds paraphernalia. A Ferris wheel is vaguely visible in the background. Strange that for years Alma didn’t see it back there, didn’t see the boy’s smile of pride, the flank of the prize calf, the rope in his hand, a luminous moment that will be there whenever she looks at the grown man from now on.

  “Helen took that picture. Just before my father left us. Last good day in a long time.”

  Alma has brought the flan over to the table, and she starts assembling another dish and spoon, keeping busy, feeling surprised and a little flattered that he’s confiding in her but also uncomfortable lest he make it a habit.

  “Is your father around? I mean, maybe he should be notified? Maybe he’s someone Helen might want to see?”

  “He’s not welcome here,” Mickey says, the quickest reply Alma has ever gotten back from him.

  She waits a moment, not knowing if Mickey wants to say more. Finally, she murmurs, “I’m sorry,” sensing that she has bumped up against a wound that still hurts to be touched.

  After a moment, Mickey nods. End of conversation. Back to being Paul Bunyan. But now he’s also a boy who won a calf and lost a father.

  A man who is losing his mother, Alma thinks, as she dishes him up an extra big serving.

  THEY SIT IN THE parlor, Mickey, Tera, Helen, and Alma, eating flan and running the topic of the cold weather to the ground. Alma and Helen and Tera would have no problem coming up with any number of things to talk about. But Mickey seems to tense up the room, the way he sits back, watching their chitchat as if conversation were a spectator sport.

  Tera breaks the rather thin ice with a pick. “Helen, I hear you’ve elected not to undergo treatments?”

  Alma has confided this to Tera, not knowing if she is supposed to. She glares at her friend, hoping to stop Tera from continuing.

  But Helen seems unfazed by the comment. “That’s right, dear. It’s pretty near spread into everything, like dandelions. There’s not much the doctors can do. It’s my time to go.” She says this so matter-of-factly, like the oven beeper just went off and the flan is done.

  “Doctors’d just nuke her to death,” Mickey interjects clunkily.

  “You said it,” Tera says, and Alma can almost feel the easing of tension in the room. Two potential foes have found a common enemy: the medical profession.

  “As long as it’s what you want, Helen,” Alma puts in. Is she the only one here who isn’t 100 percen
t sure? If she is, she should keep her mouth shut. “I know how you are about not wanting to be a bother,” Alma reminds her.

  “It’d be a big bother to me to be in the hospital, hooked up to a lot of machines.” Helen shakes her head at this bleak vision of her last days. As frail and blind as Helen is, it is surprising how seldom she visits doctors, so unlike Papote and Mamasita and most old people Alma knows. No doubt this is why Helen’s cancer spread all over without some earlier diagnosis. “It’s what I want,” Helen says, quietly, firmly, and Alma knows she can trust the sureness in Helen’s voice.

  “Sometimes they do a lot of procedures where they know it’s no use just so they can collect the insurance,” Mickey elaborates.

  “I read about that case.” Tera is nodding eagerly. “The guy in Florida with total metastasis, liver, lung, everything involved, and they did this whole stem-cell treatment, hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.”

  “Thousands,” Mickey corrects. “They cooked that poor guy.”

  Excuse me, Alma feels like snapping at them. You are talking in front of a terminally ill person! She tries to catch Tera’s eye, but her friend is too busy stockpiling evidence with Mickey to notice Alma beaming a big red stop sign.

  “Don’t get me started on the health system,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Good idea,” Alma says pointedly, which stops Tera momentarily. But Mickey goes on undaunted. “I’ve seen those fellows up close. They’re operators all right. Know what the MD stands for? Money dealers.”

  Soon he’s launched into the ills of the health system in this country, and Tera is launched right alongside him. A half-dozen I hear yous and you said its later, and the two have hit their stride, comrades. Only when Mickey stands up and says he’s going out to bring in some wood and Tera stands up and says she has something she has to get in the car does Alma realize that Tera hasn’t just been mouthing off, she has been preparing the ground to hand over her pamphlets.

  Alma is relieved to see them go. And glad that Helen is the first to laugh. “Those two, my word.” Helen is shaking her head.