by Amanda Heger
The three of them rode in choppy silence for the final leg of the drive, and each time they hit a bump Felipe’s mind wandered to a new question. Bump. How many people would show up for the clinic? Bump. How many would it take to convince his mother he was ready to run Ahora? Bump. Would they have enough supplies? Bump. Why was he still thinking about the way Annie had looked up at him on the porch the night before? By the time they rolled to a stop in the makeshift town square, his head was overflowing.
At least thirty people waited. Some were familiar. Many were strangers. Some would have been waiting for days by the time Ahora arrived. Others would have walked miles with children on their backs and at their sides. The rest would have popped out of their houses and down the well-worn path to the one-room church where the clinic would take place.
“¡Buenas!” Felipe threaded his arms through his backpack and hopped from the truck. He stood taller as the villagers returned his greeting, grinning at him like he was a dear friend.
“A good turnout, no?” Marisol asked.
“Muy,” he said. “I will count them. Madre will want to know.” Getting the people in this miniscule town to trust Ahora had taken Melinda years. And in the short time since he’d taken over the brigades, the turnout had doubled. Maybe this will convince her you are ready.
Two teenage boys escorted Annie from the truck, and Phillip hopped out behind her. A few curious stares flickered their way. This group was used to seeing the stray Americans Ahora towed along, but most weren’t encased in mud.
“The clinic is in the church. First we see the children. Women and men second,” Felipe told the Americans, handing out backpacks and bags of medical supplies.
A needle-thin man with a patchy black beard led their group to the church. Wide slats of wood formed the walls, and strips of electric blue paint peeled away from the exterior, revealing a rotting gray. The two teen boys followed closely behind, toting bags of medical supplies between them.
Inside the musty building, Felipe took a bag from the boys and set it on the first of the three pews. “Annie, you will do the mosquito nets this time.”
“What about the sex ed class?” she asked.
“Yes, she brought a plastic vagina,” Marisol said.
“What?” Felipe squeezed his eyes shut. “Never mind. You will do the classes after Sahsa. Those are the villages for sexual education. These are not ready. The people need more time. Marisol did not tell you?”
“No,” his sister answered. “I thought you would maybe have a change of mind.”
Of course she did. Marisol was always pushing, pushing, pushing.
“So what am I supposed to do instead?” Annie slouched into the pew next to the teenage helpers as Marsiol slipped away.
“Every child should take home a mosquito net.” Felipe opened the black garbage bag at Annie’s feet to show her the fine, baby blue netting inside.
“Okay.” She gave him a half-hearted smile and picked at a clump of dirt clinging to her shirt. “But I’ll still get to do the class?”
He nodded. “After the rest days. First, you need time to see how the clinics work. Do you know how to ask how old someone is in Spanish?”
“¿Quantos años tienes?”
“Good. If they are over eighteen, no net. We do not have enough for adults.”
She nodded.
“Bien.”
The afternoon was flooded with the tears of babies being vaccinated, the ailments of the elderly, and even a few serious injuries. One man’s pinky finger dangled at on odd angle, creating an awkward, constant wave. Felipe splinted it and gave him a shot of steroids while the man told him about his two-day hike to the clinic.
His patient disappeared into the crowd, and Felipe walked a lap around the room, checking in on Juan and Phillip as they cleaned teeth, then on his sister as she stuck needles into the thick thighs of infants. When he arrived at Annie’s table full of mosquito nets, a group of children hovered to her left, their cheeks and bare feet smudged with dirt.
“Everything is okay?” he asked.
“Sure. Just not sure what to do now. Everyone got a net.”
“Put the extras away and come to the exam area. You can observe, yes?”
“Really?” She scrambled to shove the nets into the bag.
Felipe ignored the flicker of hesitation sparking inside his chest and handed her the last of the nets. So far, Annie hadn’t complained about travel conditions or made jokes under her breath about the dozens of unsupervised children running through the clinic space. But it was early still. “Come.”
A girl of about fifteen waited in silence. Her feet scratched at the floor, leaving patterns and lines in the dirt. Her eyes were glassy with fear, and she didn’t wait for him to ask any of his usual exam questions. “I think I am pregnant,” she said in a swift mix of Spanish and indigenous Miskito.
He nodded, careful to keep his expression blank. “Why do you think you are pregnant?”
The girl pulled in her lips and shook her head. Felipe wasn’t sure if she was afraid to tell him or if she truly didn’t know. Neither option would surprise him. There is one way to find out. He handed her a cup and pointed her in the direction of the outhouse.
Annie nudged him with her elbow, the scratch of her pen audible even through the chaos of the clinic. “So what’s going on?”
“She thinks she is pregnant.”
“Oh.” She glanced at him for half a second, eyes wide, then went back to writing. “She’s young.”
He nodded. “What are you doing?”
“Taking notes.”
“And you are writing about what a good doctor I am, yes?”
Her cheeks turned pink, and when their patient returned, he had to push the smile from his face.
The three of them waited in silence, staring at the white stick bobbing in the cup of urine. Negative. The girl flopped back on the pew, as if the news left her muscles unable to hold tension. Felipe peered around the exam curtain. Almost everyone from the village was gone, so he slipped his patient a sleeve of condoms. She stuffed them in her pocket and darted off with a muffled thanks.
“What are you doing? You said we couldn’t—”
He laid a hand on Annie’s forearm. “Secret.”
She nodded and gave him a small smile. “Seems like I’m keeping a lot of your secrets lately.”
“Now you owe me a secret.” He began stuffing his supplies into the nearest duffle bag.
“I owe you?”
“Sí. You know two of my secrets, and I know zero of yours.”
She tapped on her bottom lip with one finger and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Okay.” She handed him a plastic bag full of tongue depressors. “When I was five, I had an imaginary friend. Her name was Brandy.”
“Everyone had an imaginary friend as a child. I do not think this counts as a true secret.”
“Yeah, but Brandy was mean. And we fought all the time. My dad even banned her from the house once because she made me cry.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You were a disturbed child, I think.”
“I know, right?”
The two teen boys from the morning reappeared in the doorway. They called out to Annie and waved their hands high above their heads, trying to grab her attention.
“I think you have some admirers.” Felipe nodded at the boys.
“Maybe they want to talk to you?”
“I do not think they are calling me the beautiful gringa.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “They’re harmless, right?”
“Sí. But do not break their hearts.”
Her laughter trailed behind her as she wandered over to the boys and slid out the door behind them.
Once he finished securing his supplies, Felipe stepped outside. The bright afternoon sun stretched into early evening, and his stomach rumbled for dinner. In the church lawn, he expected to find a single villager with a kettle of rice and beans for the group to share. Instead, a horde of children sur
rounded Annie. To her left, the rest of his group watched, passing a black pot around the circle and ladling their plates high with food.
His stomach growled again, but he stood under the last rays of daylight and watched her fold sheet after sheet of notebook paper into miniature diamonds.
“What do you call this thing?” he asked, cutting through the crowd.
She shrugged. “A fortune teller, I guess. Want to try?”
“Okay.” He took the paper. “How do I make this fortune teller?”
“Watch.” Her fingers moved in an intricate dance, tearing off a strip from the bottom and folding the remaining square into points. Children buzzed around them, tugging on her and stumbling into one another, but Annie’s movements stayed smooth and steady.
Felipe tried to mimic them, but his fortune teller came out crumpled and torn at the edges. One side lay flat, while the other was deeply bowed. “I do not think mine will tell fortunes.”
She took one look at his disfigured paper and grinned. “It takes practice. The next one will be better.”
At their feet, a small girl toddled in the dirt, naked from the waist down. Her tiny upturned nose was a smidge too small for her face, and her thin, dark hair stood on end. Annie finished another paper contraption, and three more sheets of paper appeared.
“Okay, watch.” She handed him one of the pages and began folding again. He tried to focus on her technique instead of the way the beads of sweat collected at her hairline or the way she pulled in her bottom lip as she worked. He was so lost in her nearness and the folding that he didn’t connect the resounding escape of gas with the tiny, half-naked girl in front of them. The children screamed and jumped back as the girl left an enormous pile of poop in front of Annie’s flip-flopped feet.
“Oh my god.” She drew a hand over her nose and mouth, stumbling into him. “Is there something we should do?”
Before he could respond, there was an awful squealing, accompanied by the squish of hooves on the damp ground. Round balls of pink, splashed with brown and white, charged toward them. Felipe wrapped his arms around Annie’s waist and yanked her out of the pigs’ trajectory. The swine shoved and snarled at one another as they cleaned up the mess.
“Bacon is never going to be good again.” She laughed and twisted to face him.
Felipe stared at her lips, momentarily wishing he knew how they’d feel against his. “Come.” He clasped her hand. “I want to see Phillip’s face when you tell him about the pigs. I think nothing like this happened on his American television show.”
A surge traveled up his fingers as she squeezed his hand. “Definitely not.”
Day Five
Before she climbed into the boat, Annie downed two Dramamine and said a small prayer for steady waters. Last year, on a spring break trip to Cancun, she and her roommates took an excursion that involved a small boat, choppy ocean waves, and a bottle of tequila. Annie’s breakfast came up before they stopped at the first snorkeling location, and she spent the rest of the afternoon on the floor of the boat, hoping for death.
But today it seemed that her prayers were working. The group’s first boat ride was smooth and slow, and the breeze was cool enough to feel like air conditioning.
The siblings shot Spanish back and forth over her head, too quick for Annie to catch more than one word every few seconds. She stared out over the riverbank as the drum of the engine filled her ears. In some areas, the stream narrowed, leaving barely enough space for their boat to make its way through. Branches, leaves, and vines stretched from one bank to the other, creating a dense tunnel that blocked most of the sun’s rays. The darkness was cool and quiet, and it made her eyelids heavy.
“¿Dónde quieres ir a la escuela de medicina?”
“What?” Annie squinted and turned toward her friend.
“Where do you want to go to medical school?” Marisol asked.
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but her heart tore in half with the weight of how much it mattered. “Brown. But I’m keeping my options open.” There were other schools on her list, but Brown had been the one for so many years, she didn’t know how to seriously consider someplace else.
“I am also keeping my options open.” Marisol giggled and nodded toward Phillip as their boat left the tunnel. He sat alone at the tip of the boat, squinting like a mole. Every so often he would turn and smile at them, pointing at something along the shore. It was impossible to hear him over the din of the motor, but Annie and Marisol nodded and pretended to understand. Felipe stayed silent.
“What is he saying?” Annie whispered.
“Who cares? Look at him.”
Annie laughed. “Why do I feel like you’ve done this before?”
“Done what before?”
“Seduced one of the American guys who come through here.”
“Also one Spanish.” Marisol’s grin was contagious. “He is cute, no?”
“Sure.”
They fell silent. Marisol drifted off into her own world, which apparently involved undressing Phillip with her eyes. Annie stared out at the trees. The sun scorched her cheeks and the part in her hair as she searched for signs of wildlife.
“What are you looking for?” Felipe asked.
“Monkeys.” She smiled, keeping her eyes on the greenery. “Or sloths. Pretty much anything cute and furry that doesn’t want to eat me.”
“So you like the rainforest?” he asked.
“Yeah. I don’t really have anything to compare it to, though. Before this I’d never even been camping.”
“What do you mean?”
“Camping. Like sleeping outside and stuff. This is my first time.”
“¿Verdad?” He wrinkled his forehead.
“Verdad.” She paused. “Okay, no verdad. Once I went to Girl Scout Camp. I was eight. We slept in cabins though, not outside. So I don’t think that counts.”
“Girl Scouts? The ones with the cookies?”
“Yes! In fact,” she sat up tall, “I sold the most cookies in my troop every year.”
“How many years was that?”
“One.”
He grinned. “Why one? If you were the top seller.”
“My dad said I could only do one after-school activity at a time. The next year I wanted violin lessons.”
“You play the violin?”
She shook her head. “I was horrible. After the first round of lessons, the teacher sent me home with a note that he couldn’t keep taking my dad’s money.”
“Pobrecita.” His full bottom lip stuck out. Felipe’s face cracked into that full, spectacular smile. Her stomach leapt.
“Do you still play the guitar?” She remembered the times she and Marisol had sneaked into his basement lair, searching for the phone or food. A beautiful acoustic guitar rested along his wall, and even though Annie never saw him play it, his smooth voice came up through the vents of the house.
“Sí.” His smile grew even wider as they made their way through another darkened tunnel.
That dimple.
• • •
Those freckles.
The three pinpricks of brown dancing across the bridge of Annie’s nose begged for his attention. But the boat motored into another tunnel, and the freckles disappeared into the darkness.
“We need to work on your Spanish,” he said. Even in the cool dimness, he saw the smile slide off her face.
“I know.”
“You can speak it if you try.” The words didn’t sound as encouraging out in the world as they did inside his head. He grimaced. “That is not what I mean.”
“I do try. It’s not easy.”
“I know. It is hard, but you are smart.”
“When it comes to dissecting frogs, sure. When it comes to Spanish, no way.”
“What words do you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do not know what words you know?” He regretted the question as soon as it came out.
She sighed.
“We must fix this.” The darkness of the tunnel made him brave, and he laced her fingers through his. “I will say something in English and you say it to me in Spanish, yes?”
Annie glanced over her shoulder at Marisol, who had her face deep in a book. His sister smiled at the page, and Felipe knew she wasn’t reading. There wasn’t enough light. And no one smiled that wide while reading To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Okay,” Annie said.
“Hello.”
“Hola.” Her smile escaped at the tail end of the word.
“My name is Annie.”
“Me llamo Annie.”
“You can also say mi nombre es Annie.”
She repeated the phrase, her lips turning deliberately around the strange words. He blinked hard and fast.
“Where is the bathroom?”
“¿Dónde es el baño?”
He shook his head. “Está. But in an emergency, that is okay.”
“¿Dónde está el baño?” Her accent made the words sharp, but they were understandable.
“Now you are prepared for anything. I am a master teacher.”
She pulled her hand away and tugged her hair into a rumpled ponytail as they emerged, blinking, into the sun. “Hardly.”
“I think you know more than you are letting on.”
“It’s the verb tenses.” She shook her head. “I can’t keep them straight. Sometimes I think I’m saying ‘I went to the store,’ but I end up saying ‘I wanted to have been at the store.’ And then everyone looks at me like this.” She cocked her head toward her shoulder, her lips puckered together.
“There are no stores here. I think you will be okay.”
“That’s not what—”
“Broma, Annie. Broma.”
She shook her head.
“Joke,” he told her. “You are learning. Use present tense for everything. People will understand.”
“But I’ll sound stupid. Like a tourist.”
“Everyone knows you are a tourist.” Red hair running wild in the wind. Pale skin pinking and sprouting freckles in the sun. “It is okay.”
She stared out at the shore then turned. “Okay. Teach me more words, and I will teach you to tell better jokes.”
