by Amanda Heger
Outside, the sun was setting. The light filtering in from the open window turned her hair a soft shade of pink. “Supplies?”
“Sí. For your sexual education classes.” His stomach growled, and he reached for the opportunity to get her alone. Perhaps to find out a little more about this no-boyfriend situation. “Are you hungry? There is a restaurant—”
All the color leached from her face, leaving her freckles stark against her skin. “My vagina!”
Felipe took a step back. “I am sorry. What?”
“My flashcards. Oh my God. I can’t—” Her hands fluttered around her face, pushing back her hair, lacing in and out of themselves.
“Annie?”
“Flashcards. I made flashcards so I could learn all the proper names for…things.” She waved a hand over her midsection.
“That is good, no?”
“They’re gone. I haven’t seen them since…” She closed her eyes. “Shit. I can’t believe this.”
“Breathe. Where did they go?”
“Those boys. Out there.” She waved toward the door. “The ones who stole from us. They took my vagina. Oh God, not my vagina. It was a model.” She hung her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize until now.”
“Todo bien, Annie. Maybe our banditos are studying them right now. We have a whole box of things here. Útero.” He pulled a stuffed toy from the tattered box, trying not to let his expression reflect the unease inching down his spine. Something always went wrong on the brigades. Usually multiple things. Someone would get sick. Or the supplies would run low. Or the rain would beat down so hard Juan couldn’t maneuver the boat down the river, eating into their promised rest days. And more often than not, whatever went wrong at this point in the game would be the straw to break the American camel’s back.
Annie took the plush uterus from his hands and turned it over between her fingers. “People like fuzzy, right?”
Day Twelve
As they marched to the clinic, Annie marveled at the tiny town. Hours of dense jungle separated them from the nearest actual city, but for the first time in two weeks, they passed a bar and a crowded convenience store, and a school painted in primary colors. Marisol and Juan pointed out the landmarks as they walked along the dirt road. The locals pointed at the Americans.
Twelve days, that’s how long it takes to stop feeling like a zoo animal.
The sun perched over the treetops, sending its scorching rays to broil Annie’s skin. She knew she probably smelled atrocious, but her stench was masked by the manure of farm animals wandering the main street of the town.
Marisol pointed to a tiny hut to their left. “We call her Tortilla Woman,” she said. “I do not think anyone knows her real name, but everyone knows where to go to buy tortillas.”
Annie nodded, barely hearing the words, and stepped around a pile of cow dung in her path. “Where’s Felipe?” She tried to keep her voice breezy, but her friend’s grin told her she’d been made.
“He went to visit our cousin.” Marisol winked and guided their group into a square churchyard, where a flock of patients had already gathered. The crowd closed in around them as soon as the group set foot on the lawn, hugging and slapping Juan and Marisol on the back, waving to Annie and Phillip from a safer distance.
Inside the church, the wooden pulpit loomed over them, shiny and polished while the rest of the building languished under a coat of grime. The four of them moved seamlessly into their activities, and once Felipe walked through the doors, the patients streamed in behind him.
Annie enlisted a battalion of curious children to help with her job, and in the slow periods, she tried to recreate her sex ed lecture. But her mind wouldn’t stop spinning, reliving her outburst the night before—Who screams about their vagina like that?—and then berating herself for forgetting the classes in the first place. Between teenage robbers and eating armadillo, she’d forgotten her one real responsibility during this trip.
You have to get it together.
“Do you want to watch my last exam?” Felipe stepped in front of her, looking exhausted but happy. Rumpled but perfect. Like he was born to do this kind of work.
“What’s that?” Annie pointed at a tiny, dirty handprint gracing his scrub shirt just below his heart.
“I had to go to my cousin’s house this morning. His daughter is a bit of a…trouble making girl?” He cocked his head to one side. “That is not the right words.”
“Troublemaker,” Annie said.
“Ah. I was not very far off then.” He held out a hand. “Examinations? I think your helpers have this under control.”
“I don’t think I should. I’m trying to remake my sex ed lecture.” She held up her journal, and he plucked the notebook from her fingers.
“Tonight we will work on the classes. Come.” He tucked it in the back pocket of his pants.
“Can I have my journal?” In a blind panic, she followed him to the front of the church, imagining him cracking the pages to see her ridiculous schoolgirl crush laid out in the open. “To take notes.”
Felipe waved his patient forward and unhooked the stethoscope from around his neck. He held the device out to her. “You cannot take notes and learn how to take blood pressure at the same time.”
“Really?” She took the stethoscope.
He nodded and handed her a blood pressure cuff. The Velcro was worn to nubs, and dirt had worked its way into the crevices of the deep blue fabric. “And here is your patient.”
The woman eased herself into the pew in front of them. A shocking gray bun sat atop her head, dried and brittle from years in the sun. Felipe spoke to the woman in Spanish, frowning and nodding as he asked question after question and waited for her slowed responses.
“She has headaches, and she says that sometimes her feet swell,” he translated. “She has some hypertension, but she managed it in the past by changing the foods she eats.”
Annie nodded, itching to jot it all down.
“Also she wants to know if I am coming over for dinner tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Annie raised her eyebrows. “That’s very nice.”
“Not that nice.” He grinned and the woman’s return smile made something prickle in Annie’s mind. Something about the tilt of her chin. “She is my aunt Barbara,” Felipe said. “It is her duty to feed me.”
The woman nodded, her bun shifting perilously atop her head. She spoke to Felipe once more, too fast and familiar for Annie to keep up. Maybe something about a horse? Or hair? She could never keep those two words straight.
Felipe shifted closer and placed two of Annie’s fingers below his aunt’s elbow. “First, you will have to find her pulse. Do you feel it?”
She pressed a bit harder, trying to ignore the thudding in her own veins. “Got it.” She put the flat end of the stethoscope against the woman’s skin.
Felipe took the cuff and wrapped it around his aunt’s thick upper arm. He tucked the bulb between Annie’s fingers. “You will squeeze this until you cannot hear her pulse any longer.” He pointed to a small valve. “When it is silent, turn this very slowly.”
Annie nodded.
He carried on with his explanation. But between her excitement and nerves, all his words ran together in a jumbled heap. Five tries and five different readings, all of them suggesting the woman was not actually alive.
“I’m sorry. I mean, lo siento.” Annie smiled at the woman.
Felipe’s aunt waved her free hand and rambled on in Spanish.
“She says do not worry,” he said. “She is used to being my test patient. I will not tell you the other things she said, because they are too embarrassing.”
Annie kept her gaze on the woman’s arm, trying not to think about how close he stood. “You won’t embarrass me any more than I already am.”
“No, no. Embarrassing for me. She says the first time I tried to take her blood pressure, I squeezed much too hard. She thought her arm would fall off.”
Annie smiled as the tensio
n drained from her shoulders. She stood. “What am I doing wrong? It’s like the minute I turn the valve the needle falls all the way down.”
“Maybe you are turning the valve too fast? Here.” He spun her around. “Try again, and tell me when you cannot hear the pulse.”
I delivered a baby the other day. Certainly I can figure out how to take someone’s blood pressure. Annie took a breath, closed her eyes, and squeezed the bulb. “Okay,” she said when the stethoscope fell silent.
Felipe covered his hand with hers—his thick fingers moving over her long ones, turning the valve a hair at a time. The needle inched down bit by bit.
“One sixty!” Annie jolted upright as soon as the woman’s pulse flooded through the ear pieces. Felipe stumbled backwards. “Oh crap. Sorry.”
He laughed. His aunt laughed. “You still have to take the bottom number,” he said.
“Right.” She shook her head and tried again—her body begging him to rest his chest against her back once more; her mind hoping he would let her do it on her own.
He stayed back.
“One sixty over eighty,” she said.
When the exam ended, Felipe sent his aunt away with a prescription for blood pressure medication and a promise to come by for dinner soon. The clinic had ended sometime around Annie’s third attempt with the cuff, and now they stood facing one another in the empty church.
“Now we will go fix your problem,” he said.
“My problem?”
He held out her journal. “Your lectures.”
“Oh!” Her eyes widened at the sight of the purple notebook. She snatched it from his fingers and stuffed it into her bag.
“Come.”
She followed him out the door, and as they walked to the maternity house Felipe quizzed her again and again on how to take someone’s blood pressure. By the time they stepped inside, Annie could recite the steps forward and backward.
In the narrow front room of the house, Juan lounged on his mattress, and light filtered in through the window to his face. He reminded Annie of a cat sprawled out in a patch of sun. Marisol had Phillip by the belt loop, pulling him out of the compact quarters.
“Everyone must stay here tonight,” Felipe announced from the doorway.
“¿Qué?” Marisol asked. Annie could practically read you’re-not-the-boss-of-me across her creased forehead.
“Annie needs help.”
“What happened?” Marisol let go of Phillip.
“Those kids took my stuff. My flashcards and…stuff for the sex ed class.”
Marisol shoved Juan’s feet off the bed and sat. She drew her eyebrows together. “Mi Anita. You lost your vagina?” She was so earnest.
Annie nodded. “Now I have this.” She held up the fuzzy uterus. “I think it has an STD.”
“We will go to the store and get some drinks.” Marisol stood and pulled Annie to her feet. “And food. Vamos.” Phillip rose, but Marisol put out a hand. “This is chica time.”
Annie followed her out the door.
“I see you have made friends with my brother again.” Marisol nudged her in the side.
“Sure.”
“And maybe you have made more than friends with him?”
Annie shook her head. “I already told you—”
“He would not stay in for any old Americana,” Marisol said. “Most times this is the night he spends drinking with our primo.”
“Cousin? Oh, he said he went by there this morning—”
“Yes, to cancel. It is fine. You are much prettier than Carlos.” Marisol winked and pulled her into the store. Annie swallowed the strange mix of guilt and elation that climbed her throat.
They returned to the house a few minutes later, arms loaded with bags. The lights sputtered on and the whirring of the fan filled the air.
“We have three hours of electric.” Felipe took a soda from his sister’s arms and sat on the bed, smiling. “Sit.” His dimple made her dizzy, and Annie found herself squeezing in close enough to smell the mix of rubbing alcohol and fresh cut grass that always seemed to cling to him after a clinic. Medicine and sunshine.
“Thanks for staying here and helping,” she said.
“It is nothing.” He leaned in, resting his free hand behind her back. Her body buzzed, hyperaware of his every move.
The others climbed onto the bed facing hers—where Marisol supposedly slept.
“Teach us about sex,” Marisol said.
Annie tried. She stumbled over the pronunciation of the proper words, and Juan tried to convince her to use several vulgar terms, arguing they were all easier to pronounce. She refused. They took turns pelting her with questions the villagers might ask, and for a little while, Marisol pretended to be a teenage boy who didn’t understand why he woke with an erection every day. Annie never figured out how to explain that one.
Felipe was the only one to offer much in the way of actual advice. Repeating words and phrases again and again, writing down phonetic spellings, and clueing her in when Juan’s suggestions took a tawdry turn.
“Pork sword. I think it will translate well to Spanish, no?”
Annie shook her head, and her cheeks ached with laughter. “Pork sword? Where do you learn this stuff?”
Juan shrugged as the electricity clicked off.
“You will do a good job.” Felipe got up and pointed his flashlight at the ceiling.
“Thanks.” She stood as Marisol slid by, pulling Phillip out the door with her. A moment later, footsteps shuffled along the ground, and by the moonlight, Annie watched Juan head toward the outhouse.
Beside her, Felipe pulled something from his bag. “Here. In case you are tired of eating gallo pinto all the time.”
They were alone, and all her emotions tumbled around inside her chest. Flipping over and over again like a packed dryer set to high heat. She stepped closer, stopping when the heat radiating from his skin invaded her space. “What is it?”
“Coco dulce. Coconut candy.”
A king-sized grin crept over her face, and she was helpless to stop it. “It smells amazing.”
“Good night,” he said.
“Felipe?”
“¿Sí?”
Annie swallowed, butterflies going mad in her stomach. “Thank you.”
His flashlight clicked off.
“Annie?”
“Yeah?”
The silence stretched for eons. Finally, he stepped closer, barely visible in the darkness. “I really want to kiss you.” His fingers brushed against the skin of her low back, firm but tentative. Gentle but wanting.
They eased the words right out of her. “Then kiss me.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him in until their mouths met. His lips were perfect against hers, mirroring the soft eagerness of his touch. And when he tugged her closer against him, a desperate whimper escaped her throat.
Too soon the shuffling footsteps returned. Juan.
She inched away, breathless and lightheaded.
Felipe took her stitched finger between his. “Tomorrow we will take out your stitches, sí?”
“Sure.”
He brushed his lips against hers one more time, stealing a soft, quick kiss. “Good night.”
Day Thirteen
Felipe fell asleep dreaming about that kiss and woke up thinking about it. The way Annie pressed against him. The way her mouth fit against his. The way the soft skin on her back burst into goose bumps under his fingertips.
He made his way to the sink, brushing his teeth while his sister lay sprawled across her bed. Her mouth hung wide open and a string of drool stretched from her cheek to the pillow. A paperback with a cracked, worn spine sat perched open on the floor next to her. Across the narrow room, Annie was awake and staring at the replacement flashcards she made the night before. The morning sun filtered in through the window and danced off her hair. It was long and loose and tangled with sleep.
“Hi,” she whispered, glancing at him.
“Bue
nas.” He smiled before realizing his mouth overflowed with minty foam. He cringed and fumbled with his water bottle, rinsing and wiping his lips.
He made his way toward her, and his feet echoed off the raised wooden floor. “Still practicing?”
Annie shrugged and pushed a curl out of her eyes. “We don’t have anything else to do today, right?”
“Sí.”
She sighed, and her shoulders sagged. “That’s fine. I need to brush up on this stuff anyway.” Annie turned to the flashcards, but her eyes kept flicking up to meet his. A quiet blush crept into her cheeks, and he couldn’t stop staring.
He’d never brought one of the tourists along to visit his family before, always eager to protect his loved ones from arrogance and looks of uneasy pity. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to visit some family members.”
“Your aunt? From yesterday?” Annie laughed. “I’m not sure I can face her after the blood pressure debacle.”
“Well, she will be very disappointed when you do not come for dinner then. But this morning I am going to visit my cousin.”
“The one with the troublemaker?”
“Sí.”
“Okay.”
The town bristled with morning chores. People went in and out of the little store. Men herded cattle home after a wild night of grazing in the village. Children ran toward the school in stiff uniforms, their laughter and shouts trailing behind them.
“Are you hungry?” he asked as they walked through a crowd. Most of the people waved or clapped him on the back as he passed. A few stared at Annie and her long, pale legs. “Carlos, my cousin, makes very good breakfast.”
“Breakfast.” Annie’s eyes rolled. “God, I am so hungry. Is it beans? Tell me it’s not beans.”
“You like eggs?”
“More than I like beans,” she said.
He slipped his hand into hers. “Come.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence, and he watched Annie take in the town. At first he was discreet, sneaking a glance or two her way as they moved. The closer they came to their destination, the longer his looks grew. Each time she smiled, he smiled in turn. But at the slightest hint of unhappiness—a frown here, a scrunched brow there—his pride drained. By the time they arrived at his cousin’s home, he felt both unbalanced and elated, as though he’d just stepped off a roller coaster.
