“The beginning is tough.” Emerson is talking, and I try to concentrate on his voice. “It’s a lot to get used to psychologically, all the poverty and violence. But it’s not too bad for us. The barracks are decent, and the food isn’t that awful. Anyway, you start to feel lucky about having food at all.”
“How long have you been here?” I steal another look at Emerson. He’s very tanned, probably from spending a lot of time outdoors here. He also has a smattering of freckles across his cheekbones and nose. He’s not exactly good looking, not in a Hollywood sort of way, but there is something pleasant about his face. His eyes are warm, and when he smiles it feels genuine.
“Almost a year,” he says. “I go home soon. Back to college. I took a year off to come here.”
“Where are you studying?” I ask politely. Outside, I notice a trio of dead birds smeared on the road and cringe.
“UCLA. Architecture.” He gives me a shy smile. “I’ve been helping to design the orphanage.”
“Wow.” I reach for another Mentos. Emerson’s dropped the pack in the cup holder, and my mouth is dry and sticky, as if I swallowed a tablespoon of tapioca pudding. Flying will do that to you; it’s the recycled air. My dad taught me that. Before he lost his mind, my dad was an airplane enthusiast. I think of his collection of model 747s and feel a crushing sensation in my chest, as if my insides are crumpling like an empty soda can.
“How about you?” He makes a sharp left, and I grab on to the door handle to steady myself. “You also taking a year off?”
“Yeah, but I haven’t started.” The sun is blinding, and I lower my sunglasses. “I’ve deferred. Stanford. Undeclared major.”
“Wow, right out of high school?”
“Something wrong with that?” I cross my arms across my chest, feeling defensive.
“No, it’s great,” he says sincerely. “It shows a lot of commitment. A lot of people here are just résumé-building. You know, for grad school or whatever.”
“Seriously?” It seems like a long way to come to résumé build, and I wonder if that’s the standard now. My parents made me volunteer Saturdays at a food bank, citing not only the joys of altruism but the benefits of listing the work on my university application. Now I wonder if they were being naïve. Maybe handing out canned goods was good enough to get you into law school or whatever back in the eighties, but it sounds like it might not cut it now.
“Oh yeah. Though to be fair, it’s still hard work, no matter why you’re here.”
The road narrows as we drive down a steep hill. It isn’t paved, just covered in gravel. In the distance, I catch a glimpse of the thick, green, tree canopy of the Amazon rainforest. Emerson follows my gaze.
“That’s the jungle,” he confirms, reading my thoughts. “It’s hard to believe this was all jungle once, really.”
I think of the airport, the barren ground, the dusty roads. It’s hard to imagine any of it having been the source of thriving life. I picture my battered copy of Lonely Planet: Calantes, and the photos of tall grasses and ancient trees, colorful birds, and oversized flowers.
“You know the history?” Emerson looks at me quickly, before turning his eyes back to the road, which is winding its way down the rest of the hill. My stomach is empty, and I feel slightly queasy. I take a deep breath, hoping my bowels won’t choose this particularly inopportune moment to showcase their irritability.
“Yes.” I nod, exhaling. It had been touched on briefly in orientation, of course, but I’d also done a lot of my own reading on Calantes’s long and sad history. It was a thriving hub during the Amazon rubber boom of the nineteenth century, and the capital city of San Pedro was second only to Manaus, Brazil, in its wealth and importance as an international destination for rubber. But when the rubber-tree seeds were smuggled out of the Amazon, no country suffered as much as Calantes. San Pedro had slowly crumbled over the years, its European-style buildings either destroyed or decaying, its once-paved streets cracked and unrepaired. A revolving door of corrupt leaders had plunged the tiny country into a lingering depression over the last half-century, most of them succumbing to greed and involvement in what had become Calantes’s main source of income since the rubber collapse: drug trafficking.
“These guys now—General Alvarez and his crew—they’re beyond corrupt.” Emerson shakes his head in disgust. “There was a democratically elected government here for ten years, and things were finally looking better. And now this.”
I frown at his reference to the previous government. “Wasn’t President Carias convicted of collaborating with drug cartels and stealing from taxpayers to build a saltwater pool for his mansion?” I shift in my seat, feeling a rumbling in my stomach that I pray is just hunger and not the prelude to a full-blown attack. I feel thankful the windows are rolled down.
Emerson reddens. “He wasn’t perfect,” he admits. He doesn’t look at me, his eyes firmly fixed on the uneven terrain before him. “But the army is even worse. It’s a huge step backwards for Calantes.”
I don’t say anything. He would know better; he’s been here, on the ground. Besides, I had seen the news reports, and the pictures. One particularly famous shot that had gone viral was of one of Alvarez’s soldiers lighting a cigarette off a woman’s burning hair. My stomach turns as I recall it, the victim’s anguish contrasted with the manic laughter of the soldier. The car takes another twist, and I feel the Mentos rising in my throat, coupled with another grumbling sensation.
Thankfully, moments later Emerson slows to a stop. We’ve arrived. The base is a hodgepodge of burlap tents, abandoned trailers, and old wooden barracks. They look ridiculously rickety, and I can’t help picturing the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and blowing them down. Kids my own age mill about in jeans and T-shirts. I notice a girl with two long red braids carrying a guitar and have the urge to roll my eyes. I can almost picture Tess raising her eyebrows at me. See, she would say. It’s exactly like camp. Guitars and “Kumbaya.”
Emerson follows my gaze. “That’s Sari,” he says, nodding at the girl with the guitar. “She does music therapy with the little ones.”
Of course she does. Feeling like the biggest asshole on the planet, I follow Emerson into a rusty trailer that’s been painted with the distinctive blue-and-white SWB logo. “Office” is scrawled on the door as an afterthought, in what looks like black marker. The door is propped open with a broken chair. “This is the main office,” says Emerson, unnecessarily. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Tricia.”
The office isn’t much more than a desk, a couple of dented filing cabinets, and a fan, which oscillates slowly, gently rustling the papers on the desk each time it breezes by. I step in front of it, enjoying the sensation of moving air on my face.
The girl at the desk smiles pleasantly. Her hair is a wild mass of brown curls valiantly trying to escape the ponytail they’ve been scraped into, and when the fan blows by, the loose tendrils fly upwards, forming a ruff around her face. “Nice, isn’t it? You’re welcome to come and stand here in front of my fan anytime,” she says, putting out her hand. “I’m Trish. I run the office.”
“Cat,” I say, shaking her hand firmly. “Cat Marks.”
“Cat,” she repeats. “I like that.”
“There were four Caitlins in my first-grade class,” I explain. “Cate and Caity were already taken as nicknames.”
“Ah,” she says knowingly. “My oldest sister is a Jessica. I totally understand.”
“I like Cat,” says Emerson, unexpectedly. I look at him, and he blushes and kind of shrugs. “I know a lot of Katies, but I’ve never met a Cat.”
I notice a dish of colorful lollipops on the corner of Trish’s desk and eye them hopefully. Hard candy helps soothe my stomach. Trish sees me looking and grins, handing me the bowl. Gratefully, I select a red one and noisily tear off the plastic wrapping.
“So, Caitlin Marks.” Trish swaps the
candy dish for a blue file folder and spreads it open on the desk. “Here is your name tag and handbook.”
“Name tag?” I pop the lollipop into my mouth.
“It’s for orientation,” she clarifies.
I push the sucker to one side with my tongue. “I had an orientation back in Ohio,” I say, frowning.
“This is more like an icebreaker,” Emerson interjects helpfully. “You know, like games. To get to know the others in your group.”
Icebreaker. Glorious. I imagine Tess rolling on the floor, helpless with laughter. We both hate those intolerably cutesy, forced games. I try not to cringe as I pick up the name tag with two fingers, as if it’s contaminated with hepatitis.
“You’re in Barracks B,” continues Trish. “Bed four.”
“Bed four,” I repeat. I sound like a toddler, my mouth full of candy.
“And Emerson here is your buddy. We have a buddy system here,” she adds, catching my look of confusion. “We pair the newbies with experienced volunteers to help them get adjusted. It’s like a mentorship program.”
“Right,” I say. I look over at Emerson, who smiles at me. I wonder if he thinks I’m going to sleep with him. Then I wonder where people have sex, because we all live in barracks and having sex in a communal living arrangement is sort of gross. Not that I would really know, because I’ve never had sex. I may be the only person on the planet who graduated from high school a virgin, but to be fair, I did have a lot on my mind.
“And the tuck shop and pay phones are in Barracks H.” Guiltily, I realize Trish has been talking while I’ve been thinking about sex, and I’ve missed all of it. Now I won’t know where the bathrooms are, or how to get Internet. I hope it’s all in my handbook.
“Don’t worry, all of this is in the handbook,” says Trish, as if reading my mind. “It’s a lot to take in right away, especially after seeing all the poverty on the drive in.”
“Yes,” I say quickly, feeling ashamed. She thinks I’ve gone maudlin over the underprivileged children, rather than thinking about hypothetical sex.
“And thank you,” Trish adds. Her dark eyes are warm and sincere; they make her sweet face almost pretty. “We really need the help out here. We get the fewest number of volunteers. We don’t have the cachet of Africa or the Gaza Strip.”
I wonder if it’s the first time “cachet” and “Gaza” have been used in the same sentence. I figure this is not a good time to mention I chose Calantes because Gaza seemed terrifying and Burkina Faso required more shots.
“I’ll take you over to B Barracks now,” says Emerson helpfully. “Thanks, Trish.”
“Thanks!” I add. She waves with a smile as we step out of the trailer. Little clouds of dust puff up at my feet with each step, as if the ground is smoking. I crunch down on the lollipop, biting the sweet remains. I feel better, for now.
“Trish is great,” he says. “She used to be a volunteer. Back in 2009.”
“And now she’s working for SWB?”
“Yeah. She’s the site manager. She came back after she got her MBA in non-profit organization management.”
I didn’t realize masters’ degrees were that specific. Clearly I have a lot to learn.
“This is B,” he says, gesturing to one of the broken-down barracks I’d noticed from the car. It has a giant, sloppy “B” spray-painted in orange on the door, but I don’t mention this, because right now Emerson is pretty much my only friend, and I don’t want him to think I’m a sarcastic bitch, even if it happens to be true.
There’s no one else inside when we open the door into the stale heat. “The others should be here soon,” says Emerson, looking at his watch. “I know Anthony went to pick up two newbies for three, and Erin is going later to get the last.”
“It’s four to a room?” I look around. There are four metal twin beds carefully placed, one in each corner. Each one has a bedside table, a trunk, and a bookcase tucked beside it. Mosquito nets hang over each bed like woven chandeliers. I’ve never seen a mosquito net in person before. They look a bit like canopies, giving the room a weird kind of squalid grandeur.
“Yeah.” Emerson points to a corner. “That one’s four. You put your clothes and anything perishable in the trunk, everything else in the bookcase. Oh, and keep your toiletries in your trunk, too.”
“Why?” I ask, curious.
“Because otherwise they melt,” he says simply.
“How would they melt?” I frown, picturing my shampoo. As far as I know, it’s already liquid. What happens to shampoo when it melts? Can it melt? How would I even know?
He looks at me quizzically. “It’s hot here?”
“No, but how does it melt them?”
He thinks I’m crazy now, I can tell. “The soap. It gets hot, and it melts.”
“Ohh.” Soap. Of course. “I—I use body wash.” Realizing I’ve just divulged Too Much Information, I stop talking and look away, mortified. Emerson looks amused, and I hope at this point he actually does want to sleep with me, because otherwise he’s just going to think I’m deeply weird.
“I’ll leave you here to unpack and rest a bit,” he says, chewing on the inside of his lip. At least both of us are uncomfortable. “Does that work?”
“Yes,” I say gratefully, gazing longingly at my new bed. I’m happy to have somewhere to lie down after what felt like an endless trip, even if the mattress looks like it was previously occupied by a sumo wrestler and the blanket is scratchy-looking blue polyester.
“Great, I’ll see you later,” says Emerson. He flips around his baseball cap, fiddling with the brim. “I’ll come back and take you on a camp tour.”
“Sure.” My voice is muffled by the musty pillow. I’m already flopped face-first down on the bed. Emerson says something else, but my eyes are half-closed and the words don’t register. I don’t bother to turn down the bed before falling asleep.
Chapter 3
Before
I know from the look on my mother’s face it’s bad news long before she opens her mouth.
“No,” I say. I feel the blood leave my head and plunge to my feet. I sway, dizzy, and grab on to a kitchen chair to steady myself. “Don’t say it.”
“He doesn’t know yet.” Her voice is quiet. She’s holding a glass of wine in one hand, taking gulps as opposed to sips. “But he thinks it’s bad, based on the mammogram.”
“They can’t tell it’s cancer from a mammogram,” I jump in. I know this, because I have spent the past week googling breast cancer like it’s my job. I now know that a lump can only be declared cancerous once it’s been biopsied, which involves sticking a giant needle deep into your boob to extract a sample of tissue. There was a video of the procedure on YouTube, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Just thinking about it nearly sent me running to the bathroom.
“He said it was spiculated, though.” She reaches for the bottle of Chardonnay on the counter and tops up her glass. “Apparently, that is bad.”
“Oh.” My heart plummets. Spiculated is bad. It means that the lump has spikes protruding from it when it shows up on an X-ray, and those spikes tend to mean malignant cancer. I picture a spiky mass, bright green, with crazy eyes and a scowling mouth, like a character in a video game you squash for two hundred points.
My mom is watching my expression, her eyes growing wide. “It is bad, then. I was right.” Her voice is high and thin with panic. “What did you read?”
While I have been devoting my time to becoming the world’s first high-school junior to earn a specialty in breast oncology, my mother has been studiously avoiding the Internet. “Don’t tell me, Cat,” she’d say, when I tried to explain anything to her. “I don’t want to know.”
I don’t blame her for acting this way. While I deal with fear by learning everything I can, I recognize that hiding in bed with an iPad and pretzels as an equally reasonable strategy f
or coping with stress.
“They can’t tell anything until the biopsy,” I say firmly, but I don’t make eye contact. Instead, I focus on a point just above her head, on the kitchen cabinets. I notice a tiny spider there, trying to move around undetected. Ordinarily this would bother me, but it would seem I’ve moved on from being afraid of spiders.
“I’m going to have to do chemo.” She’s tearing up now. My heartbeat stutters, then picks up; I hate seeing my parents cry. It feels unnatural. Parents are supposed to be brave and stoic and stable, and right now my mom is weeping, with a glass of wine held loosely in one hand. “I’m going to lose all my hair.” She sets her glass down on the table and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a trail of smudged mascara. “Is that shallow? It is, isn’t it? I have cancer and all I can think of is my hair.” She gives a painful little hiccup, a cross between a laugh and a sob. “What if I have a giant birthmark on my head?”
“Maybe you should lay off the wine,” I say gently, putting my hand on her arm. She’s wearing the sweater I bought her for Christmas last year. It’s baby-soft and purple, made of real cashmere.
“You’re right,” she says. “That fucker Oz says it can raise your risk of breast cancer.” She throws back her head and gives a crazy kind of cackle.
“Okay, enough.” I grab her glass and dump the remaining contents into the sink, and tuck the bottle back in the fridge. I refill her glass with water and hand it back to her. “Drink,” I say.
My mom gulps it down, obedient as a child, and goes over to place the glass in the dishwasher.
“If I die,” she says, her palms flat on the washer, “you’re going to have to remember to run the dishwasher at night. Your father will never do it.”
“Mom!” I massage my temples against a gathering headache. “You can’t say stuff like that!”
“I know.” She comes over to me and puts both her hands on my shoulders. She looks at me searchingly, her eyes full of pain. “I’m so sorry, Cat.”
Undiscovered Country Page 3
