Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "Lalo? Why are you here? It is not Ezra's room."

  "You must know."

  "I don't. You want to tell me what terrible thing happened at the beneficio? You want to explain the finer points of bullfighting? I give up! And I feel rather odd, rather ... groggy. Or soggy."

  "It seems to be the only way to be with you. Alone with you. Everyone else has to be asleep."

  "I was asleep too."

  "You must realize how I feel about you," Lalo says.

  "You can't assume I know anything. I know less and less." I sit cross-legged and clutch the white linen sheets up to my neck.

  "I think about you, your body, the way your ankles are crooked, the scab on your elbow, your hair in a bundle, your volcanic breasts ... Call it an adulterous passion."

  "Stop right there. That's not what you said before."

  "Are you indifferent to me?" he asks with the most profound interrogatory inflection I've ever heard.

  "It's a long way from indifference to adulterous passion," I say. "Is it technically adulterous if you are not married?"

  Now I am awake. I am so awake my eyelids ache.

  But not Lalo's lids. His lids are transparent skin behind the lush foliage of his lashes, lashes women dream of, kill for.

  "Could I just kiss you?"

  "There's a hurricane out there," I say.

  "Precisely."

  "Yes."

  I lean forward and he does kiss me. And it is miraculous. All that focusing on his eyelashes, and I never realized what nice lips he has. We kiss for a while. His lips feel like a sigh. Then there is his tongue, a tongue simultaneously languorous and busy. He has a snail darter of a tongue. As if he has to memorize every single one of my teeth, and this is his only chance.

  Lalo says, "This is doloroso on my back, right here." He flutters his hand in the general direction of that graceful swale. "We had to move about three hundred quintals of coffee, back there. Wouldn't it be more comfortable if I got under the sheets, with you?"

  I nod. I have nothing to say. I just want those lips back on mine. I hear the rain thumping on the roof and gurgling down every gutter and chain. I hear the rich volcanic soil absorbing the rain. I hear wind and water, and Lalo's breath next to my ear. The insides of my ears are ticklish and eroticized. He is actually speaking words into my ear, but I don't hear them because his mouth is too close. I feel them. I turn my body toward his, and just like that, all stretched out, the length of me is attached to the length of him from his blue button-down pajama top to midway down the calf of his blue pajama bottoms.

  "I'm going to take off your shirt," Lalo says. "You won't get cold."

  I'm burning up. Did I say that aloud? No, I am incapable of speech. He slides the T-shirt over my head and along my arms. His fingers play with my nipples. "Like perfect coffee beans," he says. Even that doesn't make me laugh. I wrap my searing left leg around his right calf. I bring it up higher and slip my big toe inside his pajamas, clutch the waistband between my toes, and yank the pants down, down, down. It is a descent into weightlessness. It is like falling slowly into a well, with my eyes open, and nothing but delight on every side. Down, down the well, rounding the iliac crest, down the thigh and the tibia, and in the slippery beyond.

  Lalo says, "You know that there are many different types of love: courtly love, romantic love, platonic love, agape?"

  I nod and nuzzle my nose into his shoulder cavity, which fits me well.

  His lips, which so recently molded my lips into any shape they liked, are now moving south, toward my breasts, which are not remotely volcanic. And when they arrive, and surround the nipples, the same thing happens, the thing that happened when he kept talking into my ear. I cannot remember who this is and why I am here.

  Where is Ezra? Aloud, "Where is Ezra? Oh my God, this is demented."

  "As I said, he is in his room, quite happily practicing some skill."

  I sit up. The rain has softened; it comes down without rancor or fury.

  "Exactly. Demented. I should go check on him. I need to be a good mother."

  "You are a magnificent mother," Lalo says.

  "You have no idea. What do you know about being a mother? Or a parent? Why don't any of you have children?" This has been below the surface for a while now, my wondering about the dearth of procreation around here. What's with four adult offspring and not one of them reproducing? Is there some weird genetic trait I have overlooked? Was their childhood too weird to warrant replication? "Not even Emilia, and she's married."

  "Lie down, Alice. I can explain all that later. Ezra is fine. We will be fine. I adore your body."

  "My body? My body!" Has anyone ever referred to my body like that before? Has Waldo? Is he differentiating it from my mind? Do I care?

  "Explain now."

  "There's nothing to explain, I just said that to calm you down." I am not calmed down. What if they've all taken vows of chastity? Or almost-chastity?

  Hubert told me about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who went to the convent when she was just fifteen. Her two older sisters were already there, and later, three more sisters entered the convent. Poor Monsieur and Madame of Lisieux started out with six daughters and arguably a good chance of at least one or two grandchildren and ended up with none. Not only that, but all six entered a cloistered order. It was a tale of enchantment and sorrow.

  His lips and mouth have wandered farther south, into the southern regions of white belly, lint-filled umbilicus, and even farther, into the tropics. We are in the tropics. I can hear myself breathe. I hold my breath and there is another sound, not the rain, nor my panting. It is Abelardo Llobet, humming softly as he moves his tongue in geometric patterns into the rainforest where my clitoris awaits him like a bride at the altar, just recently given away by her indifferent father, the Lord of Misrule.

  "This is madness. This is demented. I can't do this." And then I do. Lalo holds my hips tightly with both hands. I whisper, "Ezra is next door."

  Later the humming stops.

  By then I hear breath and stillness, stillness and breath. I am voracious. Lalo breathes all the air in the room. He climbs. I sink. I climb. He sinks. I breathe all the air in the room.

  And finally, stillness and enough oxygen for us both.

  I hop out of bed and stand unsteadily. "You really have to go. We'll feel better in the morning. You'll see."

  "You're brilliant, dear Alice. There is no other place in the world than here."

  But he does get out of the bed. He reaches down to the far end of the mattress where his pajama bottoms were unceremoniously discarded, retrieves them, and pulls them on. At this instant, when the pale blue pajamas are midway up his legs, I see him as he was in the snow in VerGroot, in his pajamas, going mad in the whiteness. The instant passes, as déjà vus do, leaving a lingering taste of panic.

  He stands next to me. Was this always going to happen? Was there a germ of this in the snow? In the Ginny O johnnies?

  I adore Waldo. Let's not forget that. Waldo walks on water, on swamps, on puddles and pools.

  "You know that Hubert called me?" Lalo says. "But I didn't speak with him. He left a message with Graciela. I would be very surprised if she got it correctly. Does Hubert speak Spanish? He never spoke Spanish with me."

  "That's because your English is perfect."

  "Like your nipples," Lalo says.

  "Don't do that. This. I love Waldo. You love Waldo."

  "Carmen loves Waldo. But she hasn't seen him in years. Waldo is beloved. Yes, that is all true," Lalo says.

  "What was the message?" This would be easier if I had some clothes on. My T-shirt is somewhere in the tectonic folds of the sheets. I don't dare get near the bed.

  "He told Graciela to tell me to read about Saints Marina, Pelagia, and Apollinaris."

  "Is that all?"

  "And some other saints, but she forgot." He cups my breasts in his hands. Not like before. Now they are foreign objects, experimental objects. "Can you think why I must read abo
ut those saints?"

  "None of them ever existed? They are all legendary, conflations, borrowed from other saints or folklore."

  "How can we ever say for certain that someone never existed?" Lalo asks.

  "I don't know. I don't think of it that way. I'm not a philosopher. Far from it. Hubert called Waldo too. And told him something else."

  "He did?"

  "Yup. His sources told him your rival cured some bee sting."

  "I know nothing of that, and it sounds highly dubious."

  "See! Even Abelardo Llobet has his doubts." I am gleeful, giddy.

  Then he disappears out the door, so silently, so graciously. So like a gentleman are the words in my head.

  Was he ever really here?

  I find my blue-striped cotton bathrobe—also Waldo's, a gift from Posey—and slip out, creep along the wall to the next door, Ezra's open door. I stand and listen. I need to filter out the rain and isolate Ezra's distinctive breathing.

  Lalo was right. And also wrong. Ezra is not practicing catapulting. He is dreaming.

  I tighten the robe's sash so that it cuts into my waist. Ezra sleeps on his back; his arms are bent, and both hands rest loosely on the left side of his chest, as if holding a small animal between them. Do I believe that a single saint ever levitated? Or walked across the bay? Or cured the halt, the blind, or the possessed? If I could do anything of that ilk I would gather Ezra in my arms right now and whisk him far above the stormy clouds and back to VerGroot, back to Waldo and Henry and our own barking dogs. I only kiss him.

  "I'm not sleeping," Ezra says.

  "Holy cow!" I jump and almost lose my death grip on the sash.

  "But I was sleeping before. I had a dream. Do you want to hear it?"

  "Always."

  As his dreams so often are, this one is populated with Mr. Cicero, Waldo, and a strange woman on a train. Also dogs.

  I say, "That is a great dream, Ezra."

  "You always say that."

  "That's because it's always true."

  "My head hurts. I'm going to sleep now," he says.

  "It hurts? Where does it hurt? Front or back?"

  "I don't know. It's okay, Mom." His eyelids fall, and his body settles deeper into the mattress. Gravity prevails.

  The bed I crawl back into is muggy and sticky. I am trying to remember if it was raining when we arrived. Yes, I believe it was. Maybe the first day the rain stopped and the clouds parted for three and a half minutes. Then it rained again and it has not ceased since. Or maybe I am confusing this with another visit to some other tropics. It is so slippery out there, and inside my head. The humidity is 100 percent, in this country, on this farm, in Las Brisas, in this room, this bed.

  32

  Take According to Directions

  The life is largely taken up with anecdotes of wonders, which provoked Dom Serenus Cressy in the seventeenth century to complain of "fables and unsavoury miracles."

  —Alban Butler, "St Illtud," Butler's Lives of the Saints

  EVERY MORNING THUS FAR in the tropics, the tray with coffee, hot milk, and an orchid in a narrow vase, a lurid magenta cattleya, appears in this room within minutes of my eyes cracking open. It is beautiful, and it is a shocking affront: this flower of the jungle, with its two serrated petals framing the darker tongue, the challenge. It beckons the pollinating bees with their long tongues and kinky desires. These flowers grow alone in the ordered chaos of the rainforest. Why do they have to be so beautiful? I could get very used to this, this magical appearance of strong, dark coffee that I did not make.

  I am assuming that Ezra ate breakfast earlier and that he's gone somewhere with Carmen. It seems a logical assumption. But it is wrong.

  I can't look at the gallo pinto that ordinarily endears breakfast to me. The papaya and banana are chalk in my mouth. Lalo is nowhere to be seen. I am sitting here alone with Olga.

  "Are you planning to starve yourself?" she asks cheerfully.

  "No, of course not," I say. "Do you know where everyone else is?" Rain, rain, go away, don't come back till I'm far, far away, in Utica or Canaday.

  "Anorexia has a bad name these days," she tells me. "It's been appropriated by models who sniff drugs."

  "I think anorexia is a twentieth-century diagnosis," I say. "Where is everyone?"

  "There have been several saints who survived on nothing but the Blessed Sacrament. I would try it, but I am so fond of fruit."

  "God forbid you should get scurvy," I say, and I am gone. I scooch down the hall and then up the stairs, back to the upper story with its long loggia and bedrooms without end. I knock on Ezra's door, and go in.

  Ezra is still in bed. He looks different. Still and pale. He looks at me without saying a word.

  "Holy cow, Ez. What's the matter?"

  "I threw up three times last night," he informs me.

  "Why didn't you tell me? I was right next door."

  "Every time I thought it was the last time."

  "How do you feel now?"

  "My head is pounding. And everything else hurts too."

  I press my hand to his forehead, first pushing aside the locks of brown hair that are plastered there. "You're hot. I'm going to get a thermometer and some Tylenol. But first have some water."

  He sips the water, stops to lick his lips, then sips again. He smiles at me, my beloved boy, and almost immediately his chest gives a hop, shifts location, and he starts heaving. He vomits the water and random bits onto the counterpane.

  "Sorry about that."

  "Never mind that. Oh, Ezra, Ezra." The rain is louder up here beneath the roof. Outside his window I see the vast hillsides of slick green coffee trees, just foliage. Everything is about to be submerged or washed away; I see that now. On the dark wooden windowsill I see the carcasses of three mosquitoes and one fly. They stick out because in this house I have seen no dust bunnies, no cobwebs, no dead flies, this being only one of the many ways that Las Brisas differs from the Fairweather Family Home for Stray Inventors in VerGroot, New York.

  I clean up after Ezra, somewhat, and run to my room for the medical kit I prepared before we departed. It contains Band-Aids, a thermometer, aspirin, Tylenol, an Ace bandage, Deep Woods insect repellent, Benadryl anti-itch spray, Neosporin, Cipro, Lomotil and Imodium for diarrhea, Milk of Magnesia for its opposite, throat lozenges, and vaginitis cream (not for Ezra). His temperature is 103 degrees. I give him two Tylenol. That is the prescribed adult dosage. Ezra is not exactly an adult, but he weighs as much as a (smallish) adult, and 103 is a very high temperature.

  He takes the pills obediently. Then he vomits up the white pellets, the water that washed them down, and unidentifiable mucus.

  "You can't keep them down, can you?"

  "Everything hurts, Mom."

  I stroke him and hold him as if he might break. I tell him I am going to find Lalo or Carmen and call a doctor. Everything will be fine soon. He has a stomach flu. I can do this, I know I can do this. I can comfort Ezra and find the proper medicine. What I cannot do is stop the melodrama that is playing, end to end, back to back, in my head. I cannot stop the Worst Possible Scenario: Ezra is sick and all the medevac helicopters are lined up like toys in the airport in Managua, not going anywhere because of the hurricane. And they could never fly in the first place. I am weak in the knees. Of all the possible Bad Mother Moments, this is the absolute top.

  What will I tell Waldo? Will Henry ever speak to me again? How could I have let this happen to him, here in an uncertain drowning banana republic? What exactly was I doing when Ezra was falling ill? When he was throwing up exactly three times all alone in his room? I know what I was doing, and it was a moment of insanity. Pure sanity.

  No, it must have been after Lalo and after my visit to Ezra. That doesn't mitigate the Bad Motherness of it.

  Downstairs Olga is at the dining table, drawing patterns with her finger in a plate piled with salt.

  "Did you lose something?" she asks.

  "Ezra's not feeling well an
d I need to call a doctor. Do you know a doctor who can come? Where is Carmen, or Lalo?"

  "A man came to the beneficio a while ago, looking for help and a place to stay. Lalo is with him."

  "Can we call the doctor now?"

  "Our doctor is in León, and he never leaves the house before noon."

  "But this is an emergency! Ezra has vomited five times now, and he has a fever. I take fevers very seriously!"

  "Who does not?"

  "Who doesn't what?" Carmen is standing behind me. The constant rain enables stealth.

  "Ezra has a high fever and the vomits," I say. "I should call a doctor."

  "The telephone lines are down but maybe the cell will work. What did we do before cell phones?"

  "I don't care. I just want Ezra better."

  "My poor darling Ezra," Carmen says. "I'll go call right now." Her perfume lingers when she leaves. Curare #4, or Andean Aphrodisia.

  Outside the room I stop. The kitchen dog, yet another branch on valiant Panchito's family tree, limps close to the ground, comes round the corner, and stands still. Now I realize what Ezra looks like: Dandy when he was so deathly ill. Dandy when his red blood cells were disappearing and his bone marrow wasn't doing its job. Dandy before the first blood transfusion.

  So much to refuse to think about.

  Carmen leans against the santo and speaks a mile a minute into the cell phone.

  "Fernando is an old family friend," she says to me, and inclines her head forward while the V of her thumb and index finger sweeps back her hair. She does this perhaps one hundred times a day. "He was at seminary with Lalo for a year, before they both left. His father delivered all four of us. But never mind. It is impossible to get here from León, but he can prescribe a broad-spectrum antibiotic and we can get it from the pharmacy in the village."

  "But he hurts all over."

  "I said we would call him back."

  "Did you tell him about the vomits?"

  "Most people who come here get diarrhea. Not only gringos," Carmen says. She touches my shoulder with either kindness or pity. She flips her hair back.

  "Ezra didn't say anything about the runs."