Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

"Fernando said it is probably either a stomach flu or malaria or dengue."

  "Dengue! As in dengue fever?" Horrors.

  Ezra looks the same, only smaller and paler. I was gone for mere minutes. He is talking to me but I am hearing Posey's voice saying something about dengue fever, scourge of the tropics.

  Carmen standing in the doorway appears angelic, all white and luminous, framed by the dark wood. Ezra's eyes are drawn to her like iron filings to a magnet.

  "I didn't say it was definitely dengue," she says. "Fernando was just tossing out some possibilities."

  "How do you feel now, Ez?" I touch his forehead and imagine it is cooler, but I know it is not.

  "Everything hurts," Ezra says.

  I hadn't seen her, but Olga is here too, in a corner of the room. She's all in black, which makes it easy for her to sit unnoticed in corners for who knows how long.

  "Malaria's the one you should worry about," Olga says. She's perched atop the convex lid of a massive wooden trunk with tarnished brass fittings, flaking leather straps, and the name LLOBET OTANGUEZ painted between two wooden staves. "Healthy boys survive dengue. Malaria stays with you forever."

  "Stop it, Olga!" Carmen hisses. "Don't listen to her, Ezra darling."

  "Everything hurts."

  I take his temperature and it is 104 degrees this time. What happens at 104? Do eggs poach? Do brain cells sizzle and sweat? Waldo would know. Which is why I love him. Which is among the reasons to love him.

  Waldo would know that Herr Doktor Carl Wunderlich's nineteenth-century assertion that normal body temperature was 98.6 degrees was debunked more than ten years ago, and that our actual average temperature is a few tenths of a degree lower. This means Ezra's temperature is even more of a fever than it would have been ten years ago. Waldo would tell Ezra that Herr Doktor Carl Wunderlich traveled the length and breadth of Germany sticking his mercury thermometer under armpits, until he had racked up twenty-five thousand subjects. Waldo might compose a limerick about a comical German medical man, rhyming armpit with nitwit, and mercury with fury. I would fall in love with him all over again, and again.

  There has to be an explanation for last night with Lalo. I need to explain myself to myself. But first Ezra.

  Graciela brings me a mortar and pestle I do not remember asking for. It is just the thing to crush a Tylenol pill, which I dissolve in water and feed to Ezra on a teaspoon. He smiles and slurps it down. Three women watch the faint movement of his Adam's apple swallowing.

  "Mom, I need the bucket." But I am not quick enough and he upchucks everything.

  Ezra's eyelids sink. I lie next to him and tell him a dream he has heard countless times before. I dreamed it repeatedly as a child. It involves a bear, a canoe, and Pop. Ezra seems to like it.

  Ezra's breathing is short and shallow. His skin is transparent in ways I never noticed before. The essence of Ezra travels along those blue veins.

  I have no idea what time it is when Carmen stands in the doorway and tells me that Waldo is on the phone.

  "I thought the phones were kaput," I say.

  "He called my cell."

  I tiptoe out. How did Waldo get Carmen's cell number? My Waldo dialed a series of numbers and was connected to a Nicaraguan cell phone?

  This can only mean bad news.

  "Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

  "I hear you perfectly, Al. How are things?"

  "You mean you don't know? Why did you call?"

  "I just wanted to hear your lovely voice. Anything wrong with that?"

  "Nothing. But you can't be funny right now. Ezra's sick, you know."

  "I didn't know." Waldo sounds aggrieved. "I thought Henry was the one with a bedsore."

  That idiotic bedsore experiment.

  "Don't tell me he is still doing that?"

  "It was a brilliant success, as it happens. He got himself an incipient bedsore in about twelve hours. Now that we know he can stay perfectly still for that long, maybe we should exhibit him in a circus."

  "Not funny, Waldo. Ezra is really sick. I don't know what it is and the doctor can't come. He can't keep anything—anything—down." The cell phone so close to my mouth, I could swallow it. It is warm. How long were Waldo and Carmen talking before? What other exceptions to standard operating procedure will Waldo make where Carmen is concerned?

  "Make sure he stays hydrated, that's the key."

  "Please listen. He can't keep even the smallest spoonful of water down. And he has a fever."

  "What is his temp?"

  "Last I took it, a hundred and four. Do they use centigrade here? What would that be in centigrade?"

  "It's forty degrees."

  "I should know that."

  "Most of the world uses Celsius," Waldo informs me.

  "But we're in Nicaragua."

  "Ask Lalo what they use."

  "He's disappeared," I say.

  "Disappeared. Was he kidnapped?"

  "No! He's just out somewhere. Probably in the beneficio."

  "Forty is high."

  "I know. He can't even keep a Tylenol down."

  "Does Carmen have any idea what it is?"

  "Did she say something to you?"

  "No."

  "She said Fernando—he's the doctor—thinks it's either a stomach flu, malaria, or dengue fever."

  "Shit," Waldo says.

  "He's going to be fine," I say. "He's still cheerful. You know how he is."

  "I don't like being so far away."

  "Me neither." For a few seconds neither of us speaks, and I notice the quickening of the rainfall, as if all those millions upon millions of raindrops are in a rush to get someplace else. "So really, how come you called?"

  "Really? I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I heard on the news that there are mudslides in Honduras and Nicaragua. Big mudslides."

  "You did? I hadn't heard that."

  "I can thank CNN and the Magic Satellite."

  "Of course I know we're in a hurricane. There is a ton of wind and rain. But it's not like home. It's lasting too long."

  Waldo says, "It will be over soon. I have that on Channel Twenty-five's authority."

  "Can I talk to Henry?"

  "He's next door with Susie. Her chickens finally came. They are more amusing than bedsores."

  "She got chickens while we're away?" Just a day ago this would have mattered.

  "If Ez isn't feeling better I'll send in the medevac helicopters."

  "Are you crazy? Helicopters don't fly in hurricanes. If there weren't a hurricane, the doctor could get here. He'll be better."

  "He better be," Waldo says. "Better."

  "Kiss Henry for me," I say.

  Ezra's temperature is down to 103.5. I don't know what that translates to in centigrade. Less than forty. Graciela brings me a dish with green Jell-O. This seems an odd choice for someone likely to upchuck, but maybe Graciela knows something about tropical nausea I don't. I give him a couple of wobbly spoonfuls.

  "Mom!" Ezra barely has time to grab the plastic bowl on the floor. The two spoonfuls of green Jell-O are regurgitated, up and out. "Never mind," he says. "I'm not hungry."

  If Hubert were here he would pray to Saint John Bosco, who has all those boys' high schools named after him, or Saint Nicholas of Myra, who raised three pickled little boys from the dead after they'd been murdered and stuffed in a barrel of brine. Or Hubert might take the fever-patron tack and suggest praying to Amalburga. Better to pray to Mary of Oignies, who was especially devoted to lepers, ate no meat, and dressed only in white, like someone else I know. You would think that among all the thousands of saints there would be one who was once a sweet little boy who recovered from a tropical fever and then went on to spend the rest of eternity looking after other little boys with tropical fevers.

  "How long have you been standing there?"

  Lalo says, "The beneficio is flooded and the village is under mud. I opened up the church because it's on higher ground, but I'm afraid it won't be big enough fo
r everyone."

  "I must have fallen asleep with Ezra." Ezra's eyelids flicker, then settle back down.

  "How is he?"

  "The same. Sleeping. I told Waldo about it," I say.

  "Why did you tell Waldo? We should discuss that first," Lalo says.

  "He said to tell you his temperature is forty degrees Celsius."

  "Oh. Ezra's," Lalo says. Light dawns over Marblehead. I could kiss him, again and again.

  While I sit on this old trunk with its spalling leather straps and mottled brass hinges (formerly Olga's perch), Lalo tells Ezra about Tía Tata. They know I am sitting here, but Lalo has not spoken to me.

  He tells Ezra about Tata's confidant, Padre Oscar Felipe. Ezra is immobile beneath the white sheet folded at neat right angles. His head creates a concavity in the pillow and is surrounded by a damp halo. His lips are slightly parted. He has the nicest teeth of all the Fairweathers.

  It took years, but over time Padre Oscar got used to her outbursts and grew comfortable in Tristána's presence. Whenever there was a problem with a female parishioner, he went knocking at Tristána's door. Her shack was close by the rectory, near the church that is now sheltering villagers displaced by mud and water. They ended up becoming such good friends that in old age they looked alike: tiny, wrinkled, sunburned, and crowned with tufts of gray hair that resembled precious metal in the yellow light.

  "Have I told you what she was most famous for in her lifetime? Besides being beautiful?" Lalo asks Ezra.

  "Your aunt?"

  Great-aunt.

  "She was famous for being your aunt. And Carmen's." I like the shadows in this room, because I can hide in them.

  "Not that, my young friend," Lalo says. "She had a nose for death. She always knew when someone on the farm or in one of the villages was going to die, and she went straight to his house and stayed until he died. She arrived in her shabby pants and an overshirt, but once inside she would remove those outer clothes and beneath she was always in pure white. So naturally people thought she was an angel. I don't mean they thought she was really an angel, because our people know better than that.

  "Her great task was to care for the ill, the dying, and then the dead. She was passionate about the need to respect the bodies of the dead so that they might look their best at the Last Judgment."

  "Mom says you're not required to have a body anymore for the Last Judgment, because so many people get cremated."

  Did I tell him that? Apparently I have not entirely neglected his religious education.

  Ezra continues in his low, submarine voice. "My grandfather was cremated. But he didn't believe in a Last Judgment anyway. He believed in dust and ashes."

  "I met your grandfather three times. Three times Three. He was a gentleman and a scholar."

  Ezra's eyes are drifting.

  Lalo continues. "Tata sang a cappella at the funerals of the workers, and not only the workers of Las Brisas but all around.

  "There was a certain problem about having a nose for death, and I don't need to tell you what it was. So sometimes she walked in disguise."

  Beneath his sheets, Ezra twitches at the word disguise.

  Lalo says Tata occasionally accepted rides on an ox cart. When she did, she pretended to be mute, because her Castilian inflections would have given her away.

  "If she was alive now, would she be here?" Ezra says. I hold my breath. Is this where we have been going all along?

  Lalo is holding his breath also. Finally, finally, he says, "No, not here."

  "I bet she looked like Carmen," Ezra says.

  Carmen is in the doorway. There is altogether too much padding around on silent feet in this house.

  "You're scaring him," she says. "And now we have something to be genuinely frightened of. I heard on the radio that Rio Santa Barbara has flooded. Two bridges are washed away. There are mudslides on Monocromito, bigger than the mudslides we had with Hugo. Two villages outside Granada have disappeared. Two entire villages. I'm going to take some aspirin."

  Lalo turns back to Ezra. "Who's scaring who?"

  "The problem with having a sister that beautiful is that you can't marry her," Ezra says.

  I should be anywhere but here. But I can only be here, in Ezra's room.

  "It has never bothered me. I cannot imagine the man brave enough to marry Carmen."

  "I won't be young forever," Ezra says.

  Carmen reappears at the doorway. "I forgot to tell you the most important thing. For you. Not for me. One of the disappeared villages was Tecacilpa."

  I know the expression about the hair on the back of one's neck standing on end, but I can't say I have ever seen the phenomenon. Now I know. The short, neatly shorn hairs make a straight path across the back of Lalo's neck. The hairs that I knew between my fingertips are upright. They are Eiffel Towers, Washington Monuments, CNN Towers, and Cleopatra's Needles, all in a row.

  "Tecacilpa is gone? I am sure that is an exaggeration."

  "Unless they are doctoring the footage. The mud took everything in its path. I saw the gashed hillside. I saw the nothing that is left."

  "But Carmen, you only heard it on the radio," Ezra says.

  "He is brilliant, this child," Carmen says proudly. "Graciela has a television in the kitchen that runs on batteries."

  "You know what this means?"

  "What exactly does it mean?" Carmen says.

  Lalo walks to the other side of Ezra's bed. Ezra looks better than I've seen him all day. His cheeks are pinkish. Later I will check his gums.

  "Mostly loss and suffering. Los damnificados! But for us, it must mean something. I can only imagine."

  "Am I missing something here?" I say.

  Ezra says hoarsely, "It's the other one, Mom. She's buried there. Saint La Matilda."

  "Your rival? She was buried there."

  Carmen says, "Now under mud."

  "Can I come watch the television with you?" Ezra asks.

  Carmen answers. "Later. Not now. All the damnificados. The damnificados." She walks away.

  33

  Los Gringos

  The account preserved of [Blessed] Ida of Louvain is, it must be confessed, open to some suspicion, partly because we have no external corroboration of any of the incidents recorded, and partly because it abounds in marvels of a very astonishing character.

  —Alban Butler, "Blessed Ida of Louvain," Butler's Lives of the Saints

  HOW DIFFERENT WOULD IT be to wake up inside Lalo's head? This question has been worrying at me. Imagination can only get you so far.

  Inside Lalo's head are his parents and his sisters, memories of all those chaste aunts and celibate uncles. Inside Lalo's head are the coffee trees, chicken farms, and sugar plantations. There are the Jesuits who taught him tongue twisters and coached basketball. There is the one and only year in seminary, the years at Harvard shared with Waldo. Inside Lalo's head is his conviction that this great-aunt is something that none of us can ever be, worthy of sainthood. There is his belief in miracles. And now, inside Lalo's head, is the man who crawled into bed with me, Alice, and touched my body and confused me. This is where I will always be, vis-a-vis Abelardo Llobet: outside.

  I am awake now in the night, and something is different. I touch Ezra. He is hot. With every third or fourth breath he shivers, as if trying to wake himself up. Otherwise, all is silence.

  It's the rain and the wind. It is not the wind and the rain. It has stopped. It is quiet. It is the reason I can hear Ezra breathing so clearly. Outside this room and the house is perfect silence. No rain falls on the roof tiles or roars down gutters or hammers the ground. No record-breaking wind locomotives up and down the slopes of volcanoes.

  The giant Mother Superior in the Sky has come out from her cloudy fastness and, holding her long, articulated index finger to her desiccated lips, hisses, "Shhh."

  In the morning Ezra's eyes open with the sun as it slides like an egg yolk up and off the top of the eastern volcano. I lie here perfectly still next to him. B
ut not as still as Henry incubating his bedsore. Oh, my darling, mysterious Henry. Why couldn't I speak with him yesterday? Was it yesterday? It is eons.

  "Hi, Mom, what's up?"

  "What's up with you? How do you feel?"

  "Everything hurts, but it's different now. Sideways. Vertically. Horizontally."

  "Your joints?"

  "The hurt is connected to how they move."

  I don't want him getting tired explaining the unexplainable. The sun is shining. The greatest impossibility of all seems to be the impossibility of understanding another human being.

  "Try eating something? Or drinking?"

  "Water."

  So we do it again. I hold the glass to his lips, I hold my breath. He sips and swallows. We both wait.

  And wait. Nothing.

  Minutes pass and he has not rejected the water. His forehead is still so hot, but his temperature is now 102 degrees. Whatever that is in Celsius.

  It is not as simple as making the world metric. Measurements are specific to what is measured. You have a fanega of coffee beans and a bulto of unrefined sugar, and not the other way around. We have a gallon of American milk from New York cows in the Genesee Valley, but Jacques drinks a liter of milk from cows that chewed French grass in the Dordogne. They are not the same.

  I don't see Olga until she is right here, standing on my toes and breathing my air. "Lalo has a bunch of gringos who need a place to stay," she says, and keeps walking.

  "Gringos?"

  "The same."

  "Gringos," I repeat. "Gringos? How did they get here?"

  "By jeep. Until it got stuck somewhere below the village. I bet I know exactly where. So they walked. They're a muddy mess."

  "Does Lalo know them?"

  Still moving, she says, "He says they know you."

  I follow her into her room. Books are piled from floor to almost-ceiling. Just that, neat piles of books. I would do almost anything to know the titles.

  "They know me?"

  Deep inside I am overwhelmed with shame and fear. But what have I done?

  Oh, that.

  Funny how I didn't think of it. Funny how it doesn't seem entirely real.