Hard Red Spring (44 page)

“You're happy? You don't look happy, Lenore.”

“I am!” she insisted, wiping her tears and losing her balance at a turn. “Really, I am. It's just difficult for me to understand. It makes me think maybe I'm failing at the village. God told me to come here, so why would He give me a baby so I have to leave?”

“Why do you have to leave? Why can't you do both?”

“I can't have a baby here!” Lenore laughed, realizing too late that plenty of women had babies down here, including Emelda. Why did she think she was so special?

“I can help you. All the women in the village can help. We all know how to have babies. This is not a problem. Your God isn't trying to confuse you.”

“Thank you, Emelda.”

Of course, Dan would not allow that, and neither could Lenore. Dan didn't even want a baby now to interfere with their mission. And if he was right and she wasn't pregnant, the possibilities turned frightening: grave illness, early menopause. Dan, with his insistence, didn't seem to understand what he hoped for.
It's just stress. Maybe this is a way God's helping us, too. Your period just slows you down.
The way he presented everything as a blessing in disguise had really started to bug her.

“Get your papers,” Emelda breathed hotly in her ear, bringing her back.

“What?”

“Your pass, your identity papers.” The bus slowed and Lenore could feel the crush of those behind her, straining forward. “This is a military checkpoint.”

Everyone on the bus rifled through their pockets and bags. Lenore reached into her purse just as boy soldiers stepped into the aisle from both ends. They shoved through the crowd, demanding papers. One glanced darkly at Lenore before holding out a bandaged hand. Soiled, unraveling bandages with visible leakage.

“
Misionero
,” he read, nodding. He took Emelda's papers, scanned them, and moved on.

Next to them, a man with his child pleaded with a soldier. “
Soy ser evangélico
,” he kept insisting. The soldier jostled him to the front of the bus, the small child, wide-eyed and silent, in tow. Emelda pushed Lenore into their empty seat, then slid in herself. Lenore studied her own identity card. After her name, she noticed the line:
Religión: Evangélico
.

Emelda shoved her papers back into her dress without comment. Lenore felt the warmth of the seat's previous occupants cooling and becoming her own. The bus was moving again in ten minutes. The open windows cleared the air. The jungle's close green walls dropped away abruptly, showing wide valley views. Lenore struggled to get her bearings and to ignore the feeling that they were driving in the direction of the guerrillas. In the direction all the helicopters disappeared. But the General would never send her into guerrilla territory. They were driving toward a city, where people lived. Not where the forests burned through the night. They were moving away from the war, they had to be.

“How long do you think it will be, Emelda? How many hours?”

She shrugged. “It can be three hours to Xela, it can be eight hours to Xela.”

“Xela?” Lenore stood up. “What's Xela? We're supposed to be going to Quetzaltenango!” In her panic, she tried to shove her way into the aisle.

“It's the same.” Emelda pulled her back down. “Xela is the Indian name for Quetzaltenango. It's the same thing. One is Indian, one is Spanish.”

Her terror at being lost in the jungle did not subside easily. To calm herself, she reminded herself of the good news: the General had agreed that Mincho should not waste his time with the sewing class. And he had approved the beauty pageant. She would buy supplies in Quetzaltenango—no, Xela, it was easier to say—for the girls' dresses. A very appropriate community event, he had called it. So much to do, to plan: the dresses, the show, the prize. Maybe she could arrange a talent portion, or a question-and-answer competition. But a talent contest between those girls, she realized, would be dismal. And she could not imagine them answering any question put to them in front of a crowd, not even their own names.

—

“Mrs. Beasley,” the doctor said, and at first she didn't recognize her own name pronounced correctly. In walked the first white person she'd seen in three months, other than Dan. Seeing him, seeing his California good looks, she crossed her legs in her paper gown. For the first time in her life, she was practically naked before a man who wasn't her husband. Too ashamed to visit a doctor, she'd never sought professional help to get pregnant.

“It's a pleasure to see an adult, for once,” he said, moving in to shake her hand, businesslike. “It seems all I do is care for babies now.”

Dr. Loving sat on a short stool. “Right away, I want to let you know that
you are not pregnant. The urine test was negative. Now . . .” his gaze wandered to her knees, as Lenore felt the room collapsing around her. She was not pregnant; she was dying. “Now I think I should do an exam, although I have to tell you that, by training, I am not technically a gynecologist. I'm a plastic surgeon.”

With this, Lenore would have stood up and walked out, but her grayed dress hung on the door hook a mile away.

“But I have general medical training, including ob/gyn work. I even delivered my own three kids.”

“Why are you in Guatemala, then?” Lenore asked in an appalled whisper. “What could a plastic surgeon be doing here? I asked for an American doctor, I never assumed you weren't a proper doctor.”

Dr. Loving laughed at this good-humoredly. “Please, Mrs. Beasley, I am a proper doctor. Not all plastic surgeons do face-lifts and implants. I'm a reconstructive plastic surgeon. Burns, cleft palates, that sort of thing.”

“Oh.”

“And I do things here in Xela for lack of general practitioners. I've done plenty of pelvic exams and have been able to identify common problems, although if it's not so obvious, I will refer you to a specialist in the capital.”

“There are no specialists in Xela? None at all?”

“There is one, but he's Guatemalan. You requested an American doctor. If you'd rather, it wouldn't hurt my feelings if you decided to see him.”

When she imagined this Guatemalan doctor, she could only see the General. His pleased face, peering between her legs, talking about Communists and his Harvard degree.

Dr. Loving asked her to scoot to the edge of the table and place her feet on two
X
's marked in the corners. “But you have to keep your knees open,” he said, gently pulling apart the tent she'd made with her legs. If someone had asked her the day before what she would have done in this situation, she would have said pray. But she didn't. Lenore stared up at the ceiling and went through every curse word she could think of.

“Now you're going to feel my finger, and some pressure on your abdomen as I locate your ovaries.” She felt more than one finger slide inside her, and the other crawl over her belly, kneading. The fingers met, on either side of her skin, lost each other, then met up again. “How long have you been in Guatemala?”

“Three months,” she said, because she hated to be rude. Was she
expected to endure all of this and carry on a conversation? His casualness was utterly baffling as he fingered her, searching for some lump that would be her death.

“I've been here for six,” he said. “But now I think I'm leaving.”

“Why?” Lenore glanced at him.

His fingers stopped their slow crawl. “It's the babies,” he said. “I came here to help the babies, but now I don't think I'm helping.”

“How could you not be helping? You're a doctor. There must be so much work, with the war.”

He nodded, his palm flat and tender on her belly. “The government hired me to work on the babies, to fix up the injured ones for adoption. I've restored tiny ears and noses, erased burns—”

“That's not helping?” Lenore struggled to sit up. “Those babies can have new lives because of you.” She wondered if this meeting had been divinely orchestrated. Maybe all her trouble had just been God's way of getting her here, in touch with someone who could help her adopt. Yes, she told herself, watching this man working between her legs as if delivering her a child.

“You'd think . . .” he said, then stopped. “You'd think it was that simple. I certainly did. But now I'm not so sure. Sometimes . . .” His expert tone shifted, so that he sounded like an ordinary man. “Sometimes it seems if I weren't here, they wouldn't be, either.”

Lenore had no idea what he meant by this, though it affected her profoundly. She realized they'd been talking like that with his finger inside her the whole time. His frown seemed like another message entirely, one stronger than any God may be giving her. Lenore shivered, thinking of the dead-eyed children of the camp. She imagined having one of her own, following her around for the rest of her life, like a ghost.

—

“There's nothing definite I can feel or see,” Dr. Loving reported after the exam, after he had allowed Lenore to dress in private. The dress she had made for herself in the sewing class felt little different from the paper gown. “I was having a hard time feeling your right ovary, but that may be nothing. Now, you thought you might be pregnant. You've never had children; have you been trying to become pregnant?”

“No,” she lied. She did not want Dr. Loving to assume that she was broken in some way. Trying for twelve years would sound that way. Anyway, they had stopped trying last year, so it wasn't a lie.

“It may just be the stress down here. You're a missionary?”

“No,” she heard herself say. Why?

Dr. Loving looked confused. “Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were. Wonder where I got that idea.” He searched his clipboard, trying to recollect. “Well, that's a relief, anyway.” He laughed.

“A relief?”

“Yeah, that you're not all caught up in that. It's a worse gig than this. At least I feel sometimes like I might be helping.”

—

When Lenore told Emelda she wasn't pregnant, Emelda asked, “Is that good?”

“No,” she cried. “It's terrible. They're doing a blood test now. They'll tell me in a few hours if they find anything.”

They stepped out of the waiting room into the dingy white streets of Xela. Lenore noticed the fear burning within her, felt it rising. It wasn't the blood test, the possibility of illness, that really scared her. She would know soon enough the results of the blood test, but would she ever know why she had denied being a missionary?

Moments before her denial, she had been in the clinic restroom and had looked in a proper mirror for the first time in three months. She didn't recognize herself. The clothes, her hair, grown out and turned dark, the color of spoiled honey. Her skin dried and darkened as well. She felt like someone else, and when the doctor asked if she was a missionary, she had answered for someone else.

They ate lunch in a dark restaurant that didn't offer menus. Crosses and Bible verses hung in the cemented squares where the windows had been. More beans. And Lenore recognized the taste of the military corn mix, cooked properly so that it rose like cornbread. She'd been looking forward to this meal for days. Now she couldn't gather enough thankfulness to pray over it.

“I'm never going to have children, Emelda,” she said over the food. “I think I've just realized for the first time. I mean, before, I knew it wouldn't be easy and I sort of stopped trying, but I always had hope. But now there's none. I can't think of anything worse. I don't even know any women who don't have children. What am I supposed to do with myself? What's my purpose? To stay in Guatemala forever?”

“Don't talk this way, Lenore. There are much worse things. I had a son that I had to give up. I never knew him. And now he's dead and I'm alive and I can't even imagine what he looks like. It is sad to not have children, but it's
worse to lose a child. Every dead man I saw in the mountains, I thought was him.”

“But you have a grandchild, Cruzita. Does she not make you happy?”

“Cruzita makes me very sad. Every day, all I can think of is the day she finds out who I am. On that day, I will lose her, too. She will hate me and I'll have nothing again. You have your husband, don't forget. He loves you.”

“I know you hate Dan.” Lenore heard herself almost laugh. “You don't fool me.”

“But he does love you. In his man way. He's not different from most men.” They both began to eat. Emelda forked her cornbread, inspecting it. “What's this?”

“It's the corn mix. Just cooked differently.”

“It rises? Corn doesn't rise.”

“They put wheat in it, and some other things. The General told me. All the wheat in the fields goes into the mix. I guess that's why they call it a mix.”

“I see.” She proceeded to eat the beans but not the cornbread, while she read the newspaper tablecloth. The unwashed, sticky blot on her forehead from her baptism had picked up dirt, dust, and bus exhaust. Lenore studied the dark spot, chewing, hearing the familiar sound of a military truck's arrival.

Emelda isolated a page, turning it toward Lenore. “This is crazy!” She coughed through a mouthful of food. “Why don't they write us back?” She pointed: “The Resurrection of Evie Crowder
.”
Part Four. Lenore had looked up the translation in her pocket dictionary, after seeing the pasted clippings in Emelda's shed. But the translation made nothing clearer. Just another mystery, added to all the others. Who was Evie Crowder?

“Lenore,” Emelda said, after clearing her plate of everything but the cornbread, “there's something I need to do in Xela. Something I need you to help me with.”

“Of course, Emelda. You helped me, and I'll help you.” Lenore welcomed any distraction, anything to get her through the next twenty-four hours. In a week, where would she be? In the capital, in Kentucky, in a hospital? Dead? Or back in the model village, just as before?