But these are thoughts that will accost her later. In the early-morning hours in the empty bed. Nights when she comes home and the house is dark. Times when she picks up the ringing phone and it is not Richard.
The crowd moves on from the mayor's house to the clinic. Alma joins them. They are mostly women, many of them mothers of the dead boys. At first, they were told that their sons were criminal elements. They did not have any rights even in death. But now that the dead are quarantined with the living, the bodies have to be cleaned up and buried quickly, before they become another health hazard. This is the tropics, after all. Richard, too, will have to be buried for now, the remains exhumed later and taken back to the States.
Remains, exhumed
. Alma can't bear to hear Richard spoken of in this way! Briefly, Richard will be buried in her birth land, a last embrace from a country he loved. He would have liked that, she thinks, though almost immediately she rejects the pat, posthumous thought. Richard would want to be alive, as would the dozen dead boys. No getting around that simple fact.
The guards let the women through the Centro gates, up the walk, into the clinic. Each one finds her dead. Richard has been returned to the examining room, placed on the table, the poet transferred to the floor. A young woman kneels beside himâa lover, a sister?âwiping his face with a cloth. When the women begin saying a rosary, Alma cannot pray with them. She cannot save Richard, she cannot save anyone. Compassion flows from this terrible knowledge.
She finds her way out to the back patio where hours ago ⦠Gently, she pulls herself back from that edge. She has to outlive these terrible moments, step by hopeless step. She cannot let loss have the last word. Was it Richard who said, in one of his rare moments of grand philosophizing, or it could be Alma read it in one of those photocopied articles Tera loves to send her, annoyingly highlighted and commented upon in the margins: something about how you can't live entirely for your own time, how you have to imagine a story bigger than your own story, than the sum of your parts?
The rain has let up. A wind is blowing. The night will turn cold. Just ahead, there are lights on in the dormitorios, which shouldn't surprise Alma. Of course, like everyone else, the patients are under quarantine. Inside the women's dormitorio, la doctora Heidi is checking blood pressures, dispensing medicines.
La doctora stops her work when she catches sight of Alma just outside the door. She would like to express her sentimientos to the wife of the dead americano. Her hand is at her heart, her eyes fill. She is in pain over the violence that was never a part of the original plan. “The soldiers are saying the boys opened fire. They had to defend themselves by firing back.”
Alma shakes her head. She doesn't want to hear their excuses, the stories that will be used to explain the deaths of a dozen boys and her husband. She doesn't want vengeance, but she won't shut up either. Swan, Camacho, whoever gave the orders, whoever helped create this desperate situation, must be held to account.
We will infect them with our questions
, as the black-kerchief poet said. Tera, dear Tera, will know where to begin, who to call.
“Will you come in, please?” La doctora has noticed Alma is holding her arms, shivering.
“I shouldn't.” Alma points to her mask. The patients are vulnerable. The last thing they need is exposure to monkey pox.
The doctora has heard about the scare, but it is beyond her realm of comprehension. Why would anyone willingly spread an illness and cause more suffering in the world?
Why would anyone take a simple plan of rescue and turn it into a bloodbath? Alma could ask her. But la doctora has enough grief on her hands right now.
“I have to continue,” she excuses herself. Her patients have been many days without any treatment. They cannot be abandoned. In the men's dormitorio, Dr. Cheché is attending to the men.
But instead of moving back inside, la doctora waits at the door as if for Alma's permission to go on with her lucky life, helping unlucky people.
Over her shoulder, Alma can see the thin, worried faces of women and girls. They look back at her with a cleaving look that reminds her of the hostages, the look they all gave each other, a look of fear, a look of hope. A look that aches for a look back.
I am with you. We are here together
. It makes her feel uncomfortable, this naked need. She turns to go. But the look will follow her from now on, eyes that will peer out at her in the dark, Richard's eyes, the poet's eyes, infecting her with their questions, needing her hope.
Back in the clinic, Alma finds that the women are camping out by their dead. She gets two of the younger ones to help her put Richard on the floor where she struggles to take off his pinkish windbreaker.
You don't have to be a good sport anymore
, she tells him in one of the many conversations she will have with him in her head from now on. The inner lining is stained with his blood. It's already dry. Alma closes her eyes to keep her tears to herself. This will be her first night without him, then a second, a third ⦠The beginning of so many good-byes.
In a while the guardia come and evacuate the place.
That night in Richard's bunk bed that still smells of him, Alma will not be able to sleep, not after two Ambiens, not after roaming the little house and finding Emerson asleep on a mat in the front room. She will enter the little bathroom and burst into tears at the sight of the glowing toilet seat. She will bring the lid down and sit in the dark, her leg hurting, her head aching, and wonder how she can stand to go on. And because she hasn't a clue, she will cast about for an answer that is not an answer. How could Isabel bear the disappointment of seeing all the hard work of the expedition unraveling as revolutions overran the Americas and destroyed the vaccination juntas and the vaccine was again lost? How could she live with the burden of knowing that the stories of hope she had told the boys were just that, stories that were just stories?
“Alma?” It's Emerson at the door. “Are you all right?”
“I'm okay,” she sobs.
This is how you do it, Alma thinks. You stand up because someone needs to use the john. You turn your light on and try to read, then turn
it off, and pull yourself from the edge, from the eyes you keep seeing in the dark. You tell yourself a storyâIsabel's returning to Puebla, to Benito, waiting for her lieutenantâuntil you fall into a drugged sleep.
You keep going for as long as it takes, years, months, weeks.
The stiff Heart questions was it He that bore, / And Yesterday or Centuries before?
T
HE VERY NEXT DAY,
the forensic guy issues his certificates. The bodies are released. The list of the dead makes its way to Don Jacobo's house; the names are legal names, so they don't match the earlier list with the nicknames the locals knew these young men by. Not one of the dead is over age twenty-five. It turns out two are still at large, but the ringleader, Francisco Villanueva, known as Bolo, is in custody.
How did he manage to escape the bullets indiscriminately sprayed into the front room? How did he and his buddies get arms? Why did he stage this suicide takeover? As far as Alma can gather, Bolo is not talking. They will probably break him with torture and then execute whatever is left of him. Poor guy. It probably would have been luckier for him to die in the bloodbath, after all.
“They're just scapegoating him,” Alma tells the little group of los americanos, as they are collectively known now in the village. The group is spending its quarantine together at the mayor's house. Alma is in and out of the house, in and out of their discussions. The masked woman. “Why pin everything on this one guy?”
“He's been in trouble before.” Walter or Frank happens to know for a fact. “This isn't the first time.”
Of course not. Unlike the others, Bolo learned to read and write; he got out and looked around and saw enough to tell him he hadn't been dealt the best hand. A chance to be a human being, the lucky kind.
“No one's going to scapegoat anybody,” Walter or Frank asserts.
Right, Alma thinks, just like nobody was going to bomb anything. One good thing about wearing a mask, no one can see her mouth twisting, the scorn she momentarily heaps upon them.
“He's the only one left to help now.” Alma can't let it go. “He and
the patients. I hope Swan's not going to desert them,” she addresses Jim straight on. “I mean, you can't just walk out on them.”
“Swan will honor its agreement,” Jim speaks up quickly, publicly. “We're committed to the patients until virological failure. And the Centro, we'll have to decide where to go from here ⦠if it makes sense ⦔ Jim sighs. This fiasco has been his first and it will probably be his last. At the head office, his replacement is already being discussed.
“It makes sense.” Emerson has been out in the rain, checking on the hundreds of trees planted, the tiny saplings in the nursery ready for the new terraces Richard and Bienvenido's crew had just completed. It'd be a shame to let the project die now.
She looks over at Emerson, and for the first time since this nightmare started he meets her eye. Alma might have to remind him every step of the way, but Emerson is not going to bail out. One bad thing about her mask, he can't see Alma smile for the first time since the nightmare started and the last time in a while.
T
HE BURIALS START THAT
very evening, and since the cemetery lies just outside the village, the corteges go by Don Jacobo's house, past the Centro, visible to every eye, audible to every ear. Starr and Mariana try to distract Alma, as if her mind were not already a tangle of distractions, punctuated by awful moments. One of the worst has to be when the cell phones arrive from the embassy, in a shipment of supplies left at the roadblock at the edge of town. Alma calls her stepsons. The connections are terrible. Both Ben and David are out; Alma can't bear to leave a message on their machines, so she hangs up.
Because it is still early on the West Coast, she manages to get Sam, half asleep. “What time is it?” he asks, his voice groggy.
Alma is grateful for this brief stall before the awful moment that is coming. She remembers the black-kerchief poet's asking for the time, Bolo's proudly announcing the hour, to the minute, then shooting the clock. Alma tells Sam the time in their two time zones, and then she tells him the news she can't make sound any less shocking than it is.
“You can't be serious?” Sam says. He is totally awake now.
Alma wishes she could spare him, one more orphan in the world. “Oh, Sam, I'm sorry.”
But Sam seems impervious to the news. He just talked to his father on Monday. They were making plans to meet in that week between Christmas and New Year's. Sam would fly down to Florida, meet up with Alma and his dad. Sam goes on, detail by painful detail, as if to prove Alma wrong. How can a father who was making holiday plans a few days ago not be around anymore?
Alma has to agree with him. It's inconceivable. “But it's true, Sam, Richard is dead. He got caught in the cross fire during a siege.” Keep it simple. There will be plenty of time later to infect everyone she knows with her questions.
A wrenching silence follows. And then, as if released from their cage of denial, a half-dozen questions fly out, so fast, one after another, Alma can't keep up with them. “What
siege
? Dad didn't say anything about a siege. Why was there a siege? Look, I'm coming down. How do I get there? I mean, where do I fly to?” He is moving around. Opening a door, turning on a faucet. He must be on a portable. A woman's voice is asking him something. A woman in Sam's life! And here she'd been telling Richard for years that Sam was gay. The good looks, the swift clothes, the privacy around his personal life. So Sam has a girlfriend. A bit of news Alma would have wanted to share with Richard. There will be so many of these moments, and that will be how time heals. In months that will turn into years, Alma's life will be filled with so many stories Richard will never hear. She will be living some other life than the one that stopped hours ago here.
“The thing about coming, Sam, is I don't really know if you'll be able to see your father.” She explains about the quarantine. How they all have to wait. How Richard has to be buried temporarily. At one point when she breaks down, telling her story, Emerson comes forward. Does Alma want for him to talk to Sam? She shakes her head. Sam doesn't need one more stranger between him and his dead father. Alma explains how Richard had always said he wanted to be cremated.
Maybe if the quarantine gets lifted soon, the boys can come down and see their father and then they can have him cremated here and take his ashes back.
“I don't want his fucking ashes,” Sam sobs.
When Alma hangs up, she feels what bomber pilots must feel, returning from a mission, having dropped off their deadly cargo. They can't let themselves imagine the suffering they have just sowed, the woman still up tending to a sick child, the lovers in bed, the father washing his hands, ready to eat a late supper, the people caught in the middle. They must shut off that knowledge or how else can they go on living?
B
Y WEEK'S END,
they get the all clear. The guys from the Centers for Disease Control found no evidence of monkey pox or any other deadly virus in the Marshall residence or in Michael and Hannah McMullen's pickup. What happens next? Hannah, and maybe Mickey, will probably get convicted, terrorist threats being a serious federal crime these days. Or maybe they'll be deemed too crazy to stand trial and be locked up in the state hospital at Waterbury instead. Meanwhile, the mad world gets off scot-free, Alma can't help thinking bitterly.
Everyone is relieved. Jim Larsen, Emerson, Starr, Starr's daddy who has flown in and is waiting in the capital to take her home. Alma, too, is glad to get off the mountain. Now she can go back to a life that will never be all clear again. Her clean windshield is gone. Like Helen coming through her stroke to die of terminal cancer a few weeks after Alma finally gets back to Vermont.