Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Adan has his doubts.

Now he looks at his uncle and sees that he’s anxious to end the meeting. Tio wants to smoke his crack and won’t do it in front of Adan. It’s sad, he thinks as he leaves, to see what the drug has done to this great man.

Adan takes a taxi to the Cross of Squares and walks toward the cathedral to request a miracle.

God and science, he thinks.

The sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflicting powers to whom Adan and Lucia go to try to help their daughter.

Lucia turns more to God.

She goes to church-prays, offers Masses and benedictions, kneels before a panoply of saints. She buys milagros outside the cathedral and offers them up, she burns candles, she gives money, she sacrifices.

Adan goes to church on Sundays, makes his offerings, says his prayers, takes Communion, but it’s more of a gesture, a nod to Lucia. He doesn’t believe, anymore, that help will come from that direction. So he genuflects, mumbles the words, goes through the motions, but they are empty gestures. On his regular trips to Culiacan to bring his regular offering to Guero Mendez, he stops at the shrine of Santo Jesus Malverde and makes his manda.

He prays to the Narcosanto, but puts more hope in the doctors.

Adan markets drugs; he gets biopharmacology.

Pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, psychoneurologists, endocrinologists, brain specialists, research chemists, herbal healers, native healers, charlatans, quacks. Doctors everywhere-in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, England, France, Switzerland and even just across the border, in the USA.

Adan can’t go on those visits.

Can’t accompany his wife and daughter on their sad, futile trudges to specialists at Scripps in La Jolla or Mercy in Los Angeles. He sends Lucia with written notes, written questions, stacks of medical records, histories, tests results. Lucia takes Gloria by herself, crosses the border under her maiden name-she’s still a citizen-and sometimes they are gone for weeks, sometimes months, when Adan aches for his daughter. They always return with the same old news.

That there is no news.

No new miracle has been discovered.

Or revealed.

Not by God or the doctor.

There is nothing more they can do.

Adan and Lucia comfort each other with hope and faith-which Lucia possesses and Adan feigns-and love.

Adan loves his wife and daughter deeply.

He’s a good husband, a wonderful father.

Other men, Lucia knows, might have turned their backs on a deformed child, might have avoided the girl, avoided the home, made a thousand excuses to spend time away.

Not Adan.

He is home almost every night, almost every weekend. He’s in Gloria’s room the first thing every morning to kiss her and give her a hug; then he makes her breakfast before he goes off to work. When he comes home in the evening his first stop is to her room. He reads to her, tells her stories, plays games with her.

Nor does Adan hide his child like something shameful. He takes her for long strolls in the Rio district. Takes her to the park, to lunch, to the circus, anywhere, everywhere. They are a common sight in the better neighborhoods of Tijuana-Adan, Lucia and Gloria. All the shopkeepers know the girl-they give her candy, flowers, small pieces of jewelry, hairpins, bracelets, pretty things.

When Adan has to go away on business-as he is now, on his regular junket to Guadalajara to visit with Tio, then to Culiacan with a briefcase of cash for Guero-he calls every day, several times a day, to speak with his daughter. He tells her jokes, funny things that he has seen. He brings her presents from Guadalajara, Culiacan, Badiraguato.

And those trips to the doctors that he can go on-all of them except in the United States-he goes. He’s become an expert on cystic lymphangioma; he reads, he studies, he asks questions, he offers incentives and rewards. He makes large donations to research, quietly inveighs his business partners to do the same. He and Lucia have nice things, a nice home, but they could have much nicer things, a much bigger home, except for the money they spend on doctors. And donations and pledges and Masses and benedictions and playgrounds and clinics.

Lucia is glad for this. She doesn’t need nicer things, a bigger home. She doesn’t need-and wouldn’t want-the lavish and, frankly, tasteless mansions that some of the other narcotraficantes have.

Lucia and Adan would give anything they have, any parent would, to any doctor or any god, every doctor and every god, who would cure their child.

The more science fails, the more Lucia turns to religion. She finds more hope in a divine miracle than in the hard numbers of the medical reports. A blessing from God, from the saints, from Our Lady of Guadalupe could reverse the tide of those numbers in the blink of an eye, in the flutter of a heart. She haunts the church, becomes a daily communicant, brings their parish priest, Father Rivera, home for dinners, for private prayer and counseling sessions, for Bible study. She questions the depth of her faith (“Perhaps it is my doubt that is blocking a milagro”), questions the sincerity of Adan's. She urges him to attend Mass more often, to pray harder, to give even more money to the Church, to talk with Father Rivera, to “tell him what’s in your heart.”

To make her feel better, he goes to see the priest.

Rivera’s not a bad guy, if a bit of a fool. Adan sits in the priest’s office, across the desk from him, and says, “I hope you’re not encouraging Lucia to believe that it’s her lack of faith that prevents a cure for our daughter.”

“Of course not. I would never suggest or even think such a thing.”

Adan nods.

“But let’s talk about you,” Rivera says. “How can I be of help to you, Adan?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“It can’t be easy-”

“It isn’t. It’s life.”

“And how are things between you and Lucia?”

“They’re fine.”

Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial-”

Adan makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that Lucia has been discussing their sex life with the priest; otherwise, the man would never have had the nerve to raise the subject.

The fact is that there’s nothing to discuss.

There is no sex life. Lucia is terrified of getting pregnant. And because the Church forbids artificial contraception and she will do nothing that might indicate anything other than a total commitment to the laws of the Church…

He has told her a hundred times that the chances of having another baby with a birth defect are a thousand to one, a million to one, really, but logic has no traction with her. She knows he’s right, but she tearfully confesses to him one night that she just can’t bear the thought of that moment in the hospital, that moment when she was told, when she saw…

She can’t bear the thought of reliving that moment.

She has tried to make love with him several times when the rhythms of natural contraception allowed, but she simply froze up. Terror and guilt, Adan observes, are not aphrodisiacs.

The truth, he would like to tell Rivera, is that it isn’t important to him. That he’s busy at work, busy at home, that all his energies are taken up with running a business (the specific nature of that business is never discussed), taking care of a very ill, severely handicapped child, and trying to find a cure for her. Compared with their daughter’s suffering the lack of a sex life is insignificant.

“I love my wife,” he tells Rivera.