Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

She shakes her head and reaches for your hand. “Oh, Es.” Her other hand points at the TV screen. A city building, gashed along the side and bleeding smoke. You almost fail to recognize it. You never see it from this angle anymore: the air, the view on postcards and souvenir mugs.

A pipe or boiler must have burst, you think, watching the ugly crooked mouth cough flame. You think, A man in coveralls will lose his job today. There’s an Albanian gentleman whose name you know only because it’s stitched across his shirt. Valdrin. You never speak to one another. He bows as you pass him in the staff lounge; he blows kisses as you leave the elevator.

You’re wrong. They show a plane, show it and show it, flying straight into the tower’s face and tearing through the glass.

“What if this happened late at night?” says Doris. “Es, thank God you’re here.”

She weeps as you two watch, again, the black speck pierce the glass, the smoke spill from the wound.

Trying to count floors, you stand. “I have to go.”

“What? Absolutely not.”

“I’ll clean when I come back.”

“Forget about that. Jesus! What I mean is, you’re not going anywhere.”

“I have to see about…my job.”

But Doris will not hear of it. “No one’s working now. Not your boss and not your boss’s boss. You’ve been spared, don’t you see? You’re staying here. End of story.”

“OK.” You sit. “I’ll get your coffee, then.” You stand and go into the kitchen, think. You pour Doris’s coffee and bring her the cup. “I have to try to call my boss, at least.”

In Matthew’s room, you lock the door. You change into your panty hose and uniform, as if it’s afternoon. Beside the bedroom door, you hold your shoes, a pair of hard white clogs a nurse friend from your church suggested for your troubled feet, and listen to the wall. As soon as you hear Doris go into the bathroom, you tiptoe through the kitchen. You grab your bag and jacket from the closet by the door, race downstairs, and slip into your clogs outside.

—

A book sat open on John’s desk, the next time you walked in.

“Aha!” he said. “There she is.” He pointed at the page and read aloud. “La Esmeralda. Formidable name! She’s an enchantress.”

You thought about hiding inside the cart, between the toilet paper rolls.

He stood and came around his desk, still reading. “Your parents never found that name for you at the baptismal font.” He closed the book and smiled. “Where did they find it, Esmeralda?”

“Not there,” you said, pointing your chin at the book. (Your parents would have used a book that size for kindling.) “They liked the sound of it. Or liked somebody with the name, maybe.”

John wanted to know, if you didn’t mind saying, where you were from.

“So I was right,” he said, when you told him. “My wife’s nurses are Filipina.”

“Your wife is a doctor?”

“No.” He looked down. Darkness, like the shadow from an airplane overhead, passed over his face. “A patient.”

“Oh.” The woman with green eyes and gold hair, smiling next to his keyboard, looked healthy, but you didn’t say that.

Before John — and this is terrible to say; you’d never say it, but — the lives of Americans with money were not very interesting to you. Even the troubled ones, their troubles did not seem so hard. You’d ask, “How are you?” and they’d heave a sigh, winding up to tell you some sob story: how much they worked, who had it in for them, the things they’d wished for and were not getting. Try hunger. Try losing your house, a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say.

But John’s trouble — that moved you. Enough to ask, “Your wife is sick? What kind of sick?”

“The kind you don’t come back from,” John said. She’d been sick for fifteen years. The photograph beside his keyboard was how he preferred to remember her. Before nerve cells inside her brain began to die, before the tremors started, before her muscles stiffened and her spine curled in. Back when she could walk without losing her balance, back when she could eat and use the bathroom on her own, without John’s help, and then a Filipina nurse, and then a second one for nighttime. Before she started to talk slowly, like the voice in a cassette recorder on low battery, and then stopped talking altogether. Back when she still knew who John, her husband, was.

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” he said. “It started fast, and now it’s ending slowly. When you love someone you never think a time will come when they’re a stranger.” He looked and must have felt alone. But the photo that you kept at home, on Matthew’s nightstand, was your brother’s baby portrait. Long before the lies, the cruelties, the face scarred up beyond recognition.

John’s family was Irish, and he grew up in a harbor town where his brothers still lived. “All five of them,” he said. “All firefighters, like our father. Or policemen, like our uncle.”

“You are not a fire- or policeman,” you said.

John shook his head. “Did you ever hear of a family where the finance guy’s the rebel? Me, and my cousin Sean, the priest. Plus we’re the only two who didn’t have kids. No sons to raise into cops or firefighters, either. I guess I never grew up dreaming I’d be some hero. No, I just looked across the bay at this skyline and thought, I’ll work there someday. Plus”—he tapped his wedding ring against the picture frame—“ she wanted to work in publishing. No better place for that than in this city. And we decided that if one of us was gonna work in books, the other better work in money.”

He asked after your family. You told him that your parents raised coconuts, coaxed copra oil from them, sold gallon cans of it to men who came in boats once a month. That you had just one brother. “Pepe.”

He said, “You’re not a farmer.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Are you and Pepe close?”

The first time Doris asked you this, you shook your head. Almost nine thousand miles. She laughed. “I don’t mean close on a map, ” she said. “I know he’s far away. I mean, how distant are you? Your relationship.” This threw you. How “distant” could the blood, running through your own veins, be? “So you are close,” Doris said. You learned to keep it simple with Americans who asked you after that. Yes, very close.

But here, with John, you answered like some old and lonely bag lady, whose cart was filled with stories, waiting for an audience.

“I never had a doll when I was small,” you said. “So Pepe — I was ten when he was born — was like my parents’ gift to me. He had the whitest skin. Almost as white as yours. And he didn’t know anything! He have to be protected all the time. One day I’m cleaning eggs: he took one from the basket and bit it. Like an apple. I heard a scream and I see Pepe there, with blood and yolk and shells and dirt and feathers in his mouth.”

You yammered on. About the dreams you had for Pepe. A boy that fair could finish school, grow up to star in movies, run for office. Being a girl — a poor and dark one, no less — you wouldn’t dare dream these things for yourself. You left school at thirteen, to help with the coconuts and Pepe’s chances.

John looked so much like priests you’d known, there might as well have been a penance grille between you. Is that another reason you said all this to a stranger?

“Even seven, eight years old,” you told John, “Pepe slept with his knees up, his fist like this on his mouth, like he still wanted to suck his thumb.”

“I was not my brothers’ doll,” said John, with a laugh. “Their football, maybe.”