by Laura Hankin
“Ally, wait,” Beth said. “Come back.”
Not caring that she was sweaty, not caring that she had dust on her hands, not even caring that she was wearing smelly sneakers and shorts with a gaping hole in them, Ally powered down the stairs and out the door.
EIGHT
Beth pushed herself to her feet to run after Ally. But then she looked at the mess in the attic. She’d come up to Britton Hills to help Grandma Stella, not to run after her friend. She got back to cleaning.
At least, she tried to get back to cleaning. But she kept looking at the BAAB, at the letter Ally had just read aloud and then discarded on the floor, at the unopened letter addressed to her, waiting impatiently for her eyes. When she’d brought the BAAB up to the attic, alone, the summer Ally had abandoned her, she’d thought about opening her letter, reading it by herself out of spite, but she hadn’t. We’ll be back here next summer, she had thought then. I’ll wait.
Now, she carefully unsealed the envelope and unfolded its contents, smoothing out the paper on her leg before she let herself read it.
Beth,
Hey, lovely lady! Happy BAAB Opening Day—cue the parades and timpani, welcoming us back to Britton Hills! As I write this, I’m sitting under a big old tree in the sun, just thinking how lucky I feel that you volunteered to be my special friend back in fifth grade. What if it had been some kid who wasn’t willing to cart me along on family vacations, or what if all their family vacations happened at the Jersey Shore? I mean, I’d have an excellent tan, but I’d also probably be hopelessly addicted to fried Oreos and weigh roughly 352 pounds. What if that kid in fifth grade had been mean, or boring, or had thought N’SYNC was better than the Backstreet Boys? What would I have done??
But all my sacrifices to the pagan goddess of friendship and joy—don’t worry, I didn’t sacrifice any animals—paid off when you raised your hand in class. I’m so happy to be your friend, and every time we hang out, I’m reminded of that fact. These past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about it lots. You do something considerate and wonderful, and a little angel in my brain starts bouncing around going, “Hey girl, you are lucky to have Beth in your life!”
So, favorite memory of you: When Murney’s Arcade was closing, and we were super-sad, and then you decided we should organize a thank-you/good-bye potluck for Mr. and Mrs. Murney, my brain angel went haywire. It was really delightful to see you in your element, going around to all the people in town to get them to contribute food and stories. And then to see Mrs. Murney at the potluck so moved that she started crying and laughing at the same time, and getting her tears and snot all over you when she hugged you, it was just confirmation that you’re going to make a lot of people happy.
And that’s actually my prediction for you. Since you’re a total badass and got elected president of your student volunteers thingy as a rising junior—congratulations again, by the way—you’re going to spend this year changing a lot of people’s lives for the better, until everyone in the greater Philadelphia area is just like, “Oh yeah, Beth Abbott? She’s basically the best ever.” Okay, maybe that’s a tad hyperbolic, but you know what I mean.
I love you more than anyone in the world. That part’s not hyperbolic.
Hugs and snotty Mrs. Murney kisses,
Ally
Beth put down the letter. She ached for the Ally who had written it, and for the Beth who would have read it with Ally by her side. That Beth would have felt pure warmth filling her up to her hairline from Ally’s words.
But this Beth, this real-life person she was now, stood up and continued to clean, thinking that everything she had done with her “student volunteers thingy” hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been anything compared to Haiti.
• • •
WHEN Beth arrived in Port-au-Prince, she stepped off the airplane and into a wall of heat. As she walked from the jet bridge into the main airport, she heard faint music, a makeshift band of men playing in welcome.
Peter Allen-Fox met her at the baggage claim. He pressed his way through a crowd of taxi drivers and chauffeurs holding up name signs, waving so hard she worried his arm might pop out of its socket. He flicked a sweaty lock of sandy hair off his forehead and grabbed one of her bulging suitcases. He lifted it with an easy, fluid motion. “Let’s get you back to Open Arms,” he said, “so you can see where you’ll be spending the next year.” Together, they climbed into a pickup truck that Beth guessed had once been white.
“It should only take us about four hours. But once we get out of Port-au-Prince, the road gets real bumpy.” He grinned. “Hope you don’t get motion sickness!” Beth smiled back at him, momentarily at a loss for words, wondering if turning down graduate school had been the biggest mistake of her life.
She’d been deciding between three schools for English literature—all top-ten programs, all offering her generous living stipends. And yet she’d dragged her feet on deciding. It didn’t feel like her calling, and more than anything else, she longed for even a feeble, dawning awareness of what she’d been put on Earth to do. Sometimes she thought she could feel it fluttering around her head, buzzing intermittently in her ear, but it proved impossible to catch. Then one day, walking aimlessly, debating the merits of Charlottesville versus New Haven, she’d wandered into a church off-campus and heard Deirdre—home in Philly for a rare vacation—speak. She’d asked the congregation for money to help build a new water purification system so that the people in the Open Arms catchment area wouldn’t keep dying from drinking stagnant water and given a relatively standard speech about the horrors of poverty in Haiti. They were facts Beth thought she already knew—that Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, that the 2010 earthquake had dealt a crippling blow to everyone there. But as Deirdre had talked, she’d glowed, her chestnut skin suffused with certainty from within, and somehow Beth seemed to hear the facts anew, to feel the injustice of them for the first time.
At the end of her speech, Deirdre had said, “If anyone knows any idealistic kids who want to make a difference and don’t mind living without indoor plumbing, please send them our way. We can always use some extra hands.” That had been enough for Beth to tilt her life off its course.
Peter hadn’t been exaggerating about the bumps. The central highway quickly turned into a succession of ruts and mud puddles. Beth winced each time the backs of her thighs slammed into her seat. Out the window of the truck, bits of rubble still left over from the earthquake (still! Beth thought, incredulous) dotted the Port-au-Prince landscape. She saw shacks, huts with tin roofs and lean-tos with roofs made of tarps, and then they left those behind. Breathtaking greenery whizzed by, alternating with views of dry, barren brown. Peter stopped twice to help pull other cars out of the ruts they’d gotten lodged in. The first time, he’d told Beth to stay put, he’d only be a minute, but when he stopped for the second car, Beth clambered out of the truck too. She stood next to Peter and they applied their shoulders to the rear of the old, rusty Nissan, pushing as the Haitian man who owned it steered it back onto an even stretch of road.
“Good karma,” Peter said, winking at her, in between deep breaths. “You drive these roads enough, sooner or later it’s you stuck in the mud.” The Haitian man gave them mangoes, and said something emphatic to Beth in Creole. She smiled back at him, dumbly, and he threw back his head and laughed.
“Mon blan!” he said.
“What’s ‘blan’?” she asked Peter when they got back into their truck.
“Foreigner. White foreigner, in particular,” he said. “Get used to hearing it. I did.”
Sherbet pinks and oranges were streaking their way across the darkening sky by the time they turned onto the dirt road leading to Open Arms. Deirdre had sent Beth a picture of the building a couple months before, tucked into the envelope with instructions on what to bring and how to prepare (items on the checklist had included all her immunizations, huge tubes of extra-s
trength sunscreen for her milky skin, a big flashlight, clothes she didn’t mind destroying), and Beth had carefully pressed a loop of tape on the back of the picture, then stuck it on the wall next to her bed, opening her eyes to it first thing every morning. She’d looked at the picture and tried to memorize every detail of it. There was the open patch of concrete at the front where people gathered and patients waited, scattered with assorted chairs and benches. And there, the tall structure set slightly aside from the rest, where Deirdre said that Peter led the worship each Sunday. She’d thought that if she memorized the details, she’d know what to expect, but of course (she mentally smacked herself now), of course there was no real way to prepare.
Now that she was here, up close, she could see that the concrete blocks crumbled at the corners. Peter noticed her looking, and said, “I know, I know, but repairs don’t exactly come in at number one on our priority list here.” He led her toward the main building. Her rolling suitcase rattled an uneven drumbeat on the ground.
As she walked, Beth stared at the chairs—deck chairs, folding chairs, some covered with a light fur of rust. A few people waited on them, playing dominoes. Peter called out a hello to them as he and Beth walked by, and they waved back enthusiastically, wiggling their fingers and staring at Beth with curiosity. Peter swung open the front door, over which hung a sign. To All in Need, We Offer, it said in small letters and then, underneath, in a bold twisting print, Open Arms—Bra Louvri.
There, at a behemoth desk that looked once-removed from a tank, Deirdre sat, leaning toward the thin young Haitian woman in the chair next to her, inserting a needle into her arm. At the sound of the door, she turned her head and smiled a slow, easy smile. “Beth,” she said. “Welcome! Give me just a sec.”
She withdrew the needle from the woman’s arm. The woman made a low sucking sound through her teeth, then said something to Deirdre in Creole. Deirdre laughed and said something back, and then stood up to her full, Amazonian height. She walked the woman to the door.
“Na we pita, Nathaly,” she said.
“Na we pita, Didi,” Nathaly replied. She smiled shyly at Beth and nodded her head, her braids swinging.
“The birth control shot,” Deirdre said to Beth, as Nathaly walked out the door. “She’s your age, and she had baby number four a few months ago.” Then she reached out her Michelle Obama arms. “All right, it’s time for a proper hello.” She enfolded Beth into a steely hug. Beth, sometimes stiff in hugs with people she didn’t know well, leaned into the steel, and they stayed like that for a minute, until Deirdre leaned back out and said, “Let’s send the next patient on in.”
• • •
THE next morning, as Beth was getting dressed, she glanced over her shoulder into the clouded mirror on the wall. Eggplant-colored bruises ran down the backs of her thighs, from the car ride the day before, and she smiled at the sight of them. She pulled on long shorts over the bruises and walked out to start her day.
During those first few months at Open Arms, Beth did many things she’d never done before. She walked fifteen miles in one day to bring a basket of food to a family on a remote hillside. She checked in on patients as they recovered from the flu, back in their own homes after a couple of hours in one of Open Arms’ two hospital cots. Deirdre, the half of the Allen-Fox power couple with a medical degree, taught her how to bandage a sprained ankle, and how to identify the early stages of malaria. Together, they took the car forty miles down the road to the nearest hospital and picked up supplies. Beth wrote a lot of letters soliciting money, and drove them to the nearest post office. “You’re a lifesaver,” Deirdre always said to her as she drove off.
Peter called her up to the front of a congregation of Haitians one Sunday, after he’d finished his sermon, and asked her to read a passage she’d chosen. She looked out at everyone she’d gotten to know over the past couple of months, dressed in their Sunday finest, smiling with affection at their blan. There was Emmanuel, the grizzled, ancient man who had taught her how to play dominoes. There were Leila and Claire, giggly teenage girls who went everywhere together, often hand in hand, reminding her of herself and Ally. There was Jean-Claude, who played the tanbou drum and was so handsome that she had trouble looking him in the eye. She ended up focusing on Deirdre in the front pew, sitting up with the straightest posture she’d ever seen, and spoke in a voice that grew stronger and stronger as it pushed against the humid air. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
Beth was gulping down the Allen-Fox Kool-Aid, and to her it tasted delicious, satisfied a thirst she hadn’t been able to name. She felt useful, needed. Every night she stumbled into her narrow bed, closed her eyes, and fell asleep within seconds. No need, like in college, to turn over and over, or to count backward from one hundred. And in the mornings, no tangled sheets, no quilts pulled out from where she’d tucked them in. She awoke now in the same position in which she’d fallen asleep the night before. She imagined her body, in the dark, turning into stone, a peaceful sculpture of herself like a Buddha.
For the first time, she could see the insect buzzing in her ear and, though she couldn’t fully identify its markings or redraw the filigree of its wings, she had a general sense of what it was called. She knew the genus, if not the species, and the genus was Helping. She thought to herself, When I get back home, I can do more good things there, and I can be happy. She saw herself flying back to the United States when her year in Haiti was up, carrying an invisible suitcase filled with Deirdre’s unflappable efficiency and Peter’s limitless energy. How much more she’d be able to do now than before! How much she could fix, how many people she could help, armed with this adventure to which she’d said yes.
She biked to the Internet café once every couple of weeks, ten miles of gravel that turned into pavement that turned into sand, constantly afraid that her tires would pop. She sat in the hard chairs at the Internet café and sent out long group e-mails, composed in her head on the bike ride and filled with enthusiasm. She wanted to share her newfound sense of purpose, to get her readers as fired up as she was. She also sent separate e-mails to her parents, to Ally, and to Dean and Sophie, her two best friends from college. She used the Allen-Foxes’ emergency phone, with its outrageous international rates, to call home. Her parents, relieved to hear her voice, put her on speakerphone, turning their declarations of love for her into far-off echoes. They missed her so much, she knew. It had been tough enough when she’d gone off to college an hour away. But now that their little baby bird had flown off to a whole new country (not to mention an impoverished and potentially very dangerous one), their empty nesting took on a whole new dimension of fear. Still, ever supportive, they cheered her on in their certainty that all they had to do was wait it out. Soon, this year would be over, and they would get her back. When she said good-bye, she heard her mom start to cry on the other end of the line.
Two weeks in, Beth called Ally. She dialed the number, one of the few she still knew by heart in the cell phone age, and drummed her fingers on the oak desktop that held the rotary phone.
Then a click, and Ally’s voice, uncertain and hopeful. “Hello?”
Beth felt her own voice go uncertain and hopeful in return. “Ally?”
Ally emitted a garbled shriek. “Oh my God, it’s good to hear your voice.”
“I know,” Beth relaxed into the phone, leaning against the desk in joy at the sound of her friend.
“How are you? How’s Haiti? Tell me everything.”
Beth wanted to talk forever. She wished that the phone were cordless, that she could take it into her bed and stay there for hours, listening to Ally joke and comfort and chat. “I’m really good, actually. It’s crazy here—so different—but I like it. I think—”
Beth heard a muffled laugh, then Ally’s voice saying, teasing
ly, “Stop it, you jerk.”
“Ally?”
“Hey. Yeah, sorry. Tom is being a pain in the ass. Apparently now is the perfect time to tickle my kneecap.” Again, the muffled sound. “Go away! I’m talking to Beth and I like her better than you.”
“HELLO, BETH,” Beth heard Tom shout, then an “Ouch!” as, she guessed, either he fell off the bed or Ally whacked him with a pillow.
She straightened up from her comfort slump. “Um. Hi to Tom,” she said. Tom was nice. He’d been sweet to her, the one time she’d actually met him in person, when she’d gone up to visit Ally in Massachusetts the fall of their senior year.
She’d carried her backpack into Ally’s single room and had realized right away that it effectively functioned as a double. She’d known from the way an Old Spice deodorant sat next to Ally’s toothpaste on the top of her dresser, and from how Ally had casually picked up a pair of plaid boxers crumpled in the corner and tossed them into her hamper as she showed Beth around.
And then Tom had joined them for dinner, saying things like, “Oh, it’s great to finally meet the famous Beth,” things that were so kind, but that implied lots of long conversations with Ally that she’d never be a part of, and it just made her feel alone.
“Sorry, love,” Ally said now, on the other end of the line. “Okay, go on. What’s it like there? You said it’s crazy?”
“Um, yeah, it is. Is now a bad time for you?”
“No, no, no, no! Please. I’ve been missing you and thinking about you. Here,” and now Beth heard footsteps, then a door closing. “I’m shutting myself in the bathroom. It’s just me, you, and a toilet.”
So Beth told Ally everything, until she looked at the clock and realized that they’d been talking for almost an hour at $1.15 per minute. After a quick exchange of “I love yous” and “Talk soons,” they hung up.
Beth was determined to keep in touch while in Haiti. She wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how sore her butt felt after those Internet café bike rides.