by Laura Hankin
“So much to sort through,” Grandma Stella said, sighing. “There’s a whole other drawer, and I’d like to be able to fit all the jewelry I’m taking with me in this box. I don’t even know where I got all of this.” She held up the necklace, then dropped it in the yard sale pile. “Why did I buy this and when was I planning on wearing it? Lord knows.”
Beth reached out and picked through the reject pile, making her way through rhinestone flower pins and a large owl on a leather cord. “I want to hear about the jewelry you do remember getting.”
“Well, that’s mostly this stuff over here,” Grandma Stella said, patting the pile she’d be taking with her. “This ring, for example, oh, I remember your grandfather buying this for me at the Grand Bazaar in Turkey. We saved up for years to go there. Did I ever tell you about that? They have the sweetest tea there in Istanbul, and your grandfather and I, we must’ve drunk gallons of it—when I came home and went to the dentist, he said the backs of my teeth were all stained from the way I’d swish the tea in my mouth.”
“I love hearing about the traveling you and Grandpa did,” Beth said.
“He loved you so much, you know? When you were born, he said to me, ‘Stella, that is the best damn baby in the entire world.’ I thought you were wonderful too, of course, but he wouldn’t stand for anyone saying that you were anything less than the tops. Once, he almost got into a fistfight with our friend Louis, who was insisting that his grandson was better. A joke, of course—they wouldn’t have actually fought. Or maybe they would’ve, just a punch or two, but we—Louis’s wife and I—we wouldn’t have let them.”
“I wish I’d known him better.”
“I know, darling, me too. He was a special man, a once-in-a- lifetime kind of man. The only one for me, just like your dad is for your mom. I hope you find a man like that someday too.” Grandma Stella kissed her on the top of her head, and then went through the other pieces in her jewelry pile, telling a story for each.
“This necklace I bought for myself. I think it’s so important to have something that always makes you feel beautiful whenever you put it on, no matter what else is going on in your life. When I saw this in the store, I just said to myself, ‘Stella Abbott, get out your pocketbook because that’s it!’” She held up a thin gold necklace, with little clear stones woven into the chain like dew. Beth oohed in appreciation. It was an everything necklace, she thought, lovely and delicate enough to wear with a dress but also simple enough that you could wear it on your drabbest days and not feel too fancy. She didn’t consider herself a jewelry person—jewelry got in the way, it was an unnecessary expense—but she would’ve worn this necklace in a heartbeat.
“I love it,” she said, reaching out to touch it. “I’ve seen you wear it before. I remember.”
“Do you want it? You should have it. It’s yours.”
“But you want to bring it with you! It’s in the Sunny Acres pile.”
“Pssh,” Grandma Stella flapped her hands. “That’s all right.”
“Grandma, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to take your beautiful-day necklace away from you.”
“Well then, I’m not going to be at Sunny Acres forever. I want you to have it after I’m gone. I’d like to leave something for Ally too. What do you think she’d like?”
Beth picked a bracelet from the Sunny Acres pile, one with fake emeralds for Ally’s birthstone, that Beth’s dad had given Grandma Stella for Mother’s Day when he was off at college. “She’d like this.”
“Wonderful. You two really can have them now, if you’d like. I don’t think I’ll have much of a reason to get gussied up at Sunny Acres.”
“Grandma,” Beth chided, “come on. It’s going to be nice there. You’ll have people to impress, reasons to look pretty.”
“Mmm,” Grandma Stella said, but Beth could tell she didn’t really agree. “Well, I’ll put it in the will, then.” Beth didn’t like the way she brought up her will so mildly, as though she weren’t afraid of dying. She squeezed her grandma’s hand tighter.
“Thank you,” she said. “But I hope I don’t get it for a long, long time.”
“Anything else you see around the house that you might want, let me know and I’ll put it in the will, or you can just take it home with you. Use it to furnish your apartment, when you get one. Maybe you want that lovely glass-topped table, or some of the paintings.”
“Maybe. We’ll see,” Beth said. A big glass coffee table wasn’t going to make the move to Haiti with her. But she wasn’t going to tell Grandma Stella that, at least not yet. There’d be plenty of time to tell her, and her parents, and everyone else, after Grandma Stella had gotten settled in at Sunny Acres.
“My beautiful darling,” Grandma Stella said, “I think I’m going to take a little nap.”
“Okay,” Beth said. She got up to leave the room and then added, “Anything interesting in the paper today?”
“Oh, just more bad news about the world. It can really get a person down, huh?”
“I know. But hey, at least you’ve always got Valerie’s advice column to cheer you up, right?” Grandma Stella gave her a strange smile in response, like she wanted to say something but wasn’t going to, and Beth marveled at her lack of a poker face. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll try to read a little bit. Let me know if you need anything.”
Beth settled down on the couch and tried to concentrate on the book Deirdre had lent her, about the seemingly superhuman activist doctor Paul Farmer. Farmer treated the poor in Haiti, made a difference all over the world, and saw his wife and child once every couple of months. “This is what we’re attempting to do,” Deirdre had said, pressing it into Beth’s hand as she left for the airport. “I hope it inspires you like it inspired me.” Deirdre’s notes cluttered the margins of each page. She’d underlined passage after passage. The book did inspire Beth. It troubled her too, and made her feel like she wasn’t doing enough. She found herself fascinated by Farmer, but also by Ophelia Dahl, Farmer’s former lover, who now ran the foundation in Boston that funded his work, who hadn’t been able to quite keep up with his selflessness.
Beth had read the book once already on the plane home, flipping pages without really thinking about it. But as she sat with it now in her lap, she kept flashing back to Owen, interrupting what she was trying to learn about Dr. Farmer’s attempts to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
They’d kissed for half an hour straight the other night, the grass soft against them. Breathing heavily, the scent of pines heady around her, she’d pushed his hand away when he’d moved it to her shorts, and said, “No. Too complicated.” In the day and a half since, she’d been kicking herself repeatedly, half-furious that she hadn’t just had sex with him anyway, when she’d so badly wanted to, and half-furious that she’d even kissed him at all.
“Okay, so I guess we can’t just be friends,” she’d said, when she’d finally pulled away, and then she hadn’t given him a straight answer when he’d asked when he could see her again.
She shut her book and put it on the glass-topped coffee table. She needed to move. Yes, that was what she needed—motion, a walk maybe. The sun sparkled outside, and she hadn’t yet fully taken advantage of its light today. Maybe she’d check in with the grocery store about when they were going to deliver the snacks for the party, or she could find an anniversary present for her parents (twenty-five years, a big one), and then enough time would’ve elapsed that she could just go straight to Monroe’s to meet Ally who, ever since yesterday’s fall on the mountain, had been a little distant, offering to do errands around town on her own.
She shut the front door quietly and half walked, half ran, going over her Creole flash cards in her head again, until she got into town. But she didn’t end up at the grocery store, or at any place where she could buy a suitable gift. She paused in front of Mulberry’s, looking at the big GOING OUT OF BUSINESS—FINAL SALE sign a
nd wanting so badly to go in.
She could see Owen ringing up a customer at the cash register. He turned his head as the customer dug through his wallet for change, and noticed her through the window. She put her hand up in a dumb wave and he waved back at her, an expectant half smile starting to spread across his face. He held up his index finger in that time-honored gesture. I’ll be right out, it said.
Elizabeth Abbott, you look like a creeper, she told herself. Her phone vibrated, startling her. Open Arms. She walked away toward the water as she answered.
“Hello?”
“Beth?” Even a fuzzy connection couldn’t dull Deirdre’s voice. “Hello.”
“Hi. How are you? How’s Peter?”
“We were happy to get your message.”
“Good. Yeah, I’m happy about it too—about working with you more, I mean. How’s everything going there?”
“Same as always. Too many problems, not enough money or manpower to fix them all. When will you come back?”
“Um, I need to look at flights and all that. Maybe around the middle of July?”
“Okay, send us an e-mail or leave us another message when you figure it out. The sooner you get back the better, obviously. The literacy program has really been suffering without you.”
“Right,” Beth said, nodding even though Deirdre couldn’t see her.
“It’s going to be very helpful to have you. I’m proud of you, for choosing to come back. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Thanks,” Beth said. She bit her lip and pressed her phone harder against her cheek.
“Okay, I should hang up. Patients waiting. We’ll talk more soon.”
At the beep signifying the end of the call, Beth felt dizzy. She finished walking to the harbor and sat on the ground, staring out at the never-ending water in front of her. You’re doing the right thing, Deirdre had said. But the memories of that morning in Haiti grew stronger, pushing themselves up past the barriers Beth had erected to stop them.
• • •
BETH ran away from the little boy’s eyes on her, from Nathaly’s look of surprise at her uselessness. She blew past Peter idling in the truck outside, ignoring him as he called after her. She ran until her breathing sounded like the wheezes and whines the boy had been making. She put feet, then miles, between her and him, but still she saw his face and felt his blood, now dried on her leg. She clawed through the heat and the thick air, and then she tripped on a root and hit the ground with a thud. The impact knocked the pain of everything that had just happened into her, and she began to cry. She sobbed into the dirt, balling it up in her fists. Her tears and sweat salted the ground beneath her.
She didn’t want to go back. She was so afraid. As long as she stayed out here, she didn’t have to know whether he’d died. She’d come to Haiti to help, but she’d wanted to offer halfway help, the kind that made the helper feel good, not the kind with endless potential for disaster, real people dying on her. But you couldn’t go in halfway forever. And now Beth wanted out completely. If she could have run all the way across the ocean, back home, she would have.
Eventually, though, she had to return to Open Arms. She couldn’t stay in a heap on the side of the road forever. Her throat burned, and her head pounded. Dread slowly propelled her back to the clinic.
Peter’s truck was gone. The courtyard was empty, like a ghost town. When Beth pushed open the front door, she saw Deirdre sitting at the desk, her arms folded, her eyes dark, staring at a pile of papers spread out in front of her.
“Is . . . is he okay?” Beth asked. Her voice came out raspy, like it was barely there at all.
Deirdre looked up then. “I don’t know,” she said. “It started out as cholera but became some sort of secondary infection. Peter took him to the hospital. I stayed here to wait for you.”
“Oh God,” Beth said.
Deirdre shuffled the papers around in front of her, staring at them as if they held solutions. “If we could raise the money for that damn water purification system, maybe nice young women like Nathaly wouldn’t let their kids drink stagnant water out of old bleach containers, and then they wouldn’t get fucking cholera.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to handle it. I just froze. He was so helpless and I was so useless—” She started crying again. She couldn’t seem to stop shaking, and she wanted to force the tears back behind her eyelids, but they kept coming. The distance between her and Deirdre felt endless, so she closed the gap, longing for a hug. There she stood, in front of Deirdre, every inch of her body yearning for comfort.
Deirdre looked up at her, her eyes cold. “You know, Beth, in a situation in which a child might be dying, the last thing I need to do is waste valuable time worrying about where you’ve gone.”
Beth stepped back. “I know. I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t—”
“If you want to be one of those people who come here for a year, do some good work, and then go home, that’s fine. But don’t expect me to coddle you when shit gets real. Don’t think that throwing a pity party for yourself will fix anything. These things happen, and they are going to happen again. You have to pull yourself together and work harder. This isn’t about what you did or didn’t do this time, it’s about what you’re going to do next time. And if you don’t think you can handle that . . .” Deirdre shook her head.
The front door creaked open then, so slowly it seemed that it had gotten fifty pounds heavier. Peter walked in, his eyes red, his shoulders slumped. He looked at them, and he didn’t have to say anything for them both to realize what had happened. Deirdre slammed her palm down on the desk. The hollow thud rang through the room.
“Oh, no,” Beth said.
“It was too late,” Peter said. “By the point we got him to the hospital, they couldn’t do anything for him.” His voice cracked. Deirdre stood up and walked over to him, and the two of them held on to each other, wrapped tightly in one another’s arms.
Beth turned and walked out of the room to the phone to call Ally. She needed her best friend.
It rang to voice mail. She punched the number again. Again, voice mail. She kept calling. She would keep calling, she thought, until she could talk to Ally. This time, on the third ring, Ally picked up.
“Hello?”
“Allygator?” All the crying had corroded her voice, leaving it rusted and dry.
On the other end of the line, hesitation. Then, “Beth? What’s up?”
“Oh, Ally,” Beth said, the simple act of saying her friend’s name filling her with the first measure of hope she’d had since she’d first heard Nathaly screaming. “I really need to talk to you—”
“Look, love, I’m so sorry but this isn’t a good time. I kinda have to go.”
“Wait.” Beth hadn’t expected this. Everything was going to be okay again once she got Ally on the phone. “Don’t go. Please. I did something terrible, and a little boy died—”
In the background on Ally’s end, Beth heard someone else talking. A guy. Tom. Ally couldn’t talk because she was hanging out with Tom.
“I’m gonna go, but call me back tomorrow, maybe,” Ally said, speaking in a rush.
“Ally, no, wait. Please don’t hang up. I need you. Please—”
But Ally had already gone. Beth pressed the dead phone against her ear until her ear turned red and throbbed. Then she drank some water, retched it all back up, and went to bed.
She spent all the next day tangled in her sheets. Deirdre and Peter checked in on her, and she smiled at them when they came into her narrow room and told them that she wasn’t feeling well but she’d be better soon. When they shut the door, she busied her mind with thoughts of going home. She thought about her English degree, and how maybe, if she was really efficient about it, she could apply to grad schools for next year. She could read Virginia Woolf all day long in quiet, cool lib
raries.
The second morning after it happened, she woke up to beautiful sunlight streaming in through the window and, for a good ten seconds, felt peaceful and happy. Then she remembered the little boy, and her panic, and she cried again. But she splashed some water on her face from the jug by her bed, walked out to where Deirdre was eating breakfast, and said she was better. She did the tasks assigned to her, the ones she was good at like bookkeeping and writing letters, and organized the clinic’s files with a smile glued to her face.
The day after was Internet café day, so she biked over there as usual. She hadn’t told Deirdre and Peter, but this time, she planned on buying a plane ticket home. As she rode, she only felt the bump of the bike seat, smelled the truck exhaust ahead of her, saw in her mind the boy’s face as he lay on her lap. She chained up her bike outside and sat down at the computer, deciding to briefly check her e-mail before looking for flights. There were five new e-mails from Ally. She clicked on the first one.
Shit. Shit. Phone chat? Call me?
It had been sent the day she’d called her. So Ally did care. She’d made a mistake in hanging up, and regretted it, and had been trying to get in touch with Beth ever since. Beth couldn’t wait to get home to her. Then things would be better. She clicked over to the next e-mail, sent a few hours later.
Beth,
I’m so sad. Tom and I broke up. I don’t know what to do. He’s going to Portland and I’m staying here, alone. This e-mail might not be coherent. This sucks this sucks this sucks I hate everything except him (and you). Right now I feel like I’m never going to be happy again. Why does life have to be so awful and unfair???
Another e-mail. And another. But no mention of Beth’s phone call. Ally had sent this one the next day:
Beth,
I know you probably haven’t gone to the Internet café yet, and I don’t know how to call you, but when you get these e-mails can you pleaaaaaaaaaaase e-mail me back? Or call me? Or fly home? (Kidding on that last one. Unless you want to.) I need to talk to you. I’m just a mess. I haven’t stopped crying for longer than an hour since Tom left except to sleep, not that I’ve slept well. My heart feels numb except when I can actually physically sense it breaking into a billion little pieces. All I want to do is lie in bed, or run to his door and beg him to let me come to Portland with him. I can find things to do there. I’d play guitar on street corners, or work at a feminist bookstore, or bake gluten-free cupcakes at a vegan bakery. Really, I’d find something to do. It wouldn’t matter what it was, as long as I could come home at night to an apartment we share and just love him. That would be enough for me. Why isn’t it enough for him?