Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  Fast-forward six months: Jared in a wheelchair, living in a nursing home. Bony, blank-faced Jared would never speak again. Everyone assumed that the pressures of medical school had overwhelmed him. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole story. To this day, only Kathy and Jared’s father knew what had triggered his act of self-destruction. Jared’s father, Joe, had told Kathy that he would deny anything she said in regard to their affair; he had his medical career, his wife, and his reputation to think of. He reminded her that their affair had been consensual, and that Kathy was the one who had “given Jared such a shock,” after all, not him. Jared’s mother, Lilly, never knew, but Joe’s history of infidelity wasn’t new to Jared. Kathy’s confession, along with his access to prescription drugs and lack of sleep, put Jared in a such a state of despair that he went to his aunt’s house, asked to see her tiny, mother-of-pearl-inlayed pistol, went back to his car and shot himself through the temple. The bullet’s trajectory had been a little too far left to kill him, and too far to the right for him to ever be normal again.

  Kathy’s mother and Lilly Patterson were close friends, and so the Coopers were a fixture at the hospital. But Kathy had gone to see Jared only once at the nursing home, despite her mother’s badgering. By then Jared was alert enough to recognize her. How much he remembered or understood was unclear, but he never took his one good eye off Kathy (over the other was a black eye-patch). He tried to say something to her, but it came out in moans. His eyes roamed over her hands. Kathy presumed that he was searching for her engagement ring. Kathy stepped back from the bed, ashamed. She had given the ring back to Lilly. She had not had the courage to see Jared again for many years. His mother kept sending cards and photos of Jared. On the other side of that most recent photo, Lilly had written: “Kathy, in my heart you’ll always be my daughter-in-law.”

  A fascinating course in Latin American political history followed by a conversation with a Peace Corps recruiter at a career fair had gotten Kathy to thinking about making an escape. And unlike any other post-graduation pursuits, the Peace Corps also offered the possibility of redemption. She hoped that forgiveness could be achieved by doing hard work in a third world country. She also wanted to escape being seen as a victim, to keep her hands busy, to do the kind of challenging labor that anchored the mind to the present and allowed her to forget the past. She needed to be needed and she needed to be able to sleep at night. When the acceptance letter arrived from the Peace Corps, she was elated. She would work on a unique project and would help create a resource-sharing network that involved orphanages, schools, churches, and health-care organizations in the Dominican Republic. Hogar Infantil Casa Azul was the first orphanage in the sequence, a training ground where she could assess the needs of residential units for children.

  Kathy tucked Jared’s photos back inside the liner and shoved the suitcase back under the twin-sized bed, although not too far back. She might need to look at Jared’s photo if the water ran out, if she got robbed again, or got another spider bite, or if she came down with the dreaded dengue, or malaria, which she was sure was headed her way. It was the penance, after all, that she had come for.

  When she got back to the orphanage, the two nuns asked her to watch the kids while they combed the streets for government workers, supplies, and information. By early afternoon, the children were worried that another hurricane was on its way. Kathy was shocked to learn that it was true. And more bad news: the big bridge that connected their cluster of villages to the capital was not passable. They were cut off.

  The children were extra unruly that day. Kathy suddenly remembered the giant starfish, and she fetched it from the place she had left it in the yard. It was lethargic but still alive. She made up a story. Back home, she told them, if you find a starfish it’s considered very good luck. Kathy had found rural Dominicans to be highly superstitious, and she thought that given the circumstances, it was okay to capitalize on this cultural trait. Many of the children believed that they were parentless because someone had cursed them with the “evil eye,” the dreaded mal de ojo. The children passed the dishpan around with the stinky, half-dead creature around like it was something holy. They believed her. Kathy fetched a Sharpie from her bag and proceeded to make drawings of the starfish on the backs of the kids’ hands as “proof” of their good fortune. All at once they stuck their hands out, pushing each other to be the next. The little ones did the same, not knowing what it was for, but wanting to do everything the older ones did. A half-hour later, they all had matching green starfish drawings on their hands. The last one she drew was on herself. They put their fists together. They were safe.

  “God help us,” Sister Teresa lamented. “It wasn’t easy taking care of these mocosos before the hurricane. How are we going to manage now?”

  “Don’t worry, we’re prepared,” Sister Juana assured them. “We’ll be self-sufficient for two weeks.” She leaned in and frowned. “That is, if you two don’t go giving our supplies away.” No sooner had she said this when someone hit the buzzer at the front gate. The visitor was the first of dozens to follow. Red Cross volunteers, police, firemen, neighbors, utility workers, priests, and neighbors came knocking on the door. They didn’t bring food or supplies, only children—injured, traumatized, hungry, dazed, mud-caked children found wandering the streets, alone. The number increased steadily as the long hours passed. In twenty-four hours, every room of the small orphanage was packed. Casa Azul became a triage and emergency shelter. The Red Cross delivered five mentally and physically disabled adolescents, forced them on the nuns, really, despite the fact that the age-cap of the orphanage was ten. One of them easily weighed two hundred pounds. One of the older girls remembered Kathy’s story of “The Three Little Pigs,” and suggested, with hands on hips, that the newcomers “should have been smart enough to make their houses out of cement.”

  In spite of the orphanage’s humble resources and the fastidious routines of communal life, the children normally had one great luxury: a long and elaborate bedtime routine. A few years before, a local widow, who had attended grade school with Sister Juana, had donated an upright piano to the orphanage, and even had the instrument tuned every few years. Every night, Sister Juana played, and the children developed a Pavlovian response. The little ones nodded off and the older ones grew calm and sleepy. Kathy’s arrival at the orphanage had added yet another rich layer to their routine, because she read to them a half-hour before the music. So bedtime was drawn out to a solid hour, plus ten minutes of prayer, a snack (three sips of water and half a dinner roll), teeth brushing, hand-and-face washing, medicines and ointments, and dressing for bed. The nuns did all this even as they complained that the children were being spoiled. The nuns went to bed exhausted but deeply satisfied. But after the newcomers flooded in, bedtime came and the original children went without the usual coddling. Sister Juana just shooed everyone off to bed, out of exhaustion and because the orphanage was woefully understaffed. The new children were noisy malcriados who wouldn’t let anyone else hear the story or listen to the music. Moreover, she couldn’t take her eyes off of them for a second anyway. Sister Juana feared that the years of progress they had made in restoring her children’s trust in adults was eroding, as demonstrated by their bed-wetting, biting, tantrums, nightmares, their acts of defiance, and the attempts to escape their cribs. But the plight of the newcomers pulled at the nuns’ heartstrings too. One day, Sister Juana asked Kathy to take some of the older girls to use the bathroom. The orphanage’s restrooms were out of service, so the adults and older kids had to use a crudely built outhouse in the neighbor’s field. A nine-year-old girl refused to go into the latrine without Kathy by her side. Her eyes were huge as she gripped Kathy’s hand. “You’re going to leave me here, aren’t you?” Kathy assured the girl that she would wait for her right outside the door, but the girl would not go, even as she squirmed, squatted, and crossed her legs. At last Kathy found a way to reassure her. She tucked the tips of her Keds under the gap at the bottom of the
door, so the girl could keep her eyes on them from behind the closed door. Kathy chitchatted away to distract the girl from whatever had happened to her. Only then was the girl able to trust Kathy enough to relax and go to the bathroom.

  While the original children felt neglected, the new children took notice, within hours of arriving, that the original children got fed first. They had pillows and blankets and slept in beds, never on the floor. They got their teeth brushed and their hair combed and they got utensils to eat their rice and beans. They had adults who cared about them, even a lovely, blue-eyed ma-drina who tickled and cuddled them and whispered secrets in their ears. In the meantime, the original children watched the orphanage’s stash of food, water, and supplies dwindle. They were forced to share their blankets with the muddy, foul-smelling foreigners who used bad language and had snot oozing from their noses; creatures with boils and shingles and bloody scabs that wouldn’t heal. They were monsters who mocked them when they prayed, and flashed their private parts to the nuns. The toilets were overflowing and their rags were piling up in the wash basin. They saw Sister Antonia fly into a rage when a boy tossed a lizard into the cauldron of beans she had just cooked for supper. They saw Sister Juana cry after she found three children jumping up and down on top of the piano while another banged at the ivory keys with a rock. They heard Kathy arguing with someone through the gate, refusing to unlock the iron portal to accept more children. At night, they looked out at the lonely moon though a broken window that no one had the time to fix. A bat took up residence in the girls’ room. Fights broke out. A fever started to go around.

  The women had to concern themselves with bigger things, so the squabbles among the children took a backseat to worries about food, space, and medicine. Four of the children were diabetic, and the newcomers had come with rashes and stomach parasites. But had Kathy and the nuns known the meaning that the green starfish drawings on the kids’ hands would take on, they would have scrubbed them off with what little rubbing alcohol they had left (the ink was “permanent” and would continue to be visible on the skin a very long time, especially without regular washing). Perhaps they might have drawn similar stars upon the hands of the outsiders. But since they weren’t a part of the children’s inner world they didn’t know. It wasn’t until much later that they learned that the drawings had become a visual marker of who “belonged” at the orphanage and who didn’t. Only the permanent residents had the starfish; Kathy had drawn them the morning after the storm. During the next twenty-four hours, a fierce pack instinct sprung up among them, and they instinctively polarized into two distinct clans: the citizens and foreigners.

  On the fifth day, when the last of the rice and beans were gone, Sister Teresa confiscated a nine-inch shard of broken glass from three of the outsiders who had been plotting to slice up ten-year-old Mauricio, the oldest of the original twenty-five. That same night, the nuns had awoken to terrified screams from the nursery. Two boys, around seven and nine, had climbed into a crib shared by Javier and his brother Miguel. A nine year-old boy had stripped Miguel and was lying on top of him. The other had his hand over Javier’s mouth until Javier bit him. The nuns had brought Javier and Miguel to their own beds that night, but it was Sister Antonia who had said, “Sisters, we can’t go on like this.”

  Kathy refused the Peace Corps’s offer to send her home once the airport reopened. Her ability to speak English and her connection to the Peace Corps were two critical resources for the orphanage. They needed her now more than ever, and when she fell into bed the night after the hurricane, she slept peacefully for the first time in over a year. Still, the job was exhausting and the tension at the orphanage was overwhelming. What kept Kathy sane was that she didn’t have to be there. She chose it, and at the end of the day, there was sanctuary in a rented room two blocks away. She had her stash of comforts: a stack of novels (before the storm she had been deep into Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant), a bottle of Dominican rum, an oversized bar of Toblerone chocolate nougat from the duty-free shop at the airport, a radio-cassette player, and a dozen mixtapes. UNESCO had declared 1979 to be the “International Year of the Child,” and Kathy loved the album they released after the televised UNICEF benefit concert, featuring the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Elton John, Olivia Newton-John, and Earth, Wind & Fire. She also had a generous supply of Valium and prescription sleeping pills that Joe Patterson had given her just before she left for the Peace Corps. “Something to take the edge off,” he had said. They did come in handy, but she was careful not to overdo it. Now she wondered if Dr. Patterson was hoping that she’d OD so that their terrible secret would die with her.

  On the day that the orphan wars began, Kathy thought Sister Juana was going to have a nervous breakdown. Sisters Teresa and Antonia had taken leave to go take care of some of their own relatives. But Sister Juana had no family beyond her brother Alejandro. Besides, she was the director, so she was stuck. In the meantime, the archdiocese in Santo Domingo stubbornly continued to send provisions in proportion to the needs of the original population of residents, despite Sister Juana’s pleas that they send volunteers and at least double the amount of rice, beans, and bottled water. Flooding from of the Ocoa River had knocked out the bridge that connected Casa Azul to the main road, and so the church’s deliveryman had to drive more than triple the normal distance to get around the flooding and deliver their ration of goods from the west, rather than the usual direct approach from the east. And as if things weren’t bad enough, Alejandro dropped a bomb on Sister Juana. He was going to try to enter Puerto Rico illegally, by boat.

  Kathy was touched that Sister Juana chose to confide in her. The nun described how the odyssey across the famously treacherous stretch of sea would be led by smugglers in rickety, overloaded, wooden boats. The track record for this sort of thing wasn’t good. Even if they didn’t capsize and get eaten by sharks or drift and die of exposure, they ran the risk of being caught by either the Dominican or U.S. Coast Guard. But Alejandro had given up hope on immigrating legally and he couldn’t afford a plane ticket even if someone did grant him permission to emigrate. He said that Hurricane David had wiped out his last chance of making a living in the DR, and he was desperate for work. After the hurricane, word on the street was that authorities in both the DR and Puerto Rico were completely absorbed with post-hurricane activities and that for once they weren’t bothering with illegal immigrants. It was a rare window of opportunity and the weather was perfect to make a go of it. “Don’t go!” she begged. “There’s another storm coming!”

  They would leave right after the new storm, Frederic, passed. He was determined to start a new life in Puerto Rico.

  In the meantime, Sister Juana estimated that the number of orphans in her unit would double by the end of the week. Once or twice, a bandaged relative showed up at the orphanage to claim a child, but reductions to the population of the orphanage were rare, and when they did, they came for the wrong children. Most of the original children at Casa Azul were children of prostitutes who either couldn’t afford to take care of them, didn’t want to, or had tried but been grossly neglectful. It was normal for mothers to show up now and then trying to claim or see their children. Rosita’s mother had scampered out of the alley like a cockroach, drunk and filthy and crusted with blood, claiming she would take her girl to a “special school.”

  “You want to sell her to buy drugs and trago, don’t you?” Sister Juana said, taking the woman’s arm to get a better look at her needle marks. “You’ll have to kill me first,” she said, and slammed the door in the woman’s face. Later that same day, a well-dressed man in dark glasses came by claiming that he was the uncle of a missing boy, and could he take a look around? He pointed to a sweet, fat-cheeked boy, Rafael, but couldn’t provide any papers to prove his relation, so Sister Juana wouldn’t release the child. The mysterious man never returned. “Of course not, he was a pervert,” she said. “I’ve had three women try to pull the same thing, just looking to find a child-slave.” It so
on became obvious that overcrowding at the orphanage could potentially open the door for predators and unfit parents to take advantage. Still, the decision to close the door to more children weighed heavily on her. The next day, tropical storm Frederic passed over them, and with it, more flooding. “More flooding means more children,” Kathy said wearily. Even she was starting to break down. But once Frederic passed, one week after David, their situation actually improved. First, a farmer brought sacks upon sacks of fallen oranges that they feasted on all day. You could tell that some of the kids needed a little sugar in their blood, because their overall behavior improved. A neighbor tapped at the front door with news that there were plantains and avocados washing up on the beach. But Teresa and Antonia had not come back yet, and neither Kathy nor Sister Juana dared leave the other loaded with so much responsibility. Their lucky break came when a German couple, both Red Cross volunteers, showed up at the door. This meant that the direct route from the capital was now passable, and the Germans came with a drum of powdered milk and bottled water. They told Kathy (in German, but she understood and was able to translate) that they couldn’t tolerate the heat and stink of dead bodies trapped under the rubble of the shantytowns where they had been working. They had begged for an easier assignment and had thus been delivered to the front steps of Casa Azul, a cushy job by comparison. The Germans wanted to know how they could help entertain the children. Kathy translated Sister Juana’s swift reply: “Teach them how to make German cars.” Then she took Kathy’s hand and pulled her out the door. “We’ll be back in an hour!” Kathy called out as they hurried to the shore.