“The Resplendent Quetzal,” Edward said. It was a green and red bird with spectacular iridescent blue tail plumes. He explained to her that Quetzal Bird meant Feather Bird. “I don’t think we’re likely to see it,” he said. He looked up the habitat. “ ‘Cloud forests.’ I don’t think we’ll be in any cloud forests.”
“Well, that’s the one I want,” Sarah said. “That’s the only one I want.”
Sarah was always very determined about what she wanted and what she didn’t want. If there wasn’t anything on a restaurant menu that appealed to her, she would refuse to order anything; or she would permit him to order for her and then pick around the edges, as she had last night. It was no use telling her that this was the best meal they’d had since coming. She never lost her temper or her self-possession, but she was stubborn. Who but Sarah for instance would have insisted on bringing a collapsible umbrella to Mexico in the dry season? He’d argued and argued, pointing out its uselessness and the extra weight, but she’d brought it anyway. And then yesterday afternoon it had rained, a real cloudburst. Everyone else had run for shelter, huddling against walls and inside the temple doorways, but Sarah had put up her umbrella and stood under it, smugly This had infuriated him. Even when she was wrong, she always managed, somehow, to be right. If only just once she would admit … what? That she could make mistakes. This was what really disturbed him: her assumption of infallibility.
And he knew that when the baby had died she had blamed it on him. He still didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he’d gone out for cigarettes not expecting it to be born so soon. He wasn’t there when she was told; she’d had to take the news alone.
“It was nobody’s fault,” he told her repeatedly “Not the doctor’s, not yours. The cord was twisted.”
“I know,” she said, and she had never accused him; nevertheless he could feel the reproach, hanging around her like a fog. As if there was anything he could have done.
“I wanted it as much as you did,” he told her. And this was true. He hadn’t thought of marrying Sarah at all, he’d never mentioned it because it had never occurred to him she would agree, until she told him she was pregnant. Up until that time, she had been the one in control; he was sure he was just an amusement for her. But the marriage hadn’t been her suggestion, it had been his. He’d dropped out of Theology, he’d taken his public-school teaching certificate that summer in order to support them. Every evening he had massaged her belly, feeling the child move, touching it through her skin. To him it was a sacred thing, and he included her in his worship. In the sixth month, when she had taken to lying on her back, she had begun to snore, and he would lie awake at night listening to these gentle snores, white and silver they seemed to him, almost songs, mysterious talismans.… Unfortunately Sarah had retained this habit, but he no longer felt the same way about it.
When the child had died, he was the one who had cried, not Sarah. She had never cried. She got up and walked around almost immediately, she wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. The baby clothes she’d been buying disappeared from the apartment; he never found out what she’d done with them, he’d been afraid to ask.
Since that time he’d come to wonder why they were still married. It was illogical. If they’d married because of the child and there was no child, and there continued to be no child, why didn’t they separate? But he wasn’t sure he wanted this. Maybe he was still hoping something would happen, there would be another child. But there was no use demanding it. They came when they wanted to, not when you wanted them to. They came when you least expected it. A jewel, a precious feather.
“Now I will tell you,” said the guide. “The archaeologists have dived down into the well. They have dredged up more than fifty skeletons, and they have found that some of them were not virgins at all but men. Also, most of them were children. So as you can see, that is the end of the popular legend.” He made an odd little movement from the top of the altar, almost like a bow, but there was no applause. “They do not do these things to be cruel,” he continued. “They believe these people will take a message to the rain god, and live forever in his paradise at the bottom of the well.”
The woman with the handbag got up. “Some paradise,” she said to her friend. “I’m starting back. You coming?”
In fact the whole group was moving off now, in the scattered way they had. Sarah waited until they had gone. Then she opened her purse and took out the plaster Christ Child she had stolen from the crêche the night before. It was inconceivable to her that she had done such a thing, but there it was, she really had.
She hadn’t planned it beforehand. She’d been standing beside the crêche while Edward was paying the bill, he’d had to go into the kitchen to do it as they were very slow about bringing it to the table. No one was watching her: the domino-playing boys were absorbed in their game and the children were riveted to the television. She’d just suddenly reached out her hand, past the Wise Men and through the door of the stable, picked the child up and put it into her purse.
She turned it over in her hands. Separated from the dwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn’t look quite so absurd. Its diaper was cast as part of it, more like a tunic, it had glass eyes and a sort of pageboy haircut, quite long for a newborn. A perfect child, except for the chip out of the back, luckily where it would not be noticed. Someone must have dropped it on the floor.
You could never be too careful. All the time she was pregnant, she’d taken meticulous care of herself, counting out the vitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She had drunk four glasses of milk a day, even though she hated milk. She had done the exercises and gone to the classes. No one would be able to say she had not done the right things. Yet she had been disturbed by the thought that the child would be born with something wrong, it would be a mongoloid or a cripple, or a hydrocephalic with a huge liquid head like the ones she’d seen taking the sun in their wheelchairs on the lawn of the hospital one day. But the child had been perfect.
She would never take that risk, go through all that work again. Let Edward strain his pelvis till he was blue in the face; “trying again,” he called it. She took the Pill every day, without telling him. She wasn’t going to try again. It was too much for anyone to expect of her.
What had she done wrong? She hadn’t done anything wrong, that was the trouble. There was nothing and no one to blame, except, obscurely, Edward; and he couldn’t be blamed for the child’s death, just for not being there. Increasingly since that time he had simply absented himself. When she no longer had the child inside her he had lost interest, he had deserted her. This, she realized, was what she resented most about him. He had left her alone with the corpse, a corpse for which there was no explanation.
“Lost,” people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where? What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.
Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.
Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well’s edge, her arms raised above her head. My God, he thought, she’s going to jump. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up behind her, grab her … but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He expected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down.
“Sarah,” he said. S
he had her hands over her face; she didn’t lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. “What is it? Are you sick?”
She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving. Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he’d invented ways of coping. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.
“Come on,” he said, trying to disguise his desperation, “you need some lunch, you’ll feel better.” He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.
“This isn’t like you,” Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.
Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.
She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose. It is like me, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella.
“I’d like an orange,” she said. “They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?”
Training
It must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night before. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.
“They forgot your hat,” he said to her. “That was stupid of them, wasn’t it?” Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.
“This way?” he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say yes. It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.
He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn’t get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some bumpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through space. It was one of the worst cases they’d ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.
But everyone agreed she was bright, very bright; it was amazing really what she could do. She could say yes by moving her left hand, and therefore she could play games, answer questions, indicate what she wanted. It just needed more work than usual on the part of the counsellor, and you had to do a lot of guessing. It took time, but after she had beaten him twice in a row at checkers, with no collusion on his part, Rob was willing to spend the time. He wondered about teaching her to play chess. But there were too many pieces, too many moves, a game would take weeks. He thought of her, sitting impatiently inside her body, waiting for him to get to the piece she wanted to move and figure out where she wanted to move it.
She hadn’t said anything. He turned the puzzle piece around. Yes, her hand said immediately, and he fitted it in. It was a giraffe, two giraffes, a funny-animal picture, a caricature. It struck him that she might not know what a giraffe was; she might never have seen a real one or even a picture of one.
“Is this puzzle boring?” he asked her. Yes, she said.
“How about a game of checkers?”
That was fine with her. “Okay, killer,” he said, “but this time I’m going to beat you.” Her blue eyes stared at him; her mouth wavered. He wished she could smile. He wheeled her off to get out the checkers and return the puzzle.
It was her brightness that fascinated him. It was amazing, but it was horrible too, that mind trapped and strangling. Maybe she was a genius; who could ever tell? Surely she knew things and could sense things that would escape other people. When she looked at him with her ice-blue eyes, clear and cold, hard like mint candies, it was as if she could see into him, past the desperately cheerful kind-uncle act he knew was only an act. He had to be careful what he thought about when he was with her. She would pick it up, and for some reason it mattered what she felt about him.
Sometimes he thought she would be better off if she were like some of the others. The hydrocephalics, for instance, with their watery pumpkin heads and infant’s bodies; there were three of them at the camp right now, and they could all talk, but they weren’t very bright. Or the muscular dystrophy cases, who looked so normal the first time you saw them, slumped in their wheelchairs, wan and limp as orphans. They would be dead soon; some of them would be dead even before the next summer. Rob found the camp song so painful he could not bring himself to sing it.
Where do you find the girls and boys
Who grow to be women and men?
Eff ay eye ar
EE – ee-dee-ee en!
The tune was the Mickey Mouse song, which made it worse for Rob by conjuring up an image of the Mouseketeers, those plump, pert children with functional arms and legs who had chosen to use their normal, beautiful bodies for that, for prancing and jiggling and acting on television. He would stand looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at the rows of doomed children ranged in the auditorium, brought there so Bert the Assistant Director could finger his accordion and generate what he called “camp spirit.” But the children sang the song with gusto. They liked to sing. Those who could clapped their hands.
Jordan could not clap. But on the other hand, she would live a long time. You didn’t die from what she had. She was only nine years old.
GAMES was in the right-hand half of the cabin nearest the main house. The front window had been enlarged and fitted with an awning, a wooden shutter for when it rained, and a counter. Jo-Anne Johnson, who had the shift this week, was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, reading a paperback. She was wearing a white terry T-shirt with an anchor on the left breast and red short-shorts, and she had her legs crossed. Rob looked at the line on her thigh where the tan ended, then switched to the shelves behind her where the Volleyballs and baseball bats were stored. She had brown hair, in a pony-tail held with a gold clip, and tortoise-shell sunglasses. When she walked she limped a little. She was one of the former campers who had come back as a counsellor. Rob thought of her as a nice girl; at least she was always nice to him.
“We’d like to exchange this puzzle,” he told her. “We’d like to get out some checkers.”
“Checkers again, eh?” she said. “You must be sick of checkers. That’s the fourth time this week.”
Rob didn’t like the way some people talked in front of Jordan as if she couldn’t hear. “Oh no,” he said. “I’m playing Jordan. She’s beaten me twice.”
Jo-Anne smiled at him as if they shared a secret. Then she smiled down at Jordan, who stared back at her, not moving much. “Yes, I’ve heard she’s a real whiz,” she said. She crossed out the puzzle in the lined notebook on the counter and wrote in the checkers set opposite his name. “See you later,” she said. “Have a good game.”
“Let’s find some shade,” Rob said to Jordan. He wheeled her along the cement pathway, beside the row of cabins. The cabins were white, neat, identical. Each one had a front ramp instead of a doorste
p; inside them were the special beds, the special toilets, and the curious smell that was not like the smell of children but was sweeter, heavier and more humid, and reminded him of a greenhouse. A smell of warm earth and baby powder, of things mouldering slightly. Of course there was always a lot of laundry, sitting in bags, waiting to be taken away. Some of the children wore diapers, grotesque when you saw them on a twelve-year-old. In the mornings, before the beds had been changed, the smell was stronger. It took a long time to get everyone ready for the day. The girl counsellors were forbidden to lift the children out of the beds or out of the wheelchairs; only the boys could do that. Rob lifted his own cabin and two girls’ cabins, Number Seven and Number Eight, Jordan’s cabin. With her Dutch-boy haircut and tough wilful little face, she looked out of place in the frilled pink nightgowns they put on her. He wondered if she were ever allowed to help choose her own clothes.
They reached the corner of the walk and turned left. From the open windows of the auditorium, which doubled as a gym, came the sound of recorded music and a woman’s voice: “No, back to your places and try again. You can do it, Susie.” Now they had reached the end of the boys’ side. The girls’ side was across the central field, where there was a baseball game going on, as there had been the day he had arrived. The camp van had stopped in the circular driveway. From the front, the main house could have been a rich man’s mansion, and in fact it once had been. Some figures that looked at first like grandmothers in rocking chairs were placed at intervals along the wide verandah. The Director had greeted them and had deputized Bert to give them the tour for new counsellors. Around the corner was the baseball game, and Rob had thought, Well it’s not going to be so bad, because from a distance, on the green field, in the full sunlight that seemed to have been shining ever since, the game had seemed almost normal.
The strange thing about it was the silence. Boys that age ought to be shouting, that was part of the game; but games here were played with quiet concentration. These were mostly children who could walk, with the aid of braces or crutches; some could even run. But a few of the players were double, one boy being pushed around the bases in a wheelchair by another. Rob knew from having played that the games were conducted with a politeness and consideration that he found eerie. During baseball games these children behaved as adults were always telling children to behave. The only noisy one at the moment was Bert, the umpire, who was waving his arms and yelling encouragement as Dave Snider, paralyzed by polio from the waist down, knocked the ball straight out past second base. Two outfielders on crutches hobbled after it while Dave spun onto first.
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