Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  I looked at Waldo, who had plugged his cell phone into the car charger device and was listening to his messages.

  "I thought your cell phone wasn't working. I thought that was why it was so hard to call home," I said.

  "It wasn't," he said. "I forgot the charger."

  "You never forget things like that."

  "Well, I did this time."

  "Mom, we could have done a better job with the names," Henry said.

  "I didn't think they were so terrible," Ezra said.

  Waldo looked up and said, "This is the bridge."

  "What bridge?"

  "The Whitestone. Remember the jumper when we were coming to the airport?"

  "I thought you weren't going to tell the boys."

  "They're not paying attention," Waldo said. Silence had suddenly descended on the back seat. The boys were playing Tetris on my cell phone.

  "I hate to think about things like that. About changing your mind somewhere between the railing of the bridge and the cold, black water."

  Waldo said nothing. He held his cell phone to his ear and seemed distant.

  "Do you think more suicides jump into cold water than into warm water?"

  "I have no idea, Al."

  "I bet somebody does."

  "You're not suggesting Lalo was suicidal, are you?" Waldo said.

  That hadn't occurred to me. There was enough traffic that I felt compelled to watch both the car in front of me and the car behind, and so I couldn't really examine Waldo's expression. "God, no. But he definitely wouldn't have run amok in warm weather."

  Waldo said, "You can't know that. The snow is just the ostensible reason he went a little batty."

  "Why couldn't it be the snow? You said he always hated winter."

  "You should know."

  "But I don't know. He's your friend, Waldo. I just fed him and told him all about Dandy and all the other dogs I've killed."

  "You did what? I still doubt that sent him off the deep end. You've got to stop talking that way, because—as far as I know—Dandy isn't dead."

  "Of course he isn't dead," I said.

  "Who isn't dead?" Ezra wanted to know.

  "No one," I said.

  "Lots of people," Waldo said. He looked out the window, and then reached over and stroked my thigh. Actually, first he patted the top of my thigh, and then the tips of his fingers slipped inward. Even through my blue jeans, I could feel his touch. His fingertips were warm, like electric eels.

  "There's still a lot of snow on the ground, isn't there?" he said, as if noticing for the first time.

  His canvas suitcase was delivered two days later at six in the morning by a haggard airline employee. I answered the door in my flannel robe. He handed over the suitcase and shook his head glumly as he complained, "You have a lot of snow here, lady."

  "I know," I replied.

  "You really should do something about it."

  The pickax was not in the returned suitcase. Waldo said he was going to call the airline and complain.

  That night, Waldo came glumly through the back door. His dragging feet, shod in frayed hunting boots—how had he left the house so disheveled? had I noticed?—seemed to barely propel or carry his body, his unrecognizable body, lumpen and misshapen like a Halloween gourd.

  "What train hit you?" I said.

  He sat down at the kitchen table with a muted thud that matched up to someone else, to some other man who outweighed the real Waldo, the lively Waldo, my Waldo, by at least a hundred pounds. Exhaustion spoke from his cheeks, emanated from the sleeves of his jacket, while his ears hung limply from his skull.

  "Huh?" he said. And then, "I don't know. Things are imploding at work. Half the patent department quit today. Or maybe they got fired."

  "Have you considered a vacation?"

  "I just had a vacation. In the caves."

  I handed him a glass of red wine and his mail. Between the notice from the Town of VerGroot regarding compliance with the leash law and a quasi-personal appeal for funds to restore several old farm buildings that, it had just recently been learned, were once a way station on the Underground Railroad, there was something of actual interest. There was an envelope addressed by a real hand, bearing a stamp that had been licked by a human tongue: a Nicaraguan stamp, featuring a lizard of an improbable color improbably posing in front of an erupting volcano. But it was not addressed to me, and there was no return name or address. I was still not a graphologist, yet I detected the strains of convent training in that handwriting, a convent later abandoned. The penmanship was elegantly curvilinear, but also naturalistic and freeform. The writer had used a fountain pen and purple ink. I had held the letter up to the light and squinted, all to no avail, as the sender had used a high-quality twenty-pound linen envelope.

  Waldo drank slowly and read the notice about the leash-law compliance with far greater attention than it deserved. VerGroot had no need for a leash law. He sipped his wine.

  "You got a letter from Nicaragua," I said.

  "I see that."

  "Do you think that is Abelardo's handwriting?"

  "It doesn't look like it," Waldo said.

  "That's what I thought too."

  Waldo sipped his wine and picked up a teaspoon that had been left on the table.

  "You don't think he's dead, do you? Don't you think you should open it, toot sweet?"

  "Something tells me he's not dead," Waldo said. He was enjoying my impatience, too much.

  "Fine," I said. "Just don't ask me what Posey told me about Dick."

  "I won't. I already know what Posey has to say and I recommend taking it with a grain of salt."

  "Just open the damn letter! Please."

  And he did. Just like that. As if complying with my wishes, as if humoring my impatience and catering to my neediness, were things he did on a regular basis. He took a knife from the table and neatly slit open the envelope and removed two sheets of paper. One had print on one side and was covered with tiny handwriting on the other. The other was the size of a note card and bore the same handwriting as the envelope, the same purple ink, and also an inkblot. I could see the inkblot from where I stood.

  "It's from Lalo's sister Carmen. She says she was rummaging through his jacket and found this letter he must have written when he was in the hospital up here. She thinks that we—though I'm sure she really means you—should see it."

  "Which one is Carmen?"

  "Which what is Carmen?"

  "Is she the babe?" I asked.

  "I thought I told you they were all babes," Waldo said.

  I thought: She's not the only one rummaging in pockets.

  "Here, Al. This is definitely meant for you. It's in Spanish. I had no idea his handwriting was so minuscule." He sighed. "That whole business with Lalo in the snow was certainly an object lesson about how people can totally surprise you. After so many years, they can do things you would never predict. If I had any sense, it would make me look at everyone differently. Even you. Maybe that should be, especially you."

  Waldo handed me Lalo's letter. It had been folded and unfolded and refolded too many times. He had written it on the reverse side of the Ginny O Hospital's daily menu choices sheet, the sheet upon which he should have marked his preference for turkey fricassee over baked fish (species unidentified); should have marked his preferred drink: coffee, tea, or apple juice; should have indicated whether he wanted Jell-O or vanilla pudding. And if he was writing letters on the reverse side of the daily menu choices, then how did the nutritionists and dieticians and gourmet chefs, all toiling away in their shower caps, know what to feed him? Did he go hungry that day?

  I read, or deciphered:

  Carmencita, Instead of this, instead of this, instead of this, at this very moment, on this day at this time of day in any time zone under the sun, but most specially the one we are in now, I should be at the Hagiographers Club wearing that blue suit you insisted I get tailor-made in London. Do you remember? Of course you do, you remember every
thing. We were in London after that disastrous trip to Rome, after our appallingly rude treatment by that craven, limping, sputtering Cardinal Ratskeller? Even now I see him lumbering beneath the weight of his miter—he looked like the last gasp in a long line of incestuous unions. And then to pretend he didn't know us, that he didn't even know where Nicaragua was. "Ah yes, you're the East African country with those wild blue rhinoceri. Of course I remember the article in National Geographic. How I adore the National Geographic. Do you know it?" I would have liked to put his ring through his nose. He knew perfectly well our exact location on the isthmus. We had a rather heated discussion about the proper length of sleeves. From where I lie, I can see that blue suit and all that it represents in my mind's eye, dare I say that I see it as surely as Bernadette saw Our Lady by the spring in Lourdes? As clearly as Juan Diego saw Our Lady at Teotihucan? As clearly as Don Diego of Tezoatega saw the statue of Our Lady in the shadow of the guácimo tree? Does that strike you as blasphemous? That I would equate a sanctified vision of the Virgin with my own vivid vision of a blue tailored suit, a suit I am not now wearing. No, blasphemy has never troubled you. Quite the opposite. Let me tell you about this country hospital named for a local benefactress, one Virginia O'Connor, whose greatest lifetime accomplishment, other than endowing this hospital sufficiently to get it named after her, was to be the first and, possibly, the last woman to swim the length of the Hudson while towing a rubber raft bearing her pet poodle Flanders. Her accomplishments are engraved on a plaque in the lobby of this hospital that I am now allowed to stroll through, now that I am no longer deemed a danger to myself, or a threat to anyone else. If you can believe what you read, if I can believe what is engraved on the plaque, Virginia wanted to swim the length of the Hudson as a gift to her dog Flanders, who was dying of kidney failure. I am here in this small country hospital whose one mitigating asset might ordinarily be considered its lovely views of the countryside, but now the views are all of snow, snow, and only snow, mounds of snow, snow piled high against the trees, snow pushed and soiled by the sides of the road, so much snow. Did my eyesight return merely that I might see snow again? My roommate here is Rubén. He too is a Nica. He was injured in an accident with a chain saw, not the kind of chain saw we have at the finca but another kind, larger and more dangerous, don't ask me how I know about this, I just know that these are more dangerous than anything we use, and accidents happen often and when they do, the damage to the human body is horrible to behold. I translate for him when the nurses want to know how he is feeling, if the pain is here or there, if he is allergic to anything, and other things as well which I cannot write even to you. He is in terrible pain from the laceration of his thigh and his hand. Also his face. I imagined that in the States they would change bloody bandages more often, more often than they would at the Clinica de la Virgen del Viejo. But this is not León and there are no Sisters with airborne wimples, but twice a week they do have a Pet Visitation Program, to assist with Emotional and Physical Therapy. Even if they ask, I will refuse to translate this flier for poor Rubén. No matter how much they plead for me to discuss the merits of the Pet Visitation Program, I will refuse. Poor Rubén did not come all the way from his small village to be back in a hospital with animals in the hallways. There are fifteen rooms on this floor and only three of them are occupied, including ours. In one room is the thinnest girl I've ever seen. She is nothing but anguish crying out to be fed, only it is her refusal to be fed that has brought her here. She has the face of an ascetic angel who has gone into the desert to fast and pray and battle her demons for forty days and nights. Rubén reminds me of something that happened on the finca. Do you remember? It was ancient Don Eustachio—he was Papa's best pruner, the best pruner of coffee trees in all of Nicaragua, is what Papa said—and I remember him stepping out from the cafetal, all bloody—so bloody that it was impossible to tell which limbs were attached and which were severed. He had a painfully thin daughter, I remember that too—we thought it was a tapeworm or parasites. Don Eustachios injuries involved a machete and also an animal who startled someone. Was it a rabbit? I can picture a rabbit running for its life. Tía Tata was there when Don Eustachio had his accident and she bandaged him up so brilliantly and wouldn't let anyone ask him how it happened which she said was all we wanted to know and that was probably true. I wasn't there and neither were you, not really. But we could have been and we would have wanted to know how it happened. And now here is Rubén who is all bloody and frightened and not understanding a word that goes on around him, although he watches the television. Last night he pulled back the curtain that slides along a ceiling track between our two beds in order to give us an illusion of privacy. He was lonely and frightened, that is what I think, that is what I thought until I thought this: that it was not his loneliness that caused him to pull back the curtain that separated us, but his perception of my loneliness, his kindness and concern for my isolation and despair even as, to the untrained eye, I am the unharmed one, the intact one. I will ask him if they are related. Aren't we all related, you and me and all our cousins and all their cousins and so on until we own the country, that is, we are all related to each other but not to them, not to Rubén and Eustachio, that is our history and our tragedy, if we only knew it. He knows Tía Tata. A cousin in Chinandega prayed and was cured of a kidney stone. How do I know this?

  "Well, blow me down with a feather broom," I said to Waldo. "This guy's handwriting is an act of God. Or something."

  "I don't think that's exactly what you mean," Waldo said.

  "Then what do I mean? It's infinitesimal. Look at this!" I waved the fragile palimpsest in front of him. "I've known pygmy mice with larger handwriting."

  Waldo poured himself another glass of red wine. Color was returning to his cheeks. "Maybe it's some secret seminarian code."

  "Well, is it?"

  "How would I know?"

  "Because," I said. "He was your roommate. Remember? I'm just the spousal appendage. This is all news to me."

  "So you say, but you're in this up to your frothy eyebrows, Al."

  "Well, I can't take it anymore. I need a magnifying glass," I said.

  "Check the back-door basket," Waldo said. But I was already there. I knew I would find a large magnifying glass—it had once been part of a Sherlock Holmes costume—i n a wicker basket whose contents also included shin guards, grass-stained Wiffle balls, chewed-up plastic dog bones, and a pair of clippers I'd been searching for. I knew I would find the magnifying glass in the basket by the back door because my sons, my sweet, incipient arsonists, my cherubic pyromaniacs, used it to magnify the rays of the sun and set dried oak leaves on fire.

  I cleaned the glass thoroughly with my best rag that I never used without recalling the exact flannel nightgown it used to be.

  "Why do you think she sent this to you? To make me feel guilty?"

  "Nope. That is not Carmen's way," Waldo said.

  "Or to better acquaint me with the inner workings of his psyche?" Never mind how Waldo knew what was or was not "Carmen's way."

  With the perfectly clean glass, I finished:

  Will I ever meet Hubert van Toots? Should I have contacted him? What is the protocol in a johnny in a snowstorm? I enjoyed so much our correspondence, and I have no doubt that he understands and not just understands but relishes our cause and the sanctity and miracles of Tía Tata. Who is this Hubert van Toots? Toot Toots Toot. What kind of name is that? Gringos always ask that question, of me, of each other. What kind of name is that? And I have to wonder, what is it they want, what reassurance? I know what they think they want, a provenance, geography, a category, but—Cita, I am so terribly terribly cold, is Mombacho erupting now? Cerro Negro? Could I just dive in? Where is Alice? You do not know Alice. You cannot know Alice. But you will.

  And that was the end of that. Not an end, but a stop.

  "You have to read this, Waldo. He is your friend."

  "You keep saying that," he said. I needed to stop saying it. Somehow, so
me time, in that hospital room he had morphed into my friend, and his aunt had become my task.

  PART II

  The Hagiographers Club:

  Hubert van Toots

  10

  The Hagiographers Club

  AND THAT IS HOW I came to find myself inside the Hagiographers Club, home to Hubert van Toots and repository of the Western Hemisphere's largest collection of hagiographica. The collection originated in 1871 with the startling bequest of Agatha Lipton de Romero's personal library and had been laboriously built up by four generations of librarians, culminating in the present tenure of Hubert van Toots, universally acknowledged to be the most resourceful and erudite of them all.

  The building was constructed, according to Agatha Lipton de Romero's precise instructions, and likewise financed by her startling bequest, in 1872 in the flamboyant Victorian Gothic style, in which flamboyant is a term of art and does not refer to outrageous behavior or a penchant for overdressing in splashy colors. There was something exuberantly medieval about it, as if the addition of one more detail (beyond the Gothic windows, the oriels, the alternating voussoirs and the intersecting gables, the polychromatic and patterned slate roof, and the clustered chimney pots) would send the building over the edge of architectural probity and into the realm of Disneyland or Las Vegas. It was on the cusp of something, and that was its brilliance. Not that I understood all that on first sighting. On that winter morning it was the overall effect, of secrecy and mystery and maybe just a slight nod to the fantastical, that I gleaned from the building of the Hagiographers Club. The details that contributed to that effect I would learn to name much later. And of course, there was no signage of any kind. Why of course? I had never noticed the club before, which seemed remiss on my part, if only because of the gargoyles. They were unlike any other gargoyles; they were early Christian saints slyly perched in both front corners of the building, eyeing the un-Christian and the unsaintly as they walked by, as they smoked their cigarettes, as they collected their dogs' feces in plastic bags, as they passed this repository of hagiographies and the people who loved them and never knew. Later I would learn that all the gargoyles had names and attributes and that the club members knew them all, but initially all I saw were carved stone faces in extreme pain or extreme ecstasy, probably both, such often being the sainted condition.