Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

I consider the question.

  "I'm claustrophobic," he says.

  This changes everything. He has a diagnosis. We move over so that Rodolfo can occupy the aisle seat. We all buckle ourselves in. I say, helpfully, "You know that you can tell your travel agent to book you an aisle seat. Or you can do it online. Given your condition."

  "My parents made the reservation. I'm going home for the vacation."

  "Don't your parents know that you're claustrophobic?" I ask. I am ready to write the derelict parents a note.

  Ezra is reading the Sky Mall catalog; he is considering the merits of various wheeled suitcases, including the Animal Planet Pet-Wheel-Away for $99.95.

  "Maybe all the aisle seats were taken," he says, dubiously.

  "Exactly how claustrophobic are you?" I ask.

  "I get very nervous when I'm hemmed in," he says.

  "How do you feel about elevators?" I ask. I'm not crazy about elevators, but I dislike tunnels more.

  "They don't bother me. Not much."

  "What about tall buildings? Do you get nervous in tall buildings?"

  "There aren't a lot of tall buildings in Florida. Or in Nicaragua for that matter."

  "So is it only coach class in airplanes that bothers you? What about the back seat of an armored car?"

  "Pardon?"

  "You know," I say. "The kind with tinted bulletproof windows. Even I feel a little claustrophobic in those vehicles."

  Ezra closes the Sky Mall catalog just as the plane takes off. He says, "We know someone who has just the opposite of what you have."

  "The opposite?"

  "She's agoraphobic. She's married to our vet."

  Rodolfo's chubby intertwined fingers rest upon his vast stomach. His pale pink polo shirt is so large that it is actually loose on him. I watch his knuckles get whiter and whiter as the plane lifts.

  "That means she doesn't like open spaces, or being outdoors in general."

  "I know what it means," Rodolfo says.

  "But she got a lot better during a snowstorm when everyone was snowed in. We weren't there for the snowstorm because we were spelunking, but we know all about it. Everyone knows about it. Everyone was stuck inside because the snowdrifts reached the chimney, and she wanted to go out. Things like that happen, you know."

  "I don't think anything like that will happen to me."

  "You never know," Ezra says. "I sleepwalk sometimes. Anything can happen."

  My head snaps toward him so fast I pinch a nerve. That's twice this year. Ezra wrinkles up his eyelids and fixes a menacing stare upon me. The first and, before this, last person with whom he shared his sleepwalking was Wendy Dilly, and we know her fate. Now here he is slipping it into conversation with a morbidly obese claustrophobe on a flight to Nicaragua.

  If Waldo were here, If Waldo were here. I love sitting next to Waldo in airplanes. If Waldo were here, I would drape a blanket over us and stroke his thighs. Touching Waldo in the presence of strangers—and inside a speeding vessel!—is an inexplicable aphrodisiac. If Waldo were here, I would refuse to consider all the other bodies this nubby fleece blanket has covered. Wherever my hands go, Waldo's face remains the same. He has a genius for arranging his features. If Waldo were here.

  Now Ezra and Rodolfo are exchanging names.

  Now they are talking about their animals. It seems that Rodolfo is devoted to his basset hound, Tommy.

  Ezra says, "I will tell you the pros and cons of having two dogs. The pro is that they can play together, if they don't fight. The con is that you end up liking one better than the other. You might pretend that you like them both the same, but that's impossible."

  In ten-plus years of cohabitation with him, I have never heard Ezra refer to the pros and cons of anything. Ezra removed from his native habitat could turn out to be very different from Ezra in VerGroot. Ezra in the tropics could prove to be different from the temperate Ezra. Ezra under the meteorological pressures of El Niñno could be totally unlike the Ezra basking by the Gulf Stream.

  In the guidebook, I read about a certain eccentric millionaire who, in 1972, lived in the top two floors of the only decent hotel in the capital, the one shaped like a pyramid. He spent his days naked and watching James Bond movies. He was friendly with the dictator Somoza. Then came the earthquake, and he fled.

  Elsewhere in this guidebook—I love my guidebooks—I read that Nicaragua is just about the most geologically active country in the world. We are flying at an impossible speed over land and water in order to arrive at a most geologically active place. An unstable place. I have no idea how fast the plane is flying. That is the sort of thing Waldo always knows.

  Ezra is talking to Rodolfo Godoy. No, they are playing cards. Gin rummy. Ezra will win, because he always beats me. I read this: "Subduction of the Cocos plate underneath the Caribbean plate is at a rate of 87-9 cm per year, the fastest rate of plate collision in the hemisphere.' Did Henry read this book?

  More than forty volcanoes are in a row. Volcanoes with names like Momotombo and Momotombito and Mombacho and Masaya. Names that will soon roll from my tongue like saliva bubbles.

  Ezra says, "Mom, aces go around the corner always. If I am not mistaken."

  "They do when we play," I say. In our family, aces go around the corner, but this is not a universally accepted rule. Fairweathers are adamant on this point.

  "They always do," he says with emphasis. For Ezra, emphasis involves drawing his pale blond, really almost nonexistent, eyebrows together. But no amount of facial contortions can connect his eyebrows.

  "You're right, Ez, they always do."

  Rodolfo leans over Ezra to say, "I never knew this rule."

  "Ezra plays a lot of gin rummy," I explain. "His grandmother taught him, and she is quite strict about rules."

  It hits us like a flying sauna: the tropical air and its potent humidity. This very instant when the door slides open and the Nicaraguan air meets the transported gringo air. We step down to the tarmac of the airport named by the revolutionaries for the same person who was their namesake, a young man tricked into leaving his hiding place by a promise of peace and then murdered. It is an old story. Atahualpa might have whispered a thing or two in his ear.

  We do not follow the others, including the large and sweating Rodolfo Godoy, along the passage that leads to immigration and passport control. Before we even turn the corner Abelardo steps out of a doorway and greets us. He beckons us inside the room, identified by a small and mostly unseen sign as SALA VIP.

  We negotiate a gaggle of bemused Americans clustered just outside the door. They will not enter the sala VIP. They are all wearing identical orange T-shirts that say Tryon Calvary Evangelical Mission to Nicaragua on the back. The fronts show a naïf-style sketch of a tall white man flipping hamburgers on a barbecue, surrounded by small dark children.

  Lalo asks for our passports and luggage stubs, and I unquestioningly hand everything over to his sidekick, Rolando, a young man in a guayabera. Abelardo speaks muy rápidamente to Rolando. I am pleased to see Abelardo not in pajamas and not in the snow. I startle myself by being so pleased to see Abelardo in his own climate.

  Last time I saw him he was recumbent in a hospital bed asking for fruit and confusing me with someone who'd lost a beauty pageant in Nicaragua. Last time he was getting to know a lacerated landscape worker in the next bed. Last time he was gone, disappeared without saying goodbye.

  I want to grab the nearest telephone and call Waldo and say, What am I doing here? Tell me what I am doing here. This is not a job. This is folly. I will not cry, I will not weep. I am, after all, the mother here. Is this homesickness? How can I be homesick when Ezra is by my side, dear beloved Ezra, winner at gin rummy, master of surprises? Was I homesick when I was sleeping my way across Europe in seven languages? I was not. Was I homesick in Providence, foreign land of Roger Williams and Buddy Cianci? I was not. It is not homesickness that has my eyes and cheeks in its clutches. It is heartsickness. I want Waldo to appear and tell me that all is w
ell, that I am his one and only. He can tell me in rhyme. Where is a telephone?

  Abelardo says, "So this is the famous Ezra."

  "Mucho gusto," Ezra says.

  "I slept in your bed, I think it was," Abelardo says.

  "That's what Mom told me. She should know. You left something in my room. Under my bed."

  I say, "We can talk about this later."

  Abelardo says, "Did I? I don't recall."

  "According to my mom—"

  "I've forgotten quite a lot. Perhaps you will help me to remember," Abelardo says.

  "Maybe we could get him something to drink?"

  Abelardo nods to a full-figured young woman, and lemonade materializes.

  The sala VIP of the Managua airport came into being during the Sandinista time. Once inside the sala VIP you are spared the annoying details of immigration, baggage retrieval, and customs. Inside, lovely young women bring you a cold drink of your choice, shots of Flor de Caña, chilly Victoria, sweating Coca-Cola. Carmen tells me later that they are all former contestants in the Miss Nicaragua pageant. This is the consolation prize.

  The difference is more than I can ignore. "The last time I saw you, you were so different," I say.

  "That wasn't me."

  "You mean, because you absconded? Flew from your mechanical bed?"

  "No, because I was a penumbra of my former self, an inversion. What you see now is the real thing, and I hope it pleases you."

  Ezra says, "Do you believe in ghosts?"

  "I believe in the truth of what we cannot see, which is not quite believing in ghosts, young Ezra."

  "I know the difference."

  26

  Heliconia, Agapanthus, Datura, and the Rain

  That this extravagant forgery, bristling with anachronisms and improbabilities, should have imposed upon an uncritical age is perhaps not to be wondered at: but it is surprising to find its genuineness still up held in certain quarters at this present day.

  —Alban Butler, "St Martial," Butler's Lives of the Saints

  EZRA RIDES SHOTGUN in the Mitsubishi, next to Rolando, who is driving. I'm in the back seat with Abelardo. This is all so new, sitting next to him in a car I am not driving, feeling conscious of the different parts of my body as they accumulate sweat: forehead, backs of the knees, inner elbows. I should have installed one of those international chips in the cell phone so I could call Waldo; whatever made me think I could survive without speaking to Waldo several times a day? I am at sea. No, I am in a geologically active place. I say, "I don't want you to have the wrong impression."

  "Of course not. Your son will enjoy the volcanoes very much. All the North Americans say it makes all the difference to see smoke coming from the crater. To look into a crater and see smoke."

  "I mean about the virgin saints. I'm afraid Hubert has given you a very wrong idea."

  "Hubert may be one of the few North Americans to fully understand what we are up against. One of the few persons anywhere."

  That is not what I meant. What I mean is about Waldo, Waldo and me. I don't want Abelardo to think it at all strange that I came here to his country, this Nicaragua, without Waldo.

  We are stopped at a light. This is the one and only road from the airport to the capital, and the one and only way to get from the capital to León, the city, and Las Brisas, the ancestral Llobet finca, and also to Granada, ancestral home of La Matilda and of Carolina Felicita de la Rosa Oberon and all the de la Rosas of lateral descent. Small children knock at the windows of the SUV and hold up plastic bags filled with peeled fruit. For Ezra, it is not necessarily obvious that the contents are fruit, or even edible. Other children hawk gaudy beach towels. Women wearing aprons over spaghetti-strap dresses sell mobile-phone accessories, leatherette cases and headsets. A scrawny man has a parrot perched on one shoulder and another outrageous bird in a cage that's dangling from his fingertips.

  Ezra doesn't know where to look.

  I say, "I like Hubert very much. Really I do. I think he is brilliant. But he lives in his own private world. You must realize that."

  Abelardo smiles. "Do you realize to whom you are speaking? About living in a private world?"

  We are driving north on the Carretera Norte (also known as the Pan-American Highway). Abelardo points out the baseball stadium where presidential inaugurations are held every six years, more or less.

  The traffic was slow before, but now it is almost stopped. Rolando turns on the radio and we hear that Daniel Ortega is traveling to North Korea to discuss nuclear disarmament, and also that because of a confluence of El Niño and turbulence in the Gulf Stream, the hurricane season is beginning early this year. The first three names are Alice, Bernardo, and Chloe.

  But Abelardo points to a pale blue vehicle with a woman driving. "This is marvelous," he says. "Do you know who that is?"

  "How would I?"

  "It is Carolina Felicita de la Rosa Oberon."

  "Do I know her?" I know exactly one Nicaraguan in the world.

  "La Carolina, she is second cousin twice removed of La Matilda Vargas de la Rosa, said by some—misguidedly—to be a likely candidate for Nicaraguan sainthood, because of her conversion from wickedness to sanctity."

  "Oh, her," I say.

  "So you do know her?"

  "You told me about her, when you were in the Ginny O. You thought I was she. Which is flattering."

  "I told you about her?"

  "You did. You were lying on your bed underneath about ten blankets, and I was sitting in a very uncomfortable chair."

  "You are thinking of someone else," he says, very softly.

  "Seriously, Lalo. I remember. It must occur to you that you've forgotten things. Things to do with the snow and what happened in the snow."

  "Memory is a very tricky thing," he says.

  Ezra is talking with Rolando but I cannot tell in which language. Ezra's Spanish is rudimentary, and he eschews most verb forms.

  Lalo's eyes remain fixed on La Carolina's sky blue SUV idling along with all the others. It idles primly amid the antediluvian American school buses from Mashpee County UFSD and Triple Forks Christian Middle School, the illegally imported luxury SUVs, the Japanese and Korean cars, the Yugoslavian and Russian cars on their last tires, the horse-drawn wagons, the donkey-pulled carts, and a pair of yoked oxen. We are just south of the red light next to the decaying hulk of the old National Cathedral, the one shaken loose of its theological underpinnings in that great earthquake of '72, the now desanctified, slippery pile of tessellated bits and iconic shards, the never repaired old cathedral.

  "This really is remarkable, that we are seeing her, here today. I consider it a good sign," Lalo says.

  "Beware of signs," Ezra says from the front seat. "Mr. Cicero says when we think we are seeing a sign, then we can be sure we are fooling ourselves."

  "I never heard him say that," I say.

  "Don't you think she is lovely?"

  "I can't tell," I say. Why don't I simply concur? I can hardly be jealous that he finds another woman, someone he has known forever, beautiful. Lots of people are beautiful.

  "Of course, she was always rebellious." Lalo stops in order to look over at this rival about whom he is rhapsodizing. Her lane of traffic moves forward about ten yards. Now we can see only the rear window of the sky blue SUV.

  "Mom!" Ezra whispers urgently. "Do you see what I see?"

  I follow the invisible line extending from his fingertip to a group of young men not much older than Ezra, walking in a cluster and carrying aloft a statue of the Virgin Mary. She looks like most statues of the Virgin, the pleasant but closed expression, the blond hair and blue eyes, except for two things: she is wearing a baseball cap, and over her white and cerulean robes is a team jersey. The Virgin has a large number 37 on her back.

  Lalo looks too. I ask him, "Is that normal?"

  "Is what normal?" he says.

  "Baseball Virgin," I say.

  "They must have just won a game."

  We ar
e making infinitesimal headway. This is unnerving in new ways. There is all the time in the world to watch the children selling Chiclets and random hardware items. There is ample time to see the mattresses piled up, for sale, on the sidewalk. There is time to scrutinize a man carrying a machete and a machine gun, to observe a tall gray stone statue in the neo-Hispano-Soviet style.

  "Originally I was going to bring you to León, because—well, because it is a fine house and it is in the ancient capital, and you could visit the home of Rubén Darío and see his grave. But I have changed my mind. Quite possibly a hurricane is coming, so we'll go directly to the farm, which is on higher ground. Ezra will enjoy the iguanas and the howler monkeys. Are you fond of monkeys, young Ezra?"

  "I am descended from monkeys," Ezra says.

  We head for the countryside.

  The colors are intense and the flowers unfamiliar. Not the flowers themselves but their Brobdingnagian scale. The ferns here are to the ferns of the Hudson Valley as a capybara is to a hamster. On the other side of us is the chaos and tangle of the rainforest with its one thousand shades of green. A bright blue butterfly hovers, swoops, and flits away. We drive uphill. We are among volcanoes. We are climbing a volcano.

  Up ahead, a wooden sign hangs from a pole extended between two posts. It reads LAS BRISAS. We have entered the finca.

  For a long while we ascend on this hairy dirt road, past thousands of shiny green coffee trees, through the cafetal, then level off at the village of many-colored cement workers' houses and a bright turquoise wooden church. The church, Santa Irena de Las Brisas (though there are many who hope it will one day be renamed for its local saint, not yet a saint), has vertical siding and stained-glass windows brought back from Prague in 1879 by a Llobet ancestor.

  Lalo points to a smallish brown dog standing in the middle of the road. "Young Ezra, do you see that dog? He is a grandson of my Panchito. One of many. Panchito was prolific."

  "What kind of dog was he?" Ezra asks.

  "A mutt. A bit of everything. Panchito could go anywhere and never be a stranger. Un extranjero."