Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

"Carmen says his temperature is normal."

  "Carmen took his temperature?"

  "You're coming with me," Lalo says.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Either to heaven or to hell. Probably both."

  "You don't really believe?"

  "In heaven? I was speaking in metaphors, dear Alice. Predicting," Lalo says, even as his hands are still burrowing under my pants and my waistband is digging into my belly and I am trying to suck in my petite pooch. "But yes, I do believe there is something after—if you really want to know."

  37

  Hubert's Nose

  The legendary or fictitious element is very conspicuous in the life of Hildegard ... and the story cannot be trusted wherever it goes beyond the data furnished in the chronicles and other sources.

  —Alban Butler, "Blessed Hildegard, Matron," Butler's Lives of the Saints

  LALO'S PREDICTIONS PROVED TRUE. The night lasted forever, and it was too short.

  One day I will apologize to Ezra, but not now. Isn't he in love, loving someone, too? This state (of mind, of being) we are in is tropical. And we temperate creatures are undone. Does that constitute an excuse? Already I know that I will tell Waldo. But I don't know what I will tell him.

  In the morning, another newspaper reporter—also personally known to the Llobets—calls for Lalo's comments on the fragrant body of his late great-aunt's rival for canonization. He has none.

  George appears briefly downstairs in search of coffee. When asked about Edith's condition, he devolves into weeping and handwringing.

  Ezra gets dressed and presents himself to the remnants of the assembled group in the dining room. He is paler and thinner than the Ezra who sat here so many days ago and fell for Carmen, but the luminosity has returned to his eyes. He delivers himself of a dream that includes ice water, a beautiful woman in white, and a steep cliff.

  Olga asks, "Did the woman look like anyone we know?"

  "No," says Ezra.

  George says, "I saw Mary Baker Eddy in a dream once. She was wearing overalls and funny shoes with points and tassels in the front. Elf shoes."

  Ezra tells him, "No one in my dreams ever has a name."

  I should be loving this, a morning of dreams related. But I am edgy. There is no such thing as poison ivy in these tropics, so I am assured. But I feel the premonitory itch of urushiol gathering its strength just beneath the skin.

  Lalo's eyes are darker and wider than ever, bright but focused elsewhere. He does not look like a man who didn't sleep last night, whereas I, I look like marmalade on a spoon.

  Odilia beckons Lalo to another phone call. "No more newspapers, Odilita," he says.

  "It's a man, a gringo," she tells him. We look at each other and mouth, almost simultaneously, Waldo? and Waldo!

  While Lalo is talking out in the hall, the gallo pinto turns to unmixed concrete in my mouth. Ezra is explaining his theory about colors in dreams, and I cannot follow. George is a blur, Olga is a blur, even the exquisitely outlined Carmen has become impressionistic.

  I picture Waldo at the kitchen table in VerGroot, holding the cordless phone discolored by beet juice. His bare feet are resting on Flirt's soft back, and small fruits are scattered across the kitchen table. Henry is elsewhere. It's the words I can't quite imagine. Will Waldo tell Lalo I am a domestic tyrant who can't keep a job? Will he tell him that if I don't return to VerGroot pronto, he and Henry will disappear into a cave? Or has something happened to Henry, something so dreadful that he felt compelled to tell Lalo first? Will Lalo tell Waldo that I have tumbled into his bed faster than lava flowing down the slopes on Monocromito? Will he politely and respectfully tell Waldo that my place is now on a coffee farm in Nicaragua? Will he even mention Tata?

  The coffee is making me nauseated. Ditto the juice. What should go down is coming up. Ezra is explaining his theory of animal appearances in dreams. Ezra has much to say about chickens. George is massaging his temples. Ezra mentions Susie Crench. He describes Susie's pet chickens, their feathers and coloration. He has never seen her chickens.

  Lalo stands in the doorway and fastens on my eyes. "Hubert would like to speak with you," he says.

  "Hubert?"

  "Your friend Hubert."

  "On the phone?"

  "He's just a little distressed," Lalo says.

  I go.

  "I steered you wrong. Re the virgin saints."

  "Hubert! I'm so relieved it's you. What are you talking about?"

  "It seems I steered you wrong. Had you barking up the wrong tree. Sent you off on a wild-goose chase."

  "What are you talking about?" I am a broken record. But relieved, still terribly relieved.

  "She wasn't a virgin after all."

  "Lalo told you?"

  Hubert goes on. "Which doesn't mean you should give up. Far from it. Sometimes the greater challenge—and thus the greater glory—comes from overcoming carnality to approach true godliness. To be saintly and human—there is perhaps the greatest challenge of all. Think Pelagia the Penitent. Think James of Lodi. Think Margaret of Cortona."

  "Lalo told you about the letters?"

  "He did. That's not why I called, though. I heard about La Matilda's incorruptitude. I saw it on my hagio-alert listserve."

  "Waldo told me," I say. "It's probably hysteria. Don't you think?"

  "Don't count on it. There are too many incorrupts out there to discount them all."

  "More than there are UFOs?"

  "As far as I know."

  "Those are just the circles you run in," I say.

  "Nevertheless, as I said, it's serious stuff. The Vatican's sending someone to verify the scent."

  "The papal perfumer?"

  "Very funny," he says, not laughing. "I told Abelardo he may want to change his strategy. Differentiate his aunt from La Matilda, and at the same time find some common ground. You just can't deny that this will give her a leg up."

  "Not just a leg," I say. Silence at the other end.

  "So. How is Christina the Astonishing?" I ask.

  Hubert chirps, "You haven't seen the papers, have you? The reviews have been brilliant."

  "I had no idea. It seems just the other day..."

  "She was writing it. So I thought. So I thought."

  "What's the title?"

  "The Relics of Sadness."

  "Catchy," I say.

  "Do you think so? I think it's rather glum. Lacking specificity. And a tad melodramatic."

  "Do you like it?"

  "It has the earnest passion of youth," he says circumspectly. "And my character is rather heroic, which I don't mind one bit. But otherwise—it's a tad formulaic. Bats in the belfry. You know."

  "I don't even know what it's about."

  Hubert says, "I was expecting a plain old roman à clef. But this is full of arcane violence, along with the usual coming-of-age stuff."

  "But that's not why you called."

  "I told you why I called," he says. "And there's you and Abelardo..."

  "Excuse me! What do you mean?"

  "I have a nose for sexual peccadilloes," he says. "That's from the Latin for sin, peccare. The diminutive."

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "That says it all," Hubert says, too gleefully for my taste. "Keep in mind the diminutive."

  "There is nothing to talk about."

  "Don't get so huffy, darling."

  "Oh, Hubert, what if she doesn't get to be a saint? Will it break his heart?"

  "I hope his heart is more resilient than that," Hubert says. "Besides, the process is interminable. The gears turn slowly in the Vatican. All those robes and miters, all that red tape in Latin. Any sane person will get bored before he is brokenhearted."

  "But..."

  "I know. There is nothing sane about this. Be of good faith, my dear. Your secret is safe with me."

  I shout, too loud, "I don't have any secrets!"

  "That's why she made me the father confessor character. Hugo von Coffin. Not very subtle."


  The table is empty. Everyone is elsewhere. Lalo is on the far side of the courtyard, in conversation with Olga and Doña Odilia. I realize I cannot just walk up to him and touch him in the normal course of events. I realize I am an outsider here.

  I don't know what else to do with myself. A radio show. A classroom of moody girls. But I have neither. Olga turns and says, "Papa forgot to put his pants on this morning. Doña Odilia wants to make him nettle tea."

  Lalo says, "We are deciding about Tía Tata's letters. I think we should publish every one."

  "But she didn't write them," I say.

  "I think we should burn them. We haven't had a good bonfire in ages," Olga says. "I can think of lots of things I'd like to throw in."

  Doña Odilia throws up her arms and then clasps her head with her hands. "What more can he forget?" she asks the flower border, the louche, pendulous datura and the stately agapanthus.

  Lalo (those sinkable eyes! those earlobes!) informs us that the road is clear enough to get through and he is going to take Ezra and me to see some of the carnage and destruction from the mudslides. Olga says, "And the damnificados?

  Ezra is initially reluctant to go without Carmen, and Carmen says she cannot leave the house just now as she is in the middle of a project. Lalo does not ask. He is eager to set out; he taps his foot, then bounces on the balls of his feet. It is we three in his Mitsubishi, bouncing over the freshly rutted roads of Las Brisas, down the mountainside, and out the old wrought-iron gate. Then we hug the side of the volcano for an hour of gut-jolting and head up toward another crest of the volcano.

  Everything is washed away. To describe the landscape as lunar evokes only its unearthliness. Lunar does not begin to address the mud. On both sides of the road, earth has been scraped away, rubbed raw by the mudslides. At first the earth is reddish, but as we climb it darkens to black. It is gouged. Occasional forlorn trees still stand, gathering round them sticks, plastic bags, and in one case a door. All the sad debris. It is the absence that silences us, for a time. Absence of trees, of houses, of vines and flowers, absence of the people who live here. This is an earth denuded and shorn of even its skin. When Lalo said the roads were passable, he was being optimistic. Even in four-wheel drive, in first gear, we groan and grunt along. Our wheels plunge into tire-eating potholes and spin. Lalo backs us up, repositions the jeep, and guns it. This works on the third try. The next time we get stuck, Ezra and I get out and dig at the mud with the shovel someone brilliantly keeps in the back of the vehicle, while Lalo carefully inches us forward onto harder ground. Ez and I climb back in.

  Seeing this one mud-stripped slope of one volcano among many volcanoes and mountains, it becomes easier to imagine the Tecacilpa cemetery ruptured with caskets tossed helter-skelter down the hill until they hit the immovable objects that jolt them open. Beyond that I can imagine only caskets filled with mud. Nothing smells sweet. There are no flowers.

  "Where are all the people?" Ezra asks.

  "We hope they're being properly buried," Lalo says. "But there are still many under the mud and the rubble."

  "I guess Sam the corpse-sniffing dog will have to find them," Ezra says.

  "That is what he's here for." Both hands grip the mottled steering wheel. The thumbnail of his left hand has been chewed to the quick, uncharacteristically. Lalo has such beautiful hands and lovely clean nails. Not like Waldo's.

  "Poor Nicaragua is in the path of everything. If there ever was a country in need of a saint ... we are it. But it won't be Tristána Llobet. I see that now."

  Ezra pipes up. "Maybe someone else could be the family saint. You. Or Carmen!"

  Lalo laughs thrillingly, softly. "I'd have to change my ways."

  "You'd have to perform a few miracles," Ezra says.

  "Carmen doesn't believe in miracles," Lalo reminds him. The road has flattened out, and with a grumbling of gears and spinning of wheels we are turning around. Farther up the mountain the road is much worse. The ruts appear as bottomless as volcanic craters. We descend in first gear. My right foot aches from pressing the imaginary brake.

  "She just has her own ideas about what a miracle is," Ezra says.

  Lalo grins at me. "We should have consulted this son of yours from the beginning."

  Now Ezra's face is pressed against the glass of the back window. Quietly, I say to Lalo, "Did you mean that? About Tata not getting canonized? Hubert thinks you need another angle is all."

  "I mean that without a verifiable miracle we are up a creek, as Waldo would say."

  "Without a paddle."

  "As you said long ago, hiccups don't count."

  "Did I say that?"

  "Mom! I saw a raccoon! I'm not supposed to see raccoons in the day."

  Lalo says, "It's a pizote, and they are diurnal."

  "I thought it was rabid," says Ezra. "Dad once ran away from a rabid raccoon in the middle of the day. Luckily, he's very fast."

  "I never knew that," I say. "When was this?"

  "Ages ago, Mom. In Catamunk. Posey watched the whole thing from her window upstairs."

  "Where was I?"

  Back at Las Brisas, Ezra says, "All that time I was in bed there was a hurricane named for you, Mom, and I never even saw it. Only today."

  "You know perfectly well it wasn't named for me." He is already heading off to find Carmen.

  How can we help? I mouth four of the paltriest words in the English language.

  "Stay here with me," Lalo says, too quickly.

  "I mean the country, the poor people hurt by the hurricane. The ones who were washed away."

  "You mean the damnificados ?"

  "Do you have to use that word?"

  "If that's what you're talking about, go home and persuade the U.S. Congress to send us more money and stop protecting the Florida sugar growers so that we can export to the American market. And, oh, yes, persuade American consumers to pay more for high-altitude Nicaraguan estate coffee. All of that would be helpful. But not helpful to me."

  "Lalo, Lalo. I've been unemployed for too long. I need a task. And an audience," I add, shocking myself. Is this what it's been about all this time? Needing an audience? Has this been obvious to everyone else? To Waldo?

  The office of the bishop of Managua calls to speak with Don Abelardo. Don Abelardo will not remember the bishop; he will remember only the slick-haired classmate from his Jesuit colegio who licks his pencil when he thinks. Lalo takes the call. It is an invitation to meet the special papal delegate at the bishop's palace in Managua, three days hence. It will be a private meeting, a meeting of substance.

  "Normally, I would be more than delighted," Lalo answers. "But now I must give this some thought."

  We are drinking cafécitos with tiny Doña Luisa when Graciela announces another phone call. Doña Luisa wears a dangling teardrop ring on her pinkie. It moves along with the frenetic movements of her tiny hands.

  "It is the devil's instrument," Doña Luisa announces grimly.

  "It is for Doña Alice," Graciela says.

  For the second time I mouth Waldo! to Lalo.

  Alone, I leave the room.

  "Al, at last."

  "Waldo! It is you. I was going to call later, when I had my wits about me. But you beat me to it. Oh, Waldo, Waldo."

  "It's not the end of the world, Al," he says.

  "How can you know that for sure? It's so hard to have these conversations on the telephone. I'm so scared."

  Waldo says, "Al. There's nothing to be scared of, sweetie. I don't think she felt a thing. Flirt just—"

  "Flirt!"

  "Yes, it was Flirt. Teddy Gribbon was driving for the DPW, and he just didn't see her. It happened in seconds."

  "You mean he hit her? Flirt?"

  "I'm so sorry to be telling you this, Al. I was thinking not to tell you until you got back, so you wouldn't have to grieve alone. But somehow that didn't seem fair. To you or Ezra."

  "Let me get this straight. Flirt is dead?"

  "She is, Al.
"

  "I'm going to have to tell Ezra."

  "I know. Poor Al."

  "Tell me again what happened." I have to sit and a chair is just not close enough to the ground. I drop all the way down to the hard wooden floor and pull my knees to my chest and grip them as tight as I can. Flirt! Darling, sweet, furry, ill-trained, lovable Flirt. Beloved, inarticulate, affectionate Flirt. Maybe I heard it wrong. "Tell me again."

  "Susie saw it from her window. She ran out—"

  "How could she run?"

  "Maybe she walked fast. I wasn't there. She called me and Donald Eco. She said she couldn't get Teddy to speak a word. She's worried about him."

  "This wouldn't have happened if I'd been there," I say. I am crying more than seems right. Today I've seen the landscape of destruction and loss, but the tears flow for my dead dog.

  "That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard all week," Waldo says. "Take it back or I'll hang up."

  I wail, "Don't hang up. For God's sake."

  "Not everything is your fault, Alice. Think of poor Teddy. He's not exactly equipped to deal with this sort of thing. Emotions and so on."

  "Yes, poor Teddy. But where is Henry? How is Henry? He didn't see her, did he?"

  "Henry was on a geological expedition when it happened, so we had her wrapped up before he got home."

  "I miss Henry so much."

  "He misses you too. But you'll be home soon."

  "I will?"

  "Of course," Waldo says. "Herc called to offer condolences and personally apologize. Since it was a town truck."

  "Tell me more about Henry."

  "Henry is with Dandy. He said he would tell him. They're out back. They may even be asleep. After all that crying."

  "I can't believe this."

  "She had a good life, Al. As dog lives go, it was a good one."

  "But short. Definitely short. Short is not good, in this case."

  A damp chill seeps into my bones and I shiver. The earth is suddenly compressed and warped. What was far away is now closing in. What was immediate has receded toward a distant horizon.

  "Al, are you still there?"

  "I'm here. I think I'm right here."

  "Tell me about Ezra now," Waldo says.