Barbara Kingsolver (31 page)

Some people knew. I’d gotten a card from a nun in Minneapolis
who had known Hallie. She was one of several thousand people who had gone down to Nicaragua for just a week or two, she said. They helped pick coffee, or if they had training they did other helpful things. The idea was just to be there in the danger zone, so that if the U.S. should attack, it would have to attack some of its own citizens. This nun, Sister Sabina Martin, had helped give vaccinations. She met Hallie at the clinic in Chinandega the day Hallie brought in a child who’d drunk paraquat from a Coke bottle. Sister Martin and Hallie sat with the child the whole day, and she said that although I might not think it possible, she felt she’d come to know Hallie well during that time. In some circumstances, she said, an afternoon can be a whole life.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Kimball said, after quite a while. “You must miss her.”

“I will, when it really sinks in. She hasn’t been gone that long.”

“I know what you’re going through,” said Mrs. Kimball. “I lost my sister in 1965.”

I hadn’t told her Hallie was dead. Mrs. Kimball had seized the subject of death all on her own. “I’m sorry,” I said, not really wanting to be encouraging, but you couldn’t just ignore it, either.

“She’s been dead all this time of an aneurysm and there are still days when I think, ‘Oh, wait till I tell Phoebe about that!’ Before I realize. I always think it’s harder to believe they’re gone when it’s sudden.”

“My sister,” I said, and then stopped, afraid of the lie I was about to tell. I was going to say, “isn’t dead.” I heard an old voice in my head, the teller of tales: I am a cello player running away from home. We are from Zanzibar, we’re from Ireland, our mother is the Queen of Potatoes. I was through constructing myself for other people. I didn’t say anything.

Several seats ahead of us, a teenage couple had begun necking enthusiastically. You couldn’t blame these kids, the scenery was boring and would drive you to anything, but they made me feel hopelessly alone.

“Well,” Alice said, apparently remembering it was garden pests we’d agreed to talk about. “What would
you
do for the slugs?”

“I really don’t know, I’m not that good with plants.” I considered the problem for a while. “I think what Hallie used to do was put out beer for them, in little tin cans. The slugs are attracted to it and they fall in, or something. I know that sounds crazy but I’m pretty sure it’s right.”

“Well.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “My husband and I aren’t drinkers, but I guess I could go out and get some beer for the slugs. Do you know what brand?”

“I don’t think it matters. I’d get whatever’s on sale.”

“All right, I’ll do that,” said Mrs. Kimball. She opened her magazine again to the incendiary four o’clocks, but then closed it right back up, holding the place with her finger. “You ought to try to keep in touch with your sister,” she told me. “Young people think nothing will ever happen. You should treasure your family while you have it.”

“Well, really I don’t have it,” I said, resentful of her assumptions. “It’s gone. My mother died when I was little and my father will probably be dead before the year’s out, and my baby died, and now my sister is dead too. Maybe I’m not as young as you think.”

Mrs. Kimball looked stunned. “Your sister? The one on the phone?”

“She got killed by the contras. The ones down there that we send all the money to. I think you probably heard about it.”

She looked uneasy. “I don’t know. I might have.”

“It made the news in Tucson, at least for a day. You just forgot. That’s the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: ‘Forget it. This is somebody else’s problem.’”

I suppose I was going, as Rita Cardenal would say, mental. I didn’t look at Mrs. Kimball but I could see her magazine drift slowly to her lap. I looked at the bright garden on the magazine cover and felt strangely calm. “They kidnapped her one morning in a cotton field,” I said. “They kept her as a prisoner for weeks and weeks, and
we kept hoping, but then they moved everybody to another camp and some of the prisoners they shot. Eight of them. Hallie and seven men. All of the men were teachers. They tied their hands behind them and shot them in the head and left their bodies all sitting in a line at the side of a road, in a forest, right near the border. All facing south.”

I felt a hard knot in my chest because this was the one image I saw most clearly. I still do. My voice sounded like a voice that would come from some other person’s throat, someone who had a dead sister and could speak of such things. “The man that found them was driving up from Estelí, coming along the road, and at first when he saw them all sitting there he thought, ‘Oh, that’s too many. I can’t give them all a ride, they won’t fit in my truck.’”

Mrs. Kimball and I didn’t speak again after that. I looked out the window. Far to the south, low cone shapes pushed up against the flat, bright sky. Those distant mountains were probably in Mexico, I knew, though borders in this barren land seemed beside the point. I heard Mrs. Kimball turn a page of her magazine. We’d been silent for over an hour before she first spoke up about the four o’clocks, but the silence was much more noticeable now, after we’d broken it with our little conversation. Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity
after
their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it’s the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

My airplane was
said to be bound for Denver, but it sat on the runway for a very long time. I had a window seat and could watch other planes lift their noses one after another and plow their way up an invisible road into the sky. I wasn’t impatient. Normally at this point in a flight my heart would pound and my mouth would go to cotton, but today my viscera were still. It didn’t matter especially if we burned in a fiery crash.

I thought maybe the air traffic controllers were trying to decide
whether we were worth the trouble; we were only a small, twin-engine plane, incompletely filled. A few seats ahead of me a mother coached her preschooler, who was already crying because he knew his ears would hurt when we went up. This was not the first leg of their trip.

“You swallow, honey. Just remember to swallow, that makes your ears feel better. And yawn.”

“I can’t yawn.”

“Sure you can.” She demonstrated, her voice stretching wide over the yawn: “Think about being real, real sleepy.” People yawned all the way back to the smoking section, so strong was the power of motherly suggestion. I felt overcome with sadness.

The aisle seat of my row was occupied by a teenager, and the empty seat between us was filling up with her overflow paraphernalia. She threw down a hairbrush and a curling iron—whack! whack!—and pulled a substantial mirror out of a makeup case the size of my carry-on luggage. She began applying careful stripes of pastel eye shadow. When she blinked, her eyelids waved like a pair of foreign flags.

“Give it a rest, Brenda,” said the man sitting across the aisle. “You’re not going to see your boyfriend for ten whole days. Why not take this wonderful opportunity to let your face get some fresh air?”

Brenda ignored this advice, staring with deep absorption into her makeup mirror while her parents in B and C beamed her the Evil Eye. The mother was wearing a polka-dot jumpsuit with coordinated polka-dot earrings, all a little too eager-looking even for the first day of vacation. The man had on sunny golf pants that clashed with his disposition. It was hard to ignore them, but Brenda was practiced. She glanced serenely at her left wrist, which bore three separate watches with plastic bands in the same three shades as her eye shadow. Her hair looked as if each strand had been individually lacquered and tortured into position. No matter how you might feel about the aesthetic, you had to admire the effort. Most people put less into their jobs.

“Brenda, honey, please pay attention when your father is talking
to you,” said the woman in the polka dots. “Could you please just try? Listening to you and your father bicker for a week and a half is not my idea of a vacation.”

“You should have left me at home,” Brenda said quietly, staring directly ahead. “‘Honey, I think we forgot something. Did I leave the iron on? No, we forgot Brenda.’” She shot me a glance, and I think I smiled a little. I couldn’t help being on Brenda’s side here. In my term as a schoolteacher I’d gained sympathy for adolescence. If I had to take a trip with those two I’d probably paint my face blue for spite.

The plane jerked a little and then began to roll creakily down the runway, gathering speed. We were taking off without a warning announcement of any kind. “Flight attendants prepare for takeoff” came out in a single scrambled burst over the intercom, and the women in pumps and dark suits ran as if from an air-raid siren. I closed my eyes and laid my head back, trying to hold on to my visceral indifference, but it fell right away. My heart had caught up with me. I heard the little boy chattering to his mother and I yawned nervously. So much of life is animal instinct: desire and yawning and fear and the will to live. We left the earth and climbed steeply into the void.

My habit was to count seconds during the lift-off, with my mind on news stories that ran along the lines of “crashed into a meadow only seconds after takeoff…” Somewhere I’d gotten the idea it took seven minutes to get past imminent peril. I counted to sixty, and started over. We’d been airborne for maybe three or four minutes when our pilot’s deep Texan voice came over the intercom. “Folks, I apologize for the delay in taking off today. We had trouble getting one of these cantankerous old engines started up.”

The announcement startled my eyes open. I looked at Brenda, who widened her eyes comically. “Great,” she said.

“It’s nice to know you’re riding the friendly skies in a bucket of bolts.”

Brenda laughed. “Like my boyfriend’s car.”

“I think we’d be safer in your boyfriend’s car.”

“Not in their opinion,” she said, inclining her head across the aisle.

I closed my eyes again. I tried to relax, but couldn’t help listening to every change of pitch in the engine noise. They sounded wrong. Suddenly I confided in Brenda, “I hate to fly. You know? It scares me to death.”

I hadn’t admitted this aloud before, and was surprised to hear it come out so naturally. The truth needs so little rehearsal. Brenda reached over and patted my hand.

“Folks, this is Captain Sampson. I’m sorry to report that we’ve lost that engine again.”

Against my will I glanced out at the wing to see if anything had actually fallen off. My heart beat hard and out of synch with itself and I felt I might die of fright. I let the fingertips of my right hand lie across my left wrist, tracking the off-rhythm of my aimless heart. If I were really dying, I wanted to be the first to know.

After another minute, during which I imagined Captain Sampson and his copilot trying everything, his paternal drawl crackled on again. “We could probably make it to Stapleton on one engine,” he said, “but we’ll play it safe. We’re going to turn around and head back into Tucson to see if they’ll let us have some new equipment.”

I hated the sound of the word “equipment.” I had visions of men in coveralls running out to strap a spare engine onto the wing. If we made it back to the airport at all. Suddenly we banked so steeply my stomach turned. I must have looked pale, because Brenda reached over and squeezed my hand again.

“Try to think about something relaxing,” she said. “Think about kissing your boyfriend.”

“That’s
relaxing?
”

She smiled. “No. But it takes your mind off.”

She was right; it did, for a second or two. I thought of Loyd’s last kiss on my doorstep in Grace. But it also made my chest ache, further distracting my heart from the task at hand. Nausea pressed on the back of my throat. I closed my eyes, but vertigo is an internal
distress; shutting out the world does nothing to help. The plane took another steep bank.

We were in an unnatural position, vertical in the air and slipping down, with nothing to support us.

When we finally leveled out again I opened my eyes. We were skimming low over Tucson and I was comforted—irrationally I know—by the nearness of things. Clusters of houses huddled together as if for reassurance, and in between them lay broad spans of flesh-colored desert. The freckled ground was threaded with thin, branched lines of creeks, like veins in the back of a hand. It looked as if there were water in the creeks, although I knew better. At this time of year they were bone-dry rivers of sand.

The rush of adrenalin had rinsed me clean. I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it’s as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air. I hadn’t seen color since I lost Hallie. I thought hard, trying to remember; it seemed unbelievable, but there was none. Almost none. Loyd’s green corduroy shirt, and the red flowers and the hummingbird against the brightly lit wall, the moment Emelina said goodbye. And that was all. Before that, the last thing I clearly remembered in color was Santa Rosalia in its infinite shades of brown.

I laughed at myself for carrying my mother’s phobic blood in my veins. And for telling Alice Kimball how to cure slugs. Practicing all this family business without a license. It seemed extraordinary and accidental that I was alive. I felt crowded with all the sensory messages that make up life, as opposed to survival, and I recognized this as something close to joy. As we slipped down over the city every building and back lot was beautifully distinct. I forgot about my heart, left it to look after itself. We passed south of downtown, over the railyard, where the boxcars stood in line looking sweet and mismatched like a child’s toy put together with no eye for color coordination. Just past the railyard was a school where a double row of corn-colored school buses were parked in a ring, exactly like one of
those cheap Indian necklaces made for tourists. Bright backyard swimming pools gleamed like turquoise nuggets. The land stretched out under me the way a lover would, hiding nothing, offering up every endearing southwestern cliché, and I wanted to get down there and kiss the dirt.