“Everything’s strange and different for her, Ben. Let’s all go back to the house. It’s getting colder.”
The fireplace crackled, its flames a semaphore of warmth and comfort. Eleven humans and one wolf-dog crowded the living room. Miriam sat on the floor, staring at the flickering flames, humming to herself and moving her torso forward and backward. Faisal drifted toward her, guided by the sounds she made. He gently ran his hands over her face before she could react.
Miriam did not respond the way she normally did, when other people touched her. Instead of pulling away or pushing away the offending hand, she placed her own hand on Akela’s head, and the great canine sat down between the blind boy and the mute girl.
Galen watched the interplay carefully but said nothing.
“So that’s why you left so early,” Edison spoke up. “I knew it had to be something like the End of the World or the Second Coming to keep you away from Nancy’s breakfast. What other sneaky things have you been up to, big brother?”
The laughter from the group quieted down as Ben interrupted.
“How did this happen? How did you know about Miriam?”
“Are you angry with us?” Galen asked.
“No!” he replied. “I couldn’t have asked for a better surprise...” and he hesitated before adding, “or a better gift.”
He lowered his head to hide the welling tears.
“Ben, you did so much for Lachlan, Faisal, and me,” Diana said. “How could we not do this?”
Ben looked at his daughter, who stared intently at the flames.
“How can I get her to forgive me?”
There, he had said it out loud. What would the others think of him now?
Galen stood and walked toward the big picture window, hands clasped behind his back.
Strange, how many times had Papa done this when he talked to me? Now I’m my father’s image.
He turned to the group.
“Ben, nothing that you did or didn’t do made Miriam the way she is. Yes, she’s autistic. But we don’t know what happens to cause the condition. So many possible causes—from vaccinations to trauma to food contamination—have been debunked. And if you think that being in the car with Irene that day…”
He paused at the astonished look on Ben’s face then spoke even more emphatically.
“If you had been in that car at that point in time, Miriam would have had no parents left to love her. Yes, she cannot communicate the way we do, but I want to show you all something remarkable.”
He left the room momentarily and returned with a large box. He set it down on the floor, opened it, and spread out the contents. Lifelike pictures of Ben in different poses and uniforms stared back at the crowd. And one special picture, a young woman wearing a tiara of mock orange blossoms, smiled radiantly at them.
Ben broke down.
“It can’t be!” he sobbed.
“This is your daughter’s voice, your daughter’s soul.”
Galen left again and brought back another box. It contained a large, amorphous gray lump. He walked over to the girl and placed the clay mass in front of her. She appeared to glance at it briefly then picked it up and began kneading and working it. Her hands moved faster and faster, no longer awkward and uncoordinated. They moved purposefully, fingers rivaling Faisal at his keyboard best, and suddenly the spirit of the clay emerged. Her hands stopped, lifted the piece, and placed it in front of Akela.
The clay had morphed into the life image of a boy and wolf lying side by side.
It was a three-day weekend for the kids. Founders Day at the academy fell on a Monday, and by tradition it was a school holiday. Faisal pleaded with Lachlan and Diana to stay overnight with his friends, and after a brief conversation and apologies for the perceived intrusion, he claimed his old bed in Tonio’s room.
Nancy and Carmelita agreed that Miriam would stay in her room. Carmelita set the drawing and modeling-clay supplies near Miriam’s bed. The staff at St. Ignatius had packed clothes for the girl, and they placed these few nondescript items—drab tans and faded greens—in a small side cabinet.
Carmelita placed a pair of her flannel pajamas on Miriam’s bed. Then she and Nancy helped to prepare the girl for sleep.
Four adults sat in the living room enjoying a late evening cup of bi lo chun tea. Ben was restless. He couldn’t seem to stay seated. Edison watched the younger man, prematurely aged by grief and sickness.
“What’s wrong, Ben?”
“That picture, it was Irene.”
He kept moving his hands back and forth over his forearms then stood up again.
“How could she draw a picture of Irene? She never saw her mother, and I never showed her any pictures, especially of Irene dressed like that. That was our wedding day. That was the only time Irene would have appeared like that.”
Nancy had just come in from getting Miri settled down.
“Are you sure that Miriam never saw any wedding pictures, Ben?”
He shook his head.
Galen wondered about the statue of the wolf Miri had made at the home but said nothing.
The night closed in with its mid-fall, Pennsylvania mountain chill. The moon was outlined in full clarity, unobscured by clouds or fog, and even the remaining crickets had quieted down. Ever so faintly, the sounds of howling echoed through the darkness. And ever so quietly, four paws and two feet padded through the house and out the back porch door.
As dawn began its slow rise in the east, two shouts rose simultaneously throughout the mountain house.
“Akela!”
“Miri!”
Four adults came running to find Carmelita and Faisal standing in the hallway, almost hysterical.
“She’s gone, Tia Nancy, I didn’t hear anything but she’s gone!”
Carmelita hid her head in Nancy’s chest, sobbing as she tried to tell the others what had happened.
Faisal stood bewildered beside Tonio and Freddie.
“He’s never done this! He’s always been by my side, even at night. Akela would never leave me.”
Galen turned to Edison.
“Go turn on the outside sensors. If they’re still on the mountain, we’ll pick up their sounds.”
The seven quickly converged on Edison’s communications lab, as he and Freddie sat at the consoles of the remote-sensor units, changing the inputs from location to location.
“There,” Edison said, “something’s going on down by the pond. The wolves seem overly active. Freddie, bring up video. Let’s see if we can pick up what’s happening.”
Two large overhead monitors lit up, one showing an optical image, the other infrared.
“There she is!” Nancy called out, and the sighted ones saw the shadow image of the girl sitting near the pond edge. Surrounding her in apparent council style sat seven of the wolves.
Galen threw a coat over his pajamas and headed for the door, followed by the others.
“Hold on to me, Fai.”
Tonio reached out for the other boy’s arm, but Faisal shrugged it off.
“My ears can guide me better than your eyes, my friend.”
The group headed down the path to the migratory bird pond at a rapid pace, but they slowed when Galen raised his hand and signaled for quiet.
Seven sets of green eyes watched the approach. They remained seated b before the strange one. By scent they knew it was a female and two-legged like the others, but it was different. It spoke to them as one of the pack, and they responded in kind.
“Listen,” Faisal whispered. “She’s talking to the wolves!”
In the morning stillness, lit by the first salmon-pink rays of sunlight, they heard the guttural exchanges between wolf and human.
Akela rose from his position at the edge of the pack and padded slowly to Faisal. The gray wolf seemed apologetic in its behavior, as it resumed its place at his side.
A small, brown-gray wolf, female, rose and moved to the girl. It looked at her then placed its head and muzzle on the girl’s lap.
The air was suddenly perfumed by the scent of orange blossoms.
“C’mon, Carmie, get out of the bathroom!” Freddie yelled.
“Yeah, you’ve been in there for hours!” Tonio wailed.
The two stood there, still in pajamas, towels in hand, waiting and waiting. Their voices resonated with the timbre of young adult males, as they complained loudly about a certain sister.
Freddie was now seventeen, with a full head of jet-black hair and what a past generation would have called bedroom eyes, which flashed dark brown when he smiled. Once frail and small, now he towered over his brother and sister and had developed a muscular physique from working out with weights. At six feet, two inches, and one-hundred-fifty-five pounds, he possessed enough olive-skinned good looks and tight butt to drive his female academy classmates wild.
Unfortunately, he knew it, and he flaunted it confidently. Freddie moved from one conquest to the next. If Lilly didn’t want to go out, that was fine with him. There was always Patti, or Mary, or Beth.
But Tonio took rejection hard, perceiving it as an assault on his very existence. Younger by one year, he was still growing. Standing almost six feet, at one-hundred-seventy pounds and wearing glasses, he didn’t have quite the sex appeal of his brother, but his piercing dark eyes conveyed thoughtfulness, and his dark hair and eyelashes were the envy of the girls who dated him. And despite not lifting weights regularly like his brother, Tonio’s body was supple, with enough speed and balance that he could beat Freddie at wrestling.
And both boys were smart—too smart in some ways.
Dealing with two active teenagers tried the souls of their aging uncles, particularly because Nancy wisely stayed clear. When it came to laying down the law about curfews or escapades, she would walk away, laughing inside and leaving Edison and Galen to deal with the Lothario or the brooding Werner.
“Isn’t there some sort of manual we can buy … you know, ‘Raising Teenagers for Dummies?’” Edison would gripe. “If I had known parenthood would be like this, I would have entered a monastery!”
Galen understood all the physiology that motivated Freddie’s behavior. He also understood all too well the emotional trauma that underpinned Tonio’s melancholy nature. A lot of good it did. Much of the time, their actions left him clueless.
Edison had no formal training in such matters, but he thought he knew the best way to deal with young males.
“I’ll reason with them,” he had told Nancy before the teen years began. “I’ll just calmly explain my point of view to the boys, and they’ll recognize the logic of it and follow it.”
She immediately shot him a “What planet are you from?” look.
Of course, she was right. They were good boys, but they were still boys. The only saving grace was that their antics often forced Galen and Edison to reflect on their own youthful indiscretions. And doing so made the old men shake their heads in wonderment at how they had managed to survive.
As Nancy watched the men grapple with the problems of the boys, she conceded she had not been spared entirely the angst, or
Sturm und Drang
, as her own mother would have put it, of raising her adopted niece.
Carmelita was eighteen, legally an adult, but still with the cherubic, olive-skinned face of her childhood, and highlighted by iridescent black hair and penetrating dark eyes. Her five-foot-nine-inch height and one-hundred-twenty-five-pound body made the other girls hiss in jealousy. But no one ever said a misplaced word against her character. Carmelita was growing up to be the proverbial oil on water, seeing both sides of any problem and calming tensions before they erupted on the surface. Maybe that’s how she survived the two boys, who called her “sister” but treated her like another brother. She was the grandee of the house.
Early on, Nancy had sworn to herself she would never let Carmelita go through what had happened to her. Working at her parents’ nursing home had sucked away much of the time a teenage girl needed for socializing. Young women deserve lives of their own and the time to enjoy them.
Carmie, as her brothers called her, had no end of boyfriends. She was beautiful, smart, and wise enough not to scare them off with her intellect. She would be starting college soon, living on her own with all of the incumbent risks and benefits.
Nancy prayed she had prepared her sufficiently for the challenges that lay ahead.
On her birthday—an approximation based on Carmelita’s memory, her guardians had pooled their resources and bought her a car. She needed it to get to the local hospital each day, where she worked as a translator. The burgeoning Spanish-speaking population in the area needed a voice to help them.
Galen had checked out the situation before allowing Carmelita to become involved in hospital work, and Edison had given her a cell phone to carry in case of emergency on the road. He even installed his own, custom-designed tracking system, in case she was unable to contact them for help.
Despite all the precautions, the care and concern, the elders worried more and more as the children grew older. They understood that the world the youngsters were about to enter was much less forgiving of mistakes than the world of their own youth.
God help them.
“I wish we could have found some photos of their parents,” Edison mused.
“The boys are most likely their mirrors,” Galen added. “Maybe someday, if Cuba ever becomes an open society again, the kids can obtain the official files on Sandoval and Felicita Hidalgo.”
“Okay, I’m done,” she said, emerging finally from the bathroom. “You’d think I was living in there for all your complaining.”
Both boys shoved past her, as she walked out with her hair rolled up in a towel. Neither could think of a reply that wouldn’t have earned a reprimand from their tios and tia.
“Tia Nancy, I’m going over to the hospital tonight. The supervisor wants me to help out with the trainee translators. Is that all right with you?”
“What time do you expect to be back?” Nancy asked.
“Probably by eleven-thirty. It’s Friday, so I can sleep late tomorrow.”
“Carmelita.”
“Yes, Tio Galen?”
“Is he nice?”
She blushed.
How does he always know?
Michael Dimitriades was a second-year engineering student working in the hospital tech lab part-time to earn tuition money. His dream was to become an aerospace engineer. He had met Carmelita in the cafeteria two weeks before, when crowding forced them to share a single table. He had spent so much time staring at her he couldn’t finish his food. She laughed when he lifted his soda can and missed his mouth, because he was so distracted by her.
She brought paper napkins to help dry his wet trousers and ego, and the gates of introduction opened.
Michael’s parents were from Greece, and he had grown up in a bilingual household. Soon Carmelita started using him to practice her Greek language skills. He was amazed at the ease with which she picked up the words and grammatical constructions of his parents’ mother tongue.
He began thinking of inviting her to meet his parents, but he hesitated. He had a career to pursue, and she hadn’t even started college yet—though from what his co-workers had told him, she’d probably finish before he did.
“Yes, Tio Galen, he is nice. His name is Michael Dimitriades. He’s studying engineering and working part time in the tech lab.”
“Well, just be sure you’re home before midnight, Cinderella,” Nancy called out.
The brothers climbed into their sister’s car. The guardians watched them through the living room picture window, each wistfully remembering the energies of youth.
“Carmie, Tonio and I want to go with you to the hospital this afternoon. We found out there might be some part-time work for us there. Okay?”
Great, just what I don’t need, two brothers getting in the way of me and Michael.
“Do the folks know you guys are doing this?”
“Uh … not yet,” Freddie replied. “We were going to call them from school later today.”
“You’d better get permission, or you’re not going anywhere but back home.”
“Sure! Can we borrow your cell phone later?”
School couldn’t pass quickly enough. Freddie kept thinking about the opening he had heard about in the tech lab, while Tonio entertained thoughts of becoming a pharmacy technician. And Carmelita … well …Carmelita just dreamed of Michael.
“Hello?”
“Tia Nancy, Tonio and I have found out about some jobs over at the hospital. They sound really neat. There’s an opening for a pharmacy tech and another for electronics lab tech and …uh … we …uh … thought we could go with Carmelita after school to check it out—okay? ”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this at breakfast, Freddie?”
“Well … uh … we … we … just heard about it today.”
Tonio stood near as his older brother continued to stammer.
“What’s she saying?” he whispered.
“Shh! She’s thinking.”
“What’s the work schedule?” Nancy asked.
“Friday and Saturday evenings from seven to eleven,” Freddie replied. “We could ride home with Carmie tonight.”
Nancy considered the prospect. The boys were doing well academically, and they wouldn’t be working on schooldays.
“All right, go look it over. But we’ll want to talk about this when you get home this evening.”
“Great … I mean … thanks, Tia Nancy. Bye!”
Her gut told her something was not quite kosher. She called the men into the living room and related what she had just heard. They also expressed some concern about the way the boys had sprung this news, but they agreed to wait before making any decisions.
Nancy brought the teapot and cups from the kitchen. She opened the curtains, and Edison put on their favorite classical-music radio station. They sat there, staring at the rolling hills and thinking about the kids taking their first steps toward independence.
Carmelita led her brothers to the side entrance of the hospital. There the boys split off and headed toward their potential employment sites, while she walked down the main corridor to the interpreters’ office.
She liked her job immensely. Imagine, actually getting paid to meet so many different people admitted to or visiting the hospital! As soon as she reached her desk she made a quick call to the tech lab.
Better warn Michael about Freddie!
She had barely finished her call, when the supervisor came through the door.
“Ms. Hidalgo, there’s a strange situation down in the ER. The floor nurse says the police have brought in someone who appears confused, and he doesn’t speak English.”
“Do they know the language he’s using?”
“No one’s quite sure. Would you see what you can find out?”
It’s going to be one of those nights—first the boys and now this.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She took the side stairs down to the emergency-room level and entered the circular nursing station. Things looked quiet. She went up to the unit secretary.
“Ginny, what’s the story?”
“Hi, Carm. We’ve got a weird one tonight. Glad you’re here to cover it. The cops brought in this big guy. He must weigh three-hundred pounds and looks like a sumo wrestler, but he’s not Asian. They found him wandering around the town park chasing pigeons and throwing small stones at people. They were able to restrain him, but no one can get near enough to determine what’s wrong. And he’s jabbering away something awful.”
“Why can’t they get near him?”
“He keeps lowering his head and charging like a bull. Good thing his hands are cuffed.”
“And who might you be?” the lab supervisor sniffed.
“Sir, I’m Federico Hidalgo. I called about the part-time opening in the tech lab. My sister works in the translators’ office, and my uncles are Dr. Galen and Dr. Edison.”
He stared at the electronics array, the heart of the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of all the expensive medical equipment and computers for the hospital: row after row of testing devices he already had become familiar with from Tio Eddie’s workshop.
The supervisor led Freddie to another young man as tall and darkly handsome as he was.
“This is Mr. Dimitriades. Mr. Dimitriades, this is Mr. … what did you say your name was?”
“Hidalgo.”
“Show him the ropes, Mr. Dimitriades.”
He turned and left.
“Hidalgo?”
“Yep, and I’ll bet you’re the Michael my sister is crazy about.”
She’s crazy about me? Wow!
“Well, if you’re the Freddie your sister talks about, you’re an electronics wizard. Let’s see what you can do.”
Carmie thinks I’m hot stuff with electronics? Wow!
Michael showed Freddie a bench holding the guts of a defibrillator.
“It’s not holding a charge, and when it does it’s erratic at best.”
Freddie immediately began mentally deconstructing the chassis.
Hmm. Simple circuit, regulated voltage going to a storage capacitor, which would discharge a measured amount of joules when the firing button’s closed. The amount stored and discharged would depend on the condition of the capacitor. If there’s leakage, the charge level would drop. And if it’s erratic, the regulator in the charging system would also be defective.
“Where are the spare parts, Michael?”
“Call me Mike.”
He pointed to two cabinets and filing drawers.
Freddie rummaged through the parts and picked out a replacement for the capacitor and a new triac regulator. He sat at the bench, disconnected the bad parts, wired in the new, and stood back.
“Give it a try, Mike.”
He turned on the power, held the discharge plates a few inches apart, and pressed the firing button. A satisfying electrical snap between the plates made both of them smile.
“Fast work, Fred.”
“Call me Freddie.”
“Okay, now let’s see if it holds and is putting out the right juice. If so, we’re home free. By the way, I’d like to ask you something about your sister…”
“Antonio Hidalgo, please come in.”
He was the last of the applicants for the pharmacy-tech position. He had waited nervously, while the other seven in turn entered the director of pharmacy’s office, and he watched as each departed, disappointed faces saying it all.