The Sparrow

7 CLEVELAND AND SAN JUAN: 2015–2019

Finished at John Carroll and asked for a preference, Emilio Sandoz requested that he be sent back to La Perla in Puerto Rico. The request should have gone through the Antilles Province for administrative review, but Emilio was not surprised when Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, the Provincial in New Orleans, called him.

"Milito, you sure? We got a professorship for you up at Le Moyne, now we done jerkin' you around. Ray's been chewin' everybody's ear off 'bout getting you for that linguistics position," D.W. said. The Texas twang was nearly impenetrable unless you knew him well. D.W. could speak standard English when he pleased but, as he told Emilio once, "Son, with the vows we take, there's a limited range of opportunity for eccentricity. I get my laughs where I can."

"I know," Emilio said, "and Le Moyne's got a great department but—"

"Weather ain't that bad in Syracuse," D.W. lied cheerfully. "And La Perla ain't forgot nothin', son. Won't be no welcome-home parties."

"I know, D.W.," Emilio said seriously. "That's why I should go back. I need to put some ghosts to rest."

Yarbrough thought that over. Was it affection that made him want to agree, or guilt? D.W. had always felt about half responsible for the way things had turned out, good and bad. That was arrogant; Emilio had made his own decisions. But D.W. had seen the potential in the boy and hadn't hesitated a minute when he'd gotten a chance to pull the kid out of La Perla. Emilio had more than lived up to his expectations; still, there'd been a price to pay. "Well, okay then," D.W. said finally. "I'll see what I can do."

Entering his office two weeks later, Emilio spotted the glowing message light. His hands shook a little as he opened the file and he was tempted to blame this on the Turkish coffee he'd developed an unholy taste for, but he knew it was nerves. Once he admitted that, he was able to bring himself back to calmness. Non mea voluntas sed Tua fiat, he thought. He was prepared to do as he was bidden.

His request had been accepted without comment by the provincials concerned.

In December, he called Anne and George Edwards from San Juan, spending the extra money for a viewer because he wanted to see their faces and them to see his. "Come and work with me," he said. The clinic was losing its National Service doctor and no one was willing to replace him. Would Anne? George, with the omnicompetence of a lifelong engineer and householder, could renovate buildings, teach kids a hundred practical arts, reactivate the net that would link Anne with the larger hospitals and the kids with outside teachers.

Before they could react, he told them about La Perla, in stark statistical detail. He had no illusions and refused to let the Edwardses harbor any. All they could hope for was a chance of salvaging a few lives out of the thousands of souls cramming the slum.

"Well, I don't know," Anne said doubtfully, but he could see her eyes, and he knew. "Promise me there'll be lots of knife fights?"

Hand raised, he swore, "Every weekend. And gunshot wounds, too. And car wrecks." They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with "stomachaches." Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the kapok factory. Hands opaline with infected cuts, gone bad from the bacteria and toxins in the offal at the fish-processing plant. Sepsis, diabetes, melanomas, botched abortions, asthma, TB, malnutrition, STDs. Liquor and drugs and hopelessness and rage pounded deep into the gut. "The poor you will always have with you," Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?

He saw Anne look at George, who sat thinking awhile. "The whole damned baby boom is retiring. Sixty-nine million old farts playing golf and complaining about their hemorrhoids." George snorted. "It's only a matter of time until someone opens up Funerals 'R' Us."

"I can't see either of us taking up golf," Anne said. "We may as well go, don't you think?"

"Right. We're outta here," George declared.

And so, in May of 2016, Anne and George Edwards moved into a rented house in Old San Juan, eight flights of stairs up the hill from the clinic Anne took over. Emilio took some time off to help them settle in. Once they had a bed, their first concern was finding a big wooden table with an assortment of chairs to go around it.

Emilio began his own work simply: cleaning up the mission's physical plant, organizing and surveying things, quietly getting acquainted with the neighborhood again. He worked within the existing programs, at first—the baseball league, the after-school stuff.

But he was always alert to the possibility that this child or that one could climb out and escape, if someone cared. He bought a lot of bolita tickets, giving the numbers away but keeping track of children with a talent for statistics, luring them to George, who let them play with his web links and who began tutoring a couple of kids who might do well in math. He found a child, a young girl, weeping over a dog hit by a car, and brought Anne her first assistant, Maria Lopez, eleven and good-hearted and ready to learn.

And there was a little horror named Felipe Reyes who hawked stolen goods right outside the clinic, a boy with the foulest mouth the widely experienced Anne Edwards had ever encountered. Emilio listened to the kid using two languages to excoriate passersby who wouldn't buy from him and said, "You are the worst salesman I ever met but 'mano, can you talk!" He taught Felipe to curse in Latin and eventually got him to serve Mass and help around the Jesuit Center.

Anne spent the first months in the clinic reading through the records, getting a grim feel for the kind of medicine practiced here. She dealt with the business of inventories and inspections, upgrading the equipment, restocking the supplies, while tending to the immediate calls for care: the severed finger, the infections, high-risk pregnancies and premature births, the giardiasis, the gunshot wounds. And she gradually learned who among her medical colleagues on the island was willing to take referrals from her.

George settled in as well, making endless lists, changing the locks on every door, window and storage cabinet in the clinic, overhauling the software linking the Jesuit Center with webs and libraries, installing the used but serviceable medical equipment Anne ordered. For his own satisfaction, he signed up at the Arecibo Radio Telescope as a docent, indulging his own long-latent interest in astronomy.

That was where he met Jimmy Quinn, who would lead them all to Rakhat.

"George," Anne asked at breakfast one morning, a few months after they'd moved to Puerto Rico, "has Emilio ever said anything to you about his family?"

"No, I don't believe so, now that you mention it."

"Seems like we should have met them by now. I don't know. There are undercurrents in the neighborhood I don't understand," Anne admitted. "The kids adore Emilio, but the older people are pretty distant." More than distant, really. Hostile, she thought.

"Well, there're a lot of little evangelical churches in La Perla. Maybe it's some kind of religious rivalry. Hard to tell."

"What if we gave a party? At the clinic, I mean. Might break the ice."

"Sure," George shrugged. "Free food is always a good draw."

So Anne took care of the refreshments with the help of a few women in the neighborhood she'd made friends with. To her surprise, the very unpaternal George waded into the preparations and the fiesta itself with great enthusiasm, handing out sweets and little toys, setting off homemade rockets, blowing up balloons and generally being silly with the kids. And Emilio astonished her as well, doing magic tricks, of all things, working the crowd of children with the timing of a professional, provoking screams and peals of laughter, drawing in the mothers and grandmothers, the aunts and older brothers and sisters as well.

"Where the hell did you learn to do magic tricks?" she whispered to him afterward, as shoals of kids passed around and between the legs of adults dishing out ice cream.

Emilio rolled his eyes. "Do you have any idea how long the nights are near the Arctic Circle? I found a book. And I had a lot of time to practice."

When it was all over, Anne walked back into the office after seeing the last of the children off and found herself in the midst of an argument between her two favorite men.

"He believed you," Emilio cried, sweeping up the colored paper and confetti.

"Oh, he did not! He knew I was kidding," George said, stuffing trash into a bag.

"What? Who believed what?" Anne asked, going to work on the ice cream debris. "There's a dish under that desk, sweetheart. Can you get that for me?"

Emilio fished the bowl out and stacked it with the others. "One of the kids asked George how old he was—"

"So I told him I was a hundred and sixteen. He knew it was a joke."

"George, he's only five! He believed you."

"Oh, swell. Nice way to get to know people in the neighborhood, George. Lie to their kids!" Anne said, but she was grinning and laughed as the two men launched into a good-natured dispute over the moral distinction between lying to children and stand-up comedy. Both of these guys should have been daddies, Anne thought, watching them, alight with the simple satisfaction of pleasing children. It saddened her a little, but she didn't dwell on it.

The first fiesta was such a success that others, larger and even more fun, followed. There was always some health issue tied in. Anne handed out condoms and birth-control information to everyone over the age of eleven, or did immunizations for kids under six, or checked for head lice or took blood-pressure readings. The week after a fiesta always brought in more patients than usual, people with "little questions," which often turned out to be serious medical problems they'd endured for years. George started spending more time at the J-Center and a couple of new kids began to meet him there. It was small stuff but enough to make them feel they were making some headway. People seemed glad they had come.

As time went on, Anne heard pieces of Emilio's story, which seemed to involve a seriously screwed-up family and a fair bit of ugly commerce. Not terribly surprising, considering. As a member of a generation that spilled its guts in public with unedifying displays of Olympic-level whining, Anne had mixed feelings about Emilio's silence. Unexamined nastiness could fester and poison lives; on the other hand, she admired the ability to shut up and carry on. Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations. So, while she was curious, Anne felt her interest was intrusive and never asked him about his family.

Of course, that didn't keep her from looking for people in the neighborhood who resembled him. To her anthropologist's eye, Emilio's face had a distinctive changeable quality. One minute, he could look like a Hollywood Spaniard—black beard and imperial eyes, his face vivid and alive with intelligence; the next, all she could see was the enigmatic structure hard beneath the skin, the Taino endurance bred in the bone. She saw the same qualities in a dignified woman at the flower market who could have been his older sister. But Emilio had never even mentioned if he had sisters or brothers, and Anne knew that when someone is that reticent about something so ordinary, there is usually good reason. So she was not completely unprepared for the way she found out that Emilio did indeed have a brother. What took her by surprise was her own response to the priest himself.

She was alone at the house that night, doing a literature search on clubfoot for one of her patients, when Emilio called and asked her to meet him at the clinic. His speech was slurred, and she could not believe him drunk. "Emilio, what's happened? What's wrong?" she asked, startled by how frightened she was.

"Splain when you get here. Hard to talk."

George was up at the Arecibo telescope for some kind of late-night shoot he was interested in. Anne phoned to let him know what was going on, not that she knew much herself, and asked him to come home right away. Then she hurried down the eighty stairs to the clinic. The office looked deserted when she got there, and she wondered if she'd misunderstood what Emilio had wanted her to do. But she found to her relief that the door was unlocked and Emilio was waiting inside, sitting alone in the dark.

Anne touched on the light, drew one breath at the sight of him and in the next, drew on clinical detachment as deliberately as she did her gown and gloves. "Well, Father," she commented dryly, taking his chin in her hand and inspecting his face from side to side, gentleness belying her tone, "I see you turned the other cheek. Repeatedly. Don't laugh. You'll split the lip open again."

She'd seen enough of this kind of thing to stoop down and check his knuckles for abrasions and broken bones. His hands were unmarked. She frowned up at him, still holding his hands, but his eyes slid away. Sighing, she stood and unlocked the supply room, where she opened a cabinet, getting out what she needed. His pupils had reacted properly and he had been able to call her; the slurred speech was not neurological in origin; there was no concussion, but his face was a mess. As she assembled the supplies, he spoke quietly from the next room.

"I think a rib broke. I heard something crack."

She hesitated a moment and then returned to him, loading the pressure-injection gun with a dose of an immune-system booster. "Because of the cuts," she told him, holding the gun up for him to see. "Can you unbutton your shirt or do you need help?"

He managed the buttons but couldn't pull the bloodied shirt out of his jeans. Maybe whoever beat him up didn't know he was a priest, she thought, wondering if it would have made a difference. She helped him with the shirt, pulling it down off his arms, careful not to touch him unnecessarily. He was the color of maple syrup, she decided, but she said merely, "You're right about the rib." She could see the bruise on his back where the blow had landed and popped the bone outward. Kicked him when he was down, whoever it was. Aiming for a kidney but a little high. The lungs sounded clear, but she helped him move to the portable imager and did a torso scan to check for internals. While she waited for the image, she used the injection gun on him and then sprayed anesthetic on the cut over his eye. "This is going to need stitches but I can do the rest with bioadhesive."

The scan looked okay. Greenstick fracture in the right sixth rib, hairline in the seventh. Painful, not dangerous. The anesthetic took hold quickly. He sat there silently, letting her clean his face up and pull the cuts together.

"Okay, here's the hard part. Put your arms up and let me get the ribs wrapped. Yeah, I know," she said softly, when he gasped. "This is going to be wicked for the next week or so. I don't recommend sneezing anytime soon."

She was honestly surprised at how difficult she found it, being so close to him. Until that moment, she'd have sworn that she had long ago come to terms with getting old, and being childless. This beautiful man made her reassess both assumptions. He kept going in and out of focus: son, lover. It was completely inappropriate. But Anne Edwards was not given to self-deception and she knew what she was feeling.

She finished taping him up and let him catch his breath while she reloaded the gun. Without asking permission, she pressed the nozzle against his arm for the second time and told him, "You can offer up your suffering tomorrow. Tonight, you're going to sleep. We've got about twenty minutes to get you into a bed." He didn't argue; it was too late, in any case. She put the gun back and helped him into his shirt, letting him button it himself while she put things away.

"Want to tell me about it?" she asked finally, perching on the edge of her desk. He looked up at her through the hair falling over his forehead, black against the bandages. The bruise on his cheek is going to be spectacular, Anne thought.

"No. I don't think so."

"Well," she said quietly, steadying him as he got to his feet, "I'll assume you didn't get into a fight over a girl in a bar, but I can come up with more lurid explanations if you don't want to indulge my vulgar curiosity."

"I went to see my brother," he said, glancing into her eyes.

So he has a brother, she thought. "And he said, Welcome back, Emilio, and beat the shit out of you?"

"Something like that." There was a silence. "I tried, Anne. I gave it an honest try."

"I'm sure you did, sweetheart. Come on, let's go home."

They left the clinic and started up the stairs, the priest already too dopey to be aware of the stares and questions that Anne shook her head at. George met them about halfway. Light as Emilio was, it took both the Edwardses to get him up the last flight of stairs and into the house. He stood swaying as Anne turned down the guest bed while George got him undressed. "Sheets?" he asked blurrily, apparently worried about getting blood on the linens.

"Nobody gives a damn about the sheets," George told him. "Just get into bed." He was asleep before the covers settled over him.

Anne closed the guest-room door and, in the dark hallway, she reached out for George's familiar arms. Neither of them was entirely surprised that she cried. He held her for a long time and then they went into the kitchen. While she heated up their supper, Anne told him about some of it, and he guessed more than she might have given him credit for.

They moved into the dining room, pushing the clutter on the table off to one side, and ate in silence for a while.

"Do you know what made me fall in love with you?" George asked suddenly. Anne shook her head, puzzled that he should ask her this now. "I heard you laugh, down the hall, just before I got to Spanish class that first day. I couldn't see you. I just heard this fabulous laugh, like a whole octave, top to bottom. And I had to hear it again."

She put her fork down gently and came around the table to stand by his chair. His hands went around her hips and she pulled his head to her belly, cradling it against her body. "Let's live forever, old man," she said, smoothing the silver hair away from his face and bending to kiss him. He grinned up at her.

"Okay," he agreed amiably, "but only because it'll really piss off that insurance guy you bought the annuities from."

And she laughed, a full octave, descending from high C like chimes.

The next morning, Anne got up early after a bad night, pulled on a white terry robe and went to look in on Emilio. He was still sleeping heavily, in almost the same position they'd left him in. She could hear George in the kitchen making coffee, but she wasn't ready to face him yet. Instead, she went into the bathroom and closed the door. Dropping the robe off her shoulders, Anne turned to a full-length mirror.

There she inspected the results of a lifetime of disciplined diet and decades of rigorous ballet classes. Her body had never been thickened by childbearing. At menopause, she'd begun hormone replacement, ostensibly because she was at risk for heart trouble and osteoporosis—a small-boned blue-eyed blonde who'd smoked for twenty years before giving it up in med school. In reality, without the compensation of children, she'd clung to the illusion of relative youth with the artificial extension of middle age. It was okay to be old, as long as she didn't look it. All in all, she was pleased with what she saw.

And so she forced herself to imagine Emilio's eyes on her, to work through in thought any conceivable scenario in which he could come to her as she was now. She did not look away from the mirror: an act of will.

At last she turned from her image, done with the exercise, and ran the shower. A son-in-law, she thought as the water beat down on her shoulders. A Sagadese son-in-law, with whom an old woman could flirt and joke outrageously across a clear generational distance. That came close to the need she felt. Anthropology to the rescue, after all these years.

Then she stopped moving and wondered what Emilio needed. Son, then, she thought. Like a son.

She turned off the water and stepped out onto the rug, dried herself, and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Occupied with morning rituals, she nearly forgot the night's distress. But before Anne left the bathroom, she took one last look at herself in the mirror. Not bad for an old bat, she thought briskly, and startled George by grabbing his ass when she passed him in the hallway.

The house was empty when Emilio awoke. He lay quietly for a long while, getting his bearings, remembering how he came to be in this bed. Finally, the dull pounding in his head convinced him he'd feel better upright. Using his arms and stomach muscles, trying to keep his chest still, he sat. And then stood, holding on to the headboard.

There was a bathrobe on the chair next to his bed, with a new toothbrush stuck prominently in the pocket, where he'd be sure to see it. His clothes had been cleaned and were stacked, folded, on a bureau. There was a bottle of tablets sitting on the nightstand with a note from Anne. "Two when you wake up. Two before bed. They won't make you groggy. There's coffee in the kitchen." He wondered briefly what groggy meant. Nauseous, he guessed from context, but made a mental note to look it up.

Standing in the bathroom, he decided against a shower, not sure what to do about the tape holding his rib in. He cleaned up as best he could and stared blankly at his reflection, noting the flamboyant colors and the swelling. A sudden wave of panic overcame him as he wondered what day and time it was, afraid it was Sunday and that his small congregation had been let down by his failure to appear. No, he remembered. It must be Saturday. Young Felipe Reyes would have been the only one at the chapel, ready to serve. He laughed, anticipating the fantastic Latin dressing down he was in for from Felipe, but the pain in his chest stopped him cold and he realized that raising the Host was going to be a real struggle the next day. He remembered Anne's voice the night before. "You can offer up your suffering tomorrow." She was being sarcastic, but she understood.

He dressed slowly. In the kitchen, Anne and George had left fresh bread and oranges for him. He was still a little sick to his stomach, so he took only a cup of black coffee, which helped the headache.

It was about two in the afternoon when he was ready to leave. Emilio permitted himself one heartfelt obscenity and steeled himself for a very public walk back to his little apartment, down near the beach.

He gave a different story to each person who stopped him, the explanations becoming funnier and more extravagantly improbable as he worked his way home. People who'd never spoken to him before now laughed at his replies and shyly offered help. The kids rallied and ran errands for him, bringing offers of food from their mothers. Felipe was jealous.

He was able to use only his left arm to raise the consecrated bread and wine, but Mass the next morning was the best attended since he'd returned to Puerto Rico. Even Anne came.