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.
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
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
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
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
