The Sparrow

prey to Runa's Revenge. She listened, alert for any telltale sound, but heard only George snoring softly in heavy, dreamless sleep. Knowing that she wouldn't relax until she'd checked on everyone, Anne sighed and thought, I have turned into a semi-mom with a very odd bunch of children. So she pulled on one of Jimmy's giant T-shirts and worked her way out of the tent.

She went first to D.W. and, reassured, moved on to Jimmy's sleeping shape in another corner. She looked, with a pang, at the empty beds of Marc and Sofia and wished she were a praying person so their absence would not fill her with such helpless anxiety. Then she saw a third bed empty but before her heart could lurch, she began to hear the faint clicking of a keyboard. Picking her way along a stone path only a goat could appreciate, she ducked into Aycha's place next door and saw her favorite semi-son kneeling like a scholarly geisha at a low table, typing rapidly.

'Emilio!' she cried softly. 'What the hell are you—'

He shook his head without looking up and continued to type. She sank onto a cushion next to him and listened to the night noises. It smelled like rain to her but the stones were still dry. Well, she thought, noticing the radio monitor propped next to Emilio, I'm not the only one sweating it out.

Marc and Sofia had reported that they were going to try a landing. There had been a sickening silence ever since. Jimmy thought this might be due to the severity of the storm on the other side of the mountains, but George said that would only have disrupted signals, not silenced them altogether. No one said anything aloud about a crash.

Emilio typed a while longer and then closed out the file, satisfied that he'd written enough to be able to reconstruct the logic the next morning. 'I'm sorry, Anne. I had four languages going in my head at once and if we had added one more—' His fingers flew apart and he made a sound like an explosion.

'How do you keep them all straight?' she asked.

He yawned and rubbed his face. 'I don't always. It's funny. If I understand an entire conversation perfectly in Arabic or Amharic or Ruanja or whatever, with no missing words or confusing ideas, I sometimes remember it taking place in Spanish. And I'm losing Polish and Inupiaq.'

'Those were the ones in Alaska, between Chuuk and the Sudan, right?'

He nodded and flopped back on a cushion, digging fingers into his eyes. 'I may not have done well with them because I was so resentful about having to learn those two. I never got used to the cold and the dark, and I felt that my education was being squandered. Nothing made sense to me.' He took his hands away from his face and looked at her sideways. 'It's not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses.'

Anne snorted. Not a very saintly remark, she thought. 'At least the Sudan was warm.'

'Not warm. Hot. Even for me, hot. And by the time I got to Africa, I was getting better at learning languages in the field. And then—well, professional irritation seemed pretty trivial.' He sat up and stared out into the darkness. 'It was awful, Anne. No time for anything except feeding people. Trying to keep the babies alive.' He shook it off. 'I am still amazed that I picked up three languages that year. It just happened. I stopped thinking of myself as a linguist.'

'What did you think of yourself as?'

'A priest,' he said simply. 'That was when I really started to believe what was.said at ordination: Tu es sacerdos in aeternum.'

A priest in perpetuity, Anne thought. Always and forever. She studied the protean face: Spaniard, Taino, linguist, priest, son, beloved, friend, saint. 'And now?' she asked softly. 'What are you now, Emilio?'

'Sleepy.' He grabbed her neck affectionately and pulled her close to pass his lips over her hair, loosened in sleep, silver-gilt in the camp-light.

Anne motioned at the monitor. 'Heard anything?'

'I'd have mentioned it, Anne. In a loud and ringing voice.'

'D.W. will never forgive himself if anything's happened to those two.'

'They'll be back.'

'What makes you so certain, hotshot?'

He spoke from his heart and from Deuteronomy. ' 'You have seen with your own eyes what the Lord your God has done. »

'I've seen what human beings can do—'

'You've seen what,' Emilio conceded, 'but not why! That's where God is, Anne. In the why of it—in the meaning.' He looked at Anne and understood the skepticism and the doubt. There had been so much joy, such a flowering within him…'All right,' he said, 'try this: the poetry is in the why.'

'And if Sofia and Marc are lying in a heap of wreckage right now?' Anne demanded. 'Where would God's poetry be then? Where was the poetry in Alan's death, Emilio?'

'God knows,' he said, and there was in his tone both an admission of defeat and a statement of faith.

'See, that's where it falls apart for me!' Anne cried. 'What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can't swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God's in charge or He's not. What did you do when the babies died, Emilio?'

'I cried,' he admitted. 'I think sometimes that God needs us to cry His tears.' There was a long silence. 'And I tried to understand.'

'And now? Do you understand?' There was, almost, a note of pleading in her voice. If he told her he did, she'd have believed him. Anne wished that someone could explain this to her and if anyone she knew could understand such things, it might be Emilio Sandoz. 'Can you find any poetry in babies dying now?'

'No,' he said at last. Then he added, 'Not yet. Some poetry is tragic. It is perhaps harder to appreciate.'

Anne stood then, tired, for it was the middle of the night, and was about to go back to bed when she glanced back and saw a familiar look on his face. 'What?' she demanded. 'What!'

'Nothing.' He shrugged, knowing his singular congregation very well. 'Only: if this is all that is holding you back from faith, perhaps you should just go ahead and blame God whenever you think it's appropriate.'

A slow smile started across Anne's face and she sat back down on the cushion next to him, looking speculative.

'What?' it was his turn to ask. She was grinning wickedly now. 'What are you thinking, Anne?'

'Oh, I'm just considering a few sentiments I might express to God,' she said sweetly, and then clamped both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. 'Oh, Emilio, my darling child,' she said behind her fingers in a fey and crafty voice. 'I do believe you've hit upon a theology I can live with! I have your permission for this, do I, Father? You are willing to be implicated as an accessory?'

'How rude do you plan to get?' Emilio started to laugh warily but his face was now wholly alive. 'I'm only a priest! Maybe we should check with a bishop or something—'

'Chicken shit!' she cried. 'Don't back down on me now!' And getting up on her knees, poking him in the chest repeatedly, she began to deliver herself of a series of increasingly impolite, entirely profane and very vigorously expressed opinions on the suffering and untimely death of innocents, on the fate of Cleveland in the World Series of 2018, and on the persistence of evil and of Republicans from Texas in a universe ruled by a deity who had the nerve to claim omnipotence and justice, all of which Emilio earnestly translated, with wondrously pompous and Latinate phrases, into standard groveling platitudes. Pretty soon they were clinging to each other and laughing like loons, and the whole thing got louder and rowdier until George Edwards, roused by the noise, was jolted fully awake by Anne screaming, 'Emilio, stop it! Old women have weak bladders!'

'Sandoz,' George yelled, 'what the hell are you doing with my wife?'

'We're discussing theology, dear,' Anne sang breathlessly, snorting in great gulps of air.

'Oh, for Christ's sake!'

'We're still working on theodicy!' Emilio yelled. 'We haven't gotten to divine incarnation yet.' Which laid them both out again.

'Kill 'em, George,' D.W. suggested loudly. 'Justifiable homicide.'

'Will all of you please shut the fuck up?' Jimmy hollered, which for some reason made Anne and Emilio laugh even harder.

'A New York echo!' Anne cried. 'Helloo-o-o!'