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
