When the car lurches to a stop, Kate wonders how long she has been sleeping. She cannot see her watch in the darkness. The driver gets out, and Kate peers through the dusty window at a small cluster of buildings. An electric bulb dangles over one hut. The Molinas sleep on. She hears voices outside and feels a scrape on the side of the car as the driver unscrews the gas cap.
The sharp smell of the gas fills the car stirring a memory of being back in St. Louis, with her mother and father on the way to a few summer days in the Ozarks. Then, too, she’d been crowded in the back seat, stuffed between Dan and Maggie. With the windows open, she’d lean out, and the wind would flatten her cheek. Once they stopped at a filling station out in the country. While Dan and Maggie had gone to the bathroom, she had stood by her father and watched the dark-haired teenage attendant fill the gas tank. “I love that smell,” she’d said to her father. When she looked up she had seen a look pass between her mother and father, a strange look that she recognized now as desire.
What would her parents think about her love for Tom? She had described him in her letters in the half humorous tone she reserved for all the priests she worked with, but she had been careful not to mention his name too often. Her father was especially quick to pick up on her feelings. Now they would have to know. Or would they? She starts composing the letter: “Dear Mom and Dad, While I have been working in Peru, a wonderful/ terrible/unexpected thing has happened: I have fallen in love.”
How can she explain running away? They would be horrified. They are already nervous enough about her being in Peru although they tried to sound cheerful in their letters, telling her the news of the house and the neighborhood, sharing her letters with anyone who asked about her. No, she will not write home about this.
She longs for home. It is July, winter here in the Altiplano. But somewhere back home on this night a screen door bangs, and that remembered sound is the essence of summer in St. Louis. Instead here she sits waiting in a dark car, shivering in the dry cold air of the Altiplano. But it’s the right thing to go back—back to the parish in Juliaca, back to the nuns and the children. She can stand it now. Tom is gone. The thought of his going has played around the edges of her mind all day. He is probably in Dublin already or heading across Ireland for Galway on the shore of the Atlantic, two oceans away from her. He would be hurting, she knows, and she remembers his eyes that last night, their puzzled angry pain, like those of a dog who can’t understand why he’s been whipped. He is going home to sorrow, the loss of a father, a mother alone. She imagines him in years to come, a priest still, caustic and impatient at the petty world around him. She loves him fiercely now, and the memory of his head in her lap makes her gasp. She closes her eyes, waiting for the image to fade.
Yes, she would finish out the year. Knowing she was leaving Peru in a few months made her want to see everything with that intensity that comes in knowing it’s the last time. She will work hard, she vows; she will learn everything she could about the men and women of the sierra. The brilliant light that blinded her is gone; maybe now she will be able to see things more clearly. One thing has become very clear to her: she does not belong in Peru. She does not know enough of the culture nor of the history. She can’t even speak Aymara! Sergeant Vargas’s words echo: aren’t there problems in your own country? She feels how presumptuous she’s been in thinking that she could teach in the Altiplano, when actually, the Peruvian people have taught her. No, she will go back to the States and figure out her own path. Her Spanish is pretty good now, so maybe she can find a way to use this hard-won skill in her own country. She leans her head against the window, trying to picture her future.
They are driving again now, moving out of the village into fields of moonlight. She tries to pray, looking out at the dark. All her life God had been real to her. Faith was effortless. She grew up in a world where His existence was assumed. Now came the test.
It would be easier to leave the convent if she didn’t believe in God. For without God, that life made no sense. Nuns would just be a group of do-gooders living together in the uneasy way of women in groups. She stares out at the silent distant peaks of the Andes, and she senses a presence, feminine now, like the moon that has slipped behind the clouds. In the dark back seat, she whispers, “I’m sorry, Lord. But you made me this way. I know You are here with me even though I’ve been lost.”
By dawn they are on the outskirts of Puno. Kate feels the familiar lightness, the breathlessness.
Señora Molina huddles in her overcoat, shivering and moaning, “Ay, my head hurts.”
Her husband soothes her. “Now, now. In just a moment we’ll go have a cup of mate de coca and you’ll feel better.” María Luísa is still asleep.
As they enter the Plaza de Armas, Kate sees the jeep from Santa Catalina. Sister Jeanne is standing beside it. Kate feels her stomach drop. She is embarrassed. How childish the whole episode must seem to these good nuns.
Jeanne grins when she sees her. They embrace, and Kate feels grateful as Jeanne begins to laugh. “Well, I go off for retreat, and you disappear
