Refuge Read online

  “Ah! The third death is the last death. It comes when we are no longer remembered.”

  She reached to touch his arm, and he laid his head on her hand, trapping her there, his face turned to the ofrenda. She sat in the stillness, scarcely breathing, counting his breaths. Time passed without pausing to be measured. She was easing her hand out from under his cheek when a sliver of sunlight struck the stucco and he woke.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. He sat up and took her hand in both of his, raised it to his lips in a formal kiss. “Well, my dear, we have survived to live another year.”

  He released her and stood shakily, reaching for his glass.

  “My day will come too,” he said, sucking at the final drops, then holding the empty glass up to the light. “And who will remember me?”

  She put her arm around his waist, prepared to lead him to his rooms. The weight of him against her hip made her think of her father, how she had walked him, when May allowed it, from his chair to the bed.

  “I will remember you,” she said.

  “Ah yes, for a time. But then you, too, will die. Three times.”

  ~

  She was young and strong.

  “Déjame ayudarte,” she begged Adela. “Let me help. I need something to do.”

  And so from the markets she brought woven bags weighted with fruit and vegetables. Adela invited her into the kitchen, taught her how to grate raw sugar and bitter chocolate into a thick tomato sauce, how to slap balls of dough into flat tortillas. The aunts would have been astonished; her sisters too. Helen would have laughed at the flour on her nose. The thought of her friend brought a sharp ache to her chest, but the north, after Don Arturo’s story, seemed too alarming, too ravaged a place to contemplate.

  When she wasn’t helping in the kitchen, she read, working her way through Don Arturo’s library, a Spanish-English dictionary open at her side. She sank into the pages for hours at a time, until the worlds she’d imagined made her distrust her own, and then she took to the streets.

  The more she walked, the more the strangeness of the place withered, a husk that shrivelled and peeled away. She abandoned the narrow sidewalks to the vendors and the beggars and walked in the gutters, hopping up off the road to allow a mule cart heaped with crates of tomatoes to pass, or a tram overflowing with workers hanging off the railings and the roof. The sights and smells that had leapt out at her, catching her by the throat, seemed a natural part of the landscape now.

  The beggars became her teachers. She crouched beside them to listen to their stories, writing down the words she didn’t understand in the little notebook she’d taken to carrying with her everywhere. Sometimes, she brought fruit for the children from Adela’s kitchen, and bits of meat. Every day, she returned to the same corners, the same doorsteps, until they let her swab their eyelids with drops she bought at the farmacia with her meagre travel funds. She didn’t tell Don Arturo or even Adela where she had been or what she was doing, knowing they would try to stop her, and without that bit of healing, her days took on an endless, spongy quality that dragged at her spirits.

  Don Arturo noticed her malaise. “Perhaps you would like to come to the hospital?” he said one evening. “To work, you understand.”

  “But I can hardly speak the language.”

  “Not as a proper nurse, of course — it’s true your Spanish is not yet sufficient — but we have need of someone to assist the regular staff, who are too overworked to see to the sort of care I believe is important to a patient’s healing. A warm bath, clean sheets, a kind word.”

  She smiled. “I can do that.”

  She was given the menial jobs of a ward maid: emptying bedpans, spoon-feeding the wounded and those whose limbs were limp from stroke or starvation. But the Cruz Roja was so in need of trained hands that it wasn’t long before she was performing the tasks of a nurse. What she lacked in vocabulary she made up for in observation, often the first to notice a fever creeping up, an abdomen swelling, the white of an eye taking on a liverish yellow.

  Arriving in the hospital ward that spring was like climbing back into the rowboat after the winter ice had cleared and taking up the oars, certain she knew exactly what to do, giving in to the urge to stretch out every muscle, pull as hard toward the island as she could.

  The Cruz Roja had once been a convent, its rooms small and barren, its ceilings high. Given the limits of her Spanish, she was assigned most often to nights, when darkness lowered the ceilings and muffled the moans and rustlings of the sick. Sitting alone at the nurse’s desk, she’d often stare through the narrow windows to the empty street, imagining a man in a white suit, a younger and taller Don Arturo, striding toward her, offering his arm, and she’d take it, walking out into the starry darkness. Such fantasies never held her for long. Her gaze would be drawn back to the ward and she’d move bed to bed in the darkness, peering down at the faces, so different from the ones she’d always known.

  Rummaging in Don Arturo’s library one day, she came upon an empty sketchbook, which he gave to her, along with Conté pencils in black and red that he took from his desk. After that, in quiet interludes on the ward, she would sketch using the techniques he showed her. Never very well and never a whole face: a page of eyelids or lips or the naso-labial fold that ran from the wing of a nostril to the corner of the mouth, or the grief-muscle she had learned to recognize by making it herself, contracting the small, inverted U-shaped furrow between her brows.

  She studied the rows of sleeping faces, tracing the maps of lines by the eyes, the net of wrinkles across a cheek, feeling herself pulled into the life she saw creased into the skin.

  ~

  “You’ll come back when your patient recovers,” Don Arturo said. He spoke as if it were decided.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  It was her last dinner at the pink house. The next morning, she would travel with the girl from the hospital to the home of her parents, where she would live for an indefinite time as nurse-companion to the invalid. It never occurred to her that Don Arturo would object.

  “You won’t want to stay with your young patient forever, and if not here, where will you go?”

  “I will find a place.”

  “You think so?”

  He sat stiffly in his chair. If only he would say something charming, take her arm the way he had at the beginning, tell her she could come back at any time, there would always be a room for her in his house. She might have behaved differently then.

  Change one thing and the whole world shifts.

  “You think you know a great deal,” he said through thinned lips. “When really, you know nothing.”

  He seemed to try to stop himself, but the words burst through.

  “It is good that you are leaving. You have stayed too long. I will be happy to have my house to myself again.”

  “Don Arturo, please,” she said, her cheeks reddening. “You’ve been so kind. But the girl needs me. Her injuries are extreme and she seems to have a connection with me. I know I will regret it if I don’t help her.”

  “Perhaps you will regret it if you do.”

  He turned away from her and stared through the archway into the courtyard, where the birds were starting up their evening chorus, whether to welcome the night or to forestall it, she could never tell. She rose and as she passed, she put her hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

  “We used to let the birds fly free,” he said softly, as if she were no longer there. “When they flew beyond the courtyard, we simply bought more. Since the liberation, I keep them in cages. But still they sing.”

  “Many revolution.”

  How did we get onto this? The girl is talking as if I’ve asked a question. Maybe I have. They’ve been swooping through me, swift and elusive as bats. Who are you? What have you brought me? What makes you think you come from my son?

  “Father die. Mother run
from home village.”

  I slide my shawl up over my head. I’m not the least bit cold, but I crave comfort. Relief.

  She doesn’t stop. “Soldier burn house. We hide jungle. I go Thailand, refugee camp.”

  Every word explodes into a picture. Boys with rifles, children weeping, slipping from boats jammed to the gunnels, fleeing down dusty roads, bombs splitting the sky. Half a century of horror. Before that, radio filled our ears with catastrophe, but not our heads. Not our mind’s eye. I thought I was immune, I’ve seen so much. I keep the little television flashing the world to me from its corner on the kitchen counter, for the company of it — strangers in my house that I can dismiss with a flick of my wrist.

  “That’s enough.” I shove my lunch plate onto the counter, wheel myself sharply from the table. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. If you want to make yourself useful, do the dishes.”

  I push my way through the sala into the bedroom. There’s a soreness around my heart, as if I’ve overexerted myself, when all I’ve accomplished this morning is laying out crackers and peanut butter.

  I’m overexcited, that’s what it is. Agitated. My heart is racing, my brain pinging from thought to thought so fast I feel demented. This girl isn’t good for me. Whoever she is, she needs to be gone.

  I pull the door closed, shutting out the clatter of dishes, and ease myself out of the chair onto the bed, still unmade, a nest of covers that I burrow into. It’s not cold — in fact, it’s warm for early May — yet I feel chilled, ice in my bones.

  I lie on my bed but I don’t sleep. I rarely sleep through the night and never in the day. When the doctor asks me how I’m sleeping, I always say, “Like a baby,” and he nods as if he thinks that’s a good thing, when what I mean is that I wake up half a dozen times a night, sometimes crying in the dark.

  It’s horrifying how the body boomerangs as it ages, pulling a person back into infancy. Feeble-minded and weak-kneed. But this is different. I feel stirred up, all my ghosts swirling to the surface, poking at me, demanding. Demanding what? Maybe just my attention, although it is jealousy, fear, sorrow, longing, love, remorse that are flushing through me, hot and damp, as if I were fifty again, my hormones in blind revolt. I’d get up and make myself a cup of warm milk and cinnamon, put some soothing rancheras on the record player, but I don’t want the girl to see me like this. I don’t want her taking the measure of my insufficiencies.

  I’ve always refused to be old. Older, perhaps; but not old. Worn out. Finished. I’ve never been ready to concede all that.

  Even into my eighties, I made a point of walking briskly, with purpose in my step. To keep my voice strong, I rinsed every morning with Doubat gargle that I made myself from glycerine, carbolic, soda, and borax, the way I was taught all those years ago in nurse’s training. I squeezed a soft rubber ball to keep my fingers limber and my signature firm. When I got up in the morning, I’d stand for a quarter of an hour, shoulders, heels, and gluteus maximus against the wall, a posture I would carry with me through the day and into the evening. Back straight. Chin tucked. Eyes ahead.

  I refused the dowdy colours and shapeless clothes sold to women of a certain age. I dressed pretty much as I had all my life, in slim slacks and long blouses, sharp black and white. Some good simple jewelry at wrist and neck: silver, turquoise, rustic Mexican stones. I never wore makeup, not after I met Don Arturo’s old-lady friends and saw how face powder accumulated like silt in the crevices of their cheeks.

  I don’t know when it finally happened, but this girl makes it impossible to deny. I have entered the territory of old age at last — that grey and ungraceful geography, with its dimly lit days and narrow horizons. A dismal landscape of obstacles and booby traps, each one triggered to set off yet another humiliation, some unimagined indignity or despair.

  That’s what I am thinking as I lie here in the afternoon, waiting for my strength and my courage to return.

  I can’t say I haven’t seen this coming. In the hospitals, in my private duty nursing in Mexico and New York City, even here in Newbliss after I came back for good and tried to make something of a life in the place where I was born, I have watched as old women succumbed to that insinuating hand at the elbow — Here, let me help — until they couldn’t do a thing for themselves, not wash their bottoms or lift a spoon to their mouths.

  If you look, you can always see the next stage coming. The trick is to do something about it before it knocks you flat.

  I was managing reasonably well until three years ago, when my knees began to fail. That’s when I had Bryan outfit the chair so I could read and write letters and make my meals without getting up. The year I turned ninety, I bought myself a new car as a present, a sporty little automatic to get me through the road tests they’d make me take every year from then on, but I had to give it up. Since then, I call in my order to Hanson’s grocery on Fridays and pay the grocer’s son to bring me what I need, along with the mail and, when I think of it, the weekend papers.

  Bryan wants to build a bridge across the strait to the island — in case of an emergency, he says — but it would ruin the place. I did get him to run a rope, tree to tree, from the cabin out to the shed, to the terrace, down to the dock, to my favourite rock. The last thing I want is to take a fall. I saw what happened to Helen. Such a big girl, strong from that prairie farm, the strongest of any of us in training, reduced at the end to skin and bones. I’m not so badly off. I got myself down to the water a few times last summer. I sat on my rock looking at the boat, wondering whether I could still lift the oars. But I couldn’t imagine how I would get in and out of the thing, much less row.

  That’s when it occurred to me that I might never get off the island. A curious thought, not unpleasant or upsetting, although it has taken its sweet time sinking in.

  ~

  Their voices wake me. Low, but distinct. They must be sitting on my rock, the one that juts out over the lake, the lilacs at their backs. I can smell the flowers on the breeze.

  “Not Myanmar,” he’s saying. “Malaysia. Bali. Thailand. I lived in Bangkok for a while.”

  What is Sean doing here? When Bryan and Cathy leave on their buying trips, their son Sean comes back to look after the old stone farmhouse. He thinks he has to keep an eye on me too, along with the cats and dogs. I’ve known that boy all his life. He’s pleasant enough company, but too indiscriminately enthusiastic for my taste. I don’t want him interfering in my business with this girl, which is precisely why I told him to stay away. But here he is, all gangly limbs and winning smile, like one of those schnoodle puppies. Cute, until you have him in your house.

  “I tried to get a visa to Myanmar, but they wouldn’t let me in, so I went up to Chiang Mai, near the border. I wanted to hear the Stroh violin.”

  “Biola Stroh,” the girl says.

  “Wow, you know it? Myanmar is about the only place that still makes them. Myanmar and Transylvania.”

  The boy talks like he’s running to catch a train that’s pulling out of the station.

  “Sorry. Am I talking too much? Can you understand what I say?”

  “Understand, yes. No speak.”

  Sean laughs. He laughs easily, musically, throws his whole body into it. I’ll never get rid of him now.

  “Father play biola Stroh.”

  “Really? No shit. I’d read lots about them and heard the one on the Tom Waits album, but I never saw it played until Chiang Mai. The sound was strange, kind of flutey, warmer than a violin, almost reedy. Beautiful.”

  “Hla-deh.”

  “Hla-deh. Is that your word for beautiful?”

  “Yes. Beautiful. Hla-deh.”

  That boy is such a charmer. I should get out of this bed and chase him home.

  On second thought, maybe I should just listen. Learn what I can about this girl while he has her disarmed.

  “I got to try the Stroh. I could play it n
o problem. The fingerboard, bridge, pegbox, bow, it was all pretty much what I’m used to. I held it under my chin, same as always, but the sound was coming out of this metal horn that stuck out to the side. That was weird.”

  “Nighttime in forest, father play. Very quiet. Mens. Womens. Childs. Sing.”

  “That must have been beautiful. Hla-deh. The guy in Chiang Mai, he sat on the floor, cross-legged. Held the chinpiece against his chest. Gripped the bow halfway up, as if the instrument was part of him.”

  “You? Play?”

  “No, not the Stroh. I play viola. In an orchestra in the city. I have a little band too. The Otherwords. We play world music. Weird instruments. Strange to us, anyway.”

  “I hear?”

  “Sure. How long are you staying?”

  The girl speaks so softly. I lift myself up and lean toward the window, straining to catch what she says, but there’s just the slap of water against rock, the call of a mockingbird low-down in the scrub. Then a melody lifts sweetly into the breeze.

  His fingers skimmed across the strings, like swallows on the lake.

  She had to lean over the balcony railing to see him, lounging against the stucco wall, gazing up at her as he strummed the small guitar. He was tall, with coppery hair. Fawn-coloured skin. Eyes as dark as river stones.

  “La enfermera blanca,” he sang, shooting her a sly grin.

  He cocked an eyebrow and raked the strings in a sharp flamenco riff. A young man, but not so young: creases already fanning at the corners of his eyes.

  She took him in, the way he stood, his joints loose and languorous, the way he threw back his head when he laughed. The thin moustache and the dark cigarillo clamped between smiling lips. When he left, he seemed to take the air with him, and when he came back carrying two glasses of pale beer, the light seemed to pool in his eyes, plunging the rest of the courtyard into shadow.

  “Watch out for Carlos,” Frieda said later, gossiping as always through her undressing and her bath. “He’s too good to be true.”