Whisper (35 page)

“May I?” she asked.

I carefully extracted Ranita from the cloth wrapped around my chest. She opened her mouth in a wide yawn, blinked and looked at me. Then she smiled. I felt the sting of tears in my nose and impulsively held her close. The doctor's soft hands wrapped around Ranita's middle and she took my sister, holding her out in front of her.

“Look at you, precious.” The doctor rubbed her nose against Ranita's. “We can fix you right up.” She leaned Ranita against her shoulder and patted her back a couple of times. She didn't hold Ranita with two hands as though she were delicate and about to break, but gently bobbed her against her shoulder and snuggled her close. I realized that my hands were in the air, twitching to receive Ranita back again. I put them under the table, on my lap, where they could twitch without being seen.

“These are pictures of children and adults with the bilateral cleft palate.” Dr. Ruiz pushed a large square book with a dark-blue cover into the middle of the table. She flipped open the cover and pointed to a picture encased in a plastic sleeve. It was a picture of me.

When I flipped the page and looked at the next one, the woman from the first page no longer had the splits from her nose to her mouth, nor did she have the holes beneath her nose. Her teeth did not protrude awkwardly. In the second picture, red bumpy seams had taken the place of the holes. On the next page, the seams were not as prominent, and by the fourth page, the seams were still noticeable scars running from her nose to her mouth, but they weren't swollen, and both her nose and mouth looked almost normal. I leaned over the book, examining the picture as closely as I could, wanting to know how this could happen. I wanted to push the book away, shove it across the table at this puffball of a woman who giggled and chattered like a squirrel. But at the same time I wanted to see more.

The next picture was of a baby. Ranita. Again, the splits in the face were prominent, noticeable, disfiguring and irregular. After a few pages, the baby's scars were nothing more than a fuller upper lip and thin white lines. By the last page, the child was maybe four years old and had a huge smile on her face—a perfect smile showing no gums, only clean, even teeth.

Jeremia sat beside me, breathing against my shoulder. I heard his intake of air, the speeding up of his breath as we flipped through the pages. This could be Ranita. This could be me. Eva abandoned the cat and stood between our chairs, watching the transformation as we flipped through the pages.

“Does it hurt?” she asked, looking at Jeremia. “I don't want it done to Ranita if it hurts.”

“Yes,” Dr. Ruiz said in her soft voice, the final
s
pulled long, “there will be some discomfort. But the baby will no longer have difficulties eating, she will no longer have the chronic earaches, she will no longer have the nasal voice. The surgery will be easiest for the baby and most difficult for Whisper.”

I wanted to hold Jeremia's hand, but his fingers were held tightly to the edge of the table, and his knuckles were white. I leaned toward him, wanting to ease my arm through his, but he was as stiff as one of his sculptures. He studied Dr. Ruiz's face, examining the thin line between her nose and lip, searching her eyes to see if she was someone he could trust.

“Why did it happen?” Jeremia's mouth barely moved when he spoke.

“We're not sure. It seems that something occurs in gestation—some developmental step is skipped, and the child is born with a hole in the roof of her mouth. It is nothing anyone did or could have prevented.”

Jeremia watched her as she spoke, his lips drawn tight.

“But,” she continued, “there have been too many deformities in the past fifteen years—and we don't know why. There are four of you here, four from the same village, and all with various developmental traumas. Something is causing these deformities, some environmental factor, but we have not figured out what it is. Pollution? Chemicals? Contaminants in the food?” Dr. Ruiz shrugged her shoulders and patted Ranita's back.

Jeremia sat at the table, holding the mug of cocoa in his hand while Dr. Ruiz explained the procedure to us. I took quick, careful sips from the mug. My lips didn't fit against the cup, and I didn't know what might froth from my nose. The cat was now curled up against Eva on the seat of the chair. She stroked the cat and watched us, her eyebrows drawn low.

“We need to go. We need to think about this,” Jeremia said, suddenly standing.

“Of course, of course. But don't think too long. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. Syndactyly can also be fixed with surgery.”

Eva knew the doctor was talking about her, because she held up her fingers and tried to stretch them wide.

When Dr. Ruiz handed Ranita to Jeremia, his shoulders straightened and his arm held tight to the cooing baby. We pulled on our coats and walked to the door, saying nothing.

“We've got maybe two months before we really need to start the process,” Dr. Ruiz said as she followed us down the hallway. “For the baby, do it as soon as possible.”

We walked down the street slowly. Even Eva was quiet, her fingers cold and curled in mine.

“It's so much bigger than the earaches or the holes in mouths,” Jeremia said. “Why would it matter if your face changed? It won't change you or the fact that you were ostracized by your family.”

“But it might help Ranita belong. And Eva,” I said.

“I don't want to have the surgery,” Eva said. “Then I can't swim like a fish. And Ranita doesn't want it either—I can tell.”

“This isn't about want,” I said. “It's about need and should. Do you need the surgery? Should you have the surgery?”

“I don't need anything but you. I shouldn't have anything I don't need,” Eva said, beginning to skip again.

Jeremia looked at me over Eva's head, and for a minute as quiet and fast as a heartbeat, I thought he was going to smile.

Twenty-Four

We made cheese sandwiches in the dorm room, a calming activity, mundane. Ranita lay on her nest of towels and played with her toes. Eva found my notebook and pencils and drew pictures of animals stacked on top of each other, all with large heads, stick legs and spotted bodies. Jeremia and I sat cross-legged on the floor and looked everywhere but at each other. I took the broken pieces of the violin he had carved for me from one of the desk drawers and slipped them into his hand, trying not to touch my fingertips to the palm of his hand, where sparks seemed to jump up whenever I made contact. He curled his fingers around the pieces.

We were so close to each other I could smell him, a scent that kept me leaning forward, wanting more. It was a heavy muskiness, a manness that seemed new to me even though I had smelled it in the past. If I could just sit beside him like this, feel his heat, smell his scent, I could be happy forever.

“We stayed in a barn on the way here.” Jeremia pointed to the picture Eva had drawn. “She's had nightmares ever since.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Pigs. Thousands of pigs.”

It had been their fourth night away from the camp. It hadn't been safe to follow the path out of the burned camp in the woods, the path that led to the village where we were from, so they had followed the creek.

They slept beneath the trees and ate roots and shriveled apples. By the fourth day they were so hungry, so cold, so tired of sleeping restlessly beneath the trees, so nauseated by the smell that rose from the creek, that when they saw the huge barns, they sneaked inside the closest building, where rows and rows of cages housed pigs—hundreds and hundreds, teeming and shrieking.

The pigs were rotten. The meat was tainted, grown from animals that were kept in enclosures so small they couldn't turn around. The pigs were so obese their legs couldn't hold their weight.

Eva began to gasp as Jeremia told me the story. I looked at her picture, at the animals stacked on top of each other, at the bent legs she had drawn and the obscenely rotund bodies. Eva pulled at her cropped black hair, covered her eyes and let out huge sobs. Jeremia pulled her to him, held her tightly against his chest.

“When we crept to the third barn, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the workers, we found the young ones. The piglets had been taken from their mothers and were fed from a machine. They squealed in a frenzy for the food.”

Eva clawed at Jeremia's arm, trying to bury her face even deeper into his chest. Jeremia rocked her back and forth while she shook and uttered shuddering gasps.

“She ran through the barn, pulling open the gates, screaming at the pigs to run, to hide in the forest, to save themselves. They didn't want to leave the food at first, the round metal machine with nozzles, but Eva ran into the pens and chased them through the open gates.

“Hundreds of piglets ran out into the night. The workers ran after them to get them back. Only two workers followed us. I had to carry Eva over my shoulder and back into the forest because she wanted to free all the pigs and didn't see the danger we were in. At the trees, they caught up with us and shone their lights on us.” Jeremia smiled now, a grimace that didn't reach his eyes but pulled his mouth straight. “When they saw Ranita's face, Eva's webbed hands and my missing arm, they stopped, then ran away, scared of us—the demon spirits enraging the pigs.”

Eva breathed heavily, relaxing against Jeremia's chest now that the story was over. She turned her face to the side, pressing her cheek against his shirt. Her face was streaked, lined with water, and her cheeks were mottled pink and red.

“The stream was rotten there, so full of pig shit and whatever chemicals they use to get rid of the waste that we couldn't drink from it—not until we were past the town, above the barn and its rot.”

Eva stood, shivering from head to toe, and returned to her picture. She started a new illustration, drawing piglets running through a field, running into the trees of the forest, and in this new picture, the sun shone brightly and the pigs had smiles on their faces. She wiped the water from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“The stream,” I said. “Could that be the reason for the crayfish with only one claw?”

Jeremia shrugged, and at the same time we looked at his shirt sleeve, which fell loose and partially empty.

Eva, Jeremia and Ranita slept most of that afternoon, as they had done since arriving at the university. Before resting, they handed me their dirty clothes through the barely opened door of the room. I told them to bolt the door until I returned from washing the clothes in the basement.

I sat on the washing machine, my chin in my hands, and tried to understand what I was supposed to do. I must take them to Purgatory Palace, I knew that—I couldn't keep them with me any longer without jeopardizing my standing at the school—but what would they do there? How would they pay for rent? Jeremia wouldn't beg, I wouldn't have Eva begging, and Ranita would not be used in such a way. Somehow, we needed to make money. My stipend from the school was not enough. What would happen when Celso showed up again? I had no doubt that he would, and every time I went outside, I searched for him.

After placing the wet clothes in the dryer and putting the coins into the slot, I walked across the cement floor to the basement bathroom, one hand against my stomach, one hand against my head. I didn't like using the bathroom down here because it was cold, as cold as going to the bathroom behind a log on a winter day, and it was a hard cold that crawled up your legs and into your bones. I locked the door, lifted my brown skirt and then pulled down the pants I had made from my mother's slip. I gasped when I saw the stain. Rosa's words came back to me then, her belief that when she got her period, she was a woman and would go to the city and find a man who would love her. And here I was, in the city, my body becoming a woman's. I put my face in my hands and let my tears drip between my fingers. So much loss. I wadded up toilet paper and stuck it in my underwear. I wished my mother or Candela were here to help me understand the changes in my body.