Without Borders (26 page)

“I guess they made up,” she whispered.

It would be so easy to fall back into their old conspiratorial ways, to poke good-natured fun at his sister, as if their laughter had been a rope holding them together.

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. “You only have to make it through one more clinic.”

• • •

The moonlight poured in through the window and cast shadows into every corner of the room. Annie peered into them, taking in the details of the tiny hut as she tried to forget Felipe’s words.
One more clinic.
That sentence echoed in her mind, filling it with promises of air-conditioning and her father’s famous homemade vanilla ice cream. Hot showers and cuddling with her cat. But it also meant going back to her boring, insignificant life. Watching reality television while people here lived without access to clean water. Worrying about classes and sorority gossip, while Felipe worried about children with dengue fever.

Felipe. At least she’d only have to deal with his glowering for one more clinic.

Annie rolled over, burying her face in the damp yoga mat. The foam stuck to her cheek, and she closed her eyes, hoping sleep would clean all her festering wounds. But Marisol’s grunts started again as Annie began to slip into unconsciousness.

Again? Seriously?

She flung a hand to her ear, debating whether she should throw something at them or take Juan’s make-your-ears-bleed approach. She began to turn away when the shadows shifted, illuminating a shock of blond hair.

Phillip wasn’t in Marisol’s hammock. He was tucked solidly into his own, with one tanned arm dangling from the side.

Her friend groaned again, and this time its familiarity made Annie’s pulse roar in her ears. She’d heard these noises before. And they weren’t the ones she got used to her freshman year, when her roommate would bring her long-distance boyfriend up to visit every other weekend.

Annie sprung to her feet. “Mari? Hey, Mari?” She tried to keep her voice down as she scrambled toward her friend’s hammock.

Sweat covered Marisol’s face and beaded on her upper lip. Her right cheek twitched.

“Okay. Sugar. Need sugar.” Annie dropped to her knees and dug through her friend’s bag, not caring where the clothes and books landed. “Where is it?” Finally, her trembling fingers closed around the cylinder of glucose tabs. “Here, Mari.” She flipped open the lid and tried to shake an orange coin free.

Empty.

Annie’s fingers and toes went cold even though the humidity and the temperature both approached the hundred mark. “Felipe. Wake up.” Her voice was so sharp and frantic it shredded her throat.

“
¿Qué?
” He shot up.

“Mari. She needs sugar. Where is her icing? Does she still keep a tube of icing?” Annie knew she was loud enough to wake the entire village, but she could barely hear it over the pounding of her own heart.

He threw his legs over the side of his hammock. “Get my bag. There is candy there. Front pocket.” He sprinted toward Marisol.

Annie ruffled through his backpack, dumping everything into a pile at her feet. A crumpled sheet of notebook paper stuck to her ankle, and she pulled it away. Across the top, in his familiar, slanted chicken-scratch was her name.

It made her heart thud harder, and Annie shoved the paper to the bottom of the pile. As she did, her fingers brushed the plastic bag of Smarties. “Here.” She ran the few feet to her friend’s hammock, holding a package of the candy out in front of her.

Marisol knocked it away with a grunt and a sneer.

• • •

The tiny pieces of candy clattered to the ground, leaving a rainbow of sweets at Felipe’s feet. He shoved his sister to her side as she smacked at his arms and face. “Hold her arms.” In those first months after his sister had been diagnosed, he’d shot cake icing into her mouth more than once. And even a few times as adults, but usually Marisol had perfect control of her blood sugar. Especially during the brigades.

Annie dropped the bag of candy and grabbed Marisol’s wrists, giving him a reprieve from the attack while he turned off her pump.

“She gets like this when her sugar is too low,” he said.

“I remember.” Annie picked up another tube of Smarties. “What do we do?” Her fingers never stopped moving, twisting and untwisting the piece of plastic in her hands.

Felipe glanced at Marisol’s sweaty face. Her eyes seemed to focus on him for a half-second, then they slid up to the ceiling.

“I will hold her, and you put some in her mouth.”

“Won’t she choke?” Annie asked.

He shook his head. “She is still here enough to swallow. Tuck it inside her cheek.” Felipe grabbed Marisol’s arms an inch below the elbow. She squirmed and kicked, and her sweaty skin made a good grip difficult, but he held tight. “Be careful. She might bite you.”

Annie pinched three pieces of pink candy between her fingers. “Okay.” She pulled Marisol’s cheek and dropped the candy in.

Half of it came up as she spat.

“Break it,” he said.

“Break what?”

His voice cracked, letting some of his fear escape. He took a deep breath and swallowed it back. “The
dulce
. If it is powder, it is harder for her to spit out.”

“What’s going on?” Phillip’s eyes bugged as he bolted toward them.

“Her blood sugar is too low,” Felipe said.

Annie grabbed a new roll and stomped on it. The sugary pieces crumbled, and she held the wrapped powder between her fingers. “Do I dump it in?”

“
Sí
. Try to hold her mouth closed this time. Like,” his forehead crinkled as he remembered that picture in her photo album, “like your cat, Mr. Flowers. Do you ever give him medicine?”

“Got it.” Annie grabbed Marisol’s lower jaw and dug her fingers into her friend’s cheeks. When her mouth opened, Annie popped the broken candy inside. She pushed up on Marisol’s chin and rubbed her throat until she swallowed.

A handful of breaths later, Marisol’s face stopped twitching. Her eyes were still hazy, but there was less anger there.

“You okay?” Phillip pushed the sweaty hair from Marisol’s forehead, but she didn’t answer.

“One more?” Annie crushed another package of candy under her flip flops.

His sister opened her mouth voluntarily, and Annie dropped the sugar inside.

Felipe let go of Marisol’s arms and waited while her mouth worked over the sweets. Beside him, Annie shook, and the plastic bag in her hands crinkled as she trembled.

“She is okay, Annie.” Without thinking, he put a hand on her back. For a moment, the shaking stopped, but then it returned worse than before. He tore his hand away.

Marisol eased herself up as Juan shuffled over to join them.

“I turned off your pump,” Felipe said. “Where is your meter?”

She pointed to the mess under her hammock, and he crouched to dig.

“Here.” Annie nudged him out of the way. “She keeps it in this pocket.” She grabbed the black and white case and held it out to him.

Outside, the sun appeared over the horizon, throwing soft, pink light through the room. This close to her, Felipe could see exactly where each of her long, pale eyelashes ended. Her hair slumped half out of her ponytail, and her gold-flecked eyes bore into him.

“
Gracias
.” He took the meter and shot up, afraid he would lose what little composure he still had.

Juan’s voice came from behind him. “Everything is okay?”

Felipe handed his sister her meter. “
Sí
.”

“
Bien.
” The man cleared his throat, and Felipe turned around to face him. “Because I looked through my bag for the extra sugar tablets, but I found only this.” He held up an enormous pair of underwear, and the red fabric flapped in the morning breeze.

There was a long beat of silence before Marisol coughed. “I am glad you did not try to shove those in my mouth,” she whispered.

Annie looked at the exposed wood ceiling and the wide, fingerprint-smudged windows at the back of the room. The screech and thump of children playing echoed through the cabin. “This place is really neat. What did you call it?”

“The
Casa del Niños
,” Marisol said.

“Like an orphanage?” Phillip asked.

“Not so much orphans. More like their parents cannot take care of them,” Marisol said.

A knot of children swarmed the group, and the press of little hands and legs threw Annie off balance. She stumbled as a boy stuck a finger into a hole in her shirt, and someone lifted the supply bag from her shoulder. She turned, expecting an overeager child. Instead, she found herself staring at Felipe.

Juan shoved a bag in Phillip’s hands and dragged him toward the door. “I will do my exams in the sleeping room. It is bigger.”

“I will go do the organizing. So Annie can do lots of observations for her last clinic, yes?” Marisol didn’t wait for an answer, sashaying out of the room with a trail of children in tow.

Real subtle, Mari.
Annie pulled down her ponytail and redid it twice, her fingers refusing to stay still. “Is that okay?”

Felipe nodded but kept setting out supplies. She wondered if it really was okay. If being alone together was as terrifying for him as it was for her. She pushed out her doubts. The last clinic. Her last chance to bolster her med school application.
Last chance.

Their first pint-sized patient sprinted in, and Felipe lifted her onto a heavy oak table that took up most of the space in the room. He looked in the girl’s ears and eyes. He shined a light down her throat then pulled out his stethoscope.

“Do you want to listen?” he asked.

“Really?”

“
Aquí
. Tell me what you hear.” He put the stethoscope in her ears and moved the round end of the device around the girl’s back.

Annie’s smile spread like wildfire. “Her lungs.”

“And? Do you hear anything concerning?”

She closed her eyes and listened again. The sound of deep, clear breaths filled her ears. “No. I don’t think so.”

“
Muy bien
.” He lifted the girl off the table. She wrapped her tiny arms around him, muttering into his waist.

“What is she saying?” Annie watched them, imagining the girl was begging him to stay or to take her away from this place.

“She wants a Band-Aid.”

“Oh.” Annie dug in a bag and produced a Snoopy Band-Aid. “Here.” She unwrapped the bandage and stuck it to the child’s hand.

The girl fell into a fit of giggles and tore out of the room.

“How many are left?”

“Many,” he said as the next child shuffled in. Felipe shined a light into the chubby boy’s throat. The boy’s left eye pointed toward the floor while the right looked straight ahead. “Come look at this.”

She took the black penlight from Felipe’s hand. “What am I looking for?”

“Shine it in his right eye first. Then the left.” He stood behind her, guiding the light between her fingers.

“Go slow. Look at his pupil.”

She moved the light back and forth between his eyes. Only his right one shrank under the beam. The left eyelid drooped, as if the boy was exhausted. “This one isn’t reacting. Or,” she moved the light again, “the left one is a lot slower.”

Felipe forced the light toward the floor. “Do not blind him.”

“Sorry.” Annie stepped away. “What does it mean?”

“He has damage to the oculomotor nerve.”

Her chest constricted. “That sounds bad. Do you want me to get someone?”

“No. It is okay. He has been injured since birth. I want to take him to Managua to see about surgery for his eyelid, but so far we have not been able to raise the money.”

Annie fumbled for words as she helped the boy off the table.

A girl with a prosthetic leg and a smile so wide it took up half her face came scrambling into the room. “
¡Doctor! ¡Doctor!
” She rapped on her fake leg, the pale plastic shocking against her dark skin.

“
Dios mío, ahora puedes correr más rápido que los muchachos.
” Felipe’s smile was wide enough to match the girl’s.

Annie’s heart ached. “Did you tell her she can run faster than the boys now?”

“
Sí.
Your Spanish is getting very good.” He tugged at the girl’s ponytail. “This is Mariana. One of
Ahora’s
donors helped her get a new leg last year.”

“
Hola
.” She squatted and smiled at the child.

The girl waved, and Felipe lifted her onto the table in front of them. “When we are done here, I want to talk to you, Annie.” He closed his eyes as he rubbed the crease in his forehead. “
Por favor
.”

Annie handed the girl a Band-Aid, ignoring the torrent of emotions swirling inside her. “Okay.”

• • •

Working next to Annie had grown more fluid with each child. They moved and talked and examined in the tiny quarters, handing out Band-Aids like stickers. But in the tight space, there were a dozen accidental touches and a handful of looks that lingered a second too long.

“I think that is the last of them.” Felipe packed up his supplies. “Last clinic. You survived Nicaragua.” He hated the bitter taste of the words.

“Barely.”

Silence ran between them, interrupted only by the shuffle of little feet in the hallway.

Felipe pulled the crinkled sheet of notebook paper from his bag and held it out to her. She reached out, but he jerked it back to his chest. “I am sorry. For the things I said. For yelling. For all of it.”

She frowned, and a few tiny lines sprung up on her forehead. He wanted to reach up and smooth them away.

“And I have an idea. But I am not sure of all the details.” He tucked the page into her hands. “I wanted to ask for your help before you leave.”

Her frown deepened as she stared at the paper, her eyes narrowed and focused. His stomach sank.
She hates it.

“Child vacations?” She squinted up at him. “Your handwriting is terrible.”

“No. Child abuse education. Maybe a class, like your sexual education classes?”

“Really?”

“
Sí
, I think so. I will have to talk with my mother. We have not done things like this before. Things that are not so much physical health.”