Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [114]
There may have been publicity we never knew about. We didn’t get the New York Times in Grace. I do know there was a short piece in the Tucson morning paper, in the “Money” section, of all things, right next to an article about how to reduce your mortgage with twice-monthly payments. There was a small, smiling photo of Hallie, who was identified as a former employee of the University Extension Service. The reporter had called up the Minister of Agriculture as I’d suggested, and said that he “alleged” she had been kidnapped by agitators based in Honduras. This was followed by a much longer quote from a state senator who said the Nicaraguan civil war was a tragedy, and that the United States was doing its best to bring democracy to the region, and that no U.S. citizen could go there without expecting to be caught in crossfire.
The reporter, believing I would be pleased, sent me the clipping along with a note wishing my family all the best. The breadth of his ignorance made me feel hopeless, as I’ve sometimes felt in dreams, when the muscles dissolve and escape is impossible. I wept uncontrollably all day. At school I asked my students to read Silent Spring for an hour while I put my head down on my desk and cried. They were subdued. I suspected people in Grace of walking around me on tiptoe now, the way a town might avert its eyes when its resident crazy lady hikes up her skirt and scratches an itch and swears at the blackbirds watching from a telephone wire.
I stopped going to Doc Homer’s for dinner. We were in the worst position to comfort one another. I guessed he could go on about his routine—that had always been the core of his resilience—but I don’t think I’d slept a single night since she’d been taken, and I was reaching an abnormal state of exhaustion. I fought off hallucinations. Late one night Hallie appeared in my bedroom doorway, very small, looking up at me. With those same eyes she used to ask without words to crawl into my bed.
“Hallie, I’m trying so hard. But I don’t know how to save you.”
She turned on stocking feet and walked back into the dark.
I got up and rifled my desk drawers till I found the newspaper clipping with her picture. I looked at it hard, trying to convince myself that Hallie wasn’t a child. I had the black-and-red afghan bundled around me but I felt chilled and hard as a frozen branch. My hands shook. I tucked the clipping into an envelope and wrote a note to the President of the United States, begging him please just to look at her. “This is my only sister,” I told him. “I’m coming to understand responsibility. You gave those men a righteous flag to wave and you gave them guns. If she dies, what will you tell me?” I licked the envelope and sealed it. I knew the address by heart.
We began to get letters back, to the effect that the matter would certainly bear investigation. They weren’t form letters, each one was typed by a different secretary, but they all said the same thing. It surprised me to see how a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.
In the middle of that gray month Emelina’s youngest son learned to walk. I was alone with him when it happened. The sun had come out briefly as I walked home from school, and the baby and I were both anxious to be outdoors. Emelina asked if I could just not let him eat any real big bugs, and I promised to keep an eye out. I settled with a book in the courtyard, which was radiant with sudden sunlight. The flowers were