Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [135]
“Well, really I don’t have it,” I said, resentful of her assumptions. “It’s gone. My mother died when I was little and my father will probably be dead before the year’s out, and my baby died, and now my sister is dead too. Maybe I’m not as young as you think.”
Mrs. Kimball looked stunned. “Your sister? The one on the phone?”
“She got killed by the contras. The ones down there that we send all the money to. I think you probably heard about it.”
She looked uneasy. “I don’t know. I might have.”
“It made the news in Tucson, at least for a day. You just forgot. That’s the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: ‘Forget it. This is somebody else’s problem.’”
I suppose I was going, as Rita Cardenal would say, mental. I didn’t look at Mrs. Kimball but I could see her magazine drift slowly to her lap. I looked at the bright garden on the magazine cover and felt strangely calm. “They kidnapped her one morning in a cotton field,” I said. “They kept her as a prisoner for weeks and weeks, and we kept hoping, but then they moved everybody to another camp and some of the prisoners they shot. Eight of them. Hallie and seven men. All of the men were teachers. They tied their hands behind them and shot them in the head and left their bodies all sitting in a line at the side of a road, in a forest, right near the border. All facing south.”
I felt a hard knot in my chest because this was the one image I saw most clearly. I still do. My voice sounded like a voice that would come from some other person’s throat, someone who had a dead sister and could speak of such things. “The man that found them was driving up from Estelí, coming along the road, and at first when he saw them all sitting there he thought, ‘Oh, that’s too many. I can’t give them all a ride, they won’t fit in my truck.’”
Mrs. Kimball and I didn’t speak again after that. I looked out the window. Far to the south, low cone shapes pushed up against the flat, bright sky. Those distant mountains were probably in Mexico, I knew, though borders in this barren land seemed beside the point. I heard Mrs. Kimball turn a page of her magazine. We’d been silent for over an hour before she first spoke up about the four o’clocks, but the silence was much more noticeable now, after we’d broken it with our little conversation. Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity after their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it’s the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.
My airplane was said to be bound for Denver, but it sat on the runway for a very long time. I had a window seat and could watch other planes lift their noses one after another and plow their way up an invisible road into the sky. I wasn’t impatient. Normally at this point in a flight my heart would pound and my mouth would go to cotton, but today my viscera were still. It didn’t matter especially if we burned in a fiery crash.
I thought maybe the air traffic controllers were trying to decide whether we were worth the trouble; we were only a small, twin-engine plane, incompletely filled. A few seats ahead of me a mother coached her preschooler, who was already crying because he knew his ears would hurt when we went up. This was not the first leg of their trip.
“You swallow, honey. Just remember to swallow, that makes your ears feel better. And yawn.”
“I can’t yawn.”
“Sure you can.” She demonstrated, her voice stretching wide over the yawn: “Think about being real, real sleepy.” People yawned all the way back to the smoking section, so strong was the power of motherly suggestion. I felt overcome with sadness.
The aisle seat of my row was occupied by a teenager, and the empty seat between us was filling up with her overflow paraphernalia. She threw down a hairbrush and a curling iron—whack! whack!—and pulled a substantial mirror out