The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [26]
He saw Anne look at George, who sat thinking awhile. "The whole damned baby boom is retiring. Sixty-nine million old farts playing golf and complaining about their hemorrhoids." George snorted. "It’s only a matter of time until someone opens up Funerals ’R’ Us."
"I can’t see either of us taking up golf," Anne said. "We may as well go, don’t you think?"
"Right. We’re outta here," George declared.
And so, in May of 2016, Anne and George Edwards moved into a rented house in Old San Juan, eight flights of stairs up the hill from the clinic Anne took over. Emilio took some time off to help them settle in. Once they had a bed, their first concern was finding a big wooden table with an assortment of chairs to go around it.
EMILIO BEGAN HIS own work simply: cleaning up the mission’s physical plant, organizing and surveying things, quietly getting acquainted with the neighborhood again. He worked within the existing programs, at first—the baseball league, the after-school stuff.
But he was always alert to the possibility that this child or that one could climb out and escape, if someone cared. He bought a lot of bolita tickets, giving the numbers away but keeping track of children with a talent for statistics, luring them to George, who let them play with his web links and who began tutoring a couple of kids who might do well in math. He found a child, a young girl, weeping over a dog hit by a car, and brought Anne her first assistant, Maria Lopez, eleven and good-hearted and ready to learn.
And there was a little horror named Felipe Reyes who hawked stolen goods right outside the clinic, a boy with the foulest mouth the widely experienced Anne Edwards had ever encountered. Emilio listened to the kid using two languages to excoriate passersby who wouldn’t buy from him and said, "You are the worst salesman I ever met but ’mano, can you talk!" He taught Felipe to curse in Latin and eventually got him to serve Mass and help around the Jesuit Center.
Anne spent the first months in the clinic reading through the records, getting a grim feel for the kind of medicine practiced here. She dealt with the business of inventories and inspections, upgrading the equipment, restocking the supplies, while tending to the immediate calls for care: the severed finger, the infections, high-risk pregnancies and premature births, the giardiasis, the gunshot wounds. And she gradually learned who among her medical colleagues on the island was willing to take referrals from her.
George settled in as well, making endless lists, changing the locks on every door, window and storage cabinet in the clinic, overhauling the software linking the Jesuit Center with webs and libraries, installing the used but serviceable medical equipment Anne ordered. For his own satisfaction, he signed up at the Arecibo Radio Telescope as a docent, indulging his own long-latent interest in astronomy.
That was where he met Jimmy Quinn, who would lead them all to Rakhat.
"GEORGE," ANNE ASKED at breakfast one morning, a few months after they’d moved to Puerto Rico, "has Emilio ever said anything to you about his family?"
"No, I don’t believe so, now that you mention it."
"Seems like we should have met them by now. I don’t know. There are undercurrents in the neighborhood I don’t understand," Anne admitted. "The kids adore Emilio, but the older people are pretty distant." More than distant, really. Hostile, she thought.
"Well, there’re a lot of little evangelical churches in La Perla. Maybe it’s some kind of religious rivalry. Hard to tell."
"What if we gave a party? At the clinic, I mean. Might break the ice."
"Sure," George shrugged. "Free food is always a good draw."
So Anne took care of the refreshments with the help of a few women in the neighborhood she’d made friends with. To her surprise, the very unpaternal George waded into the preparations and the fiesta itself with great enthusiasm, handing out sweets and little toys, setting off homemade rockets, blowing up balloons and