The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [27]
"Where the hell did you learn to do magic tricks?" she whispered to him afterward, as shoals of kids passed around and between the legs of adults dishing out ice cream.
Emilio rolled his eyes. "Do you have any idea how long the nights are near the Arctic Circle? I found a book. And I had a lot of time to practice."
When it was all over, Anne walked back into the office after seeing the last of the children off and found herself in the midst of an argument between her two favorite men.
"He believed you," Emilio cried, sweeping up the colored paper and confetti.
"Oh, he did not! He knew I was kidding," George said, stuffing trash into a bag.
"What? Who believed what?" Anne asked, going to work on the ice cream debris. "There’s a dish under that desk, sweetheart. Can you get that for me?"
Emilio fished the bowl out and stacked it with the others. "One of the kids asked George how old he was—"
"So I told him I was a hundred and sixteen. He knew it was a joke."
"George, he’s only five! He believed you."
"Oh, swell. Nice way to get to know people in the neighborhood, George. Lie to their kids!" Anne said, but she was grinning and laughed as the two men launched into a good-natured dispute over the moral distinction between lying to children and stand-up comedy. Both of these guys should have been daddies, Anne thought, watching them, alight with the simple satisfaction of pleasing children. It saddened her a little, but she didn’t dwell on it.
The first fiesta was such a success that others, larger and even more fun, followed. There was always some health issue tied in. Anne handed out condoms and birth-control information to everyone over the age of eleven, or did immunizations for kids under six, or checked for head lice or took blood-pressure readings. The week after a fiesta always brought in more patients than usual, people with "little questions," which often turned out to be serious medical problems they’d endured for years. George started spending more time at the J-Center and a couple of new kids began to meet him there. It was small stuff but enough to make them feel they were making some headway. People seemed glad they had come.
As time went on, Anne heard pieces of Emilio’s story, which seemed to involve a seriously screwed-up family and a fair bit of ugly commerce. Not terribly surprising, considering. As a member of a generation that spilled its guts in public with unedifying displays of Olympic-level whining, Anne had mixed feelings about Emilio’s silence. Unexamined nastiness could fester and poison lives; on the other hand, she admired the ability to shut up and carry on. Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations. So, while she was curious, Anne felt her interest was intrusive and never asked him about his family.
Of course, that didn’t keep her from looking for people in the neighborhood who resembled him. To her anthropologist’s eye, Emilio’s face had a distinctive changeable quality. One minute, he could look like a Hollywood Spaniard—black beard and imperial eyes, his face vivid and alive with intelligence; the next, all she could see was the enigmatic structure hard beneath the skin, the Taino endurance bred in the bone. She saw the same qualities in a dignified woman at the flower market who could have been his older sister. But Emilio had never even mentioned if he had sisters or brothers, and Anne knew that when someone is that reticent about something so ordinary, there is usually good reason. So she was not completely unprepared for the way she found out that Emilio did indeed have a brother. What took her by