When he looks up, he sees Maggie striding out of the jungle. She wears an iridescent blue dress untouched by mud and rain. The smoke melts away as she approaches, even though the trees around her are on fire.
Smiling at her father, she spreads her arms wide. Gordon reaches to take her hand. She vanishes just as she’s about to touch him.
Xang coughs and cries against his chest. For a time Gordon weeps with him. Finally he struggles upright, looks himself over, examines the baby. They’re both filthy but seemingly unhurt. He turns in search of Yia Pao and sees him getting to his feet a few yards away.
“You all right?” he says, and Yia Pao nods. “So are we. It’s a miracle.”
“He had terrible aim,” says Yia Pao. He points toward the smoking crater on the other side of the clearing.
“Why did he bomb us?” says Gordon.
Yia Pao shrugs. “They do whatever they want.” He makes his way over to Gordon, takes Xang, and kisses him on the cheeks. Then he starts toward the trees and gestures for Gordon to follow. “We must hurry. Before he returns to finish us off.”
The doctor in Virgil is squat with buckteeth and tufts of white hair sprouting from his ears. In the examining room, as Maggie lies on her back, her feet in stirrups, he prods her without much interest.
“Five weeks late, you say? Temperature’s high.”
“I’ve been ill. I had a fever.”
The doctor tuts as if this fact is medically uninteresting. “Have there been mood swings, headaches? Cervix feels a little soft. No spotting, but morning sickness, you said. Well, the chances are pretty good. Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out soon enough.” He draws a vial of blood and dispatches her to the bathroom with a plastic cup, saying it will be a week before the results come in.
When she exits the office, there’s a cluster of people just outside beneath an awning, watching as rain pours down before them in a solid sheet. Few vehicles pass by, and no one speaks. They all stand and wait, their numbers swelling with more patients from inside. When a man in a suit rushes down the street into the awning’s sanctuary, drenched from head to toe, those already gathered smile in sympathy, and the newcomer smiles too as he wipes himself off. Above them, a swallow perches on a strut, silent and unmoving.
Eventually the rain abates. One by one, at some sign known only to themselves, people begin to depart and continue on their way. By the time Maggie leaves, a patch of sun is poking through the clouds.
7
When the little blue Volvo comes up the driveway, Maggie’s first thought is that it’s Fletcher. She’s on the porch beating out rugs and George Ray is working close by, humming tunelessly as he plants saplings along the edge of the lawn. She’s not expecting Fletcher for another ten days, but he must have bought another car and come back early. The silhouette behind the wheel doesn’t look like his, though, and when the driver exits the Volvo in his golf cap, she sees with a sinking heart that it’s the priest from the stone church.
“Pardon intrusion,” he says, ambling up the steps. “Lenka tells me I must call first, but telephone is its own intrusion, yes?”
Maggie agrees that it is.
As the priest reaches the top of the stairs, he hands her a brown paper bag. “Buchty,” he says. “Lenka makes it for you.”
Maggie takes the bag and thanks him, worried about what kind of obligation she has just accepted.
“Is very quiet,” says the priest, turning to take in the property. On the lawn, George Ray’s hammering a stake into the ground, while the moon hangs just above the orchard, tiny and pale in the afternoon sky like an egg laid in the treetops. At first Maggie assumes the priest’s being sarcastic, given the hammering. Then she figures out his implication.
“Yes, most people have left,” she says. She can’t bring herself to admit that everyone has gone.
“Is nice man from grocery store still here?” asks the priest. He means Wale, she realizes, and she laughs at the idea of Wale as a nice man. The priest seems puzzled by her reaction.
“That man abandoned his girlfriend and his daughter,” she tells him. His expression falls, and he asks how the woman and the girl are doing. Maggie merely says they’re back in the States now. She doesn’t feel like talking about Brid and Pauline with him.
“I must tell you,” says the priest, “I come as courtesy to your grandmother.”
“My grandmother,” Maggie repeats.
“She writes nice letter to me asking how you are.” The priest sees her look of incomprehension and goes on. “You tell her you come to church, so she makes inquiry about this parish and discovers my address.”
“I didn’t tell her—” Then Maggie remembers what she said to Gran on the phone. She can imagine Gran’s excitement at the thought of her attending Mass.
“Your grandmother writes nice letter,” says the priest. “She has great worry for you.”
“Well, you didn’t need to come. Gran and I talked on the phone last week.”
The priest nods as though he’s up to date regarding contact between her and Gran. “She says you do not tell her very much of yourself,” he explains.
“We’ve had other things to talk about.”
“Yes, she tells me that too. Your father. She writes me that they are finding out if he is in village upriver. You have had more word?”
She shakes her head. “You know as much as I do. Maybe I should be asking you for news.” For a moment she mulls what would happen if she told him that the nice man from the grocery store has gone to Laos.
“Is dangerous, the mission work,” says the priest. “Your father has great courage. He is like the Jesuits in this place many centuries ago.”
“I didn’t want him to go over there,” she replies. “I didn’t want to be worrying about him. If it’s okay, I’d rather not talk about it. Thanks for coming over, though. You can tell Gran I’m fine.”
The priest looks disappointed. Probably he thinks she’s a selfish, ungrateful child.
“Before I leave,” he says, “Lenka asks me to tell you that she wishes to see you again. But she is embarrassed from night of party.”
Maggie remembers Lenka kneeling at the toilet with her brother beside her. Suddenly the brown paper bag brought by the priest seems less like a demand and more like penance.
“She shouldn’t be embarrassed,” Maggie says. “It was something she ate, right?”
The priest looks at her as though to ascertain whether she’s being serious. “You must understand,” he says, a certain fatigue creeping into his voice, “before we come here, our parents are taken. They are dissidents, yes? Lenka, she is almost thirty, but she lived with them. Is difficult. She is not great lover of life here.” His face grows troubled awhile before it brightens. “She asks that I invite you for the Sunday dinner. Will you give us this honour?”
Maggie tries to picture herself alone in a dining room with the priest and his alcoholic sister. He appears to have forgotten that the first time he saw Maggie, he accused her of stealing from a poor box. No, it would never work. Still, standing before her with golf cap in hand, he looks hopeful, almost needy. And what else does she have going on?
Then she remembers George Ray. He’s acting as if busy with a length of twine, but from the tilt of his head she suspects that he’s been listening all this time, that he’s waiting with the priest for her response.
“I’ll come if I can bring him,” she says, nodding toward George Ray. She says it thinking George Ray will appreciate the gesture, but upon the words leaving her mouth, she worries he’ll consider it patronizing.
When the priest turns to look, George Ray waves at him. She takes it as a good sign.