Avenue of Mysteries (34 page)

But
whose
one chance to leave Lithuania was it? Hers, or her child’s? Things can go wrong during the adoption process, Juan Diego knew—not only in novels.

A
S FOR
J
EANETTE
W
INTERSON
’
S
The Passion,
Juan Diego loved that novel; he’d read it two or three times—he kept returning to it. It wasn’t about an order of lesbian nuns. It was about history and magic, including Napoleon’s eating habits and a girl with webbed feet—she was a cross-dresser, too. It was a novel about unfulfilled love and sadness. It was not uplifting enough for Clark French to have written it.

And Juan Diego had highlighted a favorite sentence in the middle of
The Passion:
“Religion is somewhere between fear and sex.” That sentence would have provoked poor Clark.

It was almost five in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve in Bohol when Juan Diego limped out of the ramshackle airport and into the mayhem of Tagbilaran City, which struck him as a squalid metropolis of motorcycles and mopeds. There were so many difficult names for places in the Philippines, Juan Diego couldn’t keep them straight—the islands had names, and the cities, not to mention the names of the neighborhoods
in
the cities. It was confusing. And in Tagbilaran City, there were also plenty of the now-familiar
religious
jeepneys, but these were intermixed with
homemade vehicles that resembled rebuilt lawnmowers or supercharged golf carts; there were lots of bicycles, too, not to mention the masses of people on foot.

Clark French had manfully lifted Juan Diego’s enormous bag above his head—out of consideration for the women and small children who didn’t come up to his chest. That orange albatross was a woman-and-child crusher; it could roll right over them. Yet Clark didn’t hesitate to knife like a running back through the men in the mob—the smaller brown bodies got out of his way, or Clark muscled through them. Clark was a bull.

Dr. Josefa Quintana knew how to follow her husband through a crowd. She kept one of her small hands flat against Clark’s broad back; with the other, she held tightly to Juan Diego. “Don’t worry—we have a driver, somewhere,” she told him. “Clark, notwithstanding his opinion to the contrary, doesn’t have to do
everything.
” Juan Diego was charmed by her; she was genuine, and she struck him as both the brains and the common sense in the family. Clark was the instinctual one—both an asset and a liability.

The beach resort had provided the driver, a feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive—but he was eager to do so. Once they were out of the city, there were smaller mobs of people walking along the road, although the vehicular traffic now careened at highway speeds. There were goats and cows tethered at the roadside, but their tethers were too long; occasionally, a cow’s head (or a goat’s) would reach into the road, causing the assorted vehicles to veer.

Dogs were chained near the shacks, or in the cluttered yards of those homesteads along the roadside; when the dogs’ chains were too long, the dogs would attack the pedestrians passing by—hence people, not only the heads of cows and goats, would materialize in the road. The boy driving the resort’s SUV relied heavily on his horn.

Such chaos reminded Juan Diego of Mexico—people spilling into the road, and the animals! To Juan Diego, the presence of improperly-cared-for animals was a telltale indication of overpopulation. So far, Bohol had made him think about birth control.

To be fair: Juan Diego’s birth-control awareness was keener around Clark. They’d exchanged combative emails on the subject of fetal pain, inspired by a fairly recent Nebraska law preventing abortions after twenty weeks’ gestation. And they’d fought about the use of the 1995 papal encyclical in Latin America, an effort by conservative Catholics
to attack contraception as part of “the culture of death”—this was how John Paul II preferred to refer to abortion. (That Polish pope was a sore subject between them.) Did Clark French have a cork up his ass about sexuality—a Catholic cork?

But Juan Diego thought it was hard to say what kind of cork it was. Clark was one of those socially liberal Catholics. He said he was “personally opposed” to abortion—“it’s distasteful,” Juan Diego had heard Clark say—but Clark was politically liberal; he believed women should be able to choose an abortion, if that was what they wanted.

Clark had always supported gay rights, too; yet he defended the entrenched position of his revered Catholic Church—he found the Church’s position on abortion, and on traditional marriage (that is, between a man and a woman), “consistent and to be expected.” Clark had even said he believed the Church “should uphold” its views on abortion and marriage; Clark saw no inconsistency to his having personal views on “social subjects” that differed from the views upheld by his beloved Church. This exasperated Juan Diego no end.

But now, in the darkening twilight, as their boy driver dodged fleetingly appearing and instantly vanishing obstacles in the road, there was no talk of birth control. Clark French, befitting his self-sacrificing zeal, rode in the suicide seat—the one beside the boy driver—while Juan Diego and Josefa had buckled themselves into the seeming fortress that was the SUV’s rear seat.

The resort hotel on Panglao Island was called the Encantador; to get there, they drove through a small fishing village on Panglao Bay. It grew darker there. The glimmer of lights on the water and the briny smell in the heavy air were the only hints that the sea was near. And reflected in the headlights, at every curve of the winding road, were the watchful, faceless eyes of dogs or goats; the taller pairs of eyes were cows or people, Juan Diego guessed. There were lots of eyes out there in the darkness. If you were that boy driver, you would have driven fast, too.

“This writer is the master of the collision course,” Clark French, ever the expert on Juan Diego’s novels, was saying to his wife. “It is a fated world; the inevitable looms ahead—”

“It’s true that even your accidents are not coincidental—they’re planned,” Dr. Quintana said to Juan Diego, interrupting her husband. “I think the world is scheming against your poor characters,” she added.

“This writer is the
doom
master!” Clark French held forth in the speeding car.

It irritated Juan Diego how Clark, albeit knowledgeably, often spoke of him in the third person while delivering a dissertation on his work—à la
this writer
—notwithstanding that Juan Diego was present (in this case, in the car).

The boy driver suddenly veered the SUV away from a shadowy form—with startled-looking eyes, with multiple arms and legs—but Clark was carrying on as if they were in a classroom.

“Just don’t ask Juan Diego about anything
autobiographical,
Josefa—or the lack thereof,” Clark continued.

“I wasn’t going to!” his wife protested.

“India is not Mexico. What happens to those children in the circus novel is
not
what happened to Juan Diego and his sister in
their
circus,” Clark went on. “Right?” Clark suddenly asked his former teacher.

“That’s right, Clark,” Juan Diego said.

He’d also heard Clark hold forth on the “abortion novel”—as many critics had called another of Juan Diego’s novels. “A compelling argument for a woman’s right to an abortion,” Juan Diego had heard Clark describe that novel. “Yet it’s a complicated argument, coming from a former Catholic,” Clark always added.

“I’m
not
a former Catholic. I never
was
a Catholic,” Juan Diego not once failed to point out. “I was
taken in
by the Jesuits, which was neither my choice nor against my will. What choice
or
will do you have when you’re fourteen?”

“What I’m trying to say is,” Clark went on in the swerving SUV—on the dark, narrow road that was everywhere dotted with bright, unblinking eyes—“in Juan Diego’s world, you always know the collision is coming. Exactly what the collision is—well, this may come as a surprise. But you definitely know there’s going to be one. In the abortion novel, from the moment that orphan is taught what a D and C is, you know the kid is going to end up being a doctor who
does
one—right, Josefa?”

“Right,” Dr. Quintana answered in the backseat of the car. She gave Juan Diego a difficult-to-read smile—or a faintly apologetic one. It was dark in the back of the jouncing SUV; Juan Diego couldn’t tell if Dr. Quintana was apologizing for her husband’s assertiveness, his literary bullying, or if she was smiling a little sheepishly in lieu of admitting she knew more about a dilation and curettage than anyone in the collisiondaring car.

“I do not write about myself,” Juan Diego had said in interview after interview,
and
to Clark French. He’d also explained to Clark, who adored
Jesuitical disputation, that (as a former dump kid) he had greatly benefited from the Jesuits in his young life; he’d
loved
Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe. Juan Diego even wished, at times, he could engage in conversation with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio—now that the dump reader was an adult, and somewhat better equipped to argue with such formidably conservative priests. And the nuns at Lost Children had done him and Lupe no harm—notwithstanding what a bitch Sister Gloria had been. (Most of the other nuns had been okay to the dump kids.) In the case of Sister Gloria, Esperanza had been the disapproving nun’s principal provocateur.

Yet Juan Diego had anticipated that a part of being with Clark—devoted student though he was—would be once more to find himself under scrutiny for the anti-Catholicism charge. What got under Clark’s oh-so-Catholic skin, Juan Diego knew, wasn’t that his former teacher was an unbeliever. Juan Diego was not an atheist—he simply had issues with the Church. Clark French was frustrated by this conundrum; Clark could more easily dismiss or ignore an unbeliever.

Clark’s casual-sounding D&C remark—not the most relaxing subject for a practicing OB-GYN, Juan Diego imagined—seemed to turn Dr. Quintana away from further discussion of a literary kind. Josefa clearly sought to change the subject—much to Juan Diego’s relief, if not to her husband’s.

“Where we’re staying, I’m afraid, is all about my family—it’s a family
tradition,
” Josefa said, smiling more uncertainly than apologetically. “I can vouch for the
place
—I’m sure you’ll like the Encantador—but I can’t begin to be an advocate for every member of my family,” she continued warily. “Who’s married to whom, who never should have married—their many,
many
children,” she said, her small voice trailing off.

“Josefa, there’s no need to apologize for anyone in your family,” Clark chimed in from the suicide seat. “What we can’t vouch for is the mystery guest—there’s an uninvited guest. We don’t know who it is,” he added, disassociating himself from the unknown person.

“My family generally takes over the whole place—every room at the Encantador is ours,” Dr. Quintana explained. “But this year, the hotel booked one room to
someone else.
”

Juan Diego, his heart beating faster than he was used to—enough so he noticed it, in other words—stared out the window of the hurtling car at the myriad eyes bobbing along the roadside, staring back at him. Oh, God! he prayed. Let it be Miriam or Dorothy, please!

“Oh, you’ll see us again—definitely,” Miriam had said to him.

“Yeah,
definitely,
” Dorothy had said.

In the same conversation, Miriam had told him: “We’ll see you in Manila
eventually.
If not sooner.”

“If not sooner,” Dorothy had repeated.

Let it be Miriam—
just
Miriam! Juan Diego was thinking, as if an enticing pair of eyes aglow in the darkness could possibly be
hers.

“I suppose,” Juan Diego said slowly, to Dr. Quintana, “this
uninvited
guest must have booked a room
before
your family made your usual reservations?”

“No! That’s just it! That’s
not
what happened!” Clark French exclaimed.

“Clark, we don’t know exactly what happened—” Josefa started to say.

“Your family books the whole place every
year
!” Clark cried. “This person
knew
it was a private party. She booked a room anyway, and the Encantador took her reservation—even
knowing
all the rooms were fully booked! What kind of person
wants
to crash a private party? She
knew
she would be entirely isolated! She
knew
she would be absolutely alone!”

“She,”
was all Juan Diego said, once again feeling his heart race. Outside, in the darkness, there were no eyes now. The road had narrowed, and turned to gravel, then to dirt. Perhaps the Encantador was a secluded place, but
she
would not be entirely isolated there.
She,
Juan Diego hoped, would be with
him.
If Miriam was the uninvited guest, she absolutely wouldn’t be alone for long.

That was when the boy driver must have noticed something odd in the rearview mirror. He spoke quickly in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana. Clark French only partially understood the driver, but there was an element of alarm in the boy’s tone; Clark turned and peered into the rear seat, where he could see that his wife had unbuckled her seat belt and was looking closely at Juan Diego.

“Is something wrong, Josefa?” Clark asked his wife.

“Give me a second, Clark—I think he’s just asleep,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.

“Stop the car—stop it!” Clark told the boy driver, but Josefa spoke sharply in Tagalog to the boy, and the kid kept driving.

“We’re almost there, Clark—it’s not necessary to stop here,” Josefa said. “I’m sure your old friend is sleeping—
dreaming,
if I had to guess, but I’m sure he’s just asleep.”

• • •

F
LOR DROVE THE DUMP
kids to Circo de La Maravilla, because Brother Pepe was already beginning to blame himself for los niños taking such a risk; Pepe was too upset to go with them, although el circo had been his idea—his and Vargas’s. Flor drove Pepe’s VW Beetle, with Edward Bonshaw in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.