Found in Translation (25 page)

“Why would he act so resentful about being here if he had a choice?”

“But I was resentful at first, too.” I marveled that the memory of orientation didn’t redden my face in the darkness.

“Yes, but you still came as a volunteer.

” I grunted.

“Something else to keep in mind. My observations aren’t the most objective.”

“Meaning …?”

“Meaning Mr. Geoff doesn’t have any more use for us … thick black-skinned folks than he does for those light brown-skinned Mexicans.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Girl, you’re a sweet young lady, a fine and gentle young lady—when you aren’t cussing, that is ….”

We both cackled. I looked around at the girls camped closest to us. They were still sound asleep.

“I’ve been good for at least a couple of hours.” I’d have to tell her about teaching Anjelita not to curse, but not now.

“I’m sure you have, Kim, honey. But my point is this. You aren’t a woman of the world like I am. I’ve seen things you haven’t seen. Things you don’t know enough about to recognize if they up and bit you. I’m not gonna tell you more ‘cause I don’t want to discourage you.”

I almost laughed at Aleesha for calling herself a woman of the world, but I managed not to. She was already more of one than I’d ever be. “Am I that naive, Aleesha?”

“You know that’s right, girl, but don’t change. That’s one of your most charming and endearing qualities. If you were like me, we’d lock horns all the time. I don’t take well to competition.”

“I can’t imagine us ever tangling.”

She didn’t let my comment distract her. “Kim, you’re always looking for the best in people. I guess Jesus was ‘guilty’ of that ‘bad habit,’ too, and look where it got Him. But He saw inside people’s hearts. He knew who was sincere and who wasn’t. And He knew who would betray Him.”

“Can you do that, Aleesha? See inside people’s hearts, I mean?”

“Almost. Sometimes, anyhow.”

I was so tired I started losing my focus of the conversation. I hoped she wouldn’t notice. “So you … read minds?”

“No, Kim. I’m not clairvoyant, and I’m not Claire anybody-else, and you know it.” Aleesha had the most amazing ability to be outspoken without being offensive. With me, anyhow. “That was your fatigue mouthing off. But God often shows me if someone is who he claims to be. Not who so much as what. Whether that person is real or not. So I’m apt to be cautious when somebody would jump in noncautiously ….”

“Incautiously,” I said without meaning to. I hated having other people correct my English, but my dad was an English professor.

“Incautiously, whatever. It helps keep me out of trouble. I thank God every day for that gift.”

“So is that the same as ‘streetwise’ or ‘street-smart’?”

“You’re catching on, girl. But those concepts are more complicated than I’ve been describing, and most streetwise people don’t see their ability as a gift from God.”

I groaned inaudibly as Aleesha continued.

“Then there are people who think they—”

“Who think they’re streetwise, but aren’t?” I asked. “I thought you either are or you aren’t. Like being a Christian.”

“You’ve got it, honey. But I’m talking about people like Geoff. He acts like he’s street-smart, but he hasn’t got a clue. He thinks his bad-boy attitude is all there is to it. So he puts that attitude on before he gets up in the morning and doesn’t take it off again until he crawls back in the sack at night.” She paused for a few seconds. “They say you can’t really speak a language till you start dreaming in it ….”

I nodded invisibly in the dark. “Uh-huh,” I said, yawning once before each syllable.

“Well, he only daydreams this role he wants to play. His act isn’t very convincing—not to someone who knows what it’s really like. I can’t see inside Geoff, but I can tell you he’s a fake on the outside. He’s not nearly as bad as he wants people to think.”

“I … Aleesha, I’m almost dizzy from trying to take this in.”

“At least it ain’t ‘cause you’re blond, girl.” On those rare occasions Aleesha said “ain’t,” I knew she was teasing.

Although I needed to hear more, I could barely keep my eyes open. Or my mind. “You’ve … given me a lot to think about. I’m not sure which thread of this conversation to ask more about.” I thought for a minute. “You said Geoff has no use for black people. How can you tell? Has he said or done something specific?” I was thinking about what I thought he’d said when he heard Aleesha coming earlier.

“He doesn’t have to. You know that attitude of his? It has a slight ‘odor’ that’s immediately recognizable to somebody who’s smelled it before, even though it’s not something anyone else would notice. I’m familiar with it, so I recognize it now.”

“So Geoff ‘stinks’?” I wasn’t trying to be funny, and neither of us laughed. Geoff’s situation was pathetic, not amusing, and I felt the blood flood my face in embarrassment at the way I’d misstated my reaction.

“Yes. If I sound judgmental, that’s why you should form your own opinion. Don’t believe what I’m saying just because I believe it. Don’t chance accepting my prejudices.” She added in such a quiet whisper I could barely hear her, “Yes, I have them.” Then she spoke a little louder. “At the very least, Geoff seems seriously lacking in that ‘rare and sweet perfume’ the apostle Paul referred to.”

“I wouldn’t expect to smell that ‘perfume’ on Geoff. Not anymore. He’s pretty much admitted he doesn’t care about not being a Christian.”

Once I got my second wind, Aleesha and I whispered long into the night. We’d likely suffer from the loss of sleep, but Geoff’s situation seemed more important. We agreed that he’d maintained a good front the first couple of days in Santa María, but we couldn’t imagine what made him take down his mask.

Or trade masks.

We tried assessing his spiritual condition, but we could only guess at it. I was more concerned about his attitude toward Aleesha than about the way he’d treated me, but she disagreed. We discussed his motives and ways I might respond.

After hours of batting ideas around, nothing was more conclusive than when we started. We didn’t have a God’s-eye view of the facts, and neither of us could see inside Geoff’s heart.

“I think you should talk to Mr. Rob,” Aleesha said when we started yawning and digressing. We got giggly, too, and we were in danger of falling asleep with mouths still moving.

“I don’t want to rat on Geoff.”

“Somebody besides you and me needs to know what’s going on—especially now that it’s reached this point.”

“I suppose I could tell Rob I’m concerned about a team member who isn’t a Christian.”

“That’s good, Kim. It’s true, and if God leads you to share more, you’ll do it out of genuine Christian concern.”

It was beyond me how she could think—much less express herself clearly—when she sounded as tired and sleepy as me. I barely took in her last comment, but I managed to mumble “Amen.”

At least I think I did.

Day 5

I
got up extra early the next morning, but not because I felt like it. Aleesha was still asleep, and I didn’t wake her. Would I ever rub it in that I’d gotten up first for once.

My mind was still on overload, and some of the specifics were foggier now than last night. I wanted to catch Rob before anyone else could. He was always the first person up, or so he claimed.

But despite my intentions to find him quickly, I wasn’t moving very fast. I giggled at myself for yawning in rhythm to my dragging footsteps—or perhaps plodding along to the beat of my yawns.

Each of the other early risers I ran into told me I’d just missed Rob—sometimes by mere seconds. I’d already spent five or ten minutes looking—there weren’t many places for him to be—when Anjelita appeared out of nowhere. We hugged.

On impulse, I grasped her shoulder firmly with my left arm. As if she understood what I wanted to do, she took hold of mine, and I started swinging her around and around in a circle. That probably wasn’t the safest thing to do, but we had so much fun I never considered the dangers.

Anjelita couldn’t keep from laughing when I set her on her feet and promptly fell down. Although she staggered the first couple of steps, she remained upright. Her sense of balance never failed to amaze me.

I tried to imagine her reaction to the rides at Six Flags. Although we still had well over a week to spend together, my eyes welled with tears at the thought of going home without her.

Looking at her from the ground, I noticed that her hair now had a braid like mine. She must have gotten Aleesha up as soon as I left our sleepsite. I jumped up awkwardly, brushed myself off, and wiped my left hand on my work pants. I didn’t want to touch Anjelita’s hair with filthy hands. I hadn’t thought about it before, but her hair was always clean at the beginning of the day. I wish I could have asked her how she did it.

“So pretty!”

She hugged me as if those words had made sense.

“Belle …
” I slipped into French for a moment.

Anjelita looked at me curiously.
“Bella?”
she asked.

I was about to learn that the two words for “pretty” were similar. But because they didn’t sound that much alike, I didn’t catch on at first.

“Belle,” I repeated. I got out my notepad, turned to a clean page, and wrote it down for her.

“Bella!” She grabbed the pen and pad from my hand and wrote down “bella” for me to see. Although the similarity between the Spanish and French words was more visual than auditory, the discovery was fun.

Rob joined us. “Buenos días, Anjelita,” he said. “And to Miss Kimmy as well.”

I smiled.

Rob’s greeting had probably exhausted all the Spanish he knew, but it made me wish I could pick the brains of every team member who knew any Spanish. I could build up quite a vocabulary that way—more than I could possibly master in the limited time available.

I still wouldn’t know how to string the words together sensibly, though, and I couldn’t justify distracting the builders with a personal project, especially one so unlikely to prove beneficial.

I was only vaguely aware of Anjelita’s convincing, “Hi, Rob!” response. She’d picked up a number of English words, and she’d learned almost all the team members’ names. The guys’ names, anyhow. Smart girl! Rob’s voice brought me back to the real world.

“Kimmy, I understand you’ve been looking for me all over the vast acreage of Santa María.”

“Everywhere except where you were at the time,” I said. I didn’t try fighting back a giggle.

“No wonder. I was out looking for you.”

“You expected me to be up this early?” I grinned.

“Divine revelation.”

“Ah.”

“So here we are. Ladies first.”

“Can we move to a more out-of-the-way spot, please?”

He led the way with Anjelita and me trailing behind. Anjelita was so good at amusing herself while others conversed in English that her presence—even during the most serious of discussions—never created problems.

Rob picked a spot well out of the flow of normal foot traffic, but I still looked around to make sure no one was nearby. Paranoia about Geoff, I suppose.

I took advantage of the short delay to find a starting point. I’m not great at thinking on my feet, so deciding what to say before I start not only prevents me from blurting out words like machine gun rounds but also minimizes my self-consciousness about speaking.

“Rob, everyone on this project is supposedly a Christian—it was the first requirement on a list of many. For the evangelistic project, anyhow. But I’m concerned about one team member. He hasn’t done anything ‘wrong’ yet”—I used my fingers to put quotation marks around wrong—“but the way he talks and acts around me makes me nervous. He’s as much as admitted not being a true believer, and—”

“I know,” Rob said. Heavy sadness wiped the twinkle from his eyes. I hadn’t seen him look this serious since he picked me up at the airport. “Geoff.”

The amazement on my face apparently gave Rob all the confirmation he needed. I’d wanted to avoid telling on Geoff or identifying him specifically, but Rob had just taken that option away.

“Don’t worry, Kimmy. You didn’t tell me anything new. I’ve known about Geoff’s problems long before this morning. Long before this trip, in fact.”

His words shocked me into speechlessness. He’d dumped a puzzle in my lap, one I couldn’t possibly solve on my own. I looked at him, desperate for clarification.

“Geoff is my nephew—my only sister’s only child. They live in San Francisco, too.”

“You’re kidding! I’ve never seen the two of you together. You don’t even act like members of the same family.”

“That was part of the deal.”

“The deal?”

I wished Rob would move his story a little faster before I died of both curiosity and concern; but he, too, probably needed a good starting place.

“Here’s the scoop. Geoff’s mom, Jill, has been divorced for five years. Almost six. Geoff never got over it, and he’s made her life miserable. He wore her down by constantly harping at her and accusing her of being responsible for the breakup. The opposite was true—and she has irrefutable proof of that—but she loves Geoff too much to tarnish her ex-husband’s image by revealing his unfaithfulness.

“Jill and I held a number of brother-sister coping, crying, and praying sessions about Geoff, believing he’d eventually come around.”

I gave Rob a sympathetic “but he didn’t?” look. He shook his head.

“We took him to several sessions with a Christian counselor, but changes didn’t come fast enough, and Jill couldn’t afford to continue. I offered to pay for them, but she wouldn’t let me. I should have insisted.”

I nodded. Rob’s generosity didn’t surprise me. I’d benefited from it myself.

“Geoff became a loner after the divorce. He spent practically all of his time in his room with the door shut. I told Jill I didn’t think that was healthy, but she didn’t want to disturb the status quo. I couldn’t blame her. The only hours of peace she enjoyed were the ones she and Geoff spent apart.

“Then he became friends with some boys at church. We hoped his new friends would set a good example. They were the same age and attended the same school. We’d known their parents for ages—fine, respectable Christians. Hanging around kids like theirs could only help. And so it seemed.