I awoke in the morning with the weight of eyes on me, and when I opened mine, I saw Jeremia watching me. Eva was still curled against his chest, her cheek on her hand. I wondered if he saw changes in me like the ones I saw in him.
Ranita’s washcloth diaper had leaked—a warm rush, then a sticky residue—and my black sweater stuck to my skin. I repositioned Ranita on the towels, lifting her gently, not wanting to let go, and stood. After weeks of sleeping in a bed, the floor left stiffness in my limbs that reminded me of the jail.
Jeremia watched as I opened the closet door, pulled out the old discarded T-shirt with the big mouse on it and slipped into the bathroom. His eyes were more curious and watchful than I remembered.
The shirt was clean, laundered and dry, but I had not worn it since before Christmas, when I’d purchased my new clothes. Now, when I pulled it down over my chest, it was stretched tight, and I tugged at it so it would cover my stomach. I didn’t remember it being so form-fitting.
I peered at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair, long and black, hung straight down my back. I pulled it away from my face, pretending to secure it behind my head. The split lips became more pronounced, so I dropped my hair back around my face and over my shoulders.
He stepped into the bathroom behind me. I could feel the heat radiating from his body, and I breathed in the richness of his smell. When his hands slipped around my waist and his chin settled on the top of my head, I closed my eyes and leaned against him. He placed his lips against my neck with the lightest of touches, the lift of a dragonfly, and yet my heart pounded in response. His hands tightened around my waist, and I felt his chest muscles move against my back. Closer, I thought, I want you closer. And then I felt Eva’s hand against my leg, and Jeremia pulled away.
I showed Eva the shower. She experimented with the hot and cold taps, shrieking in surprise when water spurted over her extended hand, a shockingly warm rain, and then quickly took off her clothes and stepped inside. I handed Eva the soap and a washcloth. She scrubbed her body, dirt streaking in rivulets down her arms, and then I washed her hair.
I felt Jeremia’s presence behind me, the smell that made me think of the forest and cool places beneath the trees. He had found the card I’d left beside the bathroom sink.
“What is this?” He tried to hand the card back to me.
I shut the door to the shower and turned to look in the mirror. Our eyes met, but he never once looked at my misshapen lips or crooked teeth. Maybe he didn’t see them anymore but saw only me.
“It’s called a cleft palate,” I said. “This doctor says she can fix them. Ranita’s for sure because she’s still a baby.”
Jeremia’s eyebrows drew together. “Nathanael would have told us,” he said.
“Nathanael didn’t know everything.”
I tensed my shoulders, wondering if Jeremia would turn angry and dark. I thought of his arms around my waist, his chest against my back, and I thought of whirling, happy Jeremia at the fire. That Jeremia was not here now.
“Why would this doctor help her?” Jeremia dropped the card back beside the sink.
“Because someone fixed hers.”
“Can she give me a new arm?” he said.
“No, but I think you might be able to buy a mechanical one.”
His eyes widened, and his shoulders pulled back. I thought for a minute that he might smile or laugh. Instead, I heard Eva begin to sing, adding her sweet voice to the water falling over her head, and even though Jeremia didn’t smile, I did.
They slept the whole day, ate a tray of cafeteria food as if they’d never had such a wonderful meal and then slept again. While they slept, I studied in the library and practiced in the practice rooms. I was learning music from the masters now, and even though I didn’t read the notes well yet, I could hear a song once and repeat it almost perfectly. I practiced songs by Cavali, Albéniz, Sanz, and I began to learn different approaches, different ways to express the voice inside. I loved my hours of practice and continued them even though my family was now with me. My other classes were still a challenge, but my instructors were pleased and surprised at the improvements I was making, given my lack of formal education.
Jeremia, Eva and Ranita slept fifteen hours a day, took showers and looked out my window with its view of the campus—at the walking paths between stone buildings and the carefully placed trees that had been pruned and trimmed to look like perfect representations of themselves rather than natural forms. When they began to get restless and impatient, I knew it was time. I would take them to see the doctor on Saturday. I didn’t know if she would be there, and part of me hoped that she wouldn’t, but I could not put off the meeting any longer.
Dr. Ruiz’s office was not far from the school. Eva skipped and sang, dancing like a firefly on the sidewalk in her orange coat, her wrists sticking out of the sleeves like chicken legs. She touched the fences we passed, gaped at the large warm houses and pointed, shrieking, when she saw a woman walking a dog. Jeremia shuffled beside me, his eyes down, his hand dug deeply into his pants pocket. He stepped around the people we passed on the sidewalk, not glancing up. It had taken a week of cajoling to convince him that a meeting with Dr. Ruiz wasn’t a commitment.
I wondered what we looked like to those who passed us. The woman with the dog smiled at Eva when she saw her skipping, then held a hand to her mouth when Eva twirled on the sidewalk, her hands splayed above her head, the webbing between the fingers pink and thin. Now that I walked with my family, I had no need for the veil. I kept my head up and looked into the faces of those we passed.
Dr. Ruiz’s office was not what I had imagined. I had thought it would be a bustling place with formidable glass doors, like Randall and Burns, but it was just a house of two stories with wide steps leading to the porch and a door painted deep green. I straightened my shoulders and marched up the steps, pretending that my heart and Ranita’s were not beating in unison. I had to show my family that I was not afraid, that I knew what I was doing, but my hands shook and my mouth felt dry when we stood on the porch.
Eva pushed the button by the door. Then she stood, arm raised, finger pointed, eager to push the button again. Jeremia waited on the sidewalk below. We listened to footsteps moving inside the house. Both Eva and I took a step back when the door opened.
Dr. Ruiz looked different from the last time I’d seen her. She wore a lime-green shirt and pants that encased her doughy body like a cocoon, and when she saw us, she clapped her hands together and laughed. Her cheeks pushed up into soft bulges, and Eva clapped her hands in response, giggling at this caterpillar of a woman.
“Wonderful that you’re here,” she said. “Come in, come in.”
She stepped aside and Eva followed without hesitating, her head turning as she consumed the artwork on the walls, the wood floors, the sculptures placed in the corners of the first room. The rugs and curtains of the house were a deep burgundy with bright bits of yellow, as though they had been made from the petals of black-eyed Susans.
Jeremia, still standing on the sidewalk, watched Eva enter the house. His fist bulged in the pocket of his grimy jeans, and his shoulders hunched. He looked down the street, tensed, and I wondered if he would run, if this would be the last I would see of him. I watched, ready to chase after him if need be. Instead, a shiver ran through him, and then he stepped forward onto the stairs and entered the house.
“Bilateral cleft palates. Two of you. And the little one with syndactyly and the older with a missing appendage. Simply remarkable. Such an increase in deformities these days.”
We followed Dr. Ruiz down a short hallway with two closed doors on the right and large open rooms on our left. I wanted to stand still, touch with my eyes all the beauty in the rooms, but Jeremia marched forward, looking neither left nor right, following the woman down the hallway as though headed to his execution. It was so different now. Before, I’d just worried about my own reception and had kept my face covered, but now that we were all here together, I needed to know how Jeremia was feeling and how Eva responded to the people around her. I had no time for my own emotions.
Jeremia stopped abruptly at the end of the hall. I looked into the corner between the hallway and the kitchen. There was a statue, long and thin, with smooth, separated pieces running from the top to the bottom. It was a sculpture of water, of shadow, of sunshine beams stretching through tree branches.
Dr. Ruiz looked at us from the kitchen, wondering why we’d stopped, and saw us studying the statue in the hallway. She came to stand beside us.
“Oh, I love that piece, but I’m afraid it fell after I bought it at the marketplace.”
She leaned forward, turned the piece around and showed us the back. The sculpture was dented and gouged.
“If I keep it in the corner, no one can tell it’s damaged,” Dr. Ruiz said.
Jeremia dug into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a miniature sculpture very similar to the one in the corner.
Dr. Ruiz gasped. “You did these?” She flipped the miniature sculpture around in her hand. “This is exquisite.” She looked up, her chubby cheeks sagging. “You are a talented young man. How did you learn to do this?”
“We had a lot of spare time. You can get pretty good with practice.”
“But look at the way the wood moves like water. I’ve always felt that somehow the water was frozen into the wood.”
Jeremia ran his finger down one of the flowing pieces of the statue. “I’ve gotten better. This is crude.”
“Crude? I think this is a beautiful sculpture. Is your work that much better now?” She looked again at the piece in her hand. She examined it from all sides, almost smelling it. “Yes, this one is better. You’re right. This one is alive.” She looked up at Jeremia, her face serious. “Would you make me a new sculpture? One just like this? I’ll find the wood.”
I held my breath as I watched Jeremia. He ran his hand over the large sculpture in the corner, his long narrow fingers flowing with the movement of the wood.
“Yes, I’ll make you a new one.”
“Like this one,” said Dr. Ruiz, giving the sculpture back to Jeremia.
“Somewhat similar,” he said.
She clapped her hands again, grinned and giggled. “Marvelous. Simply marvelous.” She skipped into the kitchen.
Dr. Ruiz bustled about, pulling mugs from the cupboard and filling them with cocoa powder and milk. She set the mugs in a microwave. All the while she chatted about her plants in the window, about the mess on the table, about how thrilled she was that we’d come.
She ushered us into chairs around the circular kitchen table. When a fat orange cat strolled into the room, Eva wrapped her arms around the animal, and the two of them curled up on the kitchen floor, the feline purring a deep rumbling murmur and Eva cooing softly to it and stroking its head. Dr. Ruiz clapped her hands and laughed again. Her lime-green clothing lit up the green of her eyes but made her pale skin look almost yellow.
“May I?” she asked.
I carefully extracted Ranita from the cloth wrapped around my chest. She opened her mouth in a wide yawn, blinked and looked at me. Then she smiled. I felt the sting of tears in my nose and impulsively held her close. The doctor’s soft hands wrapped around Ranita’s middle and she took my sister, holding her out in front of her.
“Look at you, precious.” The doctor rubbed her nose against Ranita’s. “We can fix you right up.” She leaned Ranita against her shoulder and patted her back a couple of times. She didn’t hold Ranita with two hands as though she were delicate and about to break, but gently bobbed her against her shoulder and snuggled her close. I realized that my hands were in the air, twitching to receive Ranita back again. I put them under the table, on my lap, where they could twitch without being seen.
“These are pictures of children and adults with the bilateral cleft palate.” Dr. Ruiz pushed a large square book with a dark-blue cover into the middle of the table. She flipped open the cover and pointed to a picture encased in a plastic sleeve. It was a picture of me.
When I flipped the page and looked at the next one, the woman from the first page no longer had the splits from her nose to her mouth, nor did she have the holes beneath her nose. Her teeth did not protrude awkwardly. In the second picture, red bumpy seams had taken the place of the holes. On the next page, the seams were not as prominent, and by the fourth page, the seams were still noticeable scars running from her nose to her mouth, but they weren’t swollen, and both her nose and mouth looked almost normal. I leaned over the book, examining the picture as closely as I could, wanting to know how this could happen. I wanted to push the book away, shove it across the table at this puffball of a woman who giggled and chattered like a squirrel. But at the same time I wanted to see more.
The next picture was of a baby. Ranita. Again, the splits in the face were prominent, noticeable, disfiguring and irregular. After a few pages, the baby’s scars were nothing more than a fuller upper lip and thin white lines. By the last page, the child was maybe four years old and had a huge smile on her face—a perfect smile showing no gums, only clean, even teeth.
Jeremia sat beside me, breathing against my shoulder. I heard his intake of air, the speeding up of his breath as we flipped through the pages. This could be Ranita. This could be me. Eva abandoned the cat and stood between our chairs, watching the transformation as we flipped through the pages.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, looking at Jeremia. “I don’t want it done to Ranita if it hurts.”
“Yes,” Dr. Ruiz said in her soft voice, the final s pulled long, “there will be some discomfort. But the baby will no longer have difficulties eating, she will no longer have the chronic earaches, she will no longer have the nasal voice. The surgery will be easiest for the baby and most difficult for Whisper.”
I wanted to hold Jeremia’s hand, but his fingers were held tightly to the edge of the table, and his knuckles were white. I leaned toward him, wanting to ease my arm through his, but he was as stiff as one of his sculptures. He studied Dr. Ruiz’s face, examining the thin line between her nose and lip, searching her eyes to see if she was someone he could trust.
“Why did it happen?” Jeremia’s mouth barely moved when he spoke.
“We’re not sure. It seems that something occurs in gestation—some developmental step is skipped, and the child is born with a hole in the roof of her mouth. It is nothing anyone did or could have prevented.”
Jeremia watched her as she spoke, his lips drawn tight.
“But,” she continued, “there have been too many deformities in the past fifteen years—and we don’t know why. There are four of you here, four from the same village, and all with various developmental traumas. Something is causing these deformities, some environmental factor, but we have not figured out what it is. Pollution? Chemicals? Contaminants in the food?” Dr. Ruiz shrugged her shoulders and patted Ranita’s back.
Jeremia sat at the table, holding the mug of cocoa in his hand while Dr. Ruiz explained the procedure to us. I took quick, careful sips from the mug. My lips didn’t fit against the cup, and I didn’t know what might froth from my nose. The cat was now curled up against Eva on the seat of the chair. She stroked the cat and watched us, her eyebrows drawn low.
“We need to go. We need to think about this,” Jeremia said, suddenly standing.
“Of course, of course. But don’t think too long. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. Syndactyly can also be fixed with surgery.”
Eva knew the doctor was talking about her, because she held up her fingers and tried to stretch them wide.
When Dr. Ruiz handed Ranita to Jeremia, his shoulders straightened and his arm held tight to the cooing baby. We pulled on our coats and walked to the door, saying nothing.
“We’ve got maybe two months before we really need to start the process,” Dr. Ruiz said as she followed us down the hallway. “For the baby, do it as soon as possible.”
We walked down the street slowly. Even Eva was quiet, her fingers cold and curled in mine.
“It’s so much bigger than the earaches or the holes in mouths,” Jeremia said. “Why would it matter if your face changed? It won’t change you or the fact that you were ostracized by your family.”
“But it might help Ranita belong. And Eva,” I said.
“I don’t want to have the surgery,” Eva said. “Then I can’t swim like a fish. And Ranita doesn’t want it either—I can tell.”
“This isn’t about want,” I said. “It’s about need and should. Do you need the surgery? Should you have the surgery?”
“I don’t need anything but you. I shouldn’t have anything I don’t need,” Eva said, beginning to skip again.
Jeremia looked at me over Eva’s head, and for a minute as quiet and fast as a heartbeat, I thought he was going to smile.