CHAPTER 14

“So you think there’s any chance Hogar de los Niños can buy that old place?” Wearing a pair of boxer shorts dotted with sombrero-wearing chile peppers that one of the women purchased for her foundling that afternoon, John Chandler spat a mouthful of Blaine’s toothpaste into the hotel sink. The toothbrush was courtesy of the hotel.

“It’s a long shot.” Blaine stared from his bed at the swirls in the plaster ceiling, hands folded behind his head. “But as the priest said, all things are possible.” Since meeting Caroline, Blaine was beginning to believe it.

He stifled a yawn behind the back of his hand. It had been an exhausting day, and everyone, the students included, opted to turn in early. Where his mother got the idea that he’d be relaxing was beyond him. Going night and day like this, keeping up with teens, was harder than his most taxing week of travel. At least he didn’t have to entertain clients twenty-four/seven.

“You really believe that?”

“What?”

Upon wiping off his face with a towel, the young man tossed it in a heap on the counter.

Blaine’s clenched jaw checked a reprimand to hang it next to the one that he’d meticulously refolded and hung to dry earlier, as the youth walked over to the other double bed.

“That all things are possible,” he said, dropping down on the mattress.

John Chandler not only acted like Mark; he looked like Blaine’s younger brother at the same age. With sandy blond hair cut to perfection and blue eyes with naturally dark lashes to set them off, he was a female magnet. Once they heard his smooth lines, girls competed over him, while their mothers fawned. Not that Blaine, with his father’s darker features, had ever had trouble garnering feminine attention when he sought it. He simply didn’t make a game of it like Mark. But then, life was a game to his brother, just as it was for this kid. And the game was called Let’s see what I can get out of this.

“You got a new toothbrush, shorts, T-shirt, food, shelter, and transportation for two days without putting out a cent, didn’t you?”

Strike one. Guilt grazed Blaine’s consciousness the minute the cynicism escaped. The boy looked sincere. Or was he just buttering up a babe’s old man?

John winced, a painful look flickering across his face. “Okay, I’m talking God’s grace, certainly not yours.”

The shot hit its mark. Blaine had shown little grace where John, or Mark, for that matter, was concerned. Put John’s way, it didn’t sound nearly as righteous. “Sorry, I asked for that one.”

Apology accepted in silence, the young man shifted on the other bed, mimicking Blaine’s position. “My mom was religious,” he said, “and I was brought up in church. Then Dad died and she remarried. Everything changed.”

Blaine took it that the change was not for the good. Strike two with the guilt bat.

“I went from being part of a family to being ‘the kid.’ I mean, nothing I could do made my stepdad like me. I wasn’t as smart as his son. I wasn’t as ambitious as his son. It was like there was some undeclared competition, and I was the loser from the get-go.” John scratched his nose with the back of his wrist.

“By the time I was in high school, I gave up trying to please. If I was going to go anywhere, it wasn’t going to be with help from home. So I got good grades, joined the right clubs and teams, and got out of town.” The boy’s lip curled with resentment. “He didn’t even give me a pat on the back for the honors and awards. Just one when I walked out the door, like he was as eager to see me go as I was to leave.”

“To Mexico?”

John snorted. “I wasn’t going to UC or anywhere near home.”

Blaine did a mental check. “I thought you said you were from Chicago.”

“I am. My stepbrother went to UC Berkeley. Not only is he a snitch; he’s as bad as his dad when it comes to downing the kid.”

“Oh.” He thought he’d caught John in a lie. Mark was a polished liar, which meant he told the truth. But it was simply shaded in the wrong light.

Silence enveloped them. John turned off the light and settled back on the creaky bed.

Blaine didn’t know which pricked his conscience more, the pain in John’s voice or his actual words. Did Mark think of him in the same way as John did his stepfather?

“You know, sometimes dads—”and brothers, he added to himself—“ride the younger kid because they want him to succeed.”

He spoke in his own defense. “Because they love him and don’t want to see him make a mistake that can ruin his life. The easiest way isn’t always the best way, if you get my drift.”

“I guess.” John didn’t sound as if he wanted to agree, but he did.

Mark would have danced his way around the issue with what-ifs.

“Thanks for being straight with me.”

“Anytime.” Blaine closed his eyes, waiting, wondering if this odd-couple heart-to-heart was over. Maybe he’d been too harsh with this boy.

Maybe John and Mark weren’t the oddballs, but he was. Blaine had had to grow up faster, take over the business and family responsibilities after his dad’s first heart attack, and see his siblings educated and established in their careers. It was a thankless job. Perhaps it was the resulting resentment of all work and no play that made him so hard on Mark, more than his concern for his brother’s welfare.

It was totally different with their younger sister. The baby of the family was a child prodigy, gullible in her genius, but always walking in family favor and faith. Mark was the antithesis of Jeanne and Blaine.

God, I just don’t know. If that is the case, if I am too hard on my brother, open my eyes. I don’t want to be like the men who made this kid’s life miserable. I just want to see Mark stop disappointing Mom.

That’s the hardest— “By the way . . . ” John interrupted the spontaneous prayer.

And it was a prayer, Blaine realized in wonder. He hadn’t spoken to God since Ellie died. Traveling around with a band of believers must be rubbing off on him. Unlike the world Blaine circulated in, where spiritual issues were taboo, these people talked about praying for this and that as if it were as natural as eating. There seemed to be room for formal meals, like the prayer said each morning before the bus pulled out, and take-outs along the way of “Thank the Lord” when things went well or they found the good concealed in layers within the bad.

“Yes?” Blaine tore himself from his introspection.

“Mind if I borrow one of your shirts for tomorrow? The T-shirt I wore today smells like something died in it, and there’s no Laundromat nearby.”

“Did it occur to you that you might wash it out by hand?”

Blaine grated out, impatience banishing the wonder of his spiritual introspection. After all, there was a lot in the Scripture about discipline too.

A moment of charged silence eventually led to the kind of enlightenment Edison must have known when the idea of the lightbulb came to him. “Oh, yeah!” There went the mental click of the switch. “Thanks, dude.”

With that, the bedside light came on, assaulting Blaine’s eyes and testing the restraint of every muscle in his body, including his tongue. This dude needs shut-eye.

“I never thought of that. You got any soap?”

Blaine took a deep breath. “Use the bar the hotel provided. It has a lovely scent.” Seizing his pillow, he tossed on his side, away from the additional blaze of lights from the bathroom vanity.

“And wash your socks, while you’re at it,” he added, getting a whiff of the sneakers parked next to him by the nightstand. Pulling his pillow over his head, he mumbled into it. “They’ve a pungent bouquet all their own.”

The passing sun-splashed hillsides of roses looked like God-sized bouquets of pink, white, and red as the bus struggled up, down, and around the curving highway leading from Mexicalli to Cuernavaca. Cameras clicked all around Caroline, but she was too wrapped in thought to bother. All she could see in her mind was the face of the little boy she’d tucked into bed the night before.

Berto couldn’t read, write, or even speak her language, but he’d read her heart.

“Go mañana?” he asked, dark eyes peering over the edge of the blanket he’d played peekaboo with earlier.

Caroline couldn’t lie. “Sí, niñito, tengo que ir con los otros,” she said, sad to be leaving.

He said no more. As she gave him a kiss, he disentangled his arms from the blanket and hugged her tightly. She held the child until he tired and let go. His acceptance without question led her to believe this wasn’t the first time the boy had been disappointed.

When she rose to leave, wet cheeks were the only sign of his despair. And hers.

Caroline fished a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. This was ridiculous. She’d only known the child forty-eight hours. He probably did that with all the mission people who stopped by the orphanage to help out. She couldn’t imagine them having the least trouble finding a loving a home for such a darling child, but Father Menasco pointed out to her, when she said as much after church that morning, that there were so many beautiful children and very few homes that did not already have more mouths than could be adequately fed.

Beside her, Blaine covered the fist in which she compressed the tissue with his hand. A quiet understanding met her gaze as she lifted it to his. At the first quiver of her chin, she turned back to the window where a wall of solid brown rock rose higher than she could see from inside the bus. He must think her a silly goose, but he was at least gentleman enough to keep his derision to himself.

At his reassuring squeeze of her hand, she forced a smile and leaned her head against the seat.

Closing her eyes, Caroline listened to the groan and growl of shifting gears as the bus climbed higher yet into the wrinkled gray-green mountain range before them. Maybe she was just overtired from the relentless pace of the tour. Maybe it was the paper-perfect moon that filled her heart with fanciful ideas of love and taking a little boy home with her. Maybe . . .

What seemed no more than moments later, the blast of a horn startled Caroline from her nap as the bus lurched off a railed stone bridge and plunged like a whale into a fishbowl of narrow streets designed for carriages—or at the most, the beetle-bug cars so prevalent on the highways and city streets.

Hector tapped on his microphone. “Señores, señoras, y señoritas, we are now entering the town of eternal spring . . . Cuernavaca.”

He leaned to the side as driver Bill made a tight turn. “Because we are behind the others in our tour, we will stop only for lunch. And, of course, shopping,” he added with a look that all but conjured dollar signs in his eyes. “Okay?”

“H’okay!” the group answered, mimicking his enunciation.

“To the left,” Hector pointed out, “is the Palacio de Cortéz. He liked Cuernavaca’s year-round pleasant weather so well, he says, ‘Those Indians don’t need that pyramid,’ and he takes the pyramid apart and builds this medieval fortress with its stones right on its base.”

It was a beautiful town, cobbled streets filled with Spanish colonial architecture. Sidewalk cafés added the mouthwatering appeal of baking breads and sweets, strong coffees, and mesquite meats cooking on grills. An “in your face” Walgreen’s and a few other international chain restaurants broke the ambience here and there, but it was short-lived, overpowered by the history preserved in stone that had seen Aztec rule give way to Spanish and French, and then return to independence. The bus eventually squeezed into a parking place among other buses alongside the high-walled compound of the Cathedral de la Asunción, built, according to their guide, like a fortress to protect its Franciscan founders from the hostile natives, as well as to intimidate the latter.

“Now, mis amigos,” Hector said over the bus intercom. “There are several cafés and shops in this area, as well as tours of the church and gardens. But,” he emphasized, “we only have two hours, because we spent all our time at the orphanage. At 1:30 sharp, the bus leaves. Entienden? ”

With a chorus of “Entienden,” the passengers scrambled to get off the bus.

“Dónde está el servicio de postal? ” Kurt asked Hector in his best high school Spanish on the way out of the vehicle. “I got some postcards to mail and need to get stamps.”

Hector pointed down the street. “One block a la izquierda, on the left.”

“Would you mind mailing mine?” Caroline asked, tugging out the cards she’d written the night before. Hector had warned the travelers that they’d most likely be back in Pennsylvania before the cards got there, but the thought and foreign stamps made them special—at least it was when she received foreign mail.

“Wanna go with us?” Kurt asked Karen, with a hopeful expression.

“Why would I want to do that?” she answered, shooting it down.

“Beats me,” the boy recovered, shrugging. “I mean, why would anyone want to give up my charm and Wally’s brains for the bubble-wit champs?” Kurt nodded to where the other kids were trying to outdo each other in a bubble gum–blowing contest.

“Ahora, no gum in school, no gum on the trip,” Señora Marron snapped a few feet away. Producing tissues from her purse, she proceeded to collect the pink goo from the bubble-blowing recalci-trants. “We do not need someone losing”—she drew out the word with a pointed lift of one pencil-black eyebrow—“his gum in the museums or shops, no?”

Kurt grinned at Karen. “Need I say more?”

Always a sucker for the underdog, Caroline suppressed a little Go Kurt as, pony-express style sans the pony, Kurt and Wally headed for the post office with a backpack of mail from the group. After a lunch of roast beef sandwiches, Sanborn’s chain specialty, some of the group headed for the shops, but Caroline opted to spend the remaining time at the Cathedral de la Asunción de María.

Painted in earth colors of red and tan, it fit right in with the other colonial buildings she’d seen, although the walls beyond the facade were aged and weathered stone. The main sanctuary was stark in comparison, with frescoes on the wall depicting someone’s martyrdom.

“I’m glad I didn’t live in those times,” she confided to Blaine. “I don’t know that I’d be that committed under the threat of torture, much less be able to endure it. Makes me feel like a spiritual wimp.”

“Being around this group makes me feel like a spiritual wimp.”

Caroline looked at her companion, startled. “Why would you say that?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t paid all that much attention to my”— he paused, searching for the right word—“to developing the kind of relationship with a higher power I see in you and some of these people.”

“With God?”

“Whatever you want to call it . . . or Him.” His voice filled with disbelief. “I think I envy it.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, it comes and goes in all of us. What I mean,” she added, seeing a flicker of surprise prick at his forehead, “is that it rises and ebbs in all of us. When things are good, that peace is great. But when questions or life assails one’s faith . . . well, let’s just say forging by fire isn’t a walk in the park. Yet, it’s by that testing or fire that we get rid of our impurities and grow stronger. I have no doubt that I am stronger and wiser because of some of the hardships in my life. And I’ve been rewarded many times over for holding on to my faith and persevering when a task intimidated me.”

Like the thought of raising a small child in your early forties?

Caroline silently argued against the nagging voice. Lord, if that’s You, You know that’s not fair. I’ve raised Annie. I take care of everyone else’s kids now.

“Picture me as a cat clinging to the window of faith.” She held up her hands like claws, exacting a toe-curling grin from the man next to her.

Caroline had hoped to find some peace of mind in the sanctuary, not stir up her feelings even more. She was a professional now. Her schedule wouldn’t allow her to take on another child, even though the motherly feelings Berto had stirred in her heart would. Besides, she knew nothing about raising a boy. What kind of role model could she provide him? It wouldn’t be fair to him, she argued with herself as she and Blaine made their way out of the building into the recinto, or walled-in compound. Scribed into the stones of the old church were the names of those who’d died during its construction.

“This trip, being with you and the others, has caused me to reexamine my thoughts on many things . . .” Blaine said, interrupting her internal argument. “About faith and family.” He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. “I’ve been trying to maintain the status quo, even when I wasn’t happy with it. Maybe because I didn’t want it to get any worse. Or maybe it’s because I was comfortable, if not thrilled, with what I knew. I preferred discontent of the known to the possible promise of the unknown.” He exhaled a breath though his lips with a half whistle. “I guess that boils down to lack of faith, huh?”

“Was it Mark Twain who said only wet babies like change?”

Caroline smiled, but Blaine’s admission struck a chord in her mind. Is that what she was doing in her life—holding on to the status quo so tightly that she was squeezing out the potential for further happiness or fulfillment? Was she like the guy in Ecclesiastes whose heart rejoiced in all his labor only to find it was all vanity and grasping at the wind? The wind instead of the joy she’d felt holding little Berto in her arms?

“I’ll bet you keep God in stitches,” Blaine teased. He slipped his arm about her waist and gave her a playful hug.

For such an innocent gesture, its effect on Caroline was profound.

In addition to a little boy in her arms, she imagined herself in Blaine’s embrace. And there was Annie, entering the group hug, and Karen. Great. Now the voices in her head were drawing pictures.

God, is this the result of hormones and emotions running amok, or a preview of what could be—if I were willing to leave my current comfort zone and take a chance on love and faith?

“Time to get back to the bus.” Blaine didn’t remove his arm.

Instead, he used it to usher her through the ancient tombstones toward the gated entrance. It felt so right there, being this close to him . . . and safe within the protective circle of his arm.

“Mom, look what I got for the bathroom,” Annie called out to them as they approached the bus. Digging into a plastic bag, she produced a ceramic dish. “It’s a soap dish with the same blue as our bathroom, and it says Cuernavaca on it.” Having resolved to buy a small but practical souvenir from every place they visited, Annie was thrilled.

“It’ll be perfect.”

“Annie,” Karen called out from inside the baggage bay. “Toss it to me, and I’ll stow it with my stuff for now. I can’t find your backpack.”

“Kurt and Wally helped load the luggage this morning while Karen and John and I were at the hotel gift shop.” Annie rolled her blue eyes heavenward. “Males! Everything is mixed up.”

Caroline smiled. Boy, could she relate. Between Blaine and Berto, her heart, mind, and spirit were as mixed up as they could get. Or maybe Hector was right about that moon.