34

It’s hard to say what went through my mind. For a moment, the time line of my life unraveled before me like a vast stretch of ocean seen from a high ridge. I could tell which regrets would stick, and which mistakes I could still fix.

I found a taxi right outside the terminal. Once again, the road to Cara Sucia seemed so much shorter when not traveling by bus, as if the whole nation were shrinking beneath my feet. In less than one hour, I stood in the doorway to Niña Tere’s house.

“Malia?” she said, a bit shocked.

“Can I stay with you for a while?”

“You can stay here as long as you like. It’s our pleasure.”

The second quake hadn’t been nearly as strong in Cara Sucia or its environs. The people there were less traumatized than anybody I’d seen for days.

By the next morning, I’d met with the village council and convinced them to repair the aqueduct. It was less regimented than the previous phase of construction. Everyone—even women and children—formed a disorganized mob and dug ditches for the distribution lines, the pipes that would run from the tanks into their homes. Every pick and shovel in Cara Sucia swung for weeks on end. It became a sort of social event, like an Amish barn raising. The work was slowed by constant mischief and coffee breaks, but it got done.

For my part, I took a handful of the best workers—the ones who had real construction experience, or at least a good work ethic—and led them up to the spring. Like before, we used red clay to move the river and dry out the area around the spring box. With an unsightly mess of stone and concrete, we sealed up the sides, where our box had come apart during the first quake.

From there, we worked our way down. I spent all of the money in my recovered bank account on cement and pipes. In some cases, we were able to replace the galvanized sections. In others, we laid PVC and covered it over with a stone and concrete sleeve. All the while, I told the workers—and myself—that our goal shouldn’t be to build an indestructible water system, but to make one that could be repaired in the event of floods or earthquakes or other acts of God. Flexibility, I reminded them, is more important than strength.

I spoke to my father about what was happening. He was confused but patient, glad that I sounded so safe and stable over the phone. I never told the Peace Corps or anybody else what I was up to. It took weeks to summon the strength, but I managed to write a letter to Ben’s family. I didn’t say much about who I was, but instead emphasized Ben’s last days in La Lib, the hero that he had become late in his final act. Hopefully, his father and brothers would find something to admire in that.

At night, in my little bed inside Niña Tere’s house, I often kept myself awake wondering where Ben and I might be if things had turned out differently, if we hadn’t met Pelo, if we’d never quit in the first place. I guessed which country we’d be in by now, my mind making the southbound journey that my body never could.

Might we be surfing that long Peruvian left, riding backside for the first time in years? Might we be in Patagonia, staying in one of those cabins in Torres del Paine that Ben sometimes talked about, standing on the banks of a blue-green glacial lake, staring up at snowcapped peaks reflecting the pink light of dusk, alpacas grazing at their base? How long would it have taken us to reach the Tierra del Fuego—that place that even my imagination lacks the vocabulary to describe? Ben might’ve tossed that southbound stone he so often spoke of into the sea.

That seemed the cruelest part to me: that he couldn’t have lived at least one more year. Had he gotten to the bottom of that continent, spent twelve months doing exactly what he wanted, his life would’ve felt a hundred times more complete.

*   *   *

Without any sort of institutional bureaucracy, with only a personal bank account for a budget, with no lip service about sustainability or empowerment or whatever, the job went incredibly fast. I worked from dawn till dusk every day, and got home in time for a giant dinner and a bucket bath at Niña Tere’s.

Was I happy during this time? I was unconflicted, which seemed like enough. Had my kuleana been in Cara Sucia all along? Even that seems like an oversimplification. I’m still as cynical as ever about development and relief. This was more about finishing what I’d started, getting a baby-faced monkey off my back.

On the big day, my work crew finished up at the tank and walked back to the village. I went to Niña Tere’s house and told her to open the valve on the faucet, the one that had stood there useless above her cistern for so many months. A series of oddly human sounds came from the tap—gurgles, coughs, throaty breaths. She grimaced at me and started to close it again, but I told her to wait. After a minute or two, a slow dribble finally came from the pipes. Soon, the gravity-fed pressure built up, forcing the water out in a straight, strong arc. Nora clapped her hands and ran in circles. Rambo barked. Whoops and hollers erupted from the surrounding houses. Old ladies thanked the same saints they’d blamed for the earthquake. A couple of guns were shot in the air.

Niña Tere wiped away the beginnings of tears in her eyes, and we went out to the street. People splashed their dry courtyards. Spouses dumped bucketfuls of water atop one another. Somehow, a pair of mischievous teenagers made water balloons—as if that was some instinctual adolescent skill, born into even those children who’d never had running water in their homes. I wondered if I should warn everyone not to be wasteful, but I decided it was a good idea to bleed the air and pressurize the lines.

All the people from the village came up to offer congratulations, even some timid hugs. “Ingeniera,” they said, “the water has finally fallen.”

Niña Tere held on to my hand as we watched the celebration. “What will you do now?” she asked me.

“Now,” I said, “I have to go home.”

I left there the day after the water arrived. I didn’t mean to be cold about it, but it wasn’t fair to my father to stay even one minute longer than necessary. The members of the village council wanted to throw a party for me, but I assured them that it was better this way, that the Cara Sucians congratulate themselves for the project, rather than some short-term visitor.

I found myself at the airport again, not even four full months later. This time, I boarded my flight.

*   *   *

Back here in Honolulu, it didn’t take long to find the job that I’ve had for years now. It’s an engineering and architectural firm that specializes in green homes for rich people—mostly on Maui and the Big Island. The ironic part is that much of my work these days involves designing exactly the sorts of features that Pelochucho wanted for his ill-advised resort: retaining walls, erosion-proof drainage, seismic foundations.

It’s a good living. After a year or so in my father’s house, I moved into my own apartment in one of the tall glass towers near Ala Moana. It’s on a high floor, far above the street noise, and has an ocean view.

But at the hotel restaurant where I agreed to meet Alex, I find it hard to summarize my life these days.

“Do you keep in touch with anybody from El Salvador?” Alex asks me as the food arrives.

“Not much.” I shrug. “It isn’t something I’m proud of; I thought I’d always write, to Niña Tere at least. But nobody has Internet access in Cara Sucia, so … it just tapered off eventually.”

“I know what you mean.” He finds the steak knife and cuts into his meat. “And who has the time?”

In the booth beside him, Alex’s elder son quietly accepts the small morsels of food that his mother makes for him. As Courtney predicted, Alex has been touring the world with the Red Cross for years now. He went straight to New York City after El Salvador, from there to sites around the Indian Ocean, then to New Orleans, Haiti, Central Asia, and so on. He married a beautiful Indonesian girl he met doing tsunami relief. They have two young boys. The four of them stopped to spend some vacation days in Waikiki on their way back from visiting her parents in Jakarta.

I was shocked when he called my office and asked if I’d join them for dinner. Apart from a few odd e-mails, it was the first time we’d spoken since that day by the beach in La Lib. He looks happy—quite bald now, and softer around the middle. The scars along his forearms have almost completely faded away. I enjoyed chatting with him about his life but find that I do not envy it. The very idea of all that destruction all the time, it unsettles me. Important or not, it seems an unbalanced way to live, always focused on the globe’s most desperate scenes. Even the constant plane travel sounds unbearable.

His kids are cute, and well behaved, but they don’t make me want any of my own. Alex’s wife seems nice enough, but she is quiet and hard to have any sort of conversation with. She mostly minds the boys while Alex and I talk.

Alex refills my wine, and asks the waiter for a second bottle. “You still surf?”

“I’ve got a couple of boards,” I say. “I go if the waves are good, and if I have the time.” I take a sip from my glass. “Where are you headed to next?”

“D.C. for the rest of the year, then on to Afghanistan.” He rolls his eyes. “Two of my least favorite places.”

As the plates are cleared, Alex’s second bottle arrives. It’s totally unnecessary, as he and I are the only ones drinking, and we barely finished the first. Nobody wants dessert. Their mother takes the boys upstairs to bed. Alex asks me to stick around and help him with the wine.

“Think you’ll ever go back there, to El Salvador?” he asks.

“I doubt it. By the end, it was so much effort to close that chapter of my life, I’ve never wanted to open it back up.”

He nods and fills both our wineglasses up to the brim. “I’ll tell you one thing: I sure wish you’d stayed on in La Libertad, worked that site with me. What a shitstorm that town was.” He looks up at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Who knows how things might’ve worked out?”

I shrug. “Who knows?”

“I’m really sorry about what happened to Ben down there.”

I look at the sea and the night beyond him. The sun has set, but lights from the waterfront restaurants still light up the incoming waves. “It was a bad thing, a tragedy.”

“You think of him often?”

“Sometimes.” I still can’t bring my eyes back to Alex’s.

“Being married now…” He struggles for words. “I guess it’s clear how easy it is to end up with somebody for the rest of your life, you know. It’s almost like you have to kick and scream to keep that from happening, after a certain age.”

“I guess.”

“Did you love him? Really love him?”

I reel my gaze in, and nod. “We were in love; I know that. We were in love like only twenty-three-year-olds can be. Naïvely, recklessly. Would we have stayed together had he lived? I can’t say. Would it have worked—the two of us—under any other circumstances, at any other place and time? I’m not so sure about that, either.” I turn the glass around on the table. “In a way, it doesn’t seem fair to hang all those hypotheticals on it, you know?”

“Still smoke?”

“No.”

“Me, neither. If I bought some, would you have one with me, for old times’ sake?”

“I’d rather not.”

He gulps down more wine. “Should we go somewhere else? I’d love to check out your place.”

“Alex.” I move the wineglass out of the way and lower my head closer to the table. “This was a nice evening. It’s good to see you. Why don’t you go upstairs to your family now.”

I stand up, and at that very moment a band breaks into song in the bar adjacent to this restaurant—guitar and ukulele, a falsetto singer. They play an old Hawaiian standard. And though I don’t understand much of my mother’s family’s language, I’m sure it’s a song of farewell. I want to ask Alex if he’s still depressed, if witnessing all those disasters helps anymore, if he pretends to be happy in front of his kids, if he ever became a better person. But I don’t know where to start, and the music is so loud, so I simply say good-bye.

He stares at me and lets out a dark smile. Some of that old intensity is still in his face, in spite of the baldness and the wine-purpled teeth. That swollen vein still squiggles down the side of his forehead. “It’s nice to see you, too. Good-bye.”

It’s a short trip home through an oddly beautiful night. Gusts of cool conditioned air blow out from all the storefronts along Kalakaua Avenue. I’m asked for money by cardboard signs, by steel drummers, by human statues painted silver. I pass Japanese tourists with shopping bags, mainlanders with sunburns, a local couple arguing too loudly, a pack of wet teenagers carrying surfboards. Waikiki is, in a sense, the opposite of La Libertad—a beach that everyone has heard of, perhaps the most famous in the world, the origin of surfing, rather than its frontier. But like La Lib, Waikiki’s reputation is just as incapable of containing its reality.

I cross the Ala Wai, and the street turns darker and quieter. My building is only a short walk away.

Inside the elevator, two twentysomething local girls are on their way up to a party on another floor. They carry a six-pack of beer and a bakery box. The taller one gives the younger one relationship advice. Her truisms run together into a blur: All guys think x; all girls have to learn y. “I’ve seen it a million times,” she says.

Once the elevator stops at their floor, the shorter one and I lock eyes for a second. She breaks the gaze and hurries down the hall, as if I were staring at her in judgment. The truth is, my look held more envy in it than anything else. I hope she doesn’t learn too much too fast. I hope there’s a little more time for her to be reckless and innocent, in love and whatever else. The elevator stops on my floor. I get out and enter my apartment.

Feeling dizzy from the wine, I pour myself a tall glass of water and walk over to the window. In the moonlight, small waves form on the reefs just past the shore. The surf fills in and recedes along the tide line: that place where one enormous, constantly moving thing meets another enormous, constantly moving thing—and the two of them take from each other and give to each other and change each other all the time.

I wonder if the taller girl from the elevator could distill my relationship with Ben down to a single bite-size lesson. And if so, what would it be?

I’d like to say that—when it comes to remembering Ben—I think of all the good times: the sunset surfs, the long, lazy meals, making love in a sandy rented bed. Unfortunately, my mind’s eye most often zeros in on his burial at sea. I can’t help but see it every time I look out at the Pacific Ocean: the chemical flames that rose up around him like a ghost, the tide that ripped him finally away from dry land and all its misery.

Perhaps it was that image that taught me the lesson I’d needed so badly to learn, the point that I’d missed all along: In a fallen world, you’re not always free to choose. Our way of life, it turns out, wasn’t entirely up to us. All my doubts, all my second-guesses, they were like little affronts to fate—fistfuls of sand hurled toward an indifferent ocean. The truth is that—in a fallen world—all one can do is stand up often, and with grace.

Nowadays, I find I’m grateful to live in a city like this, with good waves and my family nearby. It’s funny: All the plans that were kicked around back then, and pretty much all I ever saw of the world was La Libertad—that place called freedom, which, like freedom, could be both beautiful and terrible all at once.