though it must have been, and I thought, she’s smiled more in ten minutes than Jan has the whole time I’ve known him. I tried to fix my eyes on hers so that it didn’t appear that I was avoiding looking at her, but it was hard. Despite my prizewinning headshots of bewildered two-year-olds in war zones, weakness is a kind of horror to me, and once I smell it, I keep as much distance as I can. A strange form of cowardice on my part, but there it is. I looked at Jan for the first time, who was not showing much but not hiding anything either. Somber, dependable Jan, who liked to smoke his pipe in the evenings. Good old Jan with his red driving cap and his hands easy on the wheel.
“How about,” I said, “if I start things going in the kitchen? You know, whatever Felice—that’s her name?—was thinking of making for dinner.”
Anne started to shake her head no, a slow, painful-to-watch motion, but I cut her off before she could say it. “I like to cook,” I said. “Ask these guys if I like to cook.” I wanted to be out of the room. I could feel my hands fidgeting.
“She does, Mom,” said Rikki. “She makes great arroz con pollo.”
“It’s no problem, really,” I said, “and I need to stretch after sitting all day on that bus.” Then I came to a belated halt, realizing how this must sound.
She’d stopped trying to say no and simply watched my face with a faint, uncertain smile. I backed out of the room and fled down the hall to the living room before I made it worse. There, I sank down on the sofa and sat for a minute, getting my breath. This was impossible. I could not deal with handicapped people. Dead people, fine. I’d photographed my share. People scarred and scalded and shot, all right, as long as it was clear they were either going to die or get better. But the long, drawn-out, permanent stuff was beyond me.
Pretty soon Rikki came down the hall. He stood in front of the sofa looking down, not saying anything. Looking at my face, he must have been able to see what was there—that his mother revolted me. He got pale, then flushed, then went pale again. Then he gave me what on anyone else would have been a hard look and went to the kitchen. I sat there for a few minutes longer. When I finally went in, he was dragging things out of the cupboard and didn’t turn around.
“Look, Rikki,” I began.
He waved me off.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Never mind.”
I put my hand on his arm, which was shaking a little, he was so upset with me. I could see that for years his job had been to defend her against the cruel world and its cruel remarks. This was the way he judged people: by how they reacted to her. “Nobody told me,” I said. “Neither of you. You shied away from it every time I brought her up. So I built a different picture of her in my mind and it was a shock, that’s all. I didn’t figure on her being sick. You could have said.”
“My dad doesn’t like to talk about it,” he said, still not looking at me or down at my hand on his arm. “He said it’s better that way. It’s nobody’s business but ours. He doesn’t like people gossiping about her, he says.”
“But Rikki. I’m not just anybody. I’m living here for the next two weeks, or at least I’m supposed to. And it’s Christmas. That’s not somebody who’s going to gossip, that’s somebody who needs to know ahead of time.”
“You think she’s ugly.”
“No.” I shook my head and I shook his arm. “That’s not fair.”
“You looked sick to your stomach when you saw her.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “I admit it. I’m not good around sick people. I’d make a bad nurse. I get the willies when I see people hurting like that.”
“She’s not hurting.”
“What’s wrong with her? You still haven’t said.”
He shrugged. “She’s got MS. Multiple sclerosis. She got it when I was six, when we were first at Tikal. It wasn’t that bad for a long time. But now. . .” He shrugged again.
“What’s going to happen to her?” I still had my hand on his arm, but now I was giving it a little squeeze.
He finally looked down at me, sighing. “What do you think?”
“She’s going to die.”
He nodded. We looked at each other.
“They don’t know how long,” he said, “but when they get to this stage, sometimes it speeds up. First she won’t be able to get up at all anymore, then she won’t be able to talk or see.”
“She’ll have to go to a hospital.”
“Somewhere. We don’t know where yet. But for now she wants to stay in the house and do her usual stuff until she can’t anymore.”
“What stuff?”
“She’s been teaching since a couple of years after she got sick, after she couldn’t keep her balance enough to be out in the field with Dad anymore.”
I thought about Jan in the early morning, sitting by the campfire with his big bound journal. “What does she teach?” I asked.
“She teaches people how to read. She always used to have classes at the church, but now it’s too hard for her to get there, even with Felice. So they come here, and Felice writes on the board for her because she can’t hold onto the chalk anymore. But I don’t know how much longer she can do it.” He stopped.
We stood there in the kitchen for long moment while the light died outside. It was a nice little kitchen without any charm. Functional, like the monastery buildings at the Hermitage. I could see modifications here and there, like the chopping block on cut-down legs at wheelchair height. I gave his arm a final pat and let it go.
“Have you always lived in this house?”
He nodded. “My dad’s tried to move her out of here. He says it’s embarrassing how rundown the place is getting, but she won’t leave. He wants her closer to the doctors, maybe in Tuxtla or Villahermosa, but she feels at home here, and she’s got her students.”
“It must be tough on you.”
“It’s harder on my dad.” He stopped, as though he were edging into indiscretion.
“I don’t think she’s ugly, Rikki. Just give me a chance to get used to the idea, okay?”
“Okay,” he said in a muffled voice.
“I like you, Rikki. I don’t say that to many people. And she’s your mom, so I’m guessing I’ll like her too. When I get used to everything.”
“Well,” he said. “At least you’re honest about it. Some people just pretend, but she’s too smart for that. She picks right up on it. So just ask her things, if you want to know something. It’s better than faking that you don’t mind what she looks like.”
Somebody came through the back door without knocking. “In here,” called Rikki, and a young girl, nineteen or twenty, poked her head into the kitchen. She had big eyes pulled down sweetly at the outer corners
