The Justice Within

All of the children were solemn, but none shook as violently as Dianita. The old man in the pew behind her touched her shoulder, making her jump. “Now what could you possibly have to say that’s so bad?” he asked with a chuckle. If only he knew. She watched the line get shorter and shorter before her into the confessional. The priest would be on the other side of a translucent barrier. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognize her. But when she stepped into the room, the barrier was nowhere to be found. It had been there in rehearsal! How could she face this man every Wednesday at religious education if he knew her secret?
“Bless me father for I have sinned…” Oh God. “This is my first confession.”
He asked her sins in a tone that meant to be inviting, but made him sound a bit like the big bad wolf playing her grandmother. She swallowed hard, and responded.
“I took some cookies from a jar when my mother wasn’t looking and she said not to eat them, but I did it anyway so I’m really sorry.”
The room turned yellow around his face as he told her to say a few Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, then told her she was forgiven. A sheet passed over everything she saw on her way back to the pew where her parents awaited her, and without even looking at their faces, she began to cry. The old man patted her again.
“There there,” he said, “You’re forgiven now. No need to cry.”
But she wasn’t forgiven. She was more wicked than any lacy-skirted girl in the church; more wicked even than the navy-suited boys. She had lost her chance for redemption forever. She had lied to the priest.
No one knew why Dianita had been inconsolable on that day. They celebrated just as they had for her sister, taking the entire family to brunch in her honor. Only she and a certain little boy knew the truth.
They met in his neighbor’s empty garage, the dust visible in the beams of Godly light that came in through the high windows. He took off his coat and shirt, and she her dress, and they pressed their rounded bellies together and kissed with open mouths, rubbing their hands over one another’s backs. Then they parted, put on their clothes, and swore to secrecy all they had done.
Dianita reentered her home as though the scarlet letter had been branded into her chest. As a second grader, she would not read the book for years, but when she did, she would understand it perfectly. Her parents found their daughter strange. She was prone to dismal moods where nothing could cheer her, or else she would be so cheerful they could not contain her. But she was a child and children were strange, and certainly it was nothing to be concerned about.

D woke up unusually early that morning. She sat at her computer, checked her e-mail and turned to look at her favorite view of the twin towers out her bedroom window. The towers were burning.
At first she thought it some strange construction site she had been unaware of, but she soon sobered when the first tower collapsed. What had she just witnessed? A few seconds later the same act repeated itself on her television set. Something terrible had happened, and the world was changed forever.
She could have found an all-night vigil; she could have spent the night in solitary reflection; but that night, she got drunk with some friends, and listened to loud music, and for a few hours, she allowed herself to forget it had ever happened, because she was wicked. The next night she would go light candles at Union Square. She would meet an artist there, and they would date, but it wouldn’t change the fact that she was wicked.
In the street, listening to the priest give a mass for the dearly departed, a fat, black woman dressed in shockingly colorful robes and Mardi Gras beads sang that old patriotic song in French, and sobbed so loudly the mass could not be heard. While others shushed her and gave her dirty looks, Diana put a hand on the woman’s arm, attempting to comfort her to no avail. Her failure to calm the woman brought to the foreground of her self-critical mind the disconnect that existed between her and the rest of the world. In the face of such a grandiose act of hatred, and surrounded by the love of her fellow New Yorkers, she found nothing more disconcerting than the alienation of that moment.
Though she spent the next week at the Salvation Army sorting boxes of goods to send to Ground Zero, nothing could shake the feeling of helplessness she had felt at the church. Nothing could change the guilt and the wickedness she felt in her soul. She would remain wicked and drunk for the next year.

The bar disappeared behind an endless wall of faces laughing like clowns in a red-light haunted house. Matt bought her yet another drink, which she forced down into her liquid-filled stomach. The nineteen-year-old virgin remembered only the bar and her bathroom, where a rush of pain surged through her body. In her mind she saw a pig’s head on a stick, and heard the word “no” from her own lips, then slept dreamlessly, only to wake in a strange bed, atop Matt’s naked body. She felt no anger; only bitter resignation, as a child feels when a well-deserved smack crosses her bottom. She felt somehow deserving of her misfortunes, a state of mind which she could not allow to continue. She had to get out of New York, and drinking, and the wrong crowds of people. She hopped a plane to Paris.

“The French are on to something,” D told her friend Noelle. “They use capitalism just enough to keep them strong so that they may use socialism to care for the meek.” Noelle looked skeptical.
“All I know is that not two days ago, a man in the street told me to go back to Africa. Mother fucker.”
“Well I know they aren’t perfect, but I admire the drive they have to take care of each other. If only they could extend that to the rest of the world—”
“Fat chance. And have you ever noticed how around the world it’s always people of color getting the short end of the stick? Getting ignored and shat on?”
“I probably haven’t noticed it enough, no.”

That night, their other roommate David was throwing a dinner party with his best friend Fabrice. The two were like peas in a pod, and D had assumed they were a handsome, gay couple. Fabrice had heard from David that D was a lesbian. Neither of them were prepared for the whirlwind awaiting them.
Fabrice made a gourmet dinner, then retired to David’s room to rest, while the guests ate drank and were merry. David shouted at Fabrice to join them, feeling that his friend was being rude. D tried a softer approach. She had so enjoyed the dinner he made, that Fabrice now intrigued her. She made some instant coffee, and brought it up to David’s room, rapping softly on the door. He took it greatfully, and came down to join the guests.
After the guests began to leave, and everyone was good and drunk, Fabrice, D, Noelle, and David huddled on David’s twin bed to watch Simpsons DVDs. Suddenly, D felt Fabrice’s hand on hers, and she took it. They stole away to the kitchen under the pretense of washing the dishes, which they did do, and then made love, much to their mutual surprise. It was D’s first consensual experience, and she immediately fell in love with him.
Over the next year, she would take two trips back to Paris to see him. He would contact her to tell her she had inspired him to do more noble things with his life. When she was in New York, he would tell her he was coming to visit, but would never come. When she applied to Peace Corps he would tell her he too would apply, but he never did. Though with him, she had finally found a sense of purpose, he was to be the great disappointment of her young life. But she would stop being young very soon, and more disappointments would find her.

D’s Peace Corps recruiter would ask her why she wanted to join the Peace Corps. Though she knew her reason had just as much to do with relieving her own guilt, she would tell a story about a woman drowning out the 9/11 mass with her song and her sobbing. She asked eagerly where in the world she could find more people that strange to her, that she might come to love and understand them, and finally, offer them some comfort.

Halimatou awoke with the sound of a soft rapping at the door.
“Oui,” she stated simply. What do you want?
A tiny voice shivered through the wood. “Halimatou, ouvre la porte.”
The slightly rude command to open the door was Mahawah’s way of using her best broken French to say that breakfast had arrived in a way her new sister would understand. The eight-year-old rarely attended school. Instead, her family had assigned her the role of the white girl’s servant, despite the newcomer’s attempts to protest on the child’s behalf. Still, she spoke French better than the boys her age, suggesting superior intelligence on her part.
Mahawah had a long, thin body which shook now with excitement. Try as she might, she could not contain a prideful smile at this rare intimate moment when she alone would be allowed inside the American’s mud hut. She would later brag to her siblings that Halimatou liked her best, and had proven it by giving her the last bite of her omelet sandwich, prompting all of the children to stand at Halimatou’s feet as she ate, waiting for a similar morsel, which she always gave.
Halimatou did like Mahawah a great deal, and showered her with affection because she saw the child both needed and appreciated it. But her secret favorite was Idrisa, a four-year-old boy with a tiny frame and a husky voice. He spoke no French, but came to sit every day and watch her read, wash clothes, brush her teeth, or any other mundane activity. And as he sat he smiled at her with lips together like a little doll.
One day, he had gotten up the courage to touch her, and did so by climbing around the back of her chair, and running his filthy fingers through her hair. She had cringed at first, then scooped the child up in her arms and rocked him. That first time, he’d been terrified and stiff, but later on he would relax in her arms as if she were his own mother.
After she’d finished her breakfast, Halimatou made her way to Mama, the great matriarch of the family. She had given birth to the first Halimatou, who had graciously shared her name with the white girl. The famous first Halimatou was now in and out of hospitals in the capital city, so the task of taking care of the Fote (white person) fell on Aicha, first wife of Fode, Mama’s son. Mama’s hand, Halimatou Fote noted, had not seen a bar of soap in some time; but she shook it and lowered herself to a squat in front of the old woman, knowing her acceptance in the family depended on it.
“Ikena!” The neighborhood women shouted as Halimatou made her way from the family compound to class. She must answer all of the greetings, and have a brief conversation with everyone who initiated one.
“Tana mu xi?” Any evil in your sleep?
“Tana yo mu xi. Tana mu nana?” None at all in my sleep. Any evil with you and yours?
“Aaa ha.” Nope.
At last she arrived at the shaded clearing that would serve as her Peace Corps classroom. Diana, as she was now called, breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t particularly like most of the Americans in her group. They often made her feel more like an outsider than her Guinean family, but they at least spoke English. She had just turned her plastic lawn chair to face the flip chart board when a voice spoke in her ear too close for comfort.
“So you are here at last,” Dinh murmured, attempting to sound seductive. Dinh was an overweight Cote D’Ivoirian doctor who thought the best use of his time would be to train Peace Corps health volunteers, despite the desperate need for doctors across the continent of Africa. He opened his sweaty palm and offered her a milky lollipop, which she took gratefully, her sweet tooth outweighing her better judgment.
“Hi Dinh,” she forced. At first his attention had been sweet and fatherly, but now every opportunity he got he made references to her beauty, and suggested that dating would not be inappropriate. There were rules against such a thing, but he intended to ignore them.
The sun was out now and the morning chill gave way to immediate, brutal heat. The Americans sat in pools of their own sweat, emptying their water bottles in solid gulps in an attempt to stay conscious. An angry father was beating a child, causing shrieks of pain and sharp smacks to echo into their makeshift classroom. In the trees a pair of brilliant blue birds dared the Americans to ignore them and focus on the lesson, which of course they couldn’t.
“It is imperative that a woman give her baby nothing but breast milk until what age?” Dinh blinked at the melting Americans. Silence. Then at last a hand.
“Could we please do this lesson in French? I feel so totally unprepared for going to my site, because we’ve been learning all the terminology in English!”
A groan emerges from the crowd.
“Not all of us came here speaking French as well as you did Hannah.”
“Come on guys,” Dinh pleaded, “What does it matter which language we use if none of you are going to pay attention?!”
The groans subsided as a mother hen and her little yellow chicks came waddling into the clearing between the students and Dinh.
“Oh great,” Dinh sighed before continuing his lesson. Diana raised her hand.
“Six months.”
“Thank you!” Dean beamed, winking at her for good measure. “A mother should breastfeed for six months before introducing any other foods. If the child needs to gain weight, the mother should breastfeed more often so that she will produce more milk.”

A rock in the dirt road brought Diana back to reality. She often flashed back to her training days, especially on the long bike rides her job often demanded she take. Currently, she was on her way to visit a baby who was dangerously underweight. The mother had been feeding the baby a thick porridge that the five-month-old could not digest properly. Armed with a book and her homemade visuals, Diana set forth to teach the mother about breastfeeding.
She couldn’t help feeling a bit ridiculous. The mother had probably started other foods because she’d found breast milk inadequate. She would not easily be convinced by some chubby, soft-handed white girl that she aught to go back to breastfeeding alone. Still, Diana had to try.
The Foutah stretched before her in patches of green over vast plains of dust. At last she came to a fence, beyond which she found a few isolated thatched-roof huts. The woman in question sat with the matchstick child in her lap. Diana sucked in a deep breath, opened her book, and began her presentation.
“Show me how you feed him,” she said in broken Pulaar. She was no longer in Susu land. These people beat their children in private, and were happy to go long stretches of time without a word between them. The woman brought the child to her breast, inserting the nipple all the way into the child’s mouth.
“Very good!” She encouraged the woman to feed the child in this way more often, and not to feed him anything else. Elated that the visitor had come, the woman tried to pay her money, and then fruit. Halimatou politely refused, and requested that the money be spent on food for the mother. The warmth of the woman and her family filled Diana with satisfaction. She tried to push away the thought that after all, they would not do as she instructed.
Back under her own tin roof, Diana pulled the soiled bedding from beneath her new kitten. She poured water from an old gas canister into a plastic tub, and began scrubbing. The kitten had been abandoned with its sister on the doorstep of another volunteer. He’d burst through the door in the regional capital with a meowing box. Instantly, Diana knew she’d be taking one home.
Also, she knew her maternal affections toward the cat had helped her attract the devastatingly handsome Volunteer Leader, Duncan Cohen, who ran the regional house. She had needed to travel to the regional capital of Labe to treat a bad case of amoebic dysentery coupled with worms which had somehow made their way to her stomach. Duncan had been incredibly charming, and understanding, so much so that he led her to his room to show her his guitar, after which he promptly began making out with her.
“I make a terrible boyfriend,” he had told her lying in bed.
“Well then I guess that’s the end of it,” she had replied, “I won’t be with someone who can’t be a good boyfriend.”
But two weeks later, she had found herself in Labe again—a visit which only resulted in some harmless flirtation—to do another test on her poop. And two weeks after that, she had come to Labe of her own accord.
“So you’re still not budging on the boyfriend thing huh?”
“I can’t…”
“And I’m still not budging on needing a boyfriend.”
“Maybe we can find some gray area…” and they had made love anyway. For not being a good boyfriend, Duncan had done all right. He taught her kitten to eat from a dish, gave her a pair of biking gloves, and called her baby when the time was right. Still, it was not meant to last.
Duncan had his life in perfect order. He went to bed early, woke up early, and spent his days compulsively cleaning and organizing the Labe house. He was at the end of his third year in Guinea, and in those last months became determined that the house would be better when he left it than when he arrived. Back in Ameriki, he’d worked on the Al Gore campaign in Washington, D.C., a fact that Diana found hot, being interested in politics herself. Fellow volunteers joked that he would be president someday, and he had every intention of fitting the part.
There was no room for Diana in this plan, but he’d found the petite, curvy Cuban irresistible, and he liked sex very much, when it didn’t interfere with his plans. But so close to his close of service, he disliked how often she made her way into his thoughts. He had promised her nothing, but found himself going out of his way to make her happy, when he would have preferred to keep his mind on the shelves he was building for the bathroom.
Even now, sawing away at a two by four, he found himself wondering about her trip to Conakry. After a fairly serious pregnancy scare, he’d convinced her to go to the capital city to take the morning after pill. She had left trembling, but came back in high spirits, bounding into his room with a squeaking ball to give him as a present. He couldn’t help but kiss her, and he didn’t like not being able to help himself. So just as simply as it had begun, he’d ended it—or so he thought—by telling her after sex one morning that he couldn’t continue being with her. She’d taken it casually, then kissed him defiantly, knowing full well he would kiss her back.
The memory of his kiss put a smile on her face as she scrubbed the poop out of her kitten’s bedding. Amazingly, all of this, poop included, managed to be romantic. For her part, she cherished this fling in a time of devastating loneliness, and hated to lose it. She hung the bedding on her clothesline, and headed to Thierno Hafssatou’s for dinner.
She climbed the slow hill, and through the hovering mangoes. When she first arrived in Dionfo, they hung securely above like guardian angels; but now they hung precariously, rain-swollen and ready to drop at any moment to smack her squarely in the head. She reached Thierno Hafssatou’s just before dark, while the family prayed on their frayed prayer mats. The children were pulling each other around in a cut open gas canister. One thing has many uses in Guinea, she thought to herself.
Once finished, they pulled the six inch stools around the giant cooking pot and began eating with their hands. Halimatou did this clumsily, and too slowly to get enough food before it disappeared into the mouths of the others, but she refused a spoon. She was determined to learn the Guinean way of things.
After dinner, Thierno Hafssatou and her daughter approached Hali. The chief of the health center had not shown up to work yet again. They wanted her to go to Labe and speak with the Department of Public Health about his misconduct. Apparently, he had frequently taken to using the health center’s emergency motorcycle to go joyriding in Labe whenever he pleased, leaving the health center with only an intern to treat patients.
They looked up at her tearfully, “This little girl almost died last night of Malaria.” Halimatou looked at the girl’s red eyes and melancholy expression. She looked like an advertisement for the Christian Children’s Fund.
“I’ll do what I can,” Hali promised.
Back in her room, Diana put on some Billy Joel and set about planning projects for her community. So far, she had planned several malaria presentations, a lesson on nutrition for the local elementary school, and a solar food drying project. The rain started suddenly and pounded on the tin roof. She stared at the paper in front of her with slight horror, realizing she would soon run out of ideas, and she had completed only four months of her two year service!
The negative thoughts piled themselves upon her: None of her projects could be proven successful. Her kitten was losing its hair. Duncan Cohen didn’t want to be her boyfriend. Her Pulaar was atrocious. She was alone, and terrified, and tired of the mosquitoes, roaches and lizards that nightly haunted her room.
Frantic, she reached for her journal and a pen to calm herself, but the writing only produced desperate lists of her torments and nothing to be done about them. She then reached for her sketchbook, but produced only images of her infatuated face and Duncan’s manly body. Confident that no one could hear her over the drumming rain, she screamed at the top of her lungs, then sang her favorite opera songs, attempting to calm herself with the music and vocal release. That failing, she ran to her bed, picked up a candle and began running her fingers over the flame, praying for the courage to burn herself. This done, she rolled into bed, and cried herself to sleep.
The next morning she awoke with a spring in her step. She picked up her hoe and whistled through the morning in her garden, the kitten weaving around her feet. In the afternoon she finished building the solar dryer, using three rolls of duct tape, and the clear and black plastic Duncan had given her on her last trip to Labe. Maybe things with him weren’t so bad. After all, he treated her well, and she knew she could seduce him again if she tried. She found sex with him comforting, a feeling few things afforded her lately, and had panicked at the thought of this major comfort being taken away from her.
Back at Thierno Haffsatou’s for dinner, tensions were high. Hali promised her hosts that she would go to Labe the next day and speak with the Department of Public Health about the absent doctor, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She knew that going to Labe meant seeing Duncan.
The look in Hali’s eyes did not go unnoticed. Thierno Hafssatou’s daughter asked innocently if Hali was missing her husband. Kadiatou was the same age as Hali, and she often longed to share her deepest secrets with her, but a woman could get no respect in Guinea without a husband. Hali preserved her lie, as always, and told Kadiatou nothing of her inner life.
“Of course I miss him. It is very difficult to be so far away from him,” she told Kadiatou in French.
The next day Diana loaded her kitten into his basket, filled her water bottle and headed to the road for a taxi. She used the word taxi loosely, in order to include these dilapidated tin shells with God knows what under the hood. Two hours later, her driver had acquired enough passengers to make the trip worth his while—twelve in a seven passenger station wagon, plus one goat someone had acquired in the market. One woman had a goiter the size of a baseball in her throat, so Halimatou gave a talk on iodized salt on the ride to Labe. She could see why Peace Corps Volunteers often found it so difficult to keep track of the hours they worked.
At the PCV house, Diana ran into Duncan’s arms for a hug. Immediately, he hoisted her to his hips, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. They kissed once before pulling away and regaining their composure.
“We’re not supposed to do that,” he said.
“Then don’t,” she shrugged. That kind of thing made him crazy. After a cup of his best coffee, she confided in him about her hard night in Dionfo. Concerned, he suggested she call the Peace Corps Medical Officer. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone, and found that having that kind of a bad night was unacceptable in Peace Corps.
The PCMO forced her to stay in Labe under Duncan’s supervision until she could be examined by the Psychiatrist in Washington, D.C. She breathed a sigh of relief when the doctor waved off her incident as a simple case of not having enough interesting work to do at site. She spoke to the Assistant Director, and lined up enough interesting work to get her through the rest of her service.
That night found Diana in a state of complete euphoria. She no longer had to worry about running out of projects, and Duncan was treating her tenderly as never before. He threw a party at the house that night, and she took advantage of the opportunity to celebrate.
Duncan and Diana went shopping in the market together, and spent the day preparing for the party. When night came, they drank box wine and ate good food with his friends, including but not limited to a photographer with the face of Brad Pitt. When the nightly rain came to bless them, Diana ran out to greet it, soaking herself to the bone. Duncan’s friends watched her curiously as she splashed and laughed, running in circles under the torrential downpour. She came in thoroughly soaked, and went into the back room to change, leaving the door slightly ajar for Duncan.
Through the corner of her eye, she could see him watching her peel the wet clothes from her body, and wrapping the clean ones around herself without underwear. Then, returning to the party, she drank an entire box of wine by herself, while listening to Duncan’s photographer friend play guitar and sing. When the photographer left, she allowed him to kiss her goodbye.
Duncan handed her a walkie-talkie before heading out to drive his friends home. She ran to the back office of the house, stripped naked, and began whispering into the walkie-talkie in Spanish, estimating that Duncan was now alone in the car.
“Duncan…” she urged. “Estoy desnuda.”
“Ay chica. Donde estas?”
“Tienes que buscarme.”
She heard the car pull into the driveway, and a door slam. Her whole body tingled with anticipation. When at last he opened the door to the office, she was waiting behind the door. She pressed her naked body against him from behind, daring him to resist her. He turned and kissed her passionately, running his hands over her now familiar body. Then suddenly, she pushed him away.
“I kissed your friend,” she challenged him.
“Fuck,” was his first reaction. Then, “That’s okay,” and he moved to kiss her again.
“Of course it is,” she lashed out now. “What do you care?”
“Diana. Where is this coming from?”
“Do you even care about me at all? Answer the question.”
“I’m not going to answer that. I told you in the beginning. I never mislead you.”
“Answer the question.”
“No. This is ridiculous. You’re not yourself. I’m going to bed.” And he disappeared into his room, and locked the door.
Terrified to be alone, and angry with herself for what she had done, she paced the house frantically. That same hopeless feeling engulfed her from the night before, and she began hyperventilating and staring at the candles.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she kept repeating. She would not do this again. She was stronger than this. She went to Duncan’s door, and pressed herself against it, needing to be near him, to feel his comfort. At the end of her rope, she sprinted into the kitchen, and turned to the knives magnetized to the wall.
“No, no, no, no,” but she was already reaching for one. She pressed the blade into her upper arm, watching for blood.
“Damn these dull Guinean knives!” she said out loud, and pressed harder, dragging the blade again and again across her skin. Realizing what she was doing, she dropped the knife with a shriek and ran to Duncan’s door again.
“Duncan! Please! Treat me like a sick person! I’m sick! I’m sick!” And she burst into heaving sobs, as the door creaked open.
In the morning, she slipped out of Duncan’s bed, careful not to wake him. She must write him a letter of apology and thanks, but more importantly, she must beg him not to tell the PCMO. She wrote on her best stationery, in her prettiest cursive, and left the note on the kitchen counter. This done, she breathed a sigh of relief, and remembered fondly all the new projects that awaited her when she went back to Dionfo.
Duncan woke a few minutes later, and pulled her into the bathroom.
“Diana,” he began. “I spoke with the PCMO this morning.”
“Oh no, no Duncan you didn’t.”
“Yes, Diana I had to.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them I didn’t sleep last night because I was afraid you would hurt yourself.”
“No, Duncan! NO!” The gravity of his words fell on her harder and harder. How had she allowed this to go so wrong? Why had she ever allowed romance into this chapter of her life?
“They want you to call immediately. I’m sorry.”
Shaking violently, she dialed the medical officer’s number, expecting the worst but hoping for a second chance. She didn’t get one. Within twenty-four hours, she was on a plane back to the United States on medical separation, leaving her kitten, her heart, and her dreams of a better Guinea behind her.

For a while, She is certain she has lost her identity forever. She speaks very little, even to her family, but sits and observes them through new eyes. She has a strict regimen she must follow in order to stay healthy. She sleeps on a schedule, exercises, and takes medications. Patience is her greatest asset as she weathers these days of healing. Tonight she will go out; get out of the house.
A couple of guys her age help her park her car in a tight spot in the streets of the New Jersey coast line. She follows them into the bar, and sits with them, replacing her former habits with lime and seltzer. They are all in the Navy. One is tall and somewhat handsome. His name is Sean.
“I’m not sure that I’m attracted to him,” She tells the doctor.
“That’s exactly why you should consider dating him.”
“Run that by me again?”
“When you’re overpowered by an attraction to someone, you’re more likely to make those big mistakes.”
“Like flying to Paris.”
“Or cutting yourself with a kitchen knife.”
“Point taken.”
Five months later, She finds herself in Kansas City, MO, visiting Sean and his family. They say grace at every dinner. Sean takes her to a part of town covered in little white Christmas lights. It reminds her of the Galleries Lafayette in Paris, complete with a Parisian-style bridge over frozen water. The night feels holy, even the sex, and She knows this trip was not a mistake.
They part sadly when Navy life carries Sean away to Hawaii. For a while they still talk every night and say “I love you,” but She puts an end to the ritual and decides to move on with her life.
She has moved to New York City, where She has a regular job, teaching Math and English to 3rd and 5th graders after school. She wonders if they have secrets as dark as hers were at their age, but She guesses not. She lives her life as though trapped inside a television set—life lives her. Her former aspirations and fervent creativity fall away into her medicine bottles. There is always a struggle, she thinks. Now mine lies in breaking free of this “healthy” monotony.
She knows of only one cure for a rut like this one: She hops a plane.

Abuela and Abuelo are so happy to see Dianita when she arrives in Puerto Rico, that their seventy-five-year-old bodies don’t know it’s one in the morning. Abuela shows Dianita her statue of the baby Jesus that she won in a church raffle. Apparently, she had lost the ticket with the winning number, and some woman had found it and given it to the priest. When she approached the priest with her side of the story, he told her, “God had it reserved for you.” This was the latest in a long series of little miracles her grandmother had experienced over the course of her life. Another occurred two years earlier in Union City, New Jersey, when a stranger had thrown a bouquet of red roses through Dianita’s cab window. When the young woman walked through the door with the flowers and presented them to her grandmother, a fervent shriek followed.
“God sent me flowers to give to my mother on the anniversary of her passing! I meant to go to the store and buy some, but I had no time, so God sent them to me! Oh, thank you!”
Back in Puerto Rico, the pious woman reached a hand to Dianita to say in Spanish, “It is said that this baby Jesus grants miracles. I will ask it to find you a job that makes you happy.” The fiber optic Jesus blinked at her like a circus trinket.
Her grandmother takes her to church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. There, Dianita takes the good she can from the mass, and leaves what is not meant for her. Her days are spent in deep listening now, so that the family wonders what is wrong with her.
In the morning, the family goes to El Yunque, the Puerto Rican rainforest, which is thrillingly devoid of dangerous wildlife. Even Guinea had snakes. They drive a winding road up the mountain to a hiking site that is as much a hybrid as Dianita herself: part wilderness, part city. The path through the forest is paved with blacktop, and buzzing with sweaty tourists. They “hike” half an hour through the rainforest, listening to the song of the coquis in the distance. Abuela and Abuelo, despite their youthful exuberance, cannot complete the journey, and so they return to the entrance to wait. Finally, the rest of the family arrives at the bridge that hovers at the foot of a tall, thin waterfall. They strip their clothing down to their bathing suits, and join the masses in the water.
Dianita swims straight to the falling water. Her mother warns her not to get too close, but the crashing sound drowns out her voice. She climbs upward against the torrent, letting the water scrub at her skin, making her clean. At the top of a slippery rock, she rests, and looks back at the swimmers’ bodies blurred by this heavy fall of rain. She could sing opera at the top of her lungs without being heard, but they are watching her from below. Where will she go from here? Will she come down cautiously to rejoin them when she tires? Or will she climb higher, even to the top, to throw her body to the mercy of the rocks? How long will she rest in the precarious middle of the fall?
Dianita sits and sings, but this time determination replaces the former desperation in her voice. She will speak to these people somehow; she will make herself familiar to them; she will make them love her. Through them, in them, with them, she will finally be absolved.