“He won’t elevate your life.”

“Damn it, you don’t know the first thing about my life. What’s to elevate? I’m a medical-school dropout who works graveyard shifts in quick-marts.”

“You left the profession by choice. We’ve established that.”

“Okay, so I walked out the door with my eyes open. What did I choose instead? What am I good at? Name one thing.”

He balked. I knew he would. Doc Homer wasn’t fluent in the language of compliments.

“I have no career, no kids, not even a place I consider home. Basically I’m a bag lady with an education.”

“That’s a preposterous assessment.”

“How would you know? You don’t really see me, you just see what you want. You take pictures of people and turn them into rock walls.”

“That is not what I do. I begin with a picture in my head, from the past. I try to duplicate it from the images I have at hand.”

This was a new one. “I don’t believe I give a damn about the images you have at hand.” I lowered my voice. The quickest way to lose points with Doc Homer was to lose control. I said, “You always just wanted Hallie and me to be above everybody in Grace.”

“You were above your peers.”

I snorted at that. “I was as trashy as Connie Muñoz and Rita Cardenal, without half their guts or one-tenth of their sex appeal. I was ugly and embarrassed to be alive.”

Doc Homer had a strange way of actually getting quieter when he raised his voice. “My daughters were not trash,” he said.

I looked him square in the eye. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.”

“I know. I watched you bury the baby in the riverbed.”

I felt an odd flush in my neck and face. For about a minute we both listened to the dripping of the coffeepot. Then I said, “Why do you lie about everything?”

“I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”

“You’ve never told me anything, period. You said you and mother came from Illinois. But you came from here. You’ve got a whole family lying up there in the damn graveyard.”

“We did come here from Illinois. I was stationed there, and went to medical school there. We moved back here after the war.”

“What kind of war had people stationed in Illinois?” I asked absurdly, close to tears. “I’m sorry, but in history class they never told us about the Midwestern Front.”

“Alice’s family despised me.”

I stopped, remembering how Viola had averted her eyes and said, “that family went downhill,” the day. I discovered Homero Nolina up in the cemetery. The red-haired Gracela sister with the temper, who married Conrado Nolina and produced a legacy of trash-that was my father’s family. What he believed he came from, and what we still were. Auburn-haired and angry, living in exile in our own town. There wasn’t enough air in the kitchen for me to breathe, and get all this in.

“So you, what, ran off to the army. Got yourself educated on the G.I. Bill, and then came back here as the mighty prodigal doctor with his beautiful new wife, and acted like nobody could touch you.”

I watched him closely, but could read nothing. I couldn’t even see him, really; I had no idea how he’d look to a stranger. Old? Sick? Mean-spirited? He poured coffee into two mugs and gave the larger one to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Why did you come back here? If it was so important to you to start over, you could have gone anywhere. You could have stayed back there in Illinois.”

Doc Homer sat down opposite me. He clenched and unclenched his left hand, then spread it flat on the table and examined it abstractly, as if it were a patient. I looked at the framed photograph on the wall over his head: his portrait of a hand that wasn’t a hand, but five cacti with invisible spines.

“Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?” he asked me suddenly. “When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’ve watched. I know what you mean.” The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it’s like binding a book.

“The seat of human emotion should be the liver,” Doc Homer said. “That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don’t hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.”

I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who’d been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It’s an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don’t give up until there’s nothing left.

For Christmas, Loyd had given me an Apache burden basket. It was exquisitely woven, striped with the colors of dried grass, and around its open mouth hung tin bells on leather thongs that made whispery, tinkling sounds. It wasn’t much bigger than a teacup. The night he gave it to me in Santa Rosalia I felt it would easily hold all my burdens, forever. Now it hung on the wall over my bed, and at night I looked at it and wept for my own stupidity in trusting that life could be kind.

I apologized to my classes. I couldn’t see trying to maintain the recommended authoritative distance; I told them my sister had been kidnapped and that I was scared to death. I told them everything seemed very serious to me now, including things like the ozone layer. The kids were extremely quiet. I don’t think any adult had ever apologized to them before. From the storeroom we got down a pre-World War II map that showed all the world’s climatic zones, and we found Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador. The shapes and names of many nations had changed during the lifetime of that map, but not the climatic zones. We talked more calmly about the rain forest and the manner in which fast-food chains were cutting it down to make hamburger farms. We talked about poor countries and rich countries and DDT in the food chain, and the various ways our garbage comes home to us. The memory of the land. My students understood these things perfectly well. There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

On Friday I took the day off to make phone calls. Hallie had left me a list of emergency telephone numbers, mostly speculative, and I called them all. It took the whole morning. I got nowhere with the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and ended up with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Agriculture. Viola helped me contend with the impenetrable Spanish of international operators. Emelina sat on my other side holding my hand, wringing the fingers, apparently forgetting that it wasn’t hers. Mason and the baby sat on the floor in front of us, silent, wondering as children always must wonder in a crisis what terrible thing they had done to wreck the world.

We learned nothing useful. They were sure now that Hallie had been taken across the border into Honduras, probably to a camp where many other prisoners were held. It was a well-outfitted camp; they had Sony radios and high-quality C-rations. It made me smile, a little, to think Hallie might be eating C-rations I’d dutifully paid for with my taxes. Dinner was on me. So were the land mines.

I spoke with a dozen secretaries of this and that and finally with the Minister of Agriculture himself. He knew Hallie. He talked for a long time about what an extraordinary person she was; it made me suspicious that she was dead, and I started crying. Viola took the phone and translated until I was fit to talk again. The Minister promised me she wasn’t dead. He would call me the minute they knew anything at all. He was fairly sure the contras took her by mistake, not knowing she was an American citizen, and now were probably confused as to how to release her without generating too much bad publicity. He asked, had I called the President of the United States?