"Well, you already know so much by heart."

"Yes! Are the consolations of G.o.d small with thee? No, very great!"

"She is quoting from Job," Father Emilio said, placing a pleased hand on Nalini's shoulder.

It was true. Larissa noticed that the child was able to mouth the recitations of a number of very long pa.s.sages during the daily services. Well, sure, from hearing them five times a day. Larissa, when she rehea.r.s.ed The Tempest, also knew it nearly by heart.

"Why do you take her?" Larissa asked, making a subtle face of distaste. "I mean, for a small child, to see all that unpleasantness, sickness, and suchashe has it hard enough, don't you think?"

Father Emilio lightly shook Nalini's shoulder. "How do we answer that question, Nalini?" he asked. "We say, of course, it's not so beautiful as a garden of flowers or a park with birds, buta"

"It might not be as beautiful," Nalini said. "But it's more holy."

The children have never performed on the stage, Father Emilio told Larissa. Are you staying through Christmas? Maybe we can do something? Che had mentioned you loved theater. Perhaps a small play?

Like Twelfth Night?

Father Emilio studied her with gentle curiosity.

The Tempest perhaps? Now my charms are all overthrown, and what strength I have's mine own. Which is most faint. Larissa wondered if he was appraising her, wondering perhaps how good her kidneys were, whether she should be asked to volunteer to donate one, or three. Maybe old habits died hard with him. Now *tis true, I must be here confined by you. Too much time on her hands, despite the near constant obediences. The stillness, the quiet, the lyric chants of the nuns, the repet.i.tion of the psalms, the boiling of the water, the disinfecting of all fresh fruit, the pervasive vinegar smell mixed in with tamarind leaves, flowers, and the heavy sweet smell of brown sugar and coconut, the scouring of the soup pots, and the incense permeating all, the solitude hours spent not in prayer but in remembrance, as Larissa checked the window screens at the orphanage for holes the awful dengue mosquitoes could get through, while composing letters to Kai in her head.

"Well," Father Emilio, after minutes of contemplation, finally replied, "Tempest is good. But I was thinking more along the lines of a Nativity play."

"A what?" And release me from my bands, with the help of your good handsa "Maybe you could write it for us, and we could rehea.r.s.e it to get ready for Christmas?"

"I'm not staying through Christmas, Father," Larissa hastily reminded him. "I'm going back in October. Plus I don't think I know what a Nativity play is." She shrugged. "I've never done one."

"Children don't perform Christmas pageants in America?" he asked. "As I recall, it was quite a popular thing to do in the Ess.e.x schools."

"Pageants? You mea.n.a.like about the birth of Jesus?"

"Yes," he said. "Like about the birth of Jesus."

Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant. "You know I'm not very familiar with that. When I was a child, my mother never took me to one. She believed I should judge for myself, decide for myselfa"but only when I got older. So it's just not in my background."

"Did you?" he asked. "Judge them for yourself when you got older?"

"No." And her kids didn't either. She pa.s.sed that on to her own children, the nothingness. And my ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayerawhich pierces so that it a.s.saults mercy itself and frees all faults. Mouthing Shakespeare by rote, not feel.

Larissa wanted to defend her mother on this rainy afternoon inside her favorite placea"the kitchen overlooking the lawn. There were plenty of other things she taught me. She taught me to be politea"to strangers and my family. Not to be too demonstrative. To have good manners. I have very good manners. I learned to stay calm through crisis because of my mother. I am not a histrionic like Che. I can handle anything. Skinned knees, broken bones, bee stings, dog bites.

Obviously there is something she had not given me. But my mother was always a libertarian and proud of it! Live and let live was her motto. All our friends envied me for her laissez-faire parenting, for all the books I was allowed to read, for the no-limits approach to any adult material. Find your own way. Teach yourself. Play music, or not. Read, or not. Believe, or not. Whatever I wanted was fine with her.

But there was one thing. At the very end, when Dad was leaving, it was the only time I saw a c.h.i.n.k in what I now know was my mother's armor. I heard her all the way from upstairs, screaming at him, and I had never heard my mother scream before; it was so guttural and jarring. I heard it only for a moment before I slammed the pillows against my ears. I lived my whole life only for you! And other things. It went on and on and on. It was unbearable. It was as if Dad had taken a crowbar to her.

The bitterness that flowed from the black end to their thirty-five-year union never dried out, which is another reason I couldn't visit my mother too often, because it hurt me to look at her. Dad died soon after and we never got an answer to our question that, like rhetorical cyanide, remains in my mother's heart and in mine: what was so completely missing in him that he couldn't see, blinding him to the scales on which all of us were outweighed by one pretty stranger twenty years younger?

I thought that a scruffy boy from the wrong side of Maui who extended his hand to me made me blind. But what if I, too, like my father, was always blind, and just didn't know it?

Larissa blinked, came out of it, smiled blankly at Father Emilio. "Come on," he said cheerfully. "You do theater, we do Jesus. Let's muddle through the Nativity play together. It'll be like the blind leading the blind."

"Uh, okay." Larissa glanced away from him, trying to shake off her reverie. "Does Shakespeare do nativity?"

The priest laughed. "You tell me, Larissa. You're the drama expert."

"May I use your phone, Father? I'm going to tryatry to call Kai one more time today." Morning, eveninga"why didn't he ever answer the phone? Though in Kai's defense, the rectory was closed after compline, at 8:30 and that was 11:00 p.m. in Pooncarie, so perhaps they were out drinking. She didn't know. The phone just rang and rang.

Nalini wanted to be one of the Wise Men. But you're not a boy, Nalini. I can be anything I want, said Nalini. Why can't I be a Wise Man? I want to bring myrrh.

"How about if before you bring myrrh, you and I go to the market and get us some fabric so we can make costumes? We need cloaks for the Shepherds, and robes for the Wise Men, and a dress for Mary. We need ornamental rope to use for belts, and silk or satin scarves to tie on heads. Plus we'll need some thick paper and paints, because we've got to make crowns."

"For Jesus?" Nalini squealed, jumping up and down.

"No, not for Jesus. For the Wise Men. Jesus is not a king."

"Of course He is," said Nalini, puzzled. "He's the King of kings."

"I meant," Larissa corrected herself, "he's just a baby inside the manger."

"Yes! We should get Him a halo. And Mary too. And Joseph."

"Joseph needs a halo?" Larissa didn't know if she was going to be up to this.

Nalini laughed. "You're so funny. You're joking, right?"

"Yeah. Sure I am. Well, if we get gold foil, we can make some halos."

They made sheep and goats out of cardboard. The orphans painted them in rainbow colors. They shaped an angel out of white clay. Father Emilio suggested they build a cave. They got wood, and nails and hammered boards together. They ripped gra.s.s out and when it dried, they had hay. They got Christmas lights and hung them around the wooden structure so it lit up like a Christmas tree. The afternoon rehearsals morphed into morning rehearsals, and evening rehearsals. All the children who could walk and talk wanted to partic.i.p.ate, all thirty of them. Larissa made it happen. The Narrator, Joseph, Mary, King Herod, three Wise Men, three Shepherds, and twenty angels dressed in white sheets with silver halos. Jesus was played by Benji, a severely cleft-palated three-month-old, born without any left limbs, who lay in the manger through the rehearsals.

Larissa stood by the door to the common room watching them. So simple to teach them, yet so hard for them to learn. First, to teach them to be someone else, to be other people.

Perhaps if she had been other people, she could've remained more of herself. Perhaps had she been given alternate lives to play on the stage, she could've come home and lived in a place with the tall oaks and the view and the cold windows. Perhaps she could've continued to touch with her hands the faces she loved while during the day walking out into the cold and ascending three steps, four, to the wooden platform in a darkened theater, standing on it, and lifting her gaze to the rafters, the way Nalini, standing in daylight, lifted her gaze to Father Emilio as she learned the words that were hard to remember, memorized the cues that were hard to keep.

Nalini is quite something. She wants everyone's lines, not just her own. She wants to live many lives, not just her own, not even her one part as Magi Number Three. "Myrrh is mine: its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering glooma"sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb."

The little girl loves to sing that and bellows with all her might, but then her little hands go up, and her black eyes sparkle as she mouths, then whispers along to the words of the Narrator too! Glorious now behold Him arise!

Nalini, pipe down, beckons Larissa, standing across the room from Father Emilio, while Sister Martina, excellent on the piano, plays "We Three Kings," and the children sing, and uncontained Nalini jumps up and down. "How am I doing, Larissa? How am I doing?" Though she is not the Prophet, she speaks with the prophets, as Larissa rolls her eyes, yet with pride, with desperate tenderness at the child's vulnerability. She wants to promise her, swear to her that she will never leave her, that she will never be the one again to break that bond.

Except Larissa is not the one Nalini longs for. All the vows in the world can't bring Che back to look after the beloved child that stands in the light of the ancient adobe room and announces with the Prophets, "Look! The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! How am I doing, Larissa?"

4.

Happiness

"I watch you," Father Emilio said to her in September. "You've been with us over two months, and I still don't understand or know how I can help you."

"What do you mean? I'm fine." Larissa was in the kitchen, in the afternoon. She had just finished kneading the dough for pandesal and was taking a tea break. The tea was good in the Philippines. She hadn't been much of a tea drinker before. But here they got their tea from somewhere aromatic. China Oolong? Green? It was soothing and fine.

"You're not fine. You're a gloomy Gus. Look at you."

Well, who wouldn't be gloomy? In two months she had received one letter from Kai. One! You want to talk about memorize? She memorized that letter. It wasn't hard to do, the letter being so short and all. Sixteen lines. Including the Dear Larissa.

Dear Larissa, I miss you too. I'm not a great letter writer, and I'm sorry about that, but I think about you all the time, think about the good times we had. Billy and I are working from sunrise to sundown. The stables are coming along nice. Almost done, remarkably. You'd like them very much, and the horses are doing well. Billy is an awesome wrangler and all-around great guy. We have big plans, Billy and I. I want to tell you about them when I see you. When will that be? Not soon enough. When are you coming back? I wish you could call me sometime. I love your letters, it's like you're right here with me. Though not quite. Please keep writing. I really look forward to receiving them. Nalini sounds like a great kid. Your friend Che would be happy to know you're keeping an eye on her. I'm going to go now, but I'll write again soon, and I think about you every day.

Love, Kai "There's nothing you can do," Larissa said to Father Emilio. "You can't fix this. You can't fix anything." Love, Kai? That's what she got? She had written him thirty, forty letters, and this is what came from him? She sat and stared out the window. It was pouring rain, water like a tidal wave was washing away the hopscotch course, the chalk outlines of momentary joy. The gra.s.s was sodden with standing pools. After the children would wake up from their afternoon nap, the greatest fun of their day would be to run around barefoot in those shallow ponds full of lilies.

"Larissa, look around you," Father said. "Sixty girls and boys in our Christ the Redeemer orphanage are growing up without mothers and fathers. Some of them are disabled, some of them are blind, can't walk, have heart valve problems, cleft palates. One died last week from dengue fever. I know she was already sick and small, but still. Despite this, they manage. Nalini, too. They skip rope, play cards, invent games out of rocks, they hide and go seek. They've been transformed by your play rehearsals. You should hear them in their beds, in the morning, in the yard. It's all they talk about. Every day they do this: find cheer despite the seeming misery of it. Why do you sit there and cry over your own sorrows? Even while you bake bread, cook sweet rice pudding, cut up fruit for halo-halo, make costumes for Mary and the Wise Men, I see you lead a joyless existence; why?"

"I don't know how they do what they do," Larissa replied. "I don't understand them at all."

"You should feel a sense of sacred awe toward all mystifying things you don't understand," said Father Emilio. "The mystery of life is legion, that's why we continually pray for guidance and comfort." He nodded coolly. "You would do better not to view them with the scorn I hear in your voice."

"There's no scorn, Father. But they're children! I'm hardly going to take an example from them. They don't have to live with what I have to live with. No pain, no regret, nothing."

"No pain, no regret, really?" Father Emilio said so quietly. He folded his hands in front of him.

"I mean, they're not waking up every day saying they would do anything, anything, to live their life over."

Father Emilio watched her. "No, they probably don't do that, though I can a.s.sure you they wake up in the dead of night from all manner of other unimaginable things. But is that what you do?" he asked. "You wake up every day and say to yourself that you would do anything to live your life over?"

"Yes," Larissa said to hima"and meant it. All she wanted was to live it over. To get up every morning with joy, see, once there was joy! and run toward her day, toward that one hour when she was in bliss on Albright Circle. One hour a day to feel young, to have love. Father Emilio wanted her to find it? She had found it. And now look.

"Larissa, please. Don't be keeled over like this, choking on your guilt and despair. Learn to live with the choices you made. Would you like Sister Margarita to teach you how to make macapuno?" It was a thick coconut dessert delicacy.

"Not today. Look what's happening to me," she said. "Love is vanishing. Yet it's the only thing left."

He stood up. "I must go attend to my other duties," he said coldly. "But, Larissa, love is not vanishing. It's everywhere you look, every single place on this earth. You can't get away from it. And everywhere love is, G.o.d is. And G.o.d is not where love is not. Open your eyes, and cast your glance on something other than yourself. And if you can't do that yet, then look inside your heart. When were you happiest? When did you feel most fulfilled? What place do your memories take you to? Go there, and see if you can find a way to keep yourself."

After college and before she hooked up permanently with Jared, who was off looking for himself while being a tour guide in the Himalayas, Larissa spent the summer as one of the performers in Great Swamp Revue, a traveling band of improv actors, who rode in one bus from town to town in New Jersey and lower upstate New York, performing in local theaters, up north to Woodstock and west to Allentown. Ron Palais, their road manager, booked thirteen Sat.u.r.day night gigs and seven Sunday matinees. There were eight in their theater group. Evelyn was one of them. So was Ezra.

It was the happiest summer of her life.

They lived in cheap motels and slept on the bus on the way to the next gig, they showered sporadically, read constantly, talked and smoked incessantly, recited tragedy and comedy under the pulsing beat of the Clash and the Ramones. They did not want to be sedated, they felt and saw and heard everything like they were on ecstasy. After each performance they went out drinking, continuing to rehea.r.s.e, to riff off each other, to sing. Did you stand by me? No, not at all. They danced and paired up with unlikely partners. Larissa stopped wearing makeup and a bra. Evelyn performed Job on stage, the whole thing by herself in a soliloquy. Larissa had been blown away, but their manager told Evelyn not to do it anymore. "People aren't going to get it, Ev," Ron told the disappointed and incredulous woman. "The whole suffering thing. n.o.body wants to suffer." Ezra said he agreed: suffering was for chumps. "No point in suffering for its own sake. It's self-pitying, self-indulgent, and stupid." He smoked three cigarettes in the time it took him to utter those few sentences. "Do you know why we suffer? So that the works of G.o.d can be made manifest in us. That's Job. Ev, can you convey that in a five-minute speech to families on a Sunday afternoon after church?"

Ezra was teasing her, but Evelyn didn't give up; she persisted despite Ron's orders, despite Ezra, who must have been a little bit in love with her also. Who wouldn't be? Larissa herself was a little bit in love with Evelyn, and while Ezra and Larissa were in bed, their eyes became moistened with the image of Evelyn's lovely mouth incanting, I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.

During this Renaissance Fair summer of her life, when Larissa's hair was cropped like a boy's and her face plain of makeup, she had joy every day and knew it, was cramped and didn't care, had few comforts, no money, was always broke, and didn't care. She lived not understanding why she was living and even less why eventually she had to die, and didn't care. Every night she got up on stage trying to imitate the inimitable Evelyn reciting long-suffering Job, with her own fruitful efforts from Romeo and Juliet, and Prospero's speeches. We are such stuff as dreams are made ona Larissa knew it was fleeting even then, but fully believed it would come again, in another form, to be happy like that, so alive! packed up on a bus, all her life's belongings in a duffel bag under her feet, hung over from the night before, rootlessly drifting from town to town, singing karaoke in the smoke-filled bars. Did you stand by me? No, not at all.

And almost everything but the happy did come again.

"I don't know what you think of me, Father. You must judge me. How can you not?" During a lull in the afternoon, after lunch, before vespers, when the children were having a short siesta, she and Father Emilio, with the tiny shadow that was Nalini, were taking a short walk in the monastery gardens before it downpoured again.

"I have nothing but profound sympathy for you," Father Emilio said. "Do you judge yourself?"

"Oddly, only since I've been here."

"That seems odd to you?" Father Emilio shrugged.

"A little bit. After all," said Larissa, "this place is completely removed from anything I've ever known. I can't figure out what's stirring my conscience. Nothing in it is familiar, nothing rouses the senses or the memories."

"Nothing?"

Larissa chuckled. "No, and I must admit I'm not a fan of the vinegar and the pickled fish. Though I enjoy the coconut."

"But the thick liver sauce poured over the crispy suckling pig, that doesn't move your conscience?" Father Emilio smiled a little.

"No." Larissa chewed her lip. "You knowaI really didn't mean for it to happen. This thing with Kai."

"Didn't you?"

"My pockets weren't empty and the devil wasn't dancing in them. I had a good life."

"Yes. Che was quite envious of you, or so she would tell me. I kept telling her to struggle is okay, too."

Larissa shook her head. "I've had both. Believe me, a comfortable life is better."

"That's what Che told me too, and she hadn't had both."

"She was still right."

"Was she? Your life got easya"and emptya"and your soul started looking for a way out. The question you have to ask yourself is why? Larissa, you had love in every room in your house. Why wasn't that love enough?"

Larissa frowned. She didn't like the formulation, the premise, the implied conclusion. "That's not true," she said. "It was enough. It had nothing to do with that."

"Didn't it? What then?"

"I told you, I just wasn't vigilant enough."

"True, vigilance is essential in virtue."

"It's not about virtue," Larissa frowned. "It's about what feels right in your heart. But in the beginning, I wasn't guarded enough. I should've been more careful. I should've never pretended to myself even for a moment it was nothing. Now it's too late, but that's how it happened."

Father Emilio nodded. "That's how it always happens. I kept telling Che to be careful with Lorenzo, to guard herself against his destructive pa.s.sions. All she wanted was not to struggle. I said to her, but Che, when you're struggling, conflicted, in a panic, you're always calling on G.o.d, praying to him, begging him for help, and few things please our Lord more than to give solace to the souls that cry for him."