Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,63

other over their differences.

So also, on the day when Izzy—rescued from herself, returned to the sisterhood, en route to the psychiatric residential care facility where she was to “discover a new life worth living” and “learn to make better choices” surrounded by a “supportive, complex, and multilayered treatment team,” as promised in the brochure copy—disappeared, this time for good, no omens flew their red flags.

Maybe the time of meaningful synchronicities is over? What happens after the worst that can happen has happened? After the final no there comes a yes—?

Shut up! Antonia hollers at Stevens. Where was he when she needed him to convince Izzy to hang on, wait until today’s no became tomorrow’s yes?

Daily, Antonia hears reports of the dying planet. It’s Nature’s version of terrorism: terrible storms, rivers bursting their banks, ice floes melting right under the stricken polar bears. The world of impending doom is no longer the province of the poor. Reefs gone, whole species vanishing forever, those dying generations—at their song, seabirds gorging on plastic, little villages under the ocean, the waters rising. For Earth Day, one of her former students invites Antonia on campus to a rally advocating for divesting the college’s endowment of holdings in fossil fuel companies. One of the speakers, a British journalist, speaks movingly of the task ahead. Never mind the fossil fuel spent to get him across the pond. What he has to say is not news to Antonia, but the way he states the problem shakes her to the core.

We’re being asked to do something mankind has never done before, he explains, the strain of emotion in his voice. We are demanding action for people who haven’t been born yet. Moreover, because the areas that will be most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least-seen, least-represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

How can she not despair? Antonia wonders. As if responding to her thoughts, the speaker goes on to say that pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. We have to live as if, in other words, by metaphor.

Antonia of all people should be able to do this. She has spent a lifetime working in those vineyards, taking leaps of metaphor, cultivating her own little plots of prose and poetry. She must live as if Sam, as if Izzy, as if her parents, tías, tíos, as if, as if . . . the list of losses goes on and on—as if it matters to them that Antonia not fall into one of her moods and join them.

A wrenching spring. Antonia feels like ordering all the shoots and bulbs, the crocuses, daffodils, tulips, to go back in the ground. Sam’s rhubarb patch, asparagus bed, his clump of ramps he dug up in the forest. An effrontery to be confronted with so much new life.

Estela has contributed to these dying generations by giving birth to a healthy baby girl. But as if afflicted by the same despondency as Antonia, the young mother refuses to feed her infant or eat much of anything herself. She doesn’t want anything to do with the newborn. She’s not mine, Estela keeps repeating.

How can it not be hers? Dr. Trotter challenges. I saw that baby come out of her! Beth understands about the father. Still, it’s not the baby’s fault. ?El bebé necesario la mamá! Dr. Trotter mangles the Spanish she remembers from high school.

But Estela is adamant. She doesn’t want this strange baby. She wants another baby, Mario’s.

They will have to be patient, the counselor at the Open Door Clinic counsels. After all, the new mother is a traumatized child herself. She will have to be taught how to care for her infant, care for herself. All it will take is a little patience, constant and consistent reassurances until she feels safe.

A little this, a little that, the diminutives of Spanish, one of the losses Izzy, now lost herself, often lamented about English.

Not a whole life, not a guardianship, just this present crisis. All Antonia has to do is fish the boy fallen from the sky out of the water in that Auden poem about suffering. She can do that much, she decides.

You’re on your own after that! Antonia practices what she will tell Estela once they are past this impasse.

Sorry, she keeps saying, not sure to whom. Izzy? Sam? But along with keeping alive her