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"Bigger than yours," was all Beer Belly said to Paco, after Dolores had left them standing there.
"Smaller than mine," Paco told him quietly.
Ignacio and the ten policemen had walked on; they were still arguing, although the lion tamer was doing all the talking.
"If I need a permit to dispose of a dead horse, I suppose I don't need a permit to butcher the animal and feed the meat to my lions--do I?" the lion tamer was saying, but he wasn't waiting for an answer from the ten policemen. "I don't suppose you expect me to drive a dead horse back to Oaxaca, do you?" Ignacio asked them. "I could have left the horse to die in the graveyard. You wouldn't have liked that very much, would you?" the lion tamer went on, unanswered.
"Forget about skywalking, Lupe's brother," Paco said to the fourteen-year-old.
"Lupe needs you to look after her," Beer Belly told Juan Diego. The two dwarf clowns waddled off; there were some outdoor showers still standing, and the two clowns started taking theirs.
Juan Diego thought that he and Manana were alone in the avenue of troupe tents; he hadn't seen Lupe until she was standing beside him. Juan Diego guessed she'd always been there.
"Did you see--" he started to ask her.
"Everything," Lupe told him. Juan Diego just nodded. "About the new dog act--" Lupe began; she stopped, as if she were waiting for him to catch up to her. She was always a thought or two ahead of him.
"What about it?" Juan Diego asked her.
Lupe said: "I know where you can get a new dog--a jumper."
*
THE DREAMS OR MEMORIES he'd missed, because of the beta-blockers, had risen up and overwhelmed him; his final two days at the Encantador, Juan Diego dutifully took his Lopressor prescription--the correct dose.
Dr. Quintana must have known Juan Diego wasn't acting; his return to torpor, to a diminished level of alertness and physiological activity, was evident to everyone--he did his dog-paddling in the swimming pool (no sea urchins were lurking there) and ate his meals at the children's table. He kept company with Consuelo and Pedro, his fellow whisperers.
In the early mornings, drinking coffee by the swimming pool, Juan Diego would reread his notes (and make new notes) on One Chance to Leave Lithuania; he'd gone back to Vilnius two more times since his first visit in 2008. Rasa, his publisher, had found a woman in the State Child Rights Protection and Adoption Service to talk with him; he'd brought Daiva, his translator, to th
e first meeting, but the woman from Child Rights spoke excellent English, and she was forthcoming. Her name was Odeta--the same name as the mystery woman on the bookstore bulletin board, the not-a-mail-order bride. That woman's photograph and phone number had disappeared from the bulletin board, but she still haunted Juan Diego--her suppressed but visible unhappiness, the dark circles under her late-night-reading eyes, her neglected-looking hair. Was there still no one in her life to talk with her about the wonderful novels she'd read?
One Chance to Leave Lithuania had, of course, evolved. The woman reader was not a mail-order bride. She'd put her child up for adoption, but the adoption (long a work-in-progress) had fallen through. In Juan Diego's novel, the woman wants her baby to be adopted by Americans. (She'd always dreamed of going to America; now she will give up her child, but only if she can imagine her child as happy in America.)
The Odeta in Child Rights had explained to Juan Diego that it was rare for Lithuanian children to be adopted outside Lithuania. There was quite a lengthy waiting period, allowing the birth mother a second chance to change her mind. The laws were strict: at least six months for international decisions, but the period of time (the waiting period) could take four years--hence older children were the ones most likely to be adopted by foreigners.
In One Chance to Leave Lithuania, the American couple waiting to adopt a Lithuanian child has a tragedy of their own--the young wife is killed on her bicycle by a hit-and-run driver; the widowed husband is in no shape to adopt a child by himself (not that Child Rights would allow him to).
In a Juan Diego Guerrero novel, everyone is a kind of outsider; Juan Diego's characters feel they are foreigners, even when they're at home. The young Lithuanian woman, who has had two chances to change her mind about putting her child up for adoption, now has a third chance to change her mind; the adoption of her child is put on hold. Another awful "waiting period" confronts her. She puts her photo and her phone number on the bulletin board at the bookstore; she meets other women readers for coffee or beer, talking about the novels they've read--the myriad unhappiness of others.
This is a collision we should see coming, Juan Diego was thinking. The American widower takes a trip to Vilnius; he doesn't expect to see the child he and his late wife were going to adopt--Child Rights would never have let him. He doesn't even know the name of the single mother who'd put her child up for adoption. He's not expecting to meet anyone. There is an atmosphere he hopes to absorb--an essence their adopted child might have brought to America. Or is his going to Vilnius a way of reconnecting with his dead wife, a way of keeping her alive a little longer?
Yes, of course, he goes to the bookstore; maybe it's the jet lag--he thinks a novel would help him sleep. And there, on the bulletin board, he sees her photo--someone whose unhappiness is both hidden and apparent. Her lack of attention to herself draws him to her, and her favorite novelists were his wife's favorite novelists! Not knowing if she speaks English--of course she does--he asks the bookseller for assistance in calling her.
And then? The question that remained was an earlier one--namely, whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? The collision course in One Chance to Leave Lithuania is obvious: they meet, each discovers who the other is, they become lovers. But how do they handle the crushing weight of the extreme coincidence of their meeting each other? And what do they do about their seeming fate? Do they stay together, does she keep her child, do they all three go to America--or does this lonely American widower remain with this mother and her child in Vilnius? (Her child has been staying with her sister--not a good situation.)
In the darkness of the single mother's tiny apartment--she is sleeping in his arms, more soundly than she's slept in years--he lies there thinking. (He has still seen only photos of the child.) If he's going to leave this woman and her child and go back to America alone, he knows he'd better leave now.
What we shouldn't see coming, Juan Diego thought, is that the eponymous one chance to leave Lithuania could be the American's--his last chance to change his mind, to get out.
"You're writing, aren't you?" Clark French asked his former teacher. It was still early in the morning, and Clark had caught Juan Diego with one of his notebooks, pen in hand, at the Encantador swimming pool.
"You know me--they're just notes about what I'm going to write," Juan Diego answered.
"That's writing," Clark confidently said.
It seemed natural enough for Clark to ask Juan Diego about the novel-in-progress, and Juan Diego felt comfortable telling him about One Chance to Leave Lithuania--where the idea came from, and how the novel had evolved.
"Another Catholic country," Clark suddenly said. "Dare I ask what villainous role the Church plays in this story?"
