Free The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell Page A

concerned.

    I N D ECEMBER, HE called Anne and George Edwards from San Juan, spending the extra money for a viewer because he wanted to see their faces and them to see his. "Come and work with me," he said. The clinic was losing its National Service doctor and no one was willing to replace him. Would Anne? George, with the omnicompetence of a lifelong engineer and householder, could renovate buildings, teach kids a hundred practical arts, reactivate the net that would link Anne with the larger hospitals and the kids with outside teachers.
    Before they could react, he told them about La Perla, in stark statistical detail. He had no illusions and refused to let the Edwardses harbor any. All they could hope for was a chance of salvaging a few lives out of the thousands of souls cramming the slum.
    "Well, I don’t know," Anne said doubtfully, but he could see her eyes, and he knew. "Promise me there’ll be lots of knife fights?"
    Hand raised, he swore, "Every weekend. And gunshot wounds, too. And car wrecks." They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with "stomachaches." Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the kapok factory. Hands opaline with infected cuts, gone bad from the bacteria and toxins in the offal at the fish-processing plant. Sepsis, diabetes, melanomas, botched abortions, asthma, TB, malnutrition, STDs. Liquor and drugs and hopelessness and rage pounded deep into the gut. "The poor you will always have with you," Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?
    He saw Anne look at George, who sat thinking awhile. "The whole damned baby boom is retiring. Sixty-nine million old farts playing golf and complaining about their hemorrhoids." George snorted. "It’s only a matter of time until someone opens up Funerals ‘R’ Us."
    "I can’t see either of us taking up golf," Anne said. "We may as well go, don’t you think?"
    "Right. We’re outta here," George declared.
    And so, in May of 2016, Anne and George Edwards moved into a rented house in Old San Juan, eight flights of stairs up the hill from the clinic Anne took over. Emilio took some time off to help them settle in. Once they had a bed, their first concern was finding a big wooden table with an assortment of chairs to go around it.

    E MILIO BEGAN HIS own work simply: cleaning up the mission’s physical plant, organizing and surveying things, quietly getting acquainted with the neighborhood again. He worked within the existing programs, at first—the baseball league, the after-school stuff.
    But he was always alert to the possibility that this child or that one could climb out and escape, if someone cared. He bought a lot of bolita tickets, giving the numbers away but keeping track of children with a talent for statistics, luring them to George, who let them play with his web links and who began tutoring a couple of kids who might do well in math. He found a child, a young girl, weeping over a dog hit by a car, and brought Anne her first assistant, Maria Lopez, eleven and good-hearted and ready to learn.
    And there was a little horror named Felipe Reyes who hawked stolen goods right outside the clinic, a boy with the foulest mouth the widely experienced Anne Edwards had ever encountered. Emilio listened to the kid using two languages to excoriate passersby who wouldn’t buy from him and said, "You are the worst salesman I ever met but
’mano
, can you talk!" He taught Felipe to curse in Latin and eventually got him to serve Mass and help around the Jesuit Center.
    Anne spent the first months in the clinic reading through the records, getting a grim feel for the kind of medicine practiced here. She dealt with the business of inventories and inspections, upgrading the equipment, restocking the supplies, while tending to the immediate calls for care: the severed finger, the infections, high-risk pregnancies and