Return to Tomorrow by Marisa Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

childbirth. They came to the lectures because she asked them to.
    Dr. Reynard paused for her to catch up. He walked past the screen set up at the front of the room. His shadow cut through a still photograph of a smiling young mother holding her newborn son. There was a gasp of fear from one or two of the mothers-to-be.
    â€œDoctor, please don’t do that,” Rachel pleaded, breaking into English.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I forgot. Don’t walk in front of the projector. Cutting off the light to the woman’simage might do her actual physical harm. It’s so hard to remember all the taboos.”
    â€œWe can only do our best. For these women, every living thing is ruled by its phi spirit. And most inanimate objects have a spirit, as well.” She raised her hands and soothed the women as best she could in a language that had no words for slide projector, multiple vitamins or aerobics. She reminded them in the sharp-edged, singsong intonation of their own tongue that Dr. Reynard was only a man, a foreign man at that, an unbeliever. The spirits, she assured them, would take that into consideration and would not be offended by his ignorance.
    The women, dressed in baggy black skirts and blouses, their hair piled high on their heads but lacking the intricate threading of silver and gold they would have used to adorn themselves in their mountain villages, tittered and smiled behind their hands. Dr. Reynard looked offended, then smiled sheepishly.
    â€œYou’ve been here only a few days longer than I, yet you know so much.” He made a temple of his fingers, bowed to the static figure on the screen, bowed slightly to the women sitting on the floor and walked over to his desk.
    Rachel knew she should explain her past…some of it, at least…to the young man, but now wasn’t the best time.
    She wondered if any time would ever be the best time.
    She finished translating the doctor’s lecture in a few quick sentences. Most of the women sitting silent on the floor would choose to deliver their babies in their huts, with the attendance of a wise woman from their oldvillage, if at all possible. They would bring the babies, later, to be examined. They would allow them to be immunized because they knew how powerful the foreign unbelievers’ magic was. They might even send for her, and Dr. Reynard if there were complications for mother or child, but they wouldn’t come to the infirmary to labor and give birth for any other reason. Jean-Luc Reynard had been in Camp Six for only a little over three weeks. He didn’t understand the Hlông or the other hill people in the camp. But he would learn.
    Now that the lecture was over, the women came forward shyly to bid farewell. They knew she had lived among them, in a village in Laos. She had been one of them, yet not one of them. She knew the customs and duties of a Hlông woman, yet she moved among the foreign males, her own kind, with assurance. They trusted her, yet they were in awe of her. In return, Rachel envied them their sense of belonging, their certainty of their place in their own world. She also knew how fragile that sense of place was, how completely disrupted it would be when they left the border camp for new homes in the west.
    â€œMail call.” Father Dolph’s tall, gangly frame filled the doorway, blocking out the sunlight. “Letters from the States,” he called, brandishing a batch of various size envelopes above his head. The Hlông women bowed slightly as they filed by; none of them, even with their elaborate and upswept hairdos, came above his shoulder. “Valentines, if I don’t miss my guess.”
    Sometimes, if Rachel closed her eyes, she could hear Father Pieter’s voice transposed over his nephew’s. He had been a few years older than Father Dolph was now,perhaps fifty-five, when she first met him, but the two men looked very much alike. And their