The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell Read Free Book Online Page B

enjoyable walk to the Edwardses’ house at least once a week after that. Sometimes he was the only guest. Often there were others: students, friends, neighbors, interesting strangers Anne or George had met and brought home. The conversation, about politics and religion and baseball and the wars in Kenya and Central Asia and whatever else caught Anne’s interest, was raucous and funny, and the evenings ended with people calling out last jokes as they walked off into the night. The house became his cave—a home where a Jesuit was welcome and relaxed and off-duty, where he could soak up energy instead of being drained of it. It was the first real home Emilio Sandoz had ever had.
    Sitting in their screened-in back porch, sipping drinks in the dusk, he learned that George was an engineer whose last job had involved life-support systems for underwater mining operations but whose career had spanned the technological distance from wooden slide rules to ILIAC IV and FORTRAN to neural nets, photonics and nanomachines. New to retirement, George had spent the early weeks of freedom cutting a swath through the old house, catching up on every small repair, taking curatorial pride in the smoothly working wooden window casings, the tuck-pointed brickwork, the tidiness of the workroom. He read stacks of books, eating them like popcorn. He enlarged the garden, built an arbor, organized the garage. He sank into pillowy contentment. He was bored brainless.
    "Do you run?" he asked Sandoz, hopefully.
    "I went out for cross-country in school."
    "Watch out, dear, he’s trying to sucker you. The old fart’s training for a marathon," Anne said, the admiration in her eyes contradicting her tartness. "We’re going to have to rebuild his knees if he keeps this nonsense up. On the other hand, if he croaks doing roadwork, I’m going to be a tastefully rich widow. I believe very sincerely in overinsuring."
    Anne, he found out, was taking his course because she’d used medical Latin for years and was curious about the source language. She’d wanted to be a physician from the start but chickened out, afraid of the biochem, and so she began her career as a biological anthropologist. After finishing her Ph.D., she got work in Cleveland, teaching gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve. Years of working with med students in the gross lab did nothing to sustain her awe of the medical curriculum and so, at forty, she went back to school and wound up in emergency medicine, a specialty that required tolerance for chaos and a working knowledge of everything from neurosurgery to dermatology.
    "I enjoy the violence," she explained primly, handing him a napkin. "Would you like me to explain about how that nose thing happens? The anatomy is really interesting. The epiglottis is like a little toilet bowl seat that covers the larynx—"
    "Anne!" George yelled.
    She stuck out her tongue. "Anyway, emergency medicine is great stuff. In the space of an hour sometimes, you get a crushed chest, a gunshot wound to the head and a kid with a rash."
    "No children?" Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise.
    "Nope. Turned out, we don’t breed well in captivity," George said, unembarrassed.
    Anne laughed. "Oh, God, Emilio. You’ll love this. We used the rhythm method of birth control for years!" Her eyes bulged with disbelief. "We thought it
worked
!" And they howled.
    He loved Anne, trusted her from the beginning. As the weeks went by and his emotions became more tangled, he felt more strongly the need of her counsel and the conviction that it would be good. But disclosure was never easy for him; the fall semester was half over before, one night after he finished helping George clear up the dinner wreckage, he found the nerve to suggest a walk to Anne.
    "Behave yourselves," George ordered. "I’m old, but I can shoot."
    "Relax, George," Anne called over her shoulder, as they started down the driveway. "I probably flunked the