The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(99)

The Orbis communications director walked my team down musty, faded-blue corridors, explaining that two staff ophthalmologists from the Hospital Nacional de Ni?os in San José, Costa Rica, would test each patient’s sight. If the doctor decided the patient needed further treatment, he would direct the person to one of three examination rooms assigned to me and two of my Orbis colleagues.

It had been nearly ten years since I’d turned my private practice over to Mickie and climbed aboard the refurbished DC-10 owned by Orbis, an organization dedicated to saving sight throughout the world. I intended to take one trip. Then I took another, and another, and just kept getting on the plane. Mickie had refused to buy me out of the practice, or to buy my home, though she agreed to move in and care for it. “Both will be here when you come back from wherever the hell it is you’re going,” she’d said, which was pretty much around the world. I worked in villages in Africa where at night you could hear lions moaning in the tall grass. I conducted eye exams in overpopulated slums in India and in Asia where people lived beneath sheets of metal and cardboard. I sent Mickie a postcard and a letter from every city I visited. She refused to write back. “I’ll talk to you in person, when you come home,” she’d say.

Over the years, with the advent of cell phones, desktop computers, e-mail, and the Internet Mr. Cantwell had predicted, Mickie relented. In fact, we communicated more than when we had worked together. At night, I wrote her long letters about my day. I also called Ernie, who had assumed the mantle as CEO of Cantwell Computers, once a week on average, and we also stayed in touch via e-mail.

My work and travels also gave my mother and me something to talk about when I returned to Burlingame, other than her persistent question, “When are you moving back home?” I’d taken up photography as a hobby, and we would dissect each photograph in detail. My mother’s son, I put them all in scrapbooks and labeled each one.

“Africa looks incredible,” she’d said. “Your father always wanted to take a safari.”

“There are some beautiful areas,” I said, “but also so much poverty. We should go to Africa. And you would love China.”

My mother would not leave my father. “You’re treating God’s children,” she said, tears filling her eyes, hope filling her soul. In my mother’s way of thinking, if not for the “incident”—which was how she referred to the murder-suicide of David Bateman and Trina Crouch—I never would have joined Orbis, and I would not have been helping so many less fortunate. In my mother’s way of thinking, I had become God’s missionary, down to my beard—which showed traces of gray—shoulder-length hair, round tortoiseshell glasses, and baggy clothes. She said it made me look like a disciple.

Mickie was not as kind. “You look like one of the freaking brothers, Hill,” was her frequent greeting, referring to the Franciscans of our youth.

“That’s Brother Hill to you,” I’d say.

I didn’t consider my work as “God’s work,” largely because I didn’t believe in my mother’s God. If anything, I’d classify myself as a Buddhist. I believed that every living thing came from the earth and was to be respected. I meditated and I chanted and I found that it helped me sleep—as did the exhausting schedule I purposefully kept. Intellectually, I recognized that, in some way, this was not my way of helping others as much as it was my penance for the death of Trina Crouch. This was my purgatory, to atone for my sins.

Being a visitor to Burlingame also allowed me unencumbered time to spend with my father, who had learned to speak again, though in a halting, ghostly rasp. We spent many hours together under the shade of that gnarled oak tree at the rehabilitation center. When I took him and my mother on excursions, Mickie would join us. We pushed his wheelchair across the Golden Gate Bridge, around Sausalito, and over to Alcatraz Island. When we had exhausted San Francisco, we went north to the Napa Valley, east to Yosemite and Mendocino, south to Monterey. My mother took great joy in planning these trips to coincide with my visits. These were the cruises and vacations she and my father thought they would take in the twilight of their lives but never got the chance.

Ten hours after my day had started at the makeshift clinic, I was nearing the finish line and dreaming of a cold shower, colder beer, and something more substantial than the light snack I had rushed to eat. Alejandra, one of the clinic assistants, knocked and opened my door.

“That bus has arrived,” she said. “Do you have it in you?”

The bus contained thirty orphans from a rural village outside Atenas, an hour’s drive west of the capital. We’d been getting updates throughout the day of its progress. The bus had been scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning, but heavy spring rains washed out a road and caused them to take a long detour. Then their bus broke down.

“I can hold out,” I said, “if you can find me some sugar.”

Over the next two hours, I examined eight children and three adults while sipping a warm soft drink and chewing almond cookies. I was examining a young girl whose name I do not recall but whose beautiful face would forever be etched in my memory when Alejandra interrupted again.

“Dr. Hill? Sorry to disturb,” she said, sticking her head into my room. “There’s a child here Dr. Rodriguez would like you to see.”

I was tired, with several more patients of my own still waiting. “Is it something in particular?”