The Canterbury Sisters by Kim Wright

trash dump dispensing gloves and cartons of milk and these bizarre comic-book Bibles. They had the strangest and most distorted images of Christ. I remember thinking that they had drawn him to look like an Incan, all short and squat and actually rather frightening . . .”
    “Don’t blame yourself,” someone says. I turn my head to look. Silvia, squinting into the distance as always, looking past us to something only she can see. “Those people had nothing, and you were just trying to help.”
    “Yes, trying to help, trying to give the kids milk and trying to give myself something to do,” Jean says. “I was hardly Mother Teresa. Because that’s what originally drew them to us, you see, the sight of our stupid limo going back and forth between Paradiso Blanco and the dump. The license plate was 487, I remember that too. The Americans always had low numbers. No, volunteering with this church was just one more thing I did wrong, one more thing that caught their eye. Or maybe they would have found us anyway. We had the driver, of course, and the children are all so blonde . . .”
    All the children used to be blonde , I think, looking at Becca’s shock of Crayola-colored hair. The girl is right—her mother’s story is rambling and nonsensical and yet my heart is pounding slightly and not just with the effort of getting up that last hill. Tess’s promise has come true . . . now that we are a couple miles out of the village, the land has opened up around us. The world seems bigger, as if God has exhaled, and the meadows stretch in every direction. Clumps of sheep graze here and there, but the land is otherwise empty, gone fallow with the season. There are no signs of human occupation. No houses or cars or power lines or farm machinery. It could be 1515 instead of 2015. There’s nothing to place us in time except ourselves, our hiking boots and backpacks and shiny water bottles. And of course, Jean’s story.
    “There was a kidnapping attempt?” Tess says, still trying to coax Jean along.
    Jean nods brusquely and makes an effort to pull herself together. “Of course, of course. Of course that’s where this all has been going from the start. But it didn’t happen the way you think. The attack wasn’t against me or the children. They followed Allen instead, very late one night when he and Antonio were out in the car.”
    “Where were they going?” Jersey girl asks. The short one with the coal-black hair and surprised eyebrows, Angelique, they call her, and I must find a way to remember that name. Angelique. She looks like an angel who has sprung a leak. I imagine her sputtering across the sky like a released balloon, making rude noises and doing loop-de-loops in midair. Not my best mnemonic image, but it will have to do.
    “I was just getting ready to ask the same thing,” Valerie says. “If the city was so dangerous, then why would your husband go out in the middle of the night?”
    The question seems to pull Jean up short. “I really don’t know,” she finally says. “Allen often worked late. And his job took him all over the city. It’s not like it is here . . . not like it is in America, I should say, or here either, probably.” She fiddles with her scarf, which is tied at her neck bandana-style, even though it isn’t a bandana. Even though it is silky and delicate and probably expensive. Jean’s French twist is not so smooth today. We haven’t been walking that long, and the knot of hair in the back is already half undone.
    “We could slow down,” Tess says, “or pull up entirely and have a proper rest, if anyone wants to. There’s no schedule. No particular place we need to be and no particular time we have to arrive.”
    Jean shakes her head impatiently. “The minute you drove through the gates of our enclave,” she says, “you were thrust into immediate poverty. That’s the part I don’t think I’m explaining right, what I’m not helping you to see. Guatemala isn’t like