Saving the World Read Online Free Page B

admitted grimly. Richard’s eyes filled. “Oh, Alma, have a little faith.” But he went ahead and taught her to plow the driveway, though her terror of driving through drifting snow convinced her that she would probably die of a heart attack if she tried to do this herself.
    After this afternoon’s phone call, Richard’s loss, which Alma has always imagined as tragic and terminal, is now transformed into something tawdry: betrayal and divorce. I’ll kill him! she thinks, smiling in spite of herself at the irony of causing the very loss she dreads. They have already had the infidelity conversation. “I’m not Hillary Clinton,” Alma has told him. “I’m too insecure. I wouldn’t like the person I’d become if I were married to a man I couldn’t trust.” Richard let out a deep, convincing sigh. “When are you going to get it through your head that I adore you?”
    It’s probably what Francisco Balmis told Josefa on the eve of his departure. Did she believe him? Did she look over the final registry of the members of the expedition—a list the Spanish historian sent Alma via e-mail—and ask,
So what about this Isabel?
Alma’s own eye was caught by this little detail. Accompanying Balmis were nine attendants, twenty-two boys, the ship’s crew, and—unheard of on an expedition of this sort—a woman, Isabel Sendales y Gómez—or López Gandalla or Sendalla y López. (“Of her surname we cannot be certain,” the Web historian noted.) Not only had the rectoress of the orphanage granted Don Francisco the little boys he asked for, but she had joined his mission herself! On the darkest days, when nothing else seems to interest her, Alma finds herself thinking about this crazed, visionary man, crossing the ocean with twenty-two little boys all under the age of nine, and the mysterious rectoress about whom nothing is known for certain but her first name.
    It surprises Alma—being drawn to these historical figures. She never did very well in history when she was in school. Particularly as a child, reading about a watershed episode or a battle or an important discovery made her anxious: as if she were watching a scene of impending disaster she could do nothing to change. That Portuguese captain was going to buy that first cargo of slaves and start a shameful commerce that would lead to revolts, divided families, tragic lives, civil war, the Watts riots, the murder of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, on and on—a whole juggernaut of results to be dealt with in later chapters. Alma wanted to go back and yell,
Stop! You don’t know the half of what you’re getting us all into, a hemisphere soaked in the blood of innocent people!
    Maybe what intrigues her about the historical Balmis is that she doesn’t know if she would have tried to stop him. Sure, poor orphans were used as visionary fodder, but the world was saved, sort of; massive epidemics prevented; the boys were given an opportunity to go somewhere where they could reinvent themselves and not always be bastard kids from La Casa de Expósitos. And so instead of feeling anxious or dreaming of intervening, Alma wants to go along with Isabel on the Balmis expedition.
    Alma stumbled on this story as she was writing the sequel to her second novel: a multigenerational saga of a Latino family, something weighty to make up for the six-going-on-seven years since she published her last novel. Midway through part 1 (the eighteenth century), Alma realized she didn’t care for these people; she was tired of their self-conscious ethnicity, their predictable conflicts. But what to do? The novel was bought! The signing advance spent. Her original editor, sweet Dorie, has been retired to an imprint focusing on memoirs by people who have worked for or are related to the famous: Lady Di’s maid, Elvis’s manager, William Faulkner’s second cousin. A young, very