The Sister Missionary - by Kathryn Maughan

The bandits smashed through the creaky kitchen door of the sister missionaries’ house just after nighttime companion prayer. The hermanas had prayed that night for the usual things: guidance to find people who’d listen; for the people they were teaching, that their hearts might be opened; for help with the language; and they had prayed for the health and safety of their families at home. They hadn’t thought to pray for their own.

            Hermana Harper was tired from the day, but not exhausted, getting tougher. She’d been in one of the hottest areas of Costa Rica for six weeks now, on her Mormon mission for three and a half months. It was like building muscle, and she wasn’t such a weakling anymore. Well, that’s what she had thought. In retrospect, it turned out that a bitchy trainer companion, walking in the hot sun all day, and living in a broken-down house with ants and spiders and mice hadn’t really prepared her for anything.

            Hermana King had given their prayer that night, each of them kneeling on the old tile floor next to their beds, backs to each other in the gray half-light of the bedroom. Then Harper said a quick silent prayer of her own, asking for most of the same things—but also for help to forget, and to be good.

It had been ten, fifteen minutes since they’d said good night, when there was something like an explosion outside the back door, some rapid-fire bambambam, and then the door crashed open. Hermana Harper, who had just started to doze, threw her arm out and whipped the mosquito net off the posts of her meant-to-be-a-bottom-bunk, and jumped to her feet. Her heart was pumping so hard it was almost hard to breathe. Hermana King popped upright in her bed, her head tearing her net out of the dental floss loops she’d rigged from the ceiling. She clawed it off and threw it to the side. King had been in the country eight months, on her mission for ten, and every night she dropped into the deepest sleep Hermana Harper had ever seen. But this time she snapped up like a mousetrap, panic on her face.

            They kept their bedroom door open for air. Before Hermana Harper could close it, the men had seen them.

            “Come out! All of you! Now!” they shouted, in Spanish. Wearing black: black masks on their faces and scarves around their heads, a dull gray in the streetlight that penetrated the curtains. That same light glinted off the guns in their hands.

            “What is this?” in English from the other bedroom. Misana, their landlady and housemate, a kind, eighty-nine-year-old woman who was also a member of the church, in the front row every Sunday. She spoke Spanish and English equally, having been raised in a town in Nicaragua called Bluefields. Her words were mushy since she didn’t sleep with her teeth in.

            “I said come out!” in Spanish. “Don’t be stupid.”

            The living room lights flared on and Hermana Harper winced, trying to breathe deeply. The lights weren’t near bright enough when she was trying to read her scriptures or write in her journal at night, but coming out of nowhere like that, they could’ve been the midday sun. Two men, looking like they were from a movie, standing in the doorway of their bedroom.

            Robbers in their home at eleven?  Robbers breaking into their home? It couldn’t have been past eleven o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The three of them looked like it was the middle of the night, completely disheveled—Harper wore a Costa Rican flag t-shirt and purple flowered pajama pants from The Gap, bought for her mission to a hot and humid country. King, tiny and petite, wore a knee-length green button-up nightshirt over threadbare black leggings, a thick blond braid snaking over her shoulder; Misana’s wiry gray hair stood in a halo around her head and she wore her thin, holey yellow nightgown that was probably older than the missionaries. Harper felt ridiculous standing in front of these ninjas, like a trying-too-hard college student, even though she was actually a servant of the Lord.

            The shorter man had a grin in his eyes, above his bandanna, looking between King and Harper. He was probably their age, maybe younger. He jutted his tongue into his mask and swiped it from left to right and back, and her insides lurched again. It reminded her of that homeless guy on the corner at the grocery store that one time. She’d driven up to him in the parking lot and offered him a couple of bananas but he stuck his tongue in his cheek and made a jerking motion at his mouth, and even though Hermana Harper (Cami, then) didn’t a hundred percent know the technicalities of what he meant, she knew enough.  But that time she rolled up her window and drove away.

            The tall one jabbed the other one with his elbow, the arm ending in a gun. “Beto, ya,” he said. He jerked the gun around at the three of them. In Spanish: “You know what we’re here for.”

            Harper looked at Misana and King, who looked back at her and each other, the three of them ping ponging glances around. Her heart thundered so high in her chest it felt like she would choke. There was something else bugging her, on top of the obvious, what was it?

            She felt cold. He’d said “don’t be stupid,” but using “estúpidas,” feminine, meaning he already knew there were no men there. She started to shake, and tightened her hands into fists. Such ugly images in her head—they could lock Misana in her room and there would be one on her, one on Hermana King. Or maybe they’d lock two in the room, make it easier. She had taken a self-defense class once, but they didn’t talk about what to do if the assaulter had a gun. No, they did. She breathed hard, tried to remember. They said he’d have to set it down at some point, if he was actually going to do anything, and that’s when you could do the eye jab and groin kick and get away. If there was only one. She felt another prayer forming, without crystallizing into actual thoughts, just desperately trying to send heavenward a general SOS.

            “You can have all our money,” said Hermana King. Which was perfectly fine; these men with guns could have anything, and money was the best possible option. They would call the mission office tomorrow and talk to President Patton, tell him what happened, and the office would get them some more.  It was near the end of the month, so they didn’t have many colones left anyway. Harper also had about two hundred dollars that her parents had sent, more than enough to tide them over, or they could call the other missionaries in the area. Elder Neville and Elder Aguila had been robbed themselves, walking around their area of Limón, but the men only got their watches and scriptures and hymnals and the cash they walked around with, five thousand colones (twenty-five dollars) if the muggers were lucky. If these men found Harper’s dollar stash in her clock box, well, her parents would send more of that too.

            Short Guy pointed at Misana. “I’m a poor old woman,” said Misana, still mushy. She was obviously speaking literally; Misana was eighty-nine and, well, this was her house, but she never complained or wanted pity. First thing in the morning she liked to walk around punching the air like Rocky, and she probably exercised more than her twenty-one-year-old housemates. King and Harper paid her twenty-five thousand colones a month, but even in Limón, a hundred thirteen dollars didn’t get you that far. Other than that, all her income they could see came from selling candy and bottles of Coke to the kids in the neighborhood for fifty colones each.

            “Let’s see what you have,” he said. Misana didn’t even flinch, just flung her arm toward her bedroom. Short Guy went into the bedroom and started throwing things around—with lumps, crashes and shattering glass. He rushed to the hermanas’ room and did the same thing, with thumps and bumps: clothes, the nets, sheets and mattresses. Their Bibles and Books of Mormon, their Guías, the mission-approved Mormon books they were allowed: Harper could hear their pages flap in the air and smash into the cement floor. She’d brought some that her dad had given her, from his own mission to Paris thirty years prior, and he’d trusted her with them, and now they were wrecked. Maybe the guy would open the clock box, then leave them alone. Seriously, she had a little travel clock next to her pillow and its box under the bed, what else would be in there?

            Short guy cracked his gun against the wall, barrel on cement, and she jumped again. “Chingada puta!” he yelled. “Where is it?”

            Misana trudged two feet to the couch, Tall Guy following her with his gun, and she slowly lowered herself down. “Idiot,” she muttered, in English. Tall Guy snatched a look over at the bedroom, then shifted on his feet and looked over at the hermanas, pressing themselves together, closer than they’d ever stood before. Maybe they could meld, somehow repel the men with the force of their minds, their presence, something. Two missionaries. They could will them away, summon some kind of divine force field of protection, like Daniel in the lions’ den. Right? Miracles were possible then; they were possible now.

            “Nothing!” Short Guy shouted from the bedroom. 

            “We’re full-time missionaries,” Hermana King said in Spanish. “We don’t earn anything. We pay to be here—our parents—and the money goes to the office in San José. We don’t have it. Whatever you want, we don’t have it.”

            All of which Harper knew, and understood, but wouldn’t have been able to formulate in Spanish. Thank heaven she had a companion who spoke well. Well, that was the point, they always put greenies with fluent speakers, but still, she was grateful.

            “The drugs,” said the tall one.

            The hermanas looked at each other, eyes wide. “We’re missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” said King, the spiel they said verbatim many times a day. And then something they’d never said before: “We don’t have drugs.”

            Tall Guy shrugged. “Everyone knows that’s a lie.”

            “We’re here for eighteen months,” Harper said. Still things she had memorized, almost a script, because everyone was curious as to why these two gringas were walking around their town every day clanging on their portones in the brutal heat. “They don’t pay us to come here. We’re missionaries for this short time, and then we go back to our normal lives. The elders you see walking around too, the boys, they’re here two years.”

            Usually the conversation then went to why two years versus eighteen months (no one knew), what they wanted to do after the missions were over (Harper wanted to become an ophthalmologist; King wanted to teach kindergarten and get married and have kids), what their families were like, where else they’d been in Costa Rica and their favorite areas and where they wanted to go next. Sometimes about the structure of the mission, how many missionaries there were in the country (about two hundred), in the world (sixty thousand).

            “It’s a good story,” Short Guy said.

            “It’s the truth,” mumbled Misana.

            He whirled on her. “It’s your shit they’re selling,” he said. “Maybe they don’t know where it is. But you do.”

            The shorter guy reached up and took off his head scarf and bandanna. It was a good fifteen or twenty degrees cooler than it had been when the sun was high, but the fans weren’t on and it was still Limón. He had a deep, raspberry-red birthmark from mid-cheek to chin, splashed across his nose and the side of his lips. With the bandanna on his face, his eyebrows had been his most remarkable feature, like strips of Velcro. But they wouldn’t be what anyone noticed first. “Don’t look at me,” he said, and Harper and King both turned away. What was the word for birthmark? Did it have its own word or was it a phrase? “Stain” or “spot” was mancha. Mancha de nacimiento—that sounded right. 

            “Sit down,” Mancha Man said, plural. He pointed at the couch and the rocking chair.

            Harper took the rocking chair, facing Misana and King. Misana reached over and turned on the fan, a fancy new one—oscillating, three speeds, on legs, and the air started to move, taking away one degree of the claustrophobia. “Tell us what you really want,” said King.

            “The cocaine.”

            Harper couldn’t help it, she barked out a laugh, a release valve that burst open.

            “Shut up,” said the tall guy, waving his gun. His face said that he meant it. She choked it down.

            “We are missionaries,” King started again.

            “It’s in the pantry,” said Misana. “Right after the kitchen.”

            For a second Harper thought she might puke—her stomach took such a dive, with some nausea, dizziness. But this was not reality. Misana had to be playing their game, tricking them. The pantry was full of junk. Harper didn’t go in there, because it was a room for scrap as well as food, everything covered in a layer of dust, mouse droppings, dead flies and ants and cockroaches. Two shelves spanned all three walls, lined in contact paper that was ancient, stiff, now brown, and all the food boxes, old electronics, and dishes were stacked on them and on the floor. There was a huge, heavy bike propped against the far shelf, in front of an enormous jar of sugar, one solid mass now, which sat in a bowl full of water to trap the ants, dozens every day, that tried to get at it. Three plastic bags full of little cookie packages (twenty-five colones each) hung from wires suspended from the ceiling, but mice still had found their way into a couple of them. Misana had said the hermanas could keep their food in there, and the hermanas had delicately declined. 

            Mancha Man disappeared into the pantry. Harper listened for crashes—glass shattering, more possessions destroyed—but they didn’t come this time, just rustling, some metal thunks.

            “Aquí la tengo!” he shouted, and then reappeared with a white bundle. Even Harper could tell—she’d seen the news, she’d seen movies, she’d watched Miami Vice in sixth grade. It was a big old package of drugs. The room went gray for a second, blanched of color by a sudden fury. Misana. 

            Misana looked calm as the summer sea. “Now you have it, you go,” she said.

            Hermana King hadn’t said a word, which was unlike her in the best of circumstances. She was the one who talked long after prayers about her hair; how Lancôme was her favorite makeup; and how much she missed pizza, her boyfriend on his own mission in Taiwan, and her boyfriend’s amazing mom Nancy. Look at the bright side, Harper would tell herself: at least we’re talking about something.

            Tall Guy slowly walked forward until he stood right over Misana, uncomfortably close. In her space. Misana didn’t flinch, just flicked her gaze up to stare at him. Harper didn’t know how much she could actually see, without her glasses on.

            “I need the rest of it,” Tall Guy said in Spanish.

            “She doesn’t have anything!” King said.

            But…she’d had something, Harper thought. Something she shouldn’t have had. Something they never in a million years would have expected her to have.

            “That’s all they left me,” she sighed.

            “Liar.”

            She held up her hands again. “I can only tell the truth. This is what I got today. I do not choose to store it for them. I do not choose how much they leave.” Harper felt a tiny flicker of happiness: she understood everything they had just said. Although maybe she wished she hadn’t.

            Harper and King had been gone that entire day, even longer than they usually were. It was Monday, P-day (P for Preparation), the one day a week the missionaries got time off. The handbook said it was the day for laundry and buying groceries, but they were in Costa Rica, stationed on the coast, and no one wanted to waste that. They’d left at five-thirty to join the rest of the zone’s missionaries on the six a.m. bus to Cahuita, a gorgeous beach two hours to the south. Swimming was forbidden to missionaries worldwide—probably just a safety issue, but the old wives’ tale was that “Satan rules the waters,” or some such thing—so every week they played beach volleyball.

            Harper was a terrible volleyball player and the missionaries were competitive, so she’d sat on a rock in the shade, her gaze repeatedly going to the shiny blue ocean and sand so bright it hurt through her sunglasses, to write letters. One to her parents about the heat (again, always), their investigators Juan and Delroy, and the three-year-old who’d kicked her in the shin on Friday, wearing his shoes, because she hadn’t let him pull her headband out of her hair, and she just automatically gave him a big shove backwards, and his mom didn’t blink, although she didn’t necessarily look pleased. She wrote the same letter to her grandparents, and a quick check-in to her sister Amelia—not asking any questions, staying away from anything personal, just hoping Amelia would feel some reassurance—and then instead of writing anything to Natalia, she wrote in her journal about the night Natalia had made tostones, because just last night the Durán family gave them a plateful—called patacones here—and why did everything in the world remind of her of Natalia every stupid day? And then rather than crying there on the beach in front of everyone, she’d slammed the journal shut, shoved it deep in her backpack, and walked to the shade of the food stand for some empanadas. Natalia used to make those too.