The Lies We Told
Diane Chamberlain
Maya and Rebecca Ward are both accomplished physicians, but that's where the sisters' similarities end. As teens, they witnessed their parents' murder, but it was Rebecca who saved Maya from becoming another victim. The tragedy left Maya cautious and timid, settling for a sedate medical practice with her husband, Adam, while Rebecca became the risk taker. After a devastating hurricane, Rebecca and Adam urge Maya to join the relief effort. To please Adam, Maya agrees. She loses herself in the care and transport of victims, but when her helicopter crashes into raging floodwaters, there appear to be no survivors.Forced to accept Maya's gone, Rebecca and Adam turn to one another—first for comfort, then in passion—unaware that miles from civilization, Maya is hurt and trapped with strangers she's not sure she can trust. Away from the sister who has always been there to save her, Maya must find the courage to save herself—unaware that the life she knew has changed forever.Praise for Diane Chamberlain ‘Fans of Jodi Picoult will delight in this finely tuned family drama, with beautifully drawn characters and a string of twists that will keep you guessing right up to the end.' - Stylist‘A marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem’ - Literary Times’Essential reading for Jodi Picoult fans’ Daily Mail’So full of unexpected twists you'll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult's style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.’ - Candis
Praise for Diane Chamberlain
Before the Storm
“This is powerful stuff … it is certainly as compulsive and issue-led as Jodi Picoult with whom she is being compared. I couldn’t put it down.”
—The Bookseller
“Chamberlain lays out her latest piece of romantic suspense in a shattered chronology that’s as graceful as it is perfectly paced … her engrossing prose leads the way to redemption.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Bay at Midnight
“This complex tale will stick with you forever.”
—Now Magazine
“Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read.”
—Closer
“A moving story.”
—Bella
“A brilliantly told thriller.”
— Woman
The Lost Daughter
“A strong tale that deserves a comparison with Jodi Picoult.”
—www.lovereading.co.uk
Maya
Every family has a story, told and retold so many times it seems firm and irrefutable. Etched in granite. Here are the bare bones of my family’s story:
My parents were murdered by a masked stranger, who shot them in our driveway.
My sister, Rebecca, is beautiful, wild, coolheaded and fiercely independent. She needs no one to make her happy. She does, however, need danger.
I am sensitive, quiet, brilliant and fearful, in many ways my sister’s opposite. I need safety, protection and a man who loves me.
More often than not, family stories turn out to be etched in sand rather than granite. Even the parts we think are true—even the parts about ourselves—crumble under scrutiny. These are the lies we tell everyone who knows us. These are the lies we tell ourselves.
The Lies We Told
Diane Chamberlain
www.dianechamberlain.co.uk (http://www.dianechamberlain.co.uk)
To my sister,
Joann Lopresti Scanlon.
We are so lucky to have each other.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As usual, I owe the biggest thank-you to my significant other, John Pagliuca. I don’t think John’s ever said, “Can we talk about it later?” when I’ve needed to think out loud about my story. Thank you, John, for all you do to help me write.
While researching The Lies We Told, I stumbled across an article by emergency room physician Hemant Vankawala, in which he described his experiences working with evacuees in the New Orleans airport after Hurricane Katrina. Dr Vankawala became my gracious expert on medical relief work, and I don’t know how I would have written about the fictional DIDA organisation without him. Other medical advisors were Marti Porter, RN, and paramedic Cass Topinka. Thank you all for being so generous with your time and information, as well as for the work you do.
For helping me learn about my setting, thank you Glen Pierce, Sterling Bryson, Tori Jones, Kim Hennes, Dave and Elizabeth Samuels, Bland Simpson, Dixie Browning and Brooks Preik of Two Sisters’ Bookery in Wilmington, NC.
For coming up with the name ‘Last Run Shelter’, thank you faithful reader and blog commenter, Margo Petrus. Gina Wys helped me understand what life is like after a hurricane. Dave Samuels taught me all I needed to know about helicopters. And Vivian I. Vanove gave me the inside skinny on the Wilmington airport.
For their various contributions, thank you Nellie Mae Batson, Gabe Bowne, Lynnette Jahr, Julie Kibler, Mary Kilchenstein, Ann Longrie, Melinda Smith, Betty Sullivan, Kathy Williamson, and Julia Burney-Witherspoon and her organisation, www. cops-n-kids. org.
For brainstorming help and all-around support and friendship, I’m grateful to the six other members of the “Weymouth Seven”: Mary Kay Andrews, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff and Brenda Witchger.
For their invaluable feedback and for always being there for me, my editor, Susan Swinwood and my agent, Susan Ginsburg.
And finally, thank you Denise Gibbs, who helped in too many ways to count. You rock!
Prologue
Maya
I KNEW THE EXACT MOMENT DADDY TURNED FROM THE street into the driveway of our house in Annandale, Virginia, even though I was curled up on the backseat of the car with my eyes closed. I was very nearly asleep, a half-fugue state that I wanted to stay in forever to help me forget what I’d done. The rain spiking against the roof of the car was loud, but I still heard the crunch of gravel and felt the familiar rise and fall as the car traveled over the portion of the driveway that covered the drainpipe. We were home. I would have to open my eyes, unfurl my aching fourteen-year-old body and go into the house, pretending nothing was wrong while the truth was, my world had caved in on me. Or so I thought. I had no idea that I was mere seconds away from the true collapse of my world. The moment that would change everything.
Daddy suddenly slammed on the brakes. “What the …”
I sat up, wincing from a sudden bolt of pain in my gut. In the glow of the headlights, I saw my mother running toward the car, her arms flailing in the air. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my mother run before. I’d never seen her look wild like this, her wet, dark hair flattened to her head, her dress clinging to her thighs.
My breath caught in my throat and I let out a soft moan. She knows, I thought. She knows where we’ve been.
My mother yanked the passenger door open and I braced myself for what she would say. She jumped into the car. “Drive!” she screamed, pulling the door shut. “In reverse! Hurry!” I could smell the rain on her. I could smell fear.
“Why?” Daddy stared at her, his profile a perfect silhouette—the wire-rimmed glasses, the slightly Romanesque nose—that would remain in my memory forever.
“Hurry!” my mother said.
“Why are you—”
“Just go! Oh my God! There he is!” My mother pointed ahead of us, and the headlights picked up the figure of a man walking toward our car.
“Who’s that?” Daddy leaned forward to peer into the half-light. “Does he have on a … is that a ski mask?”
“Dan!” My mother reached for the gearshift. “Go!”
I was wide awake now, fear flooding my body even before the headlights illuminated the man’s ice-blue eyes. Even before I saw him raise his arm. Even before I saw the gun. Instinctively, I ducked behind the driver’s seat, arms wrapped over my head, but no matter how loudly I screamed, I couldn’t block out the crack of gunfire. Over and over it came. Later, they said he only had five bullets in the gun, but I could have sworn he had five hundred.
My sharpest memories of that day will always be the blast of that gun, the ice-blue eyes, the silhouette of my father’s face, the skirt of my mother’s dress sticking to her thighs.
And my sister.
Above all, my sister.
1
Maya
I HAD PASSED THE ENORMOUS LOW-SLUNG BUILDING ON Capital Boulevard innumerable times but had never gone inside. Today, though, I felt free and whimsical and impulsive. All the moms in my neighborhood had told me there were great bargains inside the old warehouse. I needed no bargains. Adam and I could afford whatever we wanted. With the income of two physicians—a pediatric orthopedist and an anesthesiologist—money had never been our problem. It wasn’t until I stepped inside the building, the scent of lemon oil enveloping me, that I realized why I was there. I remembered Katie Winston, one of the women in my North Raleigh neighborhood book club, talking about the beautiful nursery furniture she’d found inside. Katie had been pregnant with her first child at the time. Now she was expecting her third. I’ll finally fit in, I thought, as I walked into the building’s foyer, where the concrete floor was layered with old Oriental rugs and the walls were faux painted in poppy and gold.
Every single one of the fifteen women in my book club had children except for me. They were always warm and welcoming, but I felt left out as their conversations turned to colic and day care and the pros and cons of Raleigh’s year-round school program. They thought I didn’t care. Being a doctor set me apart from most of them to begin with, and I was sure they believed I’d chosen career over motherhood. Every one of them was a stay-at-home mom. Most had had short careers before getting pregnant, and a couple still did some work from home, but I knew they saw me outside their circle. They had no idea how much I longed to be one of them. I kept those feelings to myself. Now, though, I was ready to let them out. I’d tell my neighbors at our next meeting. I hoped I could get the words out without crying.
Today marked sixteen weeks. I rested my hand on the slope of my belly as I walked down the aisle on the far left of the building, past cubicles filled with beautiful old furniture or handcrafted items. I was safe. We were safe. Most people waited until the first trimester had passed to tell people the news, but Adam and I had learned that even reaching the twelve-week mark wasn’t enough. I’d made it to twelve weeks and two days the last time. We’d wait four months this time, we’d decided. Sixteen weeks. We wouldn’t tell anyone before then—except Rebecca, of course—and we wouldn’t start fixing up the nursery until we’d passed that sixteen-week milestone.
Smiling to myself, I strolled calmly through the building as though I was looking for nothing in particular. Some of the cubicles were filled with a hodgepodge of goods, crammed so tightly together I couldn’t have walked inside if I’d wanted to. Others were a study in minimalism: shelves set up just so, each displaying a single item. Some of the cubicles had shingles in the entryway to give the appearance of a shop on a quaint street corner instead of a small square cubby in a warehouse. Rustler’s Cove. Angie’s Odds ‘n’ Ends. North Carolina Needlepoint. There were few other shoppers, though, and absolutely no one who appeared to be guarding the merchandise. If you wanted to slip a knickknack into your pocket, there was no one to see. No one to stop you. That sort of trust in human nature filled me with sudden joy, and I knew my hormones were acting up in a way that made me giddy.
I ran my fingertips over a smooth polished tabletop in one cubicle, then fingered the edge of a quilt in the next. I passed one tiny cubby that contained only a table with a coffeepot, a plate of wrapped blueberry muffins, a small sign that read Coffee: Free, Muffins: $1.50 each and a basket containing six dollar bills. I couldn’t resist. I took two of the muffins for tomorrow’s breakfast and slipped a five-dollar bill into the basket. I walked on, the irrational joy mounting inside me. People could be trusted to pay for their muffins. What a wonderful world!
I felt like calling Adam just to hear his voice. How long since I’d done that? Called him for no reason? I hadn’t seen him before he left for the hospital that morning, and I’d spent the day seeing patients in my office. If all went well with Adam’s surgeries today, he’d be home in time to go out to eat. We could celebrate the sixteen-week milestone together. The baby was due New Year’s Day. What could be more fitting? The start of a new year. A new life for all three of us. Things would be better with Adam now. Ever since learning I was pregnant, there’d been a tension between us that we hadn’t really acknowledged because we didn’t know how to get rid of it. If I was being honest with myself, I had to admit the tension had been there much longer than that. Now, though, I was sure it would disappear. We’d talk at dinner that evening, our future finally full and glowing ahead of us. Maybe we’d make lists of names, something we hadn’t dared to do before now. Then we’d go home and make love—really make love, the way we used to before all our lovemaking had turned into baby making. Once upon a time, we’d been good together in bed. I wanted that back.
I saw a sign hanging from a cubicle several yards in front of me. Baby Craft, it read, and I walked straight toward it. This was the place Katie had mentioned, I was sure of it. The lemony scent grew strong as I walked inside the rectangular cubicle. It was filled with furniture, but there was order to the layout. White cribs and dressers and gliders on one side, espresso-colored cribs and changing tables and rockers on the other. I shivered with anticipation, unsure what to look at first. Tags hung from each piece of furniture, telling me the original pieces had been refinished to meet twenty-first-century safety requirements. Lead paint removed. Crib bars moved closer together. The pieces were exquisite. Although Adam and I had held back from turning one of the bedrooms into a nursery, we’d already planned everything to the final detail, lying awake at night, talking. How many men would take that much interest? It had been easier to imagine the mural we’d have painted on the nursery wall than it was to imagine the baby. That would change now.
I spent nearly an hour in the broad cubicle, typing notes into my BlackBerry about the furniture. Prices. Contact information for the Baby Craft shop owner. Everything. And finally, reluctantly, I walked on. I couldn’t buy anything. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to tempt fate.
I’d be nearly thirty-five when the baby was born. I would have preferred to have my first earlier, but I didn’t care at this point. My first. There would be more to come, at least one more baby to use the furniture. Maybe two. Maybe a houseful, I thought, the giddiness returning.
Adam called on my cell when I walked into the house.
“Going to be a long night,” he said. “Couple of emergency surgeries, and I’m it. You doing okay?”
“I’m great,” I said as I slid open the back door to let Chauncey into the yard, spotting the four deer munching our azaleas a second too late. Chauncey tore down the deck steps, barking his crazy head off, and I laughed as the deer raised their indifferent eyes in his direction. They knew he wouldn’t take a step past the invisible fence.
“What’s with Chaunce?” Adam asked.
“Deer,” I said, leaving out the part about the azaleas.
Adam thought the deer were funny and beautiful until it came to the yard. “You’ll get something to eat at the hospital?” I asked, knowing our celebration would have to wait until the following night.
“Right.” He paused for a moment. “I’ll be working with Lisa tonight,” he said, referring to one of the surgeons who was a good friend of both of ours. “Can I tell her about the Pollywog?”
I smiled. The baby would have his last name—Pollard—and he’d started calling him or her “the Pollywog” a couple of weeks ago. I knew then that he was confident everything would go well this time. I felt the slightest twinge of anxiety over him telling Lisa, but tamped it down. It was time to let the world share our happiness. “Absolutely,” I said.
“Great, My.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “Let’s stay up late tonight and talk until dawn, okay?”
Oh, yes. “I can’t wait,” I said.
I fed Chauncey and ate a salad, then went upstairs to sit in the room that would become the nursery. The only piece of furniture currently in the room was a rocker. That was one thing we wouldn’t need to buy, and if our battered old rocker didn’t match the rest of the Baby-Craft furniture, I didn’t care. It was the rocking chair of my childhood. My mother had nursed and cuddled both Rebecca and myself in that rocker. It was one of the few pieces of furniture I owned that had belonged to my parents. Rebecca had none of it, of course. She lived in an apartment on the second floor of Dorothea Ludlow’s Durham Victorian, and her furniture was slapped together from whatever she could find. She was rarely there and couldn’t have cared less, but I wished we’d had the foresight to keep more of our parents’ belongings. We’d been teenagers then, and furniture had been the last thing on our minds. It was only because the social worker had told us we’d one day appreciate having the rocker that we kept it, too numb to argue with her.
Sitting in the rocker, I imagined the Baby Craft furniture in the room. It would fit perfectly and still leave space for the mural on one wall. I rested my hands on my stomach. “What do you think, little one? Mammals? A Noah’s ark kind of thing? Or fish? Birds?” I’m dreaming, I thought. How long had it been since I’d let myself dream?
“You’re a rarity,” Adam had told me early on, when we were still new to each other and everything about our relationship seemed to sparkle. “Part doctor, part dreamer. A scientist and a romantic, all in one endearing package.” Oh, how right he’d been, and what an uneasy blend of traits that could be at times. I could see myself as a stay-at-home mom like so many of my neighbors, my life filled easily and completely with the needs of my children. Yet I loved the challenge of my work. I knew I would find a way to do both. My plan for the next five months was to keep working, stopping as close to my delivery as possible as long as everything went well with my pregnancy. Sixteen weeks. I was going to be fine.
The streets of our neighborhood were deserted as I walked Chauncey before bed. The full moon was veiled by thin gray clouds and a fine mist fell, weaving itself into my hair. It had been a wet August. As we walked beneath a streetlamp, I saw Chauncey’s fur glow with tiny damp droplets. The houses were set far apart on the winding, sidewalkless streets, and they were a mix of styles. Brick colonials, like ours, and cedar-sided contemporaries. Woods divided one lot from another, and the trees hugged the road between the houses. Usually Adam was with us for this late-night outing, and walking through the darkness in our perfectly safe neighborhood still sent a shiver through me. Chauncey was a big dog, though. A hundred pounds. Some mix of Swiss Mountain dog and German shepherd, perhaps. He was dark and fierce looking with the personality of a lamb. He was wonderful with kids, and that had been the most important criterion when we found him at the SPCA three years earlier. We hadn’t realized then that the wait for those kids would be this long.
The pain was so subtle at first that another woman might not have noticed it. But I’d felt that pain before, the fist closing ever so slowly, sneakily around my uterus.
I stopped in front of a long stretch of fir trees. “Oh, no,” I whispered. “No. Go away.”
Chauncey looked up at me and I pressed my hand to my mouth, all of my being tuned to that barely perceptible pain.
Was it gone? I focused hard. Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe just a twinge from the walk? Maybe some stomach thing?
Chauncey leaned against my leg and I rested my hand on top of his broad head. I thought of walking home very slowly, but my feet were glued to the road. There it was again. The sly, sneaky fist.
My fingers shook as I reached for my BlackBerry where it was attached to my waistband. If the surgery was over, Adam would pick up. But when I lifted the phone, it was my sister’s number I dialed.
2
Rebecca
“DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW MANY OF THE MEN AT THIS conference you’ve slept with?” Dorothea looked around the massive hotel restaurant and Rebecca followed her gaze with annoyance.
“What?” she said. “Dot, you’re so full of it. I’ve slept with exactly one. Brent.”
She could see Brent, sandy haired and tan, sitting with a group of people at a table not far from where she and Dorothea were eating dinner. He looked like an aging beach bum, though she knew his coppery skin was from the sun in Peru, where he’d been working in a village devastated by a mudslide and not from lazy days on the beach. She’d known him for years. Her stomach didn’t exactly flip with desire at the sight of him, but she felt the sort of warmth you’d feel when you caught a glimpse of a good friend.
“I don’t mean this week.” The end of Dorothea’s long gray braid brushed precariously close to her plate. “I mean, of the couple hundred men at this conference, how many have you slept with over the years?”
“Is that a serious question?” Rebecca rubbed her bare arms. She’d worked out for nearly an hour in the hotel’s health club that morning and her muscles had the tight achiness she relished. “Why on earth do you care?” She was crazy about Dorothea Ludlow, but the woman could be such a snark.
“I’m just curious. Your libido’s always amazed me. You’re like a well that’s impossible to fill.”
The truth was, Rebecca would have to stop and think. She’d have to look at the roster for the Disaster Aid conference, one she’d attended here in San Diego every year for the past ten, and she’d have to struggle to remember who among the attendees she’d slept with. Probably no more than one at each conference. Although there was that one year when she slept with the pediatrician from California as well as that incredibly hot E. R. doc from Guatemala, but that was at least ten years ago, when she was in her late twenties and her moral code had been no match for her sexual appetite. Then there had been at least four or five guys she’d slept with when their paths crossed in the field. The thought was actually a little disgusting to her. Maybe she should reconsider Brent’s surprise proposal of the night before.
“Brent asked me to marry him last night,” she said. “The man’s nuts.”
Dorothea raised her eyebrows. “He wants to pin you down,” she said.
Brent knew what Rebecca was like. He knew she wasn’t the sort of woman you could wrap up in a tidy package and park in a humdrum medical practice and he’d never ask that of her. He shared her need to live on the edge. They’d scuba dived with sharks in Florida. Learned to parachute in jump school. Trained together for a half marathon. Hard to find a guy who could keep up with her like that. But marriage? What was the point?
“I told him no way,” she said.
Dorothea toyed with her stir-fried vegetables. “You think you know what you want, babe,” she said, “but you only know what you think you want.”
Rebecca scowled. “What the hell does that mean?”
Dorothea shrugged, and Rebecca knew she’d get no answer from her. She knew Dorothea better than anyone. She knew that when she was snippy, it was the pain of her loneliness coming out. Since Louisa, her partner of thirty years, died last year, Dorothea’s usual prickliness had taken on a whole new dimension. But it was her ornery nature that had led Dot to create Doctors International Disaster Aid twenty years ago, when people told her it was too ambitious an idea for one woman to take on. Her stubbornness and passion had made DIDA the respected organization it was today. The work was unglamorous, unprofitable and sometimes unsafe, but it was so very necessary. During the past few years, Rebecca had become one of DIDA’s few full-time physicians, Dorothea’s right hand in the field. Rebecca had met her at a fund-raiser in Chapel Hill, and Dot had recognized the seedling of passion in her, the fearlessness and the longing to do something truly meaningful with her medical skills. Dot had exploited those qualities with vigor. She became Rebecca’s best friend. Mentor. Mother. At a small gathering at the home Dorothea shared with Louisa, she introduced Rebecca to her partner, who immediately understood what Dorothea was plotting. Louisa pulled Rebecca into the pantry, out of earshot of the other guests. “Dot’s seducing you, Rebecca,” she said.
Rebecca’s eyes flew open. “What?”
“She’s nearly sixty years old,” Louisa said. “She’s been talking for years about finding someone who’ll eventually take over the leadership of DIDA.”
“She hardly knows me,” Rebecca had said.
“Dot reads people,” Louisa said. “She knew just by looking at you that you were the one.”
Louisa had been right, of course, and while Rebecca had never come out and said, Yes, I’ll take over DIDA when you’re ready to turn over the reins, it was one of those things that was understood between them without needing to be discussed.
Although Louisa’s use of the word “seducing” had at first startled her, Rebecca knew Dorothea had never had any sexual interest in her. Dorothea labeled Rebecca a “one.” She believed sexual preference was inborn and fell on a continuum, with complete heterosexuality a “one” and complete homosexuality a “ten” and bisexuality a “five-point-five.” When she described people she’d met to Rebecca, she might say “he’s a cardiologist, practices in Seattle, a three.” A few years ago, Rebecca had been interested in a guy when she was on assignment after an earthquake wiped out a village in Guatemala. When she told Dorothea she was attracted to him, Dot had clucked her tongue. “He’s a seven,” she’d said. “Can’t you see that?”
“Oh, come on,” Rebecca had said. “He’s totally hetero.”
Dot had shrugged. “Just warning you.”
He was a seven. Maybe even an eight. He’d told
Rebecca he wasn’t married, but she soon learned that Paul, the man he shared a house with, was doing more than just paying his share of the mortgage. Dorothea had sized the guy up with one quick look. She could be spooky that way.
She had that skill as a physician, too, an ability to diagnose with a glance or the lightest of touches. Rebecca had learned so much from her. Dorothea had made her a better clinician, as well as nurturing her longing to work in disaster areas. “You need a wild streak to do this work, babe,” she’d told her during that early seduction period. “And you’ve got it. But you also need discipline.”
“I’m disciplined.” Rebecca had been insulted. “How do you think I got through medical school?”
“Different kind of discipline,” Dorothea said. “It’s a focus. No matter what’s going on around you—power out, buildings caving in, mud up to your ankles—you see only the patient. You need blinders.”
Rebecca had developed the blinders and the focus and the love of the work. She would never love that there were disasters in the world, but when she’d get a phone call in the middle of the night telling her there’d been a quake in South America and she needed to get to the airport immediately, she felt a current of electricity whip through her body.
“Brent,” Dorothea said now, “is a good man.”
Rebecca had expected Dot to give her a host of reasons why she shouldn’t even consider marrying Brent—or anyone else, for that matter. But Dorothea probably thought of Brent as the best match for her, given their shared commitment to DIDA. Their relationship was built on friendship and mutual respect. That was the best foundation for a marriage, wasn’t it?
“Well, yeah.” She sipped her wine. “He is. But I don’t see the point of marrying him.”
“It’s probably a bad idea,” Dorothea agreed. “But have you thought about what it would be like? The two of you sharing the leadership of DIDA together? Could be amazing, actually. Very fulfilling for both of you.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “You know, it irritates the hell out of me when you talk like you have one foot in the grave.” It also irritated her to think of sharing DIDA’s leadership with Brent. With anyone.
Dorothea shrugged. “Just being a realist.”
“A fatalist is more like it.”
Dorothea leaned toward her across the table. “I want you to be ready to take over the day I can’t do it any longer,” she said. “It may be twenty years from today or it may be tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m pulling for the twenty years,” Rebecca said. She added reassuringly, “You know I’m ready, willing and able, Dot. Don’t sweat it.”
“So back to you and Brent,” Dorothea said, and Rebecca realized this was not the first time Dot had considered their sharing DIDA’s helm. “You do squabble a lot.”
“Squabble?” Rebecca smiled at the word, but she had to admit that Dorothea was right. “True,” she said, “but only about the small stuff.”
“You both have the fire in your belly for disaster work, that’s for sure. He’s as wild as you are. Almost, anyway,” she said with a wry shrug. “You’re positively feral.”
Rebecca laughed. She liked the description.
“Neither of you has ever wanted kids or a house in the burbs with a white picket fence,” Dorothea continued. “You’ve got the same values.”
Right again, Rebecca thought. She’d never wanted to settle down. She didn’t care where she lived, and kids had never been part of her life plan. When she witnessed Maya and Adam’s battle to have a baby, the lengths they were willing to go to to get pregnant, she knew she was missing the maternal gene.
“You surprise me, Dot,” she said. “I didn’t think me getting married would be something you wanted.”
“I don’t particularly, but it’s your choice. Why would I care?”
“Because you like having me living upstairs from you, for starters.”
“Get real.” Dorothea took a sip from her water glass. “You’re pushing forty and—”
“Thirty-eight!”
“And you’re not my prisoner. I can’t really see you and Brent as husband and wife. As the leaders of DIDA, though, you’d make a splendid team.”
“Well, I’m not interested in getting married. And besides, I don’t—” Rebecca glanced across the room at Brent again “—I’m not sure I love him.”
“You either do or you don’t.”
“Well, isn’t there something in between? With Louisa, wasn’t there a period of time when you weren’t sure?”
They never tiptoed around the subject of Louisa, but Rebecca could still see the sadness in Dorothea’s eyes at the mention of her name. Rebecca had learned so much about grief working with Dorothea. You didn’t hide from it, but you didn’t let it rule your life either.
“I met Lou on a Monday.” Dorothea looked off into the distance. “I knew I loved her on Tuesday. But it’s not always that neat and simple.” She returned her gaze to Rebecca. “Don’t marry him unless you’re sure,” she said. “Not fair to him or to yourself. You’re an independent woman, with a capital I. That’s what makes you so perfect for DIDA. Not so perfect for marriage.”
Rebecca’s cell vibrated in her pocket and she checked the caller ID.
“Maya,” she said.
“Ah,” Dorothea said. “The princess.” She motioned toward the phone. “Go ahead. Take it.”
Rebecca leaned back in her chair and flipped the phone open. “Hey, sis,” she said.
“It’s happening again.” There were tears in her sister’s voice, and Rebecca sat up straight.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, shit. Are you sure? Where are you?”
Dorothea stopped her fork halfway to her mouth and Rebecca felt her eyes on her.
“I’m walking Chauncey and I’m … now I’m just leaning against this damn tree because I’m half a mile from home, and I … it’s like I think if I just stand here very still I can stop it somehow, but I know I can’t. It’s over, Becca.”
Rebecca stood up, mouthing to Dorothea, She’s losing her baby, and walked through the restaurant in a blur.
“Bec?”
“I’m right here. Just wanted to get out of the restaurant.” She walked into the ladies’ room, locked herself in a stall and leaned against the wall. “Where’s Adam?”
“At the hospital. I’m sure he’s still in surgery.”
Rebecca felt helpless. She was three thousand miles away. “Are you bleeding?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Maya said. “It feels like it. I’m going to call Katie Winston—one of my neighbors—to come get me. She doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. We’d only told you so far. I’m sorry I disturbed you but I just wanted to—”
“Oh, shut up, you goof.” Rebecca leaned her head against the tiled wall, eyes closed. “I’m so sorry, Maya. I thought this time it would be okay.”
“Me, too.”
It was going to be very hard for Maya to tell Adam. This would kill him. Rebecca’d had lunch with him at the hospital the week before, and he’d been unable to keep the smile off his face when he spoke—with cautious joy—about their “Pollywog.” His eyes had sparkled, and only then did Rebecca realize how long it had been since she’d seen him look so happy. As much as Maya wanted this baby, Adam wanted it even more. He’d changed in the past couple of years. He was still handsome, of course. Still sexy as hell, even though Maya never seemed to get that about him. But the energy and enthusiasm that had been his hallmark had left him bit by bit as he and Maya failed to create a family. Now Rebecca felt their hope for the future breaking apart like glass. Their relationship, though, was solid. They’d get through this the same way they’d gotten through it the last time. And the time before that.
“Do you want me to come home?” she asked, counting on Maya to say no. “I can catch a plane in the morning.”
“Absolutely not,” Maya said.
“Look, you call your neighbor and then call me right back and I’ll stay on the phone with you till she gets there, okay?”
“I’m all right now. I don’t need to—”
“Call me back, Maya. I’m going to worry if you don’t.”
“Okay.”
She hung up her phone but didn’t budge from the stall of the restroom. She knew all about life not being fair. She saw it every day with her disaster work. She’d seen it when she and Maya lost their parents. But some things felt less fair than others, and this was one of them.
3
Maya
“ADAM?” MY VOICE CAME OUT IN A WHISPER, ADAM’S NAME on my lips even before I opened my eyes.
“Right here, My,” he said. “Sitting next to your bed, holding your hand.”
I opened my eyes, squinting against the bright lights in the recovery room. “I’m sorry.” I felt crampy from the D and C as I turned my head to look at him.
“You have to stop saying that.” Adam moved his chair closer. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know. I just … what did Elaine say? Boy or girl?”
Adam hesitated. “Boy,” he said.
Another boy. Two sons lost. At least two.
“Elaine wants us to come in next week to talk,” he said. “To figure out where to go from here.”
What did that mean, where to go? Did we dare try again? Could I go through this one more time?
“Okay.” I shut my eyes.
“Don’t go back to sleep, My,” Adam said. “You know how it is. They’re going to want you up and out of here soon.”
I groaned, forcing my eyes open again. “Why do we do that to patients?” I asked. “It’s inhumane.”
“I’ll take you home and later, if you feel up to it, I’ll make you some of my special chicken soup, and I think we have a couple of movies we can watch, and I’ll surround you with lots of pillows on the sofa and—”
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Be all … Adamy.”
He laughed, though there was no mirth at all in the sound. “All ‘Adamy’? What’s that mean?”
“All chipper and cheery and energetic and … caretakery.” Was I making any sense? I desperately wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep away the weeks—the months—of mourning I knew were ahead of me.
“How would you like me to be?” Adam asked.
I thought about it, though my mind floated in and out of consciousness. Adam could be no other way. His cheeriness was ingrained. It was what I usually loved most about him, what had drawn me to him in the first place.
He smoothed my hair away from my forehead, then let his fingers rest on my cheek. “Want me to be serious?” he asked.
Did I? “Yes,” I said. “I know you’re sad. Beyond sad.” I looked at him again. He’d lost his false smile. His fake cheer.
“Yes, I’m sad,” he said. “I’m as brokenhearted as you are. But I want to take care of you today. Today and tomorrow, bare minimum. Let me do that, okay? After that, you can worry about me.”
” ’Kay,” I said. What woman wouldn’t kill for my husband?
“I’m going to find out when I can spring you,” he said, getting to his feet.
I nodded and once he’d walked away, I closed my eyes again, hoping sleep would return to me quickly.
I’d first met Adam in the hospital room of one of my patients. The girl was tiny for eight, dwarfed by the mechanical bed. I could tell she hadn’t yet received her presurgical medication, because she was shivering with anxiety when I walked into her room. Sitting at her bedside, her mother held the little girl’s hand, and the anxiety was like a ribbon running from mother to daughter and back again.
I had seen them only once before, when I evaluated the girl, Lani, in my office and discussed the surgery I’d perform to lengthen her leg. Lani’d been playful and talkative then. Now, though, reality had set in.
“Good morning, Lani,” I said. “Mrs. Roland.” I sat down next to the bed. I liked doing that, taking the time to sit, to be at my patient’s level. To act as though I had all the time in the world to give them although the truth was, I had three long surgeries that day and really no time at all.
“Will the surgery be at nine, like they said?” Mrs. Roland glanced at her watch. Her hand shook a little.
“I think we’re on schedule this morning,” I said. “That’s a good thing. Waiting around is no fun at all, is it?” I smiled at Lani, who shook her head. Her eyes were riveted to my face as though she were trying to see her future there.
“Do you have any questions?” I asked her.
“Will I feel anything?” she asked.
“Not a thing.” I gave her knee a squeeze through the blanket. “That’s a promise.” I looked up as a man walked into the room.
“Hey.” He grinned at Lani, and his entrance into the room was so casual and genial that I assumed he was the girl’s father or another relative. “I’m Dr. Pollard, Lani,” he said. “I’ll be your anesthesiologist during the surgery today.”
The new guy, I registered. He’d been working at Duke for only a week, but I’d heard about him. He was in his late thirties and he wore khakis, a pale blue shirt and a confident air.
“What’s an anesthesiologist?” Lani pronounced the word perfectly.
I opened my mouth to respond, but he beat me to it. “I’ll make you comfortable during your surgery,” he said, one hand resting on the foot of her bed. With the other, he pointed toward the pole holding her saline solution. “I’ll give you medication in that IV there that will let you go into a sleep so nice and deep, it’ll feel like magic. You’ll close your eyes and count backwards from ten. The next thing you know, you’ll wake up and the surgery will be over. Then I’ll make sure you don’t have a lot of pain.”
Lani’s mother visibly relaxed. I watched it happen, her shoulders softening as she broke into a smile. “I told you, Lani,” she said. “You won’t know anything’s happening, and you won’t remember it when you wake up.”
“What if I want to remember it?” Lani asked.
“Well then,” Dr. Pollard said, “Dr. Ward and I can tell you all about it afterward. We love it when patients want to be informed about their health, don’t we?” He looked at me.
“Absolutely.” I smiled. I liked the way he made it sound as though we’d been working together for years.
“Good,” Lani said. “I can’t wait to hear about it.”
“I’ve heard great things about you,” Adam said once we’d left Lani’s room and were walking down the hall. “Glad I’ll be working with you.”
What I’d heard about him had little to do with his work. Instead, it had to do with his personality, and now I understood why his arrival had started people talking. He was charismatic, filled with a buoyant good cheer. He spoke in incomplete sentences, as though he had so much he wanted to say that he needed to leave out some of the words to save time. That truncated delivery was rare for someone with a North Carolina accent. I remembered, though, that he’d lived most recently in Boston.
“So, you moved here from Massachusetts?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. But I missed North Carolina—I grew up near Greensboro—and I wanted to do some clinical trials, so I’m here now. Glad to be back.”
I felt myself smiling as I listened to him. What was that about? He was not particularly attractive. Well, he actually was, though not in the conventional sense. He was slender, with brown hair and warm dark eyes, but his features were overpowered by the energy that bubbled out of him. I looked forward to working with him, to seeing him get that energy under control enough to do what needed to be done in the O. R.
“So what exactly did you hear about me?” I sounded flirtatious. Not like myself at all. I was usually all business in the hospital. I was thirty years old and in the last year of a grueling residency, and most of my life had been focused on learning, not on men. Not on dating. I couldn’t believe the gooey, girlish feelings I was having. The raw, splayed-open sensation low in my belly. I was not only thinking about how he’d be in the O. R. I was thinking about how he’d be in bed. I’d had exactly two lovers in my adult life and I wondered what it would be like to have him as my third.
“You’re well respected,” he said. “Very young. How old are you? Never mind. Inappropriate question. Quiet. Calm. Still waters run deep, of course. Unbearably self-confident.”
“Unbearably?”
“Well, maybe that’s not the exact word I heard. Just. you know, the kind of self-confidence people envy. It comes naturally to you.”
“I think you’re making this all up,” I said. He’d been there less than a week. Surely he hadn’t heard all this about me. Yet most of it was true. I was quiet. Calm most of the time—unless something scared me. I wasn’t afraid of the usual things. Not anything in the hospital. Not what other people thought of me. My fears were more the primitive variety. A rapist hiding in the backseat of my car. Aggressive dogs. A fire in my condo. A guy with a gun. I had nightmares sometimes, though no one I worked with would ever guess.
“I’ve heard all that and plenty more,” he said.
“Well, I’m at home here,” I said.
We rode the elevator to the operating suites. The doors opened on the third floor and Adam and I moved to opposite sides of the car to make room for one of the housekeepers and her cart.
“Hey, Charles!” Adam said, as if greeting a long-lost friend.
The woman laughed. “Doc, you crazy!” she said.
“Charles?” I was lost. I looked at the woman’s badge. Charlene, her name was. A short, middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her black hair.
“He calls me Charles.” The woman pushed the button for the ground floor and grinned, a blush forming beneath her brown skin. She was under his spell. “Man’s crazy.”
I had worked in the hospital for several years and had seen this woman nearly every day. I’d never once read her name tag. I’d never greeted her with more than a nod. Adam Pollard had been there less than a week and was already on a teasing basis with her.
“How’s the ladies’ man doin’?” Adam asked her.
Charlene rolled her eyes. “Goin’ be the death of me, Doc,” she said.
The doors slid open. “Don’t let that happen, Charles.” He touched the woman’s shoulder as we walked out of the elevator. “Can’t do without you ’round here.”
“Do you know … did you know her before you came here?” I asked as we started walking toward the O. R.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “Works her butt off. Did you ever notice? She’s everywhere at once. She’s raising her daughter’s kids, too. Daughter’s got a monkey on her back.”
“Who’s the ladies’ man?”
“Her ten-year-old grandson. She’s worried about him. Can’t remember his name, though. I’m crap with names.”
“How have you been able to learn all that in a week?”
“I talk to people,” he said with a shrug. “How else?”
After Lani Roland’s uneventful surgery, Adam caught up with me in the hallway outside the O. R.
“Dinner tonight,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He said it as if I couldn’t possibly have other plans.
“All right,” I answered, since that was true.
“Casual or fancy?”
“Casual. Definitely.”
“Mama Dip’s okay? I’ve missed that place.”
I nodded. “I’ll meet you there,” I said. “I should be able to get out by six-thirty.”
“Cool.” He gave my arm a playful punch as if I were a teenage boy. It made me laugh.
He was sitting at a table near the windows when I walked into Mama Dip’s a few hours later, and he was already joking with a waitress. He stood as I walked toward them.
“Hey, Maya.” He sounded as though we’d known each other for years. He leaned over and bussed my cheek. “Dr. Ward, this is our server tonight, KiKi. KiKi, this is an amazing surgeon, Maya Ward. She knits together teeny little bones.” He pulled out a chair for me, touching my arm as I sank into it.
KiKi smiled at us both. “What can I get you to drink, sweetie?” she asked me.
“Lemonade,” I said, unwrapping the napkin from around my silverware.
Adam chuckled to himself as KiKi walked away. “I introduce you as a surgeon, she calls you sweetie,” he said. “Gotta love the South. Does that bug you? The sweetie bit?” I loved the way his smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.
“Not at all,” I said. I knew plenty of professional women who bristled at the familiarity, but I’d lived in North Carolina long enough that I didn’t even notice it.
“I love it,” he said. “Boston was great, don’t get me wrong, but nobody there ever called me sweetie or darlin’ or dear. And you can’t get enough kind words. Know what I mean?”
“I do,” I said.
KiKi was back with our drinks and I popped a straw into my lemonade.
“You’re obviously not a native,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“Virginia. Outside D.C.”
“How’d you end up here?”
“I followed my sister. She went to medical school at Duke and loved it, so when it was my turn, I followed her lead.”
He sat back, eyes wide. “Wow!” he said. “There’s two Dr. Wards? Where does she practice?”
“She works full-time with Doctors International Disaster Aid, so she’s here, there and everywhere.”
“DIDA!” he said.
“You know it?”
“I thought of applying to do a stint with them, but never got around to it. Maybe one of these days. It’d be so cool to do that sort of work.” He sipped his iced tea. “She’s a do-gooder? Your sis?”
“She’s …” I hadn’t thought of Rebecca that way. Gutsy was the word I usually used when describing my sister. But she was a do-gooder, and not only with DIDA. Rebecca was my hero. “Yes, she is actually,” I said. “I haven’t seen her in a couple of months, though we talk all the time when she’s someplace with cell coverage. Right now she’s working in China at an earthquake site. She’s unreachable.”
KiKi returned with my bowl of Brunswick stew and Adam’s barbecue platter.
“Anything else for y’all?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“We’re good,” Adam said, though his gaze never left my face. “So, you’re really close to your sister,” he said once KiKi’d walked back to the kitchen.
I felt like telling him everything. About my life. About Rebecca and the complicated bond we shared. Everything. I never felt that way. I kept things locked tight inside me, never wanting to show any dent in my professional demeanor. I knew how to hide my flaws.
Rebecca hated my wimpiness, and I’d learned early to erect a brave facade. I needed to work with Adam. Better that he saw me as a competent physician than a woman who could still be unnerved by the past.
“Yes,” I said simply. “We are.”
“You’re so lucky to have a sib.”
“You don’t?” I finally got around to picking up my spoon, but I was so intent on our conversation that I didn’t even consider dipping it into the stew.
He shook his head, swallowing a mouthful of barbecued pork. “No family,” he said. “Lost my parents when I was fifteen.”
I drew in a breath of surprise. The urge to tell him my own story expanded in my chest, but it was a story I never told. “Both at once?” I asked. “An accident?”
“Exactly. They were coming back from a party. Drunk driver.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Did you live with relatives then?”
“Didn’t have any of them, either. Just grandparents who were too frail to take me. So I did the foster home thing.”
“Was it hard?” I’d been spared foster care. I ate a spoonful of the stew. I loved Mama Dip’s Brunswick stew, but now I barely tasted it.
“I got into a good one,” he said, blotting his lips with his napkin. “Unusual to be able to stay in one foster home for years, but I did. I’m still in touch with them. Good people.”
“You’re so—” I smiled “—upbeat.”
“Just born that way.” He shrugged. “Extra serotonin or something. It got me through.”
I ate another spoonful of stew, still not tasting it. “I was fourteen,” I said.
“Fourteen?”
“When my parents died.”
He set his fork down and leaned back in his chair. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You, too? An accident?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to go there, much as I longed to tell him every detail of my life. “Yes,” I lied.
“Did you end up in foster care, too?”
“No.” I looked down at the stew. “Rebecca—my sister—was eighteen, and she wouldn’t let it happen. She took care of me. She made it work.”
“You were lucky.”
“Incredibly.”
“Where does your sis—Rebecca—live when she’s not on assignment?”
“Here. Well, in Durham. She lives with Dorothea Ludlow. Do you know who she—”
“The DIDA founder,” he said. “Cool lady. Your sister lives with her? She’s her—” He raised his eyebrows. Clearly he did know about Dorothea.
“No. Dorothea’s in a committed relationship with an artist named Louisa Golden. They have this beautiful Victorian, and Rebecca rents the upstairs.”
“What’s your relationship status?”
“You are so blunt.” I smiled. “You just … you think of a question and it pops out of your mouth.”
“Does that bother you? ”
I thought about it. “I like it, actually,” I said, “and I’m not in a relationship. ”
“Amazing,” he said. “You’re pretty and smart and a catch. You’ve been working too hard, huh?”
People always said I was pretty, which meant average looking, which was good enough. Rebecca was beautiful though, and a force of nature. There were pictures of her on the DIDA Web site working in the field. No makeup, her short brown hair messy and unkempt, a sick child in her arms. The image of her could take your breath away. Even though I was the blonde, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned sister, I seemed to disappear next to her. It had sometimes been hard growing up in her shadow.
“How about you?” I asked.
“Divorced. Two years ago. Super woman, but she changed her mind about wanting kids.”
“You mean … changed her mind which way?”
“We went into it—we were married four years—we went into it talking about having a couple of kids. Several, really. Had the names picked out. All that rose-colored kind of fantasizing. I crave family, for obvious reasons.”
I nodded. I understood completely.
“Frannie was a reporter for one of the TV stations in Boston. She got caught up in her career and just totally changed her mind. It was bad. Hard when you still love each other and get along well and all, but can’t agree on that basic, really important issue. Not something you can really compromise on, you know? Either you want kids or you don’t.”
“I do,” I said, blushing suddenly. It sounded as though I was offering myself to him for something more than dinner. “I mean—” I laughed, embarrassed “—I feel the way you do. I have no family except for my sister. It’ll be a challenge balancing kids and work, but it’s a priority.”
For the first time that evening, he seemed at a loss for words. He chewed his lower lip, gazing at his nearly empty plate, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. My embarrassment had vanished, and I felt something happening between us in that silence. A shift. A knowing. When he looked up again, it was clear he felt it, too.
“You said I’m blunt.” He was smiling.
“Well, I didn’t mean—”
“I’m going to be even more blunt right now,” he said. “I fell in love with you in the O. R. today.”
I laughed. He was crazy. “You don’t know me,” I said.
“So true. So true. I sound like an idiotic kid, huh? But I fell in love with what I did know. What I witnessed. Your skill and caring.”
“Maybe you’re one of those men who can’t stand to be without a partner,” I said, but I knew where this was going. Where I wanted it to go.
“I’ve been without a partner for two years,” he said. “I’ve had opportunities. I haven’t been interested. Till right now. Today. But I don’t want to freak you out, okay? I won’t stalk you. Won’t call and bug you. I’ll leave the ball in your court.”
“Maybe you connect to people too quickly,” I said, thinking of the housekeeper in the elevator. “You assign them a personality before you get to know what they’re really like.”
“See?” He grinned. “You’re already finding fault with me, just like in a real relationship.”
I laughed. Could he be anymore likable? But then I sobered. I looked at him across the table.
“I lied to you earlier,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “What about?”
“I just … you’ve been so open. And this is a big part of who I am, so—”
“You don’t need to tell me.”
“I want to,” I said, knowing it was only a half-truth I was about to reveal. “Because I’m not … I’m a complicated person, and you should know that before you sign on.”
He laughed. “It’s not like I’m buying a house here and you need to disclose all its flaws.”
“Don’t make this hard,” I said, and I must have sounded very serious, because his smile disappeared.
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“My parents didn’t die in an accident.” I looked down at the table. Pushed the handle of my knife back and forth. “They were murdered.”
“Ah, no.”
I couldn’t look at him. “I don’t like to talk about it, okay?” I said. “Just … they were. And it shook me up. Made me afraid of. certain situations where I don’t feel safe.” If Rebecca had been sitting with us, she’d be kicking me under the table. Never let them see you sweat. That was her motto.
“Of course it did.” He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. “Did they catch the guy? I assume it was a guy?”
I nodded. “They caught him and killed him in a shootout.”
“What was his motive?”
“He was a disgruntled student of my father’s.” How often I’d heard those words, disgruntled student. I could rarely hear one without adding the other in my mind. “My father taught philosophy at American University.” I wrinkled my nose. “Can we not talk about this anymore?”
“We’re done.” He nodded. “I just want you to know
I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“And you’re sweet to want to do the full-disclosure thing.” He smiled again, and this time I returned it. “Makes me fall even harder for you, Dr. Ward.”
“I’m … a little overwhelmed by tonight,” I admitted. “Of how fast this seems to be going. People turn out not to be who you think they are at first.”
“Very true,” he said. “So we could avoid any pain down the road and not see each other again. Or we can take the risk and go with how really, really good this feels.”
I wasn’t much of a risk taker. I wished I could talk to Rebecca. I had other friends I could call for advice and commiseration, but it was Rebecca who had my heart, and Rebecca was in China, where her cell phone didn’t work. I would, for a change, have to be my own counsel.
“Let’s go for it,” I said, and I lifted my glass of lemonade for a toast.
4
Rebecca
“WHAT’S WRONG?” BRENT FROWNED AS REBECCA WALKED into his hotel room.
“Maya lost another baby.” She flopped onto the edge of his bed. She could usually shrug off bad news. Compartmentalize it and move on. She had to be able to do that in order to work for DIDA and maintain her sanity. But for some reason, this latest miscarriage was really getting to her.
“She was pregnant again?” Brent sat down next to her. “Did you know?”
“I knew, but no one else did. They were afraid to tell anyone after the last miscarriage. She made it sixteen weeks this time.”
“Man, that sucks.” Brent nuzzled her neck. “Let me make you feel better.”
She jerked her head away. “I can’t shift gears that fast, Brent,” she said. “All I can think about is Maya and Adam. I feel like a crappy sister. Like maybe I should go home and be with her.”
“Do I need to remind you you’re the speaker at lunch tomorrow? And the presenter at the … that afternoon seminar, whatever it is?”
“I know.”
“It’s not like someone died,” he said.
She looked at him sharply. “It’s exactly like someone died.”
The night table lamp picked up two sharp lines between his eyebrows. “How can you be pro choice and say that?” he asked.
“Oh, stop it. This is different. This was a sixteen-week-old much wanted baby with a perfectly healthy mother. It’s a death to Maya and Adam.”
“And apparently to you, too.”
“Because of how it hurts Maya.” Even as she said the words, she knew it was more than that. She’d wanted that niece or nephew. She wanted to be the cool aunt who’d bring gifts from all over the world. The aunt her niece or nephew could confide in, knowing nothing would ever make her blush. She’d wanted to hold Maya’s baby in her arms.
Brent sighed and got to his feet, slipping his hands into his pockets. He looked through the sliding glass doors to the small balcony and the view of San Diego harbor. “You infantilize Maya,” he said.
She could see his reflection in the sliding glass door. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you still think of her as your baby sister who needs your protection. She’s a grown woman.” He turned to face her, the lines still carved into the skin between his eyebrows. “She’s a physician, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t you ever feel protective of Brian or Kristin?” she asked. Brent was the oldest of three.
He laughed. “Hell, no. They were a pain in the ass when we were growing up and they’re still a pain in the ass now.”
“But you love them.”
“Of course. I just don’t dwell on them. They’re adults who can stand on their own two feet.”
She wished she could feel as relaxed about Maya as Brent did about his siblings, but Maya was needy and it was Rebecca’s fault. As simple as that.
“If I marry you,” Brent said, “I’m marrying Maya,
too.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You’re the one who’s being dramatic.” Brent walked over to the mini-refrigerator, opened the door and pulled out a beer. “Want one?” he asked.
“Uh-uh.”
Brent uncapped the beer. “You want to go over your speech for tomorrow?”
She ran her hand over the fern pattern on the bedspread, smoothing the already smooth fabric. “I could do it in my sleep.”
“All right.” He took a swallow from the bottle. “I get that you’re annoyed with me. Let’s just forget about sex tonight and chill. Watch TV. Maybe a movie.”
She was too antsy to watch a movie. She thought of going for a run instead, but it was getting late and she didn’t feel like changing into her running clothes. She let out a sigh as she kicked off her shoes and drew her feet onto the bed. “Okay,” she said.
She let him pick the movie—a Denzel Washington flick—and they leaned back against the headboard of the bed, at least two feet of king-size green-and-white bedspread between them. She couldn’t concentrate. She thought of Maya giving Adam the news. Crushing him with it. Had she told him over the phone? Waited till he came home? She tipped her head back, resting it against the headboard, and stared at the dim ceiling. Brent had to know she was still upset, but he was fed up with her and she didn’t really blame him.
She didn’t know what she wanted from him tonight. It wasn’t that she needed to talk more about Maya and Adam and their lost child. Their lost hope. She just wanted him to comfort her. He wasn’t that kind of man, though. One of the things he always said he liked about her was that she never let things get to her.
What if she married Brent and something terrible happened? What if Maya died? No. She couldn’t go there. What if Dorothea died? Would he tell her to keep her chin up? Change the subject? Drink a beer? Turn on a damn movie? Could the two of them ever run DIDA together without screwing it up because of their bickering? She let out her breath in frustration.
“What?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
“You just huffed.”
“Oh. Nothing.” She couldn’t talk to him about it. He wouldn’t understand. Besides, he’d already returned his attention to the movie.
She glanced at the clock on the night table. Ten-thirty. One-thirty in Raleigh. She hoped Maya was able to sleep. She pictured her wrapped in Adam’s arms. Now there was a guy who knew how to comfort someone! Thank God he hadn’t decided to come to the conference. He was now a DIDA volunteer as well, although he hadn’t yet been called to a disaster site. She and Brent had talked him into signing up the year before. He hadn’t needed much persuading in spite of the fact that Maya’d been unhappy with his decision. She was worried enough when Rebecca was in the field; she didn’t want to have to worry about Adam as well.
“Every time the phone rings,” Maya had once told her, “I’m afraid it’s going to be Dorothea telling me you were killed by a gang of thugs or an earthquake aftershock or a disease from drinking filthy water.” Maya’s worry about her was irrational, but not totally over the top. Rebecca had been shot at once in Africa, although she’d never told Maya about that, and she’d had more than a few run-ins with parasites.
Two years ago, she fell down the stairs at Dorothea’s and broke her arm. Maya met her in the E. R., and Rebecca was able to make her point: “I’ve never once been injured on a DIDA mission,” she’d said, fighting the pain as the E. R. doc splinted her arm. “It’s home that’s dangerous.”
Denzel was running through the darkness with a gun in his hand. Rebecca had no idea who he was after or why, nor did she care.
“You huffed again,” Brent said, without shifting his gaze from the screen.
“Excuse me for living.”
He grabbed the remote from the bed and hit the mute button. “What is your problem?” he asked.
She shifted on the bed so that she was facing him. “What if we got married and something terrible happened?”
“You said you don’t want to get married.”
“Hypothetically. What if Dot died? Or your sister or brother? Would you shrug it off like this?”
Brent stared at her for at least five long seconds. Then he sighed, rubbing his forehead with his palm, and she knew she’d finally gotten through to him. “Of course not,” he said softly. “Whatever happens, we’d be there for each other. We’re great together, Bec.” He reached for her hand, lifting it to his knee. “We’d do DIDA till we keeled over of old age. The cool thing about you … about both of us … is that we’ve always been able to roll with the punches, no matter what’s happening around us. We’re survivors. That’s why DIDA suits us.” He leaned over to kiss her. “I love you, Rebecca. Don’t you get that?”
She nodded, and he wrapped his arms around her. Resting her forehead against his shoulder, she suddenly pictured herself holding Maya’s healthy, full-term baby, pressing the infant close to her chest, and she felt a loss so sharp and deep it made her gasp.
She jerked away from Brent.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She stood up, rubbing her arms. The room was cold, the sound from the TV too loud. “I don’t know what’s with me tonight,” she said. “Sorry I’m being weird. I’m going out on the balcony to smoke.”
“Want me to pause the movie?” Brent asked as she slid the glass door open.
She shook her head. “I can’t concentrate. Just let it run.”
She carried her cigarettes and lighter out to the balcony and sat on the chair overlooking the harbor, trying to shake off the unexpected sensation of losing something precious. Above her, the sky was filled with stars, and below her, lights flickered in the boats lining the piers. She couldn’t blame Brent for being irked by her tonight, she thought as she lit a cigarette. She wasn’t usually like this. It was as though Maya had crawled under the surface of her skin and she couldn’t simply brush her off.
Maybe Maya and Adam would get serious about adoption now. Maya would eagerly adopt, but Adam desperately wanted his own biological child. He’d be such a joyful father, either way. He’d cook for his kids. Make pancakes in the shape of animals, with Maya watching him, smiling, totally in love with her husband and their brood. Adam was equally smitten with Maya.
You only needed to be with them for two seconds to know he adored her. Why did Maya get to be loved like that and she didn’t? The thought made her feel small and churlish. She’d felt that way ever since they were kids, when Maya’d received their father’s attention at every turn. Maya had been so much like him—bookish and studious—while Rebecca had their mother’s vitality and spunk. Rebecca’d always been certain of her mother’s love, but it was her father’s she’d craved, and that seemed out of reach. “I have a scholar and an athlete,” he’d say of his two daughters, as though he valued them equally, but everyone knew which daughter he favored. Rebecca was smart, but Maya was smarter. Maya could sit still for hours, with a focus that was uncanny for a child. Their father would read to them in bed, and although Rebecca would try her best to pay attention, she could never make it to the end of a story. “You have ants in your pants?” he’d ask her with a resigned smile, and she’d nod, hopping out of the bed to play with her trucks or run around the house with her arms outstretched, pretending she was an airplane, leaving her younger sister behind to bask in their father’s love.
Rebecca blew a stream of pale smoke into the darkness, resting her head against the back of the seat. She hated when she relived the past as though it mattered, nursing an ancient jealousy over her sister’s treatment when they were kids. The truth was, they’d both suffered the same loss. If Maya was lucky enough to find a guy like Adam, Rebecca wanted to be happy for her.
That was part of the problem with her and Brent, wasn’t it? If she was ever going to get married, she should feel about a man the way Maya felt about Adam. So she and Brent were disaster junkies. Big deal. That didn’t feel like enough.
She stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete balcony, then turned to look through the sliding glass door. She could see Brent, the changing colors of the TV screen altering his features second by second. His eyes were wide, absorbed by the movie.
“Rebecca’s type triple A,” he’d said once, when they were out with friends, and she knew he meant it as a compliment. “You should see her in the field,” he’d added. “She never sleeps.”
She’d felt his admiration then. His love. He did love her. She had no doubt of that. What the hell more did she want?
5
Maya
THEY KEPT ME OVERNIGHT AFTER THE D AND C BECAUSE Elaine was concerned about the amount of bleeding I was having, but by morning I was doing much better. Physically, anyway. The nurse wheeled me outside to the sidewalk deck where two other women sat in wheelchairs, waiting for their rides home. I was relieved that neither of them had a baby in her arms. I would have lost it.
The woman in the next chair looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if she was the mother of one of my young patients. I often bumped into them without having a clue who they were, although I would recognize their children anywhere.
Adam pulled up in his silver Volvo and got out. He was pale, his face drawn and tight. The nurse bent over to lock the brakes on the wheelchair, and just as I was about to stand up, the woman who looked familiar spoke up.
“Adam!” she said, and I instantly realized who she was: Adam’s ex-wife, Frannie. The one who’d decided she didn’t want children. I’d seen pictures of her in Adam’s old photo album. She lived in Boston, though, and I couldn’t imagine what she was doing next to me on the parking deck. I sank back into the wheelchair.
“Frannie!” Adam exclaimed with his usual effervescence in spite of the circumstances. The tight expression on his face vanished with a smile. He walked to the side of my chair, resting his hand on my back. “Maya, this is Frannie, my ex-wife. Frannie, this is Maya, my—”
“Current wife.” Frannie laughed. She had pretty teeth and thick, curly brown hair, but she looked as exhausted and pale as I felt. “Nice to meet you, Maya,” she said. “Though I feel like I’ve been run over, and you probably do, too.”
I nodded with a small smile. All I wanted was to get home and into my own bed.
Adam left my wheelchair to open the passenger door of the car. “So …” He looked at Frannie with a puzzled smile. “What are you doing in Raleigh?”
“My husband, Dave, put in for a transfer with IBM,”
Frannie said, “and we moved here last year. Better weather. Better for the kids.”
“Kids?” Adam had been reaching for my arm to help me stand up, but his hand stopped in midair.
Frannie laughed again. “I know, I know.” She ran a hand through her curls. “Don’t give me a hard time about it. I changed my mind about having them after all. We’ve got two. Just had my tubes tied, though. Two is plenty. They’re a handful.”
“Adam,” I pleaded, and he reached down again to take my arm. I let him guide me into the car, the muscles in my thighs quivering. He closed the door behind me, shutting out the rest of his conversation with the woman he’d left because she wouldn’t have children and who now had two while I—and he—had none.
It was another minute before he got into the car himself. He turned the key in the ignition, then glanced over at me. “Seat belt,” he said.
I buckled myself in and he pulled away from the curb.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Do you want me to stop at the store for anything on the way home?”
I shook my head. The ache in my throat dwarfed the dull pain in my uterus. “If you’d stayed married to her, you’d have children now,” I said.
“Maya, don’t.”
“How can I not?”
“I’m not married to her. I don’t love her any longer. I love you.”
“But if you’d stayed married to her—”
“Stop it.” He turned the corner with such force that we nearly ran over the curb, and I reached reflexively for the dashboard.
I pounded my fist against the car door. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked the air. “Why is it so hard for me to have a baby when every other woman on earth can have as many kids as she likes?”
“That’s bullshit. You have plenty of company and you know it. Please stop beating yourself up over this.”
“Every single one of my friends has kids now,” I said. “I’m cut off from all of them. I buy them baby gifts. I try to keep up the friendships and I know they try, too, but it’s impossible. They have nothing in common with me anymore. They pity me.”
“Right now, you’re pitying yourself,” he said.
“Well, so what?” I snapped, hurt. “When do I ever pity myself? Let me have five minutes of self-pity, okay?”
We never argued. Never. Yet this felt strangely good and necessary. Cleansing, in a way. But when we came to a stoplight and I glanced over at him, I saw how tired he looked. I saw the lines that creased his forehead. The pink cast to the whites of his eyes. This was not only my loss.
I reached over. Rested my hand on his biceps. “Adam,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, My,” he said with a sigh. “We’ll get through it.”
Adam tucked me into our king-size bed and handed me an ibuprofen and a glass of water. I swallowed the pill, then sank back into the bed. He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “I know this has been much harder on you than I can even imagine,” he whispered. “I know that, and I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said. I opened my mouth to say more, although I wasn’t sure what words I expected to come out, but he pressed his fingers lightly to my lips.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
I was asleep before he had even left the room, and in my dreams, I saw Frannie sitting in her wheelchair, smiling at Adam.
I have eighteen children now, Adam, she said. Too bad you didn’t stay married to me.
6
Maya
TWO DAYS LATER, ADAM AND I SAT ACROSS THE DESK from my obstetrician, Elaine, in her office. I much preferred being on the other side of that desk, talking to my patients. Educating them. Reassuring them. But my fight for a baby had put me on this uncomfortable side of the desk now more times than I could count.
Elaine thumbed through my chart where it rested on the desk in front of her. She settled on a page, running her finger down it, stopping at the midway point.
“I noticed something during the D and C that made me curious,” she said, “and I see that you didn’t answer this question on your health sheet when you filled it out a couple of years ago.”
“What question?” I asked.
“Did you ever have an abortion?” Elaine looked at me over her reading glasses.
I hesitated. I hadn’t been asked that question before, at least not in front of Adam.
“No,” Adam answered for me, and for a moment, I let the answer hang in the room between the three of us.
“Why?” I asked Elaine.
“Well, there’s some scarring in your uterus that looks like what we might see, on a very rare occasion, from an abortion. Scarring can cause difficulty with conception and especially with holding on to a pregnancy. But since you’ve never had an abortion, that’s clearly not the prob—”
“I have.” I cut her off. “I had an abortion.”
“What?” Adam leaned away from me in his chair as though I’d burned him. “When?”
“When I was a teenager.” I looked at Elaine, but could feel Adam’s startled gaze resting squarely on my face.
“Were there any complications?” she asked. “An infection?”
I remembered pain that went on and on. Pain I’d ignored. I’d had more pressing things on my mind. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I had what might have been excessive pain, but I was too young to question any symptoms.” I would never tell them how young. Fourteen years old. My father had taken me to the clinic, and I remembered the drive home, even though I’d done my best to block all memories of that day from my mind. Daddy had been so quiet in the car. So quiet that I was afraid he no longer loved me. Finally, when we neared our street, our driveway, when we neared the moment that would end his life and tear mine apart, he said, “This is between you and me, Maya, honey. It’ll be our secret.”
Oh, God. My lost babies. They were my fault. I’d certainly thought about that abortion as I struggled to get pregnant, and I’d never forgotten that first baby, taken from my body only after I’d begun to show.
“Does this mean.” I cleared my throat, unable to ask the question burning in my mind. Next to me, Adam still sat stiffly in his chair, but he reached over to cover my hand with his. I felt so grateful for him, and so undeserving. “Does this mean there’s no hope?” I finally managed to say. “That even if I’m able to conceive again, another miscarriage is inevitable?”
“Not necessarily,” Elaine said, “but it probably does explain why you’ve lost three pregnancies. The in vitro took this time, and you’ll have to talk to Dr. Gallagher about trying again. I’ll send him my report from the
D and C and you can talk with him about the pros and cons of giving it another go.”
I thought of the months of hormone shots. The always-iffy implantation. The waiting to know if I’d conceived. The hopes raised. Dashed. Raised again. All of that would be nothing compared to the anxiety of once more being pregnant, then waiting for that fist to tighten around my uterus. I didn’t know if I could go through it again.
I felt sick to my stomach by the time we got to the car. Neither of us said a word until we’d pulled out of the parking lot into the street.
“I’m sorry,” I said then.
He didn’t take his eyes from the road. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I hesitated. “It’s something I don’t like to remember. And abortion’s not supposed to have anything to do with fertility, but … I think I was afraid it … that it did have something to do with it. I mean, I got pregnant then, and now, as an adult, I have so much trouble conceiving, so I’ve always had this niggling fear that it was somehow related. Now it looks like it is.” My voice broke. I’d already felt responsible for our not having a child, worried that Adam blamed me, subconsciously or not. Now he had a concrete reason to do so. “I’m sorry, Adam,” I said again.
“Please stop apologizing, Maya.” The muscles in his jaw contracted. “I’m just pissed off you didn’t tell me. We’ve been trying to have a baby for three years—without much luck—and now I discover that you’ve kept a pretty damn significant piece of the puzzle from me.”
“I know.” I started to apologize again, but caught myself. “I wasn’t intentionally keeping it from you,” I said. “It’s something I’ve tried to forget. I …” My voice trailed off, and I turned my head to look blindly through the window. There was no excuse I could give him that was good enough.
He didn’t ask me how old I’d been when I had the abortion or who the baby’s father was, and I was relieved. I didn’t want to think about it. The damage done back then had harmed far more than my fertility.
Was Adam now wondering if there were other things I’d kept from him? Other secrets? Worse secrets?
If so, he would be right.
7
Rebecca
“YOU WANT TO STAY OVER?” REBECCA ASKED BRENT AS they pulled into the driveway of the massive Victorian she shared with Dorothea.
“What do you think?” He’d already put the car in Park and was opening his door. She was fine either way, as long as he gave her some space. Two days after returning from San Diego, Rebecca still hadn’t recovered from the conference. Too much food and not enough exercise.
“I swear,” she said as they walked toward the outside stairs that zigzagged up the side of the building to her second-story apartment, “four days of meeting and greeting, giving speeches and soaking up gorgeous scenery is more draining than a month in the field.”
“You got that right,” he said.
The lights on the first floor were burning. Every one of them, it seemed.
“Dot’s still up,” she said as they started climbing the stairs. “We should say hi.”
They stopped at the first landing and Rebecca knocked on the door that led to Dorothea’s kitchen. When there was no answer, she opened the door—Dot never locked anything—and poked her head inside.
“You up, Dot?” she called.
“Dining room,” Dorothea said.
They walked through the kitchen. The room was turquoise with violet cabinetry, bright yellow hardware, and white appliances. All Louisa’s work. Dorothea had given her partner free rein, and although she’d complained about the color combinations while Louisa was alive, she’d done nothing to change them now that Louisa was gone and Rebecca was glad. If she ever cared enough to decorate her own spare apartment, she would use Louisa’s energetic palette.
Louisa had been neat almost to the point of being finicky, but her artist’s eye craved color, the bolder the better. She would roll over in her grave—had she been buried instead of donating her body to Duke—if she could see her dining room now, Rebecca thought as she and Brent skirted the boxes and stacks of journals and papers that littered the floor.
Dorothea looked up from her seat at the head of the table, where she was typing on one of the two laptop computers in the room. “What time is it?” she asked. Long strands of gray hair were coming loose from her braid, but she looked pretty in the glow from the computer screen. Dorothea was sixty-seven now, and every once in a while Rebecca caught a glimpse of the knockout she must have been when she was younger.
Brent walked to the head of the table and leaned over to kiss Dorothea’s cheek, a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead.
“Whatcha up to?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest as he peered down at the screen.
“Watching tropical storms forming,” she said.
Rebecca pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and drew the second computer toward her. “Anything that looks like trouble?” she asked, getting online.
Dorothea moved the cursor around a bit, gnawing her lower lip as she studied the screen. “Hard to say right now. A few things … maybe. Maybe not.”
The dining room had been Louisa’s red room. The walls were painted a robust, deep red and one of her paintings—a huge stunning rectangular canvas covered with apricots—brought the room to life. The dining room used to be Rebecca’s favorite room in the house, but Dorothea now had so much stuff littered all over the table and the sideboard that the room had lost its charm. It sometimes worried her to see how Dorothea had let things go after Louisa died. Dorothea still had all her faculties. She was as brilliant and committed as ever, but the lack of caring about her surroundings, which served her very well in a disaster zone, didn’t work all that well in North Carolina. She never wanted company, with the exception of Rebecca and Brent and a few other DIDA regulars, because cleaning the house was, at this point, impossible. When Rebecca took over directing DIDA, she was going to have a mess on her hands.
“Next thing that comes up, we’ll get that brother-in-law of yours in the field,” Dorothea said to Rebecca. “I know he’s champin’ at the bit.”
Rebecca clicked the page for the National Hurricane Center. “As long as it’s not for more than two weeks,” she reminded Dorothea. She doubted Adam could take off more than that. No volunteers were required to donate more than two weeks a year with DIDA, but Dorothea had a tendency to forget that little detail.
“We just came from their house.” Brent hovered over Dorothea’s shoulder, studying the screen.
“How’s Maya doing?” Dorothea asked. “Recovering okay?”
“She seemed pretty good,” Brent said, which only went to show how unintuitive he was.
“She’s miserable, actually,” Rebecca said.
Brent frowned at her. “She seemed okay to me.”
“I know her better than you,” she said. Maya could wear a smile broad enough to span the Grand Canyon and Rebecca would still be able to see the lie in it. “They’re both miserable.”
“Well,” Brent said, “they’re going out to dinner with us Saturday night. We’re going to that new Brazilian place. Want to come?”
Dorothea shook her head. “Too much to do here,” she said. She was no good at delegating. Rebecca would do a better job of spreading the work around. “Supposed to be a good restaurant, though,” Dorothea added.
Rebecca couldn’t believe Maya had agreed to the Brazilian restaurant. Maya avoided that part of Durham. A sketchy area, to be sure, but when Brent mentioned it, Adam had lit up.
“Yeah!” he’d said. “I’ve wanted to try that place!”
Seeing the sudden life in Adam’s eyes made Rebecca realize exactly how glum he’d been since their arrival. Maya must have noticed as well, because she nodded her okay. Trying to please him, Rebecca thought. Trying to make it up to him for losing another baby. Rebecca nearly suggested a different restaurant, but remembered Brent saying that she infantilized Maya and kept her mouth shut. Besides, she wanted to try the restaurant herself.
“So are you two getting married or what?” Dorothea asked with her usual lack of tact. She looked up from the screen, first at Rebecca, then at Brent, and Rebecca could see the hurricane map reflected in her enormous gray eyes.
“I’m waiting for her answer.” Brent sounded almost shy. Kind of cute, actually. Rebecca couldn’t help but smile at him.
“I’ve told him I still don’t see the point,” she said.
Dorothea tipped her head to the side to look at Brent. “How do you stand her?”
Brent laughed. “’Cause I love her,” he said.
Rebecca lowered her gaze back to the map. She knew in that moment she did love him. As her friend. As the guy who’d run with her through the streets of Durham in the middle of the night. Who’d bike with her. Jump out of a plane with her. Who wasn’t afraid to drop everything at a moment’s notice and fly off to a tsunami-wrecked village to do whatever it took to help the injured. But could she love him as her husband? That she didn’t know at all.
8
Maya
REBECCA AND I SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF BRENT’S PRIUS, while the men sat in the front. The three of them were talking about DIDA, Rebecca with her seat belt unbuckled so she could lean between Adam and Brent’s seats, monopolizing the conversation, as usual, but I wasn’t listening. I wished I’d stayed home. I was still achy and bleeding a bit from the miscarriage and not up to trekking into the bowels of Durham for a meal I would never enjoy. But Adam was excited about it, and Brent was leaving early in the morning for Ecuador, where an earthquake had wiped a couple of villages off the map the day before. How could I say no?
It was still light out, light enough to let me see the neighborhood deteriorate block by block. I glanced at my sister, whose tanned and superhumanly toned arm was stretched across the back of Adam’s seat. Her mouth moved with words I barely heard. She was talking about the last time she was with DIDA in South America. Someone had boarded the bus she was riding and stolen money from all the passengers, threatening them with a machete. Nice, Bec, I thought. Nice, reassuring conversation for Brent the night before he leaves. But Brent was laughing, as was Adam. I was the only one who felt like I was on that bus. The only one who could see the guy coming toward me, the sharp blade of his machete catching daylight as it sliced through the air. I reached for my purse, opened it, poured my money onto the floor of the bus. Take it. It’s yours.
When Brent suggested this restaurant the other night, I thought for sure Adam would realize its location and offer an alternative. He knew this was hard for me. Either he just wasn’t thinking, or he was truly angry with me and didn’t care how I felt. But really, I was a grown woman. If I hadn’t wanted to come, I should have said so. It wasn’t up to them to take care of me. I’d kept my lips sealed, though. Adam was psyched and I was not going to give him one more reason, no matter how trifling, to be disappointed in me. He’d been cool toward me since our appointment with Elaine. I’d apologized over and over for keeping the abortion a secret from him and didn’t know what more I could do. One thing
I’d learned over the years was that I couldn’t change the past, no matter how much I might want to.
“The only time I was in Brazil,” Rebecca was saying, “my friends ordered this dish for me in a restaurant and it turned out to be boiled alligator.”
Oh, great, I wanted to say. And why do we want to go to a Brazilian restaurant?
We drove past a liquor store, where a string of women—clearly prostitutes—posed and preened on the sidewalk.
“There it is.” Brent pointed to a tiny glass-fronted building squashed between a pawnshop and a video store.
“That’s it?” Rebecca sounded both astonished and delighted.
There was no sign above the door. The word Restaurant was hand painted on a piece of cardboard taped inside the window.
“Yeah,” Brent said. “They’re so new, they don’t have their sign yet.”
“Cool,” said Adam.
“Do you see any parking?” I asked, craning my neck. I wanted a spot right in front of the restaurant so we wouldn’t have to walk any farther in this neighborhood than was necessary.
“Nothing.” Brent looked left and right.
“Is that one?” Rebecca asked. “Up there on the right? Oh. Mini Cooper.”
We drove one block. Then another. “Maybe it’s not a good night for this,” I said.
“There’s one!” Brent shouted, and he started to whip the Prius nose first toward the curb, stepping on the brake just in time to avoid creaming the motorcycle that had been hidden from our view in the parking place. “Damn!” he said. “Dude’s taking up two spots.”
“It’s puny,” my sister said. “Let’s move it!” Before I knew what was happening, she and Adam were out of the car, laughing as they half lifted, half rolled the bike out of our way. I watched the lightness in their movements, the energy, unable to remember the last time I’d seen Adam laugh, and I was glad I’d agreed to come despite my reservations. I wanted to see that smile on my husband’s face, even if I wasn’t the person to put it there.
Brent managed to squeeze the car into the parking place once the motorcycle was out of the way. We were in front of a wig store. The window was full of mannequin heads, most of them dark skinned, wearing wigs in every shade of the rainbow.
Adam offered me a hand as I got out of the car. “Oh, Maya,” he said, sudden sympathy in his voice. “We should have dropped you off out front. Are you up to the walk?”
He meant physically, and physically I was fine. “I’m okay,” I said, already starting to walk, setting a brisk, brisk pace.
“Look out,” Brent said as we bustled past the wig shop, “this woman’s hungry!”
The restaurant was long and narrow and packed, but we found a table in the rear. As we walked toward it, I saw one of the E. R. docs from Duke sitting against the far wall, and she waved. I waved back. Seeing her there gave me courage, as if it had not been a stupid idea to come to this part of Durham for dinner after all. I began to notice the other patrons. Some dressed up; most dressed down. White, black, brown. Probably some native Brazilians, happy to enjoy a meal that reminded them of home.
Rebecca and I took the far side of the table and sat down, facing the front of the room. By the time Brent and Adam sat down across from us, I was starting to relax. I liked this place, I decided. I liked the lively atmosphere. The laughter. The spicy smells.
The menus were handwritten in Portuguese and filled with bad photographs of the entrées. Sitting across from each other, Adam and Rebecca leaned over their menus, trying to pronounce the names of the dishes. The table was so small that their heads nearly touched. Their hair was the exact same shade of brown, I noticed, and very nearly the same length, Adam’s too long and my sister’s too short.
“I want this one.” Rebecca pointed to one of the pictures. “It’s the most bizarre-looking thing on the menu.” From where I sat, the entrée looked like a pile of pink flesh covered with some sort of leafy green vegetable.
“I’m going to pass on that,” Adam said with a laugh, and I was glad he hadn’t fallen completely under Rebecca’s spell. When he told me he was joining DIDA, I knew he’d finally succumbed to her persuasion. I’d always been glad that she and Adam got along so well, but I wished she’d left him alone about DIDA. I loved my sister, but she could be a steamroller.
We ordered beers while we continued to study the menu, and Adam held up his bottle in a toast to Brent.
“Drink up!” he said. “This’ll probably be your last cold brew for a while.”
Brent groaned, but he was grinning. “It’s going to be so bloody hot down there,” he said.
“Next trip is yours, bro-in-law.” Rebecca tapped her bottle to Adam’s.
“Is that a threat or a promise?” Adam asked.
“Both,” she said.
An African-American woman was walking toward the rear of the restaurant, a little girl in her arms. I suspected she was heading for the restroom, but she was looking straight at me, a broad smile on her face.
“Do you know her?” Rebecca whispered.
She wasn’t the least bit familiar.
“Dr. Ward!” she said, and for a moment, I thought she meant Rebecca, but her eyes were definitely on mine.
“Hi.” I smiled, struggling to place her. Then I noticed the little girl in her arms. “Taniesa!” I said, jumping to my feet. I reached for her, and Taniesa came easily into my arms, as though she’d never connected the pain from her surgery the year before with me. She clutched a small stuffed panda bear in her hand. “You’re getting huge, baby girl.” I planted a kiss on her cheek.
“I seed you and Mama said no, that isn’t you, but it is too,” Taniesa said.
“And you were right. How are you, honey? How’s that arm of yours?”
“Good,” she said, and she lowered her head to my shoulder as if she wanted to go home with me. I could picture the X-ray of Taniesa’s left arm, shattered in a tricycle accident, as clearly as if I’d seen it only minutes before. I’d never had a photographic memory when it came to reading, but show me a juicy X-ray or CAT scan or MRI image, and I’d never forget it.
“You mean the world to us, Dr. Ward,” Taniesa’s mother said. I couldn’t remember her name. Taniesa’s last name was Flanders, but I knew her mother’s surname was different.
“I’m so glad we could fix her up,” I said, reluctantly letting go of the little girl and handing her back to her mother. Taniesa had on a sweater against the air-conditioned chill of the restaurant, but I ran my fingers down her arm, picturing the scar beneath the fabric.
Rebecca gave the girl’s mother a little wave. “I’m Dr. Ward’s sister, Rebecca,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. This is Brent Greer and my husband Adam Pollard, and this is—”
“Lucy Sharp.” Taniesa’s mom saved me the embarrassment.
“I like that panda, Taniesa,” Adam said. “Is it a girl or a boy?”
Taniesa looked at the stuffed toy as if she was just noticing it. “Girl,” she said.
“She have a name?” Adam asked.
“Taniesa.”
We all laughed, and Taniesa grinned.
“That was so smart!” Adam’s eyes were wide with feigned wonder. “You’ll never forget her name, will you?”
God, it was strange watching Adam with other people! I’d forgotten what he was like. How playful he could be. How he used to be playful with me. Our lives had become far too consumed by fertility and pregnancy and worry. We needed to change that, yet I knew he wasn’t ready to give up. I knew he wanted a child more than he wanted the sun to rise in the sky.
“Isn’t this some place?” Lucy Sharp asked. She glanced down at our plateless table. “You haven’t tried anything yet?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“What do you recommend?” Brent asked.
“Oh, Lord, anything you get’s going to fill you up. Try the Churrasco. It’s barbecue, Brazilian style. I never thought I’d like Brazilian food. Who would’ve guessed? But my sister-in-law got me in here a couple weeks ago and now she can’t get me out.”
Our waitress came to the table just then, and Lucy Sharp took a step backward. “I’ll get out of your hair,” she said, “but Taniesa wanted to be sure we said ‘hey.’ ”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “Bye, Taniesa.”
The little girl reached for me one more time, and her mom leaned over to let her kiss my cheek.
I have the world’s best job, I thought. I watched them walk back to the front of the restaurant, and even before I saw them sit down again, I felt happy and at home and hungry enough to eat alligator meat.
The food was delicious and I was eating coconut flan when I noticed that the crowd was beginning to thin out.
“I’m drunk,” Brent admitted happily. He was. Adam was not far behind him. His eyes were glossy and a little unfocused, and the grin he’d been wearing most of the evening was lopsided in a way that made me smile.
“I’ll drive,” Rebecca said. “Though I’m so stuffed I may not fit behind the wheel.”
Adam said something in response, but I didn’t hear him. My gaze was on a man who had walked into the restaurant. He was Caucasian, dark haired, wearing a white T-shirt and beige pants and he stood in front of the door, shifting his gaze quickly from table to table. Something about him sent a shiver through me.
He started walking toward us—or at least, I thought he was heading toward our table. His stride was deliberate, his nostrils flared. Then I saw that his eyes—his ice-blue eyes—were locked on the two men at the table in front of ours. Adam said something that must have been funny, because Brent and Rebecca laughed, but
I’d set down my spoon and was gripping the corner of the table, my heart thudding beneath my breastbone.
I knew better than anyone how quickly these things could happen. The man reached behind his back with his right hand, then whipped his arm out straight, the gun a gray blur as it cut through the air, and I saw the tattoo of a black star on his index finger as he squeezed the trigger.
9
Maya
BEFORE I COULD SCREAM OR DUCK, THE SHOT RANG OUT and the man at the table in front of ours slumped in his chair. Then I did scream, the same way I’d screamed twenty years earlier in my driveway. This time, though, I had plenty of company. The congenial atmosphere of the little restaurant gave way to utter chaos. I bent over in my chair, making myself as small as possible, and I felt Rebecca cover me with her body like a shell. My hands were pressed to my ears, but I still heard footsteps racing toward the restaurant door.
“Get him!” people shouted. “Stop him!” Chairs scraped against the floor, and I heard the thud of a table falling on its side.
“Call nine-one-one!” I heard Adam yell.
Rebecca sat up and I straightened slowly from my crouched position, my stomach clenched around the meal I’d eaten. Brent and Adam were already on the floor next to the injured man, who had fallen from his chair in a crumpled heap. Rebecca sprang from her seat to the floor next to the men, while I remained frozen in my chair. The table blocked my view, and I caught only snippets of their conversation. “Press harder,” my sister was saying. “Can’t get a pulse,” Adam said. “Dude’s gone,” Brent added.
Should I try to help? Could I? This is why the three of them belonged in DIDA and I didn’t. I loved my work because it put me in control. “Maya knits teeny little bones back together,” Adam always said when introducing me to someone. That’s what I loved doing: fixing the fixable.
My gaze sank to my dessert plate, and I saw the splatter of blood across the remnants of my flan. The room spun, and I sprang out of my chair and raced toward the ladies’ room in the rear of the restaurant. The tiny restroom was crammed with crying, frightened women who let out a collective scream when I pushed open the door. Just looking at the small sea of hot bodies stole my breath away. I let the door close and sank to the dirty tiled floor of the hallway, my back against the wall.
I couldn’t seem to pull enough air into my lungs. Those cold eyes. The steady aim of the gun. Gulping air, I lowered my head to my knees and fought the darkness that seeped into my vision. I’d never once fainted. Not the first time I’d worked on a cadaver. Not during my medical training. Not as an intern in the O. R. I’d never even come close. Yet, I could feel the pull of unconsciousness teasing me now. He’s gone, I told myself. The danger’s over.
Above the voices and commotion from the restaurant, I heard the distant sound of sirens. The women left the ladies’ room en masse, stepping around me, trying not to trip over my feet. I pulled myself into a ball, wrapping my arms tightly around my legs. The sirens grew louder, multiplying in number. I pictured the police cars and ambulances squealing to a stop in front of the building, and I heard new voices adding to the din in the restaurant.
A few minutes passed before Adam walked into the hallway. He squatted down in front of me, his hands on my arms.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“The guy died,” he said.
I nodded again.
“I’m sorry, My,” he said. “You didn’t need this tonight. I know you still feel like shit.” He glanced behind him as if he could see the interior of the restaurant instead of the peeling paint on the wall. Then he sat down on the floor across from me. The hall was narrow enough that, even leaning against the opposite wall, he was able to keep one hand on mine. God, I loved his touch! During the past week, I’d wondered if I’d ever feel him touch me again.
“The cops locked the door, because they want to talk to everyone who was here when it happened,” he said. “Especially you and Becca, since you were facing the shooter. But if you’re not up to it … I can tell them you’re only six days out from a miscarriage and to leave you alone. You could go into the police station instead of—”
“I’m okay,” I said. I’d be strong for him. I wanted his admiration, not his pity.
Adam turned his hand to lace our fingers together. “You know,” he said, “it was so crazy in there, that when you disappeared, I was afraid you’d been shot. I even looked under the table for you. It scared me.” His voice was heavy with emotion, and I knew he still loved me. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to doubt that love.
“I’m okay,” I said again, getting to my feet. “I can talk to them now.”
The ride home two hours later was quiet and dismal. We were talked out from the interviews with the police, and Brent, now stone-cold sober, drove.
He dropped Adam and me off in front of our house. We started walking up the curved sidewalk to our front door, but I turned as I heard a car door slam and saw Rebecca running toward us.
“Just want to talk to my sis a minute,” she said to Adam.
He nodded, pulling his keys from his pocket. “I’ll see you inside, My,” he said.
We’d left the outside lights on, and I could see the worry in Rebecca’s face. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I nodded. “Fine.” I looked toward my house, hoping the sight of the light-filled windows and overflowing planters by the front door would erase the image of bloody flan from my mind.
“I was afraid when we picked that restaurant that you wouldn’t want to go,” she said. “I know you don’t like going to that part of town. But it seemed great at first. We were having so much fun. And then this had to happen.” She shook her head. “It was terrible.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
Rebecca looked toward Brent’s car, then faced me again. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about the baby since I got back. I mean, you and me alone. Let’s make time before I end up on the road again, okay?”
I wasn’t thinking about the baby at that moment. I didn’t want thoughts of my baby—my son—to be connected in any way to this horrible night, but she was waiting for some response from me. “Okay,” I said. “I really …” I looked toward my house once more, thinking of Adam inside. “We have to figure out whether to try again.”
“Or adopt.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think Adam ever will.”
“What is his problem?” She sounded annoyed. “I want to pound some sense into that man’s head. ”
“No. Don’t. He and I have to figure it out. Okay?”
Rebecca ran a hand through her short hair, glancing again toward Brent’s car. “This is a terrible send-off for Brent,” she said, “but then, you get kind of used to the unexpected when you work for DIDA.” It was the wrong thing to say to me now that Adam had signed on as a volunteer, and she caught herself. “But nothing like this has ever happened in all the years I’ve worked for DIDA,” she said. “Really, Maya.”
I didn’t want to talk about DIDA. What I wanted to say was, Did tonight remind you of the night Mom and Daddy were killed? But I would never say those words. Our relationship was so complex. We were close in so many ways. Distant in others. If tonight had reminded her of that other night, I would never know.
“You get some sleep,” she said. “Do you have some Xanax lying around?”
“Somewhere,” I said.
She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way a mother might touch her child. She was not usually tender, and I was moved by the gesture. Then she pulled me into a hug.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
We stayed that way, holding on to each other, for close to a minute. No matter how tightly I held her against me though, I felt that long-ago night wedged between us like a solid wall of stone.
10
Rebecca
REBECCA SAT IN HER FAVORITE RED VELVET CHAIR AT Starbucks, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her, a double Americano on the table next to her. She was reading a book written by a guy who’d worked with the Red Cross after the quake in China. Even though she’d worked in China after the quake herself, she couldn’t concentrate on the book today. She was impatient and the coffee wasn’t helping.
The devastation from the earthquake in Ecuador was much worse than anyone had realized, and she was itching to go down there. Brent had been working thirty miles from the epicenter for a week now, and he’d finally managed to call her on a satellite phone the day before. “Tell Dot we need you here,” he’d said. They were extremely shorthanded, but Dorothea didn’t want her to go.
“Not until we see what these devils in the Atlantic have on their minds,” she said when Rebecca relayed Brent’s message.
The tropical storm that had been wallowing a good distance off the coast of Bermuda was now Hurricane Carmen. She barely deserved the name hurricane, in Rebecca’s opinion. She was nothing more than a puffy white amoeba on the weather map. No one seemed sure where she would make landfall—if she made landfall at all. Possibly South Carolina. Possibly farther north, along the Outer Banks. But the storm was so pathetic that evacuation was voluntary, and Rebecca knew that most people would stay to watch the waves swell and the wind howl and enjoy being as close as they could get to danger while remaining perfectly safe. Durham and the rest of the state were promised buckets of rain and a little wind, but so far, nothing more than that, and Rebecca couldn’t believe she was stuck in North Carolina because of potential rain. She had to admit, though, that Dot had a sixth sense about storms. Rebecca sometimes thought she had missed her calling and should have been a meteorologist. She wondered if, when it was her turn as DIDA’s director, she’d be able to determine who was needed when and where with Dorothea’s precision.
“It’s not just Carmen I’m concerned about,” Dorothea had said to her in her dining room-slash-office that morning. She’d pointed to the weather map on her computer. “See these two guys north of Haiti?” She ran her finger over two other amoebas. “I don’t trust them one bit.”
“Okay.” Rebecca had given in. “Whatever.” So now she was biding her time—working out at the gym, running, catching up on e-mail and helping Dorothea with DIDA’s mind-numbing administrative tasks.
She’d finally had a couple of hours alone with Maya the evening before. Over their Frapuccinos at this same Starbucks, they’d talked about the baby. They’d sat in the courtyard outside so Rebecca could smoke, and she’d loaded Maya up with advice: It was too soon to make a decision about trying again, she’d said. Maya needed to put the whole baby thing out of her mind for a while. She had to give Adam time to grieve before reintroducing the topic of adoption. Maybe by then he’d be ready.
Maya listened in that patient way she had, looking more at her mug of coffee than at Rebecca. And when Rebecca had offered every last bit of sisterly advice she could come up with, Maya leaned toward her.
“I know you have my best interest at heart, Bec,” she said, “but you can’t really understand how this feels.”
Rebecca didn’t know why the words hurt her so much, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth. She couldn’t understand. She was out of her league, and that was a feeling she loathed. She thought of telling Maya about that weird fantasy she’d had in Brent’s hotel room of holding the baby, that powerful sense of loss, but caught herself in time. Maya’s loss was real; hers was imagined.
“Well,” she’d said, “I want to understand.”
“It’s creating issues between Adam and me,” Maya said.
Rebecca frowned. What did she mean by “it”? Maya could be so vague. She had a way of talking around a subject instead of coming out and saying what she meant. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Because he won’t adopt or what?”
“Partly,” Maya said. “I haven’t told you a lot of this because I didn’t want you to worry, but ever since the first miscarriage, things haven’t been the same between us.”
She remembered that lunch she’d had with Adam a few weeks earlier when he talked about the Pollywog. How happy he’d looked. How she’d realized then that some of the joy had gone out of him in the last year or so.
She stubbed out her cigarette and leaned forward. “You two are solid, Maya,” she said. “All couples have their ups and downs.” She held her breath, waiting for Maya to tell her once again that she couldn’t understand since she’d never been married, but Maya only shrugged.
“I know,” she said. “But this just … this feels bad.”
Adam and Maya. Maya and Adam. Their personalities were entirely different—extroverted versus introverted, jocular versus serious—but together the two of them formed one whole, balanced human being. Rebecca couldn’t imagine Maya without Adam. She couldn’t imagine her own life without Adam in it as her brother-in-law.
“This is a phase,” she said. “You’ll get through it, honey. You can’t rush it. You can’t do anything about it. But—” she leaned forward again “—the thing you can do something about is work, and I think you’re working way too hard right now.” Work was a topic she could understand and she felt herself on safer ground. Maya was covering for one of her partners who was on vacation. Someone else could have covered for him—someone who hadn’t miscarried a couple of weeks ago.
“I need to stay busy,” Maya said. “You know how I am.”
She did know. Work had always been Maya’s way of coping. Even after their parents’ deaths, when their lives had been turned completely upside down, Maya threw herself into her schoolwork. Her teachers and the school counselor had been astounded. Maya had always been a good student, the type who didn’t have to study all that hard to do well, something Rebecca had envied since she’d had to cram to get the same grades. But after their parents’ deaths, Maya lost herself completely in her studies, graduating from high school in three years instead of four. Everyone talked about how amazing she was. No one paid much attention to the fact that Rebecca had sacrificed her own first year of college to play mother and father to her sister, or that she’d fought the system to keep Maya out of foster care or that she’d cooked and cleaned and done the laundry while Maya rose to the top of her class.
The thing that really changed about Maya after the murders, though, was her transformation from a happy-go-lucky kid into a girl afraid of her own shadow. Totally understandable. She’d been right in the line of fire. Who could go through something like that and remain unchanged?
Rebecca closed the book on the Chinese earthquake, giving up. She hadn’t absorbed a single word in the past fifteen minutes. Swallowing the last of her Americano, she got to her feet. She’d go for a run. Lose the negative memories.
She left the store and headed for her car, walking quickly as though she could leave the memories behind, but it wasn’t so easy. The whole time she and Maya had been talking the night before, Rebecca had been thinking about the shooting in the restaurant. She hated guns, hated treating gunshot victims, although she did it, wanting to save their lives with a desperation that went beyond the simple practice of medicine. Two decades had passed, yet she still saw her parents’ bloodied bodies in every shooting victim she treated.
The incident in the Brazilian restaurant had to remind Maya of that night. Rebecca had seen the panic in her eyes. She’d still been trembling later, when Rebecca hugged her good-night. They never talked about their parents’ murder. It was an agreed-upon, unspoken rule between them. Yet she knew that Maya had to blame her for that night.
Maybe even more than she blamed herself.
11
Maya
“Holy shit, Maya,” Adam called from the sofa in THE FAMILY ROOM. “COME LOOK AT THIS.”
I closed the dishwasher and walked into the family room. Outside the windows, the rain created a dark, undulating curtain so thick I couldn’t see the woods behind the house. It was eight o’clock, so I wasn’t sure how much of the darkness was encroaching nightfall and how much of it was the storm. Either way, it was the sort of weather that made me glad to be inside. Chauncey sat at the sliding glass door, looking discouraged.
Adam pointed toward the TV. “They’re in Wilmington,” he said. “They’re saying now it’s a category four.”
I sat down on the sofa next to him. On the screen, a newscaster dressed in a slicker and hood held on to a lamppost to keep from flying away. He was trying to shield his eyes against the wind and rain, shouting to be heard above the din. I squinted at the TV. “Is he … where is he?” I asked. Wilmington was less than three hours from us, and I loved the charm of the city on the Cape Fear River. “Is that the Riverwalk?”
“Right,” Adam said. “He’s near the Pilot House. Listen.”
“… not moving,” the reporter said. “Just sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear. There’s no one out here on the downtown streets, but most people didn’t evacuate. Some were starting to, because the next storm, Erin, is expected to make a direct hit. And that’s a problem—” He slapped his hand on his hood to keep it on his head. “A big problem,” he said. “We’ve got people who were trying to leave and are now stuck on the roads because of flooding and downed trees. They tried to. you know … get out, but it’s just too late.” The reporter was getting blown all over the place. His knuckles were white where he clung to the pole. “You know the next named storm was Donald, but that one sort of just. fizzled, but the big … but Carmen. no one expected this. This … strength. And of course, no one expected her to make landfall here.” He fiddled with his earpiece. “Some people are trying to leave the area, like I said, but there’s already flooding on some of the major roads and many, if not most, of the minor roads. And I tell you … if this next storm, Erin, packs this kind of punch while people are here … unable to evacuate …” Something blew past his head and he ducked, then recovered. “If it packs this kind of punch,” he repeated, “we’re going to have a major catastrophe on our hands.”
Chauncey had moved to my side. He rested his big head on my knees and I massaged my fingertips into the short fur on his neck. “I hope there’s enough of a break between the storms that people can leave.” I glanced out the window, but now it truly was dark outside and I couldn’t see a thing. I’d been worried about the rain and wind in our own yard. I could still remember Hurricane Fran, which hit North Carolina shortly after I moved to the state. I was in medical school and sharing an apartment with Rebecca at the time, and I remembered trees lying helter-skelter everywhere. “How bad is it supposed to get here?” I asked Adam. “Did they say?”
He shook his head, putting his arm around my shoulders, and I felt relief well up inside me. Except for that moment in the hallway of the restaurant after the shooting, he’d shown me little affection since the miscarriage. I was trying not to read too much into it, trying not to be neurotic and insecure. I snuggled close to him. I wanted our intimacy back. I wanted to be able to talk to him. We used to talk so easily to one another. Now, though, the things that were on my mind didn’t feel safe to bring up, because they would make me sound small and pathetic and I knew he wanted me strong. Worse, I was angry with him for the way he was shutting me out. I’d rarely felt anger toward Adam before, and I didn’t know what to do with it. My hormones were still toying with me, and the things that were on my mind, the things I couldn’t get out of my mind were: my lost child, Adam’s ex-wife, laughing about having children after all, and the abortion I’d never told him about. Sometimes I thought to myself: just sit him down and say, Adam, please, I need to get all this out. Please just let me talk without telling me everything’s fine, not to worry. Please. But I didn’t. I was afraid, and I wasn’t even sure what it was that I feared.
The guy on the TV screen was growing repetitive, but he was still riveting to watch. “Dorothea was right,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This is why she told Rebecca not to go to Ecuador. She had a feeling about these storms. So I guess Rebecca will be going to Wilmington or wherever the damage is the worst once they let up.”
“… didn’t really have a chance to board up along the coast,” the reporter was saying.
“I may go, too,” Adam said.
I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Really?”
He nodded. “If it turns out they need DIDA down there, this would be a good first assignment. You know … in our backyard. Better than Ecuador.”
“Definitely,” I said, but I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to be in DIDA, period. But he was right. I would be far more comfortable having him in North Carolina than South America.
“… has the meteorologists scratching their heads, because this storm—this cat four hurricane—just wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”
The TV showed a satellite image. The hurricane was a stunner, huge and round with a perfect blue eye. It sat at the mouth of the Cape Fear and the projected path drove it straight up the river. A meteorologist with long, glossy red hair moved onto the screen and was about to open her mouth when the TV went dark, along with every light in our house.
“Knew that was going to happen.” Adam stood up. “I’ll get the flashlights.”
“I already did,” I said, getting to my own feet. As soon as the rain had started that afternoon, I’d taken them from the cupboard where we kept the emergency supplies. “The weather radio’s there, too,” I said, feeling my way toward the kitchen. “And the candles. They’re all on the island.”
I heard the ominous cracking sound of a limb being torn from a tree and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, waiting for the thud I knew was coming, hoping the limb didn’t hit the house. I heard the snapping of other branches as the limb fell and held my breath until it finally hit the earth. The whole house shook, and Chauncey began barking furiously, running around my legs, his tail thwacking against my thighs. It was going to be a long, long night.
I heard the sound of chain saws even before I opened my eyes in the morning. Adam was already up, and I stood at our bedroom window to survey the yard below. It didn’t look bad. Tree limbs and branches littered the lawn, but they were small and I knew we could drag them back into the woods without much trouble. I hoped the front yard had suffered no more damage than the back. The odd thing was, the world outside was still gray. Almost dark, as though the storm was not quite finished with us.
Adam poked his head in the bedroom. “No coffee,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“Oh.” I wrinkled mine back at him. “Power’s still out?”
He nodded. “The yard’s good, though. The Scotts have a big one down across their driveway. I’m going to take my chain saw over there.”
“Okay.” I smiled. As long as no one had suffered any major damage from the storm, I knew the men in the neighborhood would enjoy the chance to play with their saws that morning. “I’ll start picking up the yard,” I said.
I dressed and went downstairs, dialing Rebecca on my cell as I walked.
“Hey,” she answered. “Any damage at your house?”
“Power’s out, but we’re good,” I said. “How about there?” The trees around Dorothea’s house were far smaller than ours.
“Nothing,” she said. “Couple of shingles off the roof. Have you turned on the TV?”
“Can’t,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right. Well, Wrightsville Beach is practically under water. And wait till you see Wilmington. The river’s flooding a bunch of the buildings on Front Street.”
“Oh, you’re kidding. We saw on the news that people couldn’t evacuate in time. Are there injuries? Will you be going?” Would Adam be going?
“Tons of people stranded,” she said. “It’s hard to say what’s going on because nobody can get in or out. But Erin is right behind. They expect her to hit tomorrow morning.”
“Already? Hit where? I thought Erin wasn’t due until.” I tried to remember what the predictions had been for the second storm.
“They thought Tuesday, but it suddenly started moving,” Rebecca said. I heard the excitement in her voice. My sister loved a great disaster. “It’s not as big because it’s not spending enough time over the water to gain strength, but it’s still a four, and the area just can’t handle another drop of rain.”
“I hope.” I pictured images from Katrina. “I just hope all the people are safe.”
“Me, too,” Rebecca said. “Is Adam there? Dot’s probably going to want both of us to go down there after Erin, unless she turns out to be nothing.”
“He’s somewhere in the neighborhood with his chain saw.”
Rebecca laughed. “The air’s buzzing here, too,” she said. “Okay, have him call me when he gets in. How are you doing?”
“I’d kill for a cup of coffee, but that’s not much to complain about.”
“Hey, sis? You know what they’re calling these two hurricanes?”
“What?”
“The sister storms,” she said.
I thought about that. “Maybe they’ll be like us, then,” I said. “Carmen was the wild and crazy one, and Erin will be tame and mild.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Rebecca said.
12
Rebecca
ALTHOUGH THE DAY WAS CLEAR, REBECCA COULDN’T remember a more nauseating helicopter flight. She and Adam were strapped into the fold-down seats of a military helicopter, along with a disaster medical team from Asheville. On the floor between them were stacks of supplies and equipment, poorly anchored. They tilted and shifted from side to side, and Rebecca finally shut her eyes to stop the vertigo, disappointed with herself over her queasiness.
“Check it out!” Adam shouted over the sound of the rotor.
She loosened her seat belt so that she could turn toward the window behind their heads, and the sight made her gasp. Below them, the flooding Cape Fear River covered the earth nearly as far as she could see, and the sunlight reflecting off the still water was blinding. Treetops and the roofs of houses looked like litter strewn across the water’s surface. On one of the roofs, she saw two figures. A man and a child.
“Do you see that?” She pointed in the direction of the twosome on the roof. “We need to get them!”
She leaned across Adam to tug at the uniformed arm of the guy sitting next to him. She’d spoken to the man before takeoff, and he seemed to know quite a bit about the evacuation efforts. He was an older guy, gray haired with deep frown lines across his forehead, but clearly in fantastic shape. He looked as though he could lean out the door of the chopper and scoop people from their rooftops with his bare hands.
“There are people on a roof down there!” she shouted to him. “Can we get them?”
He shook his head. “We’re not equipped,” he said. “One of the rescue choppers’ll see them.”
There certainly were plenty of other helicopters. She watched them zip through the air, buzzing precariously close to one another. Some were huge and olive-drab, like the one she and Adam were in. Others were tiny and colorful, most likely donated to the cause by private companies. Rebecca could no longer see the roof where she’d spotted the man and child, and she hoped one of the choppers had already managed to pick them up.
She leaned toward Adam, her lips close to his ear. “The worst part of DIDA work is when you feel helpless,” she said, and he nodded.
It was rare that she felt helpless, though. She was a problem solver and the more chaotic the setting, the better she performed. Dot had once gone so far as to call her a magician. “The only woman I know who can manage two dozen patients at one time, make a jetload of supplies appear overnight and still find time to sleep with the best-looking dude on the site,” she’d said, annoying the hell out of Rebecca. Dot was one of the few people who knew how to yank her chain.
The gray-haired man abruptly unbuckled his seat belt and walked to the front of the helicopter, leaning into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Rebecca watched him, wondering if he would mention the people she’d seen on the roof. He spoke with the pilot for several minutes. Like the other DMAT team members flying with them, his battalion dress uniform was blue, while her DIDA uniform was dark gray. His multiple pockets, though, bulged just as hers did. In hers, she carried two water bottles, batteries, an MRE, a protein bar and her cell phone, which Dorothea told her she might as well leave behind. The cell towers near the Wilmington airport, where the evacuees were being taken, were down.
Rebecca brought it along anyway, and she knew Adam had his as well.
The man returned to his seat. He leaned toward Adam and Rebecca. “I was wondering why we went past the airport,” he said.
“We did?” Rebecca had been so mesmerized by the helicopters that she hadn’t even noticed the airport.
“Right,” the guy said. “The pilot got word that someone on the ground was shooting at the choppers.”
“You’re kidding,” Adam said. He looked a little green.
“They think it was a rumor, so now we’re going down.”
Rebecca gave Adam a “whatever” shrug of her shoulders. She faced the swaying tower of supplies again, tightening her seat belt, and psyched herself up to face whatever they’d find on the ground.
She sensed Adam’s disorientation as they climbed out of the helicopter, and remembered feeling the same confusion the first time she’d landed in a disaster area. The tarmac was brutally hot, the sun so bright and the smell of jet fuel so strong that her head instantly began to pound. There was no time to waste, though, and they joined the DMAT team in unloading the supplies from the helicopter. Adam was quick to get a grip on his confusion. She saw the energy she’d always admired in him as he climbed back into the cabin and began handing boxes and crates down to the volunteers on the tarmac. He’s going to be good at this, she thought. She remembered her conversation with Maya at the Starbucks a few nights earlier. A little separation was probably the best thing for the two of them right now. Time apart would give them a new perspective on their problems.
On the runway in front of them, she could see the string of helicopters landing and taking off. The choppers remained on the ground only long enough to dump their human cargo of evacuees before lifting into the sky again. Just like Katrina, she thought, as she watched so many people pour from one chopper that she knew they must have been piled on top of one another inside the cabin. Most of them were empty-handed, although a few clutched overstuffed plastic garbage bags. Mothers grabbed the hands of their children. One man carried an elderly woman in his arms. Rebecca turned back to the task of unloading the supplies. She would see plenty of these people in the days to come. There was no time to worry about them now.
“You two!”
Rebecca recognized Dorothea’s booming voice over the din from the helicopters. She turned to see the older woman standing near the bottom of the steps leading up to the concourse, her gray uniform a few shades darker than her braid and her hands forming a megaphone around her mouth. “Get your gear and come inside!” she called.
They finished unloading the chopper, then rummaged through the cargo until they found their duffel bags and ran together into the terminal.
Inside the glass walls of the concourse, the din changed from the roar of the helicopters to the buzz of human beings confined in too small a space to hold them. The gates looked as they might during a freak snowstorm on Christmas Eve, when all the flights had been grounded. People were everywhere. They slumped in the chairs. They sat on the floor, leaning against one another to stay upright as they tried to sleep. Long lines snaked to the restrooms, as well as to the few bottled water stations Rebecca could see.
She and Adam followed Dorothea through the corridor to the lobby, and Rebecca felt Adam’s hand light against the small of her back. He was so physical, and she liked that about him. He was always touching Maya—an arm around her shoulders, holding her hand, smoothing her hair. Brent touched Rebecca when he wanted sex; he was so damn predictable. They’d be walking home from a restaurant, and if he took her hand, she knew what he was after. The only good thing was that she nearly always wanted it, too.
In the lobby, Dot ushered them into a small office and closed the door. Two desks took up nearly all the space in the room, and there were no chairs. “Okay,” Dorothea said. “Have a seat.”
Rebecca boosted herself onto the edge of one of the desks, but Adam dropped his bag at his side and remained standing, hands in his pockets. He rocked on his heels as though raring to get to work.
“Is there any organization to what’s going on out there?” he asked. Clearly he thought there was none, and Rebecca guessed he was close to being correct, but it wasn’t the sort of question you asked Dorothea Ludlow. He didn’t know Dorothea well, so he couldn’t really have known. She tried to keep a smile off her face.
“Damn straight, there’s organization!” Dorothea said, gray eyes flashing. “We’ve accomplished more here in two days than you could in a month.”
Adam held up his hands in surrender. “I believe you,” he said with an uncertain laugh.
Rebecca grinned. “Don’t beat up on my brother-in-law,” she said to Dorothea.
“I can already see I’m going to have to separate the two of you.” Dorothea shook her head in mock disgust.
“We’ll behave,” Rebecca said.
Dorothea folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the second desk. “Well, listen up, and I’ll tell you the setup,” she said. “The concourse is where the majority of evacuees will hang out for now. Here in the lobby, on either end, is where the medical teams are setting up the tent walls. I’ll let one of the DMAT workers give you the full rundown. Look for Steve. He’s in the baggage-claim area.” She looked at Rebecca. “We’ve got the four zones going, like we did with Katrina,” she said, and Rebecca nodded. She would explain what that meant to Adam later. “No one expected this many people, and the teams are overwhelmed—” Dot looked at Adam “—which is not the same as disorganized. We’re trying to get some more teams in here. Like I told you, the cell towers are down, but I have a sat phone. Here’s your two-way radios and some extra batteries.” She pointed to the radios on the cluttered desk behind her. “No power, needless to say. The medical areas’ll have some AC from generators, but the rest of the terminal’s a damn steam bath.” She turned her attention to Adam again. “We need the princess here,” she said.
Rebecca laughed. Dorothea said that nearly every time they landed in a disaster area. She knew Rebecca would shrug off the idea, but Dot probably saw Adam as fresh meat. Adam, though, had no idea what she was talking about.
“Who’s the princess?” he asked. His face was open and boyish, and Rebecca was getting a kick out of seeing him so out of his element.
“She’s talking about Maya,” she said. “Dot thinks anyone who doesn’t work for DIDA is soft.”
“Maya’s not soft,” Adam said. Rebecca liked hearing him come to Maya’s defense, even though they both knew that Maya was as soft as mashed potatoes.
“We need her here.” Dorothea patted the pockets of her uniform jacket, as if checking her supplies. “We’ve got a mountain of kids with mountains of problems, and we have no pediatrician. Not one. And as you can see—” she motioned in the general direction of the tarmac, although they couldn’t possibly see it from the office “—the people keep pouring in.”
“Maya can’t do it,” Adam said.
“She knows that,” Rebecca said. “She’s just being a pain in the butt.”
“There’s a difference between can’t and won’t” Dorothea suddenly clapped her hands together. “Okay!” she said. “Let’s get to work.” She opened the office door and marched out, and Rebecca watched Adam stare after her, openmouthed.
“Wow,” he said. “I had no idea what a bitch she is. ”
“Really?” Rebecca stood up from the desk. “I thought that was common knowledge.” They left the office and made their way through the sea of tired, anxious people, following the signs leading toward the baggage-claim area. She felt uncomfortable that she’d put Dorothea down.
“Dot’s not really a bitch, Adam,” she said as they crossed the central lobby, where broad green beams formed a crisscross pattern beneath the high open ceiling. “It’s hard for her to believe that not everyone feels as passionately about disaster work as she does. She can make people do what they don’t want to do. That’s why DIDA is a success. Why it works.”
“Right,” he said. “I get it.”
They passed beneath a replica of the Wright brothers’ plane. Beyond that, Rebecca saw the canvas tent walls. An extremely young guy in a gold DMAT uniform rushed toward them as they neared the tent.
“Adam and Rebecca?” he asked.
They nodded and Rebecca thought he was going to hug them, he looked so pleased.
“Fantastic!” he said. “I’m Steve. ”
“Hey, Steve.” Adam reached out to shake his hand. “How’re you holdin’ up?”
“Haven’t slit my wrists yet,” Steve said, “though I’ve considered it. Let me get you oriented real quick because there’s no time to waste.” He started walking toward the tent walls, and they fell into step on either side of him. “We’re basically out of control, but we’re improving,” he said. “We’ve got nurses and PAs doing triage out on the tarmac as soon as people get off the choppers. And here’s the scoop on the tents. Tent One there.” He pointed to the tent farthest from them. “That’s for the walking wounded. Sprains, cuts, minor respiratory problems.” He nodded toward the tent in front of them. “Tent Two is urgent care. We’ve had a couple of women in early labor. Compound fractures.” He shook his head. “Saw three of them already this morning. People don’t belong on roofs.”
“I thought this was the baggage-claim area.” Adam turned in a circle, searching for the carousels.
“Inside the tents,” Rebecca said.
“Right,” Steve said. “They don’t design airports to house evacuees.” He led them to the other end of the lobby, pointing to the door leading to a stairwell. “Do not go down to the basement,” he warned. “The addicts took it over with the first wave of evacuees and things aren’t pretty down there.”
And will only get worse as they run out of drugs, Rebecca thought.
“Where are the pharmaceuticals being kept?” Adam asked, clearly thinking the same thing.
“What little we have is in one of the rental car offices,” Steve said. They’d reached the area by the ticket counters, where two more tents had been set up. “Here’s the third tent,” he said. “The E. R. of the operation. Cardiac arrest. Seizures. Active labor. That sort of thing. We have no supplies, by the way. You’ll figure that out soon enough, though.”
“And the fourth tent?” Adam asked.
Rebecca knew what the fourth tent was for, but she let Steve tell him.
“The expectants,” he said. “The ones who would die no matter what. Palliative care in that one. Letting the families be with them, if there are any family members around.”
Adam nodded. “Mostly elderly,” he said.
“Right,” Steve said. “A lot of them are from one of the small hospitals that had to be evacuated. Then we’ve been getting a lot … way too many … from nursing homes. Sadder than hell.” He looked from Adam to Rebecca and back again. “You brother and sister?” he asked.
“What?” Adam laughed.
“You look alike,” Steve said.
Rebecca and Adam exchanged a glance. Rebecca took in Adam’s dark eyes. Brown hair. She supposed they did look alike, especially in their DIDA uniforms. She tossed an arm around Adam’s shoulders, breathing in the scent of soap and aftershave, knowing it would be her last whiff of a well-groomed man for quite a while. “He’s my darlin’ brother-in-law,” she said to Steve, “but thanks for the compliment.”
“Hey!” Adam grinned. “That’s my line.”
“Well, whatever,” Steve said, and she could tell he had no time to joke around. He pointed toward the ticket counters. “You can put your gear over there. I’ve got to get back to the concourse.”
Steve took off down the hallway, and Rebecca and Adam dumped their duffel bags behind the ticket counters. Rebecca watched Adam fill his lungs as if he knew he wouldn’t have another chance to catch his breath for the next two weeks.
“Welcome to DIDA, bro,” she said, and they headed for the tents.
Rebecca spent most of the day with the patients needing urgent care, while Adam worked in the emergency tent. Dorothea had been right about the children. They were everywhere. Asthma attacks were rampant. Broken bones. Fevers. Wounds that were already oozing and infected. Rebecca didn’t know how Maya worked with kids all day. It was the one area where Maya was tougher than she was. “I’m just used to it,” Maya would say, as if it was no big deal.
As Rebecca’s fifth patient was brought to her, she already felt her frustration rising. The screaming five-year-old boy had broken at least a dozen bones in a fall from a tree onto the roof of a car. He should have been airlifted directly to a hospital, not stuffed into a helicopter with dozens of other people. Yet she knew there’d been no time to triage the evacuees as they were scooped up by the choppers. It was up to them to separate the sickest, the most gravely injured, from the others who could be treated here in the terminal. Those in the worst shape, like this little boy, would be airlifted inland. Yet as he screamed during Rebecca’s examination, she couldn’t help but wonder if Maya would be handling him differently. In her head, she heard one of her sister’s favorite refrains: Children are not simply miniature adults when it comes to medicine.
She saw Adam from time to time during the day when he’d transport one of his emergency patients to her tent. They weren’t able to exchange more than a few rushed words with each other, always about a patient’s condition and treatment, yet she felt connected to him. She was so glad he was there. She hoped the work hooked him and that he’d want to do his two weeks next year as well.
Around dusk, she finally took a break. She jogged down the long hallway to the concourse, dodging evacuees, relieved to be out of the tent and moving her muscles. In the concourse, she headed for the water station and spotted Adam standing near the windows. Grabbing a bottle of water from one of the pallets, she went to stand next to him. He glanced at her without speaking, and in his face, she saw the toll the day was taking on him. She’d never before noticed the fine lines around his eyes or seen the tight, unsmiling set of his lips.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. His gaze was fixed on the never-ending line of helicopters as they landed, dumped their passengers and took off again. “It’s different than I expected, though,” he said. “Rougher and—I don’t care what Dorothea says—disorganized as hell.”
“You get used to it.” She didn’t want him to lose heart.
He took a swallow from his water bottle. “I decided after the first few crazy hours to stop fighting it,” he said. “To see it as a challenge.” He glanced at her again. “I was thinking of you,” he said. “I figured, if Bec can do this year-round, I can handle it for two measly weeks.”
“No doubt about it,” she said.
“I admire you, kiddo.” He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Don’t make me blush,” she jested, but his words meant something to her.
“Look at that.” He pointed to one of the choppers, and they watched as the doors opened and a river of people—mostly children—literally poured from the cabin onto the tarmac. Adam quickly lowered his arm from her shoulders, pressing his hand to the glass as though he could stop them from falling. They watched as the kids landed on top of one another. Rebecca had seen worse. Much worse. She rested her hand on Adam’s back, and he shook his head. “This is a horror show,” he said.
They watched volunteers on the tarmac help the kids get to their feet, trying to create order out of chaos. One of the volunteers, a woman, waved to a group of men standing at the side of the tarmac. She held up four fingers, and the men rushed toward the helicopter, carrying four litters between them.
Rebecca heard Adam groan, probably picturing four more patients swelling the ranks inside the tents.
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