chapter three chapter threeSarah hesitated before the computer. The monitor filled the battered desk. A layer of dust blanketed the top. An old friend of hers, now stationed in Bangkok, had given Sarah permission to crash in his New York apartment and make use of its few amenities. It had taken her a good half-hour to figure out that the outdated computer did have a modem, but it still used dial-up, at a very slow speed. Following the faded instructions taped to the monitor, she’d been dialing for another half-hour. Finally, she’d gotten a slow but steady connection.
Damn.
She backed away from the blue glow of the screen. The edge of the couch bumped her legs. She gathered the folds of her skirt and sank into the couch’s perfect hollow, formed by a broken spring underneath.
In the camp outside Gatumba, such a steady stream of power would send her and Dr. Mwami scrambling. They’d charge the defibrillators, put the portable ultrasound scanner to good use, and find that woman who needed gallbladder surgery while the electrocardiogram was still working—all before a fuse blew, rain shorted out the cables, or a herd of migrating elephants crushed the generator.
But here, faced with such wretchedly reliable power, she wished for a thunderstorm. The screen blinked at her. Relentlessly. And despite the heaping piles of paper on the desk, Rachel’s little white envelope shone bright like the moon in a Burundi night.
What are you afraid of, Sarah?
The truth, Rachel. The ugly, ugly truth.
Sarah seized her cup of orange-blossom tea. She corralled its warmth in her palms. For fourteen years, she’d avoided this situation. Fourteen years of living in blessed—and willing—ignorance. Not a darn bit of good could ever come of Rachel’s last request: that Sarah track down Dr. Colin O’Rourke, Peace Corps volunteer, surgical wizard, passionate activist—and the only man that Sarah ever loved.
She closed her eyes… and remembered.
They lay under the mosquito netting, still breathing hard. Outside the hut, the insects of Paraguay screamed, slamming against the thatched roof, swarming in such density that they couldn’t fly a clear path. Night birds howled in the forest beyond. Sarah was sure she heard the growl of a jaguar.
So different, it all was, from where she’d come from—from the muffled snowy Vermont nights she’d known growing up. Here the air was thick with life.
And that’s how she felt—thick with life—lying with her head on Colin’s shoulder, admiring the way his sculpted chest rose and fell in the gleam of the moonlight. She traced his muscles. Pectoralis major. External intercostals. Obliques. Not for the first time, she wondered why Dr. Colin O’Rourke chose to love her, an odd little farm girl on her first mission.
Sarah’s teacup clattered as she set it down. The tea splashed over her hand. It smelled nauseatingly sweet. Her friend Tim—the owner of this apartment—had a perfectly functional coffeemaker but not a coffee bean in the whole place, so she was forced to drink this horrid herbal stuff. She jumped off the couch, pushed aside the beaded curtain that separated the living room from the kitchen, dumped the brew in the rust-stained sink, and mumbled an apology to the absent host for being such an ungrateful guest.
The computer waited, a blue ghost in the other room. Ready to reveal that Dr. Colin O’Rourke was now a balding proctologist in Kansas. Or a dermatologist in Tupelo, who ran marathons in his spare time. With a golf-club membership, four kids, and a pedigreed Shih Tzu named Porgy.
Perhaps, a lovely wife.
She braced her hands on the sink. Why couldn’t Rachel leave her this one small eccentricity? Who did it hurt, really? Didn’t everyone have something or someone that they held up between themselves and the jagged edges of the world, like a bright bit of rose-colored glass? Sarah ached to curl herself into a ball, clutch his memory against her breast like the last in a set of blown-glass Christmas ornaments, something shiny and exquisitely beautiful—and in terrible danger of shattering.
There was an option. She could pretend she hadn’t received the letter yet. It wouldn’t be difficult. This much Jo and Kate knew: The mail in Burundi was like the forty-year-old Volkswagen that had been donated for use in the camp; once in a while, to everyone’s great astonishment, it worked. Most of the time, it didn’t. She could hold off the task for months. Even years.
But despite too many years working in hellholes all across the globe, Sarah still couldn’t shake off the minister’s daughter in herself. She couldn’t lie, and she didn’t like to admit being a coward.
Well, she wouldn’t do this alone. She batted her way through the beaded curtains and seized the receiver of Tim’s phone. She dialed a familiar number, then turned her back to the computer screen.
“Jo Marcum.”
Sarah checked herself. Jo had her business voice on—that clipped, citified, no-trace-of-Kentucky tone—but Sarah was sure she’d dialed Jo at home. “It’s Sarah. You’re working?”
“Catching up at home. Took too many days off. What’s up?”
“I need a witness.”
Jo made a breathy gasp. “You got your envelope.”
“My mother just sent it to me.”
“So, ’fess up. How thoroughly did Rachel screw you?”
“She wants me to track down Colin.” In the silence that met her revelation, Sarah wandered to the desk. She ran her finger over Rachel’s handwriting.
“Sarah… what did you just say?”
“I know it’s unbelievable.” Sarah tapped the envelope. “Rachel came to Africa last year. We spent a whole week together. We had some real heart-to-hearts. Now she’s ripping mine out.”
“Sarah, you’ve got to be kidding.”
“I just don’t understand why she’d ask me to do this, of all things! I thought, after her visit, she understood why I didn’t ever want to—”
“Let me get this straight,” Jo interrupted. “All Rachel asked was that you Google a guy?!”
Sarah paused. There was acid in Jo’s voice. More venom than she’d expected. It was true that Jo and Kate had long given up any tolerance for the subject of Colin O’Rourke. None of the girls really understood why Colin stood between Sarah and every lame, half-realized relationship she’d attempted since.
Apparently, not even Rachel.
“Okay.” Jo was working herself up. “Kate has to jump out of an airplane. And now you, my darling, are telling me that all you have to do is type?”
Type? More like dig up a grave. Unearth what should be left to memory. Stare at the rotted remains.
“Why are you calling me, anyway? Why for the love of Sam Hill aren’t you on a computer? You could get this over in about ten seconds.”
“Hey! Do you think you could be a little more unsympathetic?”
“Sarah…” Jo paused; Sarah could hear Jo trying to restrain herself. “Listen, sugar, you’ve been cow-eyed over this guy since Paraguay.” In the background, Sarah heard something thump. Jo was apparently throwing things around. “We’ve all been telling you to hunt him down. Here, look—I’ll do it for you—”
“No!” Sarah pulled the phone away from her ear. “I am going to do this myself, Jo. I was hoping to do it—with a friend.”
“Now?!” More thumping on Jo’s end, like something heavy going down stairs. “At this godforsaken time of night?”
Sarah paused. This, from a woman who rarely saw the inside of her condo before midnight? She glanced at the cat-clock swinging its tail over the sink. “Jo, it’s eight-thirty in the evening.”
“Hold on.”
Jo muffled the receiver, but Sarah heard her talking to someone, and then Sarah understood. Of course. Jo had company. Jo always had company. Jo gathered men as a wedding train might gather rice. She collected them idly, and then, occasionally, she’d shake them all off. Yet, whenever she wanted another, there he was.
Sarah had wanted only one.
“Jo, forget it.” She tried to sound calm, easy. “I’ll call Kate—”
“You do that.” Jo walked briskly around her condo—Sarah could hear the clicking of her heels. “Oh, there she is. Grace? Gracie!”
Through the wire, Sarah heard a tremendous crash.
“Oh, shit!” Jo dropped the phone. “Shit! Shit—shit—shit!”
“Jo, is everything all right? Jo?!”
Sarah heard a high-pitched wail, and Jo swearing, and saying, “It’s okay honey it’s okay honey it’s okay honey it’s okay honey, I’ll get a towel. It’s okay honey it’s okay….”
Sarah listened, incredulous. Grace? The only Grace she knew was… Gracie Braun.
She caught her breath.
It couldn’t be.
It didn’t make sense.
It explained everything.
“Hang up,” Jo said when she returned to the phone. Grace sobbed in the background. “I have to call 911.”
“What happened?”
“There’s blood everywhere. She fell. Now get off the phone—”
“I’m a nurse. How did she fall?”
“She tripped. In my living room. Coming down the last stair. Fell against the end table—”
“Did she lose consciousness?”
“I don’t… No, I don’t think so.”
“Broken bones?”
“How the blazes do I know? She’s bloody down to her knees. She’s got a cut. On her forehead. It’s welling like a Texas oil—”
“Near the eye?”
“No. Higher. By the hairline.”
Sarah pulled the details from her. It seemed as if Grace had suffered a straight, two-inch slice that might need a few stitches. “Scalp wounds bleed like hell,” she explained. “Don’t let it get to you. Get a clean towel, apply pressure. Then drive her calmly to the emergency room. They’ll have a plastic surgeon there to sew her up so well that you won’t ever see it again.”
“Shit. Shit.” Jo paused, murmuring something to Grace. “All right. I have to go. Sarah?!”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you go telling Kate. About Grace being here.”
Sarah paused, remembering an evening when Jo got all sarcastic about Kate missing a dinner because of her kid’s soccer practice. “Jo, even you have to concede that in this she’s an expert—”
“No! Do you hear me? No! Ain’t I got enough going on? Just swear to me you won’t tell Kate.”
Sarah reluctantly promised, then hung up. Puzzled. Not just about Jo’s vehemence about Kate, but about Rachel’s decision to leave her daughter with Jo. Long ago, Rachel had left the raising of her daughter to her own mother and father, at the house in Teaneck. Rachel traveled a lot. She’d decided that the best place for her daughter was in a stable home—with her grandparents in Jersey. Apparently, Rachel had changed her mind. But Jo? The best person to raise Grace should have been Kate.
Sarah retreated to the comfortable hollow of the couch, still clutching the receiver. She slipped off her sandals and curled her toes under her skirt. Outside, the cabs honked as they wove though the narrow street. Pedestrians murmured as they passed below her window, on their way to the more commercial area with its funky shops and restaurants. In the silence of this dusty apartment, the monitor still blazed its blue light; and the envelope still lay by the keyboard, shining.
One friend down. One to go.
She dialed a new number. It rang four times. Just as it was about to click over to an answering machine, Kate picked it up.
“Grand Central.”
“It’s Sarah.”
“Hey.” She dropped her voice. “Wasn’t that wild this morning?”
“Incredible. I salute your courage.”
“Anna, that number three is backward. Can you fix it, please? I don’t know if it was courage or idiocy.”
“Have you told Paul?”
“No.” She paused. “Michael, finish that essay. Come on, two more sentences. No, I haven’t told him yet.”
“Kate!”
“I’ll tell him, I will,” Kate said, rapping twice on a door, “but only when he’s receptive. Tess, you have to finish up in there. Anna’s next for the bath. Bath night,” she explained, drowning out Tess’s complaints. “Crazy as usual.”
“I got my letter.”
“You have to find Colin.”
Sarah started. “Am I that pathetic?”
“What else would she give you? It’s about freaking time.”
Sarah closed her eyes. “You know, in Burundi, my colleagues respect me. The patients gift me with goat’s milk and bottles of banana wine—”
“He’s holding you back, Sarah-belle. Michael, you can say the book was ‘cool,’ but now you have to give an example. How do you explain a book being ‘cool’? Better to say the book was scary, or funny, or exciting, or boring. Easier to give examples. How long has it been? Fifteen years?”
“Fourteen.” Three months. Six days.
“Anna, find one more thing that begins with ‘f’ and you’ll be done, I promise. Paul, can you help her with this?” Kate puffed out some air, as if she was lifting something. “Unbelievable. She’s in kindergarten, and she’s coming up on an hour and a half of homework. So—did you Google him yet?”
“In my mind? About sixty times.”
“Hold on. Paul, I’ve got more magazines in the rack in the living room. Use the kid ones—Cricket or Spider. No, Tess, I don’t know where your hair dryer is. I took the kids out to dinner tonight. Crazy Jay’s. They thought it was a birthday, it’s been so long. Now I’m paying, though, because homework got started late.”
Sarah hesitated. She didn’t have a right to ask. Kate always had such a full load. Once, not long after Kate’s second child was born and Kate decided to give up her job as a financial analyst, Jo had snidely asked Kate what she did all day. By the time Kate finished listing the errands, Sarah was dreaming of the slow Paraguay afternoons spent grinding corn or rolling tortillas.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m distracted. Can I help you with something?”
“Come over. I need a witness.”
She hadn’t meant to ask. She knew she shouldn’t. She wasn’t completely blind. She knew that whenever she returned to the States she wasn’t quite in sync with the rest of this world, and that Jo, Kate, and Rachel always made special efforts on her behalf to stave off embarrassment or—in one particular case—arrest. To ask such a thing of Kate was to take advantage of her good heart.
But she needed a friend.
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment and wished she were home in Vermont, in that huge farmhouse with her parents and her ten sisters and brothers and her twelve nieces and nephews, and her father the minister helping her pray on this, as he fired up the parish computer.
“Me?” Kate said. “You want me to come over?”
“I could use a buddy razzing me over my fixation on an ancient fantasy in order to get this done.”
“Sarah, I… can’t. It’s bath night. And Michael has to work on his log cabin tonight or we’ll never get it done by… I still haven’t waded through the papers from their backpacks, and there’s lunches to be made, and right now I’m putting in the first of three loads of laundry. Paul’s helping with Anna, but he’s—”
“I shouldn’t have asked.” Great. Now her buddies could add “pitiful whiner” to their opinion of her, along with “clueless” and “helpless.” “I called Jo, but she had company.”
“Into the city, too. At this hour. Parking’s a nightmare.”
“Really, Kate.” She shifted her legs out from under her, set them firmly on the floor. “It’s okay. It’s not skydiving. I have to stop being a coward and just do this myself.”
“So many damn papers… and tomorrow night’s the PTA meeting, I haven’t written up the agenda. Michael, I’ll be right up, hold on. Yes. Hold on. Tess, I told you, look in the linen closet!”
“Kate, I’ll let you go.”
“No.”
It must be a full moon. Everyone was acting weird.
“Don’t hang up. Just… just give me a minute.”
Sarah heard her walking. Heard her thinking. While chaos and noise reigned in the background.
“Yes.” Kate took a deep breath, as if she were rising out of a vortex. “Yes, Sarah. I’ll come. I’ll be there within the hour.”
Indeed, within the hour Kate barged into the apartment wielding a bottle of wine. She was still sporting the T-shirt and yoga pants she’d worn under her skydiving jumpsuit that morning. Sarah rifled through the kitchen drawers and pulled out one of the six wine openers. As Kate pulled out the cork and poured two glasses, she eyeballed the garage-sale furniture, the Zulu mask on the wall, and the pressed-tin ceiling. “Some place you got here.”
“It’s a free bed. Tim’s not home often. And he’s always offering this place up to friends.”
“Look. I’m making footprints. So this is what a dirty house looks like.” Kate glanced at the computer, which was still on, though the connection was broken. “Geez, what’s that, a reject from the 1960s?”
“Unfortunately, it works. I had a good connection when I called you, but it’s dial-up, and I don’t want to stick Tim with a big bill. I figured I’d try again, once you were here to do chest compressions if I pass out.”
Sarah typed in the number and waited for it to dial. This time, she got through right away. “Sit down. It takes at least one glass of wine to load the home page.”
Kate found the comfortable spot on the couch immediately. Sarah sat at the other end. She took a sip of the wine; it was probably a fine vintage, though she wasn’t much of a drinker. Minister’s daughter and all.
“All right, Miss Sarah. This is going to hurt. Are you ready?”
“I’ve heard doctors say that, right before they take out the bone saw.”
“What do you want to find out? I mean, what would be the best thing you could discover?”
Sarah swirled her drink. One day, Colin had been playing soccer with the kids of the village. A line of sweat darkened his shirt right down the center of his back. He hadn’t shaved in about a week. For a moment, he’d glanced at her, over his shoulder. Grinning.
White teeth, wild hair.
“I’m hoping,” she said, “that he still has six-pack abs.”
“Don’t get snarky.”
“All right, all right.” The truth, then. “I’d want him to be happy.”
“The Internet isn’t going to tell you that.”
“Maybe it would. I do know the man.” Every square inch of him. From the V-shaped scar on his neck, just below his ear, to the long feet with their funny toes. To the fierceness of his intellect, and the fullness of his heart. “If I were to find out that he’s still involved in some kind of relief work,” she said, “I’d know he was happy.”
“What if he’s married?”
The word had the force of a grenade. Sarah jerked forward and clattered her wineglass on the coffee table. That was it, wasn’t it? That was the root of it all. He was thirty-nine years old. She couldn’t imagine how a man like the one she’d known in Paraguay could remain single, childless, through fourteen years. Their time together was a sacred thing in her memory, and it overshadowed every relationship she attempted. But maybe—just maybe—Colin had never felt as fiercely, and loved as thoroughly, as she had.
After all, he never came back.
“If he’s married,” Sarah said, the word rolling thick in her mouth, “then his wife is the luckiest witch in the world.”
“And your task is over. Right here, right now, in this room.”
A lot more than that will be over. She rubbed her brow so Kate couldn’t read her face. Kate didn’t live her life; Kate wouldn’t understand. And Sarah wouldn’t burden Kate with the latest story of what had happened at the camp in Burundi, only a few weeks ago. Sarah had witnessed man’s inhumanity before—humanitarian aid siphoned off to warlords at ports, medical supplies lifted by eight-year-olds to fuel their addictions, budget constraints in the midst of a measles epidemic—but never anything like that poor little girl found in one of the camp’s muddy alleys.
She was such a tiny little thing. She had two crooked braids, secured by wooden beads. And a rape fistula Dr. Mwami wasn’t sure he could repair.
Sarah squeezed her brow and poured darkness over the memory. She forced herself to exhale the breath she’d been holding. Then she took that ugly memory and shoved it deep down into that place that held all the others, where it could fester.
This was why she needed the memory of Colin, she told herself. She needed to know that goodness and honesty and dedication still lived in the world. She was afraid of what would happen to her sense of balance if she discovered that Colin had left the business of international relief, that he’d settled into an easy life as a gout-footed general practitioner with a cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan.
“Okay, Sarah, now let’s get to the hard part.”
“Childbirth?” she asked, shaking the gloom away. “Twisting a Guinea worm out of an infected leg?”
“What if he’s single?”
The idea flowed through her, dissolving the last shreds of darkness like a river of light. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider Colin’s availability. Because to consider it meant there was a possibility for more, and no reasonable girl would ask for more than heaven could give.
Kate swirled her wineglass toward the desk. “Look. The computer is booted. Get up and type his name.”
“But—”
“He was the greatest lover you ever had. Oh, please, don’t blush. You admitted that to us that night we conned you into doing a second shot of vodka. You even told us about that toe thing he did—”
“Is there nothing sacred?”
“Hey, didn’t you catch me and Paul on the washing machine that night in—”
“So,” Kate said, her grin growing sly, “have you thought about what it would be like to be with him again?”
Sarah filled her mouth with wine. Potent and dry. She thought about his body, wiry, long, strong.
“Even just once,” Kate said. “Just one more time. Even if nothing else happened.” Kate leaned forward. “Because isn’t that what Rachel wanted for you, Sarah? To either move ahead… or, at least, leave him behind.”
Sarah put down her empty wineglass. The monitor blinked at her. The home page had downloaded. Her gaze fell upon Rachel’s envelope. With a burst of courage, she slipped into the computer chair and typed “Google.”
Kate loomed behind her. “You know, when I got my letter, I couldn’t believe what Rachel had me doing.”
“When you meet her in the afterlife,” Sarah muttered, “push her off a cloud.”
“I mean, I’ve got three kids at home. Huge responsibilities. I don’t have the right, anymore, to risk my life. My life isn’t mine.”
For heaven’s sake, this computer was slow. It was still loading the very simple, very plain page.
“I’m a slave to dust bunnies. And overenthusiastic twenty-something kindergarten teachers who think they have a right to screw my weekends with ‘family projects.’ ”
The box for the search engine finally appeared. Sarah went cold. Cold that had nothing to do with the October breeze coming through the open window.
“But Rachel was right.” Kate slid her glass on the desk, scraping an inch of fuzz. “It wasn’t much of a risk at all. It was a well-managed risk. And in those few minutes and the hours since I plunged from eight thousand feet, I’ve felt more alive, more intense, and more clear-eyed than ever before. I’m not living the life I should, Sarah. Things will change.”
Type it in. Dr. Colin O’Rourke. No. Colin Quinn O’Rourke.
“Things will change for you, too.” Kate put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Warm. Firm. Confident. She spoke into her ear. “Go ahead, Sarah. Jump.”
His name blinked at her from the little box. Dr. Colin Quinn O’Rourke.
Love of my life.
She tapped the enter button.
Kate wrapped her arms around her. She clutched Kate’s forearm and leaned back against her. Her heart raced. Such a silly thing. She was acting like a child; she couldn’t look at the screen. She knew it would take a while to load. She was tempted to ask Kate to preview it, to tell her the worst.
Kate leaned close. “Gawd, this thing is slow.”
“Tranquilo.” Sarah spoke more to her racing heart than to Kate. “The news will come.”
Then there it was. Colin’s name. Running up and down the screen. Twelve hits altogether.
And seeing his name there, so steady, so real, changed everything: It turned her fear into hunger. She jerked forward in the seat. She seized the mouse. She scrolled down the entries, soaking in the snippets of information, processing them, seeing how they all fit together.
Then she came to the last. Kate gasped. Sarah covered her mouth with her hand.
“Oh my God.”