Faye sat on the easy chair in her hotel room, wrapped in a comforter. She wasn’t cold, so she didn’t need it to keep her warm. It served more as a barrier between her and a world where people did terrible things. If she were a knight, it would have been her coat of armor. If she were a superhero, it would have been her force field. If she were an astronaut, it would have been her space suit.
If she were a toddler, it would have been her security blanket.
Once that thought had burned across her mind, Faye had no choice but to rip the comforter off her body and hurl it across the room. She wanted it to sound a crash as it fell. She wanted it to break something, but all it did was sink gently to the floor. Whenever the image of three dead children, wrapped in blankets and abandoned, crept back into her mind, she wanted to make noise. She wanted to shatter something.
Joe picked the blanket up and folded it at the foot of the bed. “The doctor said you needed some rest. Those pills he gave you are beside the bathroom sink, if you need to take one.”
“I don’t remember that. Why would I want to sleep?”
Ahua had called a doctor when she suffered her little breakdown on the sidewalk, after coming up out of a space that had served as a mausoleum for children. He did this just before he told her that she shouldn’t tell the doctor or anyone else about the children, so she had to make up a reason why she was crying uncontrollably.
Reliving that moment, she remembered that Joe was correct. The doctor had prescribed rest, giving her a few pills to help her sleep.
Joe ordinarily slept like a felled tree, so he couldn’t quite wrap his brain around the concept of insomnia. He figured that if he couldn’t sleep, then he wasn’t tired. And also, he was deeply suspicious of pharmaceuticals, as young and extremely healthy people tend to be. If Joe was suggesting to Faye that she indulge in a little chemical sleep in the middle of the afternoon, then he was worried about her.
“You’re upset about something you saw down there, Faye, something you can’t tell me. But it’s more than that. Did you forget that you were right next to an exploding bomb just a few hours ago? You’ve hardly stopped moving since then. If you got hurt in the explosion, I’m not sure you’d even know it yet. I can see those bruises all over you, even if you want to pretend like they’re not there.”
If anybody but Joe had said this to her, she would have indulged in some cheap-but-emotionally-satisfying sarcasm and said, “Really? Tell me again where the bruises on my aching knees and elbows and face came from? I forgot.” But aiming sarcasm at Joe would have felt like…oh, dear, now she had let the phrase “like slapping a child” cross her mind and she was going to need to start crying again. Maybe one of those pills would be a good idea, after all.
She remembered saying to Ahua “But you say you need me. Why are you sending me off to sleep?” knowing even then that her bruised and tear-stained face answered that question for her.
He had said, “Because I’ve got plenty of investigating to keep me and my people busy, and because you look like you might collapse any minute. You just did collapse, actually. I’m not interested in breaking any archaeologists. Tomorrow, we can talk more about that room we saw.”
“What about Liu?” she had asked. “She didn’t take finding those bodies too well, either. Are you sending her off to cool her heels, too? That’s her family history down there. I think you’ll have to fist-fight her if you don’t loop her into everything you do that relates to the Chinese underground.”
“Too true. I told her to rest because I’m going to need her later. I hope she takes my advice.” His eyes had raked over her face, giving it the kind of once-over that she figured he usually reserved for suspects. “Go take one of those pills the doctor gave you and just let go of all of this. Leave the world for a while. Then come find me in the mobile command station tomorrow morning. Come early, like seven o’clock early, because I like to make the most of my days. If I were you, I’d find a way to sleep and make the most of my night.”
So Faye did. Sort of.
She took half a pill and ordered Joe to wake her up in three hours, just in time to go to Carson’s makeshift welcome dinner for his conference speakers. Carson’s day had been hellish, too. On a day like today, she wanted to support her friends. Just as the pill started making her feel loopy, there was a knock on the door.
She should have let Joe answer it, but she was closer to the door and admitting weakness had never been her strong suit. She jumped to her feet and swayed, hoping the head rush would settle down before she keeled over. It did settle down, a little bit, so she staggered to the door.
If she’d been completely sober, she would have looked through the peephole to see who was knocking on her door unannounced. She wasn’t completely sober, so she flung the door open.
A woman in a crisp maid’s uniform stood there with one hand on a housekeeping cart and the other on the handle of a vacuum cleaner. She was fairly young, probably in her late twenties or early thirties. “I am so sorry to be late vacuuming your room, ma’am. It should have been done before you checked in. The problem this morning…” Her voice trailed off.
“The bomb slowed you down.” Faye spoke slowly, trying not to slur her words. “Of course it did. Don’t worry about cleaning our room. We’re just about to take a nap. Just a li’l nap.”
As the woman turned to go, Faye blurted out, “Do you have any of the little mints? The ones that go on the pillows at bedtime in hotels like this one? They’re delicious. I’d kinda like mine now.”
The young woman reached a hand in her apron pocket and held out two mints. Faye was embarrassed now that she’d asked, but she felt like she should take them, so she did. She said, “Thank you,” then she couldn’t think of anything to add.
Joe’s hand was on her elbow, ready to steer her to bed. Then the maid turned to go and Faye saw her in profile. The woman’s prominent nose and teeth were familiar, and so was her luxuriant hair, swept up onto the top of her head into a bun. Her name tag said that her name was Grace.
“I remember you,” Faye said. “I saw you this morning, running from the bomb.” Grace was the maid who had been working closest to the blast.
Grace said, “Ma’am?”
Her voice was cool, but the expression on her face was not. She looked like someone scalded by the memory of red-hot chunks of metal and incandescent gases reaching out for her body and just barely missing. Her hand strayed to the wooden cross at her throat, and the reflexive search for comfort brought Faye to tears. She was seared by the memory of this young woman running for her life with a mop in her hand.
Here Faye was, drugging herself so that she could take a nap and forget what she’d seen that morning, and there was Grace, working. There was Grace, offering to vacuum Faye’s floor. There was Grace, making ready to scrub her toilet.
Faye didn’t know what to do, so she reached out for Grace’s hand. Holding it tightly, she said, “I’m so glad you’re okay. And I hope you get to go home and rest sometime soon.”
When the door closed between them, Faye lurched toward the bedside table, looking for her purse. It wasn’t there. She lurched to the desk and to the easy chair that sat invitingly in the corner. No purse.
Joe followed her, asking, “What are you doing? What are you looking for?”
Tears were rolling down her face. “My purse. I need my purse. I can’t find it anywhere. Where is it?”
“It’s right here by the bed, where you put it. Why do you need it? You were going to sleep. Faye, you need to sleep.”
“I need to leave a tip for Grace. A really, really big tip.” Now she was full-out weeping.
“I’ll do it. Don’t worry. It’ll be a really, really big tip.”
“And I need to call your dad and the kids. All day, I was going to call them and tell them I was okay.”
“I told them. You can call them tomorrow. Dad understands and the kids don’t need to hear you like this.”
Joe’s hand was back on her aching elbow, steadying her as he pulled back the bedcovers and guided her to a seat. She lay back on the pillow and let Joe ease her bruised legs onto the bed. He pulled the covers up to her chin and she tried not to think of motionless children swaddled in old, dusty blankets. She ignored the echoes in her head of brilliant light and terrible noise.
Then the drug took her away. Darkness dropped over her like a blanket and she was glad.