From the Beginning (10 page)

Caught up in her thoughts, she stepped into the shower without testing it and was hit with a blast of near-boiling water. It should have burned, especially considering the fact that in Somalia she’d been making due with water heated by the sun.

But instead of burning her, it felt good, the warmth seeping through her skin and into all the hollow spaces deep inside of her. She could feel her resolve melting, feel thoughts of Mabulu and Gabby and Simon all creeping in as the numbness finally began to thaw.

Panicked, she reached over and flipped the lever all the way to cold. Yet even as the frigid water bombarded her, she knew it was too late. She couldn’t refreeze her emotions, couldn’t put everything that had happened in the past two years back into the neat compartment it had once fit into.

Pain washed over her in waves, swamping her, nearly dragging her under, and Amanda started to cry. She turned, shoved her face into the shower spray so she wouldn’t feel the tears rolling down her face—after all, she’d learned in the past eighteen months that if she didn’t feel them, they weren’t real—but it was too little, too late. Sobs decimated her, harsh, painful convulsions that wracked her whole body and ripped into fears and sorrows and memories she would much rather have kept buried.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, crying, under the ice-cold water. Long enough for her teeth to chatter and her body to ache. Long enough for her stomach to burn with regret. More than long enough for exhaustion to swamp her and make her legs tremble beneath her.

Eventually the tears stopped, leaving her with a low-grade headache and eyes that felt as if she’d polished them with sandpaper. After making quick work of washing her hair and body, she wrapped a towel from the shower around her hair and then stepped out onto the bath mat. As she reached for a second towel, she got a full-body glimpse of herself.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Amanda froze in front of the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door and simply stared. In Africa, there wasn’t much privacy and no full-length mirrors, so she hadn’t had a chance to look at herself, really look at herself, in months. Now that she did, she realized why Jack, and even Simon, had been so concerned.

She looked
exactly
how she felt. Like hell. As if everything important to her in the world, everything that made her who she was, had been yanked out of her and all that was left was this sick, empty shell.

She closed her eyes, wanting to turn away. Wanting to hide from this newest realization as she had done all the others. But this time, the doctor in her wouldn’t accept her cowardice. Her medical training forced her to stand there and catalog all the damage she’d done to herself since Gabby had died.

There was a lot of it.

Not sure what else to do, she finally decided to start at the top and work her way down. It was as good a method as any other, she figured.

Her hair was dull, lifeless, its usual glossy sheen almost completely gone, its curls limp. She ran a hand through it and realized it was thinner than it usually was. Vaguely she remembered it falling out in clumps for a few months right after she got to Africa. At the time she hadn’t paid any attention, but now…now it seemed that she should have.

Her face didn’t look any better, the skin sallow despite the tan that came from months of working under the African sun. The circles under her eyes were so dark that she looked as if she’d been punched, and there were deep grooves around her mouth that hadn’t been there two years before.

She dropped her gaze, continued to carefully consider the damage she’d done to herself. She’d always been on the thin side—often too busy working to eat—but now she looked downright emaciated. Her collarbone stuck out in stark relief and each of her ribs showed prominently beneath her skin. Even her elbows, knees, the knobs on her wrists were starkly outlined—as if every ounce of fat and muscle had somehow vanished and the skin now lay directly on top of her skeleton.

And even her skin was in bad shape. Dry, lackluster, it was cracked in numerous places.

She was a mess. An utter, absolute, unmitigated disaster. And she had no one to blame but herself.

Not enough nutrition. Not enough care. For too long, she had been so wrapped up in her inner torment that she had neglected her physical body. Now she was paying the price.

She remembered thinking, more than once, that her clothes had somehow gotten bigger. She wore baggy scrubs so much of the time that it was easy to forget the way her jeans had once fit. But this almost skeletal image staring back at her wasn’t her imagination. It was real and unhealthy, and if she didn’t do something about it, very soon she would be in real trouble. Shocked and more than a little appalled, she ran her hands over her too-narrow hips. Even at her skinniest, she’d always had a little bit of padding there, a little bit of roundness. All that was gone now. She could actually trace the bones of her pelvis through the fragile skin.

Forcing herself to look away from the macabre image, she reached for a towel. Dried herself quickly without looking in the mirror again and then went into the bedroom. She opened her suitcase, pulled out a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and tried to ignore how big they felt when she pulled them on.

The last thing she was interested in was food, but she crossed to the phone, ordered an omelet with toast, fruit salad and a large glass of milk. It might take her most of the night to finish everything, but she was determined to do it.

She might have longed to die in Gabby’s place, longed to die after her daughter had been taken from her. But she hadn’t. Which meant that unless she planned to actually neglect herself to death, she had to start taking better care of herself.

And since she’d never been able to stand the idea of failure, starving to death was not really an option, no matter what she’d told Jack last night in her tent.

With at least half an hour to kill before her food arrived, Amanda pulled out her laptop and logged on to the internet. The first thing she did was check her bank balance. Thanks to her job, the small inheritance from her parents, the money from the sale of her house and Simon’s child-support payments through the years—which she had socked away in a college fund Gabby would now never need—it was very healthy. Certainly healthy enough for her to do whatever she wanted for the next couple of years without having to worry about how she was going to support herself.

The only problem, then, was that she had no idea
what
she wanted to do. No place that she wanted to be besides back in the trenches, which she knew was out of the question.

So what
was
she going to do? Was she going to stay here, in Atlanta? There was nothing for her here but Simon, and now that they no longer shared a child, they had no bond. Yes, she had loved him desperately once, but that love was long gone. And even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter. After what he’d done, there was no way she would risk letting him get close to her again.

At the same time, there was nothing for her anywhere else. She’d grown up in Boston and loved it, but she wasn’t sure she could ever live there again. She and Gabby had spent a lot of time traveling the world together with For the Children, but once Gabby was diagnosed with cancer, they’d settled in Boston. If she went back there now, her little girl would be in every park Amanda walked by, in every corner ice-cream parlor and art store.

No, Boston was out of the question. And though she had no idea if Atlanta was where she wanted to be in the long term, for now it was as good a place as any, she supposed. Besides, she was here, and she didn’t have the energy to go anywhere else.

So what exactly was she going to do here? she wondered as she hit on a visitor site for Atlanta. Maybe it was time for her to figure out not just what she should do, but what she
wanted
to do.

If there was such a thing.

And if there wasn’t, well, she needed to know that, too. Because with all the uncertainties in her world, there was only one thing she was absolutely sure of. If she kept going on the path she was on, she would die. She would simply dry up and float away, until there was nothing left of her.

And much as a part of her might wish for that very thing, for the cessation of pain that came with death, she couldn’t just give in to it.

Her whole life, she’d been an overachiever. When Gabby got sick, Amanda had hunkered down for the fight of her life, a fight she swore that she wouldn’t lose. Only, she had, and nothing had made sense since. Her whole world had gone spinning wildly off the rails. If she gave in to the misery inside of her, it would be just one more thing in her life that she’d failed at. And that wasn’t an option.

So she would spend the night learning about Atlanta, looking for she didn’t know what. At any rate, it was better than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling as she pretended to sleep.

Anything was.

SIMON SPENT AN ANXIOUS NIGHT worrying about Amanda. Was she okay? Was she sleeping or was she pacing the carpet at the Loews much as he was doing here? Was she even still at the hotel?

More than once, he tried to sleep, but ended up tossing the covers back and climbing out of bed in frustration. Finally, around 3:00 a.m., he gave up. Acknowledged that there would be no sleep for him that night, no matter how jet-lagged he felt.

He spent the time working instead. During the three weeks he’d spent in Asia last month, he hadn’t gotten all the info he wanted on the lives of orphaned and badly injured children in war-torn Afghanistan, but he had enough to make a hell of a story. While he’d been on-site, one of the orphanages had been firebombed. He’d been there when it happened and the coverage he and his team had gotten—the individual horror stories he’d been able to tell—was more powerful than he could have imagined.

Which was a good thing, since he had no intention of leaving Atlanta anytime soon, story or no story. Amanda deserved better, and though he was years too late, he was determined not to leave her while she needed him. Not now. Not this time.

The minutes crept by, until he finally deemed it late enough to call Amanda. It was seven-forty, and though he was afraid of waking her when she so desperately needed to sleep, the need to check on her was more overwhelming.

But when the desk clerk put him through to her room, there was no answer. Maybe she was still sleeping, he told himself despite the uneasy feeling in his gut. Or in the shower. Or maybe she’d gotten hungry and gone downstairs for something to eat.

His thoughts were meant to convince him that there was nothing to worry about, but they didn’t exactly do the job. Instead, by the time eight o’clock had rolled around and he’d called her room twice more to no avail, he was totally stressed-out.

Screw it, he decided. Even if she hadn’t checked out of the hotel, that didn’t mean she wasn’t in trouble. With visions of Amanda lying injured on the bathroom floor, he slammed out of his apartment, barely remembering to yank on a pair of jeans before he went charging down to the parking garage and the car he rarely used but refused to give up.

By the time he got to the hotel, the nervousness had ratchetted up a few notches to alarm, despite the reassurances he kept giving himself. Amanda was fine. She was still asleep. She was ignoring him because she was angry with him. Believing that was a lot better than believing she’d done something stupid because she couldn’t face life without Gabby.

He called her room from the hotel lobby and still got no answer. He checked out the restaurants and coffee bar, all to no avail. There was nothing to say that she hadn’t left the hotel for breakfast at one of the nearby restaurants, but he doubted it. Still, it was worth a shot, so he settled on a bench near the elevators. He couldn’t miss her if she came back.

At the same time, he continued to call her hotel room at ten-minute intervals, his concern growing. Part of him felt completely stupid for being this upset—Amanda was the most competent woman he’d ever met. She was fine, just angry at him for everything that had happened between them.