The Distance Between Us (7 page)

Why hadn’t she ever told Marcus about her girlhood skill with guns? He would have loved that, would have made up markswoman jokes, teased her about being a crack shot.

She pulls her heavy vacuum from a hall closet and pilots it through the living room, pausing to take particular care in the corners. She vacuums the seat and arms of the couch, and then lugs it aside to clean beneath. She runs the vacuum over the carpet again and again, as though she were a penitent performing an ablution. Midstride, she stops, marooning the machine in the middle of the floor.

The phone rings when she is sitting on the carpet, leaning against the couch and trying to block out everything but her rhythmic breathing.

“Caddie?”

Immediately, she puts face to lilting voice. “Sven? My God.”

“I know, I know, it’s nearly four A.M. there. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“Jesus! It’s not
that.
It’s only—what took you so long?”

“I’m sorry.” He is silent for a beat. “I
have
tried you at this number. A couple days ago.”

“I just got back from Nicosia. Where are
you
calling from?”

“London.”

“Well, get on a plane and get back here.”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m thinking about staying.”

“Staying?”

“Taking a job with one of the rags. Easy pics, royalty at horse jumps, all that. And no travel for a while.”

“A paparazzi?” Once, she might have privately sneered.

“Fluff, yes.” His voice thins. “But calm.”

“That’s something,” she says.

He coughs. “So you’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, fine.” That damn word again. She tries not to let it fall heavily.

“When the hospital released you, I took that to mean you were, you know, fine.”

Sven—charming, polite, company-fit-for-the-queen Sven—sounds almost embarrassingly awkward.

“It was—you were—lucky,” he says. “We all—but you, a couple more inches—be careful, Caddie. From now on.”

She knows. It’s simply a matter of odds. She’s used up too many lives. Sven, too. All three of them, in fact. She presses the phone between her ear and shoulder and crosses her arms. “Hey,” she says, “what’s with Rob?”

“Somehow he talked them into sending him directly to Chechnya.”

“Jeez. I had to struggle to get back here.”

“So you’re working again? Already?”

“Yeah. Well, features . . .” She moves toward the window and pushes it open. She smells chicken cooking with rosemary:
some mother preparing dinner before work, probably. Suddenly Caddie is impatient with small talk. “So listen, Sven. That driver—”

“I have no idea.” Sven’s voice turns abrupt.

“No, of course not.” She rubs the back of her neck with one hand. “But you talked to him more than the rest of us.”

“I don’t
know
, Caddie.”

Caddie feels the breeze shift, escaping through her apartment. The remaining air turns heavy. “Of course not,” she repeats.

“I mean,
I
was the one who talked, not him,” Sven says. “He was quiet. That’s what I remember.”

“His skin,” she says. “You remember? So leathery.”

“Not that it matters.”

“No,” Caddie says. “Right-o. I keep thinking, though.”

“Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to let it go.”

“Thinking,” Caddie goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Thinking
we
should go.”

“What do you mean?”

“Back, of course. Find that driver. That goddamned driver.” She hears her voice sharpen. Her words come involuntarily, like an arm raised to counter a blow.

“Caddie.”

“Find
all
those assholes.
Deal
with them.” What a relief. The need to say it aloud has been pressing against her, knotting her stomach. “Let them smell fear,” she says.

“They
do
smell fear,” Sven said. “All the time.”

“More fear, then.”

“Caddie. Yaladi and his men—or his enemies, or whoever it was—anyway, they’re all long gone. The trail’s cold.”

He’s right about that, of course. It goes cold so quickly there. “But—”

“Trying to find them could get us into serious trouble,” he says. “For what?”

“We owe it to Marcus,” she says. “You don’t ignore something like this.” She’s angry that Sven doesn’t understand. But embarrassed, too, that she has shown herself to be so underdeveloped a human as to want to personally slow-torture the ambushers. “We’ve got a responsibility. We—”

“That’s crazy,” Sven interrupts. “Our
responsibility
is to remember—and go on.” He pauses and sighs. “We
will
go back, Caddie,” he says more gently. “Someday.”

So he wants her to wait, then. For someday. “Same road?” she says. It sounds insane to her own ears, even as she says it.

“Together,” he agrees.

“We’ll try to find that driver?”

“Sure,” he says.

She’s being worked, she knows. But from Sven, at this moment, she can permit it.

Into the silence, he adds, “I’ve seen his parents. They’re concerned about us.”

“Hmm.”

“Made me feel better, Caddie, to talk to them. Maybe you should catch a flight to London, come see them, too.”

“Oh.”

“And you know about the website?”

“Yeah.” Mike mentioned it when he came to the hospital.

“Have you taken a look? There’s a shot of Marcus that I took. And lots of stuff people have written.”

She hasn’t gone there. But she doesn’t answer.

“Some really nice tributes.” He trails off. “Well . . .”

The conversation is wearing out; Caddie hears it in his voice. His comments seem disconnected from what she needs to talk about and she can’t think of how to respond to him, but
she doesn’t want it to be over
. After this it may be months, even years, before she talks to him again. He’ll move on, send a bit of cheerful e-mail at New Year’s. This thing between them, this thing they shared, will be gone, evaporated like dew, barely even a memory. And she doesn’t want that.

“Take care of yourself,” he mumbles.

She’d like to beg him not to hang up, to please please keep talking, but she’s suddenly afraid of what might happen if she tries for words spoken aloud.

“Keep pushing forward, Caddie,” he says. “It’s going to get easier. It’s got to.” And then he’s gone.

S
HE WAKES AGAIN AFTER DAYLIGHT
, hit by the now familiar sensation: part of her stomach has broken off and is churning within. Her breath comes fast, her fingers tremble, her tongue is as dry as a dead leaf. Moments repeat themselves: the driver slows, she hears a popping sound, feels the weight. She’s aware of severed branches, a smell like creosote.

Then the effort—never successful—to shut it out, this hard, fundamental knowledge that blankets her like a needy lover when she lies, and churns at the pit of her gut when she rises, and won’t let her go. Marcus is dead. Somebody killed him.

Hush, don’t worry.
Marcus’s voice, softly, in her ear.

The first thing she noticed about Marcus, really noticed—the feature that made her begin to sneak long looks at him—was his voice. What he could do with it. How gentle and warm he sounded as he took people’s pictures. It surprised her; she was suspicious at first of this quality in a war photographer. Then she saw that, along with the bold and the funny and the fearless sides, he really had a tender side. And she wanted that tenderness for herself. Greedily. The way a kid wants candy.

Caddie throws her feet over the edge of the bed, walks to the window and stares blindly at the sky for several minutes. She rubs her own arms. Then she forces herself to focus on the street below. Anya is at the corner, standing motionless as though listening to an inner sound. Crazy street prophet Anya is their own neighborhood victim of Jerusalem Syndrome, that psychosis that attacks dozens each year. Some wrap themselves in white hotel sheets and wander the Judean Desert; others rally to the banks of the River Jordan believing themselves to be John the Baptist, or squat in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher waiting to give bloody birth to the infant Jesus. Unless they become aggressive or suicidal, they are usually ignored by the authorities. As is Anya.

As always, Anya wears an ankle-length dress with wide
sleeves that intermittently slip up to reveal a tattoo of Venus on her right forearm. Her streaming blond hair is so snarled Caddie longs to shear it off. The neighbors say she’s in her midtwenties; sometimes Caddie believes it and other times she can’t imagine Anya is younger than fifty. Where she sleeps, how she gets her food, Caddie has no idea.

Some days Anya seems almost as normal as any stroller. Occasionally, in a rush of off-kilter intimacy, she links arms with Caddie on the street and asks after her in a friendly, concerned matter. But on most days she is full of mutterings about Christ, or Woden, a Bronze Age Norse god she has fixated on. She often stops at an intersection and preaches about visions, her own and others’, the gift she says she’s been given “in compensation.” People never listen to the prophets of their own time; that seems to be her main theme. She sermonizes in such a friendly way that she usually draws a good-natured crowd.

The story is that Anya—perhaps a little high-strung and overly religious, but basically an ordinary newlywed then—was touring Israel with her young husband and her mother. Anya’s husband was driving, her mother in the front by his side, Anya in the back. An eighteen-year-old immigrant from Ethiopia, traveling in the opposite direction on the Acre-Karmiel highway in the Galilee, lost control of his car. It traversed the centerline and rammed head-on into the rental driven by Anya’s husband. In three minutes, three, including the Ethiopian, were dead.

By the time the paramedics arrived, Anya, “miraculously
unscathed,” as an Israeli newspaper would report, had dragged the bodies of her husband and her mother from their car. Both heads rested on her lap. With the fingers of one hand, she combed her mother’s hair. Her face was lit by the flames from the teenager’s burning, overturned car. The horn on the rental car was stuck, and when they finally got it off, instead of silence, they heard her moaning: deep, monotonous, inhuman.

Anya traveled with the bodies to the hospital and remained mute for a week. When she finally spoke, it was to say she would not return to Sweden or cash in on her hefty inheritance. She became, instead, wandering Anya of Jerusalem, Anya of visions, Anya of the street. It was in a way, now that Caddie thinks of it, Anya’s revenge.

Caddie remembers that the day before she and Marcus went to Lebanon, they ran into Anya near the corner. When she saw them, she clamped both hands over her eyes and began to howl, an eerie sound that came from somewhere deep. Then she turned and fled. Caddie and Marcus both shrugged it off. Psychotic episode, probably. A shame. Nothing more.

Now, though, Caddie wonders: Could Anya have had a premonition? Some vision that might hold a clue about who is responsible for what happened to Marcus, and what she, Caddie, should do about it? She starts to struggle into her jeans, tugging at the zipper, rushing so she can get downstairs before Anya moves on.

Then she halts, and plants cool fingers in the hollows of her closed eyelids. What next? She’ll be looking for signs in
the damned stars. What has happened to that practicality she always prided herself on? And to think she used to believe she had ideal traits to be a journalist.

Well, she still has. Some. She’s curious. Has a precise memory for dialogue and faces. A facility for grasping on-the-ground politics. Gifted with foreign languages. And she looks the part, with clipped hair and utilitarian wardrobe.

But she has handicaps now. Sweet Jesus, does she ever have handicaps.

Outside the window, a breeze shakes the trees as if giving them a scolding. She moves to the bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror. She runs a finger along the ashy skin under each eye. Then she sits on the toilet seat to pull on her boots, concentrating on yanking the shoelaces tight.

J
ON IS ALERADY THERE
when Caddie gets to the office. She should have expected him, yet she’d hoped to slip in unseen. She needs some time alone to warm up the seat again. Her office—too grand a term for this hovel—is cramped, grad-student style, with file cabinets, a bookshelf, her PC, a laptop, two phones with separate lines, an extra foldout chair. It’s infinitely worse when a second person is added to the mix. The slightest movement becomes a process of negotiation. Marcus, cameras swinging around his neck, never more than poked his head in:
Let’s go to your place, or mine
.

The only plus is its location, in a building where the AP,
Reuters and a couple other foreign news organizations are based. Since Caddie works on her own, proximity serves as an early warning for breaking stories.

Jon hunches over her desk, so engrossed in the
International Herald Tribune
that he is oblivious to his surroundings. He’s tall, thin and neat in a corduroy jacket, his clean-shaven face as soft-looking as a boy’s. He mouths something to himself. Based in Cairo with useable Arabic, he struggles with Hebrew. He works at it conscientiously whenever he’s in town. He told her once it was insulting if he didn’t at least try to speak the language of the people he was interviewing. She’d laughed and replied that his greatest charm, an overabundance of earnestness, was also a damned embarrassment.

Diligent, plodding even, Jon will be doing this until the day he dies. A perpetual Jerusalem fill-in, industrious, sweetly sincere and burnout-proof. She remembers three days after Yitzhak Rabin was shot, when they’d been working around the clock. He came back from Kapulsky’s with a box of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, and for a few minutes they shared that intense undercurrent of camaraderie that can grow during a break in a big story. Often followed, she’s noticed, by the need to spill something personal. Something to do with life, not death.

Jon, in the foldout chair in front of the laptop, began talking between bites about his first time. Which, as it turned out, had been in a car not five minutes from the prime minister’s office, a little farther down Balfour Street. He’d been sixteen, visiting Israel with his parents, and the girl was fifteen, a rebel
from an Orthodox family. Her collarbone obsessed him; he found it beautiful. It happened on a Thursday right before Yom Kippur. It had been sweet and touching and everything a first time should be, even for a boy. Certainly for a boy like him, he said, shy and awkward still.