The Lies We Told (10 page)

Vanessa stopped screaming, staring at me wide-eyed.

“Susan, you pull on her hand.”

Susan gave me a look that said
you’ve got to be kidding me,
but she grasped the little girl’s hand and I quickly slipped the bones back into position. Vanessa let out a scream that made my ears ring.

“Done,” I said, standing up straight.

Vanessa screwed up her face in anger and kicked my thigh, and we all laughed.

“I deserved that,” I said. I felt nearly euphoric, full of relief and a sense of accomplishment. I had no way of knowing this would be the easiest thing I’d be called on to do for many days to come.

T
HERE WAS ONLY A GENERATOR-POWERED LAMP BURNING IN
the conference room, and the soft light was a relief after a long, long day in the medical tents. Rebecca found a stretch of empty floor near the windows and lay down, bunching her jacket beneath her head as a pillow. She stretched out, unkinking her aching muscles one by one. The carpet felt like concrete beneath her bones.

She’d lost track of Adam and Maya sometime during the last thirty-six hours, but Dorothea’d told her that Maya was holding up “just fine.”

She wondered if Maya had heard the rumors of mounting violence in the terminal. The rumors were flying so rapidly from person to person now that Rebecca figured there must be some truth to them. In the basement, the addicts who’d managed to escape their homes with their stashes of drugs were beginning to run out, and it was getting ugly down there. A teenage girl supposedly had been raped and beaten. A man—again in the basement—supposedly had his throat slit ear to ear.
They were seeing plenty of folks with withdrawal symptoms in the tents, that was for sure, and now a few DMAT workers kept an eye on the dwindling pharmaceuticals, more precious than gold, in one of the car rental offices. With every whisper of, “Did you hear…?” or “Be careful in the stairwell!” Rebecca thought of Maya. She didn’t want her sister to feel afraid. She truly didn’t. They needed her, and if she was actually holding up well, as Dorothea said, that could only be a good thing.

Her jacket made a terrible pillow. She adjusted it so that the pocket containing the radio was not right under her cheek. She was about to close her eyes, when she spotted Adam and Maya beneath the long, boat-shaped conference table. The dim light made it difficult to see them, but she could tell that Adam was propped against one of the broad wooden legs, and Maya lay with her head on his lap. Rebecca suddenly remembered their wedding day. She hadn’t known Adam well then; she’d been out of the country while their relationship was moving full speed ahead. She remembered taking him aside to tell him, “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.” He’d laughed, having no idea how serious she was, and she’d had no idea then how little she had to worry about. She couldn’t know then what joy he would bring to them both. They’d been two sisters grappling with a painful past, each in her own way. They hadn’t known how much they needed Adam’s light heart until he walked into their lives and filled them up.

She watched them now, and she couldn’t help but be touched as Adam bent low to kiss Maya’s forehead.

God,
Rebecca thought,
let them have a child. Please.

She felt that phantom baby in her arms again, the same baby she’d imagined holding in Brent’s hotel room. A sudden thought came to her, bizarre and out of nowhere: Maybe she could be their surrogate. Maya couldn’t seem to carry a baby
to term, so what if Rebecca could do it for her? For both of them? She rested her hand on her flat stomach. What would it be like, to feel a baby growing inside her?

What the hell are you thinking?

She’d never wanted to be pregnant. Pregnancy would get in the way of her work. Her life.

“You’ll be missing something.”
How many of her annoying friends with children had said those words to her, like a hushed, sacred warning, when she told them she never planned to have kids? She’d always scoffed at the sentiment.

The baby in her arms. The sensation was creeping her out.

She looked over at her sister again. She and Adam seemed to be talking. Maya moved a hand through the air, slowly, as though illustrating a point. Adam caught her hand. Held it to his lips.

Rebecca closed her eyes and something coiled inside her chest like a snake. It wasn’t until she felt the hard, flat carpet beneath her hand instead of the flesh of another human being that she recognized the feeling: envy. She didn’t care if they needed Maya here. She wanted her to go home.

I
T ALL HAPPENED SO FAST
.

Two volunteers carried a boy, a tiny dark-skinned little guy who couldn’t have been more than five, into my canvas-walled safe haven. The men shouted at me to move the teenage girl I was treating for a cut on her forehead. I grabbed the girl and pulled her out of the way just as the men dumped the unconscious boy onto the cot.

Susan took the shocked girl by the hand. “Come with me,” she said, quickly guiding her out of the cubicle, and I leaned over the little boy to make sure he was breathing. His eyelashes were so long, they lay like dragonfly wings against his cheeks.

“What’s wrong with him?” I pulled off my gloves and reached for a fresh pair from the flimsy table next to my chair.

“Shot,” one of the men said. “Bullet went clean through him.”

I stopped the glove halfway onto my hand. I saw that the front of the boy’s black T-shirt was wet with blood. In all my years as a physician, I’d never treated a gunshot wound, not even during my miserable rotation in the E.R., and that had taken
some tricky, guilt-inducing maneuvering on my part. I was stuck now, though.

I quickly slipped the gloves on my hands. “Help me get his shirt off,” I said to one of the men, and I reached for the hem of the small T-shirt, bracing myself for what I would see on the body of that skinny little child. We gently eased the shirt over the boy’s arms and head, and with one glance at his chest, I felt certain he was going to die.

Ten minutes later, I’d hooked the boy up to an IV and was racing next to the bobbing litter as a couple of volunteers—high school kids—carried him through the terminal. I was winded and sweating by the time we ran outside and onto the tarmac, where the helicopter stood silhouetted against the dusky sky. Two other litters were already inside, along with Janette, the nurse who’d flown with me to the terminal a couple of days earlier.
A couple of days?
I felt as though I’d been there at least a week. I helped Janette and the teenagers load the little boy’s litter into the cabin, then I leaned inside to speak to Janette.

“He was shot through the chest,” I shouted as the rotor blades began to turn. “The bullet exited between the eighth and ninth rib.”

Janette looked confused. “You’re coming, too!” she said.

“No!” I shouted back. “I’m staying here.”

“Dot said you’re coming with me. I can’t manage three critical patients alone!”

I shook my head. “She didn’t say anything to me about—”

“Get in!” The voice came from the tarmac behind me, and I turned to see Dorothea running toward me, gray braid flapping against her shoulder. She was carrying a backpack that looked a lot like mine. “Go on!” she said, pressing the pack
into my arms. “I put some extra supplies in here for you. The pilot’ll bring you right back.”

This was all happening too fast. I glanced behind her toward the terminal, longing to go back inside with Adam and Rebecca.

“I can’t go,” I said. “I—”

“Grow up, Princess!” she snapped. “Get in!”

There was no arguing with her, especially not with that little boy in desperate straits inside the chopper. Janette was right; she couldn’t manage three patients alone. Before I could think about what I was doing, I scrambled into the helicopter. I caught a glimpse of the pilot, a woman who looked no older than the high school kids who’d carried the boy’s litter.

“Everyone in?” she shouted to me.

Someone shut the cabin door, giving her the answer.

There were no seats, and the litters had been tossed haphazardly on the floor leaving barely enough room for Janette and me to sit between them.

Within seconds, we were in the air. The litters slid against my legs as we ascended at an angle into the darkening sky. Janette and I clung to whatever protrusion we could find on the walls. For me that was a metal ring close to the floor. I felt stunned to suddenly find myself high above the terminal. I thought I might throw up, my body rebelling against the chaos of the past few minutes.

“This one’s seizing!” Janette let go of the post she’d been clutching and knelt next to one of the patients, a shirtless young man who jerked so violently he popped one of the straps on his litter. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and scooted over to help her.

“How long is the flight?” I shouted to the pilot. I wasn’t even sure what hospital we were aiming for.

“Forty-five!” she shouted back.

I looked at the three patients—the guy with seizures, an elderly woman who was groaning in her sleep, her hands clutched tight across her chest, and the tiny gunshot victim. Would any of them survive another forty-five minutes? At least this flight gave them a chance. The terminal could offer them nothing.

The little boy moaned and I turned to look down at him, glad I’d given him a little morphine in his IV in case he regained consciousness. I leaned low, my lips against his ear so he might be able to hear me. “You’re safe,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”

Once the man’s seizure had run its course, I hung on to the metal ring again and looked out the window. We flew over floodwaters and dark swamps. Soon, treetops spread out in all directions below us, a black carpet in the fading light. The drone of the rotors was deafening but steady, so that when it suddenly shifted to a chunking, grinding sound, it startled me. I glanced at Janette, recalling what she’d said on our earlier flight together about hating to fly. Her eyes met mine, and I saw her mouth the words,
What’s going on?
I thought of the variety of perfectly normal sounds you’d hear on a plane, how they’d change depending on whether you were ascending or descending. Could we already be starting our descent?

The pilot suddenly shouted to us, but I couldn’t make out what she said. Janette, closer to the cockpit, understood though, and she turned to me with a wild look in her eyes.

“She said to brace for a crash!” she shouted.

“What?” My heart rocketed in my chest.

“Brace!” Janette shouted again, as she grabbed the post on the cabin wall.

I tightened my grip on the metal ring as the helicopter suddenly bucked, then rolled to one side. Losing my grasp, I slid across the floor, the litters pinning me to the wall. I ran
my hands over the wall, searching in vain for something to hang on to. Drawing up my legs, I wrapped my arms around them, and saw the dark carpet of trees zooming toward us. I buried my head against my knees as we broke through the treetops, finally letting go of the scream I’d been holding inside.

R
EBECCA WAS STITCHING THE PAPER-THIN SKIN OF AN ELDERLY
man’s forearm when she spotted Dorothea striding toward her in the tent.

“Come see me when you’re through with this patient,” Dorothea said.

Rebecca glanced at the string of patients sitting and standing along the wall of the tent. It was nearly midnight and she was far behind. “Can it wait?” she asked from behind her mask as she knotted the final stitch.

“No.” Dorothea was already walking away. “I’m in my office.”

Rebecca looked at the man whose arm she was stitching. “She’d better have a good reason, huh?” she asked him as she snipped the thread.

He looked over at the line of patients. “A damn good one,” he agreed.

She found Dorothea talking on the sat phone in the office behind the ticket counter, which she’d claimed for DIDA use in the last couple of days.

“Gotta go,” Dorothea said, hanging up and sliding the antenna back into the phone. She motioned toward one of the three chairs in the room, although she herself stood leaning against the desk. “Sit,” she said.

“What’s up?” Rebecca stayed on her feet. If she sat down, she was afraid she’d fall asleep.

“The chopper Maya was on had some sort of problem,” Dorothea said. “The pilot sent a Mayday message and said she needed to make an emergency landing.”

Rebecca frowned, searching for a different meaning behind the words than the one Dorothea was implying. “Where are they?” she asked. “Can another chopper get to them?” She looked up to see Adam in the doorway.

“Come in, Adam,” Dorothea said.

Adam glanced at Rebecca as he walked into the room. “What’s going on?”

“Maya’s helicopter had to make an emergency landing,” Rebecca said.

“No.”
He looked from her to Dorothea. “Where?”

“They don’t know where,” Dorothea said. “The chopper has an ELT on it—you know, like a GPS system? But they haven’t been able to pick up a location for it.”

Rebecca leaned forward. “You mean, they get a signal from the ELT but can’t pin down the—”

“No,” Dorothea interrupted her. “They’re not
getting
a signal. It’s not functioning.”

“What would cause it to malfunction?” Adam ran his hand over the stubble on his cheeks, and Rebecca noticed that his fingers were shaking. He looked as exhausted as she felt.

“I have no idea,” Dorothea said. “You know, maybe it was the sort of mechanical problem that causes—” she shrugged her shoulders “—a massive shutdown of everything. I just don’t know.”

Rebecca remembered their helicopter flight to the terminal. Water everywhere below them. Where would the pilot find a dry spot to land? If they were farther inland, though, they’d be okay.

“How long were they into the flight before he called in the emergency?” she asked.

“It’s a she,” Dorothea said, “and I don’t know that either.” She sighed, and for the first time since her arrival at the airport, Rebecca saw a weariness in her mentor’s eyes. “Lots of questions and no answers right now,” Dorothea added.

“Are they searching for the chopper?” Adam asked.

“It’s too dark,” Dorothea said. “They’ll start flying over the route it was on first thing in the morning.”

“They should be looking
now,
” Rebecca said.

“Too dark,” Dorothea repeated.

“Maya will be so afraid,” Rebecca said to Adam.

“I just hope she’s
alive
enough to be afraid,” Adam said.

“Oh, don’t say that, Adam!” She remembered envying Maya the night before. Wanting her to go home. The memory turned her stomach.

“Let’s not get dramatic about this,” Dorothea said. “She and everyone aboard are probably fine—or in the case of the critical patients, as fine as they can be. Most likely, the pilot found a safe place to put down and for whatever reason, the ELT just isn’t functioning. And of course, the cell towers are still down, so they have no phones.”

“Maybe they’re all trying to walk out,” Rebecca said.

“No, they’d stay with the patients,” Adam said. “Maya wouldn’t leave them.”

“You’re right.” Rebecca could picture Maya making that decision to stay. That was Maya’s strength: caring for her patients. She decided right then that she would hold tight to
that strong, safe image of her sister. But even as she tried to keep the thought in her mind, it faded away. Maya would be afraid. She’d be immobilized by fear.

There was no way she could sleep, so Rebecca went for a long run around the exterior of the airport, through the parking lots, across the tarmac and back to the parking lots again. Then she worked through the rest of the night. She splinted legs, stitched cuts, medicated children suffering from the nausea and diarrhea running rampant through the terminal, and calmed worried parents, all the while a mantra playing in her head.
She’s okay, she’s okay, she’s okay
. At the other end of the tent, she watched Adam going through the same motions. They were the only doctors up all night. The only two people in the entire terminal, she thought, who had no desire at all for sleep.

As soon as the sky began to lighten in the morning, she and Adam hurried out to the tarmac to talk to the pilots who’d be searching for Maya’s helicopter.

“I’m going with you,” Rebecca said to one of them. She was already climbing into the cabin when he grabbed her arm.

“Better if you stay here, Doc,” he said. “We’ll need the room to pick up evacuees along the route, and we’ll be calling Ms. Ludlow with regular updates.”

“I am
going,
” Rebecca insisted, but this time Adam took her arm and drew her away from the cabin.

“Let them do their job.” His face was pale beneath the dark stubble. “And we’ll do ours here. It’s not going to make a difference if you’re in one of the choppers or not.”

She thought of fighting them, but knew they were right. Besides, what if she was in one chopper and Maya was picked up by another and brought back to the airport? Rebecca wanted to be there the moment Maya stepped onto the tarmac.

As the morning wore on, though, with the calls to Dorothea from the pilots few and far between, she began to regret her decision. She tried to concentrate on her patients, constantly checking her two-way radio to make sure it was turned on.

By noon, there had been no sighting of the downed helicopter. Everyone’s best guess was that it had flown off course to find a clear spot to land.

“I’m going out on the next chopper,” Adam told her when Dorothea radioed them with the news—or lack of it. They were in the concourse, standing together in a sort of invisible bubble that blocked out the chaos surrounding them.

“I’m going, too,” she said. “I should have gone earlier.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Adam said. “And you should stay here in case she shows up. Get some sleep. There’s another DMAT team arriving from Texas this afternoon, so Dorothea said for us to do what we need to do. That’s go on the chopper for me and sleep for you.”

“I can’t possibly sleep, Adam.”

“You need to, Bec,” he said. “You’re wiped out. When I get back, it’ll be my turn, okay?”

Rebecca stared hard at his worried face. “When you get back, I want Maya to be with you.”

He looked through the terminal windows toward the tarmac, shoving his hands into his pockets. His shoulders sagged. “This is my fault,” he said. “She came here to please me.”

“She was handling it so well,” Rebecca said.

“I know.” He shut his eyes. “She was great.”

Rebecca slapped his arm. “She
is
great!” she said. “Don’t talk about her in the past tense.”

He gave her a tired smile, then drew her into a hug. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. She felt his bristly cheek brush her temple. “Go to sleep, okay?”

She didn’t sleep. Didn’t even bother trying. She treated patient after patient in the urgent-care tent, taking a break every once in a while to run to Dorothea’s office to see if she’d heard anything.

“I’ll let you know the moment I do,” Dorothea said, looking up from the desk she’d taken over as her own.

“It’s getting too late.” Rebecca looked at her watch. It was after six. Adam had left on the chopper around one. If he disappeared, too, she didn’t know what she’d do. “I need someone to take me up,” she said. “I can’t stand this sitting around.”

“Adam’s chopper refueled in Fayetteville,” Dorothea said. “That much I know. They’re going to keep looking until it’s too dark to see.”

Rebecca swiped both hands through her hair. She was no good at waiting. She never had been.

“Get some sleep, babe,” Dorothea said. “The Texas DMAT team is getting oriented and they’ll be up and running any minute.”

“Like I’m not needed,” Rebecca scoffed. “You’re already missing Adam and Maya.”

“I’d rather have you wide awake tomorrow than screwing up tonight.” Dorothea stood, giving her a shove toward the door. “Up to the conference room,” she said. “Seriously. I don’t want you back in the tent until morning.”

She didn’t go to the conference room. Instead, she carried her cigarettes and a bottle of water out to the tarmac and sat on the edge of an empty baggage cart to smoke. The air was hot and sticky from an earlier rain. A few helicopters were still doing their dance of bringing evacuees in and airlifting the most critical patients out. They had their lights on now as the
sky grew dusky. She squinted into the distance at each incoming chopper, trying to determine if it might be the blue-and-yellow bird that had carried Adam away that afternoon.

Where the hell was he? By the time she had lit her third cigarette, the string of incoming helicopters had nearly stopped for the night. Maybe his chopper had landed someplace inland. But then why hadn’t Adam contacted Dot?

She was about to stub out her cigarette when she saw a light in the distance, the chopper a dark smudge against the evening sky. She knew, before even seeing the color of the helicopter, that it was the one carrying Adam. She jumped to her feet. In her mind, she saw him climbing out of the chopper, holding his hand out to help Maya deplane. She saw it so clearly that by the time the helicopter set down on the tarmac, she was smiling.

“Rebecca!” She turned to see Dorothea walking toward her from the terminal, sat phone in her hand. Even in the dusky light, Rebecca was able to read the grim look on Dorothea’s face, and she lost her smile. She turned back to the helicopter, where Adam jumped from the cabin. He didn’t reach up to help Maya deplane. Instead, he started walking toward her.

“What?”
Rebecca shouted, looking from him to Dorothea and back again.

Adam reached her. He put his hands on her arms. The flesh beneath his eyes looked dark and raw.

“It crashed,” he said.

“
What
crashed?” She shook her head rapidly, as if she could stop the words from coming out of his mouth.

“We saw it, but we couldn’t get to it.”

She tried to hit him, to shut him up, but he caught her hand, surprise in his eyes. Rebecca felt Dorothea put an arm around her waist as if she was afraid she might fall over.

“Oh, God.” Rebecca pressed her hands to her mouth. “What…could you see
anything? Anyone?
What do you mean, you couldn’t get to it?”

“Listen,” he said. He motioned toward the baggage cart. Its metal sides glinted in the light from the chopper. “Let’s sit, okay?”

“No!” She pulled free of Dorothea’s arm. “Tell me!”

“I
will
.” He nearly barked the words, then closed his eyes. “I will,” he said more calmly. “I just need to sit.”

The three of them sat down on the baggage cart, Adam between the two women. Rebecca felt the length of his body against hers, and she couldn’t tell if the tremor coursing through her limbs was coming from him or from herself.

“There wasn’t much light,” he said, “so we couldn’t see well at all.”

“Do you know if—”

“I don’t know.” He interrupted her. “I don’t know if anyone…survived or what. We were nearly out of fuel by the time we saw it. It was in a densely wooded area. A lot of trees and brush. And the chopper was caught in some branches above a river or a stream. It was hard to tell exactly what we were looking at.”

She opened her mouth to ask him the thousand questions running through her mind, but he held up a hand to stop her.

“Let me finish,” he said. “Our pilot called another chopper with a search and rescue team aboard to get out there, since we had to come back for fuel. They were going to find the closest place to the…to the crash site where they could land. There weren’t many possible landing sites close by. Then first thing in the morning, as soon as it’s light, they’ll hike into the—”

“Why not
now?
” Rebecca jumped to her feet. “Don’t they have any fucking
flashlights?
”

“The terrain’s too difficult to negotiate in the dark,” Dorothea said.

“How do
you
know?” Rebecca snapped.

“Because I just spoke to the search and rescue guys.” Dorothea looked at Adam. “They
did
find a place to land, but it’s about a half mile from the crash site.”

“Well, someone take
me
out there tonight, then!” Rebecca said. “I’ll look for her.”

“This chopper—” Adam nodded toward the helicopter he’d just left “—will take us out early in the morning, and we can meet up with the S and R team then.”

“Adam,”
she pleaded. He seemed so dense. “What if she’s…if they’re injured! Time matters! It’s ridiculous to wait. We—”

“You didn’t see it out there, Rebecca.” He glared at her. “No one can search out there at night. Trust me.”

She pulled a cigarette from her pack and lit it, her hands shaking wildly. She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs.

“What did you see, Adam?” Dorothea’s voice was calm. In the growing darkness, it seemed to come from miles away. “Did it look like the sort of crash that…do you think anyone
could
have survived it?”

“I don’t know. The chopper was on its side, and like I said…it looked like it was suspended above a river…or rushing water, anyway, and it was getting dark, so I’m not sure exactly what the situation is.”