The world and all he believed crushed Maxence. “Dree is an excellent medical professional, and her dedication to helping people is without limits. She is a truly good human being.”
Alfonso said, “This mission is not an appropriate place and time to express my feelings, but I have a growing attraction to her. When we are finished with this survey and return to our normal lives, I would like very much to see her, to see if something could work out between us.”
Maxence quietly said, “It’s only been a week. How can you know if you like somebody in a week?”
Alfonso’s green eyes went dreamy. “Sometimes, you just know, or sometimes, someone is so special that a week is enough.”
For Maxence, even four days with her had been enough.
He planned to become a priest, as he had for years. He had worked for long years to earn a doctorate in theology to become a Jesuit, and so he spread his large hands on the table and refrained from either discouraging Alfonso or throwing him up against a wall and demanding he never speak to Dree again.
Maxence had no claim on Dree.
He could never have a claim on Dree.
It didn’t matter that Maxence thought she was beautiful, kind, intelligent, and perhaps the most incredible person he’d ever met.
Maxence was going to become a priest for so very many reasons, and that meant Dree would date and marry some other man and not him.
He said, “Alfonso, she’s an absolutely wonderful woman. You would be lucky to have her.”
Chapter Eight
One High-Tech Preemie Mono-Tasker
Dree
Hundreds of small villages dotted the foothills of the Himalayas in the Jumla district of Nepal. The settlements had sprouted up around rivers in the sharp valleys cut by snowmelt water flowing down the mountains.
Dree’s days followed the same pattern: rising early to evaluate possible sites for the NICU micro-clinics, and then riding her motorcycle with the five guys to another village that was desperately in need of healthcare, where Dree would once again work herself to exhaustion. She didn’t complain because there was no use whining about it. She’d been raised to be stronger than that and not to bleat about doing a job that had to be done.
She was dimly aware that she could have just not done it. She could have denied being a nurse practitioner and not mentioned the dwindling medical supplies in her motorcycle’s saddlebags and her backpack, but not giving these people her time and supplies felt cowardly, weak, and simply evil.
As they drove farther into the mountains and away from the larger towns, the children seemed increasingly small for their ages.
When Dree had rotated through the peds wards, she’d been introduced to the racially corrected growth charts. Growth averages were different for children whose ancestors were from different parts of the world. Children of Asian descent were often on the lower end of the overall bell curve in both birth weight and eventual height and weight, and one needed to know that when evaluating whether to suspect a problem or not. A child of Asian descent might be growing perfectly naturally and be in excellent health, but a Black child with the same initial weight and growth curve should be evaluated further for health conditions that were inhibiting their growth. It made sense that Nepali children in Southeast Asia would be smaller than she was used to seeing in the southwestern United States.
Her nurse’s eyes needed to adjust.
This was Dree’s hypothesis until they arrived in a small village where they passed very few farm fields as they rode into town on their motorcycles.
A mother brought a small female child of perhaps six years old into the clinic, complaining that the child would not stop crossing her eyes. Two of the mother’s friends, whom Batsa said were her cousin and sister-in-law, hovered behind the mother, nodding whenever she said anything to Batsa.
When Dree examined the small girl, she found the child had almost all her adult teeth, which meant she had to be at least twelve or thirteen.
When Dree asked the mother how old the girl was, the mother agreed that the child had been born thirteen winters before, a number Batsa confirmed several times before relaying it to Dree.
Dree knew all the reasons why a child might have such stunted growth. She examined the child for other nutritional deficiencies, including rickets and lack of protein.
She found just about everything she looked for.
Dree pulled Maxence over to one side and told him what she thought.
He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. “I could tell by her eyes and the way she was walking that malnutrition was probably an issue. When we were setting up, it looked like all the children here show signs of it.”
That was ridiculous. “Why are we building ten-thousand-dollar brick and cement neonatal intensive care units for premature babies instead of preventing malnutrition in these children for a few bucks?”
He sighed. “They need everything; all of them do. It’s not their fault, and it is our responsibility to help them. I don’t think we should be building NICU units at all.”
Her chest hurt like a cramp. “That’s not what I meant. Of course, we should be trying to save the lives of preemies. Last week when we got to the village too late to save that baby… That still upsets me.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that the basic plan here seems wrong. The Catholic Charities organizers are usually better about things like this. I’m worried that this is one of those projects where they didn’t consult anybody on the ground before they decided to do it.”
That wasn’t what she meant. “But surely, there are no bad charity projects,” she said.
Maxence said, “I was in Somalia and the Central African Republic a few years ago with a different group that I’m not working with anymore. They brought in a bunch of upper-middle-class white teenagers to dig wells for the village. Their parents wanted to ‘turn them around’ because they were mouthing off or failing classes in their private schools, so they spent thousands of dollars for their spoiled offspring to go dig a well in Africa so they would appreciate their privilege.”
Dree’s parents could not have afforded to send her off to Africa. If she’d been sassy, they would have made her muck out the barn alone for a month. “Slackers.”
“That was a doomed project from the start. The project coordinators chased off the local people instead of including them in the project. They wanted the little white kids to dig the wells and feel accomplishment at helping the poor people. Instead, they dug wells, and nobody who lived there helped build them, had any emotional investment in them, or knew how to maintain them. Those wells broke within a year, and nobody who was there could repair them because they hadn’t been included in the project from the start. This feels like that project. No one in these villages will be able to run the NICU incubators or maintain them. At this point, I’m here to gather information on what we should do.”
Dree tried not to have a freaking fit at the stupid rich people who thought these things up. “These people need access to all medical care. They do not need one high-tech preemie mono-tasker. It’s like they have an empty kitchen with no refrigerator, no stove, no food, and these guys are like, ‘Here, have an avocado slicer.’”
Maxence nodded. “The problem is that Alfonso is donating a bunch of these micro-NICU units that he’s designing. The charity wants to use the units because they are getting them. If they weren’t getting these specific devices, this project would never have been conceived.”
That, Dree understood. “Ah. Got it. When you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
“Exactly. It’s why you can’t trust billionaires when they ‘do philanthropy.’ Alfonso is designing and testing these units in the field here in Nepal. He’ll get a tax write-off for the donations, which will reduce or eliminate the cost of design and production. Then, he’ll take the design with a track record and sell them to small hospitals at a profit.”
“It’s a scam,” Dree said, already pissed.<
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“It’s a smart business strategy, but it’s not quite a scam. You should see some of the scams that real estate investors figure out.” Maxence rolled his eyes. “Half the real estate transactions in New York are money laundering for the Russian mafia, and the other half are intended to screw working people. The real estate tycoons are doing both at the same time.”
“Oh, come on. No real estate guy is going to admit that.”
Maxence laughed. “I went to boarding school with Russian mafia kids, the Butorins. They’ll tell you all about their family’s money-laundering deals. That one guy who runs around putting his name on all his real estate, Michael Funk, is a half-billion dollars in debt to the Russian bratvas, so he launders money for them. Every time I see a new Funk Tower somewhere in the world, I just roll my eyes because I know the Butorin bratva just cleaned another couple hundred million dollars.”
“Okay,” Dree said. She hadn’t meant to get him going on what was obviously a pet peeve of his. “But what are we going to do about this little girl, here?”
Maxence sighed. “Sorry. I have to remind myself that I can’t change the world. We can give her mother some of our supplies, but we can’t do that for every family in every village. We’re going to have to go back to the town we flew into or some other larger city to resupply soon since we’re accepting as little as we can from the communities we help because they can’t afford it.”
“Surely the Church should open their coffers to do something for these people. I mean, even our little parish church in New Mexico was opulent, and my people there were dirt poor. The parish had gold chalices that the priests drank out of and precious metals and treasure all over the place. Even the airport that we flew into in Kathmandu had so many riches compared to the poverty that we’re seeing here, where the children are severely malnourished. How are we letting this happen?”
Maxence shrugged, and his strong jaw set. “Good question.”
That night at the campfire, Dree was still seething over the fact that she’d seen seven pediatric patients with a primary diagnosis of severe malnutrition and that expensive preemie incubators weren’t going to solve the problem.
Alfonso tried to dish her up extra of his nightly lentil stew and flatbread, which was tasty, though it could use a bit more heat. The soil of her childhood sheep farm grew chili peppers with the same heat level as a blast furnace, and she was just used to scorching New Mexican food.
She also kept picturing the handsome Spaniard pouring over balance sheets and figuring out how to deduct his design and experimental costs by donating stuff to charities that they didn’t need and might actually hurt the communities where they ended up.
Finally, Alfonso said, “Dree, you are so sad today. What can we do to cheer you up?”
There was a moment when Dree seriously considered letting go on him, but that wasn’t the point.
Alfonso hadn’t started the game. He was just another player.
Instead, Dree said, “Several of the children in this village that I treated today show signs of severe malnutrition. I’m angry that the world seems to have forgotten them.”
Alfonso nodded. “But we haven’t forgotten them. That’s why we’re here. We are here to save the lives of premature infants. If we had already built these NICU micro-clinics, the child of that woman you saw last week might have been saved. Don’t you think that is a worthy goal?”
“Of course, it is, but there’s just so much that these people need.”
Alfonso waved his hand. “There’s so much that so many people need. Right now, we’re doing this. Next year, we may be able to address other things.”
Dree sighed. “A lot of these kids aren’t going to make it to next year. Even if they do, severe malnutrition like this confers lifelong problems. Their growth will be stunted forever. They’re not going to catch up. Their bones will be softer and more easily broken for the rest of their lives. Their brains will not have gotten the nutrition they need, and they’re going to have lifelong cognitive deficits.”
“But we are doing what we can, yes?”
“Are we? Why can’t we do more? If that were my kid, I’d move Heaven and Earth to get them more food. Why can’t we get them more food?”
“You said that if you were the parent, you would do this. Why do the parents not get them more food?” Alfonso asked.
“Well, I—” Dree said, still mad but not knowing. “Because—but there’s—they can’t.”
“Correct,” Maxence said, holding a bite of food in his fingers but not eating it yet. “They can’t. There is no place that they could go to get enough food for their children. Even if they left their ancestral villages and moved to Kathmandu, they couldn’t. If you divide the wealth and available income of Nepal by the number of people, it’s not enough. On a population level, there is nothing all these parents can do to feed all these children.”
“Available wealth and income?” Isaak asked from where he sat on the other side of Alfonso. Dree watched him talk. “What would you have Nepal do? Melt down all the idols in the Hindu temples for their gold and sell it to help the poor for one season? And then, there would be less tourism forever because there are no golden idols to look at, and the poor would be worse off next year.”
Dree looked between the guys over the campfire. This was an intense discussion, but not a fight.
Maxence said. “A society can be judged by the way it treats its poorest citizens.”
Across the fire, Father Booker cleared his throat and went back to eating his supper.
Max used a piece of bread to sop up some of the lentil stew on his plate and ate it, chewing as he stared at the plate and not looking up again.
Dree was ready to sink into the ground. She hadn’t wanted to start an argument, but she didn’t know what else to do for the kids who were on the verge of starving to death.
She managed to change the topic to a meteor streaking across the sky, leaving a trail of fire in the star-strewn heavens for a brief moment before it burned out.
Isaak had also seen the meteor streak overhead. “It’s probably one of the Ursids. The peak of the Ursid meteor shower started on December nineteenth. Since the nineteenth was a few days ago, we should be at the peak for another day or two.”
Dree had lost track of time other than the daily schedule of deciding which particular sites would not be ideal for a NICU micro-clinic, riding her motorcycle to the next village, and then trying to help the endless, endless patients. On a few days, Father Booker had celebrated a Mass, but she hadn’t asked whether it was yet another Sunday or a different day that they should do Mass. “What day is it?”
“December twenty-second,” Maxence said. He looked up at Dree, and her expression must’ve been puzzled because he added, “Father Booker and I have daily prayers that we are obliged to say, the Divine Office. Every day, there are different prayers that have to be said. I keep track of the date with a downloaded file on my phone.”
Dree managed to stay awake only about another fifteen minutes before she crawled into her tent for another quick sponge bath with a pan of warm water and wiggled into her sleeping bag, where her anger at the plight of her patients warred with her exhaustion.
Maxence crawled into the tent just a few minutes after she turned her flashlight off.
As always, he undressed as silently as humanly possible, and Dree resolutely stared at the fabric wall of the tent as he peeled the black leather off his body until he was nearly naked.
As the motorcycle leathers left Maxence’s body, the subtle scent of his cologne, which was cinnamon, vanilla, and the secrets that happened in an orange grove at night where no one could see, filled the tent. She had no idea how he managed to smell so good when they were riding the motorcycles for days between the few overnight stops at inns where they could shower, but he did.
She clutched the fabric of her sleeping bag in her fists. If anything could distract her from the simultaneous rage and exhaustion that ran through her mind,
it was the thought of Maxence sitting right behind her, his broad, strong shoulders and muscular biceps and triceps of his arms bared to the chilly night. His tight white undershirt would cling to his narrow waist, the lumps of his abdominal six-pack, and the strong sinews around his waist that pointed to the sexy line of coarse masculine hair that led from his navel, downward. Only a few weeks ago, she had run her tongue down his happy trail, and his sharp intake of breath had contracted his abs into a stack of bricks under his skin.
If she didn’t hang onto that side of her sleeping bag for all she was worth, Dree might accidentally turn around and pounce on that ripped hunk who was just inches away from her, getting naked.
Or, nearly naked. In the morning sunlight, she’d seen the white rim of a tee-shirt collar above his sleeping bag.
But hey, a girl could dream.
Indeed, her dreams were turning increasingly erotic as their time in Paris receded into their history.
His flashlight clicked off, and absolute darkness smothered her sight.
In the dark, she could barely hear his faint whisper. “You awake?”
“Yeah. I might’ve dropped a bomb into the campfire tonight,” she said.
“It’s fine. No one was offended. The folly of these NICU micro-clinics is an important point that we’re going to need to discuss sooner or later. Father Booker and Batsa have both made comments about the unsuitability of high-tech clinics for villages that have barely changed since the medieval era.”
“So, what’s going on between you and Father Booker? Out there at the campfire, the two of you were giving each other the hairy eyeball.”
Silence blended with the darkness in the tent until Maxence said slowly, “No, he’s not my type.”
“No, silly. The hairy eyeball means that you two were shooting daggers at each other with your eyes.”
“I haven’t heard that expression, either, but I think I can guess what that one means. Father Booker and I are not adversaries. I am quite sure that he and I both believe something we can never admit, even to each other.”
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