The Lies We Told

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Bobby!” a man next to me shouted. “Where are you? Bobby!”

  My escort disappeared into the crowd. Momentarily overwhelmed, I stood aside as a couple of people in DMAT T-shirts tried to cope with the new arrivals. If there was any organization here, I couldn’t see it. I watched an elderly man and woman get knocked down by the throng of newcomers. I stepped forward to pull the couple out of harm’s way, but another fresh wave of people suddenly poured through the concourse door and I lost sight of them.

  “Maya!”

  I turned to see Adam jogging toward me. He had dirty hair and three days’ worth of stubble, but he looked wonderful to me. He gave me a quick hug, just long enough for me to breathe in the scent of his sweat. “Let’s get out of this mess!” he shouted, pulling my backpack from my shoulder onto his. “Come on.”

  I walked with him down a long corridor lined with people, some sleeping, some talking, some crying, and I realized what seemed so different here from the situation with Katrina. So many of Katrina’s victims had been poor—people with no means to escape the area before the storm hit. Here, everyone had been trapped because of Carmen’s sudden change of course. The sister storms were equal-opportunity destroyers, and the people lining the corridor were of every race and, I guessed, every economic stratum.

  Adam and I didn’t speak until we reached the lobby, where the medical tents had been set up. I’d been in the Wilmington airport once before, but except for the green beams high above our heads and the replica of the Wright brothers’ plane, I wouldn’t have recognized it. Adam turned to face me, hands on my arms, and smiled.

  “I can’t believe you came,” he said. “You’re incredible. And gorgeous.” He wound a strand of my hair around his finger and smiled. “You’re also the only clean person I’ve seen in days.”

  I laughed. I didn’t feel incredible or gorgeous, but I loved that he saw me that way. I wanted to ask him about the rumors of violence, but bit my tongue. If he thought I was incredible for being there, I didn’t want to give him a reason to change his mind.

  Someone called his name. He looked over his shoulder toward a woman standing at the entrance to one of the tents and waved. “Be there in a sec,” he called, then turned back to me. “Do you need some time to settle in? You okay from the chopper? Or do you want to get to work?”

  “To work,” I said.

  He caught my hand, pulling it to his lips for a quick kiss. I felt bizarrely happy despite the chaos and heat and stench that surrounded me. Adam seemed alive in a way he hadn’t for so long. He was happy and he loved me, and for the first time in weeks, I thought, We’re going to be all right. We’re going to make it.

  The reality of the critical situation in the airport hit me anew as we walked past the tents and he explained the difference between them. “Dorothea wants you in Tent Three,” he said. “Urgent care. Rebecca’s in there, too.”

  We passed the second tent, and I was shocked by what I saw to our right. Between the second and third tents was a broad sea of people, all of them lying on litters on the ground. The litters nearly touched, side to side, end to end.

  “Are these…are these just evacuees sleeping?” I asked. “Or are they all patients?”

  “Patients,” he said grimly. “See why we need you?”

  “Oh my God.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around the sheer number of bodies lying on the floor. Nurses and other volunteers moved among them, squatting next to one, trying to calm another with a few words spoken as they passed by.

  “We’re not able to do much in the way of medicine here, My,” Adam warned, as though he wanted to keep my expectations in check. “We just need to stabilize people and get the most critical patients out of here as fast as we can. We can only do what we can do,” he added, and I knew he had become, in a few days’ time, seasoned to this work. To Rebecca’s work. I doubted I ever would be.

  We reached Tent Three, but before walking inside, Adam pointed toward a corner of the lobby. “MREs and water are over there,” he said.

  MREs. Well, that would be another first for me.

  Inside the tent, the air felt ten degrees cooler than in the terminal itself, and there appeared to be some organization. To my right, nurses were triaging patients. Ahead of me, on either side, were cots where people waited to be examined and around which family members or friends anxiously wrung their hands. Some areas were set apart by portable canvas walls. In the distance, I spotted Rebecca. She was palpating the abdomen of a woman who screamed, trying to push my sister’s hands away.

  “So,” I said to Adam, “what happens if someone needs more care than you can give them here?”

  “We airlift them to one of the hospitals.” He ran his hand up and down my arm. “Just this afternoon we sent out a couple of acute abdomens, two women in active labor, two MIs that I know of and a bunch of injuries in need of immediate surgery.”

  A woman rushed toward me, a notepad in her hands. She wore a gray T-shirt with DIDA emblazoned on it in white letters. Her hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail.

  “You’re the other Dr. Ward?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Dot wants you down at the end,” she said. “Come on.”

  I glanced at Adam. “See you later,” I said with barely a twinge of apprehension.

  He winked at me. “Break a leg,” he said.

  The woman in the DIDA T-shirt practically ran through the tent, her ponytail bobbing, and I had to scramble to keep up with her. We passed Rebecca, who looked up from her patient and called out, “You rock, sis!”

  “I’m a nurse,” the woman said. “Susan. I’ll be splitting my time between you and another doc.” She led me into a small, canvas-walled cubicle where my first patient already waited for me, screaming her platinum-blond four-year-old head off. I could tell from the way she clutched her swollen, misshapen wrist to her chest what the problem was. I began examining her as she wailed on her mother’s lap. I listened to her lungs and heart, before Susan leaned over and whispered, “No time for a thorough exam.”

  I nodded. Of course. No time, and no X-ray machine either. And no anesthesia, for that matter.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the girl, who only continued screaming in pain.

  “Vanessa,” her mother said.

  “We should just splint her and get her in line to be airlifted out,” Susan whispered to me.

  “She needs to go to a hospital!” her mother said. “She needs X-rays, doesn’t she? Surgery?”

  “Do your fingers tingle at all?” I asked the little girl. “Do they feel like this?” I tapped my fingers rapidly on her good hand. She just screamed louder. “How did you do this, Vanessa?” I asked. “Did you fall off of an elephant?”

  Momentarily startled by my question, the little girl halted her screaming and nearly smiled before starting up again.

  “She tripped on the wet deck stairs while we were trying to get in the rescue boat,” her mother said.

  “How long’s the wait for a plane, or a helicopter or whatever, out?” I asked Susan.

  “For a fracture, days,” Susan said quietly.

  “She can’t wait days!” The woman hugged her baby girl to her. People were dying here. Having heart attacks and ruptured appendixes and all sorts of medical emergencies, but if this had been my little four-year-old, I would have felt the same way.

  “I can set this,” I said, “but we have no way of anesthetizing her.”

  “Oh, God,” the mother said.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, in the strongest voice I could muster, trying to alleviate the woman’s anxiety. “Then we’ll splint it and give her some medication to make her more comfortable and then get you out when we can.” I glanced at Susan, hoping I hadn’t misspoken. “What do we have?”

  “Acetaminophen,” she said.

  “Ah, good,” I said, as if that would have been my first choice.

  “We’ll do this quickly,” I said to the girl’s mother. “You hold her right
here.” I guided her hands to the child’s upper arm. “Vanessa, I don’t want you to think about penguins,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t think about penguins! Okay?”

  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.

  16

  Rebecca

  THERE 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.

  17

  Maya

  IT 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?