Allah's Fire

by Chuck Holton

  In the other picture Julie, wreathed in white satin with a veil falling from her upswept hair, stood with one arm looped around Liz’s waist and the other around a slim, handsome young Arab. She was smiling with joy as was the young man. It was only Liz who looked less than elated, though no one else who looked at the picture ever seemed to notice her melancholy—which was probably a good thing. Wedding pictures were supposed to be filled with happiness, not doubt.

  She and Julie had spent their teen years in Beirut. Julie’s very fair blond hair made her look Scandinavian and always drew appreciative eyes, while Liz with her dark hair wasn’t nearly as exotic. Maybe it was Julie’s physical uniqueness and personal shyness that had made Liz feel so protective of her.

  Certainly it was Julie’s struggles with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, its pain and limitations. Then again, maybe Liz was just a little mother at heart—or a bossy kid who liked ordering someone around. Regretfully, it was probably the latter. Whatever the reason, she had always watched out for Julie, loved her as only a big sister could.

  Julie had returned the affection until Khalil came along. Not that she didn’t still love Liz. There was something about being sisters that forged a bond nothing, not even husbands, could break. But Julie’s love centered elsewhere these days.

  Liz wasn’t jealous of Khalil. She wasn’t. A woman was supposed to love her husband more than anyone. It was just that Liz wished she had her own Khalil, only an ail-American version, born on the Fourth of July. She thought she had found him once, and she still smarted from the hurt and disappointment.

  But all things work together for good, and the perfect man, a better man, was just around the corner. She knew it. He would be a strong Christian as well as an appreciator of the U.S.

  A double whammy for poor Charles. He’d certainly done his best to make her and Julie citizens of the world with strong reservations about the United States and Christianity.

  “The American system is corrupt,” he’d said again and again.

  Well, sure, Liz always thought, though she didn’t say it. Contradicting Charles wasn’t worth the cost. The U.S. had power and power corrupts. Still, it seemed to her that the rule of law kept that corruption in check there much more than in other countries.

  “Religion is for the weak,” her father also said. “Religion divides. Christianity is full of hypocrites.”

  When she came home and told her parents she had become a believer in Jesus, Charles almost had apoplexy. His face got red, and he actually stammered when he growled, “Liz, wh-wh-what have you done?”

  “Oh, my dear,” Annabelle said, more sorrowful than angry. “You don’t need that crutch. You’re a strong person.”

  “And I’m stronger now.” Liz spoke calmly though her heart was pounding faster than the beat on her favorite DC Talk track. She’d never stood up to her parents like this before. “You have to take my word for it that my faith has enriched me, not made me weaker.”

  “It’s my fault,” Charles said, his head resting in his hand. You’d have thought she’d told him she was about to die. “I should never have sent you to the States for college.”

  She smiled at the memories as she brushed her hair. She put the brush on the bureau next to the pictures as she heard a phone ring in the other room.

  Annabelle answered in Arabic. There was a moment’s silence. Then Annabelle screamed, a loud cry of pain.

  Liz bolted from the bedroom. As she raced into the living room, her mother sobbed, “No! No! Not Julie!”

  Beirut

  LIZ AND ANNABELLE sat together through the night, watching the TV, recoiling in horror at the pictures of fire and destruction.

  Liz’s heart had always broken with sympathy for those caught in terrorist attacks, both the victims and the families left behind. What she hadn’t grasped was the depth of the pain for those who waited, for those who lost someone they loved simply because that someone had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Oh, God, please! Oh, God, please!

  Even as she watched the TV and heard the reports, it was impossible to think of gentle Julie in such a violent setting. Appalling things like this fire happened all the time, but they happened to other people, not to people her family knew and loved.

  As windows in the high-rise section of the hotel exploded and rained down on the rescue workers, Annabelle began to shake. Liz wrapped her arms about her mother and held her tightly. She wanted to automatically say, “Shh, it’ll be all right.”

  But it wouldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Julie had been there with Khalil when the explosion had occurred.

  Charles had gone immediately to the scene, and he hadn’t come home. As Liz went to her room around three, unable to watch one more picture or listen to one more reporter, her hope was that when she awoke, he’d have called to say it was all a mistake. Julie was fine. Khalil was fine. Everyone was fine.

  Of course, Liz couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the raging flames, the crumbling walls, the horror-filled faces of those at the scene. She fell to her knees beside the bed.

  “Oh, God, please! Let her be okay!” Over and over and over she repeated the words as tears flowed over her clasped hands, wetting the bedspread, the blanket, the sheets, and the mattress. She couldn’t stop begging any more than she could stop weeping.

  Sometime just before dawn, she fell into an exhausted sleep. She awoke as light began to fill the sky. For a moment she wondered what she was doing on her knees beside the bed, shivering in the cool morning temperatures. Then memory slammed home, and she couldn’t breathe around the pain.

  Julie! Lovely, wonderful, beloved Julie. And Khalil.

  She pulled her aching body erect and stood, waiting for the pain in her blood-deprived legs to diminish so she could walk.

  Was this what it felt like every morning for Julie when she woke? Was this burning, prickling, crampy feeling what rheumatoid arthritis felt like? How had her sister borne such pain for so many years and been able to laugh? To love? To marry?

  As the acute aching diminished in her legs, Liz became aware that her face felt hot and swollen from all her tears. She shuffled to the bathroom and ran cold water over a washcloth, and pressed it to her aching eyes. After a few seconds, she rinsed the cloth again in cold water and spread it over her whole face.

  She heard no sounds in the house, neither weeping nor rejoicing. Surely if Charles had learned anything positive about Julie, there would be happy sounds. In the pale light of a new morning, the silence meant the worst.

  She stumbled into the kitchen. Annabelle, seated at the table with a cup of untouched coffee in front of her, looked up.

  “Any word yet?” Liz asked as she sat across from her mother.

  Annabelle shook her head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin.” And she began to cry, a jagged, raspy sound that tore at Liz.

  “Oh, Mom.”

  Annabelle never cried. When she was upset, she got charmingly, beautifully teary, the moisture resting on her lower lids and making her lovely dark eyes even more luminescent than normal and Annabelle more lovely than ever. But tears? Honest-to-goodness weeping? Charles always gave in before that was necessary.

  But Charles couldn’t fix this problem.

  “Shh, Mom,” Liz soothed, feeling helpless and very fragile herself.

  “You called me Mom,” Annabelle managed through her sobs. “Twice.”

  Liz blinked. She’d never in her whole life called Annabelle Mom. From the time she and Julie were able to talk, it was Charles and Annabelle. “Well, that’s who you are.”

  “Yes, but don’t ever call me that again.” The command was stern. Then the crying resumed.

  Liz rested her head against the wall, struck by what a contradictory individual her mother was. “Don’t cry. Please. It won’t help. Besides, it’ll make me cry again, too.”

  Annabelle took a ragged breath. “I don’t know how they could have survived
.”

  Liz sagged into the wall. Oh, Lord, please! They have to have survived!

  “Have you heard anything from Charles?”

  Annabelle shook her head, silent tears falling off her chin to drop unheeded into her lap. “He called once, but he had nothing to report. He just wanted me to know he was all right. I asked him to come home, but he can’t. He—he can’t stay away.”

  Liz understood. Much as she dreaded what she’d see, she wanted to go there herself. She needed to see the scene and all of its attendant horror to believe Julie and Khalil weren’t coming back to them.

  She didn’t trust herself to drive, so she called a cab. While she waited for it to arrive, she pulled on jeans and a hoodie. She stuck twenty thousand livre in her jeans pocket and her Steno pad, a pen firmly lodged in the coil at the top, in the hoodie’s pouch.

  She sighed. Here she was, mourning her sister, and she was planning on taking notes for an article. What kind of a person did that make her? It was a given that no one except another writer would understand the compulsion to record what she saw and felt.

  “Take me to the Hotel Rowena,” she told the driver in Arabic as she climbed in.

  He looked at her over his shoulder. “Are you sure?” He turned back and slid into the flow of traffic. “Because it was firebombed last night.”

  “I know. I still want to go there.”

  He peered at her in the rearview mirror, obviously intrigued, but he didn’t say anything. Her tear-swollen face probably told him all he needed to know. He dropped her off as close to the hotel as the cab could get—which was a block away.

  She hurried to join the crowd standing across the street from the hotel at the edge of the area cordoned off by the police and pushed her way forward, ignoring the muttered complaints of those she elbowed aside. She finally reached the front edge of the throng and stared in horror at the blackened destruction. If Julie and Khalil were at a dinner on the second floor of this ruin, how could they have survived?

  The answer was simple. They couldn’t have.

  She stared at the fire trucks, the ambulances, the heavy equipment waiting to move the crumbled and scorched rubble. The stench of wet char hung heavy, and the air was thick with ash.

  The hotel’s mostly glass front was totally gone, and the roof of the glass atrium had collapsed, leaving nothing but a pile of blackened debris. The back wall and the two side walls still stood, at least partially, though they didn’t look particularly stable, seared and damaged as they were.

  She scanned the tower rooms where many windows were missing and drapes hung out like lolling tongues. She glanced at the stores and businesses that lined the Avenue du General de Gaulle on either side of the hotel, and many of them were also missing their windows. Some owners had already boarded the gaping holes against looters; others were shoveling or sweeping up the shattered debris. For the first time Liz became aware of the crunch of glass under her feet.

  The firefighters, many wearing masks over their noses and mouths, were covered with soot. Liz imagined that most of them had been here since last evening, working all through the night. They had to be exhausted, but they kept moving, dousing hot spots, waiting for things to cool enough for them to examine the remains, looking for evidence about what had happened.

  A familiar figure appeared inside the cordoned off area, stepping from behind a police car.

  “Charles!” Liz shouted to be heard over the constant noise. “Charles!” She ducked under a sawhorse meant to keep people back and started toward him. A soldier saw her and was beside her immediately, one hand on his rifle. He grabbed her arm. “Sortez d’ici!” Apparently he assumed she was European.

  “That’s my father,” she told him in Arabic, pointing to Charles. The soldier looked but shook his head.

  “Charles!” Liz shouted again, waving her hands.

  Somehow her voice reached him, and he turned. She could see his lips say, “Liz!”

  He spoke to the uniformed man beside him. The man, obviously an officer of some rank if the gold on his uniform was anything to go by, looked toward Liz and gave a signal to the soldier holding her. The soldier dropped her arm and stepped back. Liz ran to her father.

  “Oh, Charles!” She grabbed him, and they held on to each other in silence. Liz’s throat was too clogged with tears to speak as she burrowed close. There was something immensely comforting about the circle of her father’s arms. Finally he loosened his grip, and arms still about each other’s waists, they faced the hotel.

  “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” she managed.

  Charles grimaced and rubbed a hand down his face. “I’m afraid so.”

  The man her father had been talking to cleared his throat.

  Charles stared at the man blankly for a minute, then blinked to awareness. “Liz, this is Captain Timon Habib. He was one of my students a few years ago.”

  Liz wiped her eyes and nodded.

  “Timon, this is my daughter Elizabeth.”

  “I am so very sorry, Miss Fairchild.” He spoke in English, looking toward the chaos and carnage.

  Liz managed a small, “Thanks,” but his words made her heart stutter. He had just confirmed that there was no hope, and he would know, wouldn’t he? He’d undoubtedly seen many other scenes of destruction in his career, perhaps including the scene of the car bomb that had killed al Hariri.

  “Do you know who did it?” She felt a keen need for someone to blame. “Hezbollah? AI Qaeda? Hamas?” Though why any of those groups would bomb a group of business people meeting in Beirut she couldn’t imagine.

  He shook his head. “We’re looking at the groups you mentioned, as well as the Israeli extremists, even the Syrians, as possibilities, but no group has claimed responsibility yet.”

  Liz was surprised. “Usually these groups wear their guilt like it was a badge of honor.”

  Captain Habib nodded. “It will be difficult to cast blame if no one boasts of their cleverness.”

  A weary-looking man approached Charles and the captain. Tears had carved furrows in the sooty dirt that covered his face. Liz realized with a start that the filthy man was Dr. Assan, Khalil’s father.

  He wrapped Charles in a fierce hug. “My friend, we have lost our children.” He burst into tears.

  Landstuhl, Germany

  SOFT VOICES MURMURED in the blackness inside John’s head, at first barely audible, then growing louder, more insistent. Then he drifted until he finally awoke to a gentle voice that, when he opened his eyes, he saw belonged to a pretty red-haired nurse. She was having a hushed conversation with a short, bespectacled man in class-B uniform who wore the rank of major.

  I’m in the hospital!

  He tried to remember why. He vaguely remembered waking up on a C-17 transport plane with an IV stuck in his arm, but everything after that was like staring through molasses at midnight.

  The nurse saw John blinking at them. “Hello, Master Sergeant. I’m Jennifer. I’m glad you are awake because I’ve brought you something to eat.” She set a plastic tray on the table by his bed.

  The smell turned John’s stomach. “Where am I?” he asked, disgusted to hear a wobble in his voice.

  “You’re in Germany—at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. How do you feel?”

  John tried to sit up. Why did they always ask that ridiculous question? “Fantastic.”

  The little nurse smiled at him, and a picture of another woman, moaning in childbirth, overlay the pretty redhead. Then he heard the ka-boom! and remembered flying through the air. “Where’s Doc James?”

  The nurse gestured toward the major. “This is Chaplain Chad Maxey, the duty chaplain today. He’s here to see you.”

  “Where’s Doc James?” John asked again, dread pooling in his chest. The chaplain was a very bad sign, as was Jennifer’s refusal to answer his question.

  Chaplain Maxey shook his head. “I’m sorry, John. He didn’t make it.”

  John dropped back on the bed, feeling as if he’d just b
een kicked. He closed his eyes and instantly saw the blue Suburban, riding a fireball high in the air.

  Doc never had a chance.

  “John, I’d like to pray with you.” The chaplain moved close to his bed. “Would you allow me to do that?”

  John didn’t answer. He threw the tray of food against the wall instead. Nurse Jennifer went scurrying and returned with the doctor, who told John he’d had surgery to remove one fragment of metal from his shoulder and another from his knee. He was also being treated for a level-two concussion, which explained why everything felt so fuzzy.

  To his credit, Chaplain Maxey visited again before John was released. Though John refrained from any further outbursts, he hadn’t been in any mood to talk to God, or even talk about Him, for that matter.

  Except for the chaplain, he had no visitors. His godfather, Michael LaFontaine, sent a package with some clothing in it and a note:

  “I hear you’ll be coming home soon. Those hospital gowns are notoriously drafty on airplanes. Get well quickly. Will call when you get home.”

  The man was nothing if not generous. John pulled out the striped button-down shirt, khaki pants, and brown corduroy blazer with tan elbow patches. Guess the colonel had sent his secretary shopping for him.

  His mother called the day before he was released. “I’m so glad to hear you’re alive, John. When the chaplain showed up at my door, I almost fainted.”

  John could only imagine. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve still got all my extremities.”

  “You really should be more careful, son.”

  “Mmm…” Yeah, right. If he’d been more careful, maybe Doc would still be alive.

  The conversation stalled out after that, and John decided to give her an out. “Well, I bet you’re busy there, and it’s about time for my supper, so I guess we’ll talk later, okay?”

  “I love you, honey. No more scares, okay?”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  “And John…”

  “Yes?”

  “Your father loves you, too.”

  John found that hard to believe, but he didn’t say so.