by Audrey Bell
They were right, I thought, as I fell asleep at sunrise. I had no fucking idea what I was getting into.
Chapter Forty-Five
The day off was worse. Because I had to reckon with what we’d experienced. I didn’t want to see Chip, but I didn’t want to be alone.
I wrote back to David’s emails.
He’d sent me eight and the latest was cheery, but concerned:
Hadley girl,
Are you ignoring me? It’s foggy here and wonderful and Justin is trying to change a light bulb and failing, but it’s twenty feet in the air, so I can’t blame him! Hope you are safe.
Love, David
I started the email four or five times.
It would’ve been selfish to complain to him. I couldn’t tell him a child had been shot and nobody had called the police or done anything because that was just one of the things that happened all the time here.
I wrote a short piece on it, trying to fit the cruel and personal tragedy into an article that could run in a newspaper.
I finished it and sent it to Dale, knowing he’d say that it wasn’t something they could run in a national newspaper—it was just an anecdote, not a news story, but I told myself at least I would know that I had tried, that at least I had bothered to write something down, at least I would have a record of her death, those few seconds, something that gave one of so many victims a public record of death. Even if I didn’t know her name.
Chip couldn’t stand being alone in the hotel any more than I could. He knocked on my door, muttered a gruff apology for snapping, and offered food.
I let him come in.
“I think they might evacuate us,” he said. “I mean, this is getting fucking crazy.”
I nodded in agreement.
There wasn’t much else to say. When I was twenty-two, I saw a five-year-old girl get shot. Maybe she was six. I’ll never know her name. And I knew nobody got to decide how their life went. Not really.
Chapter Forty-Six
I never thought about anybody in Syria, because I was focused on what was happening. Transcribing the story, keeping an eye on the door, looking out for Chip, knowing that we might need to move at any second, any second at all.
You can’t think about your mother and father when you’re screaming over the sound of shelling in a language you learned in quiet classrooms halfway around the world.
I saw things worse than that five-year-old little girl dying.
Bloodier things. Sadder things.
Eventually you stop putting things on the scale. It’s all horrible, you can’t tell the difference, so you turn each horrible thing into a fact. A girl shot. A man executed. A teenager bound and beaten and killed because someone repeated a story he told in his history class.
Another journalist missing.
Rumors of chemical attacks again.
One long night, as we drove silently away from a horrific scene—same old story in a brand new place—I pressed my head to the window of the truck, squinting out into the darkness at the cities from which everyone vanished.
Erin was cold, Dell rough, Chip brittle. None of them invited closeness. Neither did I. But I felt like I was vanishing, too. The things that had grounded me in place, the people I spoke to, the routines I had, my family, David, they’d all disappeared.
Chip had told me if anything happened to him, I should tell his parents how much he loved them. I told him I would. I was sure they already knew that.
I realized that if anything happened to me, I would want someone to tell Jack Diamond that I had loved him. I had never told that to anyone. He would never know if I died here.
I watched the unlit buildings and land and I thought of Jack, like he was just out there, beyond reach. I remembered his warmth. I remembered that he comforted me, somehow, when I didn’t even know I needed comfort, someone to hold onto at night when I wondered what the hell the point of anything was.
I wanted him.
I missed him.
I would trade this for him.
I would trade this for nothing.
But I wanted to trade it for him.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chip grabbed me before dawn, on maybe two hours of sleep, and he said we had to go, pushing a can of Red Bull into my hand.
“Pierre says they’ve got real evidence now. Massive casualties.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Chemical weapons,” Chip shouted.
We’d been chasing proof of chemical weapons attacks for weeks now. Having interviewed dozens of rebels across the country, we knew it was unlikely for such uniform stories to come out without attacks having occurred.
Some doctors had told us that they had treated patients whose symptoms lined up with exposure to neurotoxins, but we’d found no other evidence to corroborate that and we couldn’t print stories other than ones that said Syrian rebels claimed to be attacked by chemical arms.
I pulled my boots on, and a jacket, and grabbed my flip camera and recorder and phone.
We were on the road before 3 AM. Chip tossed me one of the gas masks from the glove compartment.
“Seriously?”
“Pierre says it’s hot,” he said. “Take it.”
Pierre was a French journalist who had reported on patients admitted to the emergency room with symptoms of gaseous poisoning a few months back.
We trusted him, but he hadn’t been able to confirm anything other than the doctors’ accounts. Rebels were hard to track down, young men in danger of dying, and if you could find them, they might not want to talk. They never knew who they were putting in danger.
“Where?” I asked.
“In Ghouta,” Chip said. He shook his head. The last alleged attack had been in Adra.
“The patients are coming in now,” Chip said. He looked at me. “It’s going to be grim if Pierre’s right. He said a couple thousand could die.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We parked in the dark near the hospital, and we could see there was a lot of activity already.
We jogged towards the entrance to the emergency room, and then we saw it all.
The vomiting women and children coughing blood, tiny bodies slumped against walls, medics shouting over screaming patients, doctors restraining wild-eyed boys.
Pierre had abandoned his camera and was talking rapidly to a doctor in French.
“What the hell?” Chip said. “What the fuck is going on?”
“We’re almost out of atropine,” the doctor said. “We’re going to need to divert patients to facilities where they can be treated.”
“What’s atropine?” I asked Pierre.
“It’s the antidote to Sarin,” he muttered in English.
“Holy fuck,” Chip muttered.
He lifted his camera and began to take pictures.
I looked around bewildered for someone who wasn’t too sick to talk, but it seemed impossible. I closed my eyes and took a short breath.
It was hard for me to breathe too. I panicked fleetingly, wondering if the attack was ongoing, if I was in danger of dying. It felt that way—the way my heart was pounding.
I found a boy, sitting alone, maybe thirteen. He was a child by my standards, but an adult by the standard of this room. He was crying softly, in between huffing air from an oxygen mask.
“Can I ask you a few questions?” I asked softly in Arabic.
He nodded.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“We were sleeping,” he began. “And I woke up, my mother screaming that the baby wasn’t breathing.” He went on. He had five sisters. His father, a rebel, was dead, and his two older brothers had joined the fight against Assad.
The baby died, he told me.
He started crying again, softly.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jabbar.”
“Did they get out? Are they here?”
He shook his head. “I ran for help, but everyone need
ed help. They brought me here instead.”
I bit my lip. Tears slid down his cheeks.
“Do your brothers know where you are?”
He shook his head. A doctor came and shooed me away and I watched him, wishing I had the time to be heartbroken for him, wishing I had the resources to find his brothers. Jabbar. Jabbar’s baby sister died.
Chip found me in a hallway, trying to catch my breath. He pulled me by the arm. “They want us out of here. We’re going to the mosque.”
“What? Why?”
“They want us out. Say we might get exposed and they’re running out of resources to treat people.”
We followed Pierre out of the hospital and deeper into the city.
It was still and silent in the square as the sun rose. We got out of the Jeep and closed the car doors, and realized why. There were announcements being read over the loudspeakers: a list of names.
And across the square, in neat lines, wrapped in white sheets were hundreds of bodies. Normal adults ones, child ones, toddlers, and tiny, little infant bundles.
My heart dropped.
I couldn’t do this.
It thudded against my chest. I thought I could do this but I knew then that I couldn’t. I couldn’t do this.
At the end of the long nightmare of that day, we got the call we’d been expecting. The call I’d been waiting for.
“We’re pulling you out. Chip and Erin will go to Lebanon. Arrington, we’re pulling back to New York. Dell, you’ve got authority to continue reporting, but we’re moving you to Turkey,” Dale told us. We heard the heaviness in his voice over the speaker phone. “You did good work. But we’re bringing you home.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
A blare of sirens woke me.
New York sirens. Harlem sirens.
The kind of sirens you know not to worry about. But it was the third time they’d woken me and I’d dropped out of my bed and onto my knees, like I was expecting bullets to spray through the window. It was only one in the morning.
I picked up my cell phone with shaky hands and called David.
He might be awake, out in San Francisco.
“Hey girlfriend! I’m so glad you’re back in New York,” he trilled. “Now we can speak on the phone.”
“Hey, David,” I said. I swallowed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just. Can’t sleep.”
David had been more shaken than I had been able to be over the chemical attacks. I didn’t know how to make it make sense in my head and I’d stopped trying.
“Tell me something about San Francisco,” I told him.
“It’s cloudy.”
I smiled.
“But I can see the Bay Bridge from my window. I bet you remember that. I like the Bay Bridge. I think the Golden Gate is overrated. I mean, it’s so out there. Red! And suspended. But the Bay Bridge is blue. It doesn’t really want your attention. I’m really into that quality in a bridge.”
I laughed.
“And it’s the one I can see from my window, so it’s my favorite.”
I laughed again.
It was the fifth night in a row I’d called him.
He told me about the homeless man with the golden voice who hung out near his building and how he was going to visit Justin in a few weeks and then, when he was sure I was good and calm, he said. “Hey, Hadley, I was thinking maybe you should talk to someone about what happened in Syria. If you can’t sleep. You know?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to see anybody. I wanted to get tough and get on with it. I just needed a few more days. “Yeah.” I smiled. “Yeah, if it keeps up, I will. I still think it’s jetlag.”
“You’re not recovering from the flight,” David told me.
“It was only three months.”
Dale had given me the week off, not just given it to me, but demanded I take it.
“It doesn’t matter,” David said. “I saw someone after what happened with Ben. It helped a lot. I think it might help you, too.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’ll think about it.
Chapter Forty-Nine
My third day back at the office in New York, when I was starting to think I would be okay, we had an unannounced fire drill.
I had a panic attack.
I thought maybe it was asthma, and then I thought maybe I was having a heart attack, and knowing both were impossible, I tried to keep quiet while everyone got up and left their desk. But I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I stood, holding the edge of my desk, afraid I would collapse.
Dale recognized it when he walked past my desk. “Hadley, let’s go,” he shouted. And then he took a closer look at me. “Jesus, you’re shaking. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I managed.
“Do you have asthma?”
I shook my head.
"You sick?"
I shook my head vehemently.
“I think you’re having a panic attack,” he said. “Hold your breath for a few seconds then let it go. And sit down. My wife says that helps.”
When I finally got my breathing under control, I wished he'd left me. I wished it were an actual fire and I was dying of smoke inhalation. I was mortified.
“You two didn’t hear the drill?” the fire marshal demanded, walking down the hallway to check if we were all clear.
“Give us a pass. Kid doesn’t like sirens, okay?” Dale shot back.
The marshal looked from Dale to me and back to Dale. He nodded. “All clear," he shouted out, to whomever was listening before he disappeared from sight.
Dale leaned over my desk and picked up a notepad. He scrawled a name onto it.
“Sorry,” I said, my face burning.
He shook his head. “Don’t be.”
I shook from the adrenaline. He handed me a piece of paper. Dr. Jane Ferguson. “Make an appointment. She can help. You need help with that. Alright? You can’t handle it on your own. You don’t need to tell me about it if you don’t want to. But you need to call her.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I will.”
“Look, I’m going to give you another week off. See the doctor, see what she says, and write a fun story. Write about the fucking fall foliage in New England or some shit. Go to a dog park.” He smiled.
I nodded.
“Take off. Don’t worry,” he said.
I nodded again, packing up my stuff. Humiliated as hell. I had to get a grip.
Dr. Ferguson didn’t ask me that many questions. I told her I was having panic attacks since Syria, I thought it was temporary, and I didn’t want to talk about it too much. She told me to take a Xanax when I felt one coming on and to come back in two weeks.
I wrote a story about dog parks.
And I went for a few long walks.
And when the phone rang incessantly at work and the edge of terror crept in, I took a Xanax.
It helped at first.
And then it stopped helping.
I went back to Dr. Ferguson. She upped my dosage and said I should try talk therapy. I said I'd stick to the pills.
Dale called one afternoon when I was trying to figure out how to get my hands to stop shaking.
"I just wanted to see how you were doing."
"I'm great," I said tightly.
"Yeah? That's good."
I swallowed. "I should be able to come into the office soon."
He was quiet. "Don't rush it. I liked the story on dog parks. You could do a whole series.”
I smiled and swallowed, staring at the bleak walls of my apartment. I should decorate. I should decorate, put down roots, and reach out to the people I knew here. I should go back to work.
I heard a siren in the distance.
"Look, if it makes you feel any better, Chip's still on leave. You guys saw some horrible shit,” he said. “Nobody thinks any less of you for needing time to get over it.”
The siren got louder. It's just a noise.
I took a breath and let it go, thinking about the subway and the
East River. I knew I was supposed to ground myself in the present, that a panic attack was misinterpreting something that was harmless as danger, that it was fear in the absence of danger.
I'm not in danger, I reminded myself.
The sirens were coming up my block now.
"I have to go," I told Dale. “Thanks for calling.”
I dropped the phone and scrambled to the bathroom for my Xanax.
I was fine, either by the time the medication kicked in or by the time the sirens faded.
I wanted Jack, I realized.
I wanted Jack. He was the only person who ever seemed to get me, to get all of me, and he was the only person who I believed might get this, too.
When I caught my breath, I scrolled to his number and to the picture I’d taken of him one morning when we were still together. It was a goofy shot of him sitting in his boxers on the corner of his bed with his hair standing up in sheer defiance of the laws of gravity.
I pressed my thumb as lightly as I could against his image. I called him.
I didn't lift the phone to my ear. I didn't put it on speaker. I heard the faint ringing buzz from my hand.
I wanted it to go to voicemail and I wanted him to have the same message he had in college.
Hey, it's Jack. Leave a message and I'll call you back.
It wasn't funny or original at all. It was just the way he said it, like he didn't care who was calling. I could imagine him leaning back on a couch, easy and relaxed.
I swallowed, tears blurring before my eyes. I finally put the phone to my ear.
I didn't get his voice, though. "You've reached the voice mailbox of Jack Diamond," a computer informed. "Please leave a message at the tone."
I swallowed hard on a thick lump in my throat. I turned the phone off before the tone. I couldn't even breathe normally.
Get a grip, Hadley.
But I didn't even know what that meant anymore.
I was going to work tomorrow, I told myself. I wasn't getting any better staying inside. I needed to go out there. I needed to face it.
Chapter Fifty
