The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  She twists slightly away from him, reminded now however irritating she finds his reckless behavior, it doesn’t bother her nearly as much as the fact that he has more or less spontaneously booked this flight to the U.S. He insisted he needed a break, had to get out, even yesterday was too late. She argued for days to get him to postpone it long enough to make this foray into Lebanon. Once they are done here, he’s taking off. She only hopes that he doesn’t miss any huge stories—major flare-ups of violence or government collapses. Nobody based in the Middle East takes photos as good as Marcus’s.

  Caddie glances behind them and her chest finally loosens: the roadblock is out of sight; surely the worst of the day is history. They pass a couple buildings still showing the kiss of battles—gapes and scars where walls should be. Then a patch of trees with leaves implausibly green against the fresh sky. Mt. Hermon rises in the distance, a landmark she knows, and the region becomes rocky again.

  Their driver slows as they pass a woman in a long, loose dress and a headscarf who totes a toddler straddled on one shoulder, a basket on her head. She looks middle-aged, though she’s probably in her twenties, eroded by having borne a child each year since age sixteen. Caddie has interviewed women like her. She lives in a one-room hut with a husband who shows more fondness for his gun than his family. Every day she scorches her fingertips making pita, and every night she rubs sore calves with callused hands. When she speaks, the wind carries away her words. When she needs help, she leans against a tree. She rarely knows surprise.

  Their driver has courtesy enough, at least, to spare the woman the discomfort of being covered in dust. As they crawl past, she acknowledges them with the smallest of nods. Her toddler, frightened by the noisy vehicle and its load of strangers, lunges forward, blocking his mother’s sight. She wipes his fingers from her eyes with her free hand in a gesture that seems to rebuke and soothe at once, and the intimacy of that movement sets off a longing within Caddie, irritating but not unfamiliar.

  “Stop,” Caddie calls out in Arabic. “Back up. Please.”

  The driver slows, shifting his face toward Sven for direction. He’s been paid to cart them where they want to go and, inshallah, he’ll do it. But Caddie knows what he’s thinking: taking orders from a woman, no one told him about that. It appeals as much as walking barefoot on glass shards.

  Caddie stares hard and Sven remains silent. The driver blows frustration out his mouth, then brakes and shifts to reverse, halting his vehicle alongside the mother.

  “Caddie,” Rob says. “What the—?”

  Caddie turns her head away; she knows what he’s going to say and doesn’t want to hear it: that the criminal they will interview is as mercurial as he is dangerous and makes enemies with the ease that most people drink water. That there are warrants on his head in Syria, Israel and the United States and he’s always on the move to avoid detection. That if they are late, even a little, he will not wait.

  This won’t cost them but a minute. Sven could move to the back and squeeze in next to them, leaving the front seat for the woman. Caddie herself will hold the child on her lap. A lift of a few miles might save this woman hours of walking.

  She rises to make the offer.

  But the mother’s chin is raised in sharp rebuff, and Caddie recognizes—a moment too late—what she already knew. The woman would never climb into this car. She would be called a whore, and possibly beaten, if a brother or husband or even a neighbor saw her in a car loaded with foreign men, and with Caddie, who is not an ally, who is only an outsider, a stranger and transient. Who has no place pretending otherwise.

  Even worse, she’s just shed her journalistic detachment. The moment reeks of sentimentality, no greater sin among reporters.

  With the Land Rover out of gear, the driver revs the engine. She feels Rob’s stare.

  The mother moves past, eyes averted. The toddler stares over his mother’s shoulder, then ducks to hide himself. No one in the vehicle moves. No one speaks. Finally their driver turns to Caddie, his expression empty, his contempt strong enough to emit a sour scent.

  She tightens her left hand into a fist, searching for a question she might ask this driver, one that could allow her to smirk. What would you put on a vanity plate for this bullet-dodger? 2-TUF-2-SPIT, she imagines him answering. That brings a smile that she hopes looks mysteriously smug to the driver, and to Rob.

  Then she nods, a gesture intended to display confidence. She sits as the driver faces forward to lean into the gas pedal. The Land Rover jumps, leaving the woman in the trail of dust he had avoided the first time.

  Rob speaks first. “Where the hell did that come from, Caddie?”

  “This damned pressure-cooker,” Marcus says. “Woman, you need a break too.”

  “As if we all don’t,” Sven says.

  “Sunday brunch in the Village,” Marcus goes on. “Mimosas and Eggs Benedict and a stack of frivolous glossy magazines. We’ll go windsurfing off Long Island. You can browse all the bookshops on the Upper West Side. And buy fresh bagels every day.”

  For a moment, she does miss New York. She misses blending in, not having to concentrate on the language. And street signs—God, how she misses street signs right now on this dusty, no-name road.

  Marcus smiles. “I see it in your eyes. Come out with me, away from this madness.”

  “The paper wants me here,” she says.

  “Tell them how dead it is; then they won’t. Point out that everyone in your country is preoccupied by the election right now. About the Middle East, no one gives.”

  Caddie shakes her head. “It’s never dead here, Marcus. And didn’t you see all those farm-fed American boys in the Inter-con bar last night? They didn’t make the trip to get laid. Spooks, for sure.”

  “She’s got a point,” says Rob.

  “CIA—so what?” Marcus grimaces in mock despair. “All that means is no photo ops for sure. C’mon, Caddie.”

  Caddie shakes her head. “If I need a break, I’ll take a couple days off in Jerusalem.”

  “Why?” he says. “Why do you have to stay?” When she doesn’t answer, he exhales in loud frustration. “Okay, then,” he says. “But not me. That’s the joy of being a freelancer.” He puts his hands behind his head as though leaning back in an easy chair. “Poof. I’m gone.”

  The driver slows again to about five miles an hour. Except for scrawny gray bushes hugging the roadside, the area seems forsaken. “Enough delays,” Rob calls, bouncing his right leg. “Let’s get the show rolling.”

  “Don’t worry.” Sven half-turns in his seat. “We must be almost there. Isn’t that right?” he asks the driver in loud Arabic. “We are there?”

  Their driver doesn’t answer—in fact, Caddie realizes she’s never heard him speak. She has no idea what his voice sounds like, and that suddenly registers as odd.

  Before she can ask another question and wait him out until he’s forced to reply, she catches sight of a bush up ahead to the right, jerking in a way it shouldn’t. The air hisses and loses pressure like a deflating balloon. “Hold it,” Caddie says, but she doubts anyone hears because right then a passing shrub rises and makes an inexplicable ping. “Hey—” Marcus exclaims, and he half-stands, faces her and raises his hands as though to block her from the bush. Then he leans on her, shoving her down, and Caddie is dimly aware of a crack and grayish smoke as she hears Sven in the front yelling, “Gas, hit the gas you idiot, go, go, go for Christ’s sake!” It occurs to her that their situation must be serious for cordial Sven to call someone an idiot, and Rob sinks to his knees on the floor of the jeep, pulling her toward him, saying, “Oh Jesus oh fuck oh Jesus,” so she’s sandwiched between the two of them, Rob and Marcus, and she’s aware of a peppery scent, and then, at last, she feels the jeep plunge forward and she tastes the dust that has settled on the leather seats but she sees nothing since her head is near her knees and Marcus is slumped over, protecting her, and the air becomes too dense to breathe, as though she’s underwater, and they se
em to be turning because she falls to her left in slow motion and she realizes she should definitely be afraid right now, very afraid, yet she feels separate from it, in it but apart, like she’s that dirt caked behind the driver’s ear, and they spin to their right and Marcus, who is still covering her body with his own—God, he’s heavy—half falls off and at that same moment she feels something sticky like tree sap on her cheek and she touches it and it’s blood. “I guess I’ve been hit,” she says, shifting her body toward Marcus, keeping her voice light because she’s already been flighty today about the woman and her toddler so hysteria now is impermissible, and then she knows, she knows right away and without any doubt. The blood is his and he’s gone.

  SHE’S HEARD IT SAID that everyone’s blood is the same color. An insistent moral position: we are all as one underneath. But it’s not true—or perhaps it’s that once spilled, the hue varies widely based on whether the day is humid, balmy, overcast. On whether the blood splatters on concrete, dirt, gravel, or grass.

  She makes lists in her mind. Pastel rose and watery. Vivid as a police warning light. Eggplant-purple.

  The blood that comes from Marcus’s head is the color of raspberries, and sticky.

  “I HAVE TO FILE,” Caddie pleads. “It’s a story. Even if anybody’s . . . hurt. Especially then.”

  No, no, dear. The voice comes from a great distance as a lady with pewter hair and creamy uniform reaches for Caddie’s arm, mops it with a cotton ball.

  Caddie feels a sting. “What’s in that syringe?” She puts her head back against the pillow, overcome by a desire to close her eyes. Then she tries to sit up, realizing at last that this is a nurse, and a nurse should know something. Caddie has to interview her. “Can you tell me the precise nature of the wounds—”

  The nurse’s head wobbles. You can’t get up yet. Please.

  “How—” Caddie breaks off for a second. “How exactly are you listing their conditions?”

  Lie still, dear. Try to relax. The doctor will be here soon. The pewter-and-cream lady, still out of focus, removes the needle and swabs Caddie’s arm again.

  “I don’t want to relax. I want to file.”

  She feels her arm being patted. It’s all over.

  The nurse’s words echo. Overoveroverover.

  . . .

  THERE’S GRANDMA Jos, sleeves rolled above the bulbs of her elbows, chopping onions for chicken soup, her eyes oozing and her face rigid with loss.

  Grandma Jos, kneeling to pray in the dusky church—one slow knee, then the other—her expression now flaccid with a resignation Caddie hates.

  Grandma Jos, counting and recounting the cookie-jar money for that yellow dress with the lacy collar that Caddie can wear to the school dance, because Grandma Jos says she must look presentable now that she’s “nearly of age.” And though Caddie is embarrassed by the old-fashioned concept, and even more by frilly dresses, she loves this one because it’s starchy in that new-clothes way that the church hand-me-downs never are, and without even the tiniest of stains.

  Grandma Jos, coming down the street in time to see Caddie, already bandaged on one elbow, jumping her rusted bicycle over a makeshift wooden ramp. A growl—Girl!—softened quickly to her public voice. Why does it always have to be dangerous to be fun?

  No. Grandma Jos is not here. Caddie is not a child. She has to pull herself from this fog.

  SHE WAKES UP ALONE in a room devoid of color. Why do they do that in hospitals, as if bland and passionless were comforting? Her left upper arm is sore and taped up; she’s tethered to an IV. She remembers a flight from Lebanon, vaguely. She gets up, pulling the contraption along with her, her hand rigid on the cold metal. Someone has left a newspaper on a table. The Cyprus Mail. So she’s in Nicosia. She flips rapidly through the pages until she finds it: Award-winning British freelance photo-journalist, 41, killed in a . . . She skims to the bottom, where she sees her own name: Catherine Blair, 32 . . . In between her name and his, the words blur.

  What makes her think, then, of that Walt Whitman poem she had to memorize and recite during a sixth grade assembly? But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red. What remote melodrama; no one would publish it today, and still school-children have to learn it. “Whitman,” Caddie says aloud. She grips the newspaper and snickers.

  Somehow, through none of her own doing, the laughter shifts into something else, something loud and unruly that makes her chest vibrate unnaturally. The nurse with the needle returns.

  HOW DID SHE LET THIS HAPPEN? She’s usually so careful, her caution more valuable than a flak jacket. So how could she let him down like this?

  Kill those bastards.

  “AND YOU’RE SURE that Sven and Rob, that my colleagues . . . ?”

  They’re fine. No injuries at all.

  So where are they, then? Where the hell . . . because she needs to ask them why.

  Isn’t there anyone you want us to contact?

  It was all set up. Yaladi wanted to be interviewed, damnit. There was no crossfire to get caught in, no shelling. A simple interview with a famous criminal.

  Some relative somewhere? The nurse, insistent, squeezes Caddie’s hand.

  Relative? Not anyone living. Grandma Jos, the last to die, would be useless anyway. She’d show up straight from the airport with the Lazarus Department Store shopping bag she always carried, and she’d pull out a Bible and suggest they pray together. That would be the extent of it.

  Caddie smooths the thin, bone-colored blanket that covers her legs. She makes her voice absolute. “No one.”

  The nurse disapproves. She stands motionless for a moment as though weighing her options. Eventually she sighs. Maybe you’ll think of someone later. For now, sleep. She reaches to the cart and closes in.

  THE DEEP PULSE OF NIGHT, its shadows a retreat, its tiny noises companions to breath. Night is a woman’s hand spread wide to shield her, to protect her from shame. At night, it’s all right if she finds herself musing without purpose, careening through memories, dallying longer among the dead than the living. It doesn’t matter that pieces of herself have been scattered, that everything she does takes place some long distance away, that her emotions, once so tethered and well behaved, now threaten to cripple her.

  The permissive night: she’s begun to crave it.

  Still, she won’t give in to a dread of dawn; she won’t be sunk by this sunlit heaviness. A flying leap, perfect form with arms outstretched and toes pointed, is what she’ll try for.

  They bury Marcus with a camera and one of those little boxes of raisins he always carried in his pocket. Does someone tell her that, or does she dream it? She isn’t sure. She imagines, against her will, his hands draped over his stomach. Square hands, almost clumsy looking, with squat nails pressed to the ends of his fingers. But when he used them in a rush to insert film or change a lens or focus a shot, they were precise enough to mesmerize her. They became, then, the hands of a creator. When they touched her, she sometimes imagined herself to be one of his cameras. Though she and Marcus always avoided talking of the future, she knew that if she let herself, she could get addicted to those moments.

  As a photographer, he was a master of angle and light and, most of all, passion. His photos of faces revealed secrets and captured essence, raw and unrelieved. He was known for the single shot that exposed a person’s history. “Penetrating,” one award committee said. “Too powerful to ignore.”

  She remembers being with him once in his converted darkroom. They were studying some photos he’d developed, full of expression and gesture, and suddenly he switched off the lights and slipped out, leaving her fumbling first for the wall, then the door.

  Whatja do that for?

  It’s a life skill, Caddie. Always know how to find your way out of a darkroom. Or did he say dark room?

  On the fourth morning, clear of drugs, she writes a letter to Marcus’s parents in London. “A fine photographer and cheerful companion. He loved the story that he died for. Was committed to
his work.” A bit beside the point, but she can’t say what she really means. That he was irreverent, and lemon-tasting, and intense and lighthearted at once, so often exactly what she needed. That already she misses the nights. That miss is not a strong enough verb. And that maybe she should have told him that.

  “CATHERINE BLAIR?”

  She raises her hand, palm out as though blocking light, and sees him through her fingers. A doctor this time. Milky white suit with shit-warmed-over grin. She shifts her body away. “Caddie,” she says. “I go by Caddie.”

  “Well, Caddie. Good to see you sitting up and reading. You must be feeling well today.”

  Christ. This phony cheerfulness is more painful to witness than a child’s tears.

  “You were lucky with the arm. Everything checks out fine. Someone from your newspaper comes tomorrow, I’m told. We’ll probably release you the next day.”

  “Right-o.” One of Marcus’s expressions.

  “In the meantime—” He pulls up a chair as though someone had invited him to sit. “I’m here. We can discuss anything.”

  He emphasizes the last word. He thinks she’ll find comfort, does he, in asking her questions aloud? As though to pronounce them one by one would remove the weight? Okay, doc, tell me. Why, right after a shower, did he smell like citrus and taste like salt? How did he learn to cook spaghetti with such a flourish? Where did he get those lips, far more beautiful than mine, heart-lips, lips that, in truth, belonged on a girl’s face? And that way he had of looking at me sideways and making it feel more intimate than anyone else’s straight-on stare and yet still full of freedom—how did he do that?

  The milk suit pats her arm, murmuring gently, urging her to speak her thoughts. “Go ahead.” The painstakingly modulated voice shakes her free of reverie. “It’s important to pay attention to your feelings.”

  Maybe, doc, but I don’t need to share. Real journalists write in third person for a reason. Don’t you know that, doc, don’t you know anything? They disguise their opinions and never spill their guts, ever. Except maybe sometimes, maybe during the dense hours while children sleep, to a half-stranger in some poorly lit airport terminal in a Third World country after witnessing acts of unspeakable violence in towns with unpronounceable names. But not to neighbors or even lovers and certainly not to doctors. You can check my passport to see the countries I’ve visited, doc, but you’ll never know where my head has been.