Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291)

by Verge Higgins, Lisa

  He held the bottle out to her. She fisted the neck and took a deep swig. Choking on the burn, she sat on the spread and handed the bottle back. “And I thought you were gay.”

  Sam spewed a mouthful of fenny.

  “Oh, I knew I was wrong the moment I met you, Sam, even if I was half dead from fever.” Kate lay down on the blanket, to better take in the smear of stars. “But before that, all I’d known was what Sarah told us, and so I assumed—”

  “Sarah knows quite well where my preferences lie.”

  “Listen, we heard your name mentioned this past year, but in Sarah’s way. Now, anytime Sarah mentions a guy, we probe a little, because, hey, we’ve been wanting to drag that girl back into life for a long time—but she always brushed off our questions, and when we figured out that you didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend, well, what else could we think?” She stretched out, languid, on the blanket. “We had to assume that you were her gay buddy.”

  “So much for the virtue of patience.” Sam curled his hand around the neck of the bottle and upended it. His throat worked as he took a hefty gulp. “In my business,” he said, the liquor making his throat husky, “to talk about the opposite sex like that—like a friend—means something entirely different.”

  Three streaks of light shot across the sky. The heat of the alcohol spread, seeping from her stomach through her veins. Sam was a looming, warm presence, a tall, vibrant man, and she found herself longing for Paul. Young Paul, never preoccupied. Before-children Paul, who’d take his time with her, in the darkness, under the open sky.

  “I’m serious, Kate. It’s different out here. People come and go in this business that Sarah and I are in.” Sam planted the bottle on the blanket between them and rifled through his bag to pull out a pack of cigarettes. “People come out of their brick houses into a new country that has no indoor plumbing. There’s hunger and disease and sometimes there’s shooting. It’s always dangerous. And for two weeks or two months or six months, they live very differently than they’ve ever lived before. They take huge risks. Sometimes they fall arse over tit in love.”

  Kate closed her eyes. “I knew I should have joined the Corps with Sarah.”

  “Sounds cracking, yes.” He lit a cigarette, and the tip glowed in the night. “But listen to this: I spent some time in the Congo. I loved a girl there.”

  “You just spoke the opening line to a romance novel.”

  “Well, here’s how it ends. When this girl’s two months were over, she went back to Kansas. For a couple of months, she rang me up every night. But as she sank back into her old life, the calls tapered off. She started talking about our time together as if it was a dream.” Sam planted the cigarette just off the corner of his blanket, at an angle in the hard-packed dirt, so the smoke curled up as it burned. “That’s what happened to all her memories of the black Brit she’d loved in the Congo. She shoved the whole relationship up on a shelf marked ‘Wild Oats Sown in Youth.’ She was married to a corn farmer in less than a year.”

  Kate turned her head to see his profile against the sky as he lit a second cigarette. She’d forgotten how booze and darkness lowered the usual social barriers to intimate revelations. “Sam, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. That kind of thing happens all the time. We call it ‘crusader sex.’ ”

  “Crusader what?!”

  “It’s a hunger for connection in a dodgy place,” he explained, planting the second cigarette by her feet. “It’s bound to happen when you’re forced outside of your own comfortable life. You feel a tug towards a stranger, a burn for deeper connections.”

  Kate understood, better than he knew. It explained why, tonight, surrounded by jungle, stretched out on a blanket underneath the stars, her body was prickly with misplaced sexual awareness, and she couldn’t get the memory of Paul’s lanky body out of her mind.

  She spread her hand over her belly.

  Paul, why didn’t you just come here with me?

  “You know,” Kate said, as Sam reached for a third cigarette, “those things will kill you.”

  “Yes, but it’ll take a while.” The tip glowed red in the darkness. “In the meantime,” he said, as he planted the third cigarette in the dirt by her head, “the smoke will surround us and keep mosquitoes away.”

  “Ah.”

  “Occupational hazard,” Sam explained, as he stretched out a friendly distance away. “After your first bout of malaria, you learn to be disciplined about bed nets and repellent. After your first bout with crusader sex, you practice a different sort of discipline. Patience and self-denial. Especially around the one you most care about.” He laced his fingers behind his head. “Which is why I make a point of steering clear of hungry-eyed ladies on their first overseas outing.”

  “Um… is this when I promise to be careful?”

  Sam rumbled with laughter. “Oh, no, I wasn’t talking about you, Kate. Any fool could see that you’re at the reeling end of a long, strong rope—soon enough, it’ll be tugging you back. I was talking about Sarah. And me. Working together for a year, and not once…”

  He let out a long, ragged sigh.

  “Oh, Sam.” Kate felt herself melt a little. “Don’t blame yourself. Sarah hasn’t been able to get very far in any relationship,” though she, Rachel, and Jo had encouraged every fledgling little hope. “We figure she just can’t get past Colin.”

  “Oh, yes, our good Dr. O’Rourke. Now, there’s a perfect example of overblown crusader sex.”

  “No, no, no way.” Kate propped herself up on one elbow. “He’s no flash in the pan. She’s worshipped him forever.”

  A muscle, burnished by moonlight, moved in Sam’s cheek. “Sarah is a woman of great loyalty and strong convictions. But Dr. O’Rourke is her one blind spot.”

  “You know, this Indian booze is pretty strong, but I’m following the conversation well enough to know we’re both talking about the same man. The surgeon who stitched a kid together using spit and bits of twig. The guy who convinced a whole village to give the kids the measles vaccine—”

  “Sarah did that,” he said sharply. “O’Rourke arrived with the vaccines after Sarah had already spent months working on the mothers. She’d earned their respect and their trust.” He made a low, angry sound in his throat. “She never takes credit for her own successes.”

  Kate knew that was true. The most infuriating thing about Sarah was her modesty.

  “The worst part of this,” Sam added, “was that I was the one who drove the bloody bastard right up to her door.”

  Kate bolted upright. “You were there? In Paraguay?”

  “Oh, yes.” The pale starlight glazed the sharpness of his cheekbones. “That’s when I first met both of them.”

  Sam went silent, but it was a tense silence, and his gaze drifted through the wavering haze of cigarette smoke, to some indistinct point beyond a southern constellation. Kate stayed still, hoping he’d tell her his side of the story. She’d heard Sarah’s side, of course, to the point of being able to mimic it, dreamy sighs and all. Over the years, the tale had taken on the sheen of a myth. And Kate couldn’t help being just a little selfishly excited, at the prospect of being—finally!—able to understand the hold that Colin had on Sarah.

  “Sarah had been alone in the camp for a while.” That muscle flexed in Sam’s cheek, more fiercely than before. “I’d see her once or twice a month, whenever I dropped off supplies. The Guaraní don’t usually take well to outsiders. They only tolerated me because I came infrequently and usually brought things they needed. But they treated Sarah like a young aunt, almost instantly. She’s Sarah.” He shrugged. “She has a quality.”

  “Like her feet don’t quite touch the ground.”

  “Mmm.” Sam took a breath, and his chest rose, then fell, as he blew it out on a sigh. “So one day I arrived with a boot-full of vaccine and another Peace Corps volunteer, a doctor sent to talk the locals into getting their children vaccinated. He was a nice enough chap. We chatted about the usual t
hings—how long you in for, how pretty are the birds, were there any pubs. He didn’t strike me as anything special.

  “So we get to the village, and there’s something going on. The women are wailing; I can hear them half a mile out. Kids flowed out of the village and tumbled all over our car. They’re speaking Guaraní, and I only knew enough to understand two words—crocodile, caiman, and boy, mitõ. Clearly, some kid was hurt.”

  Kate curled her fingers around the neck of the bottle. She held it out to Sam, but he waved it away.

  “So Dr. O’Rourke is out of the jeep like a shot. The kids knew he was a doctor—any white guy around there had to be an engineer looking to find oil, or someone from an NGO. So they dragged him into one of the huts, where Sarah was struggling to stop this kid from bleeding out.

  “O’Rourke peels away the cloth and pokes at the leg. Sarah is covered in blood, and her face is gleaming with tears or sweat, but she’s not looking at me, she’s staring at the doctor.”

  “She told me,” Kate said, slapping her thigh as one of the growing swarm of gnats pierced the halo of cigarette smoke, “that she thought he’d dropped straight down from heaven.”

  “Yeah, riding shotgun in my jeep.” Sam sat up and rifled around in his pack. “Anyway, Colin starts talking about taking this kid to a hospital. Now, some of the doctors, they come to these camps, and they think there’s a chemist around the next bend. They’re asking for bandages and antibiotic ointment and can’t you get me a pair of tweezers and where’s the penicillin? Some doctors, they arrive, and they think they can punch out for lunch.

  “So I tell him a hospital is a hundred hard miles away, and he’s staring at me as if I’m crazy. But—I’ll give the man his due—it only takes a minute for him to figure it out.” Sam thrust a small tube at her—mosquito repellent—and settled back on his elbow. “Then he starts barking orders. Sarah and I are the only ones who understand English, so we’re digging out morphine and the sutures, and for the next six bloody hours this guy sews this kid’s leg back together. And there’s Sarah standing right beside him, looking up at him like he’s the sun.”

  As Kate slathered the fierce-smelling stuff on her skin, Sam pulled the fenny to his chest, but he didn’t drink it. He twirled it, making whorls in the blanket. “I saw her fall in love that day.”

  Kate heard his regret, shimmering in the air.

  He laughed, a brief, mirthless laugh that died with a shake of his head. “You know what’s the real irony in this, Kate, my girl?” He fixed the bottle to his lips and took a long, deep sip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “I come to find out that Colin didn’t even do the right thing. Colin broke every medical rule there was, trying to stitch that boy back together. The safer, the better decision would have been to amputate quickly and close the boy up. Instead, he risked six hours of surgery in a filthy hut. The infections that followed should have killed that kid, slowly and more painfully. The chances that boy would survive were one in a million.”

  “But he did.”

  “Yes. Colin performed his miracle.”

  “Right before the eyes,” Kate murmured, handing him back the tube, “of a minister’s daughter.”

  “A minister’s daughter who can’t comprehend deceit.” Sam tossed the repellent toward his pack with more force than necessary. “Sarah didn’t see it coming. When it was time for the doctor to leave, he made the usual promises. He’d keep in touch, he said, they’d meet up again. Pretty lies.”

  “Maybe he meant them.”

  “Good intentions wouldn’t buy you a pissing pot in Gatumba.” He finished the dregs and dropped the bottle on its side on the blanket. “The doctor returned to the States and put her heart up on the shelf, marked ‘Wild Oats Sown in Paraguay.’ And that was that.”

  “But not,” Kate murmured, “for Sarah.”

  Sam flopped down upon the blanket again, lacing his fingers under his head, searching the open sky to avoid her gaze. He flexed his shoulders, as if a rock jutted into his back through the blanket. Kate wondered when Sam had realized he loved Sarah. Was it in the past year, since they’d become reacquainted? Or had he been shadowing her since Paraguay, hoping for her heart to change?

  And Kate’s own heart moved, as she thought of Paul, Paul and herself, as they’d been the evening they’d met—locked, riveted, joined. That very first evening, they’d known with certainty, This is the one; this was forever. How terrible it must be, to feel that way and not have the feeling reciprocated. How terrible it would be to lose that connection forever.

  A worry pricked her, a small thing, like the twinge of a splinter. Paul was so very far away. And they’d parted on such bad terms.

  She shook off the memory. She wouldn’t let it ruin her first vacation in years. Paul just needed a few days to come to his senses before he finally bought a plane ticket to Bangalore, to join his wife in adventure.

  She forced herself back to the jungle, with its screaming bugs and brilliant stars. “Sam,” she said, “for what it’s worth, the girls and I have been trying to get Sarah to move on for years.”

  “Yes, well, good things come to those who wait, and I’ve been waiting. Oh, I’ve been waiting. Burundi is a hard place, Kate—it breaks you down like no other—and these past months, I’d been giving some serious thought to leaving.” His mirthless smile looked more like a grimace. “I stayed for the chance to wear Sarah down with my ruthless charm.”

  You’re the better man, Sam.

  “ ’Course,” he continued, “things got a little weird when I got the letter from your friend Rachel.”

  Kate startled. “Wh—what?”

  “Yes. A little white envelope from a woman I met only once. Rachel told me to stay close to Sarah in the next few months. So I tracked Sarah’s movements like a good Boy Scout. Now here I am, an unwilling witness to her undoing.”

  “Don’t feel so bad. Rachel made me jump out of an airplane.”

  “Bloody hell.” Sam flexed his elbows, then stretched his arms flat against the ground. “I might’ve preferred that to watching the damn doctor rip Sarah’s heart out again.”

  Damn Rachel. Interfering, worldwide.

  “You know, in the weeks before Sarah left Burundi, things between us were heating up. In a very encouraging way.” Sam shifted on the blanket. “I thought I was finally, finally, breaking through the wall she kept throwing up against me. Because of Rachel’s letter, that wall now has a name.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “that’s hopeful… isn’t it?”

  “I’m not so sure. When a woman like Sarah falls in love, she falls in love forever.”

  Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

  Rockefeller Outpatient Pavilion

  Chemo Ward

  Dear Sarah,

  All these months, I’ve wished over and over again that you weren’t half a world away. I’m a mess, sweetie. I’ve got cancer. I’ve had it for a while and it has hit me hard. I’m writing this in the chemo ward, in my one last desperate attempt to conquer the disease. Since you’re reading this letter… well, I guess the cancer won.

  I’m so, so sorry for not telling you sooner. I’m so, so sorry for breaking the news like this. I could have handled so many things better, I know, but there’s no use regretting the past. I’m trying to focus on my friends and my family now, and what I can do with the time I have left.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, Sarah. Do you remember when we first met? It was the first day of the rock-climbing club. You wore Birkenstocks and an ankle-length skirt, and you swept into the room like a warm breeze. There’s serenity around you. All of us—myself, Jo, Kate—we all need that. When you’re around, our worlds are put into the proper prospective.

  But, Sarah, there’s one thing in your life in which your perception is distorted. Yes, darling. It’s Colin. Years ago, when you two first split up, it was reasonable for you to mourn for a time. But that time has long passed. Your grief has morphed into something hard. It shie
lds you from heartbreak, but it also shields you from true joy. You’ve become blind to love. You wouldn’t recognize it, even if it stood tall, dark, and handsome right in front of you.

  You mustn’t hide from love, Sarah, no matter how difficult your world will become after. You need to find Colin. You need to face him. You need to win him back, or finally say good-bye.

  Please, Sarah. I want you to do this for yourself. But if you can’t… then do it for me.

  Love,

  Rachel

  chapter nine

  I have loved you forever.

  Sarah lay still and quiet, exquisitely conscious of the fibers of the cotton sheet grazing her naked skin. A fan whirred above. Pale light seeped through the blinds. If she got out of this bed, padded across the room, and opened them, she’d see nothing but monsoon-washed Indian skies. But there was no reason to open them. Her world—her entire life—hung in the balance right here, right now, in this king-sized bed. Beside her, Colin lay on his back, his broad chest rising in a slow rhythm.

  She’d forgotten so much. The darkness of his eyelashes, tipped in gold. How quickly the stubble of his beard grew. And the range of colors in it—deep blond, little-boy red, and, sprinkled here and there, a bit of lucid white.

  I have loved you forever.

  She said it to herself out of long habit—she said it to herself because she didn’t dare say it aloud—not yet, not now. He stirred in his sleep, and she thought, Don’t wake. She wanted to lock this moment into her memory—this sweet, fragile sense of sleepy communion—where she could pretend that the last fourteen years hadn’t happened and that they were still young and alone in Paraguay. If he woke now, then he’d awaken that other presence as well. That ghost of the other woman.

  Suddenly he opened his eyes.

  “Sarah.”

  She kissed him to drown the soft incredulity in his voice. His mouth felt hot. She grasped his jaw to hold the embrace. Stubble prickled against her palm. She slid her knee up his leg. It had been fourteen years since she’d been with Colin, but her body remembered.