“Remember the piece I did on the evolution of Irish Setters for Smithsonian a while back?”
“My mom bought a copy for me. I haven’t seen it yet—but I will.”
“Doesn’t matter. It was just a fun piece with nothing earth-shattering in it.” He leaned forward and nestled his cheek against her hair. “I became friends with one of the Setter owners, Eric, a fiction writer who used to live here with his wife before they moved to Maryland. When he found out I was looking for a place for us to rent last summer, he and his wife, Julia, suggested we stay here. Then, when our plans fell apart, Eric said we should come whenever we had the time.”
“He must be pretty famous to afford houses on two coasts.”
“It’s complicated, but yeah, Eric’s books do okay.”
“Eric . . . ?”
“Lawson.”
“No wonder Smithsonian wanted him included in the piece. I see his books everywhere.” She didn’t say anything for several seconds, and then asked, “How long have you been here?”
“When I asked Julia about using the house in January, she invited us to come early. There’s a long-standing tradition with the year-round people to celebrate New Year’s together, and since it was Eric and Julia’s turn to host the party, they thought, if we came early, it would give us a chance to meet the neighbors. You weren’t available, so I came alone.”
Lindsey was hit with a jealousy so ugly and so uncharacteristic that it took several seconds to understand what it was.
“Was it a good party?” She thought about how she’d celebrated—after an exhausting day spent meeting with editors, she’d propped herself up in bed in a less-than-wonderful hotel room in New York, going through her pictures of the “Lost Children in the Congo” while out of the corner of her eye she watched the ball fall in Times Square on a ten-year-old television. She’d considered calling Matthew, but wasn’t sure where he was or what time zone he was in and figured they would celebrate in their own way as soon as they were together again. At the time she’d thought he would call her. Now she knew why he hadn’t.
“As a matter of fact,” Matthew said, “it was a great party. I’m glad I took them up on their offer.”
“You should have told me. I might have bailed out of my meetings sooner.”
As she’d known he would, Matthew instantly responded to the might have.
“I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on you,” he said with barely constrained sarcasm.
She waited, looking for something safe to defuse the tension. “Have you ever thought about how few mutual friends we have?”
“We’ve never been drawn to the same kind of people, not even in college.”
“Still, don’t you think it’s a little strange that you know people who would give you their house for a month and you never said one word to me about them?”
“No. I know a lot of people I’ve never talked to you about. Are you saying I know every one of your friends?”
“I don’t have the luxury of having casual friends.”
“And this is supposed to be my fault?”
Lindsey shook her head as if trying to clear her thoughts. “What are we doing?”
“How I got the house doesn’t matter, but you should know they didn’t give it to me originally. At least not when we were supposed to be here in July. Once we got to know each other, they said it felt odd to accept money from someone they considered a friend, and they gave me back the deposit I’d made for July. You’d like them, Lindsey. They’re terrific people.”
“Sometimes I feel like a rescued dog that no one wants to adopt.”
“Maybe it’s because you snarl every time someone tries to pet you.”
“Ouch.” She flinched at the truth buried in his retort. It wasn’t as if she brought anything to the party worthy of an invitation. Lately she’d found it hard to like herself. How could she expect anyone else to respond to her edgy charm?
She had treated the people she most depended on, Matthew and her parents, with careless disregard for the past two years, expecting them to understand and forgive her moods and outbursts—if not now, then once they knew what she’d been going through.
She’d taken her parents for granted to the point of abuse. They’d subsisted on sporadic phone calls and rare visits. The last time they’d seen her was almost three years ago when Matthew took an assignment for National Geographic Traveler about pick-your-own apple farmers in upstate New York. He was less than an hour from their farm while Lindsey was in the city trying, unsuccessfully, to get a visa extension for Belarus. As soon as she realized that nothing she could do would make the process go any faster, she agreed to join him while she waited. Her parents were thrilled, Matthew loved having her tag along, and after the first few days she actually started treating coffee like a beverage instead of a drug.
It wasn’t until she was waiting for transport out of Peshawar, Pakistan, months later, that she experienced a flash of understanding about her seeming determination to drive away everyone who loved her. If she let them in, they would see the cracks in her mental stability, and they would want to do something to help. Someday she’d be ready to accept that help. But not yet. She wasn’t ready to face those consequences.
Matthew released her, walked over to the fireplace, and grabbed a section of the newspaper to start a fire. As he crumpled the paper he glanced at the date. December 26. The day after Christmas. The day a decade earlier when his twin sister, Christine, had died half a world away in Thailand. She’d gone there with her partner to formally open the clinic they’d been working on for two years, one that would focus on children with operable birth defects.
Her Christmas present to him that year—an intricately carved jade elephant pendant—arrived a week after her body was identified. Her partner was never found, assumed to have been washed out to sea along with over 37,000 others who simply disappeared with the receding tsunami. The elephant became Matthew’s personal talisman and his last physical connection to his sister.
His parents had dealt with their grief by selling everything they owned and moving to Thailand to help victims of the disaster rebuild their lives. Matthew arranged his schedule to visit them as often as possible, but there never seemed to be enough time to catch up.
Matthew turned to meet Lindsey’s questioning gaze. “What’s really strange is why you’re asking me this now. You’ve never wanted to know about my friends or what I do when we’re not together.”
She shook her head and hugged herself. “Nothing,” she said. And then, “Everything.”
“We need to talk,” Matthew acknowledged with a deep sigh. “I was going to wait, but—”
She ignored him. “What happened to us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why aren’t we in the bedroom making love? It wasn’t so long ago that we could barely make it out of the airport before we were tearing each other’s clothes off. Hell, I remember making love to you in the airport. And more than one. What’s changed?”
He stared at her long and hard, struggling for the right words, something that wouldn’t sound as petty as it was. “Because I’m mad at you,” he reluctantly admitted. “You were in New York an entire week, and you never called.”
“You could have called me.”
“And interrupt one of your high-powered meetings? Fat chance.”
“I don’t work at night.”
“Since when?”
She didn’t have an answer.
“You stayed in the Congo twice as long as you were supposed to, and I suspect it was a hell of a lot longer than you needed to. Why, I can only imagine.”
He put a lit match to the paper and kindling and closed the screen, waiting for the flame to consume old news and start the strips of pitch-filled pine tucked under the oak. Within seconds, the popcorn sound of the fire coming to life filled the room. Even without any immediate actual heat, the orange glow made the room seem warmer.
“You never did explain
what was so important that we had to cancel July,” he said. “I’d turned down an assignment I’d fought months to get. The editor was so furious she swore I’d never work for their magazine again. Then you called a week before you were supposed to meet me and canceled like I was some last-minute lunch date you could just blow off without an explanation. For the past two years I’ve done everything I can to find a way for us to be together, and you’ve acted like you can’t be bothered.”
Instead of answering, or trying to defend herself, Lindsey shrugged in a gesture of defeat. “I can’t fight with you about this. Not now.”
He’d been gearing up for battle, and she’d pulled a white flag out of her pocket. This was a woman Matthew didn’t know, and it sent a warning chill through him. Their ongoing argument forgotten, he asked, “Have you thought about seeing a doctor?”
She nodded.
“Well?”
“She said I was suffering from PTSD.”
Not what he was expecting, but not surprising. “What kind of doctor did you see?”
She turned away to stare at the wall as if he would be able to see something in her face that she wasn’t ready to share. “A psychiatrist.”
She might as well have hit him. For Lindsey to even consider seeing a psychiatrist meant as much as the diagnosis. “When?”
“After I came home from Afghanistan the last time.” She’d spent almost a month photographing military field hospitals, and for some reason the shield that normally protected her from the daily doses of heartache she photographed developed a tear. Things began to slip through—a wedding ring placed in a personal property bag held for a young man who no longer had hands, a shoulder on a skinny recruit from Mississippi with half of a heart-shaped tattoo missing, a twenty-year-old girl who’d lost most of her ear and half of her face absently wondering what she was going to do with all her extra earrings.
“That was why you didn’t meet me in Italy?”
“I couldn’t get a flight that would get me there in time. And then you got the assignment in Uzbekistan . . .”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t.” She looked down at her hands and saw they were curled into fists, her close-cut nails digging into her palms. With effort, she straightened her fingers and stuffed her hands in her pockets. “Every time I tried, something got in the way. You were either on your way somewhere or I was.”
There was more she wasn’t telling, he could see it in her eyes and the way she held herself—as if she would come apart if she let down her guard for even an instant. He crossed the room and took her in his arms. “If I gave you the impression I don’t want you, then we have a problem bigger than either of us imagined.”
Without waiting for her to reply, he cupped her head in his hands and kissed her, trying to express in touch what he’d clumsily failed to do with words.
She dug her fingers into his thick brown hair to bring him closer still. Tears slipped from her closed lids and gave their kiss a salty taste. “I love you, Matthew,” she whispered. “No matter what else you know, you have to know that.”
He picked her up and cradled her against his chest, fighting a wave of fear at how little of her there was to hold. “You’re the one constant in my life, Lindsey.”
Chapter 3
Not trusting that the bedroom door would close without creaking, Lindsey left it open. She checked one last time to see that Matthew was still asleep before she picked up her jeans and backpack and went into the living room, torn between wishing he would wake up and go with her and looking forward to a morning without the pop of gunfire to put her on edge and only the fog for company.
Their lovemaking had gone long into the night, first with a seemingly insatiable need and then with an exquisite tenderness that left her not only sated but consumed by a feeling of hope.
Afterward, in the darkness, with the only light stealing past the curtained window from a shrouded full moon, she’d felt safe again. Safe enough to remember . . .
When Matthew had texted that they would have to postpone meeting in Italy for two weeks because of snow leopard kittens his guide had discovered in Uzbekistan, Lindsey allowed David Ambrose, her editor, to talk her into going to the Congo to cover the waves of children crossing the country in a desperate attempt to reach the relative safety of a refugee camp.
This time it wasn’t just frantic boys trying to escape the marauders who would turn them into soldiers—it was terrified girls looking to escape what the United Nations had called “the Rape Center of the World.” Word reaching the outside said that several refugee groups contained girls barely past infancy. It was the girls David wanted photographed. The more desperate and heart-wrenching the better.
For all of five minutes, she had tried to turn down the assignment, saying the stabilizer on her primary lens needed fixing and her camera had major electronic problems. David countered with an offer to overnight a new camera and lens. Finally, she pled exhaustion. David immediately jumped to the inducement he only brought out when he was desperate: how often in her lifetime would she be given the chance to make a real difference?
When even that didn’t work, he finally settled on the single argument that Lindsey could never set aside, no matter how pressing her own personal needs were. The children were dying—now. If someone didn’t find a way to draw the attention of a world already saturated with photographs of infants with distended bellies being held by mothers whose breasts were as dry as their tear ducts, then it would be impossible to save even one of them.
If not her, then who?
How many children would die because Lindsey needed time off?
How important could that time off be compared to the life of even one child?
In the end, she did what they’d both known she would do all along and agreed to photograph the children who flowed over the landscape like blood from a mortally wounded promise of peace.
She left for the Congo as soon as the new camera and lens arrived, hopping on a cargo plane carrying medical supplies for Doctors Without Borders. Instead of sleeping, she thought of images of the carnage from a civil war that had gone on for over half a century and ways to bring a fresh eye to the story.
Without something eye-catching, she would lose the nano-second attention span of a world that preferred newspapers and television newscasts that concentrated on the latest celebrity news—divorces, drunk driving, homicides, suicides. Those were the stories—the ones that took the rich and famous down a peg or two—that people talked about at work the next day. Stories you could walk away from and not feel a lingering, haunting sadness.
She needed a photograph that could eclipse a picture of Donald Trump’s hair in a windstorm. Without it, the donations the aid workers needed to provide a life-sustaining cup of beans for a three-year-old would disappear.
The story couldn’t wait while she waited around for Matthew to come back from Uzbekistan. What was her life, or even her sanity, compared to the opportunity to save an eight-year-old girl who was wandering the jungle, wondering not if she would be raped but when? Didn’t every child deserve to know, if only once in his or her life, what it felt like to be safe?
She’d left a message for Matthew with his agent that she was postponing their trip to Italy and she would be in touch as soon as she had cell service.
They managed to connect by phone ten days later. She told Matthew she was going to be in the Congo even longer than she’d told his agent. He’d seemed okay with it at the time and said he would go to South Africa to cover the trial of a group of rhino poachers—it was a rare event that anyone had even been arrested. He was hoping for the perfect ending to a story he’d been working on for two years—a conviction.
Lindsey and the fixer David had arranged to accompany her in the Congo found and joined a group of thirty children, mostly girls between nine and thirteen. They’d been traveling without adults for more than a month. Some had been forced out of their homes by parents who could no longer feed
them, some had been separated from their families during a militia attack, and some were the lone surviving members of what had once been extensive families. All journeyed with one goal in mind—to reach a refugee camp in Yida. They’d been told that they weren’t wanted, but they knew they would be given a bowl of beans to eat and, at worst, a piece of cardboard to sleep on. It didn’t matter that the hut that would shelter them was vermin infested, it was safe.
What none of the parents who’d set these young girls on their journey had understood was that they would become targets for bands of men who treated even the youngest like members of a transient brothel—put on the road solely for their entertainment.
Without an adult to guide them, the children chose their own leader, Sittina, a wisp of a girl as determined to get them to the camp as a mother leopard with cubs to feed on the trail of a wounded wildebeest. With the innate ability of a child born in the bush, she taught them to turn into ghosts, scattering and fading into their surroundings at the sound of a distant vehicle or a single footfall on dry grass. This extreme caution kept them alive, but it also slowed their progress, and that eventually took its toll on the weakest and sickest as they went days and then nearly a week without food. The end was inevitable for some of them when, out of desperation, they turned to eating indigestible grasses.
At night they huddled together in whatever shelter they could find, uselessly covering their heads with their arms at the whistling sounds of aerial bombs, taking turns standing guard with sticks they had fashioned into weapons to use against opportunistic lions looking for an easy meal.
There were some children—mostly the ones who carried infants and toddlers on their backs like cords of wood—who were the last of their families. Their stories were different yet had a familiarity that, after a while, made them all sound the same—families slaughtered for no other reason than the misfortune of having built their grass huts and raised their sheep and cattle herds on the wrong side of an imaginary dividing line between the least developed nations in Africa.
Although Lindsey was there as a photographer, not as a writer, she asked endless questions, mostly to try to make sense out of the insanity that had inspired the children’s journey from one side of a war-torn country to the other.
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