The pilot suddenly shouted to us, but I couldn’t make out what she said. Janette, closer to the cockpit, understood though, and she turned to me with a wild look in her eyes.
“She said to brace for a crash!” she shouted.
“What?” My heart rocketed in my chest.
“Brace!” Janette shouted again, as she grabbed the post on the cabin wall.
I tightened my grip on the metal ring as the helicopter suddenly bucked, then rolled to one side. Losing my grasp, I slid across the floor, the litters pinning me to the wall. I ran my hands over the wall, searching in vain for something to hang on to. Drawing up my legs, I wrapped my arms around them, and saw the dark carpet of trees zooming toward us. I buried my head against my knees as we broke through the treetops, finally letting go of the scream I’d been holding inside.
18
Rebecca
REBECCA WAS STITCHING THE PAPER-THIN SKIN OF AN ELDERLY man’s forearm when she spotted Dorothea striding toward her in the tent.
“Come see me when you’re through with this patient,” Dorothea said.
Rebecca glanced at the string of patients sitting and standing along the wall of the tent. It was nearly midnight and she was far behind. “Can it wait?” she asked from behind her mask as she knotted the final stitch.
“No.” Dorothea was already walking away. “I’m in my office.”
Rebecca looked at the man whose arm she was stitching. “She’d better have a good reason, huh?” she asked him as she snipped the thread.
He looked over at the line of patients. “A damn good one,” he agreed.
She found Dorothea talking on the sat phone in the office behind the ticket counter, which she’d claimed for DIDA use in the last couple of days.
“Gotta go,” Dorothea said, hanging up and sliding the antenna back into the phone. She motioned toward one of the three chairs in the room, although she herself stood leaning against the desk. “Sit,” she said.
“What’s up?” Rebecca stayed on her feet. If she sat down, she was afraid she’d fall asleep.
“The chopper Maya was on had some sort of problem,” Dorothea said. “The pilot sent a Mayday message and said she needed to make an emergency landing.”
Rebecca frowned, searching for a different meaning behind the words than the one Dorothea was implying. “Where are they?” she asked. “Can another chopper get to them?” She looked up to see Adam in the doorway.
“Come in, Adam,” Dorothea said.
Adam glanced at Rebecca as he walked into the room. “What’s going on?”
“Maya’s helicopter had to make an emergency landing,” Rebecca said.
“No.” He looked from her to Dorothea. “Where?”
“They don’t know where,” Dorothea said. “The chopper has an ELT on it—you know, like a GPS system? But they haven’t been able to pick up a location for it.”
Rebecca leaned forward. “You mean, they get a signal from the ELT but can’t pin down the—”
“No,” Dorothea interrupted her. “They’re not getting a signal. It’s not functioning.”
“What would cause it to malfunction?” Adam ran his hand over the stubble on his cheeks, and Rebecca noticed that his fingers were shaking. He looked as exhausted as she felt.
“I have no idea,” Dorothea said. “You know, maybe it was the sort of mechanical problem that causes—” she shrugged her shoulders “—a massive shutdown of everything. I just don’t know.”
Rebecca remembered their helicopter flight to the terminal. Water everywhere below them. Where would the pilot find a dry spot to land? If they were farther inland, though, they’d be okay.
“How long were they into the flight before he called in the emergency?” she asked.
“It’s a she,” Dorothea said, “and I don’t know that either.” She sighed, and for the first time since her arrival at the airport, Rebecca saw a weariness in her mentor’s eyes. “Lots of questions and no answers right now,” Dorothea added.
“Are they searching for the chopper?” Adam asked.
“It’s too dark,” Dorothea said. “They’ll start flying over the route it was on first thing in the morning.”
“They should be looking now,” Rebecca said.
“Too dark,” Dorothea repeated.
“Maya will be so afraid,” Rebecca said to Adam.
“I just hope she’s alive enough to be afraid,” Adam said.
“Oh, don’t say that, Adam!” She remembered envying Maya the night before. Wanting her to go home. The memory turned her stomach.
“Let’s not get dramatic about this,” Dorothea said. “She and everyone aboard are probably fine—or in the case of the critical patients, as fine as they can be. Most likely, the pilot found a safe place to put down and for whatever reason, the ELT just isn’t functioning. And of course, the cell towers are still down, so they have no phones.”
“Maybe they’re all trying to walk out,” Rebecca said.
“No, they’d stay with the patients,” Adam said. “Maya wouldn’t leave them.”
“You’re right.” Rebecca could picture Maya making that decision to stay. That was Maya’s strength: caring for her patients. She decided right then that she would hold tight to that strong, safe image of her sister. But even as she tried to keep the thought in her mind, it faded away. Maya would be afraid. She’d be immobilized by fear.
There was no way she could sleep, so Rebecca went for a long run around the exterior of the airport, through the parking lots, across the tarmac and back to the parking lots again. Then she worked through the rest of the night. She splinted legs, stitched cuts, medicated children suffering from the nausea and diarrhea running rampant through the terminal, and calmed worried parents, all the while a mantra playing in her head. She’s okay, she’s okay, she’s okay. At the other end of the tent, she watched Adam going through the same motions. They were the only doctors up all night. The only two people in the entire terminal, she thought, who had no desire at all for sleep.
As soon as the sky began to lighten in the morning, she and Adam hurried out to the tarmac to talk to the pilots who’d be searching for Maya’s helicopter.
“I’m going with you,” Rebecca said to one of them. She was already climbing into the cabin when he grabbed her arm.
“Better if you stay here, Doc,” he said. “We’ll need the room to pick up evacuees along the route, and we’ll be calling Ms. Ludlow with regular updates.”
“I am going,” Rebecca insisted, but this time Adam took her arm and drew her away from the cabin.
“Let them do their job.” His face was pale beneath the dark stubble. “And we’ll do ours here. It’s not going to make a difference if you’re in one of the choppers or not.”
She thought of fighting them, but knew they were right. Besides, what if she was in one chopper and Maya was picked up by another and brought back to the airport? Rebecca wanted to be there the moment Maya stepped onto the tarmac.
As the morning wore on, though, with the calls to Dorothea from the pilots few and far between, she began to regret her decision. She tried to concentrate on her patients, constantly checking her two-way radio to make sure it was turned on.
By noon, there had been no sighting of the downed helicopter. Everyone’s best guess was that it had flown off course to find a clear spot to land.
“I’m going out on the next chopper,” Adam told her when Dorothea radioed them with the news—or lack of it. They were in the concourse, standing together in a sort of invisible bubble that blocked out the chaos surrounding them.
“I’m going, too,” she said. “I should have gone earlier.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Adam said. “And you should stay here in case she shows up. Get some sleep. There’s another DMAT team arriving from Texas this afternoon, so Dorothea said for us to do what we need to do. That’s go on the chopper for me and sleep for you.”
“I can’t possibly sleep, Adam.”
“You need to, Bec,” he said. “You’re wiped out. When I get back, it’ll be my turn, okay?”
Rebecca stared hard at his worried face. “When you get back, I want Maya to be with you.”
He looked through the terminal windows toward the tarmac, shoving his hands into his pockets. His shoulders sagged. “This is my fault,” he said. “She came here to please me.”
“She was handling it so well,” Rebecca said.
“I know.” He shut his eyes. “She was great.”
Rebecca slapped his arm. “She is great!” she said. “Don’t talk about her in the past tense.”
He gave her a tired smile, then drew her into a hug. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. She felt his bristly cheek brush her temple. “Go to sleep, okay?”
She didn’t sleep. Didn’t even bother trying. She treated patient after patient in the urgent-care tent, taking a break every once in a while to run to Dorothea’s office to see if she’d heard anything.
“I’ll let you know the moment I do,” Dorothea said, looking up from the desk she’d taken over as her own.
“It’s getting too late.” Rebecca looked at her watch. It was after six. Adam had left on the chopper around one. If he disappeared, too, she didn’t know what she’d do. “I need someone to take me up,” she said. “I can’t stand this sitting around.”
“Adam’s chopper refueled in Fayetteville,” Dorothea said. “That much I know. They’re going to keep looking until it’s too dark to see.”
Rebecca swiped both hands through her hair. She was no good at waiting. She never had been.
“Get some sleep, babe,” Dorothea said. “The Texas DMAT team is getting oriented and they’ll be up and running any minute.”
“Like I’m not needed,” Rebecca scoffed. “You’re already missing Adam and Maya.”
“I’d rather have you wide awake tomorrow than screwing up tonight.” Dorothea stood, giving her a shove toward the door. “Up to the conference room,” she said. “Seriously. I don’t want you back in the tent until morning.”
She didn’t go to the conference room. Instead, she carried her cigarettes and a bottle of water out to the tarmac and sat on the edge of an empty baggage cart to smoke. The air was hot and sticky from an earlier rain. A few helicopters were still doing their dance of bringing evacuees in and airlifting the most critical patients out. They had their lights on now as the sky grew dusky. She squinted into the distance at each incoming chopper, trying to determine if it might be the blue-and-yellow bird that had carried Adam away that afternoon.
Where the hell was he? By the time she had lit her third cigarette, the string of incoming helicopters had nearly stopped for the night. Maybe his chopper had landed someplace inland. But then why hadn’t Adam contacted Dot?
She was about to stub out her cigarette when she saw a light in the distance, the chopper a dark smudge against the evening sky. She knew, before even seeing the color of the helicopter, that it was the one carrying Adam. She jumped to her feet. In her mind, she saw him climbing out of the chopper, holding his hand out to help Maya deplane. She saw it so clearly that by the time the helicopter set down on the tarmac, she was smiling.
“Rebecca!” She turned to see Dorothea walking toward her from the terminal, sat phone in her hand. Even in the dusky light, Rebecca was able to read the grim look on Dorothea’s face, and she lost her smile. She turned back to the helicopter, where Adam jumped from the cabin. He didn’t reach up to help Maya deplane. Instead, he started walking toward her.
“What?” Rebecca shouted, looking from him to Dorothea and back again.
Adam reached her. He put his hands on her arms. The flesh beneath his eyes looked dark and raw.
“It crashed,” he said.
“What crashed?” She shook her head rapidly, as if she could stop the words from coming out of his mouth.
“We saw it, but we couldn’t get to it.”
She tried to hit him, to shut him up, but he caught her hand, surprise in his eyes. Rebecca felt Dorothea put an arm around her waist as if she was afraid she might fall over.
“Oh, God.” Rebecca pressed her hands to her mouth. “What…could you see anything? Anyone? What do you mean, you couldn’t get to it?”
“Listen,” he said. He motioned toward the baggage cart. Its metal sides glinted in the light from the chopper. “Let’s sit, okay?”
“No!” She pulled free of Dorothea’s arm. “Tell me!”
“I will.” He nearly barked the words, then closed his eyes. “I will,” he said more calmly. “I just need to sit.”
The three of them sat down on the baggage cart, Adam between the two women. Rebecca felt the length of his body against hers, and she couldn’t tell if the tremor coursing through her limbs was coming from him or from herself.
“There wasn’t much light,” he said, “so we couldn’t see well at all.”
“Do you know if—”
“I don’t know.” He interrupted her. “I don’t know if anyone…survived or what. We were nearly out of fuel by the time we saw it. It was in a densely wooded area. A lot of trees and brush. And the chopper was caught in some branches above a river or a stream. It was hard to tell exactly what we were looking at.”
She opened her mouth to ask him the thousand questions running through her mind, but he held up a hand to stop her.
“Let me finish,” he said. “Our pilot called another chopper with a search and rescue team aboard to get out there, since we had to come back for fuel. They were going to find the closest place to the…to the crash site where they could land. There weren’t many possible landing sites close by. Then first thing in the morning, as soon as it’s light, they’ll hike into the—”
“Why not now?” Rebecca jumped to her feet. “Don’t they have any fucking flashlights?”
“The terrain’s too difficult to negotiate in the dark,” Dorothea said.
“How do you know?” Rebecca snapped.
“Because I just spoke to the search and rescue guys.” Dorothea looked at Adam. “They did find a place to land, but it’s about a half mile from the crash site.”
“Well, someone take me out there tonight, then!” Rebecca said. “I’ll look for her.”
“This chopper—” Adam nodded toward the helicopter he’d just left “—will take us out early in the morning, and we can meet up with the S and R team then.”
“Adam,” she pleaded. He seemed so dense. “What if she’s…if they’re injured! Time matters! It’s ridiculous to wait. We—”
“You didn’t see it out there, Rebecca.” He glared at her. “No one can search out there at night. Trust me.”
She pulled a cigarette from her pack and lit it, her hands shaking wildly. She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs.
“What did you see, Adam?” Dorothea’s voice was calm. In the growing darkness, it seemed to come from miles away. “Did it look like the sort of crash that…do you think anyone could have survived it?”
“I don’t know. The chopper was on its side, and like I said…it looked like it was suspended above a river…or rushing water, anyway, and it was getting dark, so I’m not sure exactly what the situation is.”
What if it falls overnight? Rebecca thought, but by now, she knew better than to give voice to her fears. What good would it do?
“Is the other DMAT team here?” Adam asked Dorothea. “Can you spare us in the morning?”
“Yes, they’re here, and absolutely.”
A lie, Rebecca knew. No one could be spared. But Dorothea had to know they were going, whether they were needed in the terminal or not.
They slept—or tried to sleep—on the conference room floor, Adam beneath the table where he and Maya had taken to sleeping, Rebecca by the windows. She stared at the ceiling, silent tears running down the sides of her face. She didn’t save Maya when she was fourteen only to lose her now.
Getting to her bare feet, she walked across the floor to the table. She squatted beneath i
t, then sat on the floor cross-legged next to Adam. He started when she put her hand on his shoulder. In the darkness, she could barely tell when he opened his eyes.
“She’s alive,” she said. “I swear, Adam, I would feel it if she weren’t. But I think she’s hurt, and with every hour that passes…every minute that passes… It’s just too long. What if she dies overnight while we’re here twiddling our thumbs because it’s too damn dark to search for her?” Her voice cracked and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying again.
“Shh.” He sat up and pulled her toward him, his arms around her and his stubbly chin against her forehead. “We’ll go as soon as we can, Bec,” he said. “We’ll find her.”
She clutched the fabric of his T-shirt in her fist, breathing in the rank scent of him. Of herself. “I can’t lose her, Adam,” she said.
“I know. I know.” He rocked her like a child. “Neither can I.”
19
Rebecca
THERE’D BEEN MOMENTS, TOO MANY TO COUNT, WHEN Rebecca had resented Maya. Moments she’d envied her. A million moments when she’d been irritated by her timidity. But in her most honest moments, Rebecca knew that Maya was a better person than she was. Rebecca had that “good Samaritan, noble physician” reputation, but it was Maya who did her work quietly and without fanfare. Maya who lived a calm, clean life while Rebecca was, she thought truthfully, a hedonist, out for herself more often than not.
Yet Rebecca would lay down her life for her sister. That was also the truth, and on that long-ago night in their childhood driveway, she very nearly did. She would do it again if she had to. As she and Adam climbed out of the helicopter in the small clearing a half mile from the accident site, all Rebecca could think about was finding her sister. Finding her alive, because losing her suddenly felt like losing her arm or her leg. Losing her would be like losing part of her heart. Maybe even the best part.