The Lies We Told

  There was a knock on the door and my receptionist, Rose, poked her head into the examining room. “Dr. Pollard for you on one,” she said.

  Adam! “Thanks, Rose.” I turned to Haley’s mother. “Excuse me,” I said, “but I need to take this call.”

  I rushed to my office. He’d been gone two and a half days, and I hadn’t expected to be able to hear from him yet. I was used to long periods without contact during Rebecca’s absences, but it felt different to be so out of touch with Adam. When I wasn’t at work, I was glued to CNN, horrified by the news of missing and stranded people and the images of boats moving from house to house in a desperate search for survivors. Disaster team personnel are treating hundreds of patients in the airport, CNN reported, and I assumed that’s where Adam was calling from.

  I sat down at my desk and picked up the phone. “Adam!” I said.

  “Hey, My.” He sounded exhausted, but I thought there was a smile in his voice.

  “I didn’t think you’d be able to call!”

  “The cell towers are still down, but I’m using Dorothea’s satellite phone. How are things there?”

  “Oh, things are fine here,” I said. “I’m more concerned with how things are where you are. It looks horrendous on TV.”

  “Understatement,” he said. “Are you in the middle of something?”

  “I have a patient, but I can take a minute. Are you anywhere near Rebecca?”

  “Uh-huh. They have a bunch of medical tents set up in the airport lobby, and the whole terminal, every part of it, is wall-to-wall people. It’s really sad, My. Most of them have lost everything.”

  “I can’t even imagine it,” I said. “Is there food?”

  “MREs.”

  “Ugh. Where do you sleep?”

  He laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. “I think I’ve gotten two hours since I arrived, but it’s not too bad. There’s a big carpeted conference room on the second floor and the volunteers sleep on the floor.”

  Ouch. He wasn’t the best sleeper even in our king-size bed.

  “You know…” His voice trailed off. “There aren’t enough of us here,” he said. “We’re trying to do the impossible, really, and…there are no pediatricians…” He stopped talking altogether.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  I heard him sigh. “I thought I could guilt-trip you into this,” he said. “Into coming.”

  I hesitated. “Coming? There? I’d be more of a liability than a help, Adam.”

  He didn’t respond, and I continued. “I heard one of the helicopters carrying doctors was shot at. I was worried it might be yours and Rebecca’s.”

  He made a sound of annoyance. “That was just a rumor. The only thing to worry about here are all the sick and injured people who need help.”

  He couldn’t really be asking me to come. “Adam, I can’t.”

  He let out a long breath. “I know,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  “What would I do with Chauncey?” I asked, although I knew the answer. Our neighborhood teemed with teenage pet-sitters.

  “I said it’s all right,” he repeated.

  I ran my fingers over the keyboard on my desk. “What are you seeing?” I asked.

  “You name it. Heart attacks. Women in labor. Broken bones. Infections. Lots of chronically ill folks who just need maintenance meds. Loads of respiratory problems. And…there are so many kids here.”

  Kids. And no pediatrician. That was why he thought I could help.

  I rubbed my temple. “God, I am such a baby,” I said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “But you called to try to talk me into it.”

  “I just got…it was an emotional reaction to what’s happening here. All around me. I knew you could help, so I felt like I should try to persuade you. That wasn’t fair.”

  “You’re still trying, but I’d be useless there.”

  “Look, someone else needs to use this phone,” Adam said. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to call again.” He was disappointed in me. I heard it in his voice.

  “Okay,” I said, unhappy with the abrupt end to our conversation. “I love you. And tell Rebecca I love her, too.”

  “Will do.”

  I hung up the phone and looked down at my orderly, uncluttered desk. Patient files were neatly stacked on the left. My prescription pad and two pens were lined up next to my mouse on the right. “You coward,” I said out loud as I stood up. I left my office and walked down the sterile hallway to the sterile examining room where my well-cared-for patient waited for me. I thought of Adam and Rebecca, the people I loved most in the world, doing what they believed in less than two hundred miles from my office, and wondered why I was in Raleigh and not with them.

  14

  Rebecca

  BY THE THIRD DAY, REBECCA WAS DIZZY WITH EXHAUSTION. Her vision blurred as she administered some of their dwindling supply of oxygen to a man with emphysema, and her voice echoed in her head as she tried to calm a woman going into premature labor. She’d managed to brush her teeth in one of the stifling, fetid restrooms, but that was her only concession to hygiene, and she knew the unshowered smell of her own body was mixing with that of the people around her. It was only going to get worse, but she’d been in DIDA long enough to know that a force inside her would soon take over. The force that no longer craved sleep, and that could see clearly through the blurred vision and hear every word a patient spoke despite the echoes. That force had never failed her, but it took time to get there.

  She hadn’t seen Adam all day and wondered how he was doing. Some people never did learn how to handle the unrelenting human tragedies and the chaos of a disaster site. Adam was used to the controlled environment of the O.R. He’d looked as though he’d been sideswiped by a train, hollow eyed and soaked with sweat, when she last saw him. Yet his focus had been tight on the shoulder wound he was treating at the time, and she’d felt encouraged. She had faith in him and wished she’d had a moment to tell him it would get better. That force—the ferocious energy he didn’t know he had inside him—would kick in, and he would be fine.

  Around two in the afternoon, when the dizziness became so intense she thought she might keel over in the middle of examining a patient, she left the tent and went upstairs to the conference room for an MRE and a bottle of water. She lowered herself to the floor near the glass wall overlooking the tarmac. Slipping the MRE pouch into the heater sleeve, she rested it against the window and drank water while she waited for the beef stew to warm up. From where she sat, she had a perfect view of the string of helicopters landing, unloading evacuees, then taking off again. She had to figure out where they would put all these people. They might need to set up tents in the parking lot. The airport simply wasn’t big enough for the number of evacuees. In a few days’ time, it had become a small impoverished city with too little food, too few restrooms, too few medical personnel to treat the burgeoning population of patients, and thick, hot, putrid air that was difficult to breathe. The two shops in the lobby had been thoroughly looted, and there were rumors of worse crimes, especially in the basement. Yet she witnessed, as she always did, bonds forming between evacuees who’d met on one of the choppers or in the waiting areas at the gates, the seedlings of friendships that would last a lifetime. She saw strangers helping strangers, women taking turns watching one another’s kids, men helping to carry the wounded into the terminal. It was always this way. Ninety-nine parts human kindness for every one part depravity.

  She was eating the stew when she noticed a man on the tarmac. He was dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, gray pants and leather work gloves as he helped unload a woman and her wheelchair from a helicopter. His back was to her, and she could see the cut of his triceps as he reached up for the chair. She felt that familiar pull low in her belly that had dogged her since she was a teenager. Lord. How could she even think of marrying Brent—marrying anyone—when her body was so quick to respond to the nearest hunk of male flesh? Was she normal? She
was thirty-eight. At some point, wasn’t her libido supposed to settle down?

  The man leaned over to say something in the woman’s ear, and even from where she sat, Rebecca could see the elderly woman’s hand shake as she reached up to touch his cheek. Tears sprang to Rebecca’s eyes. She’d worked for three days in a sea of suffering people without her eyes so much as burning, but witnessing two seconds of humanity between the aid worker and the old woman was doing her in.

  A younger female volunteer pushed the wheelchair toward the terminal, and the man straightened up, stepping back from the chopper. He opened a bottle of water and rather than drinking it, poured it over his head. Rebecca smiled, thinking of how wonderful that small shower must feel.

  The man turned to start walking toward the terminal, and she let out a gasp. Adam. She cringed. She’d been sitting there seriously lusting over her sister’s husband.

  She’d gotten to her feet and was grabbing another bottle of water from the broad conference table when Adam walked into the conference room.

  “Hey,” he said when he spotted her. He was drenched, his arms covered with grime as he pulled off the leather gloves and reached for a bottle of water. His chin and cheeks were shadowed with stubble.

  “How are you holding up?” It was hard to look at him, as though her attraction to him from moments earlier might be visible on her face.

  “Doin’ okay.” He took a long pull on the bottle, then surprised her with a grin. “I thought DIDA doctors would be practicing medicine, not offloading helicopters.” She could tell he didn’t mind, though. Not one bit. He was all right. No, not just all right. He was loving it.

  He looked past her shoulder toward the door. “Here comes the boss,” he said, and Rebecca turned to see Dorothea approaching them.

  “Just got word that a camp flooded twenty or so miles from here,” Dorothea said. “Two hundred kids. They’re flying them in now.”

  “Just what this place needs,” Rebecca said. “Two hundred more bodies.” But she was already thinking of where they could put them and how they could change their triage system to cope.

  “You.” Dorothea poked Adam’s damp chest.

  “What about me?” he asked.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You take to this stuff like a pig to mud.”

  “Good to feel needed,” he said with a shrug, as though Dorothea’s backhanded compliment meant nothing to him.

  “And here’s a mindblower for the two of you,” she said. “Got a call about an hour ago, and guess what? The other Dr. Ward is coming.”

  “The…Maya?” Rebecca asked.

  “She’s at RDU, getting ready to board a helicopter.”

  They stared at her, stunned into silence. Oh, no, Rebecca thought.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” Adam said.

  “Spoke to her myself,” Dorothea said.

  Rebecca tried to picture Maya boarding the helicopter, and she could almost feel her sister’s apprehension. This was a phenomenally bad idea in too many ways to count.

  “Well, what d’ya know.” Adam grinned. “That’s my girl.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Rebecca said, as though sharing his admiration. Inside, her heart sank like a stone.

  “Believe it.” Dorothea picked up a water bottle and gave the cap a twist. “I’ve got to get back downstairs but just wanted to give you the heads-up.” She headed for the door, calling back to them over her shoulder, “I need to find a new nickname for that one,” she said.

  Rebecca watched her walk away for a moment, then she and Adam looked at each other. Adam smiled, holding up his water bottle in a toast.

  “To Maya,” he said.

  Rebecca tapped her bottle to his. “To my awesome sister,” she said, and turned away quickly to hide her dismay.

  15

  Maya

  I WAS TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE. I THOUGHT ABOUT MY SPLIT personality as the helicopter rose into the air. We banked to the east, and below us, I watched the terminal of Raleigh-Durham Airport disappear. Definitely two different people. In my office and in the O.R., I was so strong I sometimes amazed myself. Decisive. Skillful. And above all, unafraid. I was proud of who I was. Who I’d become.

  Then there was the woman who’d cowered in the hallway of the Brazilian restaurant. The woman who was flying to the coast, not thinking of how she could help the victims of the sister storms, but rather how she could please her husband by being there. How she could pull him back to her when she felt him slipping away. And there was the woman who was not afraid of flying, not even in this tiny four-seater helicopter, but who was afraid of landing at the airport CNN said had turned into a “third world country.”

  “I hate flying,” said the woman sitting next to me, “and this is the worst, flying in this teeny little thing.” She was a twenty-something nurse named Janette. I’d met her and the two other DIDA volunteer nurses only moments before we boarded. I felt sympathy for her. The skin over her knuckles was taut and white as she clutched a paperback book in her lap.

  “This is actually pretty luxurious,” I tried to reassure her. The use of the bright-red four-seater helicopter and its pilot had been donated by a business in Raleigh, and the four of us—three women and one man—sat facing each other on buttery soft beige leather seats. It was noisy, though. So noisy we had to yell to be heard. Other helicopters—huge ones, unlike our petite luxury craft—lumbered through the air above and below us. “This will be the last time we’re comfortable for a while.”

  “Even if we crashed,” the man sitting across from me said, “we’d probably be fine. It’s not like we’re all that high.”

  Well, that’s bullshit, I thought to myself as I looked out the window at the trees and buildings far below, but I knew he was only trying to comfort Janette.

  “Let’s not talk about crashing,” the third nurse said.

  “I heard they’re running out of supplies,” the man said.

  “And I heard there’s a lot of violence at the terminal,” Janette said.

  I did not want to hear about violence.

  The male nurse scoffed at Janette. “Any time you put a few thousand desperate people together, there’s going to be some dustups,” he said.

  “It’s a lot more than dustups,” the other woman said. “My father wanted me to take his gun with me.”

  Janette laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “No, I am not. It’s not like when you go to the airport for a flight. There’s no security checkpoint you have to go through. People can bring any weapons they want. If you had minutes to leave your house and you’re some redneck fool and you know you’re going to head into God only knows what kind of situation, you’d grab your gun and—”

  “Wow, look at that!” I said, pointing out the window, not even certain what I was pointing to. I needed them to shut up so I could hold on to my fragile calm. “Look at all the downed trees,” I added. There were plenty of downed trees. Loblolly pines crisscrossed the land below us like toothpicks topped with green cellophane frills.

  Everyone peered out their windows and began talking about the storms, and I was relieved I’d managed to change the subject. As the terrain below us changed from solid ground to a huge glittering lake, we all grew quiet. I’d seen the images on TV, but still felt unprepared for the devastation below. Streets disappeared beneath the brown water, and in some areas, the only evidence of a road was a green highway sign jutting from the floodwater. The roofs of houses and commercial buildings looked as though they were floating. A blue boat rested on one of the roofs, a car on another. I saw small boats sailing between the houses, rescuers wearing helmets and life vests. It reminded me of images from Katrina. People died here. No doubt about it.

  I clutched my backpack as I got off the helicopter at the Wilmington airport, helped by a skinny young woman in uniform. I was wearing scrubs, although Dorothea had said not to worry about what I wore—she had a DIDA uniform waiting for me. I had another set of scrubs and a few cha
nges of underwear in my backpack, along with toothpaste, toothbrush, a small container of shampoo and a comb. “Just bring the bare essentials,” Dorothea had warned me. I’d brought my BlackBerry, though. If service was restored, I wanted to be able to get in touch with my office. I’d left my partners in the lurch, although I’d covered for one of them recently so they could hardly complain.

  The woman guiding me toward the terminal shouted something to me, but I couldn’t hear over the deafening roar of the helicopters. Next to us, someone drove a long string of baggage carts toward the building, and at first I thought the carts were carrying blankets or clothing, possibly donated for the evacuees, until I realized they were carrying people. Men and women lay stacked against one another, feet bobbing off the sides of the carts as they rode toward the building. Were they dead or alive? It was a horrifying sight. I grabbed the arm of my escort, pointing toward the baggage carts.

  “Those people!” I shouted above the noise. “Who are—”

  She glanced at the carts. “Nursing home, most likely,” she shouted back. I could tell by the cavalier shrug of her shoulders that this was not the first time she’d seen evacuees transported like cattle in the last few days.

  Inside the airport, the concourse was crammed wall-to-wall with people, sleeping and talking and shouting. I was prepared for the air to be hot, but heat was not all that greeted me. The smell—a combination of sewage and locker room and death—sucked the air from my lungs.

  “Help me!” a woman called from somewhere. “I’m dying!”

  I tried to see where the voice was coming from, but more people were pushing into the concourse behind me, and the woman escorting me drew me forward.

  “Just follow the signs to baggage claim!” she said, her mouth close to my ear so I could hear her, and I realized she was going to leave me there in the midst of the chaos. She pointed to the overhead sign that read Baggage Claim. “Okay?” she asked, and I nodded.