Maxence immediately regretted saying that in case she did.
Dree sighed. “Okay, I won’t quibble. Go on.”
“So, the little prince was missing for a week. The kidnappers kept trying to tell people they wanted to be paid a ransom, but nobody would talk to them because they didn’t know the prince was missing. Eventually, they realized they couldn’t find the little prince, and then the negotiations began in earnest.”
“Finally.”
“That’s what the little prince thought, too. On the tanker ship, the men who had kidnapped the little prince threw him in a squalid, unused storeroom. They only brought him water once during the first couple of days. They finally started feeding him after another few days, when it became apparent there would not be a quick resolution to the kidnapping.”
“That’s awful!” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
Within days, the empty storeroom with peeling, rusty walls reeked, and so did he. As a child, he’d never been overly fastidious about cleanliness, as little boys often aren’t.
That experience, however, had given him a new appreciation for hygiene. Out on these rustic charity missions, Maxence was careful to wash himself every day and sometimes two or three times a day, even if all he could muster was a sponge bath. Sweat and body odor drove him simply insane.
Maxence said, “Eventually, the kidnappers, who seemed to be pirates rather than professional kidnappers, began to berate the young prince for being so unimportant that the current sovereign prince, the heir apparent to the throne, and his own parents didn’t seem to care that he was missing. They terrorized him. They beat him. They asked why he was so unimportant. They asked why their demands were not being met.
“The little prince did not know.
“Eventually, he began to tell himself stories about how unimportant he was.
“Eventually, he told his kidnappers the same stories, about how he had never felt like he was part of the royal family, about how he thought he was destined for other things.
“Eventually, the kidnappers believed him.
“And eventually, the kidnappers thought he was one of them.”
“One of them?” Dree breathed. “The little prince became a pirate?”
Maxence nodded in the dark. “The little prince believed their revolutionary furor with all his heart. He believed so much that he was one of the pirates, a revolutionary, that he convinced himself, and he convinced them.
“By the end of the second week, they allowed him to leave the smelly storeroom for a few hours at a time.
“Within another day or two, he had a bunk with the other sailors and was eating their communal meals with them.
“He worked hard on the ship, mopping the deck and carrying anything that needed to be moved. He was sunburned. He was seasick.
“In another two weeks, he’d convinced them that he didn’t want to go home because he was truly one of them.”
Dree gasped. “But his family finally paid the ransom and got him back, right?”
Maxence breathed slowly, deep down into his stomach, keeping himself calm as he lay in a sleeping bag in the dark freezing tent in the highlands of Nepal near Mount Everest in December, which was about as far away from the summertime Mediterranean Sea as one could get, vertically and along the land. The Earth was even on the opposite side of the sun from that June day, which meant Maxence was vertically fifteen thousand feet, twenty-one and a half years of time, and a hundred eighty-six million miles of dead and empty space away from that rusting hulk of a tanker ship.
Breathe, he told himself. Breathe.
The scents of his leather motorcycle gear and his cologne, the feel of his hair around his face and his abdominals and shirt under his fingertips, the sound of Dree’s breathing in the night, and that faint smear of moonlight glowing through the top of the dark, dark tent.
He had practiced for many years to be able to control his breathing. While his friend Casimir had been learning to not trust girls because they toyed with him, while Arthur had been learning to become an Englishman because that was all he could hold onto in the world, Maxence had been learning to disguise the fact that in some way, he was still a little boy locked in a filthy, utterly dark steel storage room of the tanker ship, knowing that no one was coming to save him and he would have to rescue himself.
Maxence said, “Just over a month had passed when the little prince convinced his kidnappers—by believing it hard enough and telling them what he believed with all the love in his heart—that he would go and tell the world their story and recite their manifesto. He told them that he could convince the world they were right and that they should be welcomed back from the sea as heroes. They believed he could convince the world because he had convinced them that he could.”
“So, did he?” Dree asked breathlessly. “Did he become their spokesman and tell the world?”
Max stared into the darkness. The lightless obsidian of the cloud-covered Nepali countryside was not very different than the darkness of a windowless steel room with a sealed door. “He tried. The pirates set him adrift in a tiny tender, which is a small boat used to go from a bigger boat to the shore, like a rowboat. Even in just the few weeks that he had been helping on the ship, his muscles had grown stronger. He rowed the tiny vessel the few hundred yards to shore and walked out of the sea to freedom.”
“His family must’ve been so relieved to see him!” Dree exclaimed, and then she laughed. “I’m ridiculous. Getting all caught up in the stories. You’re a better storyteller than you give yourself credit for.”
Yes, Maxence could make anyone believe any story that he wanted to. He still wasn’t sure how. He’d been born with an uncanny charisma, but his ability to persuade people was a skill honed in fire.
“Some of them were,” Maxence said. “But whoever was and whoever wasn’t glad to see him was immaterial because the little prince was whisked away and returned to his boarding school as quickly as possible, to restore a sense of normality, they said. The odd thing was, whenever the little prince tried to tell his story, no one believed him. His family had not only been reluctant to negotiate a deal with the pirates, but they had also made sure that no one else knew he had been missing. If he told people, he was branded a liar.”
Her gasp echoed against the fabric walls of the tent in the darkness. “Why would they do such a thing? If my kid were ever kidnapped, I’d be all over the news, trying to find them and bring them home. Their face would be on every telephone pole, milk carton, and local news channel in the world.”
Ah, if only.
Maxence said, “The little prince’s family decided against publicity for a number of reasons. First, if it became common knowledge that they had negotiated with and paid off kidnappers, even though they hadn’t, no member of their family would ever be safe again. Every single one of them would have a dollar amount associated with their names.”
“Hire some security men. That’s what they’re for.” Dree’s voice sounded disgusted that she had to tell him that.
He chuckled, and his abs shuddered against his fingertips. “They have security. Not that it matters. The other reason was that if the little prince became notorious for having been kidnapped and abused, he would become even more of a target. A few years earlier, another little prince of another country, although not a relative, had been the subject of a tragedy when he was about the same age. His name was Wulfram.”
“Oh, so his name hasn’t been lost to posterity.”
“Right. Wulfram had an older twin, so he was also the spare to his older brother’s heir. When Wulf was nine years old, just a few years before the main character of our story, his older brother was horrifically assassinated, shot with a high-caliber rifle in front of his twin and dozens of other kids from their school. Wulfram was wounded but survived. He became notorious, and he has lived with a target on his back ever since, even as an adult. It is better to be anonymous, our young prince’s family decided. It was better if no o
ne knew the tragedy and the horror, and thus be tempted to repeat it.”
Dree said, “I hate people.”
Maxence laughed. “That is the best reaction to that story I’ve ever heard.”
A tiny sound scratched at the side of his sleeping bag. It sounded a bit like a mouse had gotten into the tent, but the mice should have been hibernating in Nepal at that time of year. Maxence unzipped his sleeping bag just a little bit and explored with his fingertips to where the sound was coming from.
Small, warm fingers were plucking at the nylon of his sleeping bag and, as he touched them, twined in his.
Dree whispered, “I don’t know what that story is a symbol for, but the loneliness and desperation are breaking my heart.”
Maxence held onto her hand. “It’s just a story. You wanted a story about Monagasquay, and it’s just a story.”
The darkness stayed unbroken within and above the tent, and Max slowly, fitfully, fell into sleep.
The next morning when he woke, Dree was still holding his hand.
He held his breath, clinging to the moment of their palms touching and fingers intertwined.
The beige sides of the tent glowing with sunlight, the boxes at the back of the tent, her burgundy sleeping bag, the rattle of wood and crunch of tinder as some of the guys were building the morning fire outside, the feminine scent of her filling the air and his nose and his mouth and touching his skin.
He held on.
Chapter Ten
Pashmina
Dree
When Dree awoke the next morning, Maxence’s eyes were closed, his eyelashes dark against his tanned skin. His hand under hers was limp, except his fingers twitched. His breathing was more ragged and high in his lungs than the deep rhythm of sleep.
Maybe he had allergies or was dreaming or something.
Her arm was cold, but her hand was warm where she held his palm.
Just as Dree was slipping her fingers out of his, his eyelids fluttered, and Maxence rolled over and stretched. “G’morning.”
He didn’t say anything about their hands, so neither did she. “Morning! I guess we’ve got to go look at the possible sites that Isaak and Alfonso found for their NICU micro-clinic, huh?”
Maxence groaned. “I really should not have started that argument around the campfire last night.”
“It needed to be said. Those NICU clinics are going to be a waste of money and time that could go to help people.”
They packed up the camp quickly and were just mounting the motorcycles when an older woman approached them from the direction of the village. They always made their camp close to the village, maybe a hundred yards away, for their privacy and to give the town the illusion that they weren’t invading.
The woman walked carefully on the thin crust of ice that had grown on the rocky ground overnight. She wore the trailing end of her dupatta draped over her head like a hood.
When she was quite close, she yelled something in the Nepali language.
Batsa, who was holding his helmet under his arm and watching her, said, “She says she is looking for Lady Doctor Dree.”
Dree supposed she looked different when she was wearing her bright red-and-white ski suit for riding the motorcycle. She lifted her arm and waved at the woman. “Here I am.”
The woman walked over to Dree, and she recognized the woman as the mother-in-law of the child with scurvy the day before. “How is he?” Dree asked because Alfonso’s words that the vitamin C deficiency should be diagnosed in a lab still rang in her ears. “Is he doing better?”
The woman held out a small, pale blue bundle that looked as soft as a cloud, and said something that Batsa translated as, “My sickly grandson is alive and doing much better today. He is better than he has been in weeks. His body is not bleeding from his skin anymore. His elbows and knees are less bad. He smiles. I thank you for saving the life of my grandson. I would like to give you this as my thanks and to give you my blessings.”
Dree took off her gloves and took the bundle from the woman’s hands, which turned out to be a shawl of the softest yarn Dree had ever felt. “It’s beautiful.”
Maxence was standing beside her. “It’s a pashmina. It’s cashmere, but the pashm wool is the softest kind of wool the goat produces. This is probably one of the finest things she owns.”
Dree glanced up at him, nervous about what was going on. “If it’s so valuable, should I accept it? I don’t want payment. I’m not doing this for payment.”
“Yes, you should accept it,” he said. “You saved her grandson’s life. She’ll probably pray for your health and happiness for the rest of her days. Community and family are the most important things to them. This is how humans have always lived, in groups of two to three hundred people. People are happiest when they form and live in highly interconnected communities. It doesn’t matter if it’s your birth family or a family unit you form, but it’s essential. Even serious introverts like my friend Arthur live their best lives when they have people around them, for when they need them. You should accept the shawl and receive her blessing because she’s giving it in the spirit of the ties that bind a community, not as payment.”
“Oh,” Dree said. She thanked the woman.
Batsa translated, and the woman did the classic blinking, head-shaking, and holding up a hand to say it’s-nothing-it’s-nothing.
Maxence touched her arm, which she felt through the puffy layers of her ski suit. “You touch her feet to receive her blessing.” He bent and spread both his hands toward the woman’s boots.
The older woman smiled and bobbled her head from side to side, grinning and saying something as she touched his shoulders and raised him up.
Dree handed him the scarf and whispered to him, “It’s okay to do this even though we’re Catholic, right?”
The cold wind whipped his black curls around his face. “It’s fine. It’s a community and cultural thing.”
Father Booker leaned toward her. “Yes, it’s all right, not that anyone asked the ordained Catholic priest for his opinion.”
“Thank you, Father Booker,” Dree said and performed the same bow and hand reach as Maxence had.
The woman raised Dree up by her shoulders and then smacked her hand to the middle of Dree’s forehead, holding it there and chanting something to the sky.
Dree went cross-eyed, looking at the woman’s hand on her face. Her palm smelled like baked bread and fresh butter.
She asked Max from under the woman’s hand. “This is okay, too, right?”
Max nodded. “You should be honored.”
“Okay.”
The woman’s hand on her face did not move, and the woman said something serious to Dree in Nepali.
If this had happened back in New Mexico, the woman would have been spraying spittle and screaming while she called on the power of Her Savior Jesus Christ to expel the demons from Dree’s soul, so this was a much nicer experience. Dree was all for less screaming and spittle.
The woman removed her hand and said something else, then pressed her hands together like she was praying and bowed.
Batsa told Dree, “She thanks you again for the life of her grandson. Do the namaste back to her, just like that, palms together and bow.”
So, she did.
They said their goodbyes, and Dree kept an eye on the older woman as she went back to the village. The six of them shoved their helmets on their heads, mounted the motorcycles, and carefully pulled out onto the dirt road that led away from the village.
That day’s ride was uneventful, and the next few days passed with little novelty.
In the next couple of villages, many people came to Dree’s makeshift clinic to be treated, but there were no medical mysteries. There were the usual stitches, listening to chests and backs and dispensing antibiotics for pneumonia, wound cleaning and instructions, a few vaccinations she had, a frantic digging through the supplies for a tube of ocular antibiotic gel for a woman with a frightening eye infection, setting a few bo
nes and plastering on a cast, rehydrating salt solution for a few children with diarrhea and probable food poisoning, just the usual.
One clinic was so busy that she couldn’t stop for lunch. Maxence handed her a bite of bread with yak butter every time she breezed by him. Yak butter was really good. It was almost as good as sheep butter, which was saying something.
And as usual, she worked as fast as she could while Batsa translated, and she worked until Maxence quietly told her that it was enough, she had done enough, and she must stop for food and rest.
Nights around the campfire weren’t particularly tense. They stopped talking about the advisability of the NICU clinics. Discussion on the morning survey missions was limited to the suitability of the actual site, whether the ground was level, how much direct sunlight the plot of land would get per day due to the mountains, and the availability of water due to river proximity in the village.
Dree sensed a confrontation was coming, though. The air was thick with arguments left unsaid.
At one village, a woman who seemed to be in her forties slowly walked in, obviously in pain.
Maxence and Batsa had been creating makeshift curtains out of bedsheets from the house that they commandeered at each stop, so they had some semblance of privacy from the dozen or more people in the waiting room. That day’s curtains were printed with a crimson and orange mandala.
The woman explained to Dree what was wrong, and Batsa translated it as, “She has a wound on her chest that will not heal. It has been there for a year or more. She apologizes for the smell, but she says that she cannot make it better.”
Her eyes remained downcast on the souls of her boots as she unlatched her coat and blouse, and Dree reached over and touched her arm, saying, “It’s all right. Just show me, and I’ll do what I can.”
As she unbuttoned her clothes, a foul odor rose from her body. The rotting smell was not sweat or common body odor, but something else entirely.
Dree caught a glimpse of Maxence’s expression, which had become carefully neutral. He turned away, and Batsa also pivoted as the woman opened her clothes, giving her a little bit of privacy.
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