In Medias Res

by Yolanda Wallace

  The elevator stopped on the floor that housed the neurological unit. When the doors opened, Jennifer stalked out and headed for the stairs. I trailed her. I would follow her up each of the remaining ten flights to the personnel department if I had to.

  “I love you, Jen,” I insisted, my voice echoing off the walls.

  “That’s what you keep telling me.” She took the stairs two and three at a time, running—leaping—up them like a gazelle fleeing from a pack of hungry cheetahs.

  “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Or use me?”

  “That’s not what last night was about.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  She turned on me. I had to pull up short to keep from running into her.

  “You wanted to know why I didn’t tell you how I felt?” she asked, her eyes filled with equal parts anger and hatred. “This is why. Because I knew you’d say anything to make it happen, then run away and hide after it did. Why would I tell you how much I loved you when I knew you’d do your best to make me feel ashamed of it? I’m not you, Sydney. I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks. Anyone except you.”

  She shrugged as if that was about to change.

  “But it’s okay. You got what you wanted,” she spat. “You got to experiment a little and that was enough for you. Now you expect things to go on being as they were. I can’t pretend to be just friends with you after we—” She paused. “You know me better than that. Or at least I thought you did. You can hide from the world in your sham of a marriage if you want to, but I’m not going to help you do it. The best thing for you to do is forget last night ever happened. Forget you ever met me. I’ll do the same with you. In fact, I already have.”

  “Jen—”

  She continued up the stairs. This time, I didn’t follow her.

  She needed time to cool off. She needed time away from me. I gave her that time. It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made. I should have fought harder to get through to her. To make her hear me. To make her understand. But I let her go. I let her go and she didn’t come back.

  I called her and e-mailed her over and over again, but she didn’t return any of my messages. The day after our aborted lunch date, she flew to the East Coast to begin her speaking tour. She made one stop—a seminar in Durham, North Carolina, at Duke University Medical School—then abruptly left the country without saying good-bye.

  With no one to talk to—no one to share my feelings with—I did as she asked. I forgot about her. Her and everything and everyone else, including myself. But the memories—and the feelings that went along with them—refused to remain hidden, no matter how deeply I tried to bury them. When they returned, they brought with them a reserve of untapped strength. I found the resolve to attempt to regain what I had lost. What I had let slip through my fingers.

  I had let Jennifer get away once. Twice. Never again.

  She was the person I wanted to be with. And this time, I didn’t care who knew it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My flight to Honduras was a commercial one but it felt more like a charter. Nearly three-quarters of the seats in the small plane were filled with teenagers and their chaperones about to embark on a month-long religious mission designed to bring the native tribes in the area closer to God. When the plane skidded off the dirt runway in Tegucigalpa, I thought I was about to meet God face-to-face.

  I gripped the arms of my seat with both hands as the plane slid inexorably toward the freeway. Traffic on the busy thoroughfare ground to a halt, policemen in fluorescent vests holding up progress in both directions.

  “Don’t worry,” the passenger across the aisle from me said with a wink. “This happens every time.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It could be worse,” he said.

  “How?”

  “We could be those guys.”

  I followed his finger as he pointed out the window. Several uniformed men were jogging across the “tarmac,” a narrow, rutted patch of land that looked more like a cow pasture than a runway.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “In the States, we have guys on cute little vehicles to tow planes around the concourse. In Honduras, these guys are the cute little vehicles.”

  As soon as we disembarked, I turned around to see if my travel companion had been pulling my leg. True to his word, though, the men lined up on both sides of the plane and pushed it back toward the terminal.

  “I told you so,” my new friend said. Dressed in cargo shorts, a Save The Planet T-shirt, and well-worn hiking boots, he looked like he had escaped from the pages of an adventure novel or an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. He stuck out his hand. “Alex Matthews.”

  “Sydney Paulsen,” I replied, using my maiden name. Though it wasn’t official yet, in my mind, my days as Sydney Stanton had come to an end.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Mocoron.”

  “Me, too. Looks like we’ll be traveling together for a while longer.”

  A charter bus was parked a few feet away from the plane we had arrived in. A man I assumed to be the driver ticked names off his clipboard as a line of people waited to board. The people in line ranged in age from twentysomethings to obvious retirees.

  As the passengers climbed the steep steps that led inside the bus, the relief driver took their bags and tossed them in the storage compartment.

  I checked my watch. My bus wasn’t scheduled to leave for another hour. I had hoped to use the layover to stock up on a few essentials—Hershey’s with almonds, a can of coffee, and a box of Power Bars—at a shopping center in town, but it looked like my ride was leaving me.

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” Alex said as we joined the steady stream of passengers heading from the tarmac to the crowded terminal.

  He seemed to be more experienced with the way things worked in our current locale, so I took his word for it.

  By the time I reached the inside of the terminal, the back of my long-sleeved T-shirt was damp with sweat. The thermometer on the side of the building read seventy-seven degrees, but the humidity made it seem much warmer. The air was so thick I could practically chew it.

  The bad thing was, I knew the conditions were bound to be even worse where I was headed. Forty kilometers from the Nicaraguan border, Mocoron was on the Mosquito Coast in an area known as Central America’s Little Amazon. I hoped that, unlike its Brazilian counterpart, La Mosquitia didn’t contain frogs the size of loaves of bread or snakes as long as football fields. Okay, I might have been exaggerating about the snakes—but not by much.

  I made it through Customs with no problems, always a major accomplishment in my book. Alex and I headed for the bus and took our places in line. The sun was high in the sky. If we didn’t run into any delays on the road to Puerto Lempira, I felt confident we would be able to make it to Mocoron before dark. No navigable roads led into the tiny town. The primary ways to reach the underdeveloped area were by air or water—or, for the truly adventurous, on foot.

  After a three-hour bus ride to Puerto Lempira, Alex and I would have to travel another hour on the Rio Mocoron before we reached our destination.

  I adjusted the straps on my backpack, shifting its dead weight to a more comfortable position. I had no idea how long I planned to stay, so I had chosen items that I wouldn’t mind wearing over and over again—jeans, T-shirts, canvas shorts, and a couple of sweatshirts. I had two pairs of shoes—the sandals I was wearing and the sturdy boots I would change into once I made it to camp.

  Alex switched off the iPod strapped to his arm and removed the ear buds. “Is this your first trip to Honduras?”

  I nodded. “Yours?”

  He shook his head. “My third. It’s beautiful down here, isn’t it?”

  I looked around at the friendly people, colorful flowers, and towering mountains that surrounded us. “Magnificent.”

  “That’s why I keep coming back. Well, that and a certain doctor I met on my last tri
p. The two of us hooked up a couple of times,” Alex continued, sounding like one of the housemates on The Real World. “We managed to stay in touch after I left—mostly through postings on each other’s blogs. I’m hoping the magic will still be there when we come face-to-face again.”

  “What if it isn’t?” I asked, wondering what I would do if I found myself in similar straits. If the animosity Jennifer felt for me the last time we saw each other was still there—or had intensified in the time since we had been apart.

  “There are other fish in the sea.”

  How could he sound so serious about someone one second and so blasé the next? Obviously one of the perks of being young.

  “What do you do in the real world?” I asked, trying to discover if he spent all his time trying to save the planet or if it were only a part-time job.

  “As little as possible. What brings you to Honduras?”

  “A gorgeous doctor I’ve known since I was three.”

  “Are you looking to rekindle a little magic of your own?” he asked, obviously happy that we had a common mission.

  Since he had opened himself up to me, I thought he deserved the same in return. I decided to be honest with him. I had to practice on someone. Why not him? I’d probably never see him again. What could it hurt to lay everything on the line?

  “If she’ll have me,” I said, absently rubbing the spot where my wedding ring used to rest.

  “Your doctor’s a she?” His green eyes twinkled, making him look like an overgrown leprechaun. “Well,” he said with another wink, “mine is a he, so there you go.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alex’s messenger bag was crammed with dozens of magazines—some dog-eared and dated, others brand new.

  When Jennifer was in Africa, I used to ship her my copies of Sports Illustrated, People,and Entertainment Weekly every month after I finished reading them. She and the rest of the aid workers had already pored through all of each other’s books and magazines. They had heard the same CDs and watched the same DVDs so many times that they could recite each line from memory. They craved something—anything—new. Jennifer’s slow but inevitable response was always an e-mailed “You made my day” in twenty-four-point type with about thirty-six exclamation points on the end. I hoped she’d feel the same way when she received her latest care package—me.

  Alex shoved his hand into the recesses of the messenger bag and came out with a pack of flavored condoms. “Big night planned?” I asked as he hastily thrust the package back into the bag.

  “With no running water or electricity, the only thing to do in Mocoron is have sex. You’ll soon find that out.”

  I should be so lucky.

  At long last, Alex retrieved a packet of chewing gum. “Jack Daniel’s is my favorite cure-all,” he said. “I’m afraid this is the best I can do.”

  He offered the pack to me. I gratefully unwrapped a stick of Trident and popped it in my mouth. The long bus ride over rough terrain had left me feeling a little green around the gills. The boat trip wasn’t doing wonders for me, either.

  In Puerto Lempira, Alex and I had picked up a few supplies—a case of bottled water and nearly as much bug spray—before hitching a ride with a fisherman who rented his boat as a water taxi during the dry season. In my head, I referred to the diminutive man as Cap’n Crunch because he bore more than a passing resemblance to the picture on the cereal box.

  As Cap’n Crunch navigated his battered powerboat down Rio Mocoron, Alex pulled a worn photograph out of his bag of tricks and handed it to me. Even though more than a dozen people were in the picture, I focused on only one. Jennifer, her hands on her hips and a familiar lopsided grin on her face, was in the back row. She was dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and a sweat-stained Cubs hat. The other people in the picture were attired the same way—minus, of course, the Cubs hat.

  I knew without asking that I was looking at a picture of the Mocoron clinic’s medical staff. One incarnation of it, anyway. Most of the faces changed every few months or so. The version in the picture was almost a year old. Jennifer hadn’t been to Mocoron since the previous spring when the mobile clinic was just getting off the ground. Now she was back and I, like Stanley looking for Livingstone, was going to find her.

  Resisting the urge to caress Jennifer’s image, I returned the picture. I didn’t want to touch photo paper. I wanted to touch the real thing.

  “That one’s mine.” Alex pointed to a handsome blond kneeling in the front row. “His name’s Lars Johansson. He’s Swedish, which means I’ll probably have to learn to love IKEA furniture, but I certainly wouldn’t kick him out for eating crackers in bed. Which one’s yours?”

  “That one.” I pointed Jennifer out to him.

  “Dr. Rekowski’s yours?” He seemed impressed, which pleased me.

  “She was,” I said, reminding him that I had some work to do in that regard.

  “And she will be again.”

  I wished I could bottle his confidence. “We’ll see.”

  Alex snapped his fingers. “I know who you are now. Dr. Rekowski used to talk about you all the time. Only she said your last name was Stanton, not Paulsen.”

  “It was for a while. A few things have changed since then.” I thought about how far I’d come in the past few days. “Okay, a lot has changed since then.”

  My chest puffed with pride and my heart soared with hope. The way Jennifer and I had left things, I had thought she would never mention my name again—unless she were cursing me or spewing invective. Based on Alex’s expression, though, whatever Jennifer had told him about me must have been positive. That meant there was still a chance for us. Her feelings couldn’t have changed that much in a year, no matter what I’d done in the meantime. Or could they?

  “What did she say about me?” I asked.

  “What did she used to call you?” He snapped his fingers again. “The one that got away. Looks like you didn’t go too far.”

  “Every road I take leads me right back to her. I either have a lousy sense of direction or wonderful taste in women. We’ll see which one turns out to be true.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Estamos aquí.” We’re here.

  The words were like music to my ears. I was so ready to see Jennifer. To stop running. To stop traveling. To stop. I had been on six plane flights in three days and I’d had no sleep the night before. I was out of gas, the fuel in my tank down to nothing but fumes.

  Cap’n Crunch steered the boat toward a clearing where the rainforest met the river. He cut the engine. The boat drifted toward the shore until the hull scraped against the rich brown earth, stopping our forward momentum.

  I could hear birds singing in the trees and small—at least I hoped they were small—animals moving around in the thick underbrush, but they were the only signs of life. Where was the welcoming committee?

  Against my better judgment, I swung my legs over the side of the boat and jumped into the shallow water. When the rainy season began in a couple of months, the depleted river would rise by several feet, flooding some of the areas we had just floated past.

  “Are we sure this is the right place?” I asked as I waded to shore.

  Alex pointed to a path that had been worn into the lush green grass. “The camp’s one mile that way, give or take a few hundred yards. If this were the rainy season, the clinic would have moved to higher ground to avoid mud slides and flood waters. That location’s about five miles in.”

  Good thing Jennifer decided to hide out in January instead of March.

  I tried to convince myself that I was up to the challenge that lay ahead, but I felt like I was going to keel over at any second.

  “She’s worth the effort,” I said under my breath. “It’s only a mile. Seven minutes on the treadmill.” Yeah, if the treadmill were ramped up to its highest setting and placed in a sauna.

  Less than a third of the way into the hike, my legs began to feel like a pair of rubber bands that had lost their elasticity. My lun
gs burned as if I were running a marathon. Sweat soaked my clothes, adding a good five pounds to the load I was already carrying. Mosquitoes the size of bats threatened to carry me away. The area we were in was called the Mosquito Coast because of the native Miskito tribe that called it home, but you could have fooled me.

  Alex led the way, the case of bottled water perched on his shoulder. We had bought the water for the clinic’s staff and their patients. With no source of water onsite, they had to haul buckets of the precious liquid from the river and boil it for hours in order to make it safe for drinking. I was tempted—not for the first time—to take one of the bottles for myself. I refrained, telling myself I could hold out for ten more minutes.

  “Okay back there?” he asked when he finally noticed that the gap between the two of us had grown from a couple of feet to nearly ten.

  I was desperate to see Jennifer but I had pushed myself to the limit. I needed a break.

  “Give me a minute to catch my breath and I’ll be as right as rain.”

  I took off my backpack and looked for a place to sit down. My head was spinning and my heart was beating much too fast. My brain was in a fog, my thoughts muddled and confused. I felt the way I had in O’Hare on Tuesday when, stressed over Jennifer’s absence and the Subway Slasher case’s omnipresence, I had rushed to catch a plane and lost myself on the way.

  No, I thought, this can’t be happening again.

  I shook my head to try to clear it. Then the rubber band snapped. The sky tilted crazily and the ground rushed up to meet my back. My eyelids slid shut and I was powerless to stop them.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Something cold and wet lay on my forehead. Something cold and metallic sliced at my T-shirt. A hand slapped my left cheek hard enough to sting. I groaned as something hard rubbed painfully across my breastbone.