by Mara White
“Don’t tease me anymore,” she pleaded into his kiss. Her lips were sore and her entire body felt like a blazing fire, alive with his touch and nearly singed by desire.
“What do you want, Salt? You want me to fuck you?” His smile was full of swagger. He bit her bottom lip and pulled it into his mouth.
“Stop—” But no sooner had the word escaped her mouth than Santiago had penetrated her fully. She arched her pelvis into his and he pushed her down with way more strength than she was capable of mustering. The man could move his hips like nothing she’d ever known, making sex not about thrusting and grunting, but an intimate dance where each dip and curve of his movement heightened her arousal in ways she didn’t know were possible. He was graceful even when he was rough, almost like someone had taught him how to move inside a woman.
Between the sheets was their ground zero. There was no class war, no cultural differences when they were marking and owning one another’s flesh. It didn’t matter who Salana was and Santiago wasn’t when the physical language their bodies spoke was more clear than most human communication. It wasn’t just sexual, the explosive chemistry that rocked them—their connection was also spiritual. Santiago made Salana feel safe even though he’d lived his whole life cozied up to danger. And Salana made Santiago feel special in a world where he often felt branded a nobody and swallowed up by the system. Bed was the demilitarized zone where their differences were laid to rest and they fell into one another’s bodies beautifully and connected as perfect lovers.
Salana knew that she’d have to leave him. Maybe not for forever, but she’d leave to pursue her dreams, man or no man waiting on the sidelines for her. She’d received her confirmation letter from Doctors Without Borders. Her hopes that Tiago would remain loyal while she was on assignment were not high; neither was her expectation that he’d go straight, get a real job without her there to constantly pressure him to get out of the game and walk the straight and narrow. And she didn’t blame him, she’d seen up close how nearly impossible it was. Easier to do what he’d always known than start over with nothing. But she had to go because the dream was part of her self-realization, and how could she pester Tiago about his path if she weren’t honestly and fully pursuing her own?
He wouldn’t understand and she didn’t expect him to. Her parents wouldn’t either and neither would many of her colleagues at the hospital. She’d accepted a position at a hospital in Afghanistan. A real war zone, where she’d live in a compound and likely risk her life just by traveling to and from work every day. But a calling was a calling and sometimes as inexplicable as your unconventional relationship with your boyfriend. Her master plan was also to set Tiago and Florencia up in her apartment. There was no need for his grandmother to continue living in the projects when there was somewhere accessible where she’d be much more comfortable. It was her old neighborhood anyway, one she’d likely been pushed out of due to the astronomical rise in rent from the wave of gentrification Salana herself was part of. Tiago wouldn’t like it but she would work to make him see it her way. And when she would dream of home from a million miles away, it would be their cozy apartment in the Heights and their lazy Sundays in bed she’d imagine more readily than her youth spent in a mansion in Connecticut. Santiago was home, he was family, and basking in his love was exactly how she wanted to live her life.
Chapter 20
Salana
Kabul, Afghanistan
The flight into the Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul from New York with one stop in Dubai took almost a full day of flying. The ticket alone set her back nearly eight grand to fly to a place no one else really wanted to go to. At times during the flight Salana doubted herself enough to provoke tears. In spite of how others might interpret her choice to go, Salana wasn’t trying to prove herself; she was much more intent on trying to find out who she was. Growing up wealthy with strict parents had given her so much privilege that her perception of the world would always be askew. Salana wanted to give back and hoped that in doing so she might have some kind of revelation, maybe really find herself.
The Ariana Afghan airplane felt like it flew out of a different time period and through a time warp to land in Dubai. The logo looked hand-painted and the body of the aircraft itself appeared in need of a good unifying paint job. She could see where holes had been patched and various old panels of the main body replaced with new ones all in slight variations of the same color. One of her travel guides told her that many of the modern amenities such as airplanes were Soviet discards repurposed by the Afghan government. Salana would be flying with mostly cargo and a few other passengers, mainly diplomats and military personnel.
Doctors Without Borders had its own compound located a stone’s throw from the Wasir Akbar Khan hospital where she’d be working. Maybe ‘a stone’s throw’ was a poor choice of idiomatic expression. She’d be transported to and from the hospital in an armored vehicle every day along with a bevy of other international nurses and doctors. She’d packed only scrubs and a few pairs of canvas hiking pants, long-sleeved T-shirts, some headscarves she’d bought online, and one ankle-length skirt in case pants were frowned upon. Everything she’d read about Afghanistan both intrigued and terrified her. Santiago refused to read the travel books or let Salana share with him the things she’d learned online. She got it. He didn’t want to be exposed to the things he couldn’t protect her from.
In the months leading up to her departure, Tiago had become withdrawn into his own battle with fear. Fear of loss and fear of change seemed to nearly paralyze him. He’d begun to pull away from her and she didn’t fight it, just given him space to breathe and to grieve, say goodbye in his own way.
She thought of him now as the huge junk of a plane rattled down the runway, leaving the slick wealth of Dubai behind for what would probably become the most harrowing adventure of a lifetime. And as she often did during trying moments that tested her resolve, she’d channel her lover’s resilience and his sometimes fatalistic but practical view of the world. Tiago expected nothing, no map of guidance or special pass to navigate the cruel universe. He survived by his own means in a hostile environment where the odds were perpetually and disproportionately stacked against him. He lived in the moment and decided his own morals and values based on real experience, not something a parent, a priest, or some politician told him. It was this raw connection to her own inner resolve that Salana ached to know. She could love him even better if she truly knew herself.
The first thing that struck her about Kabul was all the downed planes left to perpetually stew in their wreckage as soon as they came over the mountains. This was more surprising to her than the flies which were buzzing around in the airplane’s cabin or the ‘stewardess’ who had come around to serve them rice and lentils out of a single pot replete with a large stainless steel spoon. Were those wrecks left there as a warning or had the lot of rubble just been too costly to clean up?
“Soviet planes, from the war,” the woman sitting next to her said. They hadn’t spoken the whole flight but the woman apparently felt moved to speak by Salana’s horrified reaction to the abandoned crashes. “It’s a difficult landing, coming in at high altitude because of the mountains and then the dive landing into Kabul. A lot of the Russian pilots didn’t anticipate it and that was the end of them.”
The woman wore a headscarf and her accent sounded British. Salana nodded at her politely but could barely tear her eyes from the window.
“What are you doing in Kabul?”
“I’ve come to work at the hospital here,” Salana said, mustering the most mettle she could. The woman scrunched up her face at Salana’s answer and looked at her critically and curiously. The same sort of look her mother had given her when she presented her parents with her decision. Her mother felt her forehead and probably restrained the urge to have her daughter involuntarily committed. First the very questionable boyfriend phase and now the practically suicidal volunteer mission. She knew her parents wondered where they’d gone wron
g and what could possibly be the culprit for her life choices, which, to them, seemed incomprehensibly bad and troublesome. Her father tried to say no. But dads can only say that until you’re an adult. He’d gone as far as to threaten her inheritance, but Salana didn’t flinch when she told him she didn’t care.
“Good girls make good choices.”
Maybe Salana’s problem all along was that she wasn’t good.
Customs was remarkably shorter than she expected. She had notarized letters, a visa, enough ID to outfit a whole slew of special agent imposters. A driver met her with a sign bearing her name. She took in deep gulps of air and tried to absorb the sky above her before she crawled into the SUV with tinted and bullet-proof windows. It wasn’t like she’d be going out to take evening strolls after dinner at the compound. Salana would be virtually confined to the living quarters and the hospital itself for the duration of her stay there. Unless she wanted to be kidnapped, beheaded, set on fire, or tortured. She’d read all of those articles too, plus the State Department warnings. Read in fact until they turned her stomach so much she could no longer read. But it was the stories of women and children without adequate healthcare that fortified her and gave her the courage to press on. She thought if they risked their lives everyday as women then she could face danger in a small attempt to help them, feuding tribes, radical religious zealots, and shaky government be damned. It was the twenty-first century, women shouldn’t be dying in childbirth at the staggering rates they were in this country.
What impressed her the most on the ground was once again the rubble. Bombed-out shells of buildings were more prevalent than occupied residences that weren’t in a state of ruin. How did people live next to constant reminders of destruction and violence? How could you build your whole life right next to a spot where so many lives were taken away? The answers to those questions were easy. Necessity. Survival. The exact same way Santiago got up in the morning and made his way to the corner when someone he knew had been shot there the night before.
Good girls make good choices.
Sometimes there aren’t any choices. Life is a minefield. When you’ve got no choice but to go, you just step as carefully as you can.
Her first day at the hospital would probably rank as the most traumatizing and disturbing experience of her life. She put on the blue burqa and felt like she was donning ceremonial robes, like she’d graduated med school. But unlike that day where her parents were there to cheer her on, she was alone in Kabul and frankly, scared. She didn’t know if she’d made the right choice and she ached for Tiago’s arms so acutely it felt like a blood pressure gauge was cinched around her heart squeezing tighter and tighter. Squeezing until it shut out the rest of the world and caused a wound that only he could soothe. He was so far away. Once again in a totally different world.
Salana trudged forward, holding the robes away from her so she wouldn’t trip on them. Her counterpart was an Afghan-American woman who had also come through the same program. Her name was Nosheen and she spoke enough Dari to allow Salana to breathe a sigh of relief.
They climbed into an armored vehicle that was waiting inside the gates of the compound. Nosheen didn’t move with ease in the burqa either, but she cast her eyes down to the floor and Salana followed suit. She felt like curling all the way into the footwell and hiding. Why were the streets abandoned? Why were the vehicles that transported them made to withstand bombs and bullets at every turn? She knew the answers to those questions, knew the risk she was taking, but it suddenly felt much more grave than the practical vision she’d created in her head.
Nosheen ushered her inside the hospital past many women in light grey robes squatting in the barren dirt yard of the long building. Salana took them in, like plants dotting the lawn.
“What are the women doing?”
“Waiting,” Nosheen said. With a finger to her lips, she signaled Salana to hush.
Once inside there were more women who seemed to glide down the sides of the hallways, feet barely touching the floor, without making no sound. They wore identical robes to theirs, only faded into oblivion by repeated washing. They looked like grey ghosts, apologetic for taking up any space in the building. Nosheen pushed Salana to the side too, as if the middle of the hall were off limits.
“The hospital is divided into two sections, Salana. One side is for men and the other side is for women. We’ll be working in the women’s hospital, as I’m sure you’ve deduced already.”
“Do male doctors come to this side to treat patients? Or vice versa?”
“Only in rare cases. It’s not a usual occurrence.”
“But what if a specialist happens to be of the opposite gender and there isn’t anyone of the same gender to treat the patient?”
Nosheen raised an eyebrow at Salana with a look that accused her of not doing her homework.
“They don’t make exceptions?” Salana asked. Her tone was low because she’d already guessed the answer. “Wow. Okay. That will take some getting used to.”
“It’s better now than it was, believe me. In the late nineties, the Taliban forbade all medical treatment for women. It’s a step up from there.”
“No care? No treatment?”
“No exceptions. This is a vast improvement.”
She understood, but it didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Denied health care because of your gender. What a horrific human rights violation.
Nosheen showed her the supply closets that were virtually empty. Explained that anesthesia was either obtained by the patient on the black market before the surgery, or wasn’t used at all due to scarcity.
“How can you perform surgery on someone while they’re awake?”
“Four-point restraint. When it’s a life or death situation, you make do with what you have. Afghanistan isn’t the only place in the world where medical supplies are in short supply. We’re so spoiled in the States that this seems surreal, but you’ll get used to it pretty quick.”
“What about kids? What about palliative care?”
Nosheen looked at her and shook her head sadly. Salana wanted to jump out of her own skin. How could she help when it looked like resources would be impossible to come by? The open dialogue and communication she had envisioned were obviously a fantasy, when the gender taboo seemed to take priority over all else. She’d be relegated to working with only knowledge and her hands. Luckily, Nosheen would be there to translate for her. She had her stethoscope and the small doctor’s bag of supplies she’d brought with her. It would be like the turn of the last century where she’d have four fundamental tools at her disposal for diagnostics and nothing better than leeches, salt, and fresh air for treatment.
“Are there female doctors here, Nosheen? Will they recognize us as doctors?”
“Salana, not many women have been educated here since the 1950s, and that only lasted until the Soviet invasion in the 1970s. Chances are they will travel great distances to see us and we may very well be the only women doctors they see in their lifetime.”
“How do we change that?” Salana was quick to blurt out. Forgetting that she was here on a medical mission and not a political one, but wasn’t gender discrimination a human rights concern they should be addressing?
“Well, just us being here is a statement. It’s powerful in and of itself.”
“I’m afraid to ask you what the infant mortality rate is, or the maternal death rate.”
“You really didn’t prepare yourself, did you? Similar to that of remote parts of Chad and the South Sudan. But better than it was ten years ago. There’s been an international call to train midwives and it’s happening. The trouble lies in getting them to the places they’re needed. Security is a concern. Women cannot travel alone.”
Salana wanted to scream, but she maintained her composure. She’d really only contemplated what coming as a doctor meant and not what coming as a woman would concurrently mean.
“We can go over expectations and our plan for gathering information and trea
ting patients while we’re here tonight back at the compound. I’m sorry if this is a rude awakening. My mother likes to say that the Kabul she grew up in is lost like the city of Atlantis and all she has are memories and a stack of Polaroid photos of her wearing go-go boots with a skirt and smoking a cigarette in public.”
“Safe to say this isn’t your mother’s Afghanistan. I don’t smoke, but I could go for one right about now,” Salana said gravely to Nosheen. No alcohol either, or running the frustration off in the gym or a park. Salana had the disturbing feeling that this would be like joining a restrictive cult and signing over all of her rights. What in God’s name had she signed up for?
“I’ve got your back. We’re in this together,” Nosheen told her. Salana reached out to squeeze her newfound friend’s hand. “Don’t touch me in public.”
“Are you serious?” Salana whispered.
“We could get reprimanded for infractions as innocuous as eye contact or speaking out of turn.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Nope, humor stayed on the tarmac when you got off the plane. Get ready to be scrutinized and possibly disciplined for just being alive.”
“How do they stand it?” Salana asked her friend.
“Who? The women? I’m afraid they haven’t got a choice.”