“She’s beautiful. And funny. Smart. Dedicated. I’ve never met anyone like her.”
Romeo cocked his head and studied Alexander.
“What?” Alexander asked. He was finally starting to feel the alcohol. Maybe he ought to take it easy, not lose his judgment. But then again, fuck it. He downed the last of his drink and ordered a vodka tonic. Fuck the alphabet, too. He’d ruined things with Isobel and now he would drink until he didn’t feel like an asshole. Awesome plan.
Romeo’s gaze tracked a thin, dark-haired man. The man turned, caught sight of him, and raised his glass.
“Someone you know?” asked Alexander.
Romeo smiled into his glass. “Not yet. So that’s why you’ve been so damn weird. You’ve gone and fallen hard. About time, man.”
“That’s what I like about our friendship, you’re so empathetic.”
“At first I thought you had cancer or something, you were acting so weird. I’m just relieved.”
Romeo’s analysis was absurd, of course, but still interesting on a theoretical level, Alexander supposed. Had he fallen for Isobel? He could see how it might sound that way. But he wasn’t the type to fall for anybody. He sipped his drink. Although if that really was the case, he should’ve forgotten her by now, shouldn’t he? They’d fought and then he’d gone halfway around the globe to find something else to think about. He should’ve forgotten her and moved on already. It had never been a problem before. He shouldn’t be lying awake at night, still jet-lagged, going over everything they’d said. Shouldn’t find himself smiling when he suddenly remembered something she’d done. Shouldn’t be ashamed of how he’d behaved.
Shouldn’t feel so . . . Hell. Shouldn’t feel.
He emptied his glass.
“Another?”
“But with more vodka and less tonic,” he instructed the barman.
He was going to end this madness. Now. He had always been able to switch off, it was just a matter of attitude and will. And distraction, of course.
So when two giggling women came over to him and asked if he really was Alexander De la Grip, and whether they could take a selfie with him, he smiled widely and invitingly.
“We’re Swedes,” they said.
“The best kind,” he replied, pulling each of them onto a knee. They fell, laughing, toward him.
“Isn’t that Romeo Rozzi?” one asked with wide eyes.
Romeo bowed slightly. “Ciao.”
The women giggled, and Alexander wrapped his arms around them more tightly. “Don’t worry about Romeo, he’s gay. Hey, wasn’t there someone you wanted to get to know in the bar?”
Romeo shook his head. “You going to manage, then?”
Alexander placed a hand on one of the women’s thighs. He looked deep into her eyes.
“Go, I’ll be fine.”
The woman responded by pressing herself against his crotch. She was small and dainty, giggly and toned. Her friend was exactly the same. If he wanted to think about something other than serious doctors with gray eyes and a million freckles, this was the right way to go.
“So what do you think, a bottle of champagne?” he asked.
The women clapped and squealed.
Romeo left him with a look that seemed half amused, half concerned.
* * *
Alexander woke the next morning completely disoriented. His heart pounded. He had dreamed something. He took a deep breath. Home. He was home. With jet lag, a hangover, and nightmares, but no heart attacks. He looked around. He was alone, thank God. There was a vague memory of Romeo in the elevator with him, putting him in a taxi and sending him home.
He rubbed a hand over his eyes and waited for his pulse to slow before he climbed out of bed, staggered to the kitchen, and drank some water. With the glass in his hand, he studied the New York skyline from the kitchen window. Normally, he loved this apartment, loved being in New York, but the past few days had been a total waste. He hadn’t done a thing. Hadn’t been to the gym, hadn’t done any work. What was the point of partying and drinking if it didn’t even help? If he couldn’t feel calm here, where the hell should he go? He stared out. There was no point going on like this.
He felt for his cell. Found the icon for the clock app and clicked on a world clock. Isobel had to be in Chad by now. He had saved the time for N’Djamena, the capital. He stared at the screen. It was morning there. He had been on Google Earth. Seen the barren landscape. Wondered what it was like there. The sun was shining; the temperature was probably well over one hundred.
He put down his cell. Picked it back up again.
Dialed a number, waited impatiently.
“Yes, this is Leila.”
“Alexander here. De la Grip,” he added. “I’d like to have Isobel’s Skype name. Can you get it for me?”
Silence.
“Leila?”
“You know you can’t order me around just because you gave us some money.”
He snorted. “And you know that I most certainly can.”
More silence.
“I like Isobel. She might seem strong and tough. I don’t know what’s going on between you, but she’s a complicated person,” Leila said.
“I know.”
“Call after six tonight, her time. They have a curfew then, so she should be back at the base. I’ll send you the username. And Alexander?”
“Yeah?”
“Think very carefully.”
Yeah, well, it was probably too late for that.
“Bye,” was all he said.
Her message arrived. He would take a shower. Drink some coffee. Think.
Chapter 34
Time flew when you were in the field, Isobel thought to herself as she realized, between patients, that she had already been in Chad five days.
“Breathe in.” She spoke in French to her patient, a four-year-old boy with feverishly bright eyes and a high temperature. Medpax’s pediatric hospital was in the middle of nowhere. Their patients mostly came from the villages dotted around it. Sometimes they had patients from any of the nomadic groups that lived in the desert. Families often walked for days to get there, and the children who came with them were almost always in a bad way. One of the biggest concerns was that people waited too long and arrived at the hospital too late. In the worst cases, the children died immediately upon arrival. When that happened, sometimes the doctors were blamed. The attitude toward medicine was almost medieval from a Western point of view, with all the superstition that accompanied it. Much of Medpax’s long-term work was going to the villages and talking about the benefits of taking children to the doctor instead of using the shamans and their downright dangerous methods. I hope I made a difference, she thought, because the children who died here were mourned just as deeply as they would be back home. It was just that Chadian parents had to have strategies for outliving one or more of their children, because it happened so often. But a Chadian parent’s grief was just as deep and painful as any Westerner’s. “Très bien,” she said, and then moved on. She examined a six-month-old baby with breathing difficulties. Undernourished and with a lung infection. That was the most common diagnosis here.
“Did he have diarrhea?” she asked in French.
The mother, a girl who didn’t look much older than sixteen, nodded.
“We’ll give him a drip,” Isobel said to the nurse, then gave the mother a reassuring smile. “You can sit with him. And you will get something to eat.”
“Merci, Docteur,” the mother whispered.
Isobel moved on again. She had at least twenty more patients to see. She had met some of them the past fall, and their joy at seeing her again was mutual. A broken arm that had healed as it should, an undernourished child who had grown bigger and could now smile at her. But some of those she had met and treated last time were dead now. Car crashes, famine, and infections killed many in this country, one of the hardest places to live on earth. But the majority of today’s patients were new, part of a never-ending stream. She wiped
the sweat from her brow. There was no thermometer, but she would have been surprised if the temperature was much lower than 115.
After she dealt with the morning’s new patients, malaria, lung inflammations, and wounds that wouldn’t heal in the constant heat and humidity, she went by the doctors’ office. It consisted of a table and a generator-powered refrigerator behind a curtain. She opened the refrigerator. Like everything else, PET bottles were in short supply, but she had bought some juice at the airport, kept the bottle, and now refilled it with filtered water regularly. She drank it in slow gulps.
The curtain flapped and Idris joined her.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“I saw to that painful abdomen. Put in a drip. How was the C-section?”
Strictly speaking, it was a pediatric hospital, but the woman had urgently needed the operation and there hadn’t been time to send her to the bigger hospital in N’Djamena. The journey took three hours by car, but their patients didn’t have cars. Or phones. Or radio equipment. Most of them had nothing.
“It went well.” Idris checked the time. “But it’s almost six. You have to get back.”
That was the frustrating thing. Needing to leave the patients, not knowing how many would make it through the night. But breaking the curfew was madness, and not something she wanted to do without good reason. A dead doctor did no one any good.
“Are you working tonight?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Idris worked harder than anyone Isobel had ever met. He was at the hospital every day and every other night. Month after month. The hospital also had some local staff members, and their level of knowledge was much higher than many people back in Sweden realized. Once, when Isobel asked Idris what his specialty was, he laconically replied, “Everything.” Doctors in Chad needed to know basic medicine, be able to perform a C-section, operate on an appendix, and deal with tricky breech births immediately after they finished their education. The country had fewer doctors per inhabitant than any Western country; the doctors were responsible for far more patients. All of this created hugely knowledgeable doctors. But it also led to one of the most serious problems of developing countries: a terrible brain drain as trained doctors fled to nations with better working conditions.
“We’re completely full. Let’s hope nothing happens.”
And by “nothing,” he meant anything from a serious traffic accident to a conflict, to an outbreak of cholera. Or worse.
That was often too much to hope for.
“Inshallah,” said Isobel.
Idris, who was about as much of a Christian as she was, nodded in agreement.
* * *
Her driver, Hugo, who helped out with everything from driving to cleaning in the hospital, gave her a ride back to Massakory, the village where she was staying. People at home always asked how far apart things were in Chad. How far is it to the capital? How close is the village to the hospital? But those weren’t relevant questions down here. What looked like a ten-minute drive on the map could easily end up being a bumpy, shaky, eternal-feeling journey that took an hour. Maybe the road had washed away. Or a tree might’ve fallen, or a new roadblock had appeared. You never knew. But today, the trip took less than fifteen minutes, and it passed without incident.
“I’ll pick you up in the morning,” Hugo said, and he disappeared off into the Chadian evening to the sound of a muezzin. Isobel greeted the guard—everyone who could afford one had a guard in Chad—and went into the building. She was covered in sand. It came on the wind from the Sahara and mixed with sweat to produce a coating on the skin. She washed herself as thoroughly as possible, changed to a clean T-shirt, and went to the kitchen. She was given a bowl of food by the cook, a woman who looked around forty, but who Isobel knew was younger than she was, and supported her six children by cleaning and cooking for the few Westerners who came to Massakory.
“Merci,” said Isobel. It was the same meal as ever: bean stew with onion and something that looked like tomatoes. People often thought that food in African countries automatically meant fresh mangoes and luxurious fruits, but here in Chad, there was practically nothing to eat.
After she ate, she took out her computer and headed for the corner of the house where, if she was lucky, she could connect to the Wi-Fi. The Skype icon told her she had an incoming message. She clicked on it and opened the window. Assumed it was Leila. She read the message.
Alex Grip would like to add you as a contact.
Accept. Decline.
She blinked. Hesitated. Was it really Alexander? What could he want?
She accepted with a click. Waited, her hands clasped over the keyboard.
When the call came in with the usual bubbling sound, it was a video call. She clicked the green icon and waited.
* * *
Alexander had been waiting for the Skype call for two hours. Chad was in the same time zone as Sweden, which meant that Isobel was six hours ahead of him. According to Leila, the curfew came into force at six her time, and so he had sat there, staring at the screen, since twelve New York time. He had briefly gotten up to make some coffee, and when he came back, she had accepted.
The screen flickered, and then she was there. It felt like he could breathe normally for the first time in hours. He hadn’t been entirely sure she would want to talk to him, but now she filled the screen in front of him.
“Hi, Alexander.”
She had on a white T-shirt and her hair was in a ponytail. Somewhere behind her, the sun shone, and he could see plain concrete walls and faded posters bearing the UNICEF logo. She didn’t smile, just gave him a cautious look.
“Hi there. How are you?” he asked.
“I’ve had a few long days,” she replied lightheartedly, taking a sip from a bottle of beer. It suited her, drinking beer. “And you?”
“I’m well.” It was true. Now that he had her in front of him, he felt better than he had in a long while. “What are you doing?”
“Not a lot. There’s a curfew in the evenings, and at night it’s too dangerous to go outside. Between sunset and sunrise, I have to be here on the base, so I drink beer and try to relax. Gather my thoughts.”
“Is it safe?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for asking. It’s fine right now. There was some fighting in a neighboring village, but nothing here.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Medpax has a house at a compound here. I’m staying here alone, but there are some Red Cross people next door. We play cards sometimes.”
“How are things with the kids?”
“Today was a good day. No one died.”
“I’m really sorry about the last time we met. Do you have time to talk for a minute?”
“Wait, let me put my earbuds in.”
He watched her plug the simple white earbuds in, first into the computer and then her ears. It felt strangely intimate. The knowledge that his voice was now going straight into her ears, wouldn’t be heard by anyone but her. She nodded when she was ready. He moved closer to the screen.
“I know what you think, but I didn’t sleep with that girl.”
“Okay,” she said, but he saw the doubt on her face. He wished there was some way he could show her he was telling the truth. Two seconds after he and Qornelia left the restaurant, he had put her in a taxi and sent her away. Had known the whole time that she wasn’t the one he wanted.
“I just wanted you to know that. And I’m sorry I . . . I don’t know. That I acted like an ass.”
That I feel something I’ve never felt before, and it’s scaring the shit out of me.
She smiled slightly. “Thanks for letting me know. I’m glad you got in touch.”
The picture started to jump.
“Alexander?”
“Hello?”
“The Internet is overloaded here, so it’s going to go off. Do you hear me?”
The picture froze and jumped again. “You’re disappearing. Take care, Isobel. I’ll call
back tomorrow, okay?”
He heard her reply: “Yes.”
The call ended.
He closed the laptop. Stood up. Looked down at New York, sprawled out beneath him. He would go out for a run. And give Romeo a call. It was time to pull himself together.
Chapter 35
Hugo was outside, waiting for her the next morning. He flicked his cigarette butt across the street, and Isobel watched it bounce on the red sand. The village was made up of simple two-story buildings constructed of concrete, and a lot of smaller mud houses. Thin-looking animals and hardworking people lived peacefully alongside one of the world’s largest populations of insects. In the capital, N’Djamena, where practically all foreigners lived, there was a university, luxury hotels, and a business center, but here in Massakory it was like traveling hundreds of years back in time. There were barely any shops to speak of and practically no running water. Local health care consisted of a medicine man who treated his patients with—ineffective at best, and deadly at worst—household remedies.
“Bonjour, Docteur,” Hugo said, opening the door for her.
She climbed into the car, and Hugo steered the rattling jeep out of Massakory. They were in luck today, too. The road hadn’t been washed away by rain, and they didn’t pass a single roadblock.
Isobel peered out of the wound-down windows. The car lurched, and she steadied herself with a hand on the roof.
* * *
“One of the oxygen machines just died,” Idris greeted her when she arrived at the hospital.
“Merde.”
It had only been a matter of time, but they needed those oxygen machines.
“I’ll prioritize it when I talk to Leila,” she promised, but wondered whether it would make much difference. How much did an oxygen machine cost? And if Medpax could somehow afford it, how would they even get it down here?
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