The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  “And you suggest?”

  “Codeine.”

  “Oral codeine.” The junior doctor grunts. “The corruption of our own government . . .”

  “Fortunately, some nerve endings—”

  “. . . means we never have enough. And for infection?”

  “—are already dead. So the pain—”

  “Infection, I said.”

  The senior doctor picks up the girl’s chart and writes. His voice is painstakingly slow now and Caddie has no trouble following his words. “There’s been a clash with some settlers. Two teenagers and a child are on their way in right now, Ahmed. Another child. This one eight years old. Bullet wound to the leg. Decent chance of survival. But without painkillers, the boy may tear at his wound. Infection and death could follow. Needless death.” He sighs. “You know this, Ahmed.”

  “In Allah’s name, look at her,” the younger doctor says.

  The senior doctor looks at his colleague sadly but from a great distance, as though mourning a son’s obstinate refusal to learn. “You can invoke Allah,” he says. “But I have to allot the supplies.” He hands the chart to the nurse. “I’ll return in two hours. Let me know if there is change before then.”

  The child is no longer crying. She stares at Caddie with stunned eyes that hold fear—though surely, and please let this be so, she is too young to comprehend the sentence just pronounced on her. It must be the possibility of more pain that frightens her. Not the promise of nonexistence.

  The first doctor has his back to her; he is already moving on to the next patient. “Excuse me,” Caddie calls. “I’d like to talk to you about the medicine shortages.” He turns. For the briefest instant, she sees a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then he looks her up and down, and scowls. “We can talk as you work, if you’d like. Or I’ll wait.”

  “You are—who?” the doctor asks in English.

  “Newspaper reporter.”

  “Which country?”

  “America.”

  His frown stiffens. “You aren’t allowed in here. I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I heard you talking,” Caddie says.

  “You heard? And in what language did you hear?”

  “My Arabic is fine,” she says, slipping back into that tongue.

  “Mistakes are easy to make when it is not your language.” The doctor continues to speak English. “Not your people.”

  “I might be able to help.”

  “You think we will get more money because you write that a bomb-maker’s sister suffers? If it were so simple, you think our own would not have already achieved it?” He shoves his right hand into his pocket and tilts his head. His look turns suddenly softer, appraising. “You want to help? Go to an Israeli hospital and bring us back the medicine we need.” He steps toward her. “But go quickly. The child can’t wait.”

  She could do it. Get in her car and zoom back to Jerusalem. She might be able to persuade some leftist-peacenik doctor to give her the morphine, the penicillin, whatever is needed. For a little girl, a few supplies to ease her pain. Maybe even save her life.

  Caddie rubs her right wrist, remembering the leather band Marcus wore at his. It was a gift from a woman whose demolished home he photographed, whose coffee he drank, whose children he admired. He’d given her back her dignity, the woman told him, so she gave him the bracelet. They called each other habibi, friend.

  Caddie had scoffed. “A story is a story,” she’d told Marcus later. “These people aren’t our friends. We don’t share their lives in any sense of the word. We slip in, dig up what we need and move out, fast. All that buddy-buddy stuff is only worth it if it gets you a better photo.”

  “Bullshit,” he’d answered. “You want something more, too. Something to make us more than friggin’ voyeurs.”

  “Us? I know better.”

  Now, watching her, the doctor’s stare slowly grows hard. “I’m very busy,” he says, and turns away.

  Caddie studies his long, narrow back. She imagines a series of interview questions. Have you ever been so tired you dispensed the wrong medicine? Have you ever made a mistake that cost a patient his life, and then lied to the family? She watches him leave the room. She can no longer see him, but in her imagination, he blushes.

  Still, it’s difficult to leave. The girl’s family has not yet returned, and she is watching Caddie with eyes that pull. It’s as though she’s waiting for an answer to a question.

  Get too close, feel too much, and you’re sunk. That’s what she’d told Marcus. What she believes.

  Caddie forces herself from the hospital room into the hallway and halts before a window that overlooks an inner courtyard where recovering patients sit surrounded by extended families. The floor feels gritty beneath her feet. She leans against a wall. She’s done here.

  As she fights sluggishness, an emaciated man moves past, one hand pressed against the wall for support. The patient’s eyes are large above hollow cheeks. Each step is a labor. He’s maybe twenty-five years old, strikingly young for one so strikingly ill.

  The flesh is weak.

  The first time she’d heard the minister say that, she thought he referred to Grandma Jos, who had been having more and more accidents as her eyesight worsened, who’d cut herself that very morning with a paring knife. And Caddie wondered, how did he know, this minister? How did he know that Grandma Jos was aging fast? Did he, as God’s emissary, have God’s ability to see straight into their home? Was Grandma Jos really right, with her faith that seemed so inept?

  Later, much later, when she learned the minister meant something else, something obscure about lust and sin and redemption, she rejected his interpretation as overblown and unrealistic, the explanation of the cloistered. No, she’d been right from the start: “the flesh is weak” was a maxim—or, better, a protest cry—about the inescapable vulnerability of the human body. Everyone has to die—in an armchair, on the pavement, in a bed. Caddie can’t prevent it.

  She turns to leave and almost runs into two orderlies rushing past, pushing empty beds. “Fucking son-of-dog Zionist settlers,” one curses loudly to the other.

  “Any dead?” Caddie calls after them.

  The orderly glances at her over his shoulder. “Yeah. There’s dead.”

  “How many?” she asks, but he’s already moving out of earshot. To her right, there is a quick movement, and she turns to see the man with the silk tie lean forward from a chair against the wall as though he, too, is waiting for the answer. His hands rest on his lap, cupping a cell phone. His dark curls contrast with his angled cheeks and chin. His mouth is a narrow leaf. A deep dimple cleaves his chin. His eyes sweep down the hallway, following the orderlies, then anchor on her. His stare is intense, yet vacant. Caddie has seen this expression before. In the woman, smelling of vinegar and sweat, who collapsed on her in front of a bombed building. In the child whose father had been shot that same day. In Sven, that afternoon.

  “Something happened to you.” He says it to her, even though she’s thinking it of him. He speaks English with an accent. Russian, she thinks.

  “Many things.” She speaks with deliberate indifference as she begins walking away.

  “The earth is hungry, it takes as it needs,” he calls after her. “If we knew where we were going to fall, we could spread straw.”

  It sounds like something he has said before many times, a personal truism that is unfamiliar to her. His tone, however, is familiar. And he speaks as though he recognizes her.

  But no. He’s a stranger, just some stranger. Caddie stiffens her shoulders. “Poetic,” she says. “And ridiculous. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He isn’t angered by her curtness. In fact, he seems amused, maybe slightly intrigued. The way Marcus would be. He’s about to speak again. She doesn’t want that. She turns and strides down the hall, making her escape.

  Three

  ANOTHER TANGLED NIGHT. Dreams of childhood, and of guns.

  She’s a girl again
, grasping a Remington by its barrel. Comforted by its solidity, thrilled by its smooth wood beneath her fingers. Then, in a single breath, she’s an adult, aiming the rifle with intent to shoot. Her target is large and blurred. She’s about to fire when it becomes human, with eyes. In the background, she hears the voice of a colleague talking to a reporter in the field. “So how many bodies you got? I need a count for the story. Only the warm ones, now.” She hesitates a second, then contracts her trigger finger. For a moment she thinks—she hopes—she’s missed. Then she knows she hasn’t.

  She’s awakened by a sharp sense of tumbling. She rises, needing water.

  She hasn’t dreamed of guns in years. Not since childhood has she even held a rifle. The first time: a Fourth of July town picnic when she was eleven. The fathers organized a shooting contest at the edge of the field. She wandered there out of thoughtless curiosity, drawn along with the other kids. Someone put a rifle in her hand. At first, she didn’t like its leaden awkwardness. Right from the start, though, she was a sucker for a protective arm flung over her shoulders and a bit of fatherly advice—even if it was someone else’s father and only about how to hit a target. So she stayed long past her turn, as her friends were groaning, “C’mon, Caddie.” She stayed until Grandma Jos came to take her home.

  For the rest of that summer, at one house or another, she target-practiced into the gray of evening. The fathers, who soon blended into one amorphous Father, were in turn surprised, amused and, finally, appreciative of her eagerness. They taught her to identify the firing pin and the ejector of a .22-caliber bolt-action rifle. She learned how to hold it steady but not tight, how to lower her cheek, close one eye and stop breathing as she slowly compressed the trigger. She got good, damn good. She learned how to shatter a Coke bottle from fifty feet by at least her second try, every time. Eventually she discovered how much pleasure she could find in the simple weight of a gun held snug in the pocket of a shoulder. Focusing in, and controlling the wild explosion, that was an attraction. And, unexpectedly, she began to see the beauty in a rifle, in its lines and its angles and its sheen. In its bulk and its specific gravity. This surge of emotional response to a gun, she kept to herself. But she felt the fathers guessed it, and approved.

  She shot the next summer, and the next, and a little of the next, the summer of her fourteenth year. That was the last of it, though. That was the summer simple praise no longer held enough appeal, the year she drifted away from the fathers in favor of their sons. The summer she stopped imagining squeezing triggers, stopped feeling gun euphoria. Until now, in a dream.

  Why hadn’t she ever told Marcus about her girlhood skill with guns? He would have loved that, would have made up markswoman jokes, teased her about being a crack shot.

  She pulls her heavy vacuum from a hall closet and pilots it through the living room, pausing to take particular care in the corners. She vacuums the seat and arms of the couch, and then lugs it aside to clean beneath. She runs the vacuum over the carpet again and again, as though she were a penitent performing an ablution. Midstride, she stops, marooning the machine in the middle of the floor.

  The phone rings when she is sitting on the carpet, leaning against the couch and trying to block out everything but her rhythmic breathing.

  “Caddie?”

  Immediately, she puts face to lilting voice. “Sven? My God.”

  “I know, I know, it’s nearly four A.M. there. I’m sorry to wake you.”

  “Jesus! It’s not that. It’s only—what took you so long?”

  “I’m sorry.” He is silent for a beat. “I have tried you at this number. A couple days ago.”

  “I just got back from Nicosia. Where are you calling from?”

  “London.”

  “Well, get on a plane and get back here.”

  “Actually,” he says, “I’m thinking about staying.”

  “Staying?”

  “Taking a job with one of the rags. Easy pics, royalty at horse jumps, all that. And no travel for a while.”

  “A paparazzi?” Once, she might have privately sneered.

  “Fluff, yes.” His voice thins. “But calm.”

  “That’s something,” she says.

  He coughs. “So you’re okay, right?”

  “Yeah, fine.” That damn word again. She tries not to let it fall heavily.

  “When the hospital released you, I took that to mean you were, you know, fine.”

  Sven—charming, polite, company-fit-for-the-queen Sven—sounds almost embarrassingly awkward.

  “It was—you were—lucky,” he says. “We all—but you, a couple more inches—be careful, Caddie. From now on.”

  She knows. It’s simply a matter of odds. She’s used up too many lives. Sven, too. All three of them, in fact. She presses the phone between her ear and shoulder and crosses her arms. “Hey,” she says, “what’s with Rob?”

  “Somehow he talked them into sending him directly to Chechnya.”

  “Jeez. I had to struggle to get back here.”

  “So you’re working again? Already?”

  “Yeah. Well, features . . .” She moves toward the window and pushes it open. She smells chicken cooking with rosemary: some mother preparing dinner before work, probably. Suddenly Caddie is impatient with small talk. “So listen, Sven. That driver—”

  “I have no idea.” Sven’s voice turns abrupt.

  “No, of course not.” She rubs the back of her neck with one hand. “But you talked to him more than the rest of us.”

  “I don’t know, Caddie.”

  Caddie feels the breeze shift, escaping through her apartment. The remaining air turns heavy. “Of course not,” she repeats.

  “I mean, I was the one who talked, not him,” Sven says. “He was quiet. That’s what I remember.”

  “His skin,” she says. “You remember? So leathery.”

  “Not that it matters.”

  “No,” Caddie says. “Right-o. I keep thinking, though.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to let it go.”

  “Thinking,” Caddie goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Thinking we should go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Back, of course. Find that driver. That goddamned driver.” She hears her voice sharpen. Her words come involuntarily, like an arm raised to counter a blow.

  “Caddie.”

  “Find all those assholes. Deal with them.” What a relief. The need to say it aloud has been pressing against her, knotting her stomach. “Let them smell fear,” she says.

  “They do smell fear,” Sven said. “All the time.”

  “More fear, then.”

  “Caddie. Yaladi and his men—or his enemies, or whoever it was—anyway, they’re all long gone. The trail’s cold.”

  He’s right about that, of course. It goes cold so quickly there. “But—”

  “Trying to find them could get us into serious trouble,” he says. “For what?”

  “We owe it to Marcus,” she says. “You don’t ignore something like this.” She’s angry that Sven doesn’t understand. But embarrassed, too, that she has shown herself to be so underdeveloped a human as to want to personally slow-torture the ambushers. “We’ve got a responsibility. We—”

  “That’s crazy,” Sven interrupts. “Our responsibility is to remember—and go on.” He pauses and sighs. “We will go back, Caddie,” he says more gently. “Someday.”

  So he wants her to wait, then. For someday. “Same road?” she says. It sounds insane to her own ears, even as she says it.

  “Together,” he agrees.

  “We’ll try to find that driver?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  She’s being worked, she knows. But from Sven, at this moment, she can permit it.

  Into the silence, he adds, “I’ve seen his parents. They’re concerned about us.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Made me feel better, Caddie, to talk to them. Maybe you should catch a flight to London, come see them, too.”
>
  “Oh.”

  “And you know about the website?”

  “Yeah.” Mike mentioned it when he came to the hospital.

  “Have you taken a look? There’s a shot of Marcus that I took. And lots of stuff people have written.”

  She hasn’t gone there. But she doesn’t answer.

  “Some really nice tributes.” He trails off. “Well . . .”

  The conversation is wearing out; Caddie hears it in his voice. His comments seem disconnected from what she needs to talk about and she can’t think of how to respond to him, but she doesn’t want it to be over. After this it may be months, even years, before she talks to him again. He’ll move on, send a bit of cheerful e-mail at New Year’s. This thing between them, this thing they shared, will be gone, evaporated like dew, barely even a memory. And she doesn’t want that.

  “Take care of yourself,” he mumbles.

  She’d like to beg him not to hang up, to please please keep talking, but she’s suddenly afraid of what might happen if she tries for words spoken aloud.

  “Keep pushing forward, Caddie,” he says. “It’s going to get easier. It’s got to.” And then he’s gone.

  SHE WAKES AGAIN AFTER DAYLIGHT, hit by the now familiar sensation: part of her stomach has broken off and is churning within. Her breath comes fast, her fingers tremble, her tongue is as dry as a dead leaf. Moments repeat themselves: the driver slows, she hears a popping sound, feels the weight. She’s aware of severed branches, a smell like creosote.

  Then the effort—never successful—to shut it out, this hard, fundamental knowledge that blankets her like a needy lover when she lies, and churns at the pit of her gut when she rises, and won’t let her go. Marcus is dead. Somebody killed him.

  Hush, don’t worry. Marcus’s voice, softly, in her ear.

  The first thing she noticed about Marcus, really noticed—the feature that made her begin to sneak long looks at him—was his voice. What he could do with it. How gentle and warm he sounded as he took people’s pictures. It surprised her; she was suspicious at first of this quality in a war photographer. Then she saw that, along with the bold and the funny and the fearless sides, he really had a tender side. And she wanted that tenderness for herself. Greedily. The way a kid wants candy.