The mother sprang to her feet and hugged Kara, as she chattered away in Tigrinya. Kara nodded politely though she only caught every third or fourth word, then smiled as the nurse translated the woman’s thanks.
“You’re very welcome,” she answered.
“Her daughter’s name is Maia,” the nurse informed her with a musical accent. “She is six years old.”
Kara nodded. “That’s a beautiful name, for a beautiful girl.”
The mother nodded, still sobbing a little. In relief this time, Kara thought. She said her goodbyes and had turned to go, when the mother gasped and fell to the floor.
Kara crouched down next to her, felt for a pulse. The woman was pale and clammy—symptoms Kara had originally taken for fear or relief but now wasn’t so sure.
“Ask her what hurts?” she instructed the nurse urgently.
The nurse did, then responded with, “Her belly. She is pregnant.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s get her into an exam room so I can take a look at her.” Kara slipped one of the woman’s
arms over her shoulders, waited impatiently as the nurse did the same. Then they stood as one, taking as much of the woman’s weight on their own shoulders as they could.
It didn’t take them long to get down the hall to an open exam room, and once there, took her even less time to ascertain that the woman was having a miscarriage—probably brought on by the fear, terror and strain of running with her daughter’s body.
The pregnancy was early and—it turned out—not the woman’s first miscarriage. But it was still horrible to tell her what was happening, to watch her cry as she realized she’d saved one of her children only to lose another. After they had done all they could to help Maia’s mother and make her comfortable, Kara decided that privacy was what her patient needed most, at least for a little while. She’d been to hell and back twice today and it would take anyone time to recover. Because she was stable and the bleeding had stopped, there was no reason not to leave her alone to do just that.
After changing out of blood-soaked clothes for the second time in a little over an hour, Kara headed back down the hall to check on Maia. Julian, having already changed clothes, was already with her when Kara stepped into the room.
“How’s she doing?” she asked as he checked the still unconscious girl’s vitals.
He didn’t look up. “Better than she was.”
“I guess that’s something, then.”
“Something.” He snorted. “Yeah, I guess it’s something.”
Concerned at his tone—and the fact that he still hadn’t looked her in the eye—Kara asked, “Everything okay?”
“Linda told me the girl’s mother is pregnant.”
“Was pregnant. She miscarried.”
“Shitty day for her, then, huh?”
She recoiled at his callousness and almost called him on it. But when she looked closer, she realized he was just as upset as she was. More than upset, really.
Sick at heart.
“Tomorrow will be better.” She knew she sounded like Ms. Mary Sunshine, but she couldn’t help it. If she didn’t think that, didn’t believe it, there was no way she could do her job. The sadness, the grief of it all, would cripple her.
He snorted again. “Yeah, sure. We’re in a country where children are allowed to play near landmines, where ten percent of the population has been ravaged by Ebola, where the government cares more about how it looks than it does about saving its citizens’ lives. How the hell can you think, for even a second, that tomorrow is going to be better than today?”
Julian whirled on her then, his dark eyes angry in his pale face. “Why would she get pregnant again? Knowing this is the world she is bringing her children into, knowing that she can’t keep the ones she has safe, why would she want to bring another child into this hell? I don’t get it.”
“It’s none of our business.”
“Why isn’t it our business?” he demanded fiercely. “I just spent six hours working on her daughter, trying to save her from something that never should have happened. Why the hell isn’t it our business?”
She tried again, spouted words she wasn’t even sure she believed anymore. “Accidents happen—”
“Do you really believe that bullshit? Do you really believe that letting your daughter play in a minefield is accidental? She was right there, Kara. Right there to scoop her up and run her in. It wasn’t like the girl had wandered off.”
“Maia.”
“What?”
“Her name is Maia. Not the girl.”
He threw up his hands. “Really? You’re going to lecture me about impersonalization now?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“That’s exactly what you meant. Don’t back down now.” The look he shot her was filled with rage. “I don’t understand how you can criticize me but have nothing but concern for her.”
She sighed, thrust her hands through her hair in an effort to gain some control of the situation. Julian was furious and dangerously close to spinning off course. She couldn’t let that happen. She was team lead. He, and his mental state, were her responsibility.
“I wasn’t criticizing you, Julian. You’ve done—”
“Yeah, right.”
“Let me finish!” She held up a hand and shot him a glare of her own. “You’ve done amazing work since you got here. No one doubts that. I asked for you personally and I know that we would not have gotten to the bottom of this outbreak as quickly as we did if you hadn’t been a part of this team.”
He dismissed her words with a wave of his hand. “I don’t need ego stroking, Kara.”
“It’s not ego stroking if it’s true.”
“So you say.”
“So I mean.” She paused, let that sink in before continuing. “We did good today. Why can’t we just concentrate on that for a while?”
His laugh was bitter. “Because there’s always so much more good that needs doing.”
“Yeah.” She inclined her head in agreement. “But you knew that going in.”
“TIA?”
“TIA.” She leaned over, rubbed his back a few times. Then promptly vomited water all over his shoes—right before she took a swan dive for the floor.
“What the hell?” Julian caught her as she fell. “Jesus Christ, Kara, you’re burning up.”
It was the last thing she heard before the world went dark.
CHAPTER NINE
July
Dear Kara,
I haven’t heard from you in a couple weeks—just want to make sure you’re okay.
Lucas
Kara,
It’s been three weeks since your last email. Are you all right? I’m worried.
Lucas
Damn it, Kara, I’m camping out at the CDC if I don’t hear from you in the next 24 hours. Where the hell are you?
Lucas
STANDING BY HIS CAR, Lucas checked his email and text messages for what had to be the fiftieth time that day. Still nothing from Kara, though he’d been very clear in the email he’d sent the night before. She needed to contact him.
Frustrated and furious, he climbed into the car, slamming the door behind him in a totally unsatisfactory display of temper. Then used his phone to look up the website and number for the CDC. This had gone on long enough. He was going to get answers if it killed him.
After punching in the number, he waited impatiently as the phone rang for what seemed like forever. Fi
nally, it was picked up and “Center for Disease Control, how may I help you?” came through the phone in a voice that was sweet as syrup and twice as slow.
“May I speak with Paul Lennox, please?” Lucas closed his eyes and offered up a swift prayer that this would work. Because if it didn’t he was going to lose his mind.
“I believe Paul is out of the office for the day. I can transfer you to his voice mail, if you’d like.”
“Is there someone else I can speak with in his department?” He knew he sounded brusque but he was out of patience. He’d been waiting for Kara to contact him for four torturous weeks now. Four weeks of wondering if she was okay, if she was even alive. It was bullshit and the next time he talked to her he was going to tell her so in no uncertain terms.
Because there was going to be a next time. There had to be.
“If you can tell me what you need, sir, I can try to transfer you to the correct person in Paul’s department. Or, if you can wait until tomorrow, he should be back.”
Wait until tomorrow? He felt like if he waited five more minutes his head was going to explode.
“Look, a friend of mine works for Paul. She’s in the field in Eritrea and I haven’t heard from her in a month. I need to make sure she’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, sir, even if Paul was in, we wouldn’t be able to give that information to you. We have a strict privacy policy—”
“I’m a doctor. I know your damn privacy policy. But I’m her emergency contact, so—”
“Well, if that’s the case, then there’s nothing to worry about. If something had happened to your friend, you would have been notified. I’m sure she’s fine.”
Somehow that didn’t make him feel any better. “Look, if I could just talk to someone, anyone—”
She sighed, and the sweetness was gone from her voice when she said, “I suppose I can transfer you to Paul’s administrative assistant. She might know something. But that’s the best I can do—and if nothing else, you can leave a message for Paul to call you back tomorrow.”
“That’d be great, thank you.”
He waited on tenterhooks while the phone rang and rang. By the time the voice mail of a perky young woman named Marisa Hardley finally picked up, he was ready to throw his phone out the car window. Not to mention more than ready to storm the CDC as he’d threatened in his last email to Kara.
He settled for leaving a terse voice mail outlining his problem and requesting a call back ASAP.
After he hung up the phone, he put the car into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, doing his best to fight off the panic that was assailing him as he drove to his mother’s house. This wasn’t like Kara, wasn’t like her at all. Yes, things had been strained between them lately, but there was no call for her to just vanish like this. They had an agreement and this disappearing act of hers was not a part of it.
Years ago, right after he’d suffered through her first hellish trip out of the country, they’d agreed that she would contact him regularly. He didn’t care how—email, phone call, text, IM, he wasn’t picky—but she was supposed to contact him at least once a week, just to assure him that she was okay. If she was out in the field and away from communications, she’d tell him in advance and sometimes that week would get stretched to ten or eleven days. But never had she done this. Never had she left him waiting twenty-eight days to simply hear that she was okay.
It pissed him off that she was doing it now. Made him angry to an extent he rarely let himself reach, because it wasn’t helpful. He’d learned years ago, in dealing with his mom and sisters, that he had to stay cool and not let his temper get the best of him.
But this callous disregard from Kara—he wasn’t used to it and didn’t like it, at all.
He pulled into the driveway and, slamming out of his car, he started up the long, windy path that led to his mother’s front door. The absolute last thing he wanted to do was have lunch with his mother and
sisters again today, but he didn’t have a choice. It was another command performance in a summer filled with them. He didn’t know what had gotten into his mother, but something obviously had. Usually she was content to see him once a month—preferably right around the time she ran out of the monthly allowance doled out by his father’s trust. But lately it seemed she had to see him once a week.
Still thinking about Kara, he jogged up the steps to his mother’s front door. In the old days, when his dad was still alive, he would have walked right in. After all, this was the house he’d grown up in and the house that would one day be his, passed to him as it had been to the oldest son for five generations. But since his mother had taken to moving a different lover in every few months, he thought it prudent to wait on the steps until he was invited in.
In an effort to keep calm as he waited for the door to open, he went over all the places Kara could be.
She could be out in the field, without access to electricity let alone the internet.
Her camp could be under siege by rebels, her equipment seized or destroyed.
She could have contracted Ebola, could be dying in some makeshift hospital in Eritrea right now.
She could have been kidnapped by one of the rebel factions.
She could be injured and dying of infection.
Or, he admitted grimly, she could be just fine and have simply decided not to contact him because…because why? That was what was killing him. The not knowing. And she knew that about him. She knew he was not very good at not having all the information. It made him insane. As evinced by his current craziness. If he could just hear from her—
He took out his cell phone, checked messages and email again. Still nothing.
If she was okay, if something bad hadn’t happened to her and she got home safe and in one piece, he was going to kill her for putting him through this.
He was just starting to call the CDC again when the door swung open and his mother stood there, dressed in a soft-pink linen pantsuit, high heels and a double strand of pearls. It was to be a casual lunch, then. No pressure. By the time he was sixteen he’d learned that all was good as long as she was wearing pearls. It was only when the colored stones came out that there was a problem. And if she was wearing diamonds on a day she didn’t have a high-society gig to go to, then look out. Because she was out for blood.
But pearls, pearls were good. Lunch should be low-key—and it probably shouldn’t cost him more than a few grand to get back out the door. Now if only Kara would email, he could say that things were looking up.
“Hi, Mom,” he said as she stepped back and let him into the foyer.
“Hello, Lucas. How are you?” She tilted her head to the side and he obliged her by dropping a quick kiss on her still-smooth, gardenia-scented cheek.
“Great, thanks.” He fumbled his cell phone into his pocket. His mother didn’t like them at her table. She put up with his because he was a doctor, but she knew today was his day off and he decided not to push it. At least not unless the CDC actually called him back.
“Is everything okay?” his mother asked as she ushered him into the dining room. “You look distracted.”
“I’m fine. Just busy with work.”
“You’re always busy,” his mom chided. “No matter what time I call.”
“I’m a doctor, Mom. I’ve got a lot of patients.”
“You don’t have to work as hard as you do,” she told him. “If you’d just join your uncle John’s private practice—”
“I’ve told you before, I’m not joining anyone’s practice. I like my job.”
“Yes, but you’d probably like a paycheck every once in a while, too, wouldn’t you?”
Impatience sizzled along his nerve endings but he refused to give in to it. This was an argument they’d had a million times—having it a million and one wasn’t going to change anything. Certainly not his mother’s mind about the appropriate ways in which one gave back to one’s community. Benefits and charity galas were one thing, but actually getting his hands dirty with the everyday tasks it took to run the clinic—that was completely outside her realm of understanding.
He tried not to blame her much—after all, she’d raised a lot of money for his clinic through the years. The fact that she’d never be caught dead in it wasn’t important. His patients were what was important. Kara was.
As he took a seat at the long cherry dinner table, he glanced surreptitiously at his phone. Still nothing.
As one of his mother’s maids came forward to pour him a glass of iced tea that he was perfectly capable of pouring for himself, he said, “I get a paycheck, Mom. Every two weeks. Just like most people.”
“Yes, but what you get paid is barely enough to keep a hermit crab alive, and they don’t eat much.”
“You have no idea what I get paid.”
“No, but I know it’s nowhere near what your father used to make—and he’s been dead ten years. With inflation what it is, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to surpass his salary. All you have to do is—”
That’s when he tuned her out. She always had something to say about his dad, some way to illustrate how he wasn’t living up to the old man. And maybe that was true. Hell, it probably was. God knew his father had regarded his wife and daughters with a bemused kind of indulgence, had more than put up with their idiosyncrasies and bad habits.