I jerked around and saw one of the Gray soldiers weaving around the obstacle course of bodies, running erratically toward us. He had been injured. Blood soaked his uniform, but he wasn’t down and clearly had more killing in mind. He saw me staring at him, and he lifted his gun and screamed, “Zu-ber-i!”
Givens strong-armed me out of his way and raised his weapon, but before he could squeeze the trigger, he grunted and rolled onto his side.
I had no choice.
I seized the gun from Givens’s hand, sat with my back to him, and used my folded knees as a gun brace. I pointed the AK at the Gray soldier, who was closing in. I was looking him squarely in the eyes when I fired.
The burst of bullets was shockingly loud, and the kick of the gun threw me back onto Givens. I caught my balance even as the soldier staggered backward and dropped.
I didn’t need to check his pulse to know what I’d done.
Dear God. This is me. Brigid Fitzgerald.
I’ve just killed a man.
Chapter 22
THE ENTIRE field was in chaos. The helicopter chopped shouted words into strings of nonsense, and the whirling dust storms colored everyone and everything a dull yellow-brown.
Colin had been standing between the helicopter and where I sat with Givens. Now he was heading toward me, waving his hands wildly, frantically calling out to me, something like, “Brigid. Come to the helicopter. Come now.”
“I need help!” I shouted back.
Nick Givens was still alive, and as long as he was breathing, I was determined to save him.
I leaned close to the young man’s ear and said, “Nick, you hang on, okay? I’m getting help for you. You’re going home.”
A new sound washed over the field.
There was another helicopter high overhead. I felt a flash of hope. More help was coming in, and surely there were other people on this field who might be alive and, with medical assistance, could be saved.
I prayed for that.
And then another shock blasted the hope right out of me. As the helicopter descended we were sprayed with gunfire. We were under fire.
Our own helicopter was rocking and beginning to lift off, and now Colin was running toward me.
“Leave him,” he shouted over the roar of the engines. “Brigid, come with me, or I’m going to throw you over my shoulder and carry you.”
I still didn’t understand—and then I did.
The logo on the tail section of the second aircraft was not the blue UN letters with the image of the globe.
The logo was the letter Z in black.
Other helicopters appeared overhead, joining this one. We were being attacked by Zuberi’s army.
Colin was only yards away. I shouted, “Colin, he can’t walk. But we’re taking him back with us. We must.”
Colin’s face contorted as bullets flew and the enemy helicopter landed a hundred feet away, sending up thick, stinging waves of dust.
I could hardly see, but I grabbed hold of Givens’s feet, and Colin, following my lead, lifted up the young man from under his arms. He was heavy, but I was damned well going to keep a grip on him. More bullets pinged into the dirt. We were making progress toward the UN airship—it was so close, I could see the pilot’s face—when Colin let go of Givens.
I screamed, “Colin! Pick him up!” when I saw the look of shock come over his face. He clutched at the bull’s-eye on the front of his T-shirt. I yelled his name, but he looked confused as he stared at his bloody palm.
He started to speak, but he couldn’t get air. His knees buckled, and he collapsed, falling onto his side.
I released Givens’s feet and ran over to Colin. A bullet had gone through the center of the target on his back and out the front. Maybe it missed his heart.
I rolled Colin onto his back, put an arm under his neck, and grabbed his dear face with my hand. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be looking past my shoulder.
“Colin, I’ll get you out of here. Please, don’t leave me.”
I pressed my lips to his and kissed him. I felt him respond, and for a moment I was filled with relief. But then he went slack. I needed help desperately, but I couldn’t leave Colin alone, even for a second.
I stood up to look for Sabeena as fusillades of gunfire sprayed around me. I felt a hard thump to my rib cage. My vision blurred and slid sideways. I was screaming inside my head when all that I’d known went black.
NO. PLEASE, GOD. NO.
Part Two
Chapter 23
I WAS seated comfortably, speeding through total darkness toward a soft light far away. I smelled nothing, heard nothing, and I was not afraid. I wiggled my fingers, and I flexed my toes, but I had no desire to stand or stretch my arms or look in any direction but straight ahead.
I became suddenly aware of a warm place inside my chest that was not part of me. It was an unknown presence, knowing and alive, and it conveyed an idea to me. A big one. That what was happening to me now was meant to be.
I formed words inside my mind.
I asked, What is this?
I wasn’t answered in words, but I had an understanding, something like, You know. You called out to Me.
The warmth expanded out from my chest to the ends of my fingers and toes. What was happening? Was I with God? Was His spirit inside me? Was He protecting me?
Why now?
Am I dead? I asked.
There was no answer.
I had another question, equally pressing.
What happened?
The silence was accompanied by a warm breeze, and then the void was filled. I was far above the killing field in South Sudan, above the birds that cast circling shadows over the ground, and I heard blades chopping at the air. Thousands of bodies stretched out to the horizon. It hurt me to see them, but I could not look away.
Why has this happened? What purpose has it served?
I was sitting on the ground that radiated dry, baking heat. My eyes were half-closed to keep out the dust, and my mouth was dry. At my feet was the wounded soldier, Nick Givens.
But Givens became Nadir, the brave and hilarious boy who’d been shot and had his body hung on the wall. His arms were stretched out, and he looked up at me with light in his eyes.
Nadir is dead. Givens is dead. Why? What is the point of this?
A voice came to me, loud and echoing. “Brigid. Hang on.” It was Sabeena. I watched as my dear friend ran toward a helicopter. Men jumped down from the aircraft and headed toward where I sat in the bloodied dirt with Colin’s head in my lap.
Colin is dead. He’s gone. This can’t be.
A sound inside my mind seemed to say, Be with Colin.
I was with Colin entirely. I felt his terrible guilt and emotional pain. I understood his shame and how hard he had tried to redeem himself in the company of Kind Hands. But now, his expression was gentle, as though he had found peace at last. His voice, but not his voice, entered my mind.
I truly love you, Brigid. Do you know that?
My thoughts went out to him.
I love you, Colin. And I’m so very sorry. It was my fault that you were shot. Forgive me, please. You shouldn’t have died.
His silent words came to me again. Please listen to me, Brigid. Live a good life. Live.
Hands came from above and lifted me roughly onto a stretcher. I heard running feet, felt my weightless body being hoisted up, passed to other hands inside the helicopter.
“Brigid. Can you hear me? Brigid.” That was Sabeena.
I was inside a confessional booth. I saw Father Delahanty’s silhouette through the curtain. I had been holding his hand when he died.
He had wanted to confess, but he had said, “God has a plan for you.”
The last words of a dying man made no sense. I had only hoped to give him comfort.
Father. Why did you have to die?
A reply seemed to come from a presence warming my body and filling my mind, a presence that felt other than mine.
H
e lived the full extent of his life.
No. I reject that. A black rage filled me, and I thought, This is all wrong. What kind of god are you? Answer me.
No answer.
I thought, And me? Have I lived the full extent of my life?
I was in the back of the donkey cart with the remains of the dead. Father Delahanty’s body was wrapped securely in a sheet. I crossed his forehead with my thumb, and a thought bloomed in my mind fully formed. Father Delahanty wanted me to know that God had a plan for me. That He had more for me to do.
A plan? What plan is this? Speak, damn you.
A soft light was all around me. I could see it through closed eyelids, and I could almost touch it.
What is the plan?
Someone shook my shoulder.
Sabeena? Is it you? Was this all a dream?
Chapter 24
I OPENED my eyes. I was leaning against a man in the seat beside me. He was wearing a dark coat, a brimmed hat, and leather gloves. He looked to be in his sixties, and his wrinkled face was very kind.
“Oh,” I said, pulling back. “Mi dispiace tanto. I’m so sorry.”
We were on a train, and it was decelerating. Lights flashed in the windows, and the flip sign at the front of the car read CIVITAVECCHIA.
The man spoke to me in Italian.
“I hated to wake you, miss. But we are coming into Roma Termini. I’ll get your bag down. We’re here.”
People got up from their seats and gathered their possessions. The man with the hat reached up to the rack and took down my satchel.
“Watch out,” he said. “Be aware of your surroundings. Rome is a big city.”
I thanked him.
He touched his hat and was absorbed into the crush of people moving to the exit doors as the train squealed to a stop. I followed the crowd to the terminal, and from there to the street, where I joined a long taxi queue outside.
The city scene was loud and jarring, a mixed-up puzzle of sights and sounds that did not fit together in my mind. In the place of donkey carts and old Land Rovers were sports cars speeding, shifting gears, braking suddenly, accompanied by the constant blaring of horns.
Pedestrian traffic was also loud and clashing. Fashionable people carried shopping bags and computer bags. They laughed and shouted into cell phones as they strode purposefully down the sidewalk, hardly looking up at all.
Where were they going? To what end? It had been two long years since I had lived in a city.
I moved along with the queue until I was at the front of the line, and the driver of a white Fiat opened the door for me. He saw the way I held my arm and took my battered leather bag and put it in the trunk.
I got into the taxi and gripped the armrest as the driver shot away from the curb. He knew the address I had given him, and he sped through the streets of Rome. Centrifugal force pinned me painfully to the side of the cab, then threw me toward the far side of the seat as we drove around the traffic circles.
The driver had a picture of his wife and children in a frame stuck to the dashboard, and he had hung a rosary from the rearview mirror. The cross swung hypnotically as we took the many high-speed turns. That swinging rosary made me physically sick. I looked away.
I was wearing the same jeans, blue cotton shirt, and crocheted cardigan that I’d worn when I first went to South Sudan. And now I was also wearing Sabeena’s secondhand pink Skechers that, evidently, she had passed down to me.
Sabeena’s shoes were all I had of her, and they were the most precious things I owned. They reminded me that it had all really happened.
I had died with Colin on the killing field.
It was Sabeena who had gotten me off the ground and into the helicopter. Jimmy Wuster told me that she had decompressed my lungs with a needle while we were in the air and literally brought me back to life.
She had assisted Dr. Wuster and Dr. Bailey in the O.R. at Kind Hands, where they did emergency meatball surgery. Then she had gone with me to the airport in Entebbe and had handed me off to an in-flight nurse for my trip to a hospital in Amsterdam.
I imagine survival odds were small.
That was six weeks ago. I hadn’t seen or heard from Sabeena. Was she alive or dead? Had she been able to rescue Jemilla and Aziza when our hospital had been shut down?
And what was I to do now? I could not imagine ever working as a doctor again. And I no longer believed that if there was a god, he was good.
Chapter 25
MY DRIVER looked at me in the rearview mirror.
He said, “La signorina, dovrei prendere da un medico?”
He was asking if he should take me to a doctor. I felt more lost and more vulnerable than I had in my life. I could only tell this stranger the truth.
“Sono un medico. I am a doctor,” I told him. “I’ve been in a war zone in Africa. A lot of people died. I lost a man I loved to this war, and I had to leave people I loved behind.”
The man’s face reflected my pain.
Horns blared. He swerved the car, got us back on track. We were on a broad avenue, Piazza del Colosseo. The Colosseum was on my right, ancient, crumbling, and at the same time still standing after thousands of years. I barely glanced at it.
We turned onto Ponte Testaccio and were crossing the bridge over the Tiber when a gang of motor scooters came up from behind. As they passed us, their loud, popping motors shot me back to the slaughter in South Sudan.
The driver was looking into the glass, watching me hunch down and cling to the corner of the backseat.
“Were you hurt?” he asked in Italian.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Rome will be good to you.”
The cab slowed as we entered the section of Rome called Trastevere, which means “beyond the Tiber.” He turned onto a narrow street that was laid with cobblestones and lined with low, pastel-colored buildings. It was sweet and beautiful, like an old, hand-tinted picture postcard.
He stopped the cab in front of a three-story building the color of peaches, with ivy clinging to the walls and a tile with the number 23 painted in cobalt blue.
I pulled a wad of euros from my handbag, but my driver refused the fare.
“Be well,” he said. He unhooked the rosary from the mirror and bunched it into my hand exactly the way Nick Givens had with his dog tags. I couldn’t say no, so I said, “Grazie. I’ll keep it with me.”
He nodded and smiled and took my luggage from the trunk and set it down at the feet of a row of potted plants.
“Go with God,” he said.
“And you.”
A voice called out to me from above.
“Brigid. Brigid, up here. Oh, my God. I’m so glad to see your face.”
Chapter 26
TORI HEWITT was calling down to me from a window on the third floor. The open shutters perfectly framed the sunny face of my dear friend from medical school, who was leaning out over the street. I hadn’t seen Tori in two years, and she looked fresh and healthy and beautiful.
“I’m coming down!” she shouted.
A moment later she burst through the door with her arms open wide and pulled me into a hug that I needed more than she could possibly have known.
She asked me a million questions as she grabbed my battered bag and led me through an archway to the main entrance and the interior stairs to the apartment where she lived with her husband, Marty.
“How are you feeling, Brigid? Are you famished? I’ll bet you are. Did you have trouble finding us?”
The apartment was extraordinary. The high ceilings were made of beamed antique wood. The floors were made of terra cotta tiles, and the enormous windows let in brilliant light.
I stared at the fruit-colored upholstered furniture and the kitchen that was made for cooking as though I had never been inside a home before.
“What can I get you, Brigid, my dear friend?”
“A hot shower?”
“Done,” said Tori. “And if you don’t mind, I want to take a lo
ok at you.”
We were inside a shining, white-tiled bathroom. Tori turned on the shower, and as I undressed, she took away my clothes, clucking her tongue as I gave her a bit of a guided tour.
“One bullet went in here,” I said, pointing to the scar in my belly. “It went through my spleen and left lung and exited in my back.”
“It was the splenic trauma you had to worry about,” said my friend the doctor.
“Yeah. It’s good, though. They got to me quick in the O.R.”
“And the lung?”
“Collapsed. My friend decompressed it in the chopper. I lost a lobe, but no big deal. I lost blood flow to my brain for a while. But I’m good now.”
“You had neurological workups, right?” Tori asked me.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“What are fingers?” I asked.
Tori burst out laughing, and I had a laugh, too; it felt like the first time in my life. I showed off the scars over the plates in my right arm, which had been shattered in three places, and then I said, “That’s all I’ve got.”
“That’s plenty,” said Tori.
I hadn’t seen a mirror in a long time, and now I stared at myself in the prettily etched mirror over the sink. My red hair looked like a dead shrub. My skin was brown, and my cheekbones were sharp. My eyes had lost their innocence. I wouldn’t be getting that back.
Tori put a fluffy white bath sheet on the toilet seat and said, “I’m going to help you in.”
She gave me her arm to grasp as I stepped over the side of the tub and into the hot spray.
“Good?” she asked.
“Good” couldn’t begin to describe it. “Blissful.”
“Try this lavender shampoo, Brigid. It’s my favorite. And use the conditioner. I’m going to sit here, okay?”
She was making sure that I wouldn’t slip on the porcelain and reinjure myself. Her tenderness made tears well up. I couldn’t take it.
“You know what, Tori?” I said as the hot water streamed down my body.