A Mother's Heart (18 page)

Despite the hopeful activity that followed her story, Mel was suddenly plagued one night by nightmares. But rather than revisiting the horrors surrounding her in the city, her mind thrust her back to her childhood and the day her mother died giving birth to Mel’s brain-damaged
brother, David, when Mel was ten. Another dream placed her in her grandmother Dessie’s house in Georgetown, abruptly pulled from her school in Bonn when her father, devastated by the loss of his wife, shut himself up in his work as a diplomat and took an assignment in the Congo.

The dreams woke Mel up in the middle of the night, the sweat seeping through her thin cotton T-shirt caused by more than the oppressive heat. She reached for a cigarette and went out on the narrow balcony that overlooked the street. In the distance, to the north, she could see flashes of light, a phosphorescence that spread out in the mist.

How many days? She shook off the fears of the child who hadn’t understood why she’d been left by first one and then the other parent. There were far more real fears only miles away.

Unable to go back to sleep, she paced until dawn, then dressed and hurried to the orphanage. She told herself with the firefight so near she wanted to make sure that Tien wasn’t forgotten in what might be a chaotic departure.

She rang the ancient bell and waited for the shuffling feet of the night porter. The old woman’s face registered surprise at Mel’s presence on the crumbling doorstep, but let her in.

“Reverend Mother at matins,” she announced. “Too early to speak to you.”

“I’m not here for Reverend Mother. I came…”

Mel didn’t know how to explain the urgency of her trip across the city. It occurred to her that the old woman might very well understand that Mel had been summoned by a dream, but she felt suddenly foolish.

“I came to help with the morning feedings.” She finally uttered a reasonable excuse for her unorthodox arrival.

“Okay. Okay. Sister be very happy to see you. You know the way to the babies?”

Mel nodded and made her way across the cracked terrazzo floor to the nursery. Diapers that had been scrubbed so many times they were nearly transparent hung from lines stretched across one end of the room. The smell of urine mingled with sour milk hovered in the room. A single infant was crying and Mel hurried to Tien’s crib.

But Tien was still asleep, curled in her corner of the crib, thumb in mouth.

Mel looked around. The sister in charge of the ward must also be at matins. The crying continued, persistent and building to a crescendo that Mel feared would soon wake the other babies. Her eyes scanned the cribs for the needy child and found him clutching the bars of his bed and banging his head against them.

She moved quickly, striding down the narrow aisle between the crammed metal cribs until she reached the screaming little boy. His diaper was soaked and full, and Mel could see little brown rivulets dripping down his legs. She hesitated.

Come on! You’ve seen a lot worse than this out in the field.

She reached into the crib and picked up the boy, holding him away from the front of her shirt. He abruptly stopped his wailing. Mel remembered a stone sink near the end of the room where the diapers were strung and moved toward it quickly.

She sat the boy in the sink. She turned on the faucet and a trickle of water emerged, but it was enough. When he was clean, she lifted him again, holding him awkwardly with one arm while she grabbed a clean diaper from the line above her head. It had been a long time
since she had held a baby. She remembered sitting very still when her grandmother had placed her infant brother in her waiting arms.

“You have to support his head, Melanie. He can’t hold it up by himself yet.”

She had held her breath, afraid to move the elbow where David’s oddly shaped head had rested. He hadn’t been a squirming infant, but lay very still, no sign of recognition in his eyes. He looked like her mother.

The child now in her arms was twisting and kicking, his wet skin slippery. The unfamiliarity of this weight and shape against her body was unnerving.

I have no idea what I am doing.

She managed to sort out how to pin the diaper around him and then returned him to his crib, where to her relief he put his head down. She retreated to the sink, found a battered plastic bucket and filled it with water to soak the soiled diaper.

Other children were beginning to stir, although Tien still slept. Mel thought about leaving the nursery, finding some pretext for taking out her notebook. But she stayed, and as babies woke up she repeated the bathing and diapering.

Mel was at the sink rinsing diapers when she saw Phil Coughlin in the doorway at the opposite end of the room, stethoscope around his neck and a small piece of paper in his hand. Mel was surprised that he’d be here at such an early hour. He looked as if he’d had as sleepless a night as she’d had, but she guessed it hadn’t been nightmares that had kept him awake. His skin had the gray pallor of too many hours spent in smoke-filled bars and he hadn’t shaved. She assumed he’d come directly from whatever nightclub was still serving the remnants of the American community still in Saigon.
She’d heard a few stories about Phil Coughlin since the day he directed her to write about the orphans. A couple of the Marines guarding the embassy had served with him a few years before.

“Phil Coughlin? Man, that guy was a wild man in town. Everybody knew if you were looking for a party, just put a tail on Coughlin and he’d lead you to it. But on duty, there was nobody else in the Corps I’d rather have putting me back together when I got hit. I’ve seen the guy under fire, hands steady as a robot, blood from a severed artery pumping all over him and he kept the grunt alive. Saved his leg, too.”

“What’s he doing back in Nam? I was at his farewell party last August. He was joking about some plush job in Boston he had lined up—he was going to be the doc to some big-shot politician’s family.”

“Why would anybody come back?”

No one Mel talked to had the answer to that question and it was unlikely Phil Coughlin would answer it himself. Her contact with him since the day she’d met him at St. Agnes had been limited to seeing him surrounded by children clamoring for his attention.

From her end of the room, Mel now watched Phil approach one of the cribs and examine a tiny girl with pale, almost blue skin and a bloated belly. She noted how deftly and gently he touched the child, in sharp contrast to Mel’s own clumsy grasping of the squirming children she’d been bathing. He made some notations on the slip of paper as Sister Agatha, the nun in charge of the nursery, rushed in.

“I didn’t expect you so early, Doctor Coughlin. Matins were delayed because we were waiting for Father Joseph to bring communion.”

She was tying a gingham apron around her gray habit as she spoke and pulled a notepad from the pocket. She
took a position at his side as they stopped at the beds of the sickest children.

Mel, sweaty and damp, her shirt stained from too many equally damp babies pressed against her, considered easing herself quietly out of the nursery. She suddenly felt like an intruder, an interloper in the domain of those with a far more important mission. She imagined Phil Coughlin would certainly perceive her that way (although Sister Agatha, she hoped, would appreciate the freshly diapered babies, however awkwardly it had been accomplished).

Mel was in no mood for another of Coughlin’s condescending remarks. Despite her constant activity and the repetitive, mind-numbing nature of bathing and changing the children, she hadn’t dispelled the unease that her nightmares had precipitated. If anything, the work of the last hour had only amplified her sense of the desperation in the orphanage—not only the physical limitations of the crumbling building and its insufficient supplies, but the emotional deprivation of the children. Sister Agatha, as efficient and compassionate as she had to be, was only one person. The babies barely cried because they had learned that no one responded to their cries. They withdrew into a realm of isolation, staring at the patterns of light and shadow made by their own hands.

Mel’s brother David had done that. No cooing or smiling or returns of affection. Just a blankness and emptiness where she had hoped to find an emerging personality, a brother who would love her. But in addition to his damaged brain, David was also physically frail. When he was four, his congenitally weakened heart had simply stopped, and he was gone.

Mel shook off the brooding memory. She didn’t dwell on losses; life threw too many at you. Soldiers who had shared a shot and a beer on a humid night re
turning the next day in a body bag; her father receding from her life as he spiraled deeper into his work, unable to recover from his own losses; the boyfriend at Columbia who had resented her winning the
Newsweek
assignment, accusing her of taking a spot that she didn’t deserve.

“First of all, you’ll never get the kind of stories a man would be able to write. There are places you can’t go, people who won’t talk to you because you’re a woman. And second, even if you’re able to get the experience, it’ll be wasted on you. You’ll come back after a couple of years, get married and decide to stay home with your kids.”

Mel had no intention of having children. Her mother’s death giving birth to David had sealed that decision. But she didn’t tell her boyfriend that. She didn’t want to waste her breath trying to justify why she was as deserving as a man to be writing for
Newsweek
. But it was after his resentment surfaced that she decided to use Mel for her byline, not Melanie.

Each of those losses had felt as if someone had punched her in the belly, knocking the breath out of her. She had wanted no more of caring so deeply about anyone that their loss could cause her pain.

She cautioned herself not to allow her concern for the plight of the children of St. Agnes to drag her back to the vulnerability and weakness she had put behind an impenetrable wall of detachment.

She was thinking too much—an observation her grandmother had often made about her growing up. So she thrust herself back into activity. If she kept moving and doing, she distracted herself from such thoughts. That was why she had left her flat so early this morning, driven from the unnamed fears in her bed. There was little in Saigon to occupy her now except the orphans.

She slipped out of the nursery before she had to speak to Coughlin.

On her way back to the front of the house she encountered a girl of about seven.

“Reverend Mother heard you are here. She’s looking for you.”

Mel followed the girl. She didn’t particularly want to be pulled into the superior’s circle. Whenever she had seen her, the nun peppered Mel with questions, demanding information she thought Mel had access to. Mel couldn’t blame her. The woman, like everyone else in Saigon, was desperate for whatever fragments she could glean to protect her charges.

But this time it was Reverend Mother who had information for her.

Reverend Mother was just returning the phone’s receiver to its cradle. Mel saw that her hand was trembling.

“Something has happened.” Mel was certain.

The nun’s face crumpled in anguish.

“The first planeload of children left Tan Son Nhut this morning. It crashed shortly after takeoff.”

Mel felt the nun’s words as if a grenade had torn through her chest. She gripped the desk and leaned toward the nun.

“Survivors?” She could barely speak the word.

“We don’t know. I got the call from Madame Deng. The children were from her orphanage. They were supposed to be the lucky ones to get out first. She was watching from the terminal.

“I have experienced more than my share of horror in my life, Miss Ames. God has granted me the strength and the will to lift a child bloodied but unharmed from under the body of her mother, who threw herself over her child to protect her. And I’ve accepted babies from their
mothers who cannot return to their families with a dark-skinned child.

“I thought we were doing the right thing—your story, the outpouring of concern, the airlift. How can it be that we are putting these babies in harm’s way by trying to bring them to safety?”

She seized Mel’s hand, her grip at once both powerful and needy.

“We cannot be deterred by this catastrophe, Miss Ames. We can grieve, we can pray for the souls of those on board. But we cannot stop. You must let the world know that.”

At that moment Phil Coughlin burst into the room.

“I just heard. They’ll need assistance at Tan Son Nhut if there are any survivors. Ames, if you’re finished changing diapers, come with me.”

Reverend Mother released her hand. “Do what you can,” she said. Behind her wire-rimmed glasses, Mel saw tears welling up in the nun’s eyes.

Coughlin grabbed his black bag and Mel followed, adrenaline kicking in after the horror of what she had just learned. She forced herself to ignore his deprecating remark about the diapers. She knew her usefulness in the nursery was limited. There was no need for him to rub it in.

But at the airport she’d be in her element. Amidst the chaos she knew would greet them, she’d find her way. Coughlin was simply a means to get there, and she put aside her anger that he had ordered her to come with him. Once a Marine, she thought, having been at the receiving end of far too many comments intended to intimidate her.

She wasn’t expecting their mode of transportation to be a Vespa scooter. Somehow she thought the esteemed
doctor would have had access to a Jeep. Reluctantly, she climbed on behind him. At first she gripped the seat, but his speed as he wove through the crowded streets forced her to clasp her arms around his waist.

She hadn’t been this close to a man in a long time. She could smell the bite of his sweat, hear the shallow pant of his breathing, feel the accelerated beating of his heart. The intensity of his physical response to the news they had heard echoed hers. She tried to calm herself and prepare for what she knew awaited them at the airport. But she was too aware of Coughlin—his restlessness, his impatience as he raced toward the crash. She hated the sensations rippling through her and pushed them aside. She felt sucked in by him in ways she had never experienced before, and she didn’t like it.