The Distance Between Us (6 page)

A tall man wearing a stylish charcoal-gray tie stands awkwardly in the hallway. He is neither Palestinian nor patient, doctor nor common visitor, but clearly an outsider, like Caddie. He is taking in everything but he’s not a journalist—she’s sure from that silk tie. He meets her glance. His eyes are so dark they startle. He lifts an arm as though to stop her, to ask a question perhaps. But she hasn’t time. She glances away and moves past him.

Caddie knows from previous visits that the emergency room has been turned into nothing more than another ward: too many emergencies, too little space. Most new patients, whatever their conditions, are simply hustled into one of the large dorms. Nurses don’t waste time trying to group them according to the type or even seriousness of their ailments. A boy whose leg hangs in a cast lies next to a comatose woman hooked up to a ventilator.

Shooting through the hallways, Caddie finds the girl in a room that holds about twenty beds, all filled. She imagines some poor soul being carted to a grave minutes earlier, and the girl taking his place atop a still warm, rumpled and discolored sheet. The family is gathering: wailing women and sullen men.
Caddie backs against the wall near the girl’s bed, trying for invisibility. Listening to their talk, she learns that the youth who had been making the bomb is dead. The injured girl is his sister. Her burns are severe, especially on the chest. A woman—mother or aunt—opens the child’s shirt slightly to show a red mass, skin almost gone, and what’s left looks crisp in places, leathery or wet in others. She is conscious. A moan emerges from far inside her.

A doctor arrives and begins an examination. Two weeping women are led from the room by the others, leaving three young men, probably cousins, to await the doctor’s verdict. Before he can pronounce it, a second doctor enters, two nurses on his heels. His graying hair, and the way he holds himself, make it clear he is the senior. “She should be intubated and on IV,” he tells the first doctor.

“I’ve ordered it.”

The senior doctor sends a nurse away to check on what’s become of the drip, and then examines the girl himself. He straightens. “Wait outside,” he orders the remaining relatives. He glances toward Caddie, who quickly kneels beside the unconscious patient in the next bed, her eyes closed as though praying. He turns away from her and back to the girl. “The burn penetrated the subcutaneous tissue,” he says.

“In one or two places.” The younger doctor sounds as though he equivocates. Caddie leans toward them slightly to better catch the Arabic.

“Third degree on the chest, that’s clear. She had trouble breathing in the ambulance, no?”

“She needs morphine,” the junior doctor says. “Penicillin.”

The senior doctor doesn’t reply at first. He looks at the girl thoughtfully with large, liquid eyes. A skeletal cat prowls the ward, meowing loudly. “You know the state of our supplies?” he finally asks.

“We’ll use what we have,” the junior doctor replies.

Still studying the girl, the senior doctor speaks in a rhetorical tone, as if he were teaching. “Is that practical?”

Caddie doesn’t understand what he means at first. She wonders if she’s misinterpreted the Arabic.

“Either way, we must alleviate the pain,” the younger doctor says, his tone growing peevish. “The question you raise is in Allah’s hands.”

The senior doctor crosses his arms and taps the fingers of his right hand. “We have twenty vials left of morphine. Penicillin is also short.”

The ward is suddenly quiet; even the patients’ moans seem to die on their lips. Only the doctors speak, quickly, one’s voice falling on the other’s.

“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

A
NOTHER 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.