The Lies We Told (9 page)

I
WAS TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE
. I
THOUGHT ABOUT MY SPLIT
personality as the helicopter rose into the air. We banked to the east, and below us, I watched the terminal of Raleigh-Durham Airport disappear. Definitely two different people. In my office and in the O.R., I was so strong I sometimes amazed myself. Decisive. Skillful. And above all, unafraid. I was proud of who I was. Who I’d become.

Then there was the woman who’d cowered in the hallway of the Brazilian restaurant. The woman who was flying to the coast, not thinking of how she could help the victims of the sister storms, but rather how she could please her husband by being there. How she could pull him back to her when she felt him slipping away. And there was the woman who was not afraid of flying, not even in this tiny four-seater helicopter, but who was afraid of landing at the airport CNN said had turned into a “third world country.”

“I
hate
flying,” said the woman sitting next to me, “and this is the worst, flying in this teeny little thing.” She was a twenty-
something nurse named Janette. I’d met her and the two other DIDA volunteer nurses only moments before we boarded. I felt sympathy for her. The skin over her knuckles was taut and white as she clutched a paperback book in her lap.

“This is actually pretty luxurious,” I tried to reassure her. The use of the bright-red four-seater helicopter and its pilot had been donated by a business in Raleigh, and the four of us—three women and one man—sat facing each other on buttery soft beige leather seats. It was noisy, though. So noisy we had to yell to be heard. Other helicopters—huge ones, unlike our petite luxury craft—lumbered through the air above and below us. “This will be the last time we’re comfortable for a while.”

“Even if we crashed,” the man sitting across from me said, “we’d probably be fine. It’s not like we’re all that high.”

Well, that’s bullshit,
I thought to myself as I looked out the window at the trees and buildings far below, but I knew he was only trying to comfort Janette.

“Let’s not talk about crashing,” the third nurse said.

“I heard they’re running out of supplies,” the man said.

“And I heard there’s a lot of violence at the terminal,” Janette said.

I did
not
want to hear about violence.

The male nurse scoffed at Janette. “Any time you put a few thousand desperate people together, there’s going to be some dustups,” he said.

“It’s a lot more than dustups,” the other woman said. “My father wanted me to take his
gun
with me.”

Janette laughed. “You’re joking.”

“No, I am not. It’s not like when you go to the airport for a flight. There’s no security checkpoint you have to go through. People can bring any weapons they want. If you had minutes to leave your house and you’re some redneck fool and you
know you’re going to head into God only knows what kind of situation, you’d grab your gun and—”

“Wow, look at that!” I said, pointing out the window, not even certain what I was pointing to. I needed them to shut up so I could hold on to my fragile calm. “Look at all the downed trees,” I added. There
were
plenty of downed trees. Loblolly pines crisscrossed the land below us like toothpicks topped with green cellophane frills.

Everyone peered out their windows and began talking about the storms, and I was relieved I’d managed to change the subject. As the terrain below us changed from solid ground to a huge glittering lake, we all grew quiet. I’d seen the images on TV, but still felt unprepared for the devastation below. Streets disappeared beneath the brown water, and in some areas, the only evidence of a road was a green highway sign jutting from the floodwater. The roofs of houses and commercial buildings looked as though they were floating. A blue boat rested on one of the roofs, a car on another. I saw small boats sailing between the houses, rescuers wearing helmets and life vests. It reminded me of images from Katrina. People died here. No doubt about it.

I clutched my backpack as I got off the helicopter at the Wilmington airport, helped by a skinny young woman in uniform. I was wearing scrubs, although Dorothea had said not to worry about what I wore—she had a DIDA uniform waiting for me. I had another set of scrubs and a few changes of underwear in my backpack, along with toothpaste, toothbrush, a small container of shampoo and a comb. “Just bring the bare essentials,” Dorothea had warned me. I’d brought my BlackBerry, though. If service was restored, I wanted to be able to get in touch with my office. I’d left my partners in the lurch, although I’d covered for one of them recently so they could hardly complain.

The woman guiding me toward the terminal shouted something to me, but I couldn’t hear over the deafening roar of the helicopters. Next to us, someone drove a long string of baggage carts toward the building, and at first I thought the carts were carrying blankets or clothing, possibly donated for the evacuees, until I realized they were carrying
people
. Men and women lay stacked against one another, feet bobbing off the sides of the carts as they rode toward the building. Were they dead or alive? It was a horrifying sight. I grabbed the arm of my escort, pointing toward the baggage carts.

“Those people!” I shouted above the noise. “Who are—”

She glanced at the carts. “Nursing home, most likely,” she shouted back. I could tell by the cavalier shrug of her shoulders that this was not the first time she’d seen evacuees transported like cattle in the last few days.

Inside the airport, the concourse was crammed wall-to-wall with people, sleeping and talking and shouting. I was prepared for the air to be hot, but heat was not all that greeted me. The smell—a combination of sewage and locker room and death—sucked the air from my lungs.

“Help me!” a woman called from somewhere. “I’m dying!”

I tried to see where the voice was coming from, but more people were pushing into the concourse behind me, and the woman escorting me drew me forward.

“Just follow the signs to baggage claim!” she said, her mouth close to my ear so I could hear her, and I realized she was going to leave me there in the midst of the chaos. She pointed to the overhead sign that read Baggage Claim. “Okay?” she asked, and I nodded.

“Bobby!” a man next to me shouted. “Where are you? Bobby!”

My escort disappeared into the crowd. Momentarily overwhelmed, I stood aside as a couple of people in DMAT T-shirts
tried to cope with the new arrivals. If there was any organization here, I couldn’t see it. I watched an elderly man and woman get knocked down by the throng of newcomers. I stepped forward to pull the couple out of harm’s way, but another fresh wave of people suddenly poured through the concourse door and I lost sight of them.

“Maya!”

I turned to see Adam jogging toward me. He had dirty hair and three days’ worth of stubble, but he looked wonderful to me. He gave me a quick hug, just long enough for me to breathe in the scent of his sweat. “Let’s get out of this mess!” he shouted, pulling my backpack from my shoulder onto his. “Come on.”

I walked with him down a long corridor lined with people, some sleeping, some talking, some crying, and I realized what seemed so different here from the situation with Katrina. So many of Katrina’s victims had been poor—people with no means to escape the area before the storm hit. Here,
everyone
had been trapped because of Carmen’s sudden change of course. The sister storms were equal-opportunity destroyers, and the people lining the corridor were of every race and, I guessed, every economic stratum.

Adam and I didn’t speak until we reached the lobby, where the medical tents had been set up. I’d been in the Wilmington airport once before, but except for the green beams high above our heads and the replica of the Wright brothers’ plane, I wouldn’t have recognized it. Adam turned to face me, hands on my arms, and smiled.

“I can’t believe you came,” he said. “You’re incredible. And gorgeous.” He wound a strand of my hair around his finger and smiled. “You’re also the only clean person I’ve seen in days.”

I laughed. I didn’t feel incredible or gorgeous, but I loved that he saw me that way. I wanted to ask him about the rumors
of violence, but bit my tongue. If he thought I was incredible for being there, I didn’t want to give him a reason to change his mind.

Someone called his name. He looked over his shoulder toward a woman standing at the entrance to one of the tents and waved. “Be there in a sec,” he called, then turned back to me. “Do you need some time to settle in? You okay from the chopper? Or do you want to get to work?”

“To work,” I said.

He caught my hand, pulling it to his lips for a quick kiss. I felt bizarrely happy despite the chaos and heat and stench that surrounded me. Adam seemed alive in a way he hadn’t for so long. He was happy and he loved me, and for the first time in weeks, I thought,
We’re going to be all right. We’re going to make it.

The reality of the critical situation in the airport hit me anew as we walked past the tents and he explained the difference between them. “Dorothea wants you in Tent Three,” he said. “Urgent care. Rebecca’s in there, too.”

We passed the second tent, and I was shocked by what I saw to our right. Between the second and third tents was a broad sea of people, all of them lying on litters on the ground. The litters nearly touched, side to side, end to end.

“Are these…are these just evacuees sleeping?” I asked. “Or are they all patients?”

“Patients,” he said grimly. “See why we need you?”

“Oh my God.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around the sheer number of bodies lying on the floor. Nurses and other volunteers moved among them, squatting next to one, trying to calm another with a few words spoken as they passed by.

“We’re not able to do much in the way of medicine here, My,” Adam warned, as though he wanted to keep my expectations in check. “We just need to stabilize people and get the
most critical patients out of here as fast as we can. We can only do what we can do,” he added, and I knew he had become, in a few days’ time, seasoned to this work. To Rebecca’s work. I doubted I ever would be.

We reached Tent Three, but before walking inside, Adam pointed toward a corner of the lobby. “MREs and water are over there,” he said.

MREs. Well, that would be another first for me.

Inside the tent, the air felt ten degrees cooler than in the terminal itself, and there appeared to be some organization. To my right, nurses were triaging patients. Ahead of me, on either side, were cots where people waited to be examined and around which family members or friends anxiously wrung their hands. Some areas were set apart by portable canvas walls. In the distance, I spotted Rebecca. She was palpating the abdomen of a woman who screamed, trying to push my sister’s hands away.

“So,” I said to Adam, “what happens if someone needs more care than you can give them here?”

“We airlift them to one of the hospitals.” He ran his hand up and down my arm. “Just this afternoon we sent out a couple of acute abdomens, two women in active labor, two MIs that I know of and a bunch of injuries in need of immediate surgery.”

A woman rushed toward me, a notepad in her hands. She wore a gray T-shirt with DIDA emblazoned on it in white letters. Her hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail.

“You’re the other Dr. Ward?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Dot wants you down at the end,” she said. “Come on.”

I glanced at Adam. “See you later,” I said with barely a twinge of apprehension.

He winked at me. “Break a leg,” he said.

The woman in the DIDA T-shirt practically ran through the
tent, her ponytail bobbing, and I had to scramble to keep up with her. We passed Rebecca, who looked up from her patient and called out, “You rock, sis!”

“I’m a nurse,” the woman said. “Susan. I’ll be splitting my time between you and another doc.” She led me into a small, canvas-walled cubicle where my first patient already waited for me, screaming her platinum-blond four-year-old head off. I could tell from the way she clutched her swollen, misshapen wrist to her chest what the problem was. I began examining her as she wailed on her mother’s lap. I listened to her lungs and heart, before Susan leaned over and whispered, “No time for a thorough exam.”

I nodded. Of course. No time, and no X-ray machine either. And no anesthesia, for that matter.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl, who only continued screaming in pain.

“Vanessa,” her mother said.

“We should just splint her and get her in line to be airlifted out,” Susan whispered to me.

“She needs to go to a hospital!” her mother said. “She needs X-rays, doesn’t she? Surgery?”

“Do your fingers tingle at all?” I asked the little girl. “Do they feel like this?” I tapped my fingers rapidly on her good hand. She just screamed louder. “How did you do this, Vanessa?” I asked. “Did you fall off of an elephant?”

Momentarily startled by my question, the little girl halted her screaming and nearly smiled before starting up again.

“She tripped on the wet deck stairs while we were trying to get in the rescue boat,” her mother said.

“How long’s the wait for a plane, or a helicopter or whatever, out?” I asked Susan.

“For a fracture, days,” Susan said quietly.

“She can’t wait days!” The woman hugged her baby girl to her. People were dying here. Having heart attacks and ruptured appendixes and all sorts of medical emergencies, but if this had been my little four-year-old, I would have felt the same way.

“I can set this,” I said, “but we have no way of anesthetizing her.”

“Oh, God,” the mother said.

“It’ll be fine,” I said, in the strongest voice I could muster, trying to alleviate the woman’s anxiety. “Then we’ll splint it and give her some medication to make her more comfortable and then get you out when we can.” I glanced at Susan, hoping I hadn’t misspoken. “What do we have?”

“Acetaminophen,” she said.

“Ah, good,” I said, as if that would have been my first choice.

“We’ll do this quickly,” I said to the girl’s mother. “You hold her right here.” I guided her hands to the child’s upper arm. “Vanessa, I don’t want you to think about penguins,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t think about penguins! Okay?”