The Healer's War (45 page)

p And of course there was a lot of resistance to the presence of the refugees in some places.

I nodded, only half listening, and took Shirley's address as she shepherded her last group away. I lingered for a while as the crowd drifted away, then headed for the women's room. It looked empty, but then I heard a toilet flush and somebody shrieked. My adrenaline leaped up. A mugging? Heart attack? Somebody just freaking out? I searched every stall, flapping open the doors, until I came to the latched one.

Sobbing issued from within.

"You okay in there?" I asked, knocking on the door. More sobbing.

"Look, can I help you? Are you ill? I'm a nurse. Please, just answer me." But the sobbing grew louder.

Oh hell, I wouldn't catch anything on the floor of the L.A. airport I hadn't already caught in Nam. I lay down and peered up under the door.

A skinny Vietnamese girl squatted with her feet on the toilet seat. As I watched she leaned back against the flush button and shrieked again. To go through a war, and refugee camps, and a brave new world, only to be freaked out by plumbing. I wriggled under the door, unlatched it, and helped her down from the seat. She couldn't have been more than seven.

She tugged at my hand and I squatted down beside her so I wouldn't look so tall, and scooped her up, t4en showed her how the toilet flushed.

"Where's mamasan, huh, kiddo?" I asked her, and carried her to the sink and showed her how to wash her hands, then carried her out into the lobby. I had Shirley's number, but I didn't need it. Shirley, carrying a toddler, came barreling back through the door, followed by a frightened-looking young woman with a child on each hip and another toddler clinging to her skirts. When Shirley saw us she stopped and put her free hand over her heart, panting exaggeratedly. "You found her."

"Yeah," I said, looking for someone with a free hand to hold her. There wasn't anyone and it would have needed a crowbar to dislodge her fingers.

"Mrs. Huong has too many kids to keep track of, I think. Would you mind walking with us out to the van?"

"Sure," I said. It didn't look as if I had much choice. When everyone else was seated, Mrs. Huong reached for the little girl. The child clung to the theng around my neck until she was sure her mother had her, and as I released her, her fingers touched the amulet. A warm rush went through me as we formed a triangle, and the energy formed a circuit; a tentative mauve-pink light, a little grayed down, but definitely growing brighter, sprang up among us. Mrs. Huong did not smile, but her expression lightened with relief at another hurdle overcome. Life after war. It happened. I had seen hundreds of people in the last few days who had lived through it, who were still trying to live. And there was nothing I had seen that most of them hadn't seen, nothing I had had to do that many of them hadn't had to do, and maybe worse. I couldn't contaminate them, I couldn't shock them, and yet a kid who had been born and raised amid all that ugly, numbing horror had more awe and wonder at push-button flush toilets than I had at the idea of Disneyland. I watched the van depart and then headed back to the hotel. Shirley would pick me up tomorrow morning, to see some of the temporary facilities her group had arranged for the refugees, and to take me to the airport to meet more. They needed a lot of help, she said. Meanwhile, I had things to do, preparations to make. I wondered if Charlie Heron was still stoned all the time, if he was alive, if he was interested in making a trip to L.A., and if I still had his number.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a former nurse and a Vietnam veteran, is the authorof seven other Bantam novels, all humorous fantasy. She has recently moved )lrom Fairbanks, 41aska, to the Washington coast.