The Lies We Told (12 page)

W
HAT WAS THAT NOISE
? I
T RUMBLED INSIDE MY HEAD
,
SO
loud that it made my teeth ache as I typed chart notes at the nurses’ station.

“It’s cannons!” someone shouted. “They’re rolling cannons toward us!”

I peered down the hospital corridor and caught my breath. Yes! Someone was pushing a huge black cannon toward me across the long, rough wooden floor. I tried rolling my chair away from the computer, ready to flee. Where should I go? Where was everyone? I stood up, but wasn’t sure I’d be able to run. To
move
at all. My side hurt. My head. Oh my God, my
head!
My chest was on fire and I could barely draw in a breath. And what was wrong with my leg? It felt as though a shark was tearing my shin apart.

The cannon suddenly rammed into the nurses’ station, the barrel smacking my temple, and I screamed.

My eyelids snapped open and I knew in a heartbeat I was not in the hospital at all. A dream. A
nightmare
. Light flickered around me. Golden light. Moving away, then coming close
enough to make me wince. Above me, I saw the angled wooden beams of a ceiling, and the slant of them made me dizzy. Was I in an attic? Where
was
I?

My body shook uncontrollably, although I was definitely not cold. I was
suffocating
. The shifting golden light sucked all the oxygen from the air, and the hatchet that had split my head in two lodged itself deeper into my skull. The cannon rumbled again, but now I understood.
Thunder.
It was loud, and I pressed my hands to my ears.

I heard a woman’s excited voice, the words unintelligible.

“Help,”
I pleaded, my throat so dry I wasn’t certain I’d made a sound. “Help,” I said again. I didn’t know what sort of help I needed. I wanted only to be freed from the pain. From the suffocating heat.

“I’m right here, ma’am,” the woman said. She leaned forward so I could see her in the shimmery light.
The Virgin Mary,
I thought, even though I knew that was irrational. I remembered a picture my parents had in our home when I was very little, back before Daddy talked my mother out of her Catholicism with his intellectual, philosophy professor’s arguments. Like Mary in that old picture, this woman had a halo of spun gold around her head.

“Mary.” I reached a hand toward her face. I wanted to touch her perfect cheek, gold in the flickering light. Everything, everything was gold, even my hand where I lifted it toward her.

“Is that your name, ma’am?” She was holding a wet cloth to my forehead, where the pain was the worst.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I bet you’re right thirsty,” the woman said. “I got a pitcher of water over here, just waitin’ for when you waked up.” She started to move away and I panicked.

“No,” I pleaded. “Don’t leave me.”

She leaned over me, a look of concern on her face. There was a small scar dissecting her pale left eyebrow. The halo, I saw now, was hair coming loose from a clip or a ponytail. She was young, barely a woman at all. Her eyes, when the flickery light caught them just so, were the color of leaf buds.

“Beautiful eyes.” My words were so quiet that even I couldn’t hear them. The woman did, though, and she laughed.

“I can’t wait t’ tell Tully you finally waked up,” she said.

Tully? I searched my memory. “Who’s Tully?” I rasped.

“Tully brung you here,” she said. “He saved your life, ma’am. Miss Mary. We was scared you wasn’t going t’ come to, but you did. And you’re gonna be fine now Lady Alice got that leg stitched up. I know that must’ve hurt like a bitch, but you was so out of it you hardly griped at all.”

The words were coming fast, and they made no sense. “Where am I?” I asked.

“Last Run Shelter,” the woman—the girl? Yes, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen—said. “Bet you never heard of it.”

A crack of thunder split the air in the room, making me jump. There was another noise, too. Drumming. Rain? I stared at the angled rafters above me and knew rain was coming down hard, spiking against the roof a few feet above my head. “I’m not in the airport?” I asked.

“You need another blanket, ma’am? Miss Mary? You’re burnin’ up, but you’re makin’ the whole house rock with that shakin’ of yours.”

“The airport?” I repeated. Where was Adam?

“That chopper you was in,” she said. “It crashed over to Billings Creek.”

I shut my eyes.
Brace for a crash!
My body jerked with the memory. I looked up at the girl. “The others,” I said. “Where are they? There’s a nurse. A little boy. And—”

“Hush,” the girl said. She turned away, and I wanted to grab her. Keep her close. The gold light flickered in the room, and I saw that it came from a lantern she was carrying.

“Come back,” I managed to say.

“I’m right here, ma’am,” she said. “Just gettin’ you some water. You ain’t had none since Tully brung you here.”

She helped me raise my head to sip from the glass she was holding, and the hatchet cut more deeply across my temple. Water dribbled down my cheek and the girl brushed it away with warm fingers. I wanted to hold her hand, turn my cheek to press against it.

She drew away a bit to set the glass down.

“You’re a doctor?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“We figured right, then.”

“The others,” I said again.

“Hush, now,” the girl said. “I’m goin’ to git Tully. Let him know you come to. I’ll leave the lantern with you. We ain’t had no electric since them storms come through.” She glanced toward the dark window. “Just what we need, right?” she said. “More rain.”

“Don’t go,” I whispered, but she was already gone. I shut my eyes and slipped into sleep again, as the drumming of the rain and the rumbling of the cannon faded into the distance.

It hit me in the middle of the night—the cramping in my gut that put every other pain in my body into perspective. I struggled to sit up in the pitch-black darkness, one hand grasping the edge of the narrow bed, but I fell back onto the pillow, my head spinning. Even if I could get up, how would I find a bathroom in the dark? I felt my bowels loosen and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it besides hope I was in the midst of another bad dream, one I would soon wake up from.

Someone was moving my body, turning me first one way, then another. The smell was nearly overwhelming and I tasted bile rising in my throat. I felt a warm rag on the back of my thighs. My bottom. Between my legs. I opened my eyes. The light in the room was entirely different now, lemony and thick. The girl was there, cleaning me as if I were a baby.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“What, ma’am?” the girl asked.

“Sorry,” I said again.

I thought I heard her laugh. “It’s all right, Miss Mary,” she said. “I got you cleaned up good as new, now.”

I blinked and absorbed what I could of the room without turning my head, afraid the dizziness would overwhelm me if I did. It was a small cube. A narrow door—a closet?—was on the wall opposite me. One window, the glass cracked on an angle in the lower pane, let in the sun. The walls were covered with faded, ancient-looking wallpaper. Gold diamonds on a cream-colored background. Aside from my cot, the only other furniture was an old dresser, the walnut veneer peeling off the front of the drawers, and what looked like a bassinet made of dingy white wicker, cracked and broken in places. The bassinet was pushed into a corner, as though it had been used many years ago and no longer served a purpose.

I looked back at the girl who was drying my legs with a towel and realized I was nude from the waist down. I didn’t care. Nudity was the least of my worries.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m Simmee,” the girl said. “And you’re Mary.”

“No,” I said, realizing only then that she’d been calling me by that name. “Not Mary.
Maya.
”

“Oh, I thought you said Mary.” She smiled. “Well, now, we each got ourselves a funny name, ain’t we?” She leaned out of my line of sight for a moment, then stood next to me again. “Lady Alice says I should get you walking,” she said. “Ain’t good to being layin’ down so long, she says. And I need to show you where the bathroom is in case this happens again. I’m puttin’ some of my pants on you now, okay, ma’am?”

I felt her lift my left leg, then my right and she slipped soft fabric up to my hips. “You ain’t got no shoes, but I think you’ll fit in some of mine.”

“No shoes?” I said. Where were my shoes?

“I got to wash your pants and things with the sheet,” she said. “We ain’t got another sheet, so I had to put towels on the bed for you for time bein’.”

“Thank you for doing this,” I whispered.

“Happy to do it, Miss Maya.”

“Simmee,” I said, “I need to go back to the airport.”

“Can’t go nowhere, ma’am.” Simmee stood next to the bed, the bundle of foul laundry in her arms. “Floodwaters got us wrapped up tight,” she said. “Last Run Shelter’s turned into Last Run Island for a spell. I’m afraid you’re good and trapped here, just like the rest of us.”

T
HEY FLEW BACK TO THE AIRPORT LATE THAT EVENING
. Rebecca stared blankly out the window at the darkening sky, the numbness now in every cell of her body. Even when Adam turned to her to ask, “Should we have stayed with the searchers?” she didn’t bother to answer him. More searchers were flying in. There was only room in the clearing for two helicopters, and the search and rescue team members who were already there nearly pushed them aboard the blue-and-yellow chopper. The searchers found euphemistic ways of saying that she and Adam would only be in the way; it was time for the professionals to take over. They needed equipment to reach the pilot, they said. They needed another boat. They needed…Rebecca couldn’t remember what else they’d said. They pushed her, and she’d allowed it, walking toward the helicopter, unable to feel her feet. Her legs.

“Rebecca?” Adam nudged her, asking again, “Should we have stayed?”

She didn’t respond. Just stared out the window, holding tight to the numbness.

The searchers had somehow determined that the pilot was dead. “Most likely killed instantly,” one of them had said. So, in fourteen hours of searching, they’d found the pilot, the poor guy who’d been defiled by an alligator and many, many scraps of metal. That meant that four people were still missing. And there was this: thousands of
other
people were still missing. Who knew how many were trapped in their homes? Who knew how many lay underwater on their streets and in their yards? Rebecca didn’t want to hear anyone say, “Why spend all these resources on four missing people when thousands are still unaccounted for?” She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to think about that delicate leafy branch as it dipped and danced in the rushing water of the stream on its way to the river, where it had been instantly, irrevocably, lost. And so she didn’t think. She didn’t think about anything at all.

When they reached the airport, she went directly to the urgent-care tent, leaving Adam to update Dorothea on their day. She dug into her work, glad to be with patients who didn’t know or care who she was and what had happened. They cared only about themselves and, in many cases, about one another, because there was a contagious kindness among these people now. The more trapped they felt, the more their injuries festered, and the more frightened they became, the more they seemed to sense they were in this together. She witnessed the kindness as a woman offered the last half of her bottle of water to an elderly man. As a young man held a stranger’s feverish child on his lap. She wanted to be with these hurting people. She was one of them now. Maybe she could help them even if she couldn’t help herself.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Rebecca spotted Dorothea walking through the tent toward her, and a moment of sheer terror broke through the numbness at the sight of her.

“No news,” Dorothea said quickly. Then she drew Rebecca away from her patient, despite her protests. “I’ve sent Adam to bed,” she said. “And I want you to go up now, too.”

“I’m fine here.” Rebecca couldn’t meet Dorothea’s gaze. Instead she looked at the line of exhausted, sweating, sick and injured patients.

“No, you’re not,” Dorothea said. “I insist you get some sleep. I’ll get one of the fresh DMAT docs to take over here.”

Rebecca looked at her then. “Don’t make me go,” she said. Her voice sounded wounded to her own ears, but she steadied herself, clinging hard to the numbness.

Dorothea looked defeated. “I’m worried about you,” she said.

“Don’t be.”

“Two more hours.” Dorothea looked at her watch. “That’s it. Then you’re going to sleep.”

Rebecca nodded noncommittally, then headed back to her canvas-walled cubicle.

Hours later, she was examining the tender belly of a teenage girl when everything changed. Early-morning light turned the canvas tent walls a pale yellow, and all at once, the numbness left her with such suddenness that she gasped. Everything around her snapped into focus: The moaning African-American girl on the cot. The worn green flip-flops on the girl’s feet. Her own pale fingers where she pressed them against the girl’s dark skin. The tray of instruments at her side.
Snap, snap!
She lifted her hands from the girl as if she’d been burned. Rushing from the cubicle, she grabbed a nurse by the arm.

“Gotta get out!” she said. “Girl with lower right quadrant—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She ran through the tent, then through the sea of evacuees waiting for their turn inside. She ran through the lobby and the long corridor and
the concourse crowded with people who had nowhere to go. Pushing open one of the gate doors, she raced down the stairs and out onto the tarmac, where the roar of the choppers coming and going filled her head. At the wall of the building, she bent forward and screamed and screamed and screamed, letting the choppers steal the sound of her voice, until she had no voice left to steal.