But not with each other. She needed time to think, she said, then kissed him on the cheek, and left the room, slyly humming. It took him a while to recognize the song. “Just One of Those Things.”
Which was funny, but inaccurate. Whatever it was between them – love, lust, or loneliness – it wasn’t “one of those things.” It was a different “thing” entirely. He was going to tell her that when the unthinkable happened.
They were “rescued.”
Or he was. Kate was upriver delivering a baby when a UN convoy rolled into Porkpa, escorting a truck with a red crescent on its side. Pulling up to the clinic in an armored personnel carrier, a Nigerian captain jumped to the ground, and promptly announced that everyone was being evacuated.
“Everyone?” Burke eyed the little truck.
“Yes,” the captain insisted. “All the white people. Everyone!”
Burke thanked him for his trouble, but declined the invitation, only to be told that it wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. An argument ensued. Burke stood his ground. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not without the doctor.
He woke up half an hour later on the floor of the truck, his wrists bound with FlexiCuffs. Driven to the airstrip at Belle Yella, he was put aboard a UN helicopter with other evacuees, and flown to an American naval ship that was standing off the coast. Two days later, he was in Washington.
His apartment was a one-bedroom co-op on Connecticut Avenue, a couple of blocks north of the zoo. There was nothing special about it except that, in the morning, he could hear the gibbons singing above the traffic. It was never a place in which he’d spent a lot of time, but it was an address, at least, and it was where he kept his books and clothes.
He tried to get in touch with Kate, but there wasn’t any way. The shortwave was down, and her e-mail came back as undeliverable. There didn’t seem to be an Irish embassy in Monrovia. She might as well have been on the moon.
What did she think had happened to him? Did anyone tell her? Did she think he’d caught the first ride out, leaving without a word? That’s the way it must have seemed…
There was a number for Doctors Without Borders in New York, and he called it. They referred him to the Paris headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières. In his best high school French, he asked about the clinic in Porkpa.
C’est fermé.
Et la directeur?
His accent must have been execrable, because the person at the other end of the line sounded pained: It is okay to speak English, please?
Absolutely! You were saying: The clinic’s closed.
Yes, it is closed.
And I was asking about the director. Dr. Aherne.
She is no longer with us.
Burke froze. What?
Yes! I am afraid it is no longer possible to work in Liberia. It is too dangerous.
Oh… he began to breathe again. Do you have a phone number for her?
Yes, but I am afraid it is confidential. Perhaps, if you like, we could forward a letter?
He wrote the letter that same afternoon, and tore it up that evening. In the morning, he sat down with it for a second time. But there was so much to say, so much to explain. Not about his disappearance. That was the easy part. The hard part was talking about them. The two of them.
What about them? When he thought about Africa, and all the things that happened there, the memories were like hallucinations. The helicopter yawing as its rotors came apart. The ground rushing toward him. The little blanket of bees on his chest. Kate.
In the end, the letter was as much to himself as it was to her. It went on for pages and days as he came to grips, not only with his feelings for Kate but with the uncertainties of his own identity. Who was he? Who did he want to be? What was important? What was not? The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the answers rested with Kate.
By then, he’d cold-called all the hospitals in Dublin. Did they have a Dr. Aherne working for them? Indeed, they did. They had Ahernes and Ahearns. Orthopedics, pediatrics, and family medicine. Mary, Rory, and Declan. Which one did he have in mind?
It was at Meath Street Hospital that he found her. The hospital’s new directory listed Katherine Aherne as a physician in the Casualty Ward. But she wasn’t to start for a week or two, and when she did, the receptionist said, she’d probably work nights and weekends. “That’s how we break them in,” she confided.
In a way, he was relieved not to be able to reach her. There was too much to say, and what if she hung up on him? At least, with the letter, he could say what he felt. And he would, just as soon as he got it right.
In the meantime, he had plastic surgery at Sibley Hospital. There wasn’t anything to be done about the splashes of scar tissue on his chest and shoulders, but the doctors were able to make his ear, or what was left of it, “cosmetically acceptable.”
It was a strange time. He began to work out at the Y, lifting weights and playing basketball in the mornings. Most afternoons, he read the paper over coffee at a sidewalk table outside Foster Brothers, or wandered through the city’s museums. There was a poker game on Thursday nights at James McLeod’s place, but that was all the “socializing” that he did.
By now, word had gotten out that he was back, and editors were calling. F-Stop had a commercial assignment for the Patagonia catalog: a three-day trek through Chile’s Torres del Paine. Was he interested? He thought it over for about an hour. Then he caught a plane.
That night, he lay awake in a window seat, gazing into the darkness of the Atlantic, miles below. In the morning, he changed planes at Heathrow, and flew on to Dublin in the afternoon. Reeling with jet lag, he took a room at an expensive hotel on Grafton Street, and dropped into bed. When he awoke five hours later, he went to Meath Street Hospital and took a seat in the waiting room on the Casualty Ward.
The next night, he did the same. And the next. And the next. Eventually, one of the nurses took pity on him, and let drop the information that Dr. Aherne lived in Dalkey. “Like Bono,” she said.
It was easy to find her after that, but it took a weekend to sort things out, and another week to court her. Two weeks after that, they were married.
The old man gave her away. He liked Americans in general and Burke in particular, not least of all because Burke was content to stay in Dublin for as long as Kate wanted to be there. Soon, Burke was working at “the Firm,” helping the old man with incorporations. Within a year, Kate was running the Casualty Ward at the hospital, and life was grand. They began to talk about a baby.
Then the sepsis.
CHAPTER 7
When Kate died…
The old man just stopped coming in. After a while, the bookkeeper left to take a job with a software start-up in Rathmines. Then Fiona, the nineteen-year-old Goth receptionist, drifted off in the direction of Ibiza, leaving Burke by himself in a suite of offices that the old man no longer visited or cared about.
It can’t go on like this, Burke told himself. Not with the old man drinking the way he is, sitting alone in that haunted house with too many stairs and too many memories. Not with the firm making so little money. And not, Burke thought, not with me treading the days as if they were water.
The truth was: Kate was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back. That was a fact.
But it wasn’t just a fact. It was a circumstance so massive as to constitute its own dimension. For Burke and the old man, Kate’s absence was their longitude and latitude, intangible as space, but just as real – and just as empty. And maybe, for the old man, it was something more. A black hole, pulling him in.