Since We Fell Read online

  “Me too,” she whispered.

  She placed her forehead on his shoulder. He placed his palm on the back of her neck. And in that moment, she felt as close to whole as she imagined she ever would.

  After the honeymoon, she and Jeremy found it difficult to get together. Maureen wasn’t feeling well, nothing serious, just age, he supposed. But she needed him around, not gallivanting off to Boston to while away the summer in the reading rooms of the BPL or the Athenaeum. They managed to squeeze in lunch once in New London, and he looked weary, the flesh on his face too gray and tight to the bone. Maureen, he confided, was not well. She’d survived breast cancer two years ago. She had endured a double mastectomy, but her latest scans had come back inconclusive.

  “Meaning?” She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.

  “Meaning,” he said, “her cancer could have recurred. They’re going to run more tests next week.” He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, then looked over them at her with a smile that said he was changing the subject. “How are the newlyweds?”

  “Buying a house,” she said brightly.

  “In the city?”

  She shook her head, still coming to terms with it. “About thirty miles south, give or take. It needs updates and renovations so we won’t move in right away, but it’s a good town, good school system if we have kids. It’s not far from where Sebastian grew up. It’s also where he keeps his boat.”

  “He loves that boat.”

  “Hey, he loves me too.”

  “I didn’t say he didn’t.” Jeremy shot her a wry smile. “I just said he loves that boat.”

  Four days later, Jeremy suffered a stroke in his office at the college. He suspected it was a stroke but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, so he drove himself to the nearest hospital. He drove his car halfway up onto a curb and staggered to the entrance. He made it to the ER on his own two feet but promptly suffered a second stroke in the waiting room. The first orderly to reach him was surprised by the strength in Jeremy’s soft professor’s hands when he grabbed the lapels of the orderly’s lab coat.

  The last words Jeremy would speak for some time made little sense to the orderly or to anyone else, for that matter. He yanked the orderly’s face down to his own and his eyes bulged in their sockets.

  “Rachel,” he slurred, “is in the mirror.”

  6

  DETACHMENTS

  Maureen shared the orderly’s claim with Rachel during Jeremy’s third night in the hospital.

  “‘Rachel is in the mirror’?” Rachel repeated.

  “That’s what Amir said.” Maureen nodded. “You look tired. You should get your rest.”

  Rachel had to be back at work in an hour. She’d be late. Again. “I’m fine.”

  In the bed, Jeremy stared up at the ceiling, his mouth agape, his eyes wiped clean of awareness.

  “The drive must be terrible,” Charlotte said.

  “It’s not bad.” Rachel sat on the windowsill because there were only three chairs in the room and they were all occupied by family.

  “The doctors said he could be like this for months,” Theo said. “Or longer.”

  Both Charlotte and Maureen began weeping. Theo went to them. The three of them huddled in their grief. For a few minutes all Rachel could see of them was their heaving backs.

  A week later Jeremy was moved to a neuro-treatment facility and gradually recovered some motor ability and the most rudimentary kernels of speech—yes, no, bathroom. He looked at his wife as if she were his mother, at his son and daughter as if they were his grandparents, at Rachel as if he were trying to place her. They tried reading to him, scrolled through his favorite paintings on an iPad, played his beloved Schubert. And none of it connected. He wanted food, he wanted comfort, he wanted relief from the pains in his head and body. He engaged the world with the terrified narcissism of an infant.

  The family made it clear to Rachel that she could visit as much as she wanted—they were far too polite to say otherwise—but they failed to include her in most conversations and were always visibly relieved when she had to go.

  At home, Sebastian grew resentful. She’d barely known the man, he’d argue. She was sentimentalizing an attachment that didn’t really exist.

  “You need to let it go,” he said.

  “No,” she replied, “you do.”

  He held up an apologetic hand and closed his eyes for a moment to let her know he had no interest in a big fight. He opened his eyes and his voice was softer and conciliatory. “You know they’re considering you for Big Six?”

  Big Six was what they called the national network in New York.

  “I didn’t know that.” She tried to keep the excitement from her voice.

  “You’re being groomed. Now isn’t the time to ease up on the throttle.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Because they’ll test you on something big. Something national-scale.”

  “Such as?”

  “A hurricane, a mass murder, I dunno, a celebrity death.”

  “How will we soldier on,” she wondered aloud, “after Whoopi has passed?”

  “It’ll be hard,” he agreed, “but she would have wanted us to show courage.”

  She chuckled and he nestled into her on the couch.

  Sebastian kissed the side of her neck. “This is us, babe, me and you. Joined at the hip. Where I go, you go. Where you go, I go.”

  “I know. I do.”

  “I think it’d be cool to live in Manhattan.”

  “Which neighborhood?” she asked.

  “Upper West Side,” he said.

  “Harlem,” she said at the same time.

  They both laughed it off because it felt like what one did when crucial differences in a marriage revealed themselves in strictly theoretical terms.

  Jeremy James improved significantly through the fall. He remembered who Rachel was, though not what he’d said to the orderly, and he seemed to tolerate her presence more than rely on it. He had retained most of his knowledge of the luminist movement and of Colum Jasper Whitstone, but it was disjointed, his general sense of chronology off, so that Whitstone’s vanishing in 1863 was placed on a timeline just prior to Jeremy’s first trip to Normandy in 1977, when he was a graduate fellow. He thought Rachel was younger than Charlotte and couldn’t understand some days why Theo could take so much time off from high school to visit him.

  “He doesn’t apply himself in the first place,” he told Rachel. “I don’t want him using my sickness to apply himself even less.”

  He moved back into the house on Gorham Lane in November and was attended to by a hospice nurse. He grew physically stronger. His speech grew clear. But his mind remained elusive to him. “I can’t quite grasp it,” he said once. Both Maureen and Rachel were in the room and he gave them his hesitant smile. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.”

  In late December of 2009, Rachel twice caught him checking his watch in the first ten minutes of her visit. She couldn’t blame him. Without their shared detective stories to discuss—he to find evidence of Colum Jasper Whitstone crossing paths with Claude Monet, she to find her father, and the both of them to understand Elizabeth Childs—they had little to talk about. No shared ambition, no shared history.

  She promised to stay in touch.

  Leaving his house, she walked down the flagstone path to her car, and she felt the loss of him anew. Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus far experienced it, was a series of detachments. Characters crossed the stage, and some hung around longer than others, but all ultimately exited.

  She looked back at his house as she reached her car. You were my friend, she thought. You were my friend.

  Two weeks later, on January 12, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti at five o’clock in the afternoon.

  As Sebastian had predicted, Rachel was assigned to cover it for Big Six. She spent her first few days in Port-au-Prince. She and her crew covered
the airdrops of food and supplies, which most days ended in riots. They covered the corpses stacked up in the parking lot of General Hospital. They covered the makeshift crematoriums that sprang up on street corners all over the city, the bodies burning like sacrificial appeasements, gray sulfur roiling amid the oily black smoke, the body within already an abstraction, the smoke as unremarkable as all the other smoke—from the buildings that continued to smolder, from the gas lines that had yet to burn out. She reported from tent cities and medical relief posts. Down in what had once been the shopping district, she and her camera operator, Greta Kilborne, shot footage of the police firing on looters, of a young man with protruding teeth and ribs, lying in ash and rubble with his foot blown off at the ankle, a few cans of the food he’d been stealing lying just out of his reach.

  In the days after the earthquake, the only thing that teemed in Port-au-Prince more than disease and hunger was the press corps. Soon she and Greta decided to follow the story to the epicenter of the quake, in the coastal town of Léogâne. Léogâne was only forty kilometers south of Port-au-Prince, but the journey took them two days. They could smell the dead three hours before they arrived. There was no infrastructure left, no aid, no government relief, no police to shoot looters because there were no police.

  When Rachel compared it to Hell, Greta disagreed.

  “In Hell,” she said, “someone’s in charge.”

  Their second night, at a squatters camp cobbled together from sheets—sheets for roofs and sheets for walls—she, Greta, one ex-nun, and one almost-nurse moved four young girls from tent to tent. The six wannabe rapists who moved through the camp looking for the girls were armed with knives and serpettes, the machetes with hooked blades common among farmers. Before the earthquake, half these men, Rachel was assured, had held good jobs. Their leader, Josué Dacelus, had come from the countryside just east of the quake zone. Ninth in line for a small sorghum farm in Croix-des-Bouquets, he soured on the world when it sank in that he would never inherit the farm. Josué Dacelus looked like a movie star and moved like a rock star. He usually wore a green-and-white soccer polo over tan cargo pants with the cuffs rolled up. On his left hip he wore a Desert Eagle .45 automatic, and on his right, he wore a serpette in a battered leather scabbard. He assured everyone that the serpette was for his protection. The .45, he said with a wink, was for theirs. Lot of bad men around, lot of horror, lot of evildoers. He’d bless himself and raise his eyes to the heavens.

  Eighty percent of Léogâne had been cratered by the quake. Leveled. Law and order was a memory. There were rumors that British and Icelandic search-and-rescue teams had been sighted in the area. Rachel had confirmed earlier in the day that the Canadians had docked a destroyer in the harbor, and Japanese and Argentinian doctors were trickling into what remained of downtown. But so far, no one had reached them.

  That morning and afternoon had been spent helping Ronald Revolus, the man who’d been on his way to becoming a nurse before the quake. They’d transported the three mortally wounded members of the camp to a med tent run by Sri Lankan peacekeepers three miles east. It was there she’d spoken to a translator who’d assured her they’d get help to them as soon as they were capable. Hopefully by the following night, two days at the most.

  Rachel and Greta returned to the camp and the four girls had arrived. The itchy, hungry men in Josué’s gang noticed them immediately, and their awful intentions spread from the mind of one to the mind of all in the time it took to get the girls water and check them for injury.

  Rachel and Greta, who failed as reporters that night by getting involved in a story they should have covered if anyone would have put it on the air, worked with the ex-nun and Ronald Revolus to move the girls all over the camp, rarely staying in one hiding spot for more than an hour.

  The light of day wouldn’t stop the men—rape was nothing to be ashamed of in their minds or the minds of most of their peers. Death, so the norm in recent days, was only to be lamented for natives and even then, only if they were close family. They’d continued drinking through the night’s search and into the dawn, and the hope was they’d have to sleep at some point. In the end, two of the four girls were saved when a UN truck trundled into the camp that morning accompanied by a bulldozer to pick up the corpses in the ruined church at the bottom of the hill.

  The other two girls, however, were never seen again. They’d arrived in camp just hours before, both freshly orphaned and freshly homeless. Esther wore a faded red T-shirt and jean shorts. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widelene, but everyone called her Widdy. It made sense that Esther was sullen, nearly mute, and rarely met one’s eyes. What made no sense was that Widdy was sunny and had the kind of smile that blew canyons through the chests of its recipients. Rachel knew the girls only for that one night, but she’d spent most of it with Widdy. Widdy and her yellow dress and her boundless heart and her habit of humming songs no one could recognize.

  It was remarkable how completely they disappeared. Not just their bodies and the clothes they’d been wearing but their very existence. An hour after sunup, their two companions went mute when asked about them. Within three hours, no one in the camp besides Rachel, Greta, the ex-nun Veronique, and Ronald Revolus claimed to have seen them. By nightfall of the second day, Veronique had changed her story and Ronald was questioning his memory.

  At nine that night, Rachel accidentally caught the eye of one of the rapists, Paul, a high school science teacher, who was always unceasingly polite. Paul sat outside his tent and clipped his nails with rusty nail clippers. By that point, rumors had spread that if the girls ever had been in the camp—and they hadn’t, that was crazy talk—three of the six men who had roamed the camp drinking heavily that night had gone to sleep by the time the girls who never existed may or may not have disappeared. So if those girls had been raped (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul was involved. But if they’d been murdered (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul had been sleeping by that point. Just a rapist, Teacher Paul, just a rapist. If the fates of the girls haunted him in any way, however, he hid it well. He looked in Rachel’s eyes. He used his thumb and index finger to make a gun. He pointed it at her crotch and then slipped the finger into his mouth and sucked on it. He laughed without making a sound.

  Then he rose to his feet and crossed to Rachel. He stood in front of her and searched her eyes.

  Very politely, almost obsequiously, he asked her to leave the camp.

  “You lie,” he explained gently, “and it makes people anxious. They do not tell you this because we are a polite people. But your lies make everyone very upset. Tonight”—he held up one finger—“no one will show how upset they are. Tonight”—again with the finger—“no harm will likely come to you and your friend.”

  She and Greta left the camp twenty minutes later, hitching the only ride out with the Sri Lankans. At their relief center, she pleaded with them and the Canadian peacekeepers who’d worked their way inland from their ship.

  No one got her sense of urgency. No one got within a zip code of it. A couple of girls disappeared? Here? There were thousands of disappeared at last count and the number would only grow.

  “They’re not disappeared,” one of the Canadians said to her. “They’re dead. You know that. I’m sorry but so it is. And no one’s got the time or resources to search for the bodies.” He looked around the tent at his companions and a few of the Sri Lankans. Everyone nodded in agreement. “None of us anyway.”

  The next day Rachel and Greta moved on to Jacmel. Three weeks later they were back in Port-au-Prince. By this point, Rachel was starting her day with four black-market Ativans and a shot of rum. Greta, she suspected, had relapsed into the predilection for heroin chipping she’d told Rachel about their first night in Léogâne.

  Eventually, they received word that it was time to head home. When Rachel protested, her assignment editor confided via Skype that her stories had grown too
strident, too monotonous, and had taken on an unfortunate air of despair.

  “Our viewers need hope,” the assignment editor said.

  “Haitians need water,” Rachel said.

  “There she goes again,” the editor said to someone offscreen.

  “Give us a few more weeks.”

  “Rachel,” he said, “Rachel. You look like shit. And I’m not just talking about your hair. You’re skeletal. We’re pulling the plug.”

  “No one cares,” Rachel said.

  “We cared,” the assignment editor said sharply. “The United States is sending over a billion and a half fucking dollars to that island. And this network covered the shit out of it. What more do you want?”

  And Rachel, in her Ativan-addled brain, thought, God.

  I want the capital-G God the televangelists claim moves tornadoes out of their paths. The one who cures cancer and arthritis in the faithful, the God professional athletes thank for taking an interest in the outcome of the Super Bowl or the World Cup or a home run hit in the eighty-seventh game of the hundred sixty-two played by the Red Sox this year. She wanted the active God who inserted Himself in human affairs to reach down from Heaven and cleanse the Haitian water supply and cure the Haitian sick and uncrumble the crumbled schools and hospitals and homes.

  “The fuck are you babbling about?” The assignment editor peered into the screen at her.

  She hadn’t realized she’d spoken.

  “Get on a plane while we’re still paying for it,” the assignment editor said, “and get back to your little station.”

  And that’s how she learned any ambitions she’d had to make the national network scene were dead. No New York for her. No career track to Big Six and beyond.

  Back to Boston.

  Back to Little Six.

  Back to Sebastian.

  She weaned herself off Ativan. (It took four attempts but she got there.) She cut her drinking back to pre-Haiti levels (or in the neighborhood anyway). But the bosses at Little Six never gave her a lead story again. A new girl, Jenny Gonzalez, had arrived during the time she’d been gone.