Caddie shakes her head. “It’s never dead here, Marcus. And didn’t you see all those farm-fed American boys in the Inter-con bar last night? They didn’t make the trip to get laid. Spooks, for sure.”
“She’s got a point,” says Rob.
“CIA—so what?” Marcus grimaces in mock despair. “All that means is no photo ops for sure. C’mon, Caddie.”
Caddie shakes her head. “If I need a break, I’ll take a couple days off in Jerusalem.”
“Why?” he says. “Why do you have to stay?” When she doesn’t answer, he exhales in loud frustration. “Okay, then,” he says. “But not me. That’s the joy of being a freelancer.” He puts his hands behind his head as though leaning back in an easy chair. “Poof. I’m gone.”
The driver slows again to about five miles an hour. Except for scrawny gray bushes hugging the roadside, the area seems forsaken. “Enough delays,” Rob calls, bouncing his right leg. “Let’s get the show rolling.”
“Don’t worry.” Sven half-turns in his seat. “We must be almost there. Isn’t that right?” he asks the driver in loud Arabic. “We are there?”
Their driver doesn’t answer—in fact, Caddie realizes she’s never heard him speak. She has no idea what his voice sounds like, and that suddenly registers as odd.
Before she can ask another question and wait him out until he’s forced to reply, she catches sight of a bush up ahead to the right, jerking in a way it shouldn’t. The air hisses and loses pressure like a deflating balloon. “Hold it,” Caddie says, but she doubts anyone hears because right then a passing shrub rises and makes an inexplicable ping. “Hey—” Marcus exclaims, and he half-stands, faces her and raises his hands as though to block her from the bush. Then he leans on her, shoving her down, and Caddie is dimly aware of a crack and grayish smoke as she hears Sven in the front yelling, “Gas, hit the gas you idiot, go, go, go for Christ’s sake!” It occurs to her that their situation must be serious for cordial Sven to call someone an idiot, and Rob sinks to his knees on the floor of the jeep, pulling her toward him, saying, “Oh Jesus oh fuck oh Jesus,” so she’s sandwiched between the two of them, Rob and Marcus, and she’s aware of a peppery scent, and then, at last, she feels the jeep plunge forward and she tastes the dust that has settled on the leather seats but she sees nothing since her head is near her knees and Marcus is slumped over, protecting her, and the air becomes too dense to breathe, as though she’s underwater, and they seem to be turning because she falls to her left in slow motion and she realizes she should definitely be afraid right now, very afraid, yet she feels separate from it, in it but apart, like she’s that dirt caked behind the driver’s ear, and they spin to their right and Marcus, who is still covering her body with his own—God, he’s heavy—half falls off and at that same moment she feels something sticky like tree sap on her cheek and she touches it and it’s blood. “I guess I’ve been hit,” she says, shifting her body toward Marcus, keeping her voice light because she’s already been flighty today about the woman and her toddler so hysteria now is impermissible, and then she knows, she knows right away and without any doubt. The blood is his and he’s gone.
SHE’S HEARD IT SAID that everyone’s blood is the same color. An insistent moral position: we are all as one underneath. But it’s not true—or perhaps it’s that once spilled, the hue varies widely based on whether the day is humid, balmy, overcast. On whether the blood splatters on concrete, dirt, gravel, or grass.
She makes lists in her mind. Pastel rose and watery. Vivid as a police warning light. Eggplant-purple.
The blood that comes from Marcus’s head is the color of raspberries, and sticky.
“I HAVE TO FILE,” Caddie pleads. “It’s a story. Even if anybody’s . . . hurt. Especially then.”
No, no, dear. The voice comes from a great distance as a lady with pewter hair and creamy uniform reaches for Caddie’s arm, mops it with a cotton ball.
Caddie feels a sting. “What’s in that syringe?” She puts her head back against the pillow, overcome by a desire to close her eyes. Then she tries to sit up, realizing at last that this is a nurse, and a nurse should know something. Caddie has to interview her. “Can you tell me the precise nature of the wounds—”
The nurse’s head wobbles. You can’t get up yet. Please.
“How—” Caddie breaks off for a second. “How exactly are you listing their conditions?”
Lie still, dear. Try to relax. The doctor will be here soon. The pewter-and-cream lady, still out of focus, removes the needle and swabs Caddie’s arm again.
“I don’t want to relax. I want to file.”
She feels her arm being patted. It’s all over.
The nurse’s words echo. Overoveroverover.
. . .
THERE’S GRANDMA Jos, sleeves rolled above the bulbs of her elbows, chopping onions for chicken soup, her eyes oozing and her face rigid with loss.
Grandma Jos, kneeling to pray in the dusky church—one slow knee, then the other—her expression now flaccid with a resignation Caddie hates.
Grandma Jos, counting and recounting the cookie-jar money for that yellow dress with the lacy collar that Caddie can wear to the school dance, because Grandma Jos says she must look presentable now that she’s “nearly of age.” And though Caddie is embarrassed by the old-fashioned concept, and even more by frilly dresses, she loves this one because it’s starchy in that new-clothes way that the church hand-me-downs never are, and without even the tiniest of stains.
Grandma Jos, coming down the street in time to see Caddie, already bandaged on one elbow, jumping her rusted bicycle over a makeshift wooden ramp. A growl—Girl!—softened quickly to her public voice. Why does it always have to be dangerous to be fun?
No. Grandma Jos is not here. Caddie is not a child. She has to pull herself from this fog.
SHE WAKES UP ALONE in a room devoid of color. Why do they do that in hospitals, as if bland and passionless were comforting? Her left upper arm is sore and taped up; she’s tethered to an IV. She remembers a flight from Lebanon, vaguely. She gets up, pulling the contraption along with her, her hand rigid on the cold metal. Someone has left a newspaper on a table. The Cyprus Mail. So she’s in Nicosia. She flips rapidly through the pages until she finds it: Award-winning British freelance photo-journalist, 41, killed in a . . . She skims to the bottom, where she sees her own name: Catherine Blair, 32 . . . In between her name and his, the words blur.
What makes her think, then, of that Walt Whitman poem she had to memorize and recite during a sixth grade assembly? But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red. What remote melodrama; no one would publish it today, and still school-children have to learn it. “Whitman,” Caddie says aloud. She grips the newspaper and snickers.
Somehow, through none of her own doing, the laughter shifts into something else, something loud and unruly that makes her chest vibrate unnaturally. The nurse with the needle returns.
HOW DID SHE LET THIS HAPPEN? She’s usually so careful, her caution more valuable than a flak jacket. So how could she let him down like this?
Kill those bastards.
“AND YOU’RE SURE that Sven and Rob, that my colleagues . . . ?”
They’re fine. No injuries at all.
So where are they, then? Where the hell . . . because she needs to ask them why.
Isn’t there anyone you want us to contact?
It was all set up. Yaladi wanted to be interviewed, damnit. There was no crossfire to get caught in, no shelling. A simple interview with a famous criminal.
Some