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 Léogane.
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.
Sebastian said, “She’s smart, accessible, and she doesn’t look at the camera sometimes like she might head-butt it.”
The ugly truth was that Sebastian was right. Rachel would have loved to hate Jenny Gonzalez (Lord knows she tried), to believe her looks and sex appeal had gotten her where she was. And while those things certainly didn’t hurt, Jenny had an MA in journalism from Columbia, could improv on the fly, always hit her marks fully prepared, and treated everyone from the receptionist to the GM with the same respect.
Jenny Gonzalez didn’t replace Rachel because she was younger, prettier, and more well endowed (though she was all those things, goddammit)—she replaced Rachel because she was better at her job, had a more easygoing nature, and people loved talking to her.
There had still been a chance for Rachel, though. If, through clean living, she reversed the aging process she’d accelerated in Haiti, if she removed the chip on her shoulder that had first appeared and then kept growing there, if she kissed ass and played ball and transformed herself back into that slightly sexy, slightly tomboyish, slightly nerdy (they gave her red horn-rimmed glasses in place of her contacts), wholly knowledgeable ace reporter they’d hired away from the Globe for big bucks in the first place . . . then she still had a home at Little Six.
She tried. She covered a cat that barked like a dog and the annual “breaking of the ice” by the L Street Brownies, a group of mostly naked men who were the first to brave the waters of Boston Harbor every year. She reported on the baby koala born at Franklin Park Zoo and the running of the brides at Filene’s Basement.
She and Sebastian rehabbed the house they’d bought south of the city. Their schedules were such that when he was at the house, she was at work, and vice versa. To rarely see each other was such a pleasant arrangement that she would, in hindsight, come to believe it added a year to their marriage.