She received a couple of e-mails from Brian Delacroix. And even though one of them—You did magnificent work in Haiti. People in this city care now because you cared—carried her through an otherwise shitty day, she reminded herself that Brian Delacroix was a salesman, one with a weird energy that probably stemmed from his soul being at odds with the career decisions he’d made. She couldn’t trust there was a real Brian left anymore, so her responses to his e-mails were limited and polite: Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. Take care.
She told herself she was happy. She told herself she was trying to get back to the reporter and wife and person she’d been before. But she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t stop watching the feeds from Haiti, following the country as it scrabbled for rebirth but mostly just continued to die. Cholera broke out along the Artibonite River. This was followed by rumors that UN soldiers were the source of it. She begged Klay Bohn, her assignment editor, to let her go back for a week. Even at her own expense. He didn’t even dignify the request with a response, just told her she was expected in the parking lot behind the station, where she’d hop a van to cover a six-year-old in Lawrence who claimed God had given him the numbers his mother used to win the lottery.
When cameras secretly filmed UN soldiers removing a leaking pipe from the ground along the banks of the Artibonite and the footage went viral, Rachel was interviewing a hundred-year-old Red Sox fan attending his first game at Fenway.
As the cholera continued to spread, Rachel covered back-to-back house fires, a hot-dog-eating contest, a weekend of gang-related shootings in Dorchester, two elderly sisters who created end tables out of bottle caps, a BC party that got out of control in Cleveland Circle, and a former Wall Street broker who turned his back on high finance to do outreach work with the homeless on the North Shore.
The stories weren’t all tripe, they weren’t all inconsequential. Rachel had almost convinced herself that she occasionally performed a valid public service when Hurricane Tomas hit Haiti. Only a few people died, but the shelters were wiped out, sewers and septic tanks overflowed, and the cholera outbreak metastasized across the island.
She’d been up all night, following the available footage and reading the reports as they came across the wires, when Brian Delacroix’s name popped up in her in-box. She opened his e-mail and all it said was:
Why aren’t you in Haiti? We need you there.
It was as if someone had placed a warm hand to the side of her neck and tilted her face to his shoulder and let her close her eyes. Maybe, since that off-kilter encounter outside the Athenaeum, she’d been judging Brian too harshly. Maybe she’d just caught him on a bad day, as he was trying to close a deal with Jack Ahern, an antiquities dealer from Geneva. Rachel had no idea where lumber and antiquities could cross paths, but she didn’t really understand finance—maybe Jack Ahern was an investor of some kind. In either case, so Brian had acted a little odd, a little nervous. What was wrong with being a little odd and a little nervous?
Why aren’t you in Haiti? We need you there.
He understood. Somehow from a remove of years and through the scantest of cyber-contact, he grasped that it was crucial she get back there.
And as if she’d ordered it up like a pizza, half an hour later Sebastian came home and said, “They’re sending you back.”
“Back where?”
He pulled a plastic bottle of water from the fridge and placed it to the side of his head. He closed his eyes. “You have the contacts, you know the customs, I guess.”
“Haiti. They’re sending me back to Haiti?”
He opened his eyes as he continued to massage his temple with the bottle. “Haiti, yeah.” Though he’d never spoken the words, Rachel knew he blamed Haiti for her career decline. And he blamed her career decline for his own career stagnation. So when he said “Haiti,” it sounded like an obscenity.
“When?” Her blood was tingling. She’d been up all night but now she was wide awake.
“Klay said no later than tomorrow. Do I have to remind you that you can’t fuck this up?”
She felt her face drop. “That’s your pep talk?”
“It is what it is,” he said wearily.
She could think of a lot of things to say, but they all would have led to a fight and she didn’t want to fight right now. So she tried, “I’ll miss you.”
She couldn’t wait to get on the plane.
“Miss you too,” he said as he stared into the refrigerator.
7
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Back in Haiti, the same heat and crumpled buildings and exhausted despair. The same bewildered looks on most of the faces. Where there was no bewilderment, there was rage. Where there wasn’t rage, there was hunger and fear. But mostly bewilderment: After all this suffering, the faces seemed to ask, are we to accept that suffering is the point?
On her way to do her first story, meeting the crew out in front of Choscal Hospital in the dense slum of Cité Soleil, Rachel walked streets so poor a newcomer would have been unable to discern the difference in the neighborhood before the quake and after it. Photos were pasted to broken lamp poles and impotent power-line poles and the low walls that lined the streets—pictures, in some cases, of the dead, but primarily of the missing. Under most of the photos a question or plea was written:
èske ou te wè m?
Have you seen me?
She hadn’t. Or maybe she had. Maybe the face of the middle-aged man she passed as she turned a corner was one of the bodies she’d seen in the collapsed church or the hospital parking lot. In either case, he was gone. And not coming back, she was fairly sure.
Rachel crested a small hill and the breadth of the ghetto spread out before her, a spillage of steel and cinder-block shacks sun-blasted to monochrome. A boy rode past her on a muddy bicycle. The boy looked to be about eleven, twelve at most, and had an automatic rifle strapped to his back. As he looked over his shoulder at her, Rachel reminded herself that this was gang territory. Mini war gods ran the show and fought for turf from one end to the other. Food didn’t flow into here, but guns sure as shit did. She shouldn’t have been walking around there alone. She shouldn’t have been walking around there without a tank and air support.
But she didn’t feel fear. She just felt numb. She felt overwhelmed with numbness.
At least she thought that’s what it was.
Have you seen me?
No, I haven’t. No one has. No one did. No one will. Even if you’d lived a full life. Didn’t matter—you vanished the moment you were born.
That was the mood she carried into the little plaza in front of the hospital. The sole good news about what followed was that it only went live to the local market, in this case, Boston. Big Six was going to decide later if they’d use it. Little Six, though, believed a live feed would stoke a sense of urgency in a story everyone suspected was losing viewer interest because of tragedy fatigue.