So she went live standing in front of Choscal Hospital. The sun slipped out from a black brick of clouds directly above her head and set itself to sear. Grant, the anchor at Little Six, somehow managed to sound twice as stupid coming through an international feed.
Rachel rattled off the statistics—thirty-two confirmed cholera cases lay bedridden in the hospital behind her; post-hurricane flooding was contributing to the spread on a national scale and complicating relief efforts; the situation was expected to grow more dire by the day. Behind the camera crew, Cité Soleil spread out like a sacrifice to the sun god, and Rachel could feel something sever within her. It was a spiritual piece and untouched by this world up until this moment, a sliver of soul perhaps, and the heat and loss hunted it down as soon as it detached and ate it. In its place, a sparrow flapped its wings in the center of her chest. No warning, no buildup. It suddenly hovered in the center of her chest, flapping as hard as it could.
“And excuse me, Rachel,” Grant was saying in her ear, “but Rachel . . .”
Why did he keep saying her name?
“Yes, Grant?”
“Rachel?”
She consciously avoided gritting her teeth. “Yes?”
“Do you have any estimates on how many people have contracted this deadly disease? How many people are sick?”
The question struck her as absurd.
How many people are sick?
“We’re all sick.”
“I’m sorry?” Grant said.
“We’re all sick,” Rachel said. Was it her imagination, or did the words come out a tad slurry?
“Rachel, are you saying that you and other members of our Channel Six crew have contracted cholera?”
“What? No.”
Danny Marotta removed his eye from the lens and gave her a “You okay?” look. Widdy walked behind him with a graceful stride that didn’t fit with her youth or the blood on her dress, or the second smile carved into her throat.
“Rachel,” Grant was saying. “Rachel? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
And Rachel, sweating profusely by this point, shaking so hard the mic jumped in her hand, replied, “I said we’re all sick. We’re all, we’re all, what, I mean, we’re just sick. You know?” The words sluiced out of her like blood from a puncture wound. “We’re lost and sick and we all pretend otherwise, but then we all go away. We all just fucking go away.”
By the time the sun went down footage of Rachel repeating “We’re all sick” to a baffled anchorman as her hands and shoulders shook and her eyelids batted at the sweat that drizzled from her forehead had gone viral.
It was the consensus of upper management during a postmortem meeting that while it was commendable that the feed was cut four seconds before Rachel said “fucking,” it should have been cut ten seconds earlier. As soon as it became clear that Rachel was unhinged—and most agreed that moment occurred the very first time she said “We’re all sick”—they should have cut to commercial.
Rachel was fired over cell phone, as she walked across the tarmac at Toussaint Louverture Airport toward the plane home.
Her first night back, she went to a bar in Marshfield, a few blocks away from their house. Sebastian was working through the night and had made it clear he had no desire to see her right now. He said he’d stay on his boat until he could “process what she’d done to them.”
She couldn’t blame him really. It would be a few weeks before the reality of what had become of her career would sink in, but when she caught her reflection in the bar mirror as she drained her vodka, she was startled by how frightened she looked. She didn’t feel frightened, she felt numb. Yet she stared over the scotch and whiskey bottles to the right of the cash register at a woman who looked a bit like her mother, a bit like herself, and every bit terrified.
The bartender clearly hadn’t seen the video of her meltdown. He treated her the way bored bartenders the world over treated customers they couldn’t give a shit about. It was a slow night, so he wasn’t making his nut in tips no matter how hard he shucked and smiled. So he did neither. He read a newspaper at the other end of the bar and texted with someone on his phone. She checked her own texts but she didn’t have any—everyone she knew was ducking and hiding until the gods decided how fiercely they wanted to continue their assault or whether they could relent and spit her back out. She did have one e-mail, though, and even before she tapped the mail icon, she knew who it was from and smiled when she saw Brian Delacroix’s name.
Rachel,
You didn’t deserve to be punished for being human while surrounded by inhumanity. You didn’t deserve to be fired or condemned. You deserved a fucking medal. Just one man’s opinion. Hang in there.
BD
Who are you? she thought. You strange man with (mostly) perfect timing? One of these days, Brian Delacroix, I would like to . . .
What?
I would like to give you a chance to explain that weird encounter outside the Athenaeum. Because I can’t connect that guy with the guy who just sent me this note.
The bartender brought her another vodka, and she decided she’d head back to her apartment, maybe compose an e-mail to Brian Delacroix that articulated some of the thoughts that had just passed through her head. She handed the bartender her credit card and told him he could cash her out. As he rang up the sale, she felt beset by déjà vu stronger than any she could remember. No, it wasn’t simply déjà vu: She’d experienced this precise moment before, she was sure of it. She caught the bartender’s eyes in the mirror, and he gave her a curious look in return as if unsure why she stared so intently at him.
I don’t know you, she thought. But I know this moment. I’ve lived it.
And then she realized she hadn’t. Her mother had. It was a restaging of the photograph of her mother in roughly the same place at a similarly shaped bar, in similar lighting, thirty-one years before. Like her mother, she stared absently at the bottles. Like the bartender in the picture, the bartender tonight had his back to her as he rang up the sale. His eyes hung in the mirror. Her eyes hung in the mirror.
Look for yourself in his eyes, her mother had said.
Rachel is in the mirror, Jeremy had said.
The bartender brought her the check. She added a tip and signed it.
She left her drink unfinished on the bar and hurried back to the house. She went to her bedroom and opened the shoebox full of photos. The photographs from the bar in East Baltimore were on the top of the pile where she and Jeremy had left them two summers ago. Rachel followed her mother’s gaze over the whiskey bottles to the mirror behind them, to what Elizabeth had really been looking at, to what had put the charged look, the eroticized look, on her face.
The bartender’s face loomed above the cash register, his eyes locked on Elizabeth’s. The green in his eyes was so pale it was almost gray.
Rachel took the photograph to her bathroom mirror. She held it up beside her head. His eyes were her eyes—same color, same shape.
“Well, shit,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”
8
GRANITE