Where were they going? To what end? It had been two long years since I had lived in a city.
I moved along with the queue until I was at the front of the line, and the driver of a white Fiat opened the door for me. He saw the way I held my arm and took my battered leather bag and put it in the trunk.
I got into the taxi and gripped the armrest as the driver shot away from the curb. He knew the address I had given him, and he sped through the streets of Rome. Centrifugal force pinned me painfully to the side of the cab, then threw me toward the far side of the seat as we drove around the traffic circles.
The driver had a picture of his wife and children in a frame stuck to the dashboard, and he had hung a rosary from the rearview mirror. The cross swung hypnotically as we took the many high-speed turns. That swinging rosary made me physically sick. I looked away.
I was wearing the same jeans, blue cotton shirt, and crocheted cardigan that I’d worn when I first went to South Sudan. And now I was also wearing Sabeena’s secondhand pink Skechers that, evidently, she had passed down to me.
Sabeena’s shoes were all I had of her, and they were the most precious things I owned. They reminded me that it had all really happened.
I had died with Colin on the killing field.
It was Sabeena who had gotten me off the ground and into the helicopter. Jimmy Wuster told me that she had decompressed my lungs with a needle while we were in the air and literally brought me back to life.
She had assisted Dr. Wuster and Dr. Bailey in the O.R. at Kind Hands, where they did emergency meatball surgery. Then she had gone with me to the airport in Entebbe and had handed me off to an in-flight nurse for my trip to a hospital in Amsterdam.
I imagine survival odds were small.
That was six weeks ago. I hadn’t seen or heard from Sabeena. Was she alive or dead? Had she been able to rescue Jemilla and Aziza when our hospital had been shut down?
And what was I to do now? I could not imagine ever working as a doctor again. And I no longer believed that if there was a god, he was good.
Chapter 25
MY DRIVER looked at me in the rearview mirror.
He said, “La signorina, dovrei prendere da un medico?”
He was asking if he should take me to a doctor. I felt more lost and more vulnerable than I had in my life. I could only tell this stranger the truth.
“Sono un medico. I am a doctor,” I told him. “I’ve been in a war zone in Africa. A lot of people died. I lost a man I loved to this war, and I had to leave people I loved behind.”
The man’s face reflected my pain.
Horns blared. He swerved the car, got us back on track. We were on a broad avenue, Piazza del Colosseo. The Colosseum was on my right, ancient, crumbling, and at the same time still standing after thousands of years. I barely glanced at it.
We turned onto Ponte Testaccio and were crossing the bridge over the Tiber when a gang of motor scooters came up from behind. As they passed us, their loud, popping motors shot me back to the slaughter in South Sudan.
The driver was looking into the glass, watching me hunch down and cling to the corner of the backseat.
“Were you hurt?” he asked in Italian.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Rome will be good to you.”
The cab slowed as we entered the section of Rome called Trastevere, which means “beyond the Tiber.” He turned onto a narrow street that was laid with cobblestones and lined with low, pastel-colored buildings. It was sweet and beautiful, like an old, hand-tinted picture postcard.
He stopped the cab in front of a three-story building the color of peaches, with ivy clinging to the walls and a tile with the number 23 painted in cobalt blue.
I pulled a wad of euros from my handbag, but my driver refused the fare.
“Be well,” he said. He unhooked the rosary from the mirror and bunched it into my hand exactly the way Nick Givens had with his dog tags. I couldn’t say no, so I said, “Grazie. I’ll keep it with me.”
He nodded and smiled and took my luggage from the trunk and set it down at the feet of a row of potted plants.
“Go with God,” he said.
“And you.”
A voice called out to me from above.
“Brigid. Brigid, up here. Oh, my God. I’m so glad to see your face.”
Chapter 26
TORI HEWITT was calling down to me from a window on the third floor. The open shutters perfectly framed the sunny face of my dear friend from medical school, who was leaning out over the street. I hadn’t seen Tori in two years, and she looked fresh and healthy and beautiful.
“I’m coming down!” she shouted.
A moment later she burst through the door with her arms open wide and pulled me into a hug that I needed more than she could possibly have known.
She asked me a million questions as she grabbed my battered bag and led me through an archway to the main entrance and the interior stairs to the apartment where she lived with her husband, Marty.