I couldn’t say the same, but I hugged him. He was as substantial as ever. He smelled good. His eyes sparkled. He was so—alive.
I asked him, “Is this God’s plan for me, Father? The plan you were always rattling on about?”
“What do you think?” he asked me. He was grinning like a fool. “Brigid, get into the car. Do you know where we’re going?”
“I guess you’ll tell me.”
“You have a very dry sense of humor,” he said.
“And an enormous confusion about what the heck has happened.”
I got into the backseat with Gilly, and she turned her bright, always curious gaze to the countryside, the goats tied to trees, the meager shops lining the streets of the town. Beyond the town, the long dirt road cut through the open plains and over the dusty hills. It all looked solid and real.
I was hardly surprised when we pulled up to Magwi Clinic at sunset. The clinic was lit up from within, and I heard the loud hum of the generator. This had been a very good place for me. Perhaps Gilly could be happy here, too.
As I got out of the car and looked around, I took in the tent village under the red acacia trees outside the clinic, much bigger than it had been before. I heard babies crying and the braying of donkeys and saw a new structure beyond the tent city and opposite the clinic.
It was a church with the name Jesus Mary Joseph, Magwi, on a hand-painted board affixed to the siding. The doors were painted red, symbolizing the phrase To God through the blood of Christ.
My eyes welled up. Tears spilled over. And when I heard my name, I turned. I recognized her voice before I saw her, and there she was.
Sabeena, her hair wrapped in colorful fabric, was running down the steps from the clinic, and two tall girls were running right behind her. Sabeena, Jemilla, and Aziza all reached Gilly before they reached me, and they hugged her and danced her around as if she was a long-lost sister as well as my baby girl.
Sabeena screamed my name again, and when she got to me, she almost knocked me off my feet with her full-body hug.
“Oh, Brigid, I’ve missed you so much. Come inside. Albert has been cooking all day. Father Delahanty,” she called over my shoulder, “you come, too. Dinner is served.”
Were we all dead, living on a parallel plane alongside the living? I said, “Sabeena, I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry. You are off duty, doctor.”
I began the climb up the steps to the long porch, my mind racing in circles inside my skull, my arm around Sabeena’s waist. We had just reached the old screen door when a horrible racket cut through the night sounds of babies wailing, young girls laughing, insects chirping.
“Dr. Douglass. You are needed in room four forty-one. Dr. Douglass. You’re needed—”
And that was when my reality split.
God. Are You here?
I was standing on the the long porch of Magwi Clinic, Sabeena’s arm around my waist and mine around hers.
And at the same time, I watched myself lying in a hospital bed. My eyes were closed. There were tubes in my arms, and a doctor was sitting on the edge of my bed, saying and repeating my name.
Sabeena was saying, “We’ll take the night shift, Brigid. Just like old times.”
I stopped on the stairs and looked out past the JMJ church, the cross at the top of the steeple silhouetted against the cobalt-blue sky. I saw long lines of people streaming toward Magwi Clinic with baskets on their heads, babies in their arms, their bare feet stirring up the golden dust as they made their way down the road. I couldn’t see the end of the line. There were so many people, and there was so much to do.
The doctor sitting near my feet adjusted the valve on the IV line.
“Brigid. Dr. Fitzgerald. This is Dr. Douglass. Can you hear me?”
God. What should I do?
There was a vibration inside my mind, the hum that was almost a voice. You know.
I was so warm, I thought I had a fever. A hot wind came up and blew at my clothes.
I opened my eyes and gasped.
I hurt all over.
Chapter 121
I WAS in a hospital bed with needles in my arms and a cannula in my nose. I ripped that out and blinked.
“Okay. Good,” said the doctor. He looked to be in his sixties. The name tag on his white jacket read J. Douglass.
He asked, “How do you feel?”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“That’s right,” said the doctor.
“Five. It hurts to breathe. What happened to me?”
“You took a couple of bullets, doctor. One passed through your left shoulder and your back and exited under your shoulder blade. The second bullet was a doozy.”
“New medical term?”
“Just coined.”
“You’re my surgeon?”