“Don’t say like. I’ve told you a hundred times.” But Chris experienced a second bolt of suspicion. Aya had said the word like so many times just now that it was almost as if she wanted Chris to pay attention to it. Diversion!
“Whatever, Mom! So she made us do a report on animal abuse around the United States. I might as well finish it in case the emergency ends and we go back to school. You told me to think positive. So I am.”
Something was off but there was no time to deal with it. If Aya was doing schoolwork, Chris would not get in the way. If Aya wanted to regard the emergency as temporary, Chris could only give thanks for that.
It’s going to get a lot worse first, either way.
Havlicek the gentleman held the suite door open for her. Zipped into her white hooded Andrew Marc parka, a $99 clearance sale purchase, she stepped out with the FBI agent onto the snowy campus and headed beneath vapor lights toward the hospital complex. Ray wore FBI blue.
“So you haven’t heard from Joe,” he said.
“Nobody has. He should have been back by now.”
“Well, my guys missed him at the cathedral, I found out.”
They stopped at mid-campus, by the Jesuit graveyard. Its tilting, worn headstones marked the remains of priests who had died over three centuries, in trouble spots around the world. “I once wanted to be a priest,” Havlicek said as they eyed the gathering of dead: Jesuits who had died of the flu in World War One, tending soldiers; Jesuits who had perished of cholera in Haiti; Jesuits who had given their lives fighting outbreaks, or who’d been killed by the Soviets, or died of old age there in Georgetown, their final resting place only two hundred feet from a hospital, as if those buildings were doorways to the next world.
Joe Rush came into her head.
I had no choice, Joe. You asked me to choose between Aya and you. There was no choice.
Chris fought off the stab of misery. She felt as if she’d destroyed a relationship, yet she had never been Rush’s lover, or the recipient of any of his affections at all. Not that that would have changed what she had done. Not for a second.
“Chris, I think Burke plans to reinstate you,” Havlicek said. “He might even send you to Virginia, get you out of the line of fire here. Maybe I can pull some strings and get Aya sent there, too.”
“You could? Really? My God, Ray! Thanks.”
“No problem.” He smiled. He had a very nice smile. “Anyway, let me know if you hear from Joe.”
Even at 9 P.M. more ambulance headlights rolled into the horseshoe-shaped driveway. Extra ambulances had arrived from outlying suburbs, and moved past the guards in a stream. The line of cars grew longer at the entrance. Masked nurses escorted patients to designated buildings. New arrivals to triage, in the Medical and Dental Annex. Clearly sick to the hospital, which normally held six hundred beds but had been expanded. More beds were being set up in the Dahlgren Memorial Library and Davis Performing Arts Center. Military station in Building D; Chris’s office in the Lombardi Cancer Center.
She told Havlicek, “We’ll add beds in the field house, too. But we may need to open up another building.”
From the searchlights a few blocks off, and sirens, she surmised that another police action was going on. They heard shots. Havlicek explained that after an initial period of laxity with civil disobedience, “police and Marines are now responding with extra force.”
“Ray, I thought Burke was crazy when he told me to move in here. But I guess he knew what he was doing.”
“He does. Believe me. He does.” Ray paused. From his expression, she thought he was about to get personal. It made her uncomfortable. “Chris, remember when we were going out, our talk about bad timing?”
“I do. But not now, Ray, please.”
There are no good choices. If the disease gets out of the wards, then this campus will be the worst possible place to have my daughter. I can’t send her into the city. It’s too late to send her to Dad, and even if I could, I’m not sure whether things will get bad down there, too. Maybe I should be nicer to Ray. Shut him out more gently. He’s a good guy. He can get Aya to safety.
“I’m just upset,” she said.
“No, it was stupid of me to bring personal stuff up. No problem at all,” Ray said, smiling, palms out. A pal.
He stayed with her for one last stop before going with her to her office. At the front gate she checked the line of walk-ins that stretched down Reservoir Road toward 37th Street. Two hours ago she’d found one of the guards mistreating people, shouting, pointing an M4, scaring little kids and making them cry. She’d had the man transferred to the hospital. She’d told the Marine captain in charge to make sure that his soldiers treated the frightened people with kindness. At the time, she’d thought that Joe Rush would never treat strangers badly. He was good with frightened people. He was just bad with normal people. Go figure, she thought.
“Must be four hundred people out here,” Ray said.
They stood on the “safe” side of the razor wire. The line was seven deep out there and Havlicek’s shoulder brushed hers. The scene reminded her of bread lines she’d seen at refugee camps in Syria, in Haiti, in New Orleans.
She started to turn away when she spotted something familiar. She shielded her eyes with gloved hands to cut out the vapor light glare. A man in midline wore a dark parka, hood up, and had his head down, his hands jammed in his pockets. She was not sure what had caught her attention. Then he inched ahead and she realized that was it. Rush moved like that, favored one side, because of his amputated toes. Left side dipping slightly, then coming back up fast.
The man shuffled forward, face away from the street, where a police car was slowly approaching, shining a side light down the line. The man seemed to make himself smaller. The car rolled past. The man’s head came up and followed the receding car and the vapor light turned a flash of face green.
It’s Joe! He’s hiding from them!
The thumping in her chest happened when he was close whether she wanted it to or not, whether she was angry at him or glad to see him or puzzled, as she was now. Why is he standing in line instead of announcing himself at the gate?
“Why exactly did he say he was going to the cathedral?” Havlicek asked, as if sensing that Joe was on her mind.
“He wanted to ask the dean about leprosy and religion.”
She started to tell Havlicek that Rush was here. But she stopped. The throbbing in her head spread down into her intestines. All she had to do was say it and point and she’d be reinstated at her old job and Aya might be in Virginia. People like Burke thought in terms of rewards.
Rush took two steps forward with the line. Havlicek was saying, “Religion? What does religion have to do with it?” The police car was coming back down the block, and this time its spotlight paused here and there on the line. Rush turned away, very slightly, not enough to attract attention. You had to be watching to see him do it.
Chris remembered the gunshots she had heard ten minutes ago, and she remembered the helicopter. Mentally, Chris measured Rush’s place in line against the stop-and-go speed with which the line moved. He looked as if he’d been here for… about ten minutes. No, she thought. It couldn’t have been for you.
Her breath floated into the night as mist, as she turned to Havlicek, looked into his face. Havlicek’s full attention was on Chris. His soft smile.