Eva greeted Sheyda and reminded them that there were some things she wasn’t authorized to say. “What I can tell you is that he and his team were hunting two Iranian warheads that the Israelis missed in their initial air strikes,” she said. “The hunt took them out of Iran and into Syria. They were headed right into Damascus when the missile lifted off and exploded. We were tracking his team with a drone. But when the explosion happened, we lost contact with the drone and with Reza.”
“But he could still be alive, right?” Najjar asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Eva said. “But I…” She began to choke up.
Farah ran to get a box of tissues and gave several to Eva, who dabbed her eyes and apologized for her lack of professionalism.
“Anything’s possible,” she said again. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath, Najjar. As I told you, the devastation is beyond belief. We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world. Believe me, you don’t want to see the satellite photos. It’s… well… I don’t see how anyone could have survived.”
The room was quiet for several minutes, and then Sheyda asked Eva a question. “You two were very close, weren’t you?”
Eva was clearly caught off guard by the question, but she chose to answer it anyway. “We’d become good friends, yes,” she said.
“Just friends?” Sheyda asked, but Najjar reprimanded her and quickly apologized.
“It’s okay,” Eva replied. “Your wife is a very perceptive woman. The truth is, I guess I was hoping for something to develop between us. But it never did. And even if he had lived, honestly, I don’t think it ever would have happened.”
“Why not?” Sheyda asked, more gently this time.
Eva sighed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue again. “He didn’t love me,” she said, her bottom lip quivering. “He loved someone else.”
Epilogue
Looking out over the twenty young faces in her classroom, Marseille Harper knew she had done the right thing coming home to Portland. She needed some semblance of normalcy, needed a sweet routine to make it possible to keep breathing. Her heart and mind had taken so many turns, felt so many blows in the past two weeks. It was a miracle she wasn’t under the covers of her bed, just weeping or numb. Of course, there had been several nights since her return to her responsibilities in the classroom when she had sobbed herself to sleep. She thought of the psalmist who wrote about his tears being his food, and she felt like a kindred spirit had written that especially for her.
The obliteration of the Syrian capital and the deaths of more than two million people, including the Twelfth Imam and the top leaders of both Syria and Iran, had dominated the news and everyone’s conversations all week. The utter horror of it all had deeply penetrated the culture, Marseille had noticed. People talked about it constantly, always in hushed, somber tones. Conversations on completely unrelated topics seemed to be more subdued since the detonation as well. Even the children were asking questions about what had happened in the Middle East. Where was Damascus? Where was Syria? What was a mushroom cloud? Why did Mommy and Daddy seem so quiet, so sad?
In a way, being asked these questions helped Marseille feel needed, like at least she was helping her little friends process the world-shaking event in Damascus in a way that was simple and brief. The hugs of the children were like a balm.
On Monday morning, she had been waiting at Hancock Field in Syracuse, ready for the early-morning flight back to Portland. She had wanted to stay in Syracuse and help the Walshes as much as she could after the news of Lexi and Chris’s deaths. But she had a job to do back home. She’d signed a contract. She’d given her word, and she had to keep it. At least Lexi’s aunt lived nearby and seemed very capable of assisting the Walshes in their planning for the funeral arrangements. Lexi and Chris had a strong church community, and Marseille knew meals would be brought and friends would be there to listen and cry and pray.
She remembered reaching her gate at the airport and sitting down with a cup of coffee to read her Scripture passages for the day. She had just started to pray about the verses in front of her when a wave of gasps and shock moved through the atmosphere at the United gate. People were suddenly standing and staring at the television monitors and shaking their heads. They were making phone calls and looking wide-eyed at one another. Marseille had not been sitting where she could see any of the TVs, but when she walked to the nearest monitor, she found a CNN breaking news story and a single, horrifying image — a mushroom cloud over Damascus.
She had barely been able to believe what she was seeing. Her mind had been flooded with questions. How had it happened? What did it mean? Was David safe, or had he been killed in the explosion? Though Tom Murray had told her only the day before that David was alive and well and doing his job — a job she had assumed was in Iran — she wondered if he could have been in Syria when this happened. If so, had he died instantly and painlessly, near ground zero of the blast? Or was he burned and dying a slow death somewhere on the outskirts of Damascus?
Marseille tried to push such thoughts out of her head. She wanted to believe David was in Iran. But the doubts kept creeping in. Maybe he had been trying to stop this very thing from happening. If he was doing that, then maybe he had been right in the middle of it. She remembered one of the United reps calling her and her fellow passengers to board their flight at that moment, and she had forced herself to put one foot in front of the other. She told herself she would wait for Dr. Shirazi to call. No news was good news, right? Then she wondered if maybe she should call Mr. Murray again. Or maybe he would call her?
She desperately wanted to believe that David had been in Tehran or some secret location far away from the nuclear blast, but over the last few nights as she cried herself to sleep about Lexi and Chris, she had shed many tears over David, too. Where was he right now?
Thankfully, her class didn’t know about Lexi and Chris and of course had no knowledge of David. She could mourn her friends in private, in prayer, and wait for God’s comfort, if not his answers to why all this had happened. One thing was clear, at least. She’d been praying and studying and trying to understand for weeks if the Twelfth Imam was the Antichrist who would come and rule the world in the end of days as the Bible foretold. But he was gone now. He was not the Antichrist — not the final one, at least. Marseille wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. But at least she knew for certain.
Tomorrow, she would head back into sorrow, flying to Syracuse early in the morning for the Saturday-afternoon memorial service of the newlywed couple she still had trouble believing were really gone. Then she would fly straight back to the West Coast early Monday morning, missing only one more day of class and, hopefully, bringing this chapter of tragedy to an end. It would be an incredibly fast trip, one she wasn’t sure she would handle well emotionally or physically, but she had to be there.
She was still trying to seek God’s wisdom about whether she should visit Dr. Shirazi again while she was in Syracuse. She felt she should, but it would be so painful. And what right did she have to keep attaching herself to that family? She would already be involved in the Vandermarks’ memorial — only weeks after she’d been in their wedding, only a week after she’d helped with Mrs. Shirazi’s memorial, only months after her own father’s memorial… No, she couldn’t let herself start that line of thinking. It was all too much.
She looked out at the heads bent over their chapter books. She was so proud of them and satisfied to see their reading progress since the school year started. She prayed that each of them would someday read the greatest Book of all and learn about the character of the heavenly Father who loved each one of them. She knew they would need his wisdom to navigate a world that seemed to lack any sense these days.