ground, and people wailing over their dead. It got steadily worse as they advanced into the village to where Blake had said he'd be waiting. He was working out of one of the Red Cross tents. And as they drove slowly toward the rescue tents, Maxine was aware of the hideous, acrid stench of death that she had experienced before in similar situations, and that one never forgot. She pulled one of the surgical masks out of her bag and put it on. It was as bad as she had feared, and she had to admire Blake for being there. She knew the whole experience must be a shock to him.
The Jeep drove her into the central part of Imlil, where houses were collapsed, rubble and broken glass were everywhere, bodies were lying on the ground, some covered with tarps, some not, and people were shuffling around still in shock. There were children crying, carrying other younger children or babies, and she saw two Red Cross trucks where volunteers were serving food and tea. There was a medical tent with a huge Red Cross on it, and smaller tents set up in a camp. The driver pointed to one of them, and then followed her as she approached it on foot over rough ground. Children stared up at her with matted hair and filthy faces. Most of them were barefoot, and some had no clothes on as they had fled in the night. The weather was warm, mercifully, and she took her sweater off and tied it around her waist. The smell of death, urine, and feces was everywhere as she walked into the tent, looking for a familiar face. There was only one person she would know here, and she found him within minutes, talking to a little girl in French. Blake had learned most of his French in nightclubs in St. Tropez, picking up women, but it seemed to work, Maxine thought, and she smiled the moment she saw him. She was standing next to him within seconds, and when he looked up, he had tears in his eyes. He finished what he was saying to the little girl, pointed her to a group of others, being cared for by a volunteer from the Red Cross, and stood up and hugged Maxine. She could hardly hear what he said over the rumble of bulldozers outside. They had been flown in from Germany by Blake. And rescue teams were still digging to get people out.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, sounding like a drowning man. “It's so awful. So far, there are more than four thousand children who seem to be orphans. We're not sure yet, but there are going to be a lot more before it's over.” More than seven thousand children were dead. And almost twice as many adults. Every family had been decimated and sustained losses. And he said the next village up the mountain was worse. He had been there for the past five days. There were almost no survivors there, and most had been brought here. They were shipping the elderly and the severely wounded to hospitals in Marrakech.
“It looks pretty bad,” she confirmed. He nodded, holding her hand in his own, and gave her a tour of the camp. There were crying children everywhere, and every volunteer seemed to be holding a baby. “What's going to happen to them?” Maxine asked. “Has anything official been organized yet?” She knew they would have to wait for confirmation that parents were dead and family members couldn't be found. It would be a mess until then.
“The government and the Red Cross and Moroccan Red Crescent are working on it, but it's still pretty chaotic right now. It's mostly word of mouth, and what people are telling us. I'm not involved in the rest of it, I've been concentrating on the kids.” Once again, it struck her as odd for a moment, since he had always spent so little time with his own, but at least his instincts were good, and his heart was in the right place.
She spent the next two hours roaming around the camp with him, talking to people in the best French she could muster. She offered her services at the medical tent, if they needed them, and she identified herself to the head surgeon as a psychiatrist, specialized in trauma. He had her talk to several women and an old man. One woman had been pregnant with twins and lost them both from a blow when her house collapsed around her, and her husband had been killed, buried under the rubble. He had somehow saved her life and lost his own, she explained. She had three other children, but no one could find them. There were dozens of cases like hers, and one beautiful young girl had lost both arms. She was crying pitifully for her mother, and Maxine just stood with her and stroked her hair, as Blake turned away in tears.
It was nearly sunset when she and Blake stopped at the Red Cross truck, and took steaming cups of mint tea. And as they stopped to listen, they both heard the mystical call to prayer that reverberated from the village, started by the main mosque. It was an unforgettable sound. She had promised to go back to the medical tent later that night, to outline some plans for helping them deal with trauma victims, but that meant almost everyone here, including the workers. They had seen some terrible tragedies firsthand. Maxine had chatted with the Red Cross volunteers for a few minutes. Everyone needed such basic care at this point that there was really no way to set up more sophisticated interventions. All you could do was talk to people one by one, and she and Blake hadn't sat down for hours. It was only as they sipped their tea that Maxine suddenly thought of Arabella, and asked him about her, and if she was still in his life. He nodded, and smiled.
“She had a commission and couldn't come on this trip. I'm glad she's not here. She's pretty squeamish. She faints if someone gets a paper cut. This wouldn't be for her. She's at the house in London.” She had moved in with him officially months before, which was a first for him too. Usually, women stayed with him for a while, and then just disappeared from his life. After seven months, Arabella was still around. Maxine was impressed.
“Is she a keeper?” she asked with a broad smile, finishing her tea.
“Could be,” he said, looking sheepish. “Whatever that means. I'm not as ballsy as you are, Max. I don't need to get married.” He thought it was a brave thing to do, but he was happy for her, if that was what she wanted. “I've been meaning to tell you, by the way. I want to give you and Charles your rehearsal dinner in Southampton. I feel like I owe you at least that.”
“You don't owe me anything,” she said gently, with her surgical mask hanging around her neck. The smell was still awful, but she couldn't drink her tea otherwise. She had given a mask to Blake too, and surgical latex gloves. She didn't want him getting sick, and it was easy to do in a place like this. Soldiers had been burying bodies all day, while family members wailed. It was an eerie, torturous sound, mercifully drowned out by the bulldozers some of the time.
“I want to do that for you. It'll be fun. Have the kids settled down yet?”
“No,” she said honestly, “but they will. Charles is a good man. He's just awkward with kids.” She told Blake about their first date then, and he laughed.
“I would have run like hell,” Blake confessed, “and they're my kids.”
“I'm surprised he didn't.” Maxine was smiling too. She didn't tell him how furious Charles had been that she had come to Morocco. Blake didn't need to know that, and his feelings might have been hurt, or like Daphne, he might have concluded that Charles was a jerk. Maxine felt a need to protect them both. As far as she was concerned, they were both good men.
She went back to the medical tent for a while after that, trying to help them work out a plan, and she talked to some of the paramedics about signs of severe trauma to look for, but at this point it was like trying to dig through a mountain with a spoon, not very effective and pretty crude.
She was up for most of the night with Blake, as he had been for days, and in the end they both slept in the Jeep that had brought her there, piled on top of each other like puppies. She didn't even think about what Charles's reaction would have been to that. It was entirely beside the point, and of no interest here. She could spend her time reassuring him when she got home. She had more important things to do now.
They spent most of Saturday with the children. She talked to as many of them as she could, and sometimes just held them, particularly the young ones. Many of them were getting sick, and she knew that some would die. She sent at least a dozen of them to the medical tent with volunteers. And it was dark before she and Blake stopped.
“What can I do?” Blake looked as helpless as he felt. Maxine was more used to this than he was, but it upset her too. There was such a huge need here, and so little at hand to fill it.
“Honestly? Not much. You're doing about as much as you can.” She knew he was pouring money and machinery into the rescue efforts, but by now they were finding only bodies, not survivors.
And then he shocked her with what he said next. “I want to take some of the kids home,” he said softly. It was a normal reaction. Others in similar circumstances had reacted that way before. But she knew that in situations like this, adopting orphans was not as simple as Blake may have thought.
“We all do,” she said quietly. “You can't take them all home.” The government was going to set up makeshift orphanages for them, and eventually feed them into their own system, and some might find their way into international agencies for adoption, but very few. Children like that usually stayed within their own countries and cultures. And most of the children around them were Muslims. They would be taken care of by their own. “The hardest part of this work is having to walk away. At some point, you've done all you can within the scope of your possibilities, and you have to go home. They stay.” It sounded harsh, but she knew that in most cases, that was true.
