Sister Marie Claire had met them at the hospital, which was a mistake, Rocky now realized. The nun accompanied Hanley on the flight from Juba to Nairobi. She tried to explain to Rocky and Elizabeth why Hanley was involved and what happened but Elizabeth exploded the instant they were introduced. What little of her mother Elizabeth had in her came roaring out, blasting the nun and the mission, Sudan and anyone else Hanley’s daughter could think to include. Father Laslo intervened, allowing one of the doctors to take the nun from harm’s way. Sister Marie Claire, who had so desperately wanted to stay with Hanley, left to fly back to Sudan on Father Laslo’s orders, accompanied by the same doctor. The priest said the nun would only remain in Sudan a short time.
Hanley was semiconscious. He had been that way since landing his plane almost five days ago. Two doctors from the clinic in Mapuordit found Hanley in the plane thirty minutes after he had landed and ten minutes before the nun and a friend made it back from Shambe. By then, the doctors had Hanley on a canvas stretcher beneath the plane, intravenous bottles and antibiotics already administered. Hanley was taken to a small, ancient clinic in the village where he was placed on a wooden platform with a thin, tick mattress covered in graying linens. There he had lain, his condition worsening. The doctors found the bullet had shattered a lower rib, fragmented into pieces that had cut into his right kidney and nicked his spinal column. The bleeding had stopped and he was stabilized. Despite his condition, the Sudanese government demanded his arrest, then removal from the country, but after the Catholic Church interceded, he was flown to Juba and then Nairobi.
After his daughter had left, Rocky told Hanley that the children had all been taken to Mapuordit. A search of Jumma’s room had yielded his notebooks, one of which contained contact information with the families of the rescued. The mission would attempt to reunite them, Father Laslo had told her. She hoped Hanley had heard her.
Spots covered the front of her linen skirt, the stains left by the tears she had wept for Hanley. Not one for prayer, Rocky had been pleading with God since Elizabeth had called her on Saturday. No one had listened, certainly not a caring God, she thought. She feared he would die in a corner of the world that time and other men chose to ignore.
***
Wherever he was smelled sickly sweet, like rotting flowers in a vase. He tried to speak, to call out for Elizabeth but could not.
He saw milky light and vague shapes, then things went back to complete darkness, and this went on back and forth for some time and then there was only light and shapes. The light he saw was weak but steady. Steady was good. The darkness was gone, at least for a while.
He thought of the streetlight at the entrance to his uncle’s farm, obscured by the morning mist which brought a dampness to his skin. He wished to feel it again, the mist, chilling, raising his flesh wherever it touched, but he couldn’t. At least for now he had this steady light. There was something else he felt, something new.
It was odd, this new feeling; this lightness, strange after having lost the feeling in his feet and legs.
***
Pushing through the door, Rocky made her way to the corner bed. Sick and dying people lay scattered about. A woman cried, softly pleading for help to no one and everyone. Hanley looked bad, only the slight movement of the sheet covering his chest telling her he was still alive. Taking up his hand, she noticed how dry and stiff his fingers were. There was as much to hate about life as to love she thought. She sat by the bed to wait. For what?
Rocky began to cry. How had it all come to this, how could he have thrown his life away so carelessly? She was alone on a bench far from the new start with Hanley she had hoped for. Her exhaustion pushed her down, hunched her over. Now a sudden constricting pressure in her chest made her afraid to breathe. It must be the stress she told herself, a dusting of fear covering her heart. The pressure eased; the crying helped.
The wall behind her was rough and hard but warm. She slumped over, too tired not to. Her head hung over her knees, her hands on rough, dry wood, arms locked in support, tears wetting the closely woven linen stretched over her legs. The bench trembled beneath her as she wept and prayed prayers full of anger even while pleading for mercy. Doubting the effect, she rose and left the room.
Evening had darkened the hallway. The hospital and everything in it smelled of death. As she walked the halls, she remembered her grandmother at night on her knees beside her bed, praying for a consideration or a gift or guidance. Rocky could not remember any proof of those prayers being answered. The wind blew through the open windows of the hallway, carrying her prayers away, pushing them to where they would never be heard. Her eyes burned, her nose ran. She felt sorry for herself and then ashamed.
Rocky returned to the room and the corner bed. Straightening the covers with some care, she pulled the sheet to Hanley’s unshaven chin. The coarse weave of the cloth against his face did not make him stir; the coarse weave or the smell. The old bed linen had the sweet stink of something washed in sulfur water. These rough touches did not rouse him.
They said he would live but not walk again. He would remain in Kenya for weeks before he could be moved, first to Europe, probably France and then to America. Rocky hoped Hanley’s dog Weed lived long enough to see
