Chapter 18
~§~
“Gillian?” he called out, knocking on the door but not waiting for an invitation to enter since it was unlocked. The old familiarity came easily. “Gills – ”
The words died on his lips as he took in the empty room.
Antonio must have been in earlier that morning, or more likely Alicia, for everything was very tidy. The mosquito netting was tied back over the neatly made bed, chairs tucked under the table and counter clear of clutter. Even her books were lined up in a fairly straight line upon their shelves. But as always, the layer of microscopic dust that permeated everything was too thick. The whole room needed a good dusting.
Leaving her house, he darted up the road toward the clinic. He slowed only as he passed his old shack, still leaning to the left. For a brief second, he thought of going inside. Not because he’d left anything behind, but because he wanted to know that it still looked the same. Faded posters and torn screens. The yellowed paperbacks resting on the shelf, the narrow pallet with its pancake pillow. All waiting for him.
With a shake of his head, he decided to stop back later. Once more, before he left for good. But first he had to see Gillian.
“Sam!”
The shout stopped him before he could turn down the path leading to the clinic’s front door. He lifted a hand in greeting as Jeff trotted toward him. Dried stucco coated Jeff’s bare arms, a smudge of the thick, white paste dabbed on his dark cheek.
“Hey, Jeff!” Clark greeted him, holding out a hand and then drawing the thin man into a tight hug, thumping his back affectionately.
“Wow, look at you,” Jeff said when they pulled out of their embrace. “Clean shaven and a hair cut. Bet you’ve even had a shower or two. You look almost civilized.”
Clark laughed. “Yeah, this look goes better with the suit.”
He’d changed into his volunteer clothes immediately upon landing, not wanting to scare any of the children with the Diablo cape. And he had to admit that slipping on the old Tevas felt pretty good. It was actually somewhat disconcerting how good it all felt. How comfortably familiar.
“So you’re wearing the suit again?” Jeff asked with a knowing wink.
“It’s not the same out there as it is here. I need it…” Clark started to explain but decided it was far too complicated. And he wanted to keep this part of his life as simple as possible. “It’s a long story.”
“Then I’m guessing you’re not staying for long?” Jeff asked. His smile was warm, but something flickered in his eyes, and Clark guessed that he already knew the answer to that question.
“Afraid not,” he said, genuinely sorry. “I have to get back. I’ve got...people...expecting me.”
Clark felt a pang of guilt, his vagueness deliberate. Jeff’s loyalties would always lie with Gillian, and after Clark broke her heart, the man might not feel as kindly toward Clark as he did at that moment. It made his return mission all the more painful, losing Jeff’s respect a regret he felt keenly. Jeff had become a good friend. Would always be a good friend.
But for the moment, Jeff apparently didn’t know what Clark was about to do because he nodded his understanding. “Well, you’re going to be missed. Come to Rosita’s with me for a final shot of chicha?”
Clark shook his head regretfully. This had to be done quickly, before he lost his nerve. “I need to talk to Gillian. Is she up at the clinic?”
He took a few steps up the path, not waiting for confirmation.
“She’s not there.” Jeff called out, stopping him before he got very far.
Clark felt a slight flicker of irritation before he squelched it. Every second that he had to wait made his heart ache all the more, prolonging the inevitable. And he wanted to see her. Missed her. “Is she at the school? Not in Piendamó, I hope?”
“Sam, I didn’t know where to send word...” Jeff stammered, “...didn’t know how to get a hold of you...”
The flicker that Clark had noticed in Jeff’s dark eyes became more pronounced, more of a glistening that made the hairs on the back of Clark’s neck stand on end. And he noticed then a pale weariness in the slump of his friend’s shoulders. He tensed. “Where is she?”
“Two days after you left, we got word that André had been wounded,” Jeff said flatly. “The FARC wouldn’t bring him back here, so Gillian got it into her head to go and get him.”
<...because my eyes aren’t brown...>
Clark’s voice was a choked whisper. “Oh, God, she was kidnapped?”
He stated it as a question, but deep inside, he already knew the answer. He thought instantly of her parents, his chest constricting painfully. Did they have that kind of money? Where could he get it if they didn’t?
Jeff continued. “She took Henriqué and José with her, along with as much cash as we could get our hands on...”
The words came at him in bits and pieces as his mind raced. Where should he begin searching? The camp...
“...less than ten miles away...two horses...”
He’d fly low, use his x-ray vision. Search every cave...
“...figured they could fetch him while she held back, stayed hidden...”
<...these Latino men. For some reason, they seem to find light hair exotic...>
Oh, God. What if he was too late, and they...Struggling, he fought against the hysteria climbing up his throat. He had to stay calm...
“...André’s injuries...camp already deserted...”
He’d get her back. Then he’d make her go home with him. No more excuses.
“...get out of camp, the paramilitaries showed up...”
Jeff’s words penetrated his thoughts like knives.
<...I’ve heard horror stories about what these paramilitaries have done to civilians...they won’t even take the time to listen to the story much less care...>
“Don’t...” Clark warned as an icy coldness enveloped his body. “Jeff...don’t...”
But Jeff didn’t listen. He kept talking. Wouldn’t stop talking.
“Gillian was shot.”
The world started to spin wildly, and Clark felt the overwhelming need to sit down.
“No. No, that’s not possible. She was with the ICRC. There was a red cross on her ID. They’re not supposed to touch people with red crosses.”
“Sam, she died,” Jeff insisted firmly.
“She didn’t die,” he insisted just as firmly. “They took her somewhere, and I’ll just go find her and get her back.”
“I saw it...” Jeff cried, strangled. “Her. I saw her body, Sam.”
Clark shook his head, refusing to believe it. Jeff was wrong. She was at the clinic, giving Lourdes a lecture on safe sex or in Roberto’s cellar playing gin rummy. Or running between wax palms trying to catch dark blue butterflies...
The nausea blindsided him, and he barely made it to the edge of the forest before his stomach emptied. Retching heaves mingled with sobs, choking him with their violence. Taking deep breaths, he slashed the back of his hand across his mouth, shaking, then glanced around frantically. This wasn’t happening. Hadn’t happened. But the thick vegetation spreading beyond and into infinity remained silent and empty.
“Nooo!” His anguished bellow ripped through the forest, sending all of the birds within a mile radius soaring into the sky.
Unable to contain the overwhelming grief that flooded through him, he placed his hands on the broad trunk of a palm and shoved. Roots tore from the ground, the towering tree falling in slow motion. Three more trees met the same fate. When it became clear that he could knock down every tree in Colombia and feel no better, he sank to the ground, burying his face in his hands.
He’d come to say good-bye, but now he couldn’t because she’d left first. God. He couldn’t stand it. He’d been ready to give her up. But he wasn’t ready to give her back. She was supposed to live on. Be happy. She’d said it herself. You couldn’t avoid the future.
But she’d found a way. Butterflies that never made it over the Andes and Gillian Brooks. But Gillian wasn’t a butterfly. She was a woman.
With a sob of anguish, he raged against every person who’d ever lived. Against her brother, Chris, so selfish in his need to take her with him to an early death that he wouldn’t release his hold on her.
Against Lois, for making Clark love her so much he couldn’t stay.
Against Gillian for her obsession with this place. Her rash disregard to her own worth, valuing everyone over herself until there was no her left.
Against the people of Colombia, who’d done this to her. Or allowed it to happen. Didn’t they know what they were stealing from the world?
Against himself. For leaving her. He choked back a sob.
He’d left her there.
And now the gray eyes were forever closed, unseeing. The bright smile silenced. His haven was lost, it was she that had made it so. How could this be happening? How could he have let it happen?
Jeff watched him from a distance, and when finally Clark lifted his head to give him a tormented stare, the tall man turned and walked up the path, disappearing into the clinic and closing the door behind him.
How long he remained on the ground Clark had no idea. It might have been hours or seconds. Only after he became aware of the clammy wetness from the forest floor seeping through the knees of his pants did he think of getting up. And it took many long minutes after that to muster the strength to stand. Finally, possessing only a miniscule grasp on the emotions warring within him, he staggered to the clinic.
~§~
Henriqué, who’d had the foresight to play dead after the paramilitaries had shot him clean through the thigh and upper arm, remained in the clinic’s single bed recovering from his agonizing return journey home. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he recounted the events of that day to Clark, who sat in stony silence, staring blankly at the wall he himself had helped build.
He took no comfort whatsoever in learning that the first shot had killed her immediately, for there was no comfort to be had. At least his mind wouldn’t be tormented with images of her being tortured or raped as neither horror had occurred. By some miracle, she’d suffered no pain. Just death.
For his sanity, he forcibly refused to imagine the fear she must have felt. When his mind played over her face and neared the gray eyes, he recoiled inwardly, knowing that if he allowed himself to see the terror they must have held, to think on how she might have trembled or cried out for him, he would have been driven mad.
< If you ever need me – ever – all you have to do is yell for help and I’ll be there.>
Gillian’s body had been fetched from the camp, saving Clark the painful task of retrieving it himself. In fact, within days after the shooting, Jeff had been able to secure transport for her back to the states, an accommodation readily afforded by a Colombian government embarrassed that an ICRC volunteer had been so brutally murdered. For that, Clark was grateful. He didn’t relish the thought of flying her lifeless body to her grief-stricken family. But he would have done it.
There was one thing left undone, which Jeff explained when he reluctantly approached Clark later that day.
After leaving Henriqué, he’d gone to Gillian’s shack where he’d sat alone for several hours, stroking the soft fur between Luke’s ears. The dog seemed to sense that something horrible had happened, again, and sat next to Clark’s chair, his head placed mournfully in the subdued man’s lap. He lifted it when Jeff entered the shack, adding several welcoming thumps of his tail in greeting.
“Sam, I’m sorry. If I could have sent word…” Jeff offered by way of apology for the shock.
Clark shook his head numbly. “You couldn’t have reached me. It’s the way I wanted it when I left. Not to be found.”
Jeff pulled another chair away from the table and sat across from Clark. “You have to know that she knew what she was risking. We tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t be swayed. Even so, I blame myself. I should have locked her up or…something.”
“Persistent,” Clark mumbled.
“What?”
He cleared his throat, licking the dryness from his lips. “She was…persistent.”
Jeff chuckled. “I was thinking something else, but that works.”
The hot spark of fury flared in his chest again. He’d been over and over it, but still it came as strong as the first moment he’d felt it. The anger at himself for not insisting that she go back with him and at her for doing something so stupid. Anger that he’d left in the first place, or more in knowing that he’d have left all the same because he loved Lois that much.
“I should have made her go back with me,” he ground out, his teeth clenched. “Forced her even, if that’s what it took.”
“And then what?” Jeff asked. “Kept her under lock and key? She was an adult. She made her own decisions.”
“Dammit, I told her. I told her something like this would happen.” How many times had he imagined it himself? What could happen. Tried to convince her, his pleas falling on death-defying ears. “She didn’t care. She laughed it off.”
“If it helps at all, some of what you said...it did make a difference,” Jeff offered softly. “She was talking about going home. Thinking of maybe surprising her parents for Christmas.”
“Christmas? That’s six weeks too late,” he choked, thinking of all of the holidays she would never see. The birthdays...
“Just stop, Sam. Don’t do this to yourself. Trust me. I’ve already done it. And it gets you nowhere.” Jeff sounded defeated, but still he tried to offer words of assurance.
“But you stayed, would have gone with her even,” he argued. Jeff had nothing to feel guilty about. That emotion belonged solely to him, and he hoarded it like a miser. “You didn’t run off and leave her...”
“You had to leave and Gillian understood that. She didn’t hold that against you.”
“How do you know that?” Clark snapped.
He stood, pacing across the stone floor. It was time to confess. To pay the price for his choice. It was what he’d come back to do, and the coincidence of Gillian’s death shouldn’t let him off the hook.
“Did she tell you why I left? That I left because I’m in love with another woman and couldn’t make up my mind. So I went back home to see if the other woman would have me.” He stopped pacing, looking Jeff directly in the eye while he said the words that would make Jeff hate him. “I came back to San Pablo to tell Gillian good-bye. To tell her that she wasn’t the one I chose.”
But instead of hatred, Jeff’s expression remained concerned, almost sympathetic, and his voice was calm. “So here you are. Say good-bye.”
“It’s a little late for that,” Clark said, feeling the burning sting of tears once again. “She didn’t wait around for me to say anything. She went off and got herself killed.”
He instantly regretted the harsh words when a stark pain flashed across Jeff’s face. It wasn’t fair of him to take his own guilt out on Jeff, who’d never been more than a friend to either of them.
“Maybe it’s not the one you planned, but in the end, it’s still a good-bye,” Jeff said quietly.
Raking his hand through his hair, Clark sank wearily back into his chair. He felt hollow inside. Nothing made sense. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It was supposed to be painful, saying good-bye. But it wasn’t supposed to crush him. Then again, Gillian wasn’t supposed to be dead.
Jeff broke the silence, standing and wiping his hands on the legs of his pants. “There’s one thing I haven’t done. I haven’t sent Gillian’s things back to her parents.”
He walked over to the corner and retrieved a box just big enough to house a pair of men’s boots, setting it on the table between them. It was taped and neatly labeled.
Clark blinked, wondering that he hadn’t noticed it earlier. Funny. Jeff hadn’t drawn any crosses on it. Didn’t he know that it needed to have lots of crosses?
Jeff explained, “I didn’t want to send it through the mail because I was afraid…well, you know how those Colombian postal workers can be. They don’t hold much sacred, even the effects of a dead woman.”
Clark winced when he heard Gillian described that way. A dead woman. He’d never be able to imagine her any way but fully alive. He refused to imagine her any other way.
He turned his attention back to Jeff who was continuing. “I gave her clothes to Rosita, and I kept a couple of things out, thinking that maybe you’d come back…someday. Things I thought you might like to have. But the rest needs to go to Grosse Pointe. If you’re willing, can you take the box back and mail it once you get to the states? It might even be better if you send it UPS or Fedex or –”
Clark shook his head. “I’ll take it to her parents personally. Today. It’s the least I can do.”
Jeff blanched visibly. “I don’t know, Sam. Three years ago they lost a son and now they just lost their daughter. There’s bound to be a whole lot of stuff going on that you might not want to see. It’ll just make it harder.”
“Why should it be easy for me?” he asked, not really knowing how it could be any harder than it already was. “Why should I be spared? Gillian wasn’t. Her family wasn’t. And I…” He choked, a sob lodging in his throat.
Jeff clamped his shoulder with a tight grip, and before he could stop himself, Clark fell against his friend, holding on to this last connection with Gillian as if he was drowning and Jeff was a life line.
Swallowing hard, he forced himself to say it out loud. Way too late, but still, it deserved to be heard by someone that had known her. So that it would be real to someone other than him, the only one left who knew the truth.
“I love…loved her, too.”
to be continued…
