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The sun was setting when the rain stopped. The air had cooled ever so slightly. Leah produced apples and oranges, peanut butter and cheese crackers and bottled water from her backpack. They shared their makeshift meal with the guards, who spoke English far better than Adam spoke Vietnamese. As darkness fell, a little battery-powered lantern materialized from yet another pocket of Leah’s backpack. It fought the darkness to a standstill in a small circle around them.
As the hours slowly passed, he’d kept her talking about her work, about growing up an army brat and about her family. He’d learned her parents were retired, her father after thirty years in the military, her mother after a career as a teacher. One brother was a U.S. Navy SEAL, one a navy chaplain, the third an army Green Beret.
And in return he had given up a few details of his own life during the dark minutes before midnight—broken home, one brother, who lived in California, he saw only now and then. Both parents dead. They’d lived hard and died young, he’d told her. She hadn’t asked for more details and he hadn’t offered them. He told her about the judge who’d given him the choice of joining the U.S. Marine Corps, or going to jail for a joyride that had resulted in a totaled car. He’d taken advantage of college courses the Corps offered, found he was a good student and went on to medical school. And then the unrelenting grind of a neurosurgical internship and residency, followed by one marriage, one son, one divorce and all the nightmares he could handle. This last he hadn’t spoken aloud.
Than Son Nhut he’d faced and survived. This morning it was Saigon. The city had fallen to the victorious enemy only one day after his helicopter had lifted off the airfield. He wondered if Leah’s company might be as potent a talisman against the past today as it had been yesterday.
He walked the few feet down the hallway to her room and pushed open the louvered door. Her accommodations were identical to his—high ceiling, white walls, sheer curtains at the French doors. The place had once been a villa that belonged to a South Vietnamese general, B.J. had told him. Now it was a hotel, a joint venture between the Vietnamese and an Australian firm. They were trying hard, but they hadn’t gotten it quite right yet. The rooms were clean, the toilets worked, and there was hot water, but no soap and only one towel in the communal bathroom. The electricity was eccentric, as Leah had said. To turn on the ceiling fan, he’d had to hook two bare wires together, and there was no such thing as room service.
Leah must have heard him enter the room. “There’s whitener in those little packets,” she called from the balcony.
“No, thanks. Black is fine.” He couldn’t help himself to her coffee and then just leave, walk back into his room and stare at the walls, so he made himself move through the doors onto the balcony to stand beside her.
Saigon was up with the sun. The dusty, tree-lined street below was crowded with bicycles, motor scooters and cyclos, the bicycle-rickshaws that served as taxicabs and couriers everywhere in Vietnam. There were also a few cars and buses, but completely absent were marked lanes and traffic signals, at least none that anyone was obeying. Traffic moved in both directions on both sides of the street. It was every man for himself.
Leash was leaning over the railing watching what went on below. She was wearing a flowered cotton skirt that ended just above her ankles and a shortsleeved pink blouse that complemented her creamy skin. Her mink-brown hair was pulled back into a French braid so complicated he wondered how she could accomplish it on her own. There was nothing even vaguely military about her appearance. Today she was all woman.
“How does anyone manage to cross the street safely?” she asked.
“Like that,” Adam pointed with his coffee mug. A man with two young children in tow waded, undaunted, into the traffic. Miraculously, bicycles, cyclos, motor scooters, even a bus, swerved to miss him and the children.
Leah let out her breath in a whoosh. “They made it,” she said, turning to Adam with amazement on her face. “You just start walking. Show no fear. It’s like my dad said it would be.”
“Your dad was here?”
“In ‘65 and ’68,” she said.
“He was in the country during the Tet offensive?”
She nodded. “That’s where he got his Purple Heart. He wants to come back, but Mom says no more. She’s never going anywhere that requires a passport again. We moved eleven times in fifteen years. I’m sorry. I told you all this last night, didn’t I.”
“I enjoyed it,” he said. She blinked. He’d spoken too tersely. He was out of the habit of making small talk with a woman.
“I’m going to do some sight-seeing right after breakfast. Dad wants pictures of the embassy and Chinatown, and I want to tour the presidential palace. They’ve kept it exactly as it was the day the North Vietnamese marched into the city. Want to come along?”
“No.” Again, too terse. “I mean, I...I hadn’t thought about it.”
She rested her hip against the stone railing and looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug. “Of course, you were here before. You said so last night.” She turned her head, her gaze moving in the direction of the abandoned American Embassy. “It’s so different—not what I expected at all. My impressions were shaped by those videos of the last days—pictures of tanks and soldiers with guns, mobs of terrified people fighting to get out. But this... It’s as if the war never happened.”
“For most of these people it didn’t,” he said. “Vietnam is a young country. Half the people here were born after the war. They don’t want to look back. They want to move forward.” Good advice. Too damned bad he couldn’t follow it himself.
B.J. appeared on Adam’s balcony. “Hey, buddy, there you are. You left your door unlocked, did you know that?” He waved a greeting. “Good morning, Leah.”
“Good morning, B.J.”
“Leah has coffee.” Adam moved to the edge of the balcony and surveyed his friend across the few feet separating them. B.J. was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian-print shirt in shades of pink and orange. His red baseball cap was emblazoned with the Marine Corps emblem in gold.
“So does the hotel restaurant, old buddy. Café filtre and baguettes. Delicious.”
Leah laughed and held out her mug. “You mean I dragged a coffeemaker all the way from Kentucky for nothing?”
“Nope. I’m only saying they’ve got great coffee in the hotel. Hospital coffee is the same the world over—not fit to drink. I doubt it’s any different at Dalat. You’ll get plenty of use out of it there.”
“Any word on when we’ll be moving out?”
B.J. poked at a piece of crumbling balcony railing with the toe of his shoe. “That’s what I came to tell you. The trucks pulled up at the airport about an hour ago. If there’s any sight-seeing you want to do, I suggest you do it this morning. We’ll be leaving here before noon. Don’t want to get stranded overnight somewhere along the highway. Luckily the day starts early here. Most of the shops are open by seven, the museums, too. Some of the others have already left the hotel. If you apply yourself, you should be able to see a little of the city and at least hit the antique shops on Dong Khoi Street.”
“An excellent plan, B.J. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”
“Why don’t you go with her, Adam? Take her to the embassy and the presidential palace,” his friend suggested.
“No.” His voice was harsh. Striving to soften it, he added, “I figured I’d go back to the airport with you. Make sure everything’s okay.”
“Not necessary. I’ve paid all the fees and a few plain, old-fashioned bribes. Nothing’s going to go missing. Head out with Leah and get a souvenir to take home to Brian. Have your picture taken in front of the embassy. Better yet, have a beer on me if you can find the Tiger’s Den.”
“It’s too early for a beer, and I doubt the Tiger’s Den survived the reunification.” The panic-filled streets of the defeated city he’d known were long gone, but he wasn’t interested in trying to find the bar he and B.J. and their buddies had hung out in.
“I don’t need a chaperon,” Leah said. “I’ll find my own way.”
“I know you will. It’s Adam I’m worried about. Lousy sense of direction. Gets lost all the time. Why I remember one night in Norfolk—”
“Stow it, B.J. You lead,” he said to Leah. “I’ll follow.”
She stayed where she was. “But I thought—”
“I changed my mind. I’d like to go if you’re willing to put up with my company.”
She studied his face for a moment and he endured the scrutiny. He had the feeling she could see all the way to the center of his soul, but that was ridiculous. If she could really see what was inside him, she’d turn and run like the sane and sensible woman she was. Instead, she said, “Okay, let’s go.”
LEAH WALKED DOWN the vaulted hallway with Adam Sauder on one side and B. J. Walton on the other. She was glad none of her brothers were around to see what she was up to. They’d teased her about picking up strays all her life. Usually it was the four-legged kind, puppies with sore paws or homeless kittens, but she tended to do the same thing with people. Most of the others probably couldn’t see the pain behind Adam Sauder’s dark gaze, but she did, and it should have warned her to stay away. Instead, she found herself riding down to the lobby in the elaborately grilled elevator, saying goodbye to B.J., hailing a double cyclo and moving out into the bewildering stream of traffic with him still at her side.
Their cyclo driver was a young man of French and Vietnamese descent who spoke excellent English. He maneuvered them skillfully through the heavy traffic, taking them directly to the abandoned American Embassy, a concrete-and-glass fortress every bit as ugly as it had looked in the news footage on TV. The building had a sad, defeated air about it, Leah thought. Someone had hung laundry in one of the old guard towers. She sat quietly for a moment, Adam equally silent beside her. Then they climbed out of the cyclo and stood by the gates where she had seen videos of refugees trying to climb over, of grim-faced young Marines on the wall pulling others into the compound, of overloaded helicopters taking off from the roof.
She’d brought her camera, and without her asking him Adam took her picture in front of the gates, and then their driver took a picture of both of them together. Her father’s ghosts were close. She could feel their eyes on the back of her neck. “Were you here?” she asked Adam.
He shook his head. “I never got this far.” His expression appeared set, his jaw clenched. Leah didn’t ask any more questions about the past.
They didn’t stop to tour the presidential palace. She didn’t know what she was going to tell her dad when she got back, but she’d think of something. Most likely the truth. I went there with a Marine who was in Saigon at the end. He didn’t want to go inside, so we didn’t. Her dad would understand.
Instead they took B.J.’s advice and went shopping. Their driver took them to a small, bustling marketplace. It was alive, wall-to-wall, with sights and sounds and smells that were raucous and tantalizing, unfamiliar and fascinating. Leah stood for a long minute just looking around. Street vendors peddled their wares on every corner. Food stands crowded storefronts, shoppers jostled one another as they ogled the merchandise. Vietnam was still a Communist country, and poor, but you would never know it by the stacks and boxes and cartons of VCRs, televisions, CD players and microwave ovens piled inside the tiny stores, spilling outside onto the sidewalk, lashed to cyclos and bicycles, and stacked in pushcarts.
She bought a pale blue silk ao dai, the traditional slim dress and loose pants worn by Vietnamese women, for her mother. Exactly like the one her father had brought home thirty years ago, but three sizes larger. Then she bought a mint-green one for herself. She chose greeting cards with beautiful, silk-screen paintings of craggy green mountains and mist-covered valleys that she could frame for Caleb Owens and his wife, Margaret. Also one for Juliet Trent, the pregnant teenager she had befriended. That left only her brothers, and for them she bought carvings of elephants and of smiling old men smoking their pipes and wearing the traditional conical hats called lo nan.
Adam stayed by her side saying little, waiting patiently. He didn’t buy anything, not even for his son, Brian. She knew his name, knew he was nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard. Adam had told her that much the night before. But she knew nothing beyond those few facts, certainly not why his father wasn’t buying him a gift from this exotic and fascinating place.
Like the stray animals Leah had rescued in the past, once or twice she’d become involved with stray men—men with haunted eyes and sad smiles like Adam Sauder. Trying to heal wounded souls was much harder than healing wounded bodies, she’d learned to her sorrow. His hurts and heartaches were none of her business. This time she wasn’t going to get involved. She was going to protect herself for a change. She saw him pick up a watch, turn it over, then put it down again.
“Do you suppose it’s really a Rolex? For only a hundred dollars?” There was a sign in English above the table of watches. There were a lot of signs in English, nothing in Russian. The few Russians who came now didn’t have money to spend. The Americans and Australians did.
“I doubt it, but it’s a very good knockoff.”
“It would be a nice gift for your son.”
He picked the watch up again, unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out a money clip. The shopkeeper appeared in front of them as if by magic. “You like?”
“I’ll take it.” Adam peeled off five twenties and handed the man the money. He didn’t bargain for a better price.
“Engrave for free,” the smiling shopkeeper said. “Remember Saigon always.”
“I don’t need a watch for that.” But Adam handed it to him, anyway.
“What do you say on it?”
“For Brian—” Adam began.
Suddenly there was a small stampede of sandaled feet, and from out of nowhere came a whole gaggle of children of all ages, all sizes, from toddlers to young adolescents, who swirled around them. Street children. There were many of them in Saigon, some orphaned, some not. Left behind in the headlong rush to prosperity, they roamed the streets living hand-to-mouth.
“Nguoi My! Nguoi My!” It meant American. Leah had learned it from her phrase book. “Friends, give us money—dollars.”
She wished there was more she could do to help, but she’d learned the hard way you couldn’t save the world all by yourself. At least, she could do her small part and make today a little better for them. She slipped her hand into her skirt pocket to fish out a couple of dollar bills she had stashed there.
The children became even noisier when they saw the money. They began to jump up and down, laughing and giggling, demanding more. The shopkeeper waved them away. They ignored him, crowding around Adam and Leah and plucking at their clothes. A couple tugged the straps of her backpack. Leah laughed and tugged back. The shopkeeper picked up a broom resting by the door and made sweeping motions toward the children, still scolding in Vietnamese. The boys shouted. The little girls squealed, and one of the smallest started crying.
Leah glanced over at Adam. His face was as white as his shirt. A look of pure horror.
The shopkeeper shooed the children out into the street. Leah held her breath and watched them until they were safely on the other side of the narrow, crowded roadway. She turned back as the ebb and flow of Saigon street life surrounded her again. She was alone. She looked around. Adam was already a hundred feet away and walking fast. Surely he hadn’t turned tail and run because a group of kids had hustled them for a couple of dollars. Then she remembered the look on his face and thought maybe he had. She watched him go, a head taller than everyone else around him.
“Adam, wait! Your watch.” She might as well have saved her breath. The level of street noise made it impossible for him to hear her. She didn’t think he would have stopped if he had. He’d left her alone in the middle of a strange city without a word of explanation. She had every right to be angry with him, but she wasn’t. Being stranded didn’t worry her—she could take care of herself. What bothered her was the memory of that look on his face. She wanted to know what had put it there. She wanted to help take it away—and that bothered her most of all.
CHAPTER THREE
A DELIVERY-TRUCK DRIVER made a U-turn in the middle of the street two blocks from the market, tying up traffic in every direction, when Leah was heading back to the hotel. It took her driver almost an hour to maneuver his cyclo through the snarl. When she finally arrived, the bus to take them to Dalat was waiting, engine idling. She paid the driver and hurried to her room. While packing, she listened for sounds of movement from Adam’s suite, but heard nothing. She couldn’t stop wondering where he was and what he was doing. She couldn’t forget the horror she’d glimpsed on his face—an old horror, familiar and long remembered. It sent a shiver of dread up and down her spine. When she left her room, she knocked on his door. There was no answer. She hadn’t really expected there would be.
Adam wasn’t in the lobby. He wasn’t on the sidewalk outside the hotel. He wasn’t on the bus. She shoved her duffel bag into the overhead bin and looked around. The passengers were all women, except for Roger Crenshaw.
“Glad you’re here, Leah. Only two more to come,” he said, putting a tick beside her name on the clipboard he was holding.
“Join me. We’re almost ready to leave.” Kaylene smiled and beckoned from across the aisle.
“Where are the others?” Leah asked, sliding onto the cracked leather seat beside the woman she already considered a friend.
“B.J. and most of the men left for the airport—” Kaylene glanced at her watch “—half an hour ago.”
“Dr. Sauder, too?”
“Yes, I believe I saw him with the group.”
Leah was relieved to learn that Adam had made it safely back to the hotel. Something of what she was feeling must have shown on her face, for Kaylene looked as if she wanted to say more. But just then the bus doors screeched shut on unoiled hinges behind the final two members of the group. Moments later they pulled out onto the street, parting the waves of opposing traffic like a whale in a school of shrimp.
The ride to Dalat was one of the most nerveracking experiences of Leah’s life. The highway out of Saigon was crowded with all manner of vehicles, from eighteen-wheelers to high-wheeled carts pulled by water buffalo. There were seventies-era American cars, Japanese motor scooters, Chinese trucks and buses, cyclists and pedestrians, and no one paid any more attention to the traffic laws here than they had in Saigon. There seemed to be only one rule of the road: have a horn and use it. It was a long, harrowing drive, and even the beauty of the mist-washed hillsides was not enough to take Leah’s mind off their driver’s suicidal tendency to pass other vehicles on the winding stretches of narrow roadway with sheer, unguarded drops only inches from the bus’s wheels.
The sun had set and the short twilight had almost faded when they arrived at the hospital compound in the jungle, several miles outside the hill-country city of Dalat. Father Gerard, the French Canadian priest in charge of the hospital, and two of the nuns, whom he introduced as Sister Grace and Sister Janet, came out of the square, two-story, brick building to welcome them.
Leah took a moment to look around and get her bearings before following the white-cassocked Father Gerard and the others on a tour of the compound. To the west of the hospital was a church made out of the same dusty-red brick, its copper-roofed steeple green with age. Grouped between the two buildings were half-a-dozen thatched-roof huts. Smoke from cooking fires curled through holes in the roofs while small children played outside in the dirt, among chickens and potbellied pigs. Here, Father Gerard explained, as he led them to their rooms in two larger communal huts, the families and friends of hospital patients stayed while their loved ones underwent treatment.
They drew names out of a hat for room assignments, and Leah and Kaylene found themselves paired up, an arrangement that suited them both. Their room was at the end of the long building closest to the hospital. Barely big enough to turn around in, it held two hard, narrow beds draped with mosquito netting, a small table and one chair, a metal washbowl and pitcher. A single bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The hospital had electricity provided from Dalat, but in the compound there was only an aging generator that produced electricity for two hours at dusk and one hour in the morning. Showers and toilets were in the hospital building. The kitchen and refectory were there, too.
The evening meal had been held for them. They took their places at the long benched tables and the Vietnamese nuns brought them soup thick with noodles and bits of pork and chicken. It was spicier than anything Leah had ever eaten, but delicious. The rest of the meal consisted of steamed rice, stale French bread, dried fruit—and tea—no coffee. Adam wouldn’t like that, Leah thought. When they’d finished eating, they toured the wards and the operating suites. It was dark by the time they returned to their rooms to unpack. The generator shut down at eight as advertised. They undressed by candlelight and were in bed by nine.
Leah was so tired she ached in every muscle, but still she couldn’t sleep. Where were the supply trucks? They should have arrived by now. The highway they’d traveled was treacherous enough in daylight. At night, with only the moon to guide them, it would be even more dangerous. She stared into the darkness and listened to the unfamiliar but comforting sound of Kaylene’s gentle snoring. She found herself straining to hear the sound of trucks laboring up the steep grade to the hospital compound. What if something had happened to them? To B.J. and the others? To Adam?
She forced herself to relax. There was nothing she could do to get the trucks and their occupants here any faster, and tomorrow was going to be a long, busy day. The two operating suites would have to be evaluated and arranged to the surgeons’ satisfaction. The electrician would have to get the generator that would power all their high-tech equipment and computers up and running. All the surgical instruments had to be checked and checked again. There would be patients to evaluate, operating schedules to draw up. But still she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she watched the luminous hands of her travel clock creep forward in slow circles until at last her vigil was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of heavy trucks pulling into the compound.
They were here. They were safe. He was safe. Leah closed her eyes, but it wasn’t until she heard the low rumble of Adam’s voice as he exchanged greetings with Father Gerard that she relaxed enough to fall asleep.
THUNDER RUMBLED in the distance, barely audible above the steady roar of the generator on the other side of the wall. Adam looked out the operating room’s one small window, saw the dark clouds rolling down from the mountains and knew they were in for a downpour. He would be surprised if they didn’t get a thunderstorm at this time of the afternoon every day for the next three weeks. He saw Leah Gentry glance over her shoulder to the same spot and then continue her conversation with Roger Crenshaw.
He’d been avoiding her all day. He owed her an apology and an explanation. The apology he could handle; the explanation he wasn’t so sure about. Adam watched as Leah and Roger inspected a pressure gauge they’d just unpacked. Roger would oversee the larger operating room next door where the orthopedic and general surgeons would set up shop. He and Leah would work together here. The generator’s staccato beat stuttered and faltered. The lights flickered and dimmed, then steadied again. Leah dropped a screwdriver on the cement floor and mumbled an apology in his direction.
He acknowledged it with a nod and went on checking his own instruments, thousands of dollars’ worth of specialized scalpels and retractors, drills and clamps. He hadn’t bothered to keep them with him on the plane, as Leah had with her red toolbox. If they’d been lost, he wouldn’t have to operate. He could have turned tail and run back to Chicago. He closed the case and set it on the table by the antique autoclave in the corner. From now on they were Kaylene Smiley’s responsibility.
Roger Crenshaw left the room, and Adam found himself standing at the head of the operating table watching Leah work. “Everything check out okay?” he asked.
She was apparently so involved in what she was doing it took a moment for his words to sink in. Then she looked at him and blinked. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept well. She probably hadn’t, if her bed was as hard and uncomfortable as his.
She smiled tentatively, obviously not quite certain how to handle him after yesterday’s disappearing act. Her hair was in the same French braid as before, but today little curling wisps had escaped to brush against her cheek and the nape of her neck. “The humidity is giving me fits. Everything’s sticking or jumping around.” She tapped one of the gauges with the tip of her fingernail.
“B.J. said they’ll have the air conditioner installed soon.” Even though it was cooler in the hills this time of year than in Saigon, the humidity would play havoc with the delicate instruments on which both he and Leah relied. The air conditioner was a necessity, not a luxury.
“I’ll run one more check when it’s up and going. Then I’m ready whenever you are.”
“We start patient evaluations first thing in the morning. Would you like to sit in on mine?” Back at St. B’s he let his residents do most of the face-to-face work. These days he kept his distance from his patients, especially the youngest ones.
“Thank you, I would. Caleb and I work together that way. I like to have a feel for the patient. There’s more to anesthesia than just checking height and weight, and looking up dosages on a chart.” She tilted her head slightly and smiled at him.
Adam had been waiting for that smile, and the realization made him angry at himself. He took it out on Leah. “This isn’t going to be fun and games. It’s triage. The oldest, the youngest, the sickest—those are the ones who can’t beat the odds, the ones we’ll have to pass over.”
Her smile disappeared. “I know that.”
“B.J.’s done a hell of a job getting me what I need to operate here, but it’s still a Third World setup. No heroics. No miracles. Some are going to make it and some aren’t. Can you handle that, too?” He looked down at his hands, balled into fists on the metal table. He sounded like the soulless medical machine he was becoming.
“I can live with the tough calls,” she said quietly. “Can you?”
He ignored her question. Losing your soul didn’t mean you had to behave like a jackass. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. We’ll do our best for all our patients. We’ll do fine together.”
“I always give my patients one hundred percent. I’m sure you do, too.”
She didn’t sound completely mollified, but he forged ahead. “And while I’m at it, I also want to apologize for leaving you stranded yesterday.”
