Hope Street Part 6

"At least two. More if time allows. Remember, we won't just be seeing patients, Ellie. We'll be checking out their homes and families. We'll be scrutinizing their contexts."

The wind blasted them in their roofless vehicle and blew Adrian's long, wavy hair back from his face. Sungla.s.ses hid his eyes, and she slid her own sungla.s.ses up the bridge of her nose as the morning sun glared through the windshield. The Jeep had to be at least a few decades old. It lacked seat belts, let alone air bags. Adrian wasn't the most cautious driver she'd ever ridden with, either. She gripped the window frame and held on tight as he careered around turns and zigzagged past cars, bicycles, motor scooters and pedestrians milling through the neighborhood's busy roads. More than a few of the people clogging the sidewalks waved and shouted a greeting at him. Dr. Wesker was clearly a popular figure in town.

"My fans," he muttered with mock humility when a couple of dimple-faced children shouted, "Hey, Dr. Wesker! Ya, Doc!" at him, their voices distorted by the wind as he cruised past them.

"Amazing how they recognize you, even with those sungla.s.ses on," she teased.

He shot her a sly grin. "Celebrity is such a b.l.o.o.d.y burden, isn't it? Stick around, Ellie. You'll have your own fan club soon, too."

She actually liked that idea. Not that she wanted fans idolizing her, but she'd be thrilled if, after she'd spent six months in Ghana, the children she'd treated would feel she was truly a part of their community, and would remember her fondly once she was gone.

The village shrank behind them, and they found themselves on a roughly paved road that cut through farmland. "That's cacao," Adrian told her, gesturing toward the rows of dark green shrubs spreading back from the side of the road. "Chocolate beans."

She stared at the shrubs in fascination. "I love chocolate."

"It releases your endorphins, does it?" He smiled. "According to recent studies, chocolate is a hormonal experience. Women are very susceptible to it."

"I wouldn't say I'm susceptible," Ellie argued, feeling as if she had to defend her entire gender against such absurd generalizations. She smiled to a.s.sure him she wasn't outraged.

"You were the one who used the word love," he argued back, his smile as challenging as hers was apologetic.

"Being pa.s.sionate about chocolate is not the same as being susceptible to it," she insisted. "You can love something and still say no to it."

"Only if you are endowed with a willpower mightier than most of us." He steered onto an even b.u.mpier road. "I have a dreadful time saying no to anything I feel pa.s.sionate about."

Ellie was tempted to ask him what he felt pa.s.sionate about, but she stifled the urge. She'd been in k.u.masi only a couple of weeks. She'd eaten dinner with Adrian a few times, a.s.sisted him in setting and splinting a five-year-old girl's fractured ulna, reviewed the clinic's inventory of supplies and medicines with him and Rose and allowed him to introduce her to a local beer that was dark and heavy and deliciously sour. But she certainly didn't know him well enough to ask him about his pa.s.sions.

They drove for nearly an hour under the relentless sun, pa.s.sing fields of cacao interrupted by groves of trees. Occasionally, a rattly truck drove past them in the opposite direction, or an old car so covered in road dirt and dried mud Ellie couldn't identify its color or make. Now and then she spotted a field worker bowed over the plants. Broad-winged birds glided above them, puncturing the late-morning peace with loud caws.

Finally, they arrived at their first destination, a small farmhouse built of stucco and wood and roofed with scraggly shingles, set back from the road at the end of a rutted dirt drive. "This was once a prosperous farm," Adrian told her as he turned off the engine. "Unfortunately, the husband died a year ago and his widow can't manage the place alone. She's been searching for a new husband. So far, no luck, in spite of the fact that she owns property. She's rather stuck here, running things and keeping her children in line. Her youngest has cerebral palsy."

"Does the child receive any therapy?"

"Not nearly enough. But he gets along. Sometimes I wonder if it's a good thing he doesn't have therapists fussing over him. He has to learn to cope. But then I worry that he's the reason she can't find a husband. If a man has to take responsibility for some other man's children, I don't suppose he wants any defective ones."

Adrian climbed down from the Jeep and Ellie followed, not bothering to challenge him on his use of the word defective. She understood that he was verbalizing the biases of potential husbands for the widow who lived here, not expressing his own views.

Two children barreled out of the house before Adrian and Ellie had reached the screen door, which hung crookedly on rusted hinges, the mesh torn in parts. "Dr. Wesker, Dr. Wesker!" they hooted, their dark faces shiny with excitement and sweat. One of them began boasting about how much his running speed had increased since Adrian's last visit, and the other grabbed Adrian's free hand and singsonged that their mother had fixed him a cake. Ellie wondered whether she might have selected Adrian as a prospective husband. Ellie couldn't imagine him giving up his medical practice to farm cacao in the hinterlands, but she could easily imagine a widowed mother viewing him as a prize catch, even if he was a light-skinned expatriate whose one true love was his clinic.

He wasn't catchable, though. Rose had warned Ellie of that her first day in k.u.masi. Not that Ellie had required the warning. She wasn't looking for a husband. She already had one, and he'd torn her heart to shreds.

Inside the farmhouse, the air was warm and stagnant, the furniture rudimentary and as in need of repair as the screen door. No curtains draped the windows, and the pallid walls were marked with water stains that indicated the presence of leaks. But the house was clean, and a dense, sweet aroma filled the main room. The cake, Ellie guessed.

The next hour sped by in a blur. With Ellie's a.s.sistance, Adrian examined each of the widow's five children, spending the most time with the youngest, who was about five and had outgrown his leg brace. Thanks to a bit of tinkering and tampering-besides medical supplies, Ellie learned that Adrian carried a few basic carpentry tools in his black bag-Adrian was able to elongate the metal bars so the child could get a few more months' use out of the brace. While he extended the metal rods and loosened the straps, surrounded by yammering children, he requested that Ellie retreat to the kitchen with the widow and find out how her health was.

She was fine, she told Ellie, even though she looked haggard and her eyes were so heavily framed in shadow she resembled a racc.o.o.n. "Really, yes, I am fine. No problems. Nothing wrong with me," she said, her voice so lilting and her words so rhythmic she sounded as if she were singing rather than speaking.

"Are you taking any vitamins?" Ellie asked. The kitchen was as clean as the living room, and as dismal. Cracked Formica counters rested on splintering shelves and cabinets. The oven would have qualified as an antique back home, and the refrigerator was much too small to hold all the fresh food she and her children needed.

"Vitamins, yes. Yes, I take them."

"Iron supplements?"

"Oh, sure, that, too."

Ellie smiled at the woman, whose hair was pulled back under a scarf in a way that emphasized how thin and wan her face was. The whites of her eyes had a yellow tinge to them. Ellie didn't believe she was taking vitamins or iron. She wondered if Adrian had brought any supplements in his bag.

"Would you let me examine you?" Ellie asked carefully, hoping not to spook the woman. One thing she'd learned within days of her arrival in k.u.masi was that the health of children was inextricably linked to the health of their mothers. The mothers here-like mothers everywhere-would gladly sacrifice their own lives for their children. But whatever sacrifices they made were often pa.s.sed like weights to their children. A woman might forgo food so her children could eat more, but if she became sick, her children invariably became sick, too.

A woman like this one probably didn't check her b.r.e.a.s.t.s for lumps. She probably hadn't had a blood test since her youngest was born. If she felt ill, she most likely doctored herself or suffered.

"I'm healthy," the woman insisted.

Another thing Ellie had learned was that many mothers would prefer not to know if something was wrong with them. If they knew, they'd have to deal with it-perhaps at the expense of their children. Ignorance was better. "Is there anything I can do for you?" Ellie asked, keeping her tone light. "Anything that would make you feel better than you already do?"

"I require a man," the widow said bluntly.

"That would be nice, wouldn't it," Ellie agreed. "It's hard to run a farm by yourself."

"Yah, that. And I require a man to let me be a woman."

Ellie could have interpreted that to mean she longed to let someone else do the farm work so she could spend her days tending to the house and raising her children. But she suspected the widow was talking about s.e.x.

She smiled faintly. What was she supposed to say? She could discuss the mechanics of s.e.x without hesitation. She could discuss pelvic exams and birth control and even ways to achieve physical satisfaction. But love and fear and the deep, gnawing ache of loneliness, the desire to be a woman...No, she didn't feel comfortable talking about that. Certainly not now, given where she was in her own life.

When was the last time she'd had s.e.x? Two years ago. Before Peter had died. Maybe she wasn't a woman, either.

She used to love s.e.x. Then her son pa.s.sed away and she couldn't bear the thought of it. She couldn't convince herself she missed it. What she missed was being who she used to be-a normal woman, fully alive, a woman who enjoyed sleeping and waking, working and eating, laughing through bad movies and singing along with whatever song was on the radio...and making love. She missed that.

s.e.x was the least of it.

"All done in here?" Adrian's voice wafted through the doorway from the living room.

With his face in full view, not half concealed by his sungla.s.ses, and the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt rolled up, his sheer masculinity startled her. It wasn't that he was better looking than any other man. It was just that she'd been thinking about s.e.x and whether going without it made a woman less of a woman...and suddenly, there Adrian was, with his silver eyes and his windblown mane and his lean build.

Ellie truly didn't want s.e.x. But she was still enough of a woman to think about it in the presence of a man like Adrian Wesker.

FROM THAT FARM, THEY DROVE to another, maybe ten kilometers away-Ellie was beginning to get used to thinking in kilometers instead of miles. The family there was marginally more prosperous than the widow, but their three-year-old suffered from chronic ear infections. Adrian painstakingly explained the surgery that would implant tubes in the child's ears to reduce pressure, but his mother was adamantly opposed to surgery. "You cut open a child and the evil spirits can enter through his skin," she declared.

"That won't happen," Adrian a.s.sured her. "When we do surgery, Mrs. Braimah, everything is very clean and sterile. This is a simple procedure. A surgeon would perform it at the university hospital in k.u.masi."

"There are evil spirits in the city, too," Mrs. Braimah argued. "The university is full of evil spirits." Ellie suppressed a laugh. If the universities in k.u.masi were anything like the universities at home, she could see why some people might believe they were full of evil spirits. Alcoholic spirits, anyway.

"If you don't let Enam get the operation," Adrian said earnestly, "he will continue to have ear infections. He'll develop a resistance to the antibiotics I've presecribed for him. That means the drugs will stop working. He could lose his hearing."

Mrs. Braimah remained stubborn. "No one will cut open my child."

"It's a tiny little cut," Adrian said. "It's not big enough for evil spirits to get in."

Ellie heard the impatience in his tone and touched his arm. "Let me," she said. She was seated on a wooden bench next to Adrian. Enam, a plump, dimpled toddler with thick curls crowning his head like black bubbles, had climbed onto her lap. She wrapped her arms around him, savoring his weight on her knees. So many years had pa.s.sed since her own children were small enough to fit on her lap.

She turned to Enam's mother, who sat rigidly on a chair facing her visitors, her fingers knotted together in her lap and her gaze fastened to her child. "He's a sweetheart," Ellie said gently. "Do you know that term? Sweetheart?"

"It's something nice," Mrs. Braimah guessed.

"Yes. It means he's gentle-natured and loving. You're a lucky woman to have a son like this."

"He's good," Mrs. Braimah boasted. "No evil spirits in him."

"Actually, there is an evil spirit in him. It's the infection that makes his ears hurt. If you let him get the surgery, the little cut inside his ear will let the evil spirit escape. It won't let the evil spirit in. It will let the evil spirit out. But if you don't let Enam have the surgery, the evil spirit will stay inside him and hurt his ears."

"There's no evil spirit in him," Mrs. Braimah said, clearly fuming.

"Yes, there is. It's called an infection. We have to get that evil spirit out of him. That's what the surgery will do."

Mrs. Braimah rocked in her chair, her gaze drifting and her hands clasped even more tightly as she fretted over whether the surgery would let the evil spirits in or out of her beloved son. Finally, she relented. "How much this surgery cost?" she asked.

"Our clinic will make the financial arrangements," Adrian said. "Don't you worry about that. It won't cost you anything."

"And it lets the evil spirit out?"

Adrian gave Ellie a smile that brimmed with grat.i.tude and admiration. Then he addressed Enam's mother. "Yes, Mrs. Braimah. We will get those evil spirits out of Enam."

"You're a miracle worker," he praised Ellie a few minutes later, as they climbed back into the Jeep. Their hours driving on back roads had layered the vehicle with dust, and Ellie wiped the cracked leather of her seat clean before settling into it. Adrian didn't bother. Now she understood why he dressed in khaki whenever he wasn't wearing surgical scrubs. The tan fabric hid the dust.

She smiled modestly. "I'm not a miracle worker."

"I've been trying without success to get Mrs. Braimah to agree to the surgery for six months. You got her to say yes."

Ellie shrugged. She didn't believe she'd worked any miracles, but she liked the idea that Adrian thought she had. He was the one working miracles in the villages surrounding k.u.masi. That he would consider her single triumph with Enam's mother enough to elevate her to his level filled her with warmth.

Back home, her job as a school nurse demanded no miracles of her. Sometimes youngsters remembered to thank her before they galloped back to their cla.s.srooms after having a splinter removed or a sc.r.a.pe bandaged. Sometimes, when they were ill and had to be sent home, the parent who picked them up thanked Ellie. But no one ever called her a miracle worker.

Then again, back home she was never called upon to rid a child of evil spirits.

She and Adrian didn't talk much during the long drive back to the clinic. But he wore a faint, devilishly appealing grin throughout the trip, and Ellie-rightly or wrongly-decided that she was in some way the reason for that smile.

She shouldn't have been so pleased with herself. Getting a man to smile wasn't that difficult, most of the time. Lately, she hadn't gotten Curt to smile, but she hadn't gotten herself to smile, either. Cheering everyone up was usually a woman's task, and Ellie had abdicated that responsibility the day Peter died.

Getting Adrian to smile was...special. He was in love with his clinic-and his smile had nothing to do with love anyway-yet he'd called her a miracle worker. She'd accomplished something he hadn't been able to do on his own. She'd come through for him, fulfilled a need for him and maybe, just maybe, saved a little boy's hearing. She hoped Enam would have his surgery before Ellie had to leave Ghana. She wanted to be present, to see him through it, to celebrate with that adorable little b.u.t.terball of a child once he was liberated from his evil-spirit ear infection.

And shame on her for being proud, but she wanted Adrian to turn to her once Enam was out of the hospital and recovering at home with his doting mother, and say, You did this. I couldn't have made it happen without you....

EIGHT.

"SO YOU SAVED A LITTLE boy's hearing," Curt said.

Ellie had never before told him about the children she and the doctor had visited in the hinterlands of Ghana. When she talked about those children now, her eyes glowed with a kind of ecstasy he hadn't seen since...G.o.d, since the good days of their marriage, when the kids were all asleep and she would lure him upstairs to their bedroom and have her way with him. It was the glow of a woman who'd reached a pinnacle, a woman who'd mastered her universe. He hadn't realized that something other than s.e.x could light up her eyes like that.

Then again, he wasn't convinced she was telling him everything. Yes, he believed she'd traveled from farm to farm with the doctor in a squeaky, dilapidated Jeep with nonfunctional shock absorbers and an open roof that sucked all the road's dirt in on her, and that she'd gotten this superst.i.tious rural woman to trust her with her baby's infected ears. She'd e-mailed him and the girls photos. The Jeep existed. So did the dirty roads. So did the doctor.

But he knew there was more, something beyond simply curing a kid's chronic ear infections. Ellie was editing herself.

If he pressed her, she'd shutdown and seal herself off from him. So he simply drank his coffee and munched on grapes and encouraged her with nods and brief comments at appropriate places.

"I didn't think it was such a big deal," she said with a shrug. "I suspect the mother listened to me because I was another woman. But Dr. Wesker acted as if I'd done something astonishing."

"In his eyes, you did." Curt studied her face, loving how radiant she looked as she recounted the incident and wishing he'd been the source of that radiance. "Remember when you saved that guy's life at Walt Disney World?"

She shrugged again, and brushed the notion away with a wave of her hand. "I didn't really save his life."

"You really did." The moment crystallized in Curt's memory, a warm, slightly muggy February afternoon during the kids' winter-break vacation from school. They'd stood in line for what seemed like a year to ride on the s.p.a.ce Mountain roller coaster-a three-minute thrill worth the wait, they'd all agreed-and staggered out of the building into the blinding sunlight. A few steps ahead of them, a portly older man had been walking a meandering path over to a bench. Curt had scarcely noticed him-just one more dizzy roller-coaster rider trying to regain his bearings after an exhilarating ride. But Ellie had immediately noticed that the man was struggling to breathe, his face was deeply flushed and he had his right hand pressed to the left side of his chest.

"Oh, no," she'd muttered just as the man had tipped over sideways and sprawled out on the bench. The woman with him let out a scream, and suddenly, there Ellie was, bowed over him, unb.u.t.toning his shirt and beginning CPR while she shouted to Curt to find a park employee. She kept up the compressions for several long minutes until an ambulance arrived and EMTs took over. Someone from Disney security took her name, and the next day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived for her at their hotel, along with a note that read, "Thank you for saving my husband's life."

Curt remembered that note vividly. Yes, Ellie had saved the man's life. She hadn't had to travel all the way to Africa to be a hero.

"You've always done that," he remarked, wondering why he'd never called her on it. "You make light of all your accomplishments. You say you didn't really save the guy's life, or that kid's hearing in Ghana. You say all you do at the school is wipe noses and take temperatures."

"That is what I do," she argued.

"You wipe their noses and take their temperatures and make them feel better. d.a.m.n it, Ellie-you do a lot of good in the world, everywhere you go. Africa, Disney World, here at home. You save people's lives."

She made a face. "Believe me, I wish I could save lives. But I can't. When a third-grader has a sniffle, I'm hardly saving his life if I hand him a tissue and tell him to blow."

Curt shook his head. "Sometimes I think your parents brainwashed you into believing that being a nurse instead of a doctor meant you couldn't possibly be healing people," he said. "You do heal people. You make them better. You convince the mother of a little child halfway around the world that the child should have surgery to save his hearing. Don't put yourself down, okay? You save lives. Accept it."

She stared at him dubiously. He hadn't launched into that speech in an effort to win her heart-or even to win himself a bit of predivorce physical pleasure tonight in the tres romantic room. He'd said it because it was the truth. He'd been listening to Ellie belittle her work ever since she'd quit her job at Children's Hospital and accepted a position as a school nurse at the Felton Primary School in town. "So I can be home in the afternoon, when the children get home from school," she'd said, justifying her decision, but it had required no justification. Suburban children got sick just like city children, or village and farm children in Ghana. Ellie used her expertise to make those suburban children feel better. She deserved a few medals and a ticker-tape parade.

He wondered what she saw in his face. Pride? Admiration? Longing?

Or perhaps regret that he'd never praised her accomplishments, never a.s.sured her that she was every bit the miracle worker her Ghana buddy, Dr. Wesker, had declared her.

She lowered her gaze to the nearly empty fruit platter, then turned to watch the fire. How had they traveled from fighting to kissing to tension and anger to this moment of honesty in so little time? Were fiftieth birthdays supposed to be full of introspection and a.n.a.lysis and emotions with as many peaks and dips as the s.p.a.ce Mountain roller-coaster ride at Disney World? His birthday hadn't been. It had been full of rage-rage at Ellie for denying him the chance to feel fully alive, to recover completely from the grief. Rage at himself for wanting what she remained unable to give him. Rage at the brutality of fate, at the cruel whimsy of a world that could s.n.a.t.c.h his son away from him and destroy his marriage.

Rage and a hot car.

He'd bought his BMW and spent his birthday testing the engine's limits on a barren stretch of Route 2, hoping no state troopers happened to be waiting on that same stretch with their radar guns aimed in his direction. He'd driven until he'd burned off enough anger to trust himself not to erupt in another fight with Ellie when he got home.

Not the happiest birthday of his life.