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.
