Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

That morning and afternoon had been spent helping Ronald Revolus, the man who’d been on his way to becoming a nurse before the quake. They’d transported the three mortally wounded members of the camp to a med tent run by Sri Lankan peacekeepers three miles east. It was there she’d spoken to a translator who’d assured her they’d get help to them as soon as they were capable. Hopefully by the following night, two days at the most.

Rachel and Greta returned to the camp and the four girls had arrived. The itchy, hungry men in Josué’s gang noticed them immediately, and their awful intentions spread from the mind of one to the mind of all in the time it took to get the girls water and check them for injury.

Rachel and Greta, who failed as reporters that night by getting involved in a story they should have covered if anyone would have put it on the air, worked with the ex-nun and Ronald Revolus to move the girls all over the camp, rarely staying in one hiding spot for more than an hour.

The light of day wouldn’t stop the men — rape was nothing to be ashamed of in their minds or the minds of most of their peers. Death, so the norm in recent days, was only to be lamented for natives and even then, only if they were close family. They’d continued drinking through the night’s search and into the dawn, and the hope was they’d have to sleep at some point. In the end, two of the four girls were saved when a UN truck trundled into the camp that morning accompanied by a bulldozer to pick up the corpses in the ruined church at the bottom of the hill.

The other two girls, however, were never seen again. They’d arrived in camp just hours before, both freshly orphaned and freshly homeless. Esther wore a faded red T-shirt and jean shorts. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widelene, but everyone called her Widdy. It made sense that Esther was sullen, nearly mute, and rarely met one’s eyes. What made no sense was that Widdy was sunny and had the kind of smile that blew canyons through the chests of its recipients. Rachel knew the girls only for that one night, but she’d spent most of it with Widdy. Widdy and her yellow dress and her boundless heart and her habit of humming songs no one could recognize.

It was remarkable how completely they disappeared. Not just their bodies and the clothes they’d been wearing but their very existence. An hour after sunup, their two companions went mute when asked about them. Within three hours, no one in the camp besides Rachel, Greta, the ex-nun Veronique, and Ronald Revolus claimed to have seen them. By nightfall of the second day, Veronique had changed her story and Ronald was questioning his memory.

At nine that night, Rachel accidentally caught the eye of one of the rapists, Paul, a high school science teacher, who was always unceasingly polite. Paul sat outside his tent and clipped his nails with rusty nail clippers. By that point, rumors had spread that if the girls ever had been in the camp — and they hadn’t, that was crazy talk — three of the six men who had roamed the camp drinking heavily that night had gone to sleep by the time the girls who never existed may or may not have disappeared. So if those girls had been raped (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul was involved. But if they’d been murdered (and they hadn’t been; they couldn’t have been; they didn’t exist), Paul had been sleeping by that point. Just a rapist, Teacher Paul, just a rapist. If the fates of the girls haunted him in any way, however, he hid it well. He looked in Rachel’s eyes. He used his thumb and index finger to make a gun. He pointed it at her crotch and then slipped the finger into his mouth and sucked on it. He laughed without making a sound.

Then he rose to his feet and crossed to Rachel. He stood in front of her and searched her eyes.

Very politely, almost obsequiously, he asked her to leave the camp.

“You lie,” he explained gently, “and it makes people anxious. They do not tell you this because we are a polite people. But your lies make everyone very upset. Tonight” — he held up one finger — “no one will show how upset they are. Tonight” — again with the finger — “no harm will likely come to you and your friend.”

She and Greta left the camp twenty minutes later, hitching the only ride out with the Sri Lankans. At their relief center, she pleaded with them and the Canadian peacekeepers who’d worked their way inland from their ship.

No one got her sense of urgency. No one got within a zip code of it. A couple of girls disappeared? Here? There were thousands of disappeared at last count and the number would only grow.

“They’re not disappeared,” one of the Canadians said to her. “They’re dead. You know that. I’m sorry but so it is. And no one’s got the time or resources to search for the bodies.” He looked around the tent at his companions and a few of the Sri Lankans. Everyone nodded in agreement. “None of us anyway.”

The next day Rachel and Greta moved on to Jacmel. Three weeks later they were back in Port-au-Prince. By this point, Rachel was starting her day with four black-market Ativans and a shot of rum. Greta, she suspected, had relapsed into the predilection for heroin chipping she’d told Rachel about their first night in Léogâne.

Eventually, they received word that it was time to head home. When Rachel protested, her assignment editor confided via Skype that her stories had grown too strident, too monotonous, and had taken on an unfortunate air of despair.

“Our viewers need hope,” the assignment editor said.

“Haitians need water,” Rachel said.

“There she goes again,” the editor said to someone offscreen.

“Give us a few more weeks.”

“Rachel,” he said, “Rachel. You look like shit. And I’m not just talking about your hair. You’re skeletal. We’re pulling the plug.”

“No one cares,” Rachel said.

“We cared,” the assignment editor said sharply. “The United States is sending over a billion and a half fucking dollars to that island. And this network covered the shit out of it. What more do you want?”

And Rachel, in her Ativan-addled brain, thought, God .

I want the capital-G God the televangelists claim moves tornadoes out of their paths. The one who cures cancer and arthritis in the faithful, the God professional athletes thank for taking an interest in the outcome of the Super Bowl or the World Cup or a home run hit in the eighty-seventh game of the hundred sixty-two played by the Red Sox this year. She wanted the active God who inserted Himself in human affairs to reach down from Heaven and cleanse the Haitian water supply and cure the Haitian sick and uncrumble the crumbled schools and hospitals and homes.

“The fuck are you babbling about?” The assignment editor peered into the screen at her.

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken.

“Get on a plane while we’re still paying for it,” the assignment editor said, “and get back to your little station.”

And that’s how she learned any ambitions she’d had to make the national network scene were dead. No New York for her. No career track to Big Six and beyond.

Back to Boston.

Back to Little Six.

Back to Sebastian.

She weaned herself off Ativan. (It took four attempts but she got there.) She cut her drinking back to pre-Haiti levels (or in the neighborhood anyway). But the bosses at Little Six never gave her a lead story again. A new girl, Jenny Gonzalez, had arrived during the time she’d been gone.

Sebastian said, “She’s smart, accessible, and she doesn’t look at the camera sometimes like she might head-butt it.”

The ugly truth was that Sebastian was right. Rachel would have loved to hate Jenny Gonzalez (Lord knows she tried), to believe her looks and sex appeal had gotten her where she was. And while those things certainly didn’t hurt, Jenny had an MA in journalism from Columbia, could improv on the fly, always hit her marks fully prepared, and treated everyone from the receptionist to the GM with the same respect.