Therese Fowler - Reunion

He didn’t want to discuss, with Brenda or anyone, how he’d led Blue on—with respectable intentions, but still—and then broken her heart. And he didn’t want to discuss the domestic drama that led him to break things off. He didn’t want to talk about how he’d waited until his U-haul was packed and he was leaving for North Carolina before he stopped by Blue’s house, to apologize for being so harsh with her at the end. His coldness had been an act, to discourage any hope that they would get back together. He felt awful when her mother reported that she was gone. “She needed her own space,” Nancy Kucharski had said, shrugging. He knew this was right; she did need her own space, some separation from everyone who had relied on her too much.

So he’d moved on. That’s what you do when you’re powerless to fix what’s broken. You bury yourself in your work. You focus on your goals. You eventually find another woman who you think is right for you, and try not to be conflicted when the one you let get away shows up several years later on your living-room television every afternoon, transfixing your second wife—along with almost every other life-form free at that hour. You move on, because if you don’t, you end up like Renee—tormented, pessimistic, alone. You end up with no career, dependent on others to give you your worth.

He’d had things to do with his life then, and still did. A wise man would right now put aside all thoughts of that girl of the past in favor of thinking about the woman of his present. With any luck, they’d be able to get his Lions business accomplished without further mention of that past. The island might be small, but a celebrity and her entourage should be enough of a spectacle that he could see them coming and avoid them entirely.

Chapter Six

Julian Forrester’s BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket, reminding him he was due to phone his grandparents, but he ignored it and kept his attention on his two good friends who stood, hands joined, at the center of what was ordinarily the mess tent. Through his camera’s viewer, he studied the pair. They looked something alike: both had short black hair, both were lean, both had skin darkened by a sun that seemed to shine more harshly on the kinds of people they served—except on this evening, when that same sun, heavy now on the western horizon, was lighting their faces so beautifully it was as if their marriage really was being sanctioned by God. They gazed at each other as though they shared a delightful secret. He pressed the shutter release, capturing their look if not their thoughts.

“Wow,” Brandy whispered, close to Julian’s ear. Her warm breath gave him a shiver. “They are so in love.”

Love. He’d seen the look on other faces: mothers in Darfur whose children were finally getting a nutritious meal; fathers, as they watched a child finally grown strong enough to kick a soccer ball across a dusty yard … That made sense to him. What Alec and Noor had, though, was for the most part beyond him. If not for his grandparents’ enduring, happy marriage of fifty-four years, he wasn’t sure he would buy it at all.

A minister, his camouflage uniform somehow neatly pressed despite the heat, spoke sincerely about the obligations Julian’s friends now faced. Trust, intimacy, and devotion, every day, forever. What an incredible ideal. Who could meet such obligations, especially these days? He approved of trying—ask anyone, they’d say he was willing to give most things a try. Fried caterpillar. Lamb’s brains. Cliff diving in Croatia in the dark. Marriage, however, was almost certain to have a much worse and more enduring outcome than any of those stunts; he would leave that to the truly courageous.

He focused the Nikon, pressed the button as Alec pulled Noor close, pressed it as Noor tipped her face upward, pressed it as Alec’s lips met hers, pressed it as the kiss became two wide smiles and the couple turned to face the crowd.

The forty or so guests inside the tent applauded. It was done. Noor and Alec were now a single entity where before they had just been a great guy and a smart woman who did the kind of stuff he did: ramble around the planet trying, in their meager ways, to undo the undoable. What little they did manage to accomplish—provide water and food and medical care and sanitation, give the people a presence, a face, a voice—had to be enough.

Today his efforts were being made in Afghanistan, just as they had been for the last seven months, while tent camps for refugees continued to multiply and spread across the south desert like a plague. Before here he’d worked in Bangladesh, Malawi, Croatia, Darfur, Mississippi, Indonesia, Bosnia … all beginning with Chechnya in early 1995. His history was a blur of turbulent flights and iffy food, desperate children and chaos. He felt like thirty-two going on sixty.

His collection of photos and video and the documentaries he’d shot all preserved the stories that had begun to merge in his memory. One tent camp after another. One starving family, one mother dead of AIDS, one village torched, one empty-eyed girl working as a sex slave, one boy with hands lost to a machete—his memory was overflowing with the atrocities he’d documented with a succession of cameras that had, so far, seemed to protect him from any serious harm. He’d gone to sleep hungry countless nights. He’d been shot at, he’d been cursed—literally, if not effectively. In Bosnia three years back, a disgruntled Mafia type had cut off his left hand’s little finger and threatened his thumb if he didn’t leave Sarajevo that day (which, as soon as he was bandaged, he did). That was the worst of it for him, though. He was lucky.

Interspersed with all that were moments like the ones now unfolding in this tent. Weddings, and births; lives begun and lives saved; hope restored. Events like these kept him going. A person could be only so skeptical when they’d witnessed the expressions he was seeing on his friends’ faces right now. He didn’t, however, hold out much hope of wearing such expressions himself. Just before he’d packed out from his previous assignment, in Kabul, his now-ex-girlfriend announced that he was “congenitally incapable of permanent connection.” He hadn’t told her much about his parents, so she had no idea how accurate a statement that was.

The wind kicked up, flapping the tent’s walls and roof, blowing in the fine grit no one much noticed anymore, though it was murder on his camera equipment. He spent nearly as much time huddled over his stuff, cleaning it with tiny brushes and ear swabs, as he did putting it to use.

Alec walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Can you believe she actually went through with the wedding?”

“Hell, if I was a woman, I would’ve locked you down myself a long time ago—so yeah, I can believe it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Alec said. “What does she see in me?”

“A lot of what you see in her, but with a mustache.”

Alec laughed. “And speaking of facial hair …”

“I know,” Julian said, rubbing his beard. “I needed to shave three months ago.”

“And a haircut wouldn’t have hurt, in honor of your best friend’s wedding day.”

“Love me or leave me,” Julian said.

As Noor joined them Alec said, “I’m afraid it’s gonna be both.”

“What will be both?”

“Loving Julian, and leaving him—it’s what we have to do as soon as the sun comes up again.” He kissed Noor, looking at her in a way that made Julian’s belly feel empty. Alec turned back to Julian and said, “But you’re still planning to ship out soon, right?”

Julian nodded. “Back to Chicago for a couple weeks, then I’m doing that troop embed in Iraq—should be interesting,” he said, “assuming they don’t stick me with a bunch of paper pushers. This administration …” He sighed. “It’s harder to get access, you know? I was born in the wrong era—I should’ve been working in ’Nam.”