Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

And then there was something else. It was Dr. Stern who wrote her the first prescription for Vicodin, and before long she was visiting this pain clinic in a strip mall out on the drive. Wait in that waiting room for an hour with the white trash and the pregnant ladies with the stringy hair, not believing that this was how her life was turning out, and then six minutes with that weird old Indian doctor, shaking his head in stupid figure eights. “What is being the problem, Madame?” Being the problem is that my back/nose/spleen/soul won’t stop hurting. Then walking out with the scrip. Not that she had ever imagined herself doing that, but that’s how she got through those days, and she wasn’t making any excuses. It’s what allowed her to get through those days and not explode with stress and rage and not kill her husband, and if you want to judge me, go ahead, but try walking a couple of miles in my espadrilles first.

So all that was what was going on in Kay’s mind when Terry first packed up and headed down to Haiti. When Terry got the job in Haiti, she thought, We can pay the mortgage. Then she thought, Thank God I won’t have to see him anymore.

* * *

Only the strange thing was — Haiti was sort of just like this thing that they had needed.

As soon as Terry got down to Haiti, she started to like him more, just the tone in his voice, the pictures he sent of him and his African colleagues. Kay wasn’t too vain, certainly not compared with her sisters, but sometimes she would see an outfit in a fashion magazine — a pretty skirt or blouse, something that under ordinary circumstances she’d never wear in a thousand years — and more than anything she’d want to try it on, see herself wearing that printed skirt in the mirror. See how it transformed her, turned her into another woman. Kay had two fears in life: the first was that she was going to lose everything she loved — her job, her husband, her house — but the other was that it was all just going to stay the same until she died. She knew that didn’t make much sense, but where was it written that Kay White had to make a whole lot of sense? Sometimes the thought tormented her, especially in the early evenings, that nothing in her life was ever going to change — and Haiti was change, pure and distilled. She saw Terry’s pictures of the beaches and the white dirt roads, the tin-roofed huts and the little kids in nothing but ankle-length old gray T-shirts, and she saw change: she wanted to see herself in that picture too.

Looking at Terry in those photos was like seeing him for the first time, as if she were looking at someone else’s foxy husband on Facebook. The little fleck of gray in his hair was new. Kay thought it was handsome. Terry with his arm over his colleague, Terry with his arm around the judge. That was the Good Terry. Terry telling her about that road. This was the Terry she had once loved before life had set them both back on their heels. The Terry who thought huge and made big plans and said yes to everything. The Terry who was going to take her up in the hot-air balloon of life until they were floating weightless in the clouds …

… the Terry who showed her one day — they were just kids, broke and hopeful — that big Georgian house with the columns and the rolling lawn and told her that was going to be the place where one day their grandkids would play on the lawn. House wasn’t even for sale. Terry said, “Come on,” rang the doorbell. Old couple answers. Cutest little old people you ever saw. So in love, so old. Terry says, “We’d like to buy your house and raise a family here.” This old couple, charmed as all heck, they invited us in, offered us lemonade. Before long, they’re showing us the nursery and the pantry, and Terry is telling them we’re going to have two boys, and those old people are saying, “We can tell you kids are going to have a wonderful life.”

Just a wonderful life.

That Terry was in those photos from Haiti — that same Terry grin and smirk. “Kay, we’re going to do some great things down here”—that’s what he told her. “Kay, we’re going to make a difference.”

Welcome back, buddy. I missed you.

So she came down to Haiti, and then she just kept coming. People back home asked her, “What d’you love about it down there?”

And what could she say about Haiti but that it made her happy?

Soon some of Kay’s other friends arrived at the restaurant. How had she met so many people? That was the miracle of Kay White. “This is my friend Baker, he’s from the embassy,” she said, and I shook hands with a dreadlocked political attaché whose accent was Texas, whose aspect was the other Caribbean of pretty beaches and steel drums, and whose manner was all pleasant professional charm. Then I met a man named Larry Bayles Jameson who told me to call him LBJ, just like everyone else.

“LBJ is my inspiration,” Kay said. “You know what LBJ does?”

I shook my head, and LBJ looked at the floor modestly, and Kay explained that LBJ ran a small Ford dealership outside Terre Haute. He gave his customers the following option when they bought a new vehicle: if they made a donation to one of his water projects in Haiti, the first service was on him. At the end of the year he matched all the donations out of his own pocket. Then he and his sons came to Haiti twice a year to dig wells and install pumps and build cisterns.

Over the course of the next quarter hour, the group swelled out to more than a dozen. On the flight down to Haiti just that morning, Kay had met an Indian telecom engineer who worked for Digicel — he was there too; then I shook the hand of a cartographer who worked for USAID, and I kissed the downy cheek of his French girlfriend, an epidemiologist who worked for the WHO. A few of Terry’s colleagues were there. “These are our good friends,” Kay said. Some of the guests had never even met Kay in the flesh. They were friends only on Twitter and Facebook.

We were soon seated at a long table in the garden, where on Kay’s instructions I was nestled between LBJ on my left and Baker on my right. Kay was directly in front of me, talking to the French lady from the WHO. The others in our group, who did not know one another, made polite conversational forays. The only thing that brought us all together was that we were acquaintances of Kay White.

I said, “Now, LBJ, tell me what brought you down to Haiti.”

“You want the long version or the short version?”

Seeing me hesitate, LBJ smiled. “Short version is I used to have quite a serious drinking problem. Came to Haiti and stopped drinking.”

LBJ picked up a roll from the basket, pulled it open, and smeared it with butter.

“And the long version?”

LBJ said, “Long version is I had more money than I needed and more time than I could handle and I was wasting my life away swimming laps in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. That’s a real long story right there. Long version is I got to the point where my wife was going to walk right out the door if I didn’t clean up my act. So I went to my pastor, and he told me to come with him down to a village in Haiti for a week.”

Up there in Fond Rouge, LBJ continued, the nearest water was from the Artibonite River, an hour away on foot. There was no water for bathing or for washing clothes or for irrigating crops or for drinking — no water except what people could carry on their heads. So the local people walked to the river, then walked back home, picking their way along the rocky paths, five-gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The kids were skipping school just to lug the gallons up the hill. Not only was the water inaccessible, it wasn’t even all that clean: it was river water, and there were villages crapping and pissing in the river long before the residents of Fond Rouge got it in their buckets.