The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton Read Free Book Online

from a basket, rubbing her fingers over their indented surfaces, pretending to inspect them before letting them fall. “He decided he’d had enough.”
    “And you continue on?” Hikmet draws on his cigarette and holds the smoke a moment before exhaling. “A man is not what he wants to be, but what he must. Sometimes, perhaps, it is the same for a woman.”
    She pushes the basket of buttons aside. “What’s been happening?”
    He begins to grumble about the clashes, a noose around his neck, always followed by the funerals, which require him to close his business for a day, and then there are more clashes, more dead, another funeral. A downward spiral, he says. He pauses as though to consider the colorful phrase he will come up with, the quote so perfect she won’t be able to put it any lower than the third graph. Before he can speak, though, they’re interrupted by a noise from outside. Muffled, it’s hardly louder than a generous sneeze. But they’re attuned, both of them, to sounds of a certain timbre.
    Hikmet invokes Allah’s name. “Always it’s something,” he mutters as he tucks his prayer beads into his pocket and rushes to the street.
    Caddie’s knees soften; her fingernails drive into her palm. There is Marcus, with his chilled, wide-eyed expression.
    She pushes him off. Too heavy.
    His right shoulder slams against the door of the jeep.
    His head falls carelessly at an odd angle, oh God.
    She tears her gaze away from him and spots Rob staring at her with something she can’t identify. Not at first. Then, sharply, she recognizes it as accusation, as if she were responsible.
    She hears a woman trilling. The blast is here, in Gaza. Not Lebanon.
    Notepad already in hand, she pushes through the shop’s door in time to catch an ambulance slicing up the street, andthe ululating woman lifting over her head a scrap of cloth stained with blood. On the next block, a section of wall is missing from a second-floor apartment. She looks up to see a man stumbling through the building entrance carrying a girl who looks to be about ten years old. The child’s eyes are closed. Her chest and right leg are burned.
    Caddie imagines this moment framed through Marcus’s lens. Woman dropping to her knees: click. Man emerging from the smoke with girl in his arms: click. Close-up of girl, delicate face above damaged body, glazed eyes half-open: click, click. It’s odd, seeing it this way—at once more focused on tiny details, and more distant from them.
    Emergency workers converge on the girl, and then three men lift her into the ambulance. Others rush upstairs to the smoking apartment.
    There is no surprise in the accidental explosion of a firebomb. Materials used to make such bombs in the Strip are old and unstable, and the bomb-makers themselves—kids, often—are trying to patch together deadly explosives the way they might, in another culture, use rubber cement to assemble a model airplane. Mistakes are common. Still, there might be a story.
    Caddie jogs to her car and drives fast to the Strip’s main hospital. She runs up the steps, discolored with blood, and shoves open the doors. No trace of antiseptic scent lingers in the halls; instead it smells of chickpeas, sweat and mold. Women in headscarves gossip as they cook over Bunsen burners in the hallway, while children toss jacks near their feet. A knot ofmen under knitted caps huddle, their foreheads nearly touching. One drops a cigarette butt to the floor and grinds it with his heel. A nurse strolls past, pushing a patient in a wheelchair, his head slumped and eyes closed as he hums loudly, tunelessly. He is shushed by one of three men who sit on their haunches around a radio plugged into a hallway outlet, listening to the news.
    A tall man wearing a stylish charcoal-gray tie stands awkwardly in the hallway. He is neither Palestinian nor patient, doctor nor common visitor, but clearly an outsider, like Caddie. He is taking in everything but he’s not a