The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

journalist—she’s sure from that silk tie. He meets her glance. His eyes are so dark they startle. He lifts an arm as though to stop her, to ask a question perhaps. But she hasn’t time. She glances away and moves past him.
    Caddie knows from previous visits that the emergency room has been turned into nothing more than another ward: too many emergencies, too little space. Most new patients, whatever their conditions, are simply hustled into one of the large dorms. Nurses don’t waste time trying to group them according to the type or even seriousness of their ailments. A boy whose leg hangs in a cast lies next to a comatose woman hooked up to a ventilator.
    Shooting through the hallways, Caddie finds the girl in a room that holds about twenty beds, all filled. She imagines some poor soul being carted to a grave minutes earlier, and the girl taking his place atop a still warm, rumpled and discolored sheet. The family is gathering: wailing women and sullen men.Caddie backs against the wall near the girl’s bed, trying for invisibility. Listening to their talk, she learns that the youth who had been making the bomb is dead. The injured girl is his sister. Her burns are severe, especially on the chest. A woman—mother or aunt—opens the child’s shirt slightly to show a red mass, skin almost gone, and what’s left looks crisp in places, leathery or wet in others. She is conscious. A moan emerges from far inside her.
    A doctor arrives and begins an examination. Two weeping women are led from the room by the others, leaving three young men, probably cousins, to await the doctor’s verdict. Before he can pronounce it, a second doctor enters, two nurses on his heels. His graying hair, and the way he holds himself, make it clear he is the senior. “She should be intubated and on IV,” he tells the first doctor.
    “I’ve ordered it.”
    The senior doctor sends a nurse away to check on what’s become of the drip, and then examines the girl himself. He straightens. “Wait outside,” he orders the remaining relatives. He glances toward Caddie, who quickly kneels beside the unconscious patient in the next bed, her eyes closed as though praying. He turns away from her and back to the girl. “The burn penetrated the subcutaneous tissue,” he says.
    “In one or two places.” The younger doctor sounds as though he equivocates. Caddie leans toward them slightly to better catch the Arabic.
    “Third degree on the chest, that’s clear. She had trouble breathing in the ambulance, no?”
    “She needs morphine,” the junior doctor says. “Penicillin.”
    The senior doctor doesn’t reply at first. He looks at the girl thoughtfully with large, liquid eyes. A skeletal cat prowls the ward, meowing loudly. “You know the state of our supplies?” he finally asks.
    “We’ll use what we have,” the junior doctor replies.
    Still studying the girl, the senior doctor speaks in a rhetorical tone, as if he were teaching. “Is that practical?”
    Caddie doesn’t understand what he means at first. She wonders if she’s misinterpreted the Arabic.
    “Either way, we must alleviate the pain,” the younger doctor says, his tone growing peevish. “The question you raise is in Allah’s hands.”
    The senior doctor crosses his arms and taps the fingers of his right hand. “We have twenty vials left of morphine. Penicillin is also short.”
    The ward is suddenly quiet; even the patients’ moans seem to die on their lips. Only the doctors speak, quickly, one’s voice falling on the other’s.
    “And you suggest?”
    “Codeine.”
    “ Oral codeine.” The junior doctor grunts. “The corruption of our own government . . .”
    “Fortunately, some nerve endings—”
    “. . . means we never have enough. And for infection?”
    “—are already dead. So the pain—”
    “ Infection , I said.”
    The senior doctor picks up the girl’s chart and writes. Hisvoice is painstakingly slow now and Caddie has no trouble following his