The Keeper of Happy Endings(2)
In the kitchen, she eyed her surroundings with a creeping sense of overwhelm; the sink full of dishes, the brimming trash can, the remnants of last night’s takeout from Eastern Paradise still sitting on the counter. She’d meant to tidy up after dinner, but then Random Harvest came on and she hadn’t been able to tear herself away until Greer Garson and Ronald Colman were finally reunited. By the time she stopped blubbering, she’d forgotten about the kitchen. And now there wasn’t time if she was going to make it across town by eleven.
She toyed with calling to cancel as she splashed half-and-half into her mug—a sore throat or a migraine, a messy case of food poisoning—but she’d already bailed twice this month, which meant she had to do this.
In the shower, she rehearsed for the grilling she knew was coming: questions about her studies, her hobbies, her plans for the future. The questions never changed, and it was getting harder and harder to pretend she cared about any of it. The truth was, she had no hobbies to speak of, dreaded the idea of returning to school, and her plans for the future were in serious doubt. But she would put on a brave face and say the right things, because that’s what was expected of her. And because the alternative—a deep dive into the black hole that had become her life—was simply too exhausting to contemplate.
She padded to the bedroom, toweling her hair as she went, doing her best to resist the familiar pull from her nightstand. It was a ritual she’d begun of late, starting each day with one or two of Hux’s letters, but there wasn’t time this morning. And yet she found herself opening the bottom drawer, lifting out the box she kept there. Forty-three envelopes addressed in his thin, sprawling script, a lifeline tethering her to him, keeping her from hitting bottom.
The first had arrived in her mailbox just five hours after his flight left Logan. He’d sent it overnight delivery, to make sure it arrived on the right day. He’d written another while sitting at the gate and one more while on the plane. They’d come nearly every day at first before leveling off to one or two a week. And then they’d simply stopped coming.
She glanced at the photo beside the bed, taken at a restaurant on the cape the weekend after he’d proposed. Dr. Matthew Edward Huxley—Hux to everyone who knew him. She missed his face, his laugh, his silly jokes and off-key singing, his love of all things trivia and his perfect scrambled eggs.
They’d met at a charity event for Tufts’ new neonatal intensive-care wing. His smile had made her go weak at the knees, but it was who he was underneath that smile that actually sealed the deal.
The child of two special needs teachers, he had learned the value of service early on and by example. But during his freshman year at UNC, a logging truck had jumped the median on I-40 and hit his parents’ car head-on. He quit school after the funeral, rudderless and bitter, and spent a summer on the Outer Banks, playing beach bum with a pack of surfers and numbing himself with Captain Morgan.
Eventually, he’d pulled himself together, returning to UNC, then going on to medical school. His plan had been to specialize in internal medicine, but after one week of pediatric rounds, those plans had changed. When his residency was over, he had signed with Doctors Without Borders to provide care to children in South Sudan, as a way of honoring his parents’ memory.
It was one of the things she loved most about him. His story was far from perfect; no trust fund or country-club upbringing for Matthew Huxley. He’d gone through some things—things that had rocked him to the core—but he’d found his footing and a way to give back. It was hard to see him off when the time came, but she was proud of the work he had committed to doing, even if his letters were difficult to read.
In one he’d admitted to taking up smoking. Everyone here smokes like a fiend. Maybe to keep their hands from shaking. We’re all so incredibly tired. In another, he’d written about a journalist named Teresa who was there doing a story for the BBC and how she kept him connected to the outside world. He wrote about the work too, about endless days in makeshift surgeries, children maimed, orphaned, terrified. It was worse than he’d ever imagined, but it was making him a better doctor—tougher but more compassionate.
The pace was grueling, the emotional trauma more than he could adequately express on paper. We’re so spoiled in the US. We can’t comprehend the sheer scope of lawlessness and barbarity, the gut-wrenching need that exists in other places. The lack of basic humanity. What we do, me, all of us, it’s a drop in the bucket when you see what’s happening here.
That was the last one.
One week, two, a third passing with her own letters unanswered. And then one day she was listening to NPR and the reason became clear. The US was confirming that a band of armed rebels had abducted three workers in an early-morning raid in South Sudan, including an American physician, a nurse from New Zealand, and a British journalist on assignment for the BBC and World magazine.
It had taken several days to confirm what she already knew—that Hux was the captured American—but there were no leads. Nothing on the truck witnesses saw driving away. No description of the men who’d forced them out of the clinic at gunpoint. And not a word from anyone claiming responsibility, which typically happened in the first forty-eight hours. They had simply vanished.
Five months later, she was still waiting. According to the State Department, every resource was being brought to bear, every lead being followed, not that there’d been many. A late-night raid had been carried out on an abandoned shack in Libya eight weeks ago, after someone reported seeing a woman fitting the description of the missing journalist, but by the time they went in, the shack was empty, the occupants long gone.