Return to the Beach House (28 page)

Lindsey and the fixer David had arranged to accompany her in the Congo found and joined a group of thirty children, mostly girls between nine and thirteen. They’d been traveling without adults for more than a month. Some had been forced out of their homes by parents who could no longer feed them, some had been separated from their families during a militia attack, and some were the lone surviving members of what had once been extensive families. All journeyed with one goal in mind—to reach a refugee camp in Yida. They’d been told that they weren’t wanted, but they knew they would be given a bowl of beans to eat and, at worst, a piece of cardboard to sleep on. It didn’t matter that the hut that would shelter them was vermin infested, it was safe.

What none of the parents who’d set these young girls on their journey had understood was that they would become targets for bands of men who treated even the youngest like members of a transient brothel—put on the road solely for their entertainment.

Without an adult to guide them, the children chose their own leader, Sittina, a wisp of a girl as determined to get them to the camp as a mother leopard with cubs to feed on the trail of a wounded wildebeest. With the innate ability of a child born in the bush, she taught them to turn into ghosts, scattering and fading into their surroundings at the sound of a distant vehicle or a single footfall on dry grass. This extreme caution kept them alive, but it also slowed their progress, and that eventually took its toll on the weakest and sickest as they went days and then nearly a week without food. The end was inevitable for some of them when, out of desperation, they turned to eating indigestible grasses.

At night they huddled together in whatever shelter they could find, uselessly covering their heads with their arms at the whistling sounds of aerial bombs, taking turns standing guard with sticks they had fashioned into weapons to use against opportunistic lions looking for an easy meal.

There were some children—mostly the ones who carried infants and toddlers on their backs like cords of wood—who were the last of their families. Their stories were different yet had a familiarity that, after a while, made them all sound the same—families slaughtered for no other reason than the misfortune of having built their grass huts and raised their sheep and cattle herds on the wrong side of an imaginary dividing line between the least developed nations in Africa.

Although Lindsey was there as a photographer, not as a writer, she asked endless questions, mostly to try to make sense out of the insanity that had inspired the children’s journey from one side of a war-torn country to the other.

Even after what had happened to her in Afghanistan, she believed that she was as removed from the possibility of becoming a part of the story herself as she was from the possibility of switching careers. This time, though, something changed. Sittina walked up to Lindsey, insisting that she was ten but looking no older than five or six because of acute malnutrition, and found a permanent home in Lindsey’s heart.

Days later, when they crossed a dry gully and Sittina reached for Lindsey’s hand to keep from falling, a folded piece of orange cloth held together with a single piece of knotted grass fell out of the tattered pocket of Sittina’s dress. Lindsey retrieved the cloth from a crack in the parched dirt and turned to hand it back. She was startled to see Sittina’s expressive black eyes widened with challenge.

Even after the week they’d been together, Sittina had automatically assumed Lindsey would keep the small treasure. Tears of gratitude slipped from her eyes as she tucked the bundle into her whole pocket and carefully buttoned it closed.

“It was my mother’s,” she said as they moved to rejoin the group. “The men could only find one earring after they killed her. They were so angry that they cut her into many pieces with their machetes. They were drinking and singing very loudly when they left our home. They were proud of what they had done to my mother. They danced and sang as if they had faced a pride of lions to capture that one small circle of gold.”

The connection between the young woman soldier in Afghanistan who only needed half of her earrings and Sittina’s mother haunted Lindsey for days. She stayed in the Congo less than two months—six weeks longer than the original assignment but shorter than the time she needed to tell the story. After five days in New York going over her work with the new photo editor who’d been assigned to the piece—a woman wearing a pencil dress and Christian Louboutin pumps trying to explain her indefensible rationale for pulling photographs that were too “difficult” for their readers—Lindsey felt as emotionally empty as a plastic bag caught on a barbed-wire fence.

She didn’t call Matthew while she was in New York because she had nothing to offer him.

Listening for sounds coming from the bedroom that would indicate she hadn’t sneaked out successfully, Lindsey stood in front of the sliding-glass door and stared into the night, seeing nothing but an impenetrable gray-tinged blackness. Slipping into her jeans, she opened her backpack, which contained at least one of everything she needed when she traveled, including a toothbrush. The first thing she pulled out was the tightly woven wool sweater she’d picked up at the duty-free shop the last time she’d been in Dublin. She had to dig a little for the rain jacket to put over the sweater. There were good and bad things about clothing that disappeared into its own stuff bag—small might be convenient, but it could also mean hard to find.

She loved the idea of Ireland, but like most cities in peaceful parts of the world, she knew the airport, not the country. Years before she became part of the press corps that chased wars and bloodshed, the Good Friday Agreement had been ratified and Ireland had moved toward a shaky, but eventually triumphant, peace. There was no reason to send someone like her on assignment to a country where people died of natural causes.

One day she would go back and experience the serenity of the countryside and the boisterous pub evenings she had only imagined. She would lose herself in the culture and not duck for cover if a car backfired. These were the kinds of places she went in her mind to try to put herself to sleep at night while bullets and bombs exploded around her. She allowed herself to fantasize about such things even if she didn’t believe in them.

With a stealthiness that belied the background of a girl who’d broken both of her arms once and one leg twice falling out of trees and down gullies and ski slopes, she slung her camera bag over her shoulder and headed for the beach, anxious to see what picture opportunities would appear when the sun finally penetrated the fog.

As she’d expected, she had the beach to herself. It was still a good half hour before even the hardiest fisherman would arrive. Time enough to explore once her eyes adjusted. She was looking for a stretch of undisturbed sand where she could leave relatively deep footprints that wouldn’t immediately be washed away. Maybe a few unbroken shells for a focal point or just a ragged line of foam. It was a picture that had already been taken a thousand times, and that was the challenge. She wasn’t going to get what she really wanted—a baby sea lion following the footprints, erasing them as he reclaimed what was rightfully his. But that was for another day. This was plainly not a beach where sea lions hauled out for a day in the sun.

Propping her backpack against a log resting well above the high-water line, she sat with her arm looped through the strap and her back firmly planted against the pack, a trick she’d learned after losing her first camera to a ten-year-old thief in Kabul when she’d stopped to rest by sitting against a tree and promptly fell asleep. Even though there was no chance of that happening now, old habits were . . . well, they were old habits.

Lindsey woke to the sound of laughter. Giggling, to be more precise. The sun was still nowhere to be seen, but it was light enough to detect the outlines of three people walking along the shoreline. One was a girl no more than four or five, judging by her size and the high-pitched squeal when she misjudged a wave and the water climbed her legs. As she came closer Lindsey saw that she was wearing pajama bottoms and a coat that hung lopsided from having been closed one button off.

“Not too close,” the woman accompanying the girl warned.

The man laughed. “You might as well be talking to the sanderlings.”

Lindsey shifted and sat up straighter. There was something decidedly strange about this threesome. She reached for her camera. Because there were times when her life and the lives of those around her depended on being as quiet as possible, she always had her camera set to silent mode. When she started shooting, she didn’t get so much as a glance in her direction.

As always, she and the camera instantly merged, her world reduced to the image she saw through the lens, her focus laser-sharp, her peripheral vision gone.

The adults who accompanied the child were old, too old to be late-in-life parents. More likely grandparents, maybe even another generation out. They followed the girl’s every movement, allowing her the freedom to explore, ready to intercede if needed.

With a palpable joy, the girl let out another squeal as she stopped to pick up something left behind by a foamy wave. She ran to her guardians with her arms outstretched, turning over her prize when she reached them. They said all the right words, too softly for Lindsey to make them out, but the child’s delighted reaction was enough to fill in the blanks. She clapped her hands and spontaneously hugged them before skipping back across the packed sand to hunt for more treasure.

A distant voice, female and frantic, shattered Lindsey’s focus. She had no sense of time when she was working. Her only clue was when she glanced at the camera to see how many shots she’d taken and was startled to see it was over five hundred.

With one part of her mind aware of the woman’s voice, but seeing no reason to become involved when the resolution was only moments away, she went back to shooting, capturing the child’s concerned look and being surprised to see the grandparents’ relieved expressions. Again it struck her that there was something strange about the three of them.

This time the voice that shot through the fog was a man’s, loud and insistent. “
Abbey
—where are you?”

The girl stopped exploring and looked behind her. Her chin dropped to her chest. “I’m here, Daddy,” she said, barely loud enough for Lindsey to hear.

But plainly a father seeking his daughter’s voice was tantamount to a soldier listening for an ambush.

“Abbey?”

“I’m by the water, Daddy. With my friends.”

It wasn’t Abbey’s father who first materialized, but her mother. She ran to her little girl and scooped her into her arms. Seconds later, her father joined them. Abbey tried to talk as they pummeled her with questions, but every sentence she offered was crushed by one from her parents.

“What friends?” her mother insisted.

Abbey looked around, but her protectors had disappeared. Even Lindsey had missed seeing them leave.

“They have my presents,” she moaned. “I found the pretty shells you told Daddy you wanted to take home, and they were keeping them for me.” Dejected, Abbey walked over to the spot where her companions had last been.

“They’re here,” she shouted seconds later. “They left them for me on this pretty scarf.” She ran back to her parents, the red-and-blue scarf fluttering behind her. She grabbed her father’s hand. “If we hurry, we can find them.”

Through it all, Lindsey continued taking pictures, unnoticed against the dark log, in her usual position of being a witness to life rather than a participant.

Abbey’s father hoisted her to his shoulders. “That pretty scarf is your sister’s,” he said. “And unless your imaginary friends broke into our house—”

“They aren’t imaginary,” she insisted. “They talked to me and everything. They told me my shells were beautiful. They said I was beautiful too,” she added softly.

They walked away and the tenor of her parents’ voices changed from naked relief to stern reprimand. Abbey plainly listened to neither as she took advantage of her perch and intently swiveled her head back and forth, seeking the uncritical man and woman who had shared her magical morning.

Matthew rolled to his side, taking up even less space in the king-size bed than he had the night before. He was accustomed to narrow cots and sleeping bags and had trouble adjusting to a bed big enough to hold a small family. He wasn’t surprised to find Lindsey missing. She might fill his heart and his mind, but she’d never truly filled his life.

He ran his hand over her side of the bed, seeking warmth that would indicate how long she’d been gone. The sheet was as cold as the room. The five days he’d been there alone were days lost from the month they had planned to be together, but it had given him time to grocery-shop and unpack and wash his basic traveling clothes.

Surprisingly, his favorite purchase was one he almost didn’t make—bathrobes. He bought two, one for each of them, imagining them sitting together drinking coffee on the deck or by the fire at night sipping hot buttered rum out of ceramic mugs.

He did this kind of thing a lot lately—imagining a life that had little reference to reality. For years he’d walked a narrow line down the center of reality and fantasy when it came to Lindsey. He accepted that he would never love anyone the way he loved her and that she would never change. She would fight the good fight with her camera until she was too old to shoulder her pack and climb a mountain. And then she would die.

Her crusade for justice was her lifeblood. Without it, she couldn’t breathe. Her pacemaker was her conviction that no one else would tell the stories that needed to be told. She honestly believed there was a world of innocents who could not and would not survive without her ability to communicate their plight in ways that drew attention.

It wasn’t ego so much as recognition that, to touch someone’s heart, your own heart had to be breaking when you told the story. She insisted she knew how to protect herself from the pain, but Matthew knew better. When their separations were as long as the last one, the changes in her were dramatic and irrefutable.