up with the two remaining meks, she attempted to make a census of the abducted persons from their villages and the others’, but she would count off only a few names before the words “That is when I knew I loved you” caused her to lose track. In her distraction, she wandered the mission grounds alone, asking herself how he could be so sure of his heart and if she loved him. She was learning that war has the same effect on human emotions as a gorge has on a placid river—it accelerates them. She was torn between a desire to be sensible and another to leap recklessly into the swift turbulence and surrender herself to its power.
She used an inflamed tick bite on her arm as an excuse to see Ulrika. Finding refuge from the sun under a tree, she waited until the nurse had seen to her patients. Then, stepping into the hut, hardly bigger than a storage closet, the shelves racked along all four walls making it appear smaller still, Quinette rolled up her sleeve, baring the welt above her wrist.
“You have had in your hands a chicken?”
Quinette nodded. Last night she’d helped Pearl pluck a chicken for dinner.
“Ja. These things come from the chickens. Whoever pulled out the tick left in the head and jaws. This is what causes the inflammation.”
Pushing off one foot, Ulrika rolled herself to the table under the window and removed a scalpel and forceps from a drawer. Taking Quinette’s arm in her thick strong hands, she daubed the bite with a cotton swab soaked in anesthetic. Then she sliced off a thin shred of skin, pulled out a black object the size of a pinhead with the forceps, squeezed ointment from a tube, and rubbed it in.
“I would give you this to take with you, but I have no more left. I have so little of everything. The child died, early this morning.”
“Child?” asked Quinette, buttoning her sleeve.
“The child with the diarrhea.” Ulrika’s eyes, of a pale unearthly blue, gazed at her steadily. “The mother’s milk, it no sooner goes in the mouth than out the other end it comes. The baby dies of the dehydration.”
Quinette detected an accusatory glint in the woman’s stare. No, her own imagination and her guilt had put it there; Ulrika couldn’t know.
“Would you have saved him if you had more medicine?”
“Possibly.”
The indefinite answer left Quinette unsure about her culpability.
“This is certain—if I am not soon resupplied, some other child will die,” Ulrika said.
“As soon as Wes and Doug get back, I’m going to let them know how desperate you are,” Quinette promised, figuring that this intention—the intention alone—would propitiate her conscience. “I’ll tell them to make sure there’s plenty on the next flight in. Give me a list of what you need and I’ll see to it myself that you get it.”
“What do you mean, when Wesley and Douglas get back? Where have they gone?”
“With Michael. On the operation. They went with Michael.”
This was a good moment to change the subject, but she didn’t know how to begin, nor even if she should begin. Wouldn’t she be betraying Michael’s confidence?
Ulrika looked at her quizzically. “There is something else I can help you with?”
“Could I talk to you? It’s not a medical problem. It’s about Michael.”
“What about him?”
She was silent. With a scooping movement, the nurse prodded her to speak.
“Last night he—” Quinette laughed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Could you keep this to yourself?”
“If I knew what, I would.”
“He told me that he was in love with me.”
“This is not a surprise,” Ulrika said without hesitation. “He speaks about you a great deal. And?”
“I guess I had to talk to someone about it, another woman.”
“Because you don’t know if with him you are in love.”
Quinette said nothing.
“If you don’t know, that means you aren’t.”
Count on Ulrika to be blunt, even brutal, Quinette thought. “It isn’t that, it’s—”
“It is this? If you do love him, you are afraid of what could come of it.”
“Exactly. And I don’t like to think of myself as being afraid of anything.”
“You would be a fool if you were not afraid.” Ulrika patted her arm. “For this I have remedy, for that none. You must look to yourself for the remedy.”
DARE HAD FALLEN asleep—passed out was more like it—his chin to his chest, head flopping side to side with the rocking motion of the truck. A jolt knocked his skull against the window frame and woke him. From the