tears streaming down his cheeks. His hajj had begun.
8
Salvador
Saudi Arabia, Henry was saying on the phone. His driver had been with him in the camp; now he was on a religious pilgrimage. He should never have been allowed to leave Indonesia. Henry felt responsible.
“But how could you think that?” Jill asked. “You warned him how dangerous the situation was. You told him to wash himself and burn his clothes.”
“Yes, but did he?”
“Didn’t you say you told the police to find him? You can’t hold the world together all by yourself.” She might as well have been standing in the closet addressing Henry’s empty suits. “Really, Henry, you’re driving yourself crazy over something that may not be a problem at all.”
“Nearly three million people from all parts of the world,” he said. “It’s the worst scenario imaginable.”
“If he’s actually ill.”
But Henry was not going to forgive himself. He was at the airport. He would call when he got a chance.
* * *
—
THE CALL RATTLED JILL. By nature, Henry avoided certain emotions, such as self-pity. He was steely, which was almost a prerequisite for his line of work. Pain, suffering, death—these were common elements he witnessed all the time, but he put them away in some emotional filing cabinet. Jill could never do that. Emotion had far too much control of her life. Sometimes she admired Henry’s reticence; other times she resented how closeted he could be about the things that had hurt him.
Perhaps because of his deformity he had long nursed the belief that no woman would ever be interested in him. He wasn’t a virgin when they married, but at age thirty-six Henry was sexually inexperienced and intimidated by Jill’s enthusiasm. He certainly didn’t consider himself an appealing sexual partner, but he developed into a wonderfully attentive lover. He would do anything to please her, and Jill was happy to be his guide to the world of intimacy. There was still an unspoken pact between them that their sexual pleasure was a deep secret. It was an affair that stretched on and on.
Jill never felt she understood Henry completely. He held back so much. He rarely talked about his childhood, although as a teacher Jill could imagine how he would have been treated in school. She had many students who were impoverished, who lived without parents, who suffered infirmities. Life was a special challenge for them, and those who succeeded were ennobled by their effort. But few of them did succeed.
Henry had told her that his parents had been missionaries in South America, and that they perished in an air crash when he was four years old. She supposed that was why Henry had such strong opinions about the dangers of religion. Jill’s own church experience, growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina, had been comforting but uninvolving, whereas religion seemed to be one of the few things Henry actually feared. Science was his way of protecting himself from the lure of belief.
“You’re not open with me,” she had said on their first anniversary. It was supposed to have been a romantic date, but Henry’s mind was somewhere she couldn’t reach.
“I’m sorry, what do you want to know?” he said, genuinely puzzled. The restaurant was in a former church on Ponce de León, with exquisite stained glass windows and waiters playfully dressed as monks and nuns. It was probably the only time Henry had been in a church as an adult. Jill had thought he would be amused.
“Something’s bothering you.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Henry said. “I’m enjoying being with you.”
“Tell me what you did today.”
“I was in the lab, as usual.”
“That’s it?”
“I also went to Emory Hospital to assist with a patient.”
Jill had had too much wine. She was aggressive. She felt entitled to know why Henry wasn’t fully present for their anniversary. And intuition was one of her strongest features.
“Who was the patient?”
“A nine-year-old boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“Do you actually know who you’re treating? Are they just patients or are they individuals?”
“His name was Salvador,” Henry said. “Salvador Sánchez.”
“Was?”
“We couldn’t save him.”
“God, Henry, no wonder you’re so distant. What happened to this boy?”
“We shouldn’t be talking about this, especially tonight,” Henry said, reaching for Jill’s hand. But she wouldn’t let him slip away. She wanted to know exactly what was going on inside him. “Tell me,” she insisted.
“He had an unusual disease called necrotizing fasciitis.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s also called flesh-eating bacteria. It’s very rare among children. The hospital asked me to attend.”
Jill recoiled, but she was driven to