The tears of dark water, p.27
The Tears of Dark Water, page 27
What would Halima say? she thought as she scanned the questionnaire in front of her. The girl was eighteen, the firstborn of five children, only three of whom were still alive. Born in Darfur in western Sudan, she was Muslim but not Arab, which made her a target for the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Sudanese government. In late 2003, soldiers had burned her village to the ground, killing her father and two brothers. Her mother had fled with Halima and her sisters to the Kakuma refugee area in Kenya, where they lived for seven years until they were resettled in the United States.
Halima had been fortunate. She was smart and industrious and had acquired a decent command of English in the camps. She was also blessed with a hardy disposition and had survived chronic malnourishment and two bouts of malaria with little sign of long-term distress. In the initial evaluation, Vanessa didn’t have time for a physical. She focused on building rapport and determining whether there were any acute issues like infections or parasites that required immediate attention.
“Your health is good,” she told the girl. “We need to run tests on the samples we took. But you should be pleased.”
“Subhanallah,” Halima said, her large eyes sparkling. “Thanks be to God.”
Vanessa escorted the girl to the lobby, where her mother was waiting. “I’d like to see you again in a couple of months. The receptionist can give you an appointment.”
Halima smiled. “You are very kind, Dr. Vanessa. Stay well.”
As soon as she left, Vanessa’s carefully constructed façade began to crack. She walked quickly to her office, locking the door behind her. Her grief was like a tropical squall. She never knew when it would arise and how hard it would blow. She kept tissues in her pockets for the occasions when she came unglued in public. But those moments were rare. In the past two months, she had become a virtual hermit, seldom venturing beyond her house, her practice, and Quentin’s recovery room, first at Georgetown Medical Center and now at Medstar National Rehabilitation Hospital. She knew that the sooner she returned to a normal rhythm, the sooner her heart would begin to mend. But solitude was safe. People were unpredictable. Most of the time she wanted nothing more than to be left alone.
After a minute or two, the worst of the storm passed. She looked at her watch. She had an hour before she had to be at the hospital, and the drive wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing. She had to be strong for Quentin. The interview would be an ordeal. He had agreed to do it, and Dr. Greenberg, his neuropsychologist, had given him permission, despite the gaps in his memory. But the FBI was relentlessly thorough. Vanessa had spent two days with the investigators, and more than once their questions had left her in tears.
She opened her eyes again and saw the letter sitting beside her computer. It was Daniel’s last, sent the day they sailed from the Seychelles. Reading it had become a daily pilgrimage for her. It was a paean to Quentin and a vision of the person he could become again if only his brain would heal.
Dearest V:
We’re about to depart for Réunion. We’ve had an extraordinary week in the Seychelles. All of the islands were memorable, but La Digue was in a class by itself. It’s a paradise of sun and sand and sea, worlds apart from the noisome frenzy of the modern jungle that we know so well. On La Digue, the soul doesn’t huddle in self-protection. It opens its wings and takes flight.
The place brought out the truest essence of our joy. Quentin spent most of his time climbing the endless granite boulders that line the beaches and protrude into the water, creating swimming pools in the surf. I wasn’t adventurous enough to follow him, but I had the time of my life strolling barefoot across the sand and watching him scale the monoliths and stand at the highest peak, a silhouette against the sky.
You know better than anyone how much I’ve struggled with fatherhood. You know the doubts that have haunted me, the fear that Quentin would inherit the worst of my insecurities, that I would, by demanding too much of him, turn him into a spineless drone, a people-pleaser terrified of risk, as I’ve been for most of my life. Until this trip, those fears seemed not only justified but certain to come true.
No more. The boy who once crawled like a caterpillar has become a butterfly. He is alive, Vanessa. I’ve never met anyone more alive than he is. He is beautiful and strong and intelligent and capable. He could sail the rest of the way on his own and I don’t doubt he would make it home.
I give you more credit for this than I take myself. He sees the hearts of others like you do. He feels deep empathy for pain. There once was a day when I struggled to love him. Today, I look up to him. I wish I were more like he is. Maybe I will be someday. But even if I never make it, I am comforted that in this way, at least, I haven’t failed. I haven’t failed our son.
Where will he go? Only time will tell. But I believe that the stories he will pass on to his children will be greater than the story I’m telling you now. He’s as close to bulletproof as a man can get in this life. Nothing can hold him back. He’s learned to rise above his fears.
See you soon, I hope. Perhaps Cape Town?
—D
Vanessa set down the letter, thanking Daniel again for this talisman of hope in the blackest hours of her night. The thought came to her, as it had many times before, that it was almost as if he had known what was coming. It was ridiculous, of course. But she couldn’t help wondering if an angel had touched him that morning in the Seychelles. Someday she would read the words to Quentin. Someday he would remember the way his father was at the end. The letter was a more fitting epitaph than anything she could write.
She stood up and collected her things, saying good-bye to the staff. Aster met her in the hallway and saw the dried remnants of her tears. She gave Vanessa a long hug.
“Are you comfortable with this?” she asked. “Is he ready to answer questions?”
A few minutes ago, Vanessa might have said no. But the letter emboldened her. “I think he is.”
Aster gave her a poignant look. “Are you ready?”
Vanessa nodded. “I’ve come this far, haven’t I?”
“My mother always told me that strength is a choice. Be strong.”
Vanessa smiled. I’d rather be bulletproof. Like my son.
On the drive into Washington, Vanessa turned on Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but her mind drifted backward across the days and weeks since Quentin had returned to the United States and been admitted to the ICU at Georgetown. It had been a long and painful road to get him to the point where he could sit for an interview with federal agents, to the point, indeed, where he could understand what happened to him and why he needed to answer their questions at all.
Vanessa had remained at his bedside for days, watching as he slowly woke up from the coma. After the full battery of tests, the neurologists had confirmed what the military doctors suspected: he had suffered temporary anoxia—or oxygen loss to the brain—as a result of cardiac arrest brought on by the tamponade in his heart. The prognosis, however, was unclear. No one had been able to say with any certainty how the injury would affect him. So Vanessa asked them not to try.
The first three weeks had been a waiting game—excruciating at times, exuberant at others. He learned how to breathe on his own, how to swallow food, how to take thoughts out of the cloud of confusion and forgetfulness and form words again. Vanessa played his favorite piano music in the background—Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy. She read him stories and poetry and Ariadne’s daily e-mails. To Vanessa’s astonishment, the Australian girl took his injuries in stride, pressing in with support instead of disappearing into the woodwork. The effect her words had on him was almost hypnotic—steadying his soul and illumining his eyes.
After four weeks, his doctors had discharged him from acute care and moved him across town to NRH, where an award-winning team of therapists helped him recover his mental acuity, long-term memory, and motor skills. The more alert and energetic he became, the more the past took shape in his mind and the more he regained muscle control—maintaining balance while standing upright, walking over uneven surfaces, holding a toothbrush, dressing and feeding himself.
But there had been bumps in the road. Quentin’s capacity for language, his ability to make decisions—known as “executive function”—and his memory of the days preceding the shooting were significantly impaired. At first he seemed unaware of his disabilities. But the more his body and mind healed, the more agitated he became about his limitations. He was especially disturbed by his aphasia and amnesia. When he struggled to string words together in a sentence or identified another blank spot in his memory, he would pace his room like a tiger, muttering to himself. Sometimes when Vanessa came to visit, he refused to talk to her.
For Vanessa, however, the hardest part wasn’t the stuttering pace of Quentin’s recovery; it was the depression into which he slipped when she confessed to him that his father was gone. He had asked about Daniel many times, but Vanessa had dissembled as if he were a small child. “He’s not here right now,” she told him. After a week of rehab, Dr. Greenberg cautioned her against extending the illusion too far. So she summoned her courage and told him the truth. His response confirmed the worst of her fears. She watched in agony as his face fell and his mouth hung open, as the light faded from his eyes and he lapsed into a different kind of coma—a coma of the heart.
For two days he lost all interest in human interaction. He stayed in bed, wrapped in blankets, and ignored everyone. Music didn’t soothe him. Neither did Ariadne’s messages. Vanessa interrogated his therapists, searching for a way to save him. They told her to be patient and to give him space; he would return to her in time. At some point she realized that he wasn’t just struggling with grief. He was struggling with guilt—that he had survived and that he couldn’t remember how Daniel died.
It was then that she had an epiphany: for Quentin to escape the tunnel, he had to find a way to bury his father on his own terms. So she retrieved Daniel’s postcards and letters and read them aloud to Quentin. The postcards were a travelogue of their port calls in the Caribbean, Panama, and the South Pacific. Daniel had written his first letter on Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, after Quentin met Ariadne. As Vanessa revived Daniel’s memories, speaking them with her own voice, they became like threads in a tapestry, weaving together the narrative of Quentin’s redemption.
He started to talk again, to add to Daniel’s stories, filling in details that his father had omitted. He asked Vanessa to read the Rarotonga letter twice and then told her about Ariadne—about the days they had spent circling the island on mopeds and hiking across its mountainous spine, about the nights they had walked on the beach beneath the stars, talking about everything in the world. His therapists informed her that his openness was a symptom of his brain injury. But she regarded it as a gift. For the first time in his life, she had an unobstructed window into his soul.
A week later, in a therapy session with Dr. Greenberg, Quentin had started to talk about the hijacking. His memories were inchoate and disorganized, but the neuropsychologist encouraged them, evaluating the consistency of his story and his capacity for answering questions. In time, the doctor told him about the investigators who wanted to talk to him. Quentin agreed to an interview, and Dr. Greenberg made the arrangements.
Upon reaching the hospital, Vanessa parked in the garage and walked through the lobby to the elevator. Soon she emerged on Quentin’s floor and strolled down the hallway to his room. Dr. Greenberg met her at the door. A jovial man with a balding head and a scraggly beard, he looked more like a lumberjack than an expert in brain medicine. But he was as sharp as they came.
“He’s in good spirits,” the doctor said. “He really wants to do this. I’m going to limit the initial session to half an hour. I’ve made that clear to the agents. They can explore his surface memories, but I don’t want them to go too deep until we see how he responds.”
“Where will you be?” Vanessa asked, feeling a twinge of anxiety.
“I’ll be down the hall. If at any point you feel uncomfortable about the way it’s progressing, you can terminate the interview.” He touched her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right.”
When he left to get the investigators, Vanessa opened the door and found Quentin sitting upright on the bed, watching television. He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a Naval Academy sweatshirt, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
She kissed him on the forehead. “Hi, sweetie. How are you today?”
He stared at her a moment before smiling. The therapists called it “brain lag”—the second or two his mind required to adjust to something new. “Hey . . . Mom,” he replied, hesitating slightly between words. “I’m good . . . I want . . . to get this . . . over with.”
“I know you do,” she said warmly. “You’re going to do fine. Just take your time. There’s no need to rush. It’s okay if you don’t remember something.”
His eyes shifted to the bed, and he rubbed the hem of his blanket, as he did when he was nervous or upset. “I will . . . tell them . . . what I know.”
Vanessa placed a chair beside him and arranged two more at the foot of the bed. Then she turned off the television and took a seat, squeezing his hand. A minute later, she heard a knock at the door, and Dr. Greenberg brought in the agents. She knew them from her own interview. Ben Hewitt was a Harvard-educated attorney who had left a lucrative job in New York “to do something good for a change.” Carlos Escobido was Hewitt’s opposite—a hard-charging, chain-smoking detective from the Bronx who had busted drug dealers and Mafia dons before 9/11 prompted him to join the feds and hunt terrorists. Both were dressed casually in shirts and slacks. They shook Quentin’s hand and took a seat, placing a digital recorder on the bed.
Hewitt took the lead. “Quentin,” he began, “I want to tell you how sorry we are for what you’ve gone through. We’re going to make this as easy as we can—a few questions today, maybe a few more tomorrow. Is that all right with you?”
Quentin processed this. “I will tell you . . . what I remember.”
“That’s all we ask.” Hewitt sat back and folded his hands. “Do you recall when the pirates came aboard the sailboat? Can you tell me about that?”
As Vanessa watched, Quentin turned away from Hewitt and stared at a spot on the wall. “It was night,” he said with a frown. “Or morning . . . It was dark. I was . . . on watch . . . I fell asleep. I heard shots . . . then my dad came . . . from below. We didn’t fight.”
“How many were there?” Hewitt asked as Escobido made notes.
“Seven.” Quentin grimaced and closed his eyes. “I know . . . their names.” Suddenly, he blurted out, “Mas.” He thought some more. Then: “Liban . . . Their leader was . . . Af . . . Afyareh.”
Hewitt waited a few seconds before asking, “How did you know Afyareh was in charge?”
“He told us,” Quentin replied. “And . . .” He looked lost in thought. “And . . . we saw . . . the way he talked . . . to the others. He spoke English . . . he . . . negotiated . . . with the Navy.”
With deftness and a gentle touch, Hewitt led him through the major events in sequence: the arrival of the Gettysburg, then the Truman and San Jacinto the next morning; the planes and helicopters the Navy put in the air and then grounded after Curtis—“Grandpa,” in Quentin’s words—intervened with the government. When Hewitt inquired about the ransom negotiations, however, Quentin drew a blank. Vanessa watched him wrestle with himself, saw his brow furrow and his shoulders tense. She traded a glance with Hewitt and shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“Why don’t we change gears?” he said, taking her cue. “With the time we have left, let’s focus on Afyareh. Is that okay with you?”
The muscles in Quentin’s face relaxed. “Okay.”
Hewitt softened his tone. “Did Afyareh ever point his gun at you?”
Quentin looked into the distance again. “I don’t . . .” For a moment he seemed confused, then his expression clarified and his eyes filled with sadness. “Afyareh . . . pointed his gun . . . at my dad. He said—” A tear spilled down Quentin’s cheek. “He said, ‘Do you . . . want to die?’”
Vanessa took a breath and held it, transfixed by her son’s words. She imagined the scene—Daniel’s hands flying into the air; Afyareh shouting his threats; Daniel pleading with the pirate not to shoot; Quentin watching the confrontation, at once horrified and afraid. She felt the rage again, stirring in her gut. Then, in an instant, her anger branched out and encircled her heart like a malevolent vine, blocking out the light. There at the core of her something else began to grow—hatred.
Hewitt made a note to himself. “Those were his exact words: ‘Do you want to die?’” When Quentin nodded, he asked, “Do you recall when he said that?”
Quentin began to fiddle with the edge of his blanket again. “There was a . . . boat that came . . . No, that was . . . another time . . . The ships were nearby . . . He was angry . . . He wanted them . . . to go away . . . I don’t . . . I don’t remember when that was.”
