Page 2 of Gone Before Goodbye
“You can’t save him,” the nurse says to me, as she pulls away. “Even if you finish in time, even if he could somehow survive the surgery, they won’t let him live.”
I don’t know who “they” are. I don’t know the justifications, the origins, the history, the factions, the tribes, the warlords, the fanatics, the extremists, the innocents. I don’t know who the good guys or the bad guys are, why these people are in this refugee camp, what side is the oppressor or what side is the oppressed. It’s not that I’m not political, but for Maggie and Trace and me, it can’t matter.
I continue to work on my patient, a fifteen-year-old boy named Izil. I hope everyone I treat is an innocent, but I doubt it. It just can’t be our job to figure out who is on what side. Our job, not to get too grandiose, is to save their lives. They say, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” It’s close to the opposite for us—save them all and let God… You get the drift.
I’m not being “both sides” here. I’m being “no sides.”
“Everyone out,” I say. “I want the room cleared.”
“Marc,” Trace says.
Our eyes meet over the surgical masks. Trace and I have known each other a long time. We did our surgical residency together. We have provided medical aid in humanitarian crises like this one across the globe. He is one of the most gifted cardiothoracic surgeons in the world.
Trace says, “I can help you close.”
“I got it.”
“We’ll wait.”
I shake my head, but he knows.
“Leave me an ambulance,” I say. “They won’t shoot up an ambulance.”
We both know this is no longer true, not in today’s world.
We should never have come. I shouldn’t have allowed it. I should have taken care of business and said goodbye and flown home.
I should be with Maggie.
I don’t say goodbye to Trace. He doesn’t say goodbye to me.
But this will be the last time I ever see him.
Seconds later, it’s only Izil and me in the room. I hurry, stupidly thinking I can make it. I am closing the boy’s chest when the doors burst open.
Armed militants storm in. I don’t know how many. They all have that crazed look in their eyes. I have seen that look before. Too many times. I saw it just a few days ago east of Djanet.
And sometimes I see it when I look in the mirror.
I close my eyes and picture Maggie’s face and wait for someone to pull the trigger.
CHAPTER ONE
Baltimore
ONE YEAR LATER
Maggie McCabe shouldn’t have come.
“Where are you?” Marc asks.
Maggie looks down at her husband’s face on the phone screen. “I told you.”
“Johns Hopkins?”
“Yes.”
“You on the quad?”
