Kiro. He acts like such a brute, such a savage, but at this moment, he’s more achingly human than anyone I’ve even known. Needing to connect. Like his life depends on it.
“What did you lose?”
Am I really going to do this? To tell him? “Just my career,” I say. “I guess it shouldn’t be that big of a deal—”
“Your career is a big deal for you.”
“It is. Was.” I swish my hand in the water, and suddenly I’m telling him how I used to be so badass. I tell him how I was on top of my game in the journalism trenches. “It’s different from the kinds of reporters you met. You know what long-form journalism is? It’s where you write articles that are way longer than…they’re just long and hopefully thoughtful. Anyway, I’d pitch stories to good publications, and they’d bite, sending me to far-off locations. They’d know I’d get the story I promised or a better one. I have a nose for a story.”
“Like with me.”
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
I feel the quicksilver slide of a fish against my fingertips, and I grab for it. I have its tail for a split second, then it slips through.
“Hard to keep hold of the tail,” he says. “You learn that pretty fast.”
“Yow.” I switch arms. My right hand needs to thaw.
“As a woman, I gained access to realms that guys couldn’t get into. I also had nursing skills, which made me valuable in a crisis. I could sometimes stay long after they were shooing the civilians out. War zones. Or refugee situations. Disasters.”
“You’re also resourceful, Ann. I saw you at the hospital, the way you were. You never gave up. You kept fighting no matter what.”
I rest my chin on my non-fishing arm and look into his eyes. Some men, when they look at you, it’s like they’re taking from you. But Kiro gives. He looks with his heart.
It makes it easy to tell him the hard things. I tell him about the hospital bombing. “I was working alongside Worldcorps Medicale, doing this long, in-depth NGO story, when the hospital we were in was shelled. I’d been shelled before, though I’d always been in bomb shelters. This was like nothing I’d ever been through. The building groaning like a monster. Metal girders screaming. I pulled four kids from the unit into a stainless steel meds cooler just as everything collapsed around us. We were trapped, the five of us. In near darkness—just a tiny sliver of light. The smallest boy was badly injured on the way in, and by the time the chaos quieted, I knew he was dead. The other kids were hysterical from the collapse alone. I couldn’t let them know, so I pulled the dead kid into my lap. I said he was sleeping. Sometimes I pretended he was moving around. We were in there for thirty-nine hours, trapped, listening to people—”
“You held a dead child for nearly two days?”
“The other kids would’ve freaked out. The kids and I sang a lot of songs. When we got out, everybody was really amazed at how I kept my famous cool.”
He just lies there. Fishing. Listening.
“My editor at the time wanted that story instead; obviously it was better than the NGO story I’d gone to cover. That means nongovernmental organization. Like an aid group. It was a coup to have an actual journalist trapped in rubble with kids. But every time I tried to write about it, it was chaos in my mind. I couldn’t find the story. I couldn’t find my way in. I couldn’t find the right detail.”
I describe how she held a feature space open for me and I blew two deadlines and they had to run something from the can. I couldn’t handle even a Q&A with another reporter. I wasn’t sleeping anymore.
“I felt so numb in those days after, and there was this sense I had suddenly that every single detail from those thirty-nine hours weighed exactly the same. That maybe doesn’t sound important, but it really is. When you’re a reporter, you’re always sifting through the pebbles of a story, looking for the one detail that weighs the most, that means the most. I couldn’t find it. And every time I’d go near a hospital, the antiseptic smell would seriously fuck me up.”
“Oh,” he says.
“Right.” I tell him how I had another gig lined up after that, also in Afghanistan. “It was a glorious story—an interview with a notorious and nearly mythical female warlord from out of the Hindu Kush mountain range.”
“The one you missed. You were two hours late.”
“You were listening.”
“Every word.”
“Everyone was jealous I landed it. A career-making story. And the kitten incident made me miss the only chance at this interview. Made me trash months of legwork by a very major publication.”
“You saw the little paw. You got men to move the rock slabs,” he says. “That’s what you said. You talked about your…fixer. I wondered what that was.”
“A fixer is a helper, often in places where the order has broken down. Sometimes just a driver.” I swish my hand around. “So yada yada yada, I’m supposed to be this pro, and I’m kneeling in a road with a kitten. I suppose you remember that part.”
“I do,” he says, listening intently, chin on the rough bark.
“That’s when you held my hand, Kiro.” I grin. “Fuck, do you know how much that shocked me? You nearly sent me through the ceiling.”