DISCLAIMER: Not mine. No money made. Maca, Esther and (to my great disappointment also Cruz), along with the entirety of Hospital Central, belong to Telecino. All I own is my brain and a very vivid imagination. I only lay claim to the journey I'm sending the characters on.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: After taking refuge in the Hospital Central fandom almost a year ago, I am delighted to see the growing interest for Maca and Esther in the international community, where Ralst's call for submissions finally convinced me to post this story here as well. It is originally being written in single chapters on the Spanish Maca y Esther board at miarroba (Ralst has kindly added the link to the HC link section, and if any of you speaks Spanish, I'd advise you to run and don't walk over there and take a look at the fan fic section) and is as of yet unfinished.
TIMEFRAME: uh… let's call it al Alternative AU, which is like an Über, but not quite. The Spanish folks on miarroba write nearly exclusively in this form.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.

By Nordica aka Nique Bartok

51

Esther needed a few moments to recognize the room she was in, dark and with high ceilings. It was the church where the funeral had taken place. It looked strange this empty, with the deserted rows gazing back at her. The sound of her bare feet on the stone floor echoed softly around her and when she looked down her body, she saw that she was wearing a thin summer dress, one of those which she had worn in the Congo.

The coffins in front of the altar were gone, only a few dried flowers still giving testimony to the funeral service. One woman was sitting in the front row, her head bent, and Esther couldn't see her face because she was wearing a hat. In walking closer, she realized it was Maca's mother who was trying not to cry, but tears kept silently running down her cheeks, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs. She looked at Esther with desperation, but she didn't seem to notice her, seeing right through her.

Esther tried to reach out to her in comfort, but suddenly, there were more and more empty rows between them and Esther could only watch as Maca's mother continued to cry, restrained but inconsolably, crying all those tears that Esther herself hadn't left to shed anymore.

A motion close to the altar distracted Esther and she thought her heart would stop for a moment when she saw Maca sit on the stairs, in her cargo pants and a small t-shirt with rolled up sleeves, her hair loosely tied back, just like the first time she had ever seen her.

Blinking incredulously, Esther wanted to hurry towards her, but there was an infinite sadness in Maca's gaze that stopped her short. She could do noting but watch as Maca slowly stood up and walked down the stairs towards her mother.

"Please stop crying…I'm back…" Maca said before she enfolded her mother in a hug and Esther felt guilty for not crying as well, standing there shell-shocked and yearning to be the one Maca embraced instead. She was terrified that this was just a mirage, that Maca wouldn't be able to see her, just as her mother hadn't seen her, and she wanted to call or out wave, but found herself unable to move, shivering with sudden cold in the room.

But just at that moment, Maca looked up over her mother's shoulder and looked directly at her and Esther drank in that gaze like someone who had been dying of thirst without knowing it. Those were really Maca's eyes, with their warmth and their softly glowing fire and that edge of mischievousness…

Not daring to believe her luck, Esther hastened forward, stumbling over her own feet, so terribly afraid that Maca would vanish into thin air before she could reach her. And then Maca's mother turned around as well, seeing her rushing towards them, and she merely nodded at Esther in that polite, understated way and took a step to the side as Esther threw herself into Maca's arms, clawing her fingers into her shoulders as if she could attach her own body to Maca's, to prevent her from ever leaving again.

"Esther…" It was Maca's voice next to her ear, strangely weak, but it was her voice and Esther buried her face in Maca's neck, breathing in that endlessly familiar mix of skin, lotion and sun, noting the worn cotton of the shirt against her cheek and the slightly salty tang of the skin under her lips. "It was just a mistake… a graze shot… I'm back…"

And Esther could only nod, still clinging to Maca, desperate to hold her as close as possible. The ground under her feet was soft suddenly and Esther realized it was warm earth. She could hear Maca smile against her ear. "You simply had a bad dream…" she murmured and Esther nodded, holding on for a moment longer before she opened her eyes again and the church was gone. They stood behind the last row of patient huts at the clinic, the early morning sun playing through Maca's hair.

And just as Esther finally allowed herself to believe that this was real, that finally, she was back where she belonged, there was the sound of heavy tires across the planes and shots, tearing Maca out of her arms and hurling her to the ground.

Again, Esther could feel the shards cutting into her arms, but she tried to throw herself across Maca, to stay with her, to at least stay with her this time, but something held her back and she had to watch in horror as the vultures drew together above and from afar. The silhouette of a hyena was visible against the horizon, and then another one, and another… slowly coming closer in their trademark silent slink… Maca stared at her, pleading wordlessly for help and Esther struggled against the grip that held her captive, crying with ire, but it was as if she were cemented into a wall, unable to move a muscle, not even able to scream…

With a gasp, Esther tore out of sleep, jerking up in the bed and pushing the hair away from her forehead with trembling fingers. Her pajama clung to her skin, drenched in cold sweat.

Maca…

The nightmare still stood terribly clearly in front of her eyes and as always, the sickness came just a moment later and Esther barely made it into the bathroom, retching until she tasted gall.

She remained on her knees for long minutes, her forehead pressed against the cool enamel of the toilet.

"Esther?" A sleepy voice called out from outside the bathroom. "Sweetheart…?" There was a knock on the door, and Miguel waited for a few moments before he entered, taking in the familiar scene with worry. With now practiced ease, he wet a towel with cool water and helped Esther sit up on the edge of the bathtub. He filled a glass with water while she cooled off her face and looked at him apologetically.

"You should sleep," she murmured.

"As if I could sleep when you're feeling this bad," he replied gently, brushing a hand across her shoulder. "Come on… you need to rest as well. I'll get you a new pajama."

Esther drank a few more sips of water before she followed him back into the bedroom, slipping out of her sweaty pajama and into a new one automatically. It wasn't the first night like this.

Miguel had already climbed back into the double bed, looking at her tiredly, his curly hair sticking out in all directions. She gave him a look of fond gratitude as she pulled the covers back over herself. "I'm sorry…" she offered, not knowing what else she could say.

"Don't worry." Miguel shook his head. "You were traumatized. I know this will take time." He pressed his lips to her forehead, a calming gesture that contained almost nothing romantic. Almost. "Try to sleep a little, okay?"

She nodded, bathed in darkness as Miguel switched off the light again. The alarm clock on the nightstand read 4 a.m.

A lot of nights were like this now, but Miguel never complained. He never tried to touch her, either, a hug or a gentle kiss on the cheek were the most he opted for, and the most Esther allowed. She hadn't been enthusiastic about moving in with him after she had been released from the clinic, but in her mother's small apartment, she couldn't really stay, and she had to admit that at the moment, she didn't have the energy to look for an apartment on her own.

If it weren't for Miguel, Esther thought, she wouldn't be sleeping or eating at all. He took care of her, never demanding anything in return, leaving her feeling more and more guilty about not telling him about Maca. But Maca was her secret, something that belonged to know no but her, and she guarded it with jealousy. It was nobody's business but hers and Maca's.

Maca, and always Maca. Esther couldn't count the nightmares anymore, always the same – trying to get through to Maca, being unable to defend her, looking for Maca and not finding her, and the worst ones, the ones like tonight, lulling her into the peace of a possible reunion, painfully real enough that she could breathe the smell of Maca' skin and feel the texture of her clothes under her fingers, only to be torn away from her again and having Maca stare at her, helplessly and pleading while she was dying.

Some nights, Esther found herself half curled around Miguel, as if the sensation of another body close by could keep the horrible images at bay. Sometimes it helped, a little, but the dreams still came back.

How many times had she dreamed, both asleep and awake, that Maca had by some miracle survived the deadly gunshot, conjuring up ridiculous fantasies of an impossible reunion? Her therapist said it was a defense mechanism, but Esther hadn't really told the therapist just what Maca had been to her, either.

"You were traumatized."

Miguel's patient assessment echoed through Esther's mind and she turned onto her side, thinking bitterly that quite the opposite was true. She had been happy, deliriously happy.

And then she had lost everything.

She remembered laying awake with Maca at night when the heat was too oppressive to sleep, talking softly and making plans. They had used to complain about the heat and the thin mattresses and the bugs, instead dreaming of a little place back in Spain, of a proper bathroom and going out for cool beers in the evening, conjuring up their own little paradise of sorts. But while they had been making all these plans, they had never stopped to realize that paradise had actually been right where they were.

Before the malaria, Esther amended her own thoughts, only to shake her head at herself. Even during the malaria, when they had lost patients by the dozen, even through the horrible, silent funeral trips out into the planes, there had still been Maca when the day was over. They had still had each other.

Esther lay awake for a long time, hearing Miguel's even breathing at the other side of the bed and feeling terribly alone despite the warmth of another human body so close by. She yearned for Maca's arms around her with a hopeless, desperate intensity, an emotion so fierce that she thought it would consume herself and all the emptiness she felt, numb as if someone had cut her wings right at her shoulder blades, leaving her useless and unable to move, with no idea where to go now.

52

The transporter jolted through another hole in the barely there road, sending two of the men half sliding into Maca where she sat between them on one of the benches in the back. She had to stifle a smile when they hastened to move away again, leaving a hand's breadth of space between themselves and the foreign woman, even in the close confines of the transport car.

It was the fourth day they traveled; and Maca had needed a day or two to figure out why everyone was treating her with such wary respect. After the birth of little Ma-Ka and the way she seemed to have cured Adanna's dizzy spells and swellings, someone had apparently set free the rumor that Maca was a witch of sorts, and now it was what she heard the rebels call her behind her back with a mixture of fear and resentment. For once, Maca was grateful for the superstition that raged high even among this outlaw group. Most of them were barely in their late teens, but neither Sefu nor Amobi had come along. Sefu's father was driving, though, and a worried Karim had pleaded with Maca to stay close to him since he was indebted to her because she had healed Sefu.

Maca had to admit that she had been more than uncomfortable at the prospect of riding for four days in a small bus with a group of men who were numbed enough by militia life that they could look with curious detachment at a woman who was nearly dying with labor pain. The rumor about her 'witch powers' kept everyone at bay, though, and it had also kept everyone at an arm's length from Adanna and her baby. Maca only hoped it would stay this way. She had made Karim promise her that he would take care of them before she left. The goodbye from her little namesake had been harder than expected, even though she had only spent a scant few days with him before the rebels had regrouped enough to move out again.

The superstitious belief that she was somehow a witch also had kept Maca from being blindfolded during this trip since clearly, she would be able to see through any blindfold anyway. Two days ago, she had cured an infected arm wound on one of the more boisterous guerillas with nothing but distilled water and some ominous schnapps she wouldn't drink, but which served well to disinfect wounds and ever since then, nobody even dared to look at her the wrong way. Only the self-appointed commander continued to look at her with distrustful antipathy, a feeling that was wholly mutual on Maca's part.

For the most part, she tried not to think about with whom exactly she was traveling here. The guerillas were a means to an end and she had no other option, but even when she had treated that arm wound, she had kept thinking about how the man had gotten the wound, in what ominous pillaging or plundering 'mission', and she had been secretly glad when he winced under the sting of the alcohol. She kept wondering whether one of these men with whom she sat in that narrow transporter, silent in the heat, for long hours every day, had been the one who had killed Pablo and she had to reign in her rage every time, reminding herself that she had no other option. Perhaps, if there hadn't been anyone else to consider, she would have refused to travel with the rebels, instead trying her luck on her own or waiting until Karim left the jungle again. She would have upheld her principles and told these thugs to go to hell, but these thugs were her best chance to get back to civilization as quickly as possible, to Mbuji-Mayi, and to Esther, and so Maca had swallowed her bad conscience. All that mattered was getting back to Esther who had to be worried out of her mind.

And despite the tension, and the lack of sleep – she didn't allow herself to sleep too deeply when they stopped, not trusting any of them especially since she knew they hadn't been happy about taking her along – Maca was in a state of giddy excitement that made her endure the strenuous trip without a single complaint.

The moment when they had pushed the car out of the last bit of the forest, into the open air of the planes, had been indescribable. For the first time in weeks, Maca had the feeling that she could breathe freely. And every glance out of the broken car windows reminded her that she was getting closer and closer to home. To Esther.

More than once, she was convinced to see the clinic in driving past, a line of white laundry hanging heavily in the thick air in between the small, brushwood covered huts, but every time, it was just another village, or just a mirage. Maca wondered whether there was a new team at the clinic now, or whether they had given it up completely. She remembered those last, hard weeks, battling the malaria and the superstition.

No, for now she was through with missions like this. Now, it was time to come home to Esther, and do nothing but enjoy every moment in her presence while they decided what to do next. Perhaps she would even try and talk to her parents again, if they had become a bit more reasonable by now. Possibly, she could even take Esther to Jeréz with her, introducing her to her parents and seeing whether they could relax for a while at the mansion.

The hours passed over thoughts like these, happier than the brooding worries about what exactly the rebels might be up to. Maca knew she would inform headquarters about the cell, but she knew just as well that there was nothing they could do to stop them, either.

On this fourth day, in the late afternoon, they dropped her off close to a small village that was at walking distance to Mbuji-Mayi.

"You leave here," the commander informed her with a sneer and Maca jumped off the transporter without a word, but not without staring at him with such cool aplomb that he nervously averted his eyes and looked to the ground. She knew he wished her to hell, and she returned the wish tenfold, but right now, she was much closer to paradise than he would ever be. In the distance, she could already see the street to Mbuji-Mayi, and, trembling in the hot air, the outline of the outskirts in the distance.

Only the young man whose arm she had helped to heal looked at her with a respectful smile, and then Maca turned around to walk towards the village, not looking back once. She heard the car stutter and start again behind her and felt nothing but utter relief at being away from the guerillas.

Again, she looked over at the outline of Mbuji-Mayi, thinking that somewhere in this city, tomorrow, she would see Esther again.

53

Thankfully, the village was one where Maca had been before with Mbele and Azuka and the people recognized her immediately, even though she definitely looked a little worse for wear. There were at least some perks to being one of very few white people who kept sticking out like sore thumbs: you got recognized a lot easier.

Maca was very exhausted, but among the many voices who spoke to her in a mix of slightly different Luba and thick French, she caught that Mbele apparently had been traveling through here as well, a few weeks ago, released from quarantine and heading back out to the planes, accompanied by another man who had to have been Malik. She was relieved to know that they both had made it out all right. Much as she asked, though, it seemed neither of the two had said anything about Esther or any of their other Spanish colleagues during their brief stay, so Maca was left with the same impatience, this single last night now seeming as long as all the nights before combined ever since she had been separated from Esther.

Still, it was the first night she slept peacefully again, away from the rebels, lulled into sleep by the low voices of the elders around the fire and the occasional bleat of the goats. The silhouette of Mbuji-Mayi with its few evening lights stood clear in the distance and Maca felt a bit like a pilgrim at the end of the pilgrimage when she traveled into town by foot with a few of the villagers the next morning, staring at the city line in front of her as if she was expecting it to disappear in front of her eyes.

With every step, the houses and streets came nearer, and Maca could barely believe that she had finally made it here. She needed a while to find the headquarters; before, she had always taken a taxi, but she was without money, with no credit cards or identification.

Walking up to the house, Maca had problems to recognize it at first. The front side was blackened, half the roof was in disarray and some of the windows were splintered or missing completely.

"Grenade last month," said the young soldier who was leaning against the fence. He shrugged, spitting onto the street to his side. "With the elections almost upon us, they should send some of those UN troops down here, not just to Kinshasa."

Maca didn't remember him; the last time she had been here, the Permanent Representation of Foreign Medics and Services hadn't been guarded like this, but then, the last time she had been here, the windows had been intact.

The soldier waved her through – the Wilson attitude her mother had imprinted on her apparently even worked in threadbare fatigues – and Maca mused that like this, the security wouldn't do much good. She would have stopped herself if she were the guard, as shabby and lost as she looked like.

It was a whole different thing when she walked into the office where the bureaucrat responsible for the government-subsidized missions of Médecins Sans Frontières resided. Maca blinked at seeing a young, clean-shaven man behind the desk who was probably younger than she was herself. At least the young man seemed just as surprised, surveying her with skepticism, taking in her ragged clothes that clearly had not originally been intended for her, the shirt a little too tight and the pants a little too loose. She looked a lot more like a homeless person than a doctor.

"Where is Matthieu?" she asked, hoping to be able to speak with the elderly gentlemen who had taken care of their paperwork before.

"He left after the grenade attack," the young man stated, still staring at her askance. "The entire team changed…" He shook his head. "So… what can I do for you?" he inquired with all due reserve.

Maca couldn't blame him. "I need some information about the local personnel of Médecins Sans Frontières," she said formally. Especially about a certain Esther García, she added mentally, because seeing her again was a matter of life and death, at least as far as Maca was concerned.

"Médecins Sans Frontières?" the man behind the desk echoed forlornly, looking up at the tall, disheveled woman in front of him whose impatient gaze seemed to bore right through him. "We don't have any Médecins Sans Frontières here anymore." He shook his head. "They pulled off all their personnel --- there was a bad incident out in Kasaï-Oriental a while back and…"

"I know that," Maca interrupted him arrogantly. "I was in it." She kept looking around the office as if Esther should be there, like she had imagined it so many times. "I'm Dr. Macarena Wilson, and I'd like my mail." The man still stared at her, not really reacting. "Please," she added coolly.

"Uh…" The office worker still looked at her skeptically. "And you can prove that…?"

"Naturally, I lost all my papers during the attack," Maca pointed out dryly. "But even though I spent the past weeks recuperating in the jungle and am clearly not in the best condition, I should still match my photo, I hope." She raised an eyebrow in exasperation when the young man simply stared at her, clearly perplexed by her patterns of speech that did not at all match her outfit.

"So… it would be very kind if you could sort through the copies that should be deposited here?" Maca prompted after a moment.

"Most everything got burned," the office worker said, rising from his chair, now with a certain nervousness and Maca saw that the file cabinet he was beginning to sort through looked rather new, as did the computer on his desk.

"There should be a letter for me here…" Maca tried to gaze at the papers he was shifting, hoping to see one of Esther's envelopes, the ones she had always used to write to Miguel or to her mother, but then she realized that they would all have been left behind at the clinic. "…or a note, at least," she amended nervously, shifting from one foot to the other. "From Esther… Esther García… or Dr. Rodolfo Vilches…"

A few minutes passed until he looked up, shaking his head at her over a stack of folders. "No, there is nothing here… no letter… no note. No receipt of a call, either." He pushed the file cabinet close again. "About your documentation, I can send someone to look through the boxes with papers that survived the grenade fire… perhaps there is something. – They are still unsorted, though." He cleared his throat as if he was embarrassed by the state of disarray, but Maca had more important things to worry about.

"No note? Where are they?" She asked in bafflement. "They were supposed to wait for me…" Fear crept up her insides now. "What happened to my teammates?"

"I don't know." The young man shrugged with regret. "I only got here afterwards… after the incident in Kasaï-Oriental, and after the grenade… Most of the files were burned and nobody waits for anyone anymore around here." There was sympathy in his expression now. "It's only weeks till the elections and most organizations have pulled off personnel. And we try not to sponsor such risky missions anymore… unless you want your head blown off by some Tutsi militia near the Tanzanian border with the crazy NGO folks. They still accept applications."

"No thanks," Maca declined with aplomb. "I just want to go home."

Home to Esther. Home to take her out to that dinner she had promised her so long ago, and to buy them that little apartment that they had decorated in their minds during the long nights when the malaria had raged in the clinic and it had been too hot to sleep. Actually, she just wanted to find Esther and take her into her arms and hold her for a long, very long time. Anything else could wait.

She didn't understand that there was no letter, no note – even after the fire, in these past few weeks, there should have arrived something. Esther would ask about her every day, she knew that. Maca harshly tried to swallow her disappointment.

"You can use our computer, if you need to inform anyone," the office worker offered belatedly, gesturing at Maca to take a seat in front of the computer at which he motioned with pride. "And you can have someone call you here," he added. "With the calls going out, it doesn't really work these days…" He shrugged apologetically.

Maca sank down onto the offered chair without a single clear thought. Headquarters, attacked… it meant that her letter to Esther could have made it here, and still have gotten lost in the grenade attack. She had no way to find that out. Neither did she know if there had been any reply for her here. She didn't even know if she could get access to her own papers and passport copies again! And what was worse, she had no idea where Esther was waiting for her, whether she was even still in Mbuji-Mayi, or perhaps in Kinshasa, or even back in Spain.

"Wait…" Maca looked up to find the man wave at her excitedly. "Our concierge is still the same, she should have been there then… she was here before the attack." He nodded enthusiastically, happy with his own idea and perhaps also a little relieved that he could hand over the responsibility for this foreign woman who looked so run down and had no papers, but acted like a rich bourgeois. "I'll find her…" He gestured at her to wait before he left the room after a bout of hesitation where he apparently decided that this woman wouldn't try to walk out of his office and steal his computer.

Maca logged into her email account, needing a moment to remember the password. The feeling of a keyboard underneath her fingers was alien, as if she had never done it before. She was worried for a moment that her account had been deleted due to inactivity, but then she only had to reactivate it. It was empty.

When Maca opened her address book, she saw the little online icon blinking next to a name and smiled when she recognized it was Begoña. She sent her a brief note asking her to call her at the headquarters in Mbuji-Mayi as soon as possible, and whether she had an address or phone number for Esther. Anything else could wait.

Maca cursed herself now for never asking Esther for her email address, or any address. She knew that Esther hadn't had an apartment back in Spain – after all, Miguel had been waiting with the new one, and that had been a topic Maca had never liked to dwell on unnecessarily – and now Maca reasoned she should at least have asked for the address of Esther's mother, or for a cell phone number.

She had never asked because they had always had more important things to talk about, or to do. And also, with a certainty that seemed criminally naïve to her in retrospect, she had never assumed the possibility that she and Esther would be separated like this.

At that moment, the office worker entered again, with a small, but very massive woman at his side who had to be somewhere in her fifties. Maca hastily logged out of the computer again, thinking that she didn't really remember the woman, but then, she had only been here a few times, and the more important thing was that the woman remembered her, and the others.

The office worker pointed the woman in her direction, and for a while, the concierge simply stared at her, much as her colleague had done when Maca had entered.

But Maca was at a point where she didn't care what she looked like. And right now, she had no time for introductions or polite small talk. "What happened to the team from Kasaï-Oriental?" she questioned without preamble. "The one from Médecins Sans Frontières?"

The woman leaned her head back for a long moment and Maca half expected her to break into some chanting like the healer at the village. But then the woman spoke, in a rich, broken French Maca was able to understand. "They all left… there was a bad mission… a while ago."

"I know that," Maca replied impatiently. "But the ones that got back here… was anyone here? A woman… a white woman, about this tall…" Maca motioned with a hand, almost feeling Esther leaning against her with her head on her shoulder, fitting against her own body perfectly. "A little pale, perhaps, but very pretty… With dark eyes, and dark curly hair… a woman who asked about me?"

The concierge looked at her oddly for a few seconds and then shook her head. "There was only a white man, with little hair. He kept yelling…he was very angry. Bad spirits." The woman put her right fist against her open left hand, a gesture Maca had seen a lot over the past few days. It was supposed to ward of the evil eye and other curses. "He was yelling he lost half his team…"

"…half his team?" Maca repeated in shock, the color draining from her face.

"Half his team. He kept saying it on the phone, again and again." The concierge shrugged. "He said they died on him, and he'd be damned if he left anyone else behind." She clicked her tongue. "Very angry…"

Half his team. The phrase echoed hollowly through Maca's mind even though she was already feverishly doing the math. Half the team, three of the six of them… Pablo had been shot, she knew that. And Maria had been very ill when they had been evacuated… Vilches was apparently fine, if he could yell at people at the headquarters, and Maca herself was all right as well. And so was Begoña, unless somebody else had taken over her email address.

That only left… Maca stopped short of her own thought, shaking her head. Perhaps Vilches hadn't meant it literally, or it had been about having to leave her behind, and not about Esther. Perhaps they had her flown out and she was fine and the people at headquarters simply didn't know about it. But Maca had to admit that Esther had still been very weak, even though her fever had been down. And the trip to Mbuji-Mayi was strenuous for a healthy person already. And if even Maria hadn't made it…

Maca felt nauseous, the room around her beginning to spin.

"Sit," the concierge urged her worriedly. "Sit…" And Maca sank down onto the shabby plastic chair that the concierge helpfully shoved underneath her unsteady legs.

After weeks of struggle, of living with God knew what kind of rebels, out in the jungle, held upright by the one thought of Esther waiting for her in Mbuji-Mayi… after all this, after finally having it made back to civilization, would she be forced to realize that Esther was long gone?

Without conscious thought, Maca's hand went to her left hip, to where the lion tattoo was embedded into her skin, and she clung to the thought that all this had to be a terrible misunderstanding. "God, please no…" she muttered tonelessly, the exhaustion of the past few days finally catching up with her, now that the beacon she had been looking towards all these weeks was nowhere to be seen anymore. Inwardly, she bartered with the devil. She'd do anything, if only Esther was all right. She'd go back home and beg her parents' forgiveness, something she had sworn she would never do. She'd join another mission out here in the Congo, just as dangerous as the last one. She'd walk and swim back to Spain.

She'd endure anything as long as Esther was fine.

Anything.

54

"The letter…" Maca remembered after long minutes of shifting through files for any possible sign of Esther. She had started to help when things were going to slow for her tastes. "I sent a letter here… Did you get it? Did she get it?"

"Look." The office worker looked at her gently, realizing that this was a matter of greater importance to Maca than he had initially assumed. "If she – this Ms. García, right? – was flown out, and the letter got here before the fire, we sent it after her." He motioned at the files in front of him – she had made him turn the whole cabinet upside down – and shrugged apologetically. "But there is nothing that arrived here since then, not for her…" He glanced at her taxingly. "…and not from her, either. "

"There was an odd letter," the concierge remembered. She had sat down on the plastic chair Maca had vacated in her hurry to aid the search, and the material was squeaking threateningly under her weight. "Odd paper. A leaf. Smelled like metal. It got here."

"So they sent it on to Spain, to her… right?" Maca asked hopefully.

The concierge nodded slowly. "They should have, it was just before the fire."

"That means you have an address for her…" Maca reasoned hopefully.

"Had," the concierge corrected her. "Before the grenade." At seeing Maca's heartbroken look, she slowly rose from her chair. "I'm sorry, girl…"

"I will send someone to look for the salvaged personnel files in cellar," the office worker suggested comfortingly. "Perhaps something survived the melee… but things are not sorted or in order down there."

"I can look myself…" Maca started, but the man interrupted her, instead sending the concierge out of the room with a nod.

"You sit down here, and have a tea while we wait… all right?" He stood there until she was seated again, clearly afraid she would turn his office upside down for a second time.

Maca stared at the clock while he tried to put all the papers back where they belonged. The little rack with the incoming mail yawned emptily at her and she glared at it in return, knowing that there was nothing in there for her, no letter, no note, no receipt of a call. And still she couldn't refrain from asking again, just once more, as if the answer could be different this time. "And you are sure she didn't write?!" But how could she, Maca thought bitterly, if something had happened to her. And there was no way Esther wouldn't be looking for her if she could.

"Nothing in the past month," the man repeated regretfully looking up from his desk with an expression of scheduled patience. "And before that… it might have been lost in the fire."

"She has to be all right," Maca repeated, more to herself. "She has to be…"

A sound at the door interrupted her fervent wishes and she saw someone who had to be an office clerk at the door with a thin file under his arm.

The office worker – Maca realized that she hadn't even asked for his name yet – took it from him and nodded as he sifted through the contents. "We have a file… but no permanent address." He handed her a slightly singed folder, and Maca almost cried at recognizing Esther's handwriting and seeing the pass photo of Esther, with the haircut she had had when she arrived at the clinic. She passed her fingers over it longingly, taking in the warmth and decisiveness of her eyes and the disarming smile she had even on this official photo.

The office worker noted Maca's wistful look with concern, it wasn't the first time he had to deal with the disappointment over a jungle romance that had ended badly. "Perhaps she didn't want to be found?" suggested tentatively.

The muted ring of the phone interrupted them before Maca could snap at him in angry reply, and then the office worker held the receiver out to her. "One of your colleagues?"

And even though it might have been utterly irrational, Maca felt her own heart stutter and halt for a moment only to then beat forward double time, hoping against hope that it was Esther on the phone. She wiped her palms on her threadbare fatigue pants before she accepted the receiver. "Yes?"

"…Maca?" Begoña's voice sounded at the other end of the line, incredulous.

"Yes," Maca stated curtly, unable to hide her disappointment that it wasn't Esther she was talking to. "Could you tell me what is going on?"

"I thought this was a bad joke," Begoña said, still sounding rather dazed. "…are you okay?"

"Yes… yes… I'm fine," Maca replied, thinking that she was the one who should sound dazed and be comforted, not the other way around. "Are you back in Spain? Where is everyone?" More as an afterthought, she added, "I told her to wait for me…" but Begoña didn't seem to hear it.

"Yes, I'm back in Spain. Maca…" Begoña's voice was gentle now. "The attack on the clinic was almost three months ago."

"Three months?" Maca repeated with disbelief. It was impossible that that much time had passed, but then, without a watch and a calendar, she couldn't really know how much time she had spent in the jungle, or how long it had taken until she had been fully conscious again after her shot wound. But for now, she had more urgent matters to clear than what day it was. "How are the others?"

"Well…" Begoña sighed. "Pablo died," she admitted quietly. "I don't know if you still saw that… he was shot like you, right at the clinic… he didn't make it." She took a fortifying breath before she continued, and Maca was grateful that Begoña wasn't trying to prettify things in retelling. She didn't think her mind could take more than simple facts right now. She wiped her free hand on her pants again, her palm still sweaty.

"Maria died on the trip to Mbuji-Mayi." Begoña spoke slower now. "The malaria… and there was no doctor, and nothing we could do. I had my arm broken in two places, and since Vilches couldn't see… " She interrupted herself, obviously realizing that Maca couldn't know what had happened to Vilches. "He took a grenade splinter to his eye and burned his right hand – he can't do surgery any more, and so he left with Cruz and Maria for the States." There was a brief pause before Begoña went on. "I only just returned to Madrid myself – they had to reset the arm twice, and after the shock, well, you know…"

"And Esther?" Maca interrupted her anxiously. "How is Esther…?"

Begoña hesitated that bit of a second too long before she spoke. "Maca…"

"Just tell me already, damn it!" Maca snapped, unable to take it any longer.

"Oh, no, no," Begoña reassured hastily when she understood what Maca was getting at. "She is fine. She had a malaria relapse, but she is fine now."

"Oh thank God," Maca murmured, slumping against the side of the office desk. "Thank God." She brushed a shaky hand over her eyes, swallowing the tears of relief. She felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders and even though she leaned heavily against the desk behind her, she felt so light as if she would float up toward the ceiling at any moment.

"I wrote her a letter…." Maca shook her head trying to organize her thoughts. "It should have reached her in Spain, they sent it after her, but I only have the work address…" She trailed off, unable to gather another clear thought for now. Esther was fine. Now everything would turn out to be all right.

"Uhm…" Begoña cleared her throat." Maca…"

"What…?" A sense of foreboding crept up Maca's spine, making the hair on her neck stand on end.

"I can give you her address, but…" Uncharacteristically, Begoña seemed reluctant to speak. "I don't quite know how to say this."

"What?" Maca asked anxiously, now really scared. A shiver ran through her even in the barely air-conditioned office.

Begoña sighed. "She moved in with Miguel."

"You are kidding me!" Maca exclaimed. This had to be a bad joke. Esther wouldn't do that, Esther would never do that, and Begoña knew that as well as Maca did.

"Maca…" Begoña spoke as if to a child. "She moved in with him weeks ago…"

"That can't be…" Maca uttered in a choked whisper. She slid into the chair behind the desk without even noticing it, her knuckles white on the receiver.

"As far as I know they're back together." Begoña sounded almost ashamed, as if she could understand Esther's actions just as little as Maca. "Or perhaps, they're still together," she added pensively. "What if it was just Jungl…"

"Don't even say it!" Maca yelled, not wanting to hear it. It couldn't be true. It simply couldn't be.

"Fine," Begoña stated coolly. "You probably understand her better than I do."

But Maca didn't understand it at all. She didn't understand anything anymore.

"I just thought you should know before you get back," Begoña's voice sounded against her ear again, and there was a bit of rustling over the line. "Ah, here is it… Do you have something to write? I can give you the phone number… and their address…"

"Sure," Maca replied automatically, reaching for a pen and some kind of official looking writing pad. She numbly jotted down the number and address and her only thought was that this couldn't be happening.

"So what are your plans now?" Begoña asked. Maca had almost forgotten that she was still on the phone, and she couldn't believe how she could just ask this question, so normally, as if Maca's whole world hadn't just tumbled down around her. "Where have you been, anyway? You need to…"

But Begoña only heard a click at the other end of the line and then nothing.

Maca disconnected the line wordlessly, without even looking at what she was doing. She placed the receiver haphazardly next to the phone, unable to tear her eyes away from the scrap of paper in her fingers.

Somewhere she still hoped she would be waking up at any moment, finding herself back at the jungle with the rebels, alone and at risk, but full of hope, brushing off this nightmare with a shake of her head, knowing that Esther would wait for her, and for more than just three months.

But apparently, she hadn't. And she hadn't even had the courage to come here and tell her in person. Or perhaps she simply hadn't cared enough.

The numbers on the piece of paper began to dance in front of Maca's eyes.

She couldn't breathe.

55

The small piece of paper burned against Maca's fingers, while around her, her entire world crumbled to ashes. She blinked against tears, her eyes burning as well, with ire and a feeling of betrayal so deep that she couldn't even fathom it.

Esther had never promised her anything, she reminded herself coldly, and she had never asked for any promises, either. But then, Maca had thought that they were unnecessary, that what was happening between them was as special to Esther as it was to herself.

How could she not have come looking for her, Maca asked herself with desperation. They belonged together. She even had the lion on her hip to prove it.

Maca remembered how Esther had looked at her when she had come back from Mbuji-Mayi without Azuka, the expression in her eyes, as if she had been drinking her in, when she had stepped from the car.

She remembered holding hands with her underneath the table in the middle of what was supposed to be a staff meeting, nodding politely at whatever Vilches was saying while she didn't hear a word of it, all of her attention drawn to the way Esther slid her fingertips across the back of her hand.

And she remembered Esther standing in front of her, in nothing but the turquoise shirt she had given to her, wordlessly holding out the small carved lion statuette.

Maca shook her head. Of course Esther loved her. Begoña's insinuations were ridiculous.

Perhaps Esther had been right and she was still jealous, a thing Maca had always found a little far-fetched because her affair with Begoña was clearly nothing against the love story between her and Esther and even if the blonde nurse would have been blind, she would have seen it and accepted that.

The more Maca thought about it, the less she believed Begoña, more and more convinced that it was all some ill-fated joke and that Begoña had misunderstood things. But still, Maca's own insecurities were nagging at the back of her mind. Esther hadn't come back to look for her, she hadn't sent her a note to Mbuji-Mayi and she hadn't answered her letter even though it had been sent after her, if the concierge was right. Perhaps she hadn't broken up with Miguel upon her return. Perhaps she had changed her mind upon returning to Spain, with the their little oasis out in the clinic gone and lost. Esther had never really told her she loved her, not that explicitly… not like Maca had.

Unwilling to even allow that thought, Maca shook her head. Of course Esther loved her. But still, nasty doubts were raising their heads all over her mind. Looking down at the paper in her hand, she knew what she had to do.

"I need to make one call," she pleaded with the young man at the other side of the desk. "One call to Spain… please…"

"I can't really let you…" The office worker fell silent in front her desperate expression. "All right, you can try whether you get a line. But make it brief." With a resigned nod, he slid the phone over to her.

Maca punched in the digits with trembling fingers. There was a slight crack in the line, and then the quiet rustle of an answering machine's tape. And then there was that one voice that made her heart stumble over itself in its haste to beat faster. Esther's voice.

"Hello, you've reached Esther and Miguel. At the moment, we're not home, but if you leave us your name and phone number, we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for calling."

Maca gasped unwillingly, tears shooting up to her eyes at hearing that voice again. God, she had missed her so much. Only then, she took note of just what Esther had said.

Esther and Miguel.

Home.

We.

The beep of the machine that signaled she could speak now rang only thinly through the sound of the blood rushing past her ears. It couldn't be true. It just couldn't be. But much as she wanted to tell herself it was all a lie, how could she, when Esther's own voice contradicted her?

Maca disconnected the line, staring at the receiver as if paralyzed while Esther's calm, serene voice still echoed in her ears. There had been no harm, nothing of the pain or the yearning Maca felt rage through herself at the mere thought of Esther. How could she sound so calm, when somewhere out here, there was someone who felt so much for her that Esther's ears should be ringing even across the continent and the sea, far away in Spain?

And Esther hadn't told her, or written her, no, Begoña had had to tell her. Begoña, of all people!! Maca thought she had known Esther better then that. She would have sworn Esther would wait for her, and now she hadn't even waited a mere three months.

And with Esther, everyone else was gone as well – Cruz, who had been a dear friend, had moved away together with Vilches, without a note, and Maria and Pablo had died. Back to her family, Maca didn't want to go. The only who was left of her old group now was Begoña.

Maca crumpled the scrap of paper in her fist, squeezing it so tightly that actually, the ink should be wrung out of the paper if the world would still adhere to its natural laws. But it didn't. It didn't because Esther had abandoned her and if that was possible, then anything else Maca had ever been taught or had ever believed in was not irrevocable, either. Not that the earth under her feet carried her and not that sun would go down at the and of the day.

With effort, she uncoiled her fist, the piece of paper resting quiet and wilted in her palm as if she had suffocated it in her grip. With a flick of her wrist, she threw it into the wastebasket next to the desk before she rose from the chair.

There was nothing in Spain that made her want to go home.

Benumbed, she walked out into the streets of Mbuji-Mayi, ambling aimlessly through its depths, unaware of the tears that were streaming down her face. Behind every corner, at every booth at the markets, she thought she saw a flash of Esther's hair, heard a brief second of her laughter or caught a last trace of the scent of her skin, as if she had walked by a minute ago, and if Maca had been there only seconds before, she would have met her.

She half expected her to wake up next to her at every moment, and Esther would be sliding her fingers into Maca's own like she had so many times, leaning her head against Maca's shoulder and looking up at her with one of her dazzling smiles.

"You didn't believe any of that, did you?" she would say, and laugh as if it couldn't have been true for even a second. "It was all just a misunderstanding…"

But before Maca could come up with any explanation, there was the other voice again, Esther's voice on the answering machine, a little tinny, but unmistakably Esther's. "Hello, you've reached Esther and Miguel. At the moment, we're not home…"

Home, Maca thought bitterly. We're not home. Her home had been with Esther and now she was erring through foreign streets, with no place to go to bed her head.

Another letter, she decided impulsively. She would write her another letter, asking her to explain what had happened. Or perhaps two letters or three, just to be on the safe side. Esther's work address, she had memorized from the singed work file in the morning, so long had she stared at it.

In the end, she mailed off the letters not prepaid – with how she looked like, and without any papers, nobody at the bank where she had made the donation for Azuka a few months ago recognized her and thus she was denied access to her own accounts, even though she could cite down the numbers and pin codes of her credit cards. They didn't even let her place a call to her bank representative in Spain and the same bank bureaucrat who had been dripping with politeness when she had been here last now didn't look at her twice, motioning at the bodyguards to escort her out.

But Maca didn't care.

She walked along the streets in a daze, reminding herself to breathe in and out and to put one foot in front of the other. She had never felt so lost, or so torn, not even in the jungle with the rebels where she hadn't even known what day it was and where she had had to compromise her principles, cooperating with a bunch of thugs to get back here. And for what?

Maca remembered how she had felt after Azucena had gone back to her husband, the anger and the helplessness, the hurt and the despair. She had though she wouldn't make it through back then, but anything she had ever felt over Azucena seemed like small matters of childish pride to her now, in comparison to what Esther had done to her.

Never in her life had she felt so alone and betrayed. Maca thought that even if she would have died out here, she would have expected Esther to wait for a long time before getting involved with anyone else. Actually, she hated the idea of Esther dating anyone else, even in a world she wouldn't be in anymore, but of course she would want her to go on and try to be happy, even if it was with someone else. But not so soon, and no with her ex-boyfriend! If he had ever even been her ex-boyfriend, Maca mused acidly. Perhaps she hadn't broken up with him at all, even though she had said she would. Perhaps she had simply settled back into the comfort of her old life back in Spain, without the difficulty of having to come out and living with a woman publicly.

Maca would never have guessed that Esther could be like that. She had always believed her to be courageous, that she fought for the things she cared about and would stick with her through the good and the bad times. But either, Esther was less courageous after all, or – which hurt more – she had never cared as much about Maca.

Blinking against more tears and surprised by how much hurt she could feel when actually she was still numb with shock, Maca pushed her hands into the pockets of her worn fatigue pants and walked on. She felt like she would keep walking and walking now, without ever arriving at a place to rest.

Esther had been that place. Esther had been her home. And now, without her, she felt homeless, tossed out into the street and with her heart torn open in so many places that she would never be able to piece it back together.

It was about four hours later, with his shift nearly over, when Jean Petit, office worker for voluntary and medical organizations in the Mbuji-Mayi office, looked up from his desk and saw the woman walk back in who had nearly turned the entire building upside down this morning. He still wasn't sure whether she really was this Dr. Macarena Wilson that she pretended to be, since they had no files that anyone by that name had ever worked for Médecins Sans Frontières and when he had called the European headquarters, they told him that they didn't have anyone by that name on file, either. She was still dressed in the same threadbare clothes she had worn in the morning and once more he mused that if she really was a doctor from Spain, she would have organized herself a flight out of this insanity long ago already. No stranger in their right mind stayed in town, not this close to the elections.

She just nodded at him, deeming another greeting as superfluous as he did. "What was that with the job offer you mentioned this morning?" she inquired without preamble. Her voice was raw, as if she had been crying or screaming for the past hours and was only now trying to form words again. "…the one with the NGO on the Tanzanian border?"

56

"Welcome home." Miguel smiled as he opened the door and Esther walked into the apartment. "How was your day?"

"Exhausting," Esther replied with a sigh, leaning in to kiss his cheek. It was her first week at work, and she still wasn't used to the schedule. "In Africa, I worked three shifts like this back to back and wasn't this tired," she muttered.

"Don't forget you were very ill," Miguel reminded her. "It will take time."

He didn't add that she had also been very unstable and on anti-depressants the likes of which Esther tried to sort to the very back of the medical cabinets she was now controlling again. She was just glad that she was off that state of forced serenity, still feeling embarrassed about having needed to take them even though her therapist kept telling her that it was nothing to be ashamed of, given the state she had been in. Esther looked at herself in the hallway mirror. The woman who gazed back at her seemed a lot older than she should be, but at least she recognized herself again, with all the sadness and the bouts of fear that still plagued her, also at work where she still wasn't sure she was up to the task of being an ER nurse, even though Miguel and Cruz kept telling her that after what she had seen and done in Congo, a regular ER would most likely be a cakewalk for her.

Esther wasn't as convinced. She still had problems getting used to the speed again and to that many people around her. But overall, working again felt good. For a few moments today, she hadn't even been thinking about Maca, although Maca was always at the edge of her consciousness, like a quiet, gentle presence, something that Esther thought she would always carry with her, as if she had built her own memorial for Maca right inside herself.

"Have you thought of looking at job offers again?" Miguel had asked one night coming home when he had found Esther sitting quietly on the couch again, like so many other nights. "Didn't the wife of your former boss take over at the Central? Perhaps they have something for you."

And Esther had to admit that, yes, Vilches had called them a few nights ago, informing her that they had returned from the United States where they had been able to better his sight a little, but not enough by far for him to go back to work at a hospital. Cruz had meanwhile accepted a longstanding offer to return to the Central in a chief position and just as Miguel had suggested, Cruz was more than willing to give Esther a chance.

"We had an odd call on our answering machine today," Miguel's voice interrupted Esther's musings.

"Really?" Esther asked distractedly, slipping out of her shoes and raking her hands through her hair. "Who was it?"

"I don't know," Miguel replied from the kitchen. "Someone who was just breathing funny and then hung up."

"What do you mean, breathing funny?" Esther frowned. "We barely got the line, and already get molesting calls? I thought the number wasn't listed?"

"It isn't – and the odd thing is that it seemed to be a woman," Miguel continued, looking around the corner. "I deleted it," he added when he saw Esther walk over to the small table that held the phone and answering machine.

"Oh." Esther shook her head, stopping just short of pressing the button. "Yes, of course." She really had to get past these bouts of irrational daydreaming where she fantasized that against all odds, Maca had survived a gunshot wound, and a grenade explosion with ensuing fire, and three months out in Kasaï-Oriental all on her own and was now miraculously calling to check on her. She remembered the garish pictures of the clinic Maca's father had sent and a shudder ran through her.

"Are you alright?" Miguel questioned, pressing a couple of plates into her hands. "Dinner is almost ready, by the way."

"Sure." Esther nodded. She took a deep breath, looked at the plates in her hands and moved to set the table.

57

The driver who had taken her along the rest of the way hit the car horn twice to signal that this was her stop, and Maca jumped off the back of the shabby pick-up truck where she had been traveling between water canisters and livestock.

She brushed a few tiny feathers off her shirt and looked around herself. The people at headquarters hadn't been lying when the said that the clinic was virtually out of nowhere. There were shabby huts and little houses, shrubs and dirt, and earth so dry it send up clouds of dust as she walked toward the worn-down sign that read "Public Clinic".

She entered the domain, thinking that it looked like a cheap wooden garrison; one large building with a lining porch in the middle, surrounded by modest, even shabbier looking huts, some smaller – patient habitations, Maca supposed - some a little bigger, probably kitchen and facilities.

There were patients around, people who stared at her curiously, most of them younger men, but nobody tried to approach her. It was emptier than she had expected, after the rumors she had heard about the Tanzanian border. She counted two specks of white among the disparate cloud, white nurses in white gowns, a man and a woman, their heads hidden from the sun under scarves. One of them stopped for a moment where she was trying to get a patient to step back into line, looking over in her direction and Maca could see that a few strands of light blonde hair showed underneath her scarf.

On the porch, in front of what had to be the central office, sat a man behind a desk, his booted feet up on the table, a military cap drawn low over his eyes. Maca wasn't sure whether he was asleep. His jacket rested over the back of his chair and under the arms of his shirt were lines of dried transpiration visible. He had dark hair, even on the back of his hands, and his face was badly shaven, probably more due to negligence than to lack of water or razors.

Maca cleared her throat. "Dr. Cjelko Ibramovic?"

"Yes, yes…I'm Cjelko." He shook his head as if he had indeed been asleep and shifted the worn military hat back from over his eyes and peered up at her where she stood in front of his desk, with her bag slung over her shoulder. His eyes were clear and cold. "Are you the new one?" He leaned forward a little, shifting through the papers next to his boots. "…Fernandez?"

"Dr. Fernandez," Maca corrected with mild annoyance, thinking that she had never had to work for anyone that unkempt.

He smiled unfriendly. "If you have no papers, you're no doctor around here until I say so, Fernandez." He squinted at her. "First name?"

Maca regarded him coolly, thinking that the antipathy was entirely mutual. "Fernandez will suffice." It was her mother's maiden name, and since nobody at the headquarters had felt inclined to acknowledge her as Macarena Wilson, she had decided that this name was just another link to her past lie that she could cut.

Cjelko looked her up and down and a small grin appeared at the corners of his mouth. "You're Spanish, aren't you?" He grinned at her in a way that bared his teeth. "I'll simply call you Penelope," he decided.

Maca barely resisted rolling her eyes at the assessment. She didn't care if this was her new boss, if he kept going at this rate, she didn't think she could be held responsible for her own actions. And from the looks of it, it didn't seem as if anyone cared out here. For a moment, she asked herself why she was doing this, before she remembered that there was no place to go left for her. She had no papers, no money, nobody to vouch for her identity. This one might be a starting place as good or bad as any other to try and forget.

"So…" Cjelko seemed more awake now, trailing his eyes slowly over her body. "What is a nice piece of ass like you doing out of nowhere in a place like this?"

If he was trying to be charming, Maca thought he hadn't really grasped the concept. "Better a piece of ass than a total ass," she replied, looking directly at him to remove any doubts as to whom she was talking about.

"Now listen…" Cjelko began angrily but forgot what he had wanted to say when he saw Maca gaze searchingly across the porch and the stamped earth around it. "What are you looking for?"

"The rock from underneath which you crawled," Maca stated with causal negligence, looking at a point far behind him.

In a movement she hadn't expected from him, least of all at this speed, Cjelko jumped up and put himself right in front of her. "That was very dumb of you, Penelope," he swore, clearly annoyed that the woman in front of him didn't appear to be intimidated in the least. She didn't even blink. "I can make your life here a living hell."

"I've been there and back," Maca replied evenly, not moving an inch as she eyed him with utter ennui. "Twice." She adjusted the bag over her shoulder and calmly held his gaze. "They hadn't even heard of you." It wasn't much she had in her bag; a few clothes they had given her at the headquarters, temporary papers, and the only prized possession she had bought from the little money they had given her after signing up: a little paper lantern, like the one she had given to Esther, somewhere in another lifetime.

She was careful not to breathe in as Cjelko exhaled derisively in her face. "You'll live to regret this, Penelope."

But Maca just smiled tiredly, more to herself than at him. At the close distance, she could see that his eyes were bloodshot. Since she didn't detect alcohol on his breath, she suspected there were some packages missing from the medical cabinet. "If that's all…" Maca shrugged. "I guess there's work to do around here."

She suspected he would have liked to hit her, but either he was conscious of the people around them, or he had more self-control than she would have assumed.

"Tatyana can show you around," Cjelko said, slumping back onto his chair and Maca supposed he meant the woman who was taking care of the small line of patients to her right.

She didn't look back at Cjelko once, knowing that things could have gone better and that she had just made one enemy more that she didn't need. But Maca simply didn't care. All she wanted was to work herself into exhaustion until she stopped hurting so much, until she was too tired to even think about the fact that she was hurting.

Whatever this Cjelko could do to her was nothing in comparison to what she had seen already. It was nothing against the fact that Esther had given up on her.

Walking over to the patient line, Maca shielded her eyes against the sun. It felt different here than it had in Kasaï-Oriental, more scorching and dry. Perhaps it would burn the memory of Esther's eyes out of her mind, the magic of her smiles and then gentle enchantment of her laughter. Perhaps, if she scrubbed enough patient habitations and operating theatres, the detergent would wash the memory of Esther's skin off her palms, and if she breathed long enough in the hot, dusty air, perhaps she would only taste the bitterness of the sand, forgetting the sweet softness of Esther's lips.

But even if she managed to forget what it had been like to live with her, Maca knew that unless she made her own heart stop beating, she would never forget what it was like to love Esther, with or without her, back then as much as right now.

58

"Esther - come on in!" Cruz's voice sounded over the hum of the buzzer and the apartment door swung open.

Esther hesitated a moment before she stepped across the threshold and into the empty hallway. It was odd to be invited to dinner by her current boss and her former boss, even though Vilches had proven to be a lot more than a boss during her recovery. And with Cruz, she had been sharing lunch now and then at work over the past months, even talking about Africa sometimes. But Cruz was still her boss and it was still strange to be invited to her house like this.

Miguel had a meeting this evening that would most likely run late, followed by a business dinner and a few drinks, and Esther was glad that she wouldn't sit in the apartment by herself. Being alone meant hearing her own thoughts much more loudly and whatever she thought of, sooner or later it was Maca.

Maca, and the way she had crossed her arms over her chest when something annoyed her. Maca, and how she had looked at her just before they had kissed for the first time, out in the rain, and she had been too stupid to realize what it meant. Maca, sitting at her bed and pleading with her not to leave her.

In the end, Esther always found herself incapable of believing that Maca was gone, her stubbornness, her smiles, her even breathing at night and the soft curves of her thighs, all that which Esther had loved so much about her. How could she be gone, when there still was so much emotion, enough to evoke her image in vivid detail, every time Esther closed her eyes?

"Sorry, I'm a little late with cooking." Cruz' head appeared in the kitchen doorway, interrupting Esther's musings. "I had a staff meeting, and then Maria wouldn't calm down."

"How is she doing?" Esther hadn't really seen Maria in a while, only in passing when Vilches picked up Cruz at the hospital, or when they dropped by in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

"Right now? Great," Cruz replied dryly, nodding in the direction of the nursery from where happy giggling could be heard, interspersed with a low male voice. "I swear, that man only needs to look at her and she is happy." She shook her head, laughing at her own words. "And she keeps him in a much better mood."

As if on cue, the door to the nursery opened and Vilches walked out, with Maria in his left arm. He was smiling so happily that it gave Esther pause for a moment, reminding her sharply of a time where she had been smiling like this herself, whenever she saw Maca walk towards her across the courtyard of their clinic. The scenario seemed far away, like a faded photograph, and Esther realized with bitterness that she couldn't recall the feeling anymore, only its absence.

"Now look who has come to visit you, Princess…" Vilches gently sat Maria down where she held onto his knee, remaining standing and curiously gazing at Esther. "See? She is beginning to walk," he said proudly by way of greeting, making Cruz laugh.

"You could at least say hello first," she observed pointedly, but Esther could hear the echoing smile in her voice. At least for them it had worked out, Esther mused as she watched Maria wrap one of her small hands around Vilches's scarred right, letting him hold her while she stepped onto his foot and let him 'walk' them down the hallway.

The scars around his eye were a lot less pronounced than those on his hand and to someone who didn't look at him more closely in conversation, it wasn't apparent that he had very limited vision on one side. At least the operation in States that they had placed so much hope in had been a cosmetic success, and Vilches looked just like ever, if somewhat more rakish with the scars that split his brow, but Esther secretly suspected that he enjoyed that fact.

"I've never seen him this much a ease," Esther commented to Cruz, looking after father and daughter.

"Me neither," Cruz said, moving to stand next to her and watching how her husband carefully kicked a small, bright red ball across the room with Maria still standing on his foot. "Being around her is good for him," she stated quietly. "And he is the most wonderful father."

Both of them watched on as Maria stumbled after the ball, squealing with delight.

"Between lecturing and coaching, his hours are a lot more flexible than mine," Cruz added with a shrug. "If you had told me a year ago he'd be the one at home with the baby, I'd have laughed it off, but now it really turns out to be the best thing we could have hoped for."

"Yes," Esther agreed distractedly, still looking at Vilches playing ball with Maria, and for a moment she saw Maca, frolicking across the courtyard with Azuka, playing soccer regardless of the sun and the humid heat. And then there was always the moment when Maca seemed to feel her eyes on her and turned around to look at her, for a split second making Esther feel as if there was nothing else on earth but the two them. Then Azuka would use the momentary distraction to aim for another shot and Maca would chase after him, both of them laughing.

Esther watched a good-humored Vilches lifting a happily giggling Maria up with his arm and had to blink against tears when she remembered the evening she and Maca had tentatively spoken about perhaps having children someday, half joking only to realize that it hadn't been that much of a joke after all. She had to admit that she had been thinking about it after that, sometimes, when they had treated a child together, or when she had watched Maca tend to a newborn, with that amazed, achingly soft smile playing about her lips. Two at least, she had thought then, because she remembered being a single child and also, Maca's stories about her brothers and the jokes they had played on each other enchanted her.

Esther swallowed thickly, feeling the salt of unshed tears in her throat. It had been more than half a year now, and she still missed her so much that everything hurt. Almost without conscious thought, she reached for the leopard pendant around her neck, feeling its shape through the thin fabric of her shirt. There were few days where she was not wearing it or carrying it around in a pocket somehow. She had put it on a new, whisper-thin necklace of white gold that was longer than the old leather string had been, leaving the pendant nestled low against her chest so that nobody could see it. It wasn't anyone else's business. Like this, she kept it literally close to her heart, she thought, and she had to smile a little at that. It was just like her memories of Maca. She still hadn't told anyone else about her, keeping their shared time close to herself like a precious secret that would wilt when exposed to a stranger's eyes. The time she had shared with Maca was hers, and hers alone, and she guarded it with jealousy.

Miguel had asked her what the pendant meant, and she had only said that it was a piece of symbolic jewelry she had gotten in the Congo. It wasn't even a lie, although it wasn't the truth, either. But Miguel hadn't asked again, and Esther hadn't brought up the topic, either.

She knew it was most likely unfair against Miguel, but it felt like two such completely different things that she didn't think of it as cheating. Miguel was Miguel, a familiar feeling of mutual affection. He was a kind face in the evening and the warmth of another body at night, someone who supported her and whom she supported in return, and she felt honest tenderness for his quirks.

But Maca… Maca had been everything.

"You should see what he is planning for her first birthday party next week," Cruz muttered dryly, cutting through Esther's musings. "You would think our daughter is the next Queen of Sheba!"

"It's so hard to believe she's already a year old," Esther said, and what she actually meant was that she couldn't believe it was already a year since that fateful birthday celebration, where between too much cheap schnapps and Malik's bongos, she had finally dared to reach out and pull Maca out to dance with her. A whole year since she had become involved with Maca. It both seemed so much more recent, and so much farther away.

Tempting smells rose from the oven when Cruz checked on the casserole and between the two of them, they started to set the table. Just as Esther set down two large wine glasses, the small red ball rolled into the kitchen, with Maria in hot pursuit.

"Goal!" Vilches cheered, appearing in the doorway and proudly smiling at his daughter. "Perhaps she is going to be a soccer champion."

"Perhaps she is going to bed first?" Cruz suggested with gentle insistence, raising an eyebrow at her husband who took two steps closer, leaned in, and pressed a kiss precisely to that eyebrow.

Esther looked away, the family idyll leaving a bittersweet taste in her mouth. "You still need a wine glass," she noted as she gazed at the table arrangement, trying to avoid another glance at the happy couple at her side. She moved to reach for the cupboard from which Cruz had taken the other two glasses.

"No…" Cruz shook her head, smiling, and out of the corner of her eye, Esther could see that Vilches shared that smile and she realized that something else was going on here. She looked at the pair of them expectantly.

"No alcohol for me – we're having another baby," Cruz announced simply, but her smile was broadening. "I'm pregnant again."

"Congratulations…" Esther managed, completely taken by surprise. "That is wonderful news…"

"Well, I thought if I can manage one baby at home, I could just as well manage two," Vilches offered nonchalantly, but his own smile belied his attitude as he put his arm around Cruz's shoulders.

"You managed a whole clinic," Esther reminded him, envying him wildly for a moment, him and Cruz and that they had the family she and Maca never had a chance to build.

Vilches snorted, the mood in the room suddenly tense. "For the good it did," he growled.

"It wasn't your fault," Esther contradicted him immediately.

Cruz nodded. "It wasn't anyone's fault," she added quietly and from the way she said it, it was apparent that she had already said it many, many times.

Vilches shrugged coolly. "I'll bring her to bed," he offered then and bent down to pick up Maria who was still trying to get a grasp on the red ball. His attitude changed immediately once he was speaking to Maria. "All right, my princess… bedtime for you…"

"I don't know what you did to this man, Cruz, but he is perfect with her," Esther observed when Vilches had disappeared into the nursery with his daughter. She tried not to think of the few, precious times Maca had called her princess, in a way that made Esther believe she'd whip out a tiara at any given moment and whisk her away to a faraway kingdom.

Thankfully, Cruz distracted her from that train of thought. "Yes, he is," she said and Esther could hear the contentedness in her tone. "And with me, as well. It takes a bit of nudging now and then, but we're doing very well, really."

"It's kind of disconcerting to see him so relaxed," Esther remarked lightly, shaking her head. "With how grumpy I've seen him in Africa… But of course, he was without you then."

Cruz chuckled with amusement. "Believe me, he was just as grumpy even when I was still there."

Esther stared at her. "No way."

"Oh yes." Cruz laughed. "I have photos!" She walked into the living room and retrieved a large paper box from one of the living room shelves and motioned for Esther to sit on the sofa next to her. "He'll need a while getting her to settle down anyway, and the dinner is still simmering…" She didn't notice the wistful look Esther cast at the two small wooden statuettes which stood on a board for themselves, a sturdy representation of a water buffalo, and the now slightly singed gazelle that had been in Vilches's office out in the Congo. Cruz pulled a large stack of photos out of the box. "See?" Thumbing through a few images, she held one up and handed it to Esther. "Standing right next to me, and looking just as grumpy!"

The photo had apparently been made when Vilches's team had just arrived in Kasaï-Oriental. There were less huts, and no patients mulling about. Begoña wasn't in the picture, either, but instead there was another dark-haired nurse, in between Pablo and Maria. And there was Cruz and next to her Vilches with one of his typical glowering looks while everyone around him was smiling. And next to him, with her hair a little shorter and falling freely over her shoulders, there was Maca, with the oh-so-typical gesture of having her arms crossed in front of her chest and her head tilted slightly to the side, smiling confidently into the camera.

The unexpected sight hit Esther like a bolt of lightning, making her gasp. "Maca…"

"You miss her a lot, don't you?" Cruz asked after long moments, observing Esther with curiosity and only then Esther realized that she must have spoken aloud.

"Every day," Esther said without tearing her eyes away from the photo. Then she corrected herself. "No… it's like it's always there… at the back of my mind." She looked at Cruz, irrationally jealous for a few seconds. "You were good friends, weren't you?"

"Yes," Cruz confirmed with a smile. "She was great. A really good friend." She sighed, looking back at the picture. "I miss her, too…"

"Yes," Esther agreed thinly, knowing that there were no words to describe just how much she missed Maca, so much that at times, it seemed she was nothing but a thin membrane around an entity of emptiness that was gaping over Maca's absence.

But strangely, talking to Cruz helped and her shared memories of Maca were like an unexpected treasure chest for Esther, small slices and shards that allowed her to see Maca in front of her again, unexpectedly, as if she had discovered a box of souvenirs in the farthest corner of the closet, stashed so far away that she had forgotten she owned it.

And between Cruz and herself, they conjured up Maca until it almost felt as if she was sitting on the couch with them, and she was just like Esther would always remember her – just a little arrogant, vivid, stubborn and breathtakingly charming.

59

"Hey Penelope… when you're done there, you can start with the first one of the row again!"

Maca didn't even look up from where she was finishing cleaning out the last of the patient habitations. It was late in the afternoon and Cjelko sat in his favorite spot on the porch with the feet up on his desk, doing what he was best at: taunting her while she was working. He made her do the most mundane things, cleaning duties that in Maca's eyes were a waste of resources and that not even Malik or Mbele had been asked to do back in Kasaï-Oriental. But this was not her old clinic, and Cjelko made sure that she never forgot about that fact.

That she didn't consider her stay here the hell on earth that Cjelko had sneeringly promised her certainly wasn't for the lack of him trying. She suppressed a wince as the dry and cracked skin of her hands was sprayed with the cleaning lye again. She'd rather have bitten her tongue off than letting Cjelko see that he succeeded in wearing her out and also, she actually welcomed the exhaustion and the dull repetitiveness of these shores which allowed her not to think. When she was lucky, she arrived at a point where she didn't feel anything anymore, not even the lye against her skin.

She kept to herself, as did most everyone out here. She had learned soon that most of the personnel had been stationed here as a matter of punishment. Assault, harassment, bribery, substance abuse – the stories resembled each other. Hardly anyone had papers or identification. The only one Maca had formed a tentative connection with was Tatyana, a blonde with melancholy eyes from one of the former Soviet states whom she had already seen upon her arrival. Her story was much like any other: She had been in love with a doctor who had been addicted to pain killers and she had broken into the medical cabinet for him. Or at least that was what she said.

Out here, there was not much reason to trust anyone. Most of their patients were militia members of some kind; young men, mostly teenagers, with deep knife wounds and limbs torn by grenades. There were very few women or children who even came to the clinic. On some days, Maca felt like a puppet doctor, separating or reattaching an infinite array of limbs from and to torsos. Actually, she wasn't allowed to operate since Cjelko didn't acknowledge her medical degree and she had no way to prove it, but Maca had quickly figured out how things worked – Cjelko was a morphine addict and operations only took place when he was sober or a little under influence. When he was out stoned or having withdrawals, the operating theatre remained closed. Maca had taken to simply operating on her own during these times, aided by Tatyana and one or two of the other nurses who were a little less on the shady side.

As for Cjelko himself, Maca had to admit that he could have had a big career as a surgeon. Strangely, he seemed to operate best when he was just slightly on drugs, and the work she had seen him do on these few occasions had amazed Maca. But even when he was working, Cjelko always seemed more focused on the level of technical perfection he could achieve than on the patient. From what she had heard around the clinic, Cjelko had once been a leading surgeon at the university hospital in Zagreb, but some actions in the Balkan War had cost him his position and his career. Nobody openly called him a war criminal, but Maca had no problem imagining just what he might have done to lose his job.

He took a thwarted kind of pleasure in pushing people to their limits, mistreating patients and coworkers alike in a way that wasn't caused by drugs, but that seemed to be part of his personality. On quiet nights, when she couldn't sleep, she had seen heavily armed militia members going in and out of his quarters, making her conclude that he most likely meddled in the feuds of the local warlords.

Maca found that she didn't even care. His taunting, she could more or less ignore and while he was trying to get a rise out of her, he didn't dare to do anything else. She was reminded of the fact that Tatyana wasn't quite so lucky in that regard when she looked up to find the blonde nurse walking across the porch with a box of medical supplies. Cjelko had taken a special twisted liking to her, evident once more as he reached for her while she passed, his movements just a little off.

Without needing to check, Maca knew that his eyes would be bloodshot again. She walked to the supply room to get rid of the lye when she heard Tatyana yelp and only seconds later, she stood behind Cjelko, more fueled by frustrated ire than anything else. Lye poured over the hems of Cjelko's pants and his boots.

"Take your hand off her ass," Maca commanded calmly. "Or I will file a complaint against you."

Cjelko just laughed in her face, and Maca felt a chill trickle down her spine. "Where? Headquarters?" he inquired coldly. "Nobody will care. They need a surgeon out here and nobody else would do it." He reached to adjust his hat, casually shaking the lye off his boots while Tatyana hurried to move out of reach. "This is already the end of the world, Penelope… The took away my career and my name and put me out here. There is nothing left they could still do to me."

Maca just coolly arched an eyebrow at him, knowing it would make him even madder. "You think so?"

For a moment, Cjelko was startled, Maca could see that. Then, the veins that were visible on his forehead became more pronounced as the anger rose up his face. "I'll find your weak spot yet," he promised through clenched teeth.

"You know Cjelko…" Maca said with something close to amusement. "Unlike you, I really have none left." She nodded at Tatyana, who was standing off to the side, still somewhat shaken. "Let's get back to work."

And they did exactly that, walk back to the empty office in the back of the main building and take care of the next patient, and then the next, and then another. The last one had a replaced broken arm and Maca swore under her breath when she realized that their morphine reserved were depleted again. In her first weeks, after she had figured out what was behind their constant shortage, she had been ready to simply break into the medical cabinet and place all their morphine somewhere where Cjelko would not find it, but Tatyana had stopped her, saying that dealing with Cjelko like this was the lesser of two evils. And from how Maca had seen him act when their supplies were gone and the medical transporter was held up along the way, she knew that Tatyana was right.

So many things went wrong out here, this was just one more. And all of them combined still didn't compare to the level of helplessness and despair that Maca felt when she thought of Esther with Miguel. And yet, even though she told herself that she should be mad at Esther for forgetting about her so quickly, the sadness and disappointment she felt were bigger than any anger. She cursed herself for it, for her inability to stop loving her and for the fact that she still remembered exactly what it had felt like, every little detail – the tiny sound she made deep in her throat when Maca enfolded her in arms and how the soft skin on the inside of her thighs felt under Maca's fingertips, the way Esther's nose crinkled when she was smiling widely with happiness and even the ephemeral flutter of Esther's eyelashes against her neck when they lay curled up at night. Maca remembered everything and she still didn't understand how Esther could have left her. It had been perfect. They had been perfect.

That evening, she accepted one of Tatyana's cigarettes and they leaned against the fence behind the medics' quarters, the tips of their smokes two glowing points of orange in the darkness.

"So whom are you trying to forget?" Tatyana asked between draws.

Maca looked down at her fingers in the dark for a few moments. "Doesn't matter," she said with a shrug, and yet all she could think of was the sound of Esther's laughter when Maca had told her stories from her childhood while they had lain in bed together, wrapped around each other as snugly as possible.

"Fine," Tatyana replied amiably. She didn't move closer, but she didn't step away, either. "Thanks for coming to my aid earlier."

"Don't mention it." Maca brushed off the thanks, taking another drag from her cigarette. Earlier, she hadn't thought about it, but actually, it had been the first time in months she had felt much of anything, even though it only had been ire and some kind of protectiveness. Something had snapped inside her when she had seen Cjelko grab Tatyana and for a split second, she had seen Esther, pressed to the wall by a foreign soldier in fatigues, and she had acted without further thought.

"Thanks anyway," Tatyana repeated quietly. They stood in silence for another few moments after their cigarettes were finished, the tiny stubs cooling between their fingers.

Maca went to bed late that night, and like every night, she took a few minutes to light the candle inside the red paper lantern while she prepared for bed, letting the soft orange glow wash over her. She smiled when she remembered how happy Esther had been about the simple gift. They had made love that night, and Esther had worn the turquoise shirt, and she had told her she would break up with Miguel once they got back to Madrid.

Esther, and always Esther. Maca sighed, loosening her hair and brushing two fingers across the tattoo on her hip. All the heat and all the exhaustion didn't manage to burn Esther out of her mind and her heart.

In a last, tentative try to reach out after she had written Esther a last letter from Mbuji-Mayi, she had left her address on the Tanzanian border at headquarters with an explicit note to hand it out to any Esther Garciá that might call. She had also asked that any letters or notes that should arrive for her would be sent after her to her new posting.

It had been months, though, and there hadn't been a single note for her in all the mail transports since she had arrived. Esther clearly wasn't looking for her. Most likely she didn't even want to speak to her anymore, and yet, as Maca gently blew out the cheap stump candle and slipped underneath the threadbare blanket, she imagined rain on the roof and Esther's arms around her, and Esther's breaths close to her ear.

It was the only way she could fall asleep.

60

The familiar sound of the small teaspoon against the filigree coffee cup made Esther look up from where she was stroking the plush of her mother's old couch back and forth with two fingers. She had done this countless times as a little girl when she had to sit quietly on the sofa for hours that had seemed endless when one of her mother's many cousins was visiting and got the coffee served in the good cups that her mother only took out of the cupboard for their guests.

Esther turned the delicate cup in her fingers while her mother kept stirring the sugar into her coffee. She wondered when she had become that much of a guest that Encarna brought out the good china when she was dropping by for a coffee and a talk. She would have liked to stay with her mother for a while after she had left the hospital, almost ten months ago now. But her mother's new apartment was too small, and also, Miguel had been so happy to see her move in with him that she didn't have it in her to say no, just like you wouldn't say no to a child on Christmas Eve.

But despite the different apartment – no longer the one she had grown up in – the coffee cups were the same, as was the old couch with its worn plush.

"So… how is work?" Encarna asked, leaning back and crossing her legs while she took the first, small sip of her coffee.

"Good… good," Esther replied, wondering if she would ever stop feeling like she had missed curfew again when her mother looked at her like this. "They made me temporary shift supervisor for next week, since the chief nurse is on vacation."

"Congratulations." Encarna smiled proudly. "I saw Miguel the other day," she changed the topic, sounding much too casual. "I ran into him at the corner store. – He looked good… But he's still worried about you, you know, even though you're through with therapy now. Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yes, Mom, I'm fine," Esther replied automatically. And she was fine, for the most part. She was dealing with all the posttraumatic stress, just as she had been told, and she had passed her last psych evaluation at work with flying colors. The only thing she hadn't talked about in therapy was Maca, but Esther hadn't seen any reason to – she knew what she was missing, and no therapist could bring it back with gentle words or intellectual advice. After all, what kind of therapy could there be against having half of one's heart ripped out for good? "It'll simply take time," she added, more to calm her mother than herself.

"Miguel said the same thing," Encarna commented with a nod. She sat down her cup and looked at Esther squarely. "He really is a good man." She hesitated before she pressed on. "Do you love him?"

"Yes," Esther answered, taken by surprise. "Yes of course." And she did love him. Her mother was right, Miguel was a good man – patient, caring, considerate and supportive. She knew she wouldn't have made it through the first months after being released from the hospital without him and she didn't want to imagine how lost she would be if the quiet, calming familiarity of his presence were gone. Of course she felt guilty next to him at times, knowing how much she owed him, and knowing that much of what he gave to her she had given to Maca.

"But…?" Encarna prompted, watching her daughter closely.

Esther looked up sharply. "What do you mean?"

"Esther… I'm your mother," Encarna stated with gentle admonishment. "I can see that there is something going on." For a moment, she was silent before she asked the next question. "Is there somebody else?" Her tone was without reproach.

"No," Esther replied evenly, but faced with her mother's honestly concerned look, she found herself amending her statement. "Not anymore. Not really."

Encarna sighed. "What happened? Was it something in Africa?"

It probably didn't take a genius to figure that out, Esther allowed. "I… I was in love with someone down there," she said slowly, listening after her own voice. "Very much." It felt strange to tell someone about it now, more than a year later. Quickly, she reached for the pendant underneath her shirt, feeling its shape against her fingers through the fabric. It was hard to believe that Maca had already been dead for a year.

"And…?" Encarna didn't complete the question, her tone cautious.

"And they died," Esther concluded matter-of-factly, surprised that she had to swallow against tears that she had long since believed herself incapable of shedding. The hurt over losing Maca was something that was beyond tears, beyond comfort, a wound that she had learned to live with, but that didn't close.

Encarna nodded slowly, sitting completely still otherwise. "Pablo?" she guessed.

Of course that was what her mother would assume, Esther realized, and she had to smile a little at that. The fact that Maca had been a woman was nothing she had given much thought to after they had become involved – it had felt so inarguably right to be with Maca that she had never stopped to think about what it meant in terms of labels. "No," she said gently, uncertain how her mother would react to this. "No. It was Maca."

A few moments passed, then Encarna nodded slowly. "Ah." She seemed confused, looking at Esther uncertainly, as if she was searching for a sign of familiarity. Then, something else seemed to occur to her. "The Wilson daughter?!" she asked incredulously.

"Yes…" Esther admitted reluctantly and despite the situation, she had to chuckle a little at the fact that her mother seemed to be much more scandalized by the fact that her daughter had fallen for someone from a rich and famous dynasty than by the fact that this dynasty member had been a woman.

Encarna had to laugh a little bit herself, even if somewhat uncertainly, when she realized how her question must have sounded. "Wasn't it exotic enough already?" she asked with exasperation. "If you wanted to try that… women… why did it have to be a jet set woman?"

"I didn't want to try anything," Esther protested. "It just happened." She remembered how she had been struggling with her feelings, only to realize that it was pointless. Maca and she had been drawn towards each other with an inevitability that had bordered on fatefulness. "It would have been her, no matter where we would have met, or who she would have been." She blinked, and faced with her mother's startled expression, she realized that she had perhaps never put it into words like this. "I didn't care about her money, and neither did she." It was important to her that her mother understood this. "Or does working for a voluntary organization out in the jungle sound very posh to you?"

"Well, sometimes these rich girls feel the need to…" Encarna fell silent when Esther glared at her, angry and a little insecure. "No, of course not," she said in a placating manner.

"At first, I didn't even know who she was," Esther remembered, recalling how Maria had had to tell her. "And even after that… it didn't matter, to either of us."

"And what do you think would have happened if you had both come back here?" Encarna asked practically. "How would you have lived with someone like that, who is used to expensive restaurants and travels?" She shook her head, sighing softly under her breath. "What would her family have said about this?"

"They were nice enough to me when I was in the hospital," Esther stated defensively, knowing very well that this would have been far different if Maca's parents had known just how close she had been to their daughter. "And Maca didn't care about expensive places… She wasn't like that."

"Not out there," Encarna commented guardedly.

"She wasn't like that…" Esther repeated hotly, only to trail off when she listened to her own words and realized that she had spoken of Maca in the past tense. Her mother's words echoed in her ear, making old insecurities rare back up that Maca had once defeated so easily with nothing but a wink and a smile. But did she really know what would have been if they had returned to Spain together, and could she say with absolute certainty that Maca would not have missed the money she had always had at her disposal, the fancy dinners and expensive getaways? Esther was suddenly insecure.

"Oh my dear… come here…" Encarna acted on instinct, like any mother would at seeing her child in pain, wrapping Esther in a tight hug and letting her cry on her shoulder for long minutes, rocking them softly back and forth. It took a long time until Esther calmed down, her sobs lessening slowly in the familiar embrace. "There… better now?"

Esther nodded, withdrawing a little and blinking, still blinded by her tears.

"Well… this woman…." Encarna pursed her lips, realizing that this sounded wrong. "Your Maca," she amended and Esther involuntarily had to smile at that through her tears, surprised at how good it felt to see Maca acknowledged like this, even more than a year later. "What would she want you to do now?" Encarna questioned gently. "Poor Miguel is so worried…"

"I know. I know that," Esther nodded soberly. "She…" She had to swallow another bout of tears. "She would want me to smile…"

"Did you tell Miguel any of this?" Encarna asked worriedly, trying to piece the puzzle together.

"No… no." Esther seemed almost surprised at the insinuation. "This is something completely different. It has nothing to with him." She looked at Encarna with anguish. "Maca is dead, Mom. Why should I hurt him with that now?"

Encarna looked at Esther intently for long seconds. "Are you sure you really love him?"

"Yes. Yes, I do." Esther frowned, not really understanding the question. "And I owe him so much… I wouldn't have made it through those first few months without him."

"And he really loves you," Encarna reminded her daughter gently. "And sometimes it's not about whom you love most, but whom you can live with…"

Esther gave her mother a puzzled look. "What do you mean by that?"

"Your father wasn't the one I was the most in love with," Encarna explained lightly. She shrugged. "But he was the first one with whom I think I could build a life, not just live on clouds." She pressed her lips together for a moment, her expression something between sad and angered. "And it turned out I was wrong after all. So it just goes to say that you never know…"

"Maca wouldn't have left me," Esther swore. "She promised me…" She closed her eyes for a moment, fighting against new tears and struggling to collect her thoughts. She didn't know just how she could make her mother see what she and Maca had shared and what they had lost. "I know I would have grown old with her… I would have had her children… I would have gone anywhere with her." Lost in her search for the right words, she missed Encarna's somewhat frightened look. "And if there was only the slightest chance, no matter how tiny, to get her back, I would drop anything… I would walk to hell and back just to be with her. Anywhere." Her posture straightened, and now she looked calmly at her mother. "She wouldn't have left me, Mom. Never."

"Maybe," Encarna said slowly, still somewhat shaken by the passionate confession. She reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind Esther's ear, stroking across her cheek with the motion. "Sweetheart… why didn't you tell me all this earlier?"

"How?" Esther shrugged helplessly. "I still have no words for it." She reached for her now cooled coffee, noting that her hands were shaking, making the china rattle. "And nothing can bring her back." The silvery clangor stopped when she lifted the cup from the saucer. "And the memories are mine… they are all I have…"

Esther's voice wavered and Encarna reached forward and plucked the cup out of her daughter's unsure hands. "I am so, so sorry…" she said soothingly, setting down the cup before she took both of Esther's hands in hers and took a deep breath. "The only advice I can give you is to be happy about the time you shared with Maca, and focus on that happiness rather than on the grief." When her daughter nodded unconvincingly she reached out with two fingers and tilted Esther's chin up until she could look into her eyes. "Wouldn't she want you to be happy and go on?"

Esther hesitated for a moment or two before she nodded. "Yes." Maca wouldn't want her to be this sad. Maca had always wanted her to smile. Esther nodded slowly, staring at the coffee table without really seeing it. Perhaps her mother was right, and she should be more grateful for the time she had been allowed to share with Maca. Perhaps they had had all the happiness possible in their short few months, so perfect and intense that it equaled another person's lifetime. All the happiness she could ever have hoped for, she had lived with Maca. Esther knew she would never feel that much again, but perhaps she could still pass that kind of happiness onto someone else.

So now, it was perhaps time to give something back, to repay fate for the happiness she had known. She thought of Miguel who loved her and cared for her, and she did love him in return. Not like she had loved Maca, but she did love him. She couldn't hope for more. And perhaps, this was enough.

Part 61

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