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Can’t we push the reset button?

AFTER DAD DIES, I don’t go back to work. I cannot step on another plane bound for sunny Southern California. I can no longer retreat behind the camera wearing this season’s Banana Republic collection in all black, size 14, hoping it hides my forty-five-pound weight gain, which I’m afraid screams: I don’t know who I am anymore. I am disappearing. I can’t lead models in one more round of “One, two, three. Yay!” I will not sit through one more lecture from a stock-photo library rep who mocks lovely little-girl models as “weird looking” or “horsey faced.”

Instead, as Ted will point out later in division-of-labor arguments, I sit on the couch and do precisely nothing for months. Four months, to be exact. This leads us to try Paris. The plan is to visit the city—it will be my first time there—to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. I want to mark the territory of the next decade with something new and different. Because I have a sneaking feeling that now may be the time to get away . . . from all this.

Ted and I visit his family in England, where I catch a horrible cold. By the time we reach Berlin for a quick visit with friends, I have both the flu and strep throat. As though I can will myself to feel better, I go out one night, but the smoky Berlin bars throw me into a nonstop coughing fit. The next day, while Ted explores the city’s museums, I stay in bed watching shadows shift around our hosts’ dark guest apartment. I trace lines in the wide-board floors, scan the bookshelf and attempt to make sense of the German titles, and drift in and out of sleep, trying not to swallow. By the time Ted returns, we hit “eject.” We’re supposed to fly to Paris in the morning, but we fly home instead.

I wind up back on the couch in Portland, watching Oprah.

ON JANUARY 24, 2005, Oprah features a twenty-minute segment on women in the Congo.

“During World War II, a lot of people pretended not to know what was going on. Well, there’s another holocaust going on. This time, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And if you are like most people, you probably had no idea.”

What?

In the report, journalist Lisa Ling describes a conflict born out of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. After the mass killings, the Hutu militias responsible were pushed west over the border into Congo, where they retreated into the forests and began to terrorize the local population. The militias that were formed to fight them soon began fighting each other. Eventually, half a dozen countries were involved in the conflict, which became known as Africa’s First World War.

Oprah adds, “And the violence continues today, as we speak.” Women have suffered the worst of it; rape and sexual slavery are widespread, and once they’ve become victims, women are usually rejected by their husbands. “Four million people have died. Four million people. And no one is talking about it,” Lisa Ling reports. “I think it’s the worst place on earth . . . and the most ignored.”

Wait. Wait. Wait. Let’s be clear. The militias responsible for the Rwandan genocide are still out there? Killing people?

Oprah says, “They are hoping somebody in the world will hear their screams for help.”

Could I be one of those people?

Zainab Salbi, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Women for Women International, appears on the show. The articulate, thirtysomething Iraqi American woman suggests sponsoring a Congolese woman for $27 a month. Oprah concludes, in an unusually pointed tone, “Now that you know, you can’t pretend you didn’t hear it.”

I’ ll do that. I’ ll sponsor a woman.

The show ends. Ted shouts from the next room, “Would you like some tea?”

The phone rings. I chat with my mom for a couple of minutes. I check email then initiate the daily discussion, calling to Ted in the next room. “Where should we have dinner?”

Walking down the hall, heading for my tea, I remember the show. I know how this will go. My mind will drift to cash-flow charts scrawled on