Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [80]
“What was it like there? How did people react?”
“Disbelief, at first, and then shock. Just total, utter shock. I remember sitting around the bar that night. There was no television, but someone had brought out a radio, and we were all huddled around it, listening.”
She looked at the raindrops gathering on the windowpane. “It’s ironic, actually. One of the main selling points of this resort was that you could ‘get away from it all’—you know, no TV, no phones in the rooms. We were all there because we wanted to be cut off from the rest of the world. And then this terrible thing happens, and we sit there together in the bar—I guess there were a dozen or so guests and about half that many staff—and we just sat and listened to that damn radio all night. By morning we were all on a first-name basis with each other. It was like instant bonding, you know? Like in wartime—our country had been attacked.”
“So you were all Americans?”
“One couple was Canadian, and there were two elderly English ladies traveling together. We all thought they were lovers, but they were very ‘discreet’ about their relationship. We called them Gertrude and Alice when they weren’t around.”
“As in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas?”
“Right.”
The waitress brought steaming plates of food and set them down on the table. Kathy poured hot sauce on her chicken—a lot of hot sauce. Lee was amazed when she took a bite and swallowed it as though it were nothing.
“Up until that night everyone had been drinking piña coladas, margaritas—frozen drinks with fresh fruit and little paper umbrellas—but that night we all ordered scotch and whiskey and gin, straight up. People weren’t drinking to have fun anymore; they were drinking to calm down. It was kind of surreal. All we could pick up on this little radio was this local station that was getting a feed from the BBC. The announcer sounded really upset. It was startling to hear this very formal, stiff-upper-lip-type Englishman almost lose it on the air.”
She took a long drink of her beer and motioned to the woman for another one.
“But at least we were spared the pictures that night. Thank God for that. No one slept very much, but at least we were spared the pictures.”
“Who were you traveling with?” Lee asked, feeling an unwelcome flicker of jealousy.
“My dad. We both love to snorkel. I’m an only child, and since Mom’s been gone, I guess we sort of depend on each other, you know?”
She looked at him, her eyes serious. “Do you think that’s weird?”
“No, I think it’s sweet.”
She reached for the noodle dish, almost knocking over her beer. She was a bit of a loose cannon, he thought. In spite of her scientific training and precise manner in professional settings, away from her work she had an open, childlike demeanor. When she talked there was a force behind the words, a passion for the minutia of life that made him want to drink up her words.
A thought flashed into his head, unbidden: In the midst of death, there is life.
He couldn’t remember where he had heard it, but as he looked at Kathy Azarian’s glistening, eager face, he understood what it meant.
Chapter Thirty-five
They lingered over dinner until they were the last patrons in the restaurant. Lee pushed food around on his plate and managed to eat some, but his stomach felt as twisted as the jumbled heap of rice noodles in the house special dish.
Kathy had a healthy appetite, though, expertly plucking food from her plate with her chopsticks, placing it between her startlingly white teeth. She pierced a piece of pineapple with one chopstick and put it in her mouth.
“Mmm, I like it when they give you fruit for dessert.” She glanced at Lee’s plate. “You didn’t eat very much.”
“My appetite comes and goes.” What he wasn’t ready to tell her was that for six months after Laura’s disappearance, he had hardly eaten at all, living mostly on liquid protein drinks.
“Hmm,” Kathy said. “We need to put some weight on those bones.”
She thinks I’m too thin. Still, he thought the use of “we” was