“Maybe I’ll be able to lure you to Africa with me one day,” Dick Dennis said casually while Véronique dressed.
“Why Africa?” she said, as she pulled down her sweater and put on her boots. All of her tests and exams had checked out. She was surprisingly healthy and strong given what she’d been through nine months before. It was the blessing and advantage of youth. He was sure that many of the other victims hadn’t fared as well.
“I spend three months in Angola every year,” he explained to her, “at a children’s hospital. Angola had twenty-seven years of civil war, which left them with over four million displaced people, incredible famine, and ten to fifteen million unexploded land mines. The damage to the population from those mines is heartbreaking. I got involved years ago with the HALO Trust. We’re hoping to make Angola and several other countries free of land mines in the next few years. HALO has been working toward that for more than twenty years. I spend my three months there every year, operating on the children who are the victims of those mines. Many lose limbs or are severely disfigured. We round up the local children who’ve been injured, and provide free surgery and support services. The hospital is run by a small convent of nuns, and wonderful, dedicated nurses. They have medical teams who go through the area periodically. I do surgery there as a volunteer. You come back feeling as though you made some kind of difference. A three-year-old doesn’t lose a leg, or a seven-year-old boy keeps his arm, or you try to repair what’s left so they can function and maybe a little girl isn’t disfigured. We see some awful stuff there. And the nurses and nuns are terrific.
“It’s the only way I can do what I do here. You can only inject so much Botox, without feeling that you’ve wasted your medical school degree. Phillip is better at all that than I am. The work in Angola feeds my soul. Each of my kids has come out there at least once. Some like it better than others. My oldest son just started med school at Columbia. He’s come out there with me a lot. The others aren’t so keen on it. My wife hates it, but she’s a good sport about letting me do what’s important to me. She spends three months having dinner with her girlfriends, and I think she loves it.” He laughed, and Véronique was fascinated by what he was saying. “Princess Diana was involved with HALO, and her son Prince Harry is now.”
“I’d love to come out and see it sometime,” she said spontaneously. “I’ve hardly been to Africa, just to Johannesburg once. I’ve worked just about everywhere else. South America, Asia, all over Europe, here in the States. I’ve never been anywhere else in Africa.”
“I have a feeling you’d love it,” he said warmly. His oldest son was twenty-four, and his next younger daughter was Véronique’s age. “There’s something very special about that part of the world. I fell in love with it when I was in college. I’m there roughly from February to May every year. I’ve been doing it for twenty years. I only stayed for two months when the kids were younger, or my wife would probably have divorced me. When they got to high school, I added the third month. I speak fluent Portuguese now, and some Kikongo and Umbundu, the other local languages. I’ll tell you more about it if you’d be interested in going sometime.” It was obvious how passionate he was about it, which touched her deeply. Her mind was full of her surgery the next day, and she was nervous about it, but she was intrigued by what he had told her and it sounded exciting.
She did a few errands after she left their office, and she called her father, hoping to see him. His nurse spoke to her, and said he wasn’t well. He had a bad case of bronchitis and couldn’t see anyone. She had written to him and told him about her surgery, and he had answered her and wished her luck. She asked the nurse to wish him a merry Christmas, and she said she would. His staff had been very responsive to her calls ever since she’d seen him, and she hoped to see him again while she was in New York, if his health permitted. She imagined him surrounded by his three children at Christmas. She was the unknown child in the shadows they knew nothing about and never would. It was an odd feeling. She was the secret he would take to his grave, as her mother had been too.
Doug called her on her cellphone that night from Ireland to wish her luck. He sounded a little drunk, said he had just come back from the pub with his brother, and that they were all driving him crazy but he was having a good time. He remembered to call her before her surgery. He’d been very good about staying in touch regularly, ever since she’d come back from Brussels. In the past, he had drifted off for months when they were busy, but now he made a point of calling her often, knowing how alone she was. He was her only friend at the moment, the only non-medical person who knew about her face other than Bernard, her father, Gabrielle, who had visited her once at the hospital, and her agent, whom she’d run into and never heard from again.