Together by Julie Cohen

Author:Julie Cohen [Cohen, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409171775
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

1972

Chapter Twenty-Two

August 1972

Miami, Florida

Miami was hot. After the thin air at La Paz’s high altitude, the atmosphere felt almost solid and soupy. Sweat sprang out on to Emily’s skin, dampening her shirt as soon as she stepped out of the plane on to the stairs leading down to the tarmac. The surface, ablaze with heat, penetrated the soles of her shoes soon after she stepped off the stairs.

Christopher carried their coats and their smallest suitcase as they walked to the waiting bus. Even so, he touched her elbow as she stepped up into the vehicle, as if she needed steadying.

In less than an hour they would be meeting her family at the holiday villa they’d rented in Miami Beach. Emily hadn’t seen any of them for over a year; she hadn’t even spoken to them on the phone for weeks, as service was patchy in Bolivia at the best of times. But as the bus motored its way to the terminal, she wasn’t thinking about her father and her mother and Polly. She was thinking about Consuela Diaz.

Consuela Diaz was fourteen years old and a street child. She lived under a bridge in La Paz with a loose group of other orphans who lived by stealing, begging, scavenging and selling themselves. She had thick black hair that was tied tightly in plaits around her head. She was eight and a half months pregnant and her belly protruded from her skinny body.

She also had a suppurating foot, blackened and swollen, the result of a rat bite that had gone untreated.

When Consuela had come into Emily’s antenatal clinic early yesterday morning, Emily had seen Consuela’s smile first, and then her elaborately plaited hair, and then she had smelled the rot.

‘How much of her foot did you need to take?’ she asked Christopher, now, as they embarked from the bus. The terminal was air-conditioned and it chilled her skin.

‘Whose foot?’ Christopher was busy looking for the signs pointing them to passport control.

‘Consuela Diaz.’

‘The young girl with gangrene?’ He shook his head. ‘You saw how far advanced it was. We couldn’t risk the baby as well as her. I had to take it off mid-shin.’

Emily stopped walking on the polished floor. The other passengers streamed around and past them. ‘Mid-shin?’

She had held Consuela’s hand and told her: ‘I’m sending you to my husband, Mr Knight. He’s a good surgeon, and a good man; he’ll do everything for you that he can.’ And Consuela had nodded trustingly and her baby had kicked, and a beautiful smile had blossomed on her face. She had a gap between her two front teeth, which made her look even younger than she was.

‘Mid-shin?’ Emily repeated. ‘How is she going to survive, where she is, without half her leg? How is she going to cope with having a baby?’

‘With any luck, she’ll get a prosthesis. I spoke with Randall.’

‘I don’t think we should have left.’

Christopher put down their suitcase. He touched her chin, tilted up her head. ‘Darling. We did a lot of good, but our time there is over.

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