“Dr. Mel?”

Why was the world shaking? It wasn’t supposed to shake. Earthquake? No, that didn’t seem right.

“Dr. Mel?”

No…not the world. Her arm. Someone was shaking her arm.

Hard.

Melissa Bell pulled her head off the soggy seat. Drooling? She’d been drooling? When did I fall asleep? She wiped at the corner of her mouth, soaking the sleeve of her sweater in spittle and embarrassment. Eyes didn’t want to open, but did. Gritty. Painful. Everything was still. Too still now that her arm wasn’t being shaken anymore. Oh, crap.

The plane had landed.

We must have…? The thought wouldn’t coalesce any more than Maria would. Too bleary-eyed to make sense of the world, Mel sat up and tried to focus. Maria’s angelic face swam into view. The girl looked pale, white bandages standing out in stark relief along the one side of her face.

“We landed, Doctor,” Maria said, eyes darting to the window as if unsure the ground was still out there and that they were upon it. She seemed breathless. “It was…scary.”

Scary. The child had been through hell and never even referred to the day that took her father and her face as ‘scary.’ Oh shit, what have I just slept through? “Oh, Maria.” Mel jolted upright and reached for the girl, folding her into a tight hug. “I’m so sorry I slept through it. Were you scared?”

“Not like I was the first time. But that was a smaller plane in…Florida?” Her voice was muffled. Brave though her slender shoulders still trembled.

Great job, Mel. You had one job and you’ve landed the poor child in a state of pure terror.

Mel took a breath and nodded, Definitely awake now. Disappointment in oneself had a way of shaking out the cobwebs. She set the girl back in her seat, offering her a proud smile alongside her nod. “Yes, that was Florida. At least this time, when we’re off the plane we’re off, and we don’t have to get another on one.”

Maria ducked her head, her smile shy. Self-conscious still. “Dr. Mel, I think that is what those…? I think…how you say…” She shook her head. “Azafata.” She pointed somewhere behind Mel’s head. “Everyone is off but us.”

Azafata. Her Spanish was good, but this one had her at a loss. But she had a sneaking suspicion. Sure enough, an entire entourage of flight attendants were hovering in the aisle, looking like the two passengers from Belize were the only thing standing between them and a night off. Mel flushed and jumped to her feet, scrambling for her overnight case in the overhead compartment and bringing it down on her head. Hard. “Wow, I must’ve really been sleeping…wow. Look at that. Everyone is off already.” She gave a bright smile to the uniformed masses, watching unsmiling, and not exactly offering to help.

 “Sí,” Maria nodded emphatically. The bandages on the left side of her face had loosened and were beginning to slip. “I let you sleep as long as I could, but the…azafata? They were looking at us very hard.”

They still were. Mel groped for the bag between the seats, still seeing stars. Maria stretched beside her, balancing on one foot to reach her own case before stepping out into the aisle, ready to go. Mel resisted the urge to apologize to the staring throng. “You’re ready then? Got everything?”

Maria looked at her for a moment. “Doctor, I have been ready.”

Mel tried to smother her chuckle, with mixed results. “Let’s get going, then.” She walked down the rows of seats between a gauntlet of stares and snap judgements. Somehow she returned the forced smiles of the flight crew who had spent the journey eyeing Maria’s loose bandages with some trepidation. Not hostile exactly, but this particular trip hadn’t been with the friendliest of skies.

As in Florida, it was the noise that assaulted the senses once you deplaned. In LAX, she expected maybe a little worse. Both were large airports, after all.

She could handle this.

Only it was worse, a lot worse. People were everywhere: they walked, they rode, they came to abrupt stops and re-read the same gate pass they’d re-read on the last three gates—the gates they’d screeched to a halt at only moments before. All with a hurried sort of busyness that pulsated with a frantic energy that had been noticeably missing on the other end of the country.

Florida had been an airport for vacationers heading to Walt Disney World. LAX was a shark tank about to erupt into a feeding frenzy.

There were carts and trollies and wheelchairs, all driven by people who cared little for the content in their care. Even in the terminal, horns sounded when luggage carts and people carts wended their way through the crowds that gathered in front of coffee shops and magazine stores, like so many wildebeests at a watering hole. Not that Belize had wildebeests, but the word was somehow stuck in her head.

I’m a doctor. I have graduated from medical school, for bloody sake. I’ve done residency in some of the worst areas of inner cities. I carved a clinic from a jungle, saved lives, lived with snakes, faced down dangerous men…I can handle LAX.

They were comforting thoughts, but she was having a lot of trouble believing them.

She stopped finally in the main concourse and turned in a slow circle, eyes searching a crowd that wouldn’t stay put long enough to find what she was looking for. “Where’s Brant?”

“Dr. Mel?”

“I’m sorry, Maria; I didn’t know I was saying that out loud. I’m looking for Brant. Dr. Layton.”

“Is there trouble?” Maria’s eyes grew huge in her tiny face, wet with unshed tears.

The poor thing’s terrified. Pull yourself together, Doc, and take care of your patient. Mel straightened her shoulders, adding some iron to her spine. “No honey, not trouble. Just…just…”

Okay, maybe not iron. Iron wouldn’t sag so quickly.

“You are scared to see him again?”

Mel stared at Maria. Little girls weren’t supposed to make such grown-up pronouncements. Flustered, she went to adjust the bandages again. She’d straightened them at the gate, in the plane, in Florida…if she was honest, she was probably the reason they were slipping off in the first place—too much re-adjustment.

Maria was such a pretty girl, with bright and wide, guileless eyes. A ready smile. Extremely polite and friendly. The skin on the left side of her face was ruined. The puckering, the scarring, left her deformed. Ironically, it was her innocence and beauty that had caused her to lose this all when she fell in the house fire her father had started. She had run back into the house to save him where he lay, passed out on the couch.

“Don’t be silly.” Mel restrained herself from tampering with the bandages further. They weren’t strictly necessary; the wounds had healed as best as they were going to, but they were in place for the girl’s privacy. The marks were ghastly and people would stare less at bandages. “I’m not scared at all.” Mel’s hands went to Maria’s collar and continued their business there.

“Dr. Mel.” Maria looked up at her dubiously. “You don’t need to be afraid. Remember landing in Florida? If you can do that without fear, you don’t have any fear.”

Mel laughed and hugged her. Maria’s thousand-watt smile shone through again. “I suppose you’re right,” Mel said, feeling the tension ease from her own shoulders. “After that we can’t fear anything ever again, can we?”

“No,” Maria said. “And you were asleep for the landing here. So why are you scared?”

Mel looked the girl. She was 13, not really a child anymore, but not quite an adult yet either. On the other hand, Mel didn’t actually have anyone to talk to and it was eating away at her.

“It’s been six months, Maria,” she said as the stream of people and baggage parted around her. “It was only supposed to be six weeks. What if…what if he’s changed his mind?”

“You mean if he changed his mind about me…” Maria brushed her fingertips across the bandaged cheek. “Or you?” Maria took her hand.

Mel squeezed the proffered hand. “No, Maria, he’s not going to change his mind about working on you. He gave us his word, didn’t he?”

“Sí, he did.” Maria looked Mel in the eye. “And he gave his word to you, too. Why should I believe if you don’t?”

Mel took a deep breath. Hard to argue that. “All right, all right, I’ll stop fussing. But remember, you’re still a kid! You keep forgetting that!”

Maria smiled brightly “I will try to remember.” She frowned a minute. “Maybe he’s where the suitcases are? You said we have to get them when we land.”

Mel glanced up at the signs to get her bearings. To the right. They needed to go…somewhere…to the right. She took a deep breath and grabbed Maria’s hand, not about to lose her in the vastness of the airport. “You know,” she said thoughtfully as they skirted around a family of seven, harried mother charging after children while the father stared blithely at his cell phone, “for a kid who’s never left her village, you know an awful lot about airports.”

“I know jungles,” Maria said with a shrug, and fell into step alongside her.