“I don’t know. But I am sure if my mom found that button, she’d be the first to push it. She thought I would end up writing for the Kansas City Star.”

Mom groans, turning her head to the other side without opening her eyes. “People are always complaining about moms pushing their buttons,” she says.

I stifle a laugh.

Clay looks impressed at Mom’s ability to slide into a conversation half-asleep.

During my surgical residency, I’d scrubbed in for a difficult case. An eighty-nine-year-old man had suffered complication after complication in the treatment of his colon cancer. His physical deterioration seemed to accelerate his dementia, leaving his children to make decisions on his behalf. When he came into the hospital writhing in pain from yet another bowel obstruction, his children insisted that something—anything, everything—be done to save him.

But the man’s cancer had robbed his blood of the elements it needed to form clots. He bled profusely. Bright red blood splattered onto my mask, my glasses, and my sterile gown. I cauterized and irrigated and cauterized some more, finally getting the bleeding under control.

At the close of the case, I left the recovery area and walked down a hospital corridor, heavy-footed in my clogs, to see an ailing patient in the intensive care unit. I noticed people looking at me askance. A woman’s hand flitted to her mouth.

I looked down and cursed under my breath.

Blood had soaked through the sterile gown, painting scarlet splatters across my scrub top. I took a few papers out of my pocket, unfolded them, and used them to cover the stains.

The woman I passed probably thought I’d done my patient more harm than good. I didn’t blame her for looking away. To wrest a body—or a country—from the grips of demise is a bloody affair.

Chapter 51

Even without the turbulence in the skies, my stomach would have been doing somersaults. I press my face to the glass and trace the jagged lines of the mountains.

“No city in the world makes a grander entrance,” Mom whispers.

I hear the lift of pride in her voice too and remember that Kabul was much more than just another post for her.

This leg of the flight, from Dubai to Kabul, is just under three hours. There are only a handful of Westerners on the flight. Some toy with spreadsheets on their laptops, while others sleep with arms folded and heads tilted back. The rest are my countrymen, some dressed in loose-fitting tunics and pantaloons, some in suits, and a few in acid-washed jeans and slim-cut dress shirts. They are men with features as rugged as the mountains, with skin the color of the earth. They look as if they were bits of homeland shaped into people.

I have kept to my seat and avoided eye contact with them for the duration of the flight.