Playing Dirty(65)

My eyes teared up as I stared at him. He was overcome with profound emotion, and it was affecting me as well. A trail of hot salty tears dripped down my cheek, and Jay reached over and laced his fingers with mine, pulling them close.

“That’s what happened with my parents,” he said softly. “I…I never got to tell them how much I loved them. It was the day of my confirmation, the day I joined the church. They wanted me to go home for supper with them but I wanted to go play with my best friend in the park. When they got in the car to leave, it exploded immediately. Someone had planted the bomb while we were all in church.”

I sucked in a deep breath. Jay’s story was heartbreaking. As much as he’d told me about the past, I’d never imagined anything quite that painful.

“Jay, they must have known how much you loved them,” I said softly. “And I bet wherever they are now, they’re very, very glad that you weren’t in the car with them that day.”

Jay didn’t reply. Instead, he pulled me into a tight, intimate hug and I closed my eyes and let him stroke my hair. All around us was chaos. The airport had bloomed into a fantastic mess of people and luggage. Adults wailed and hugged each other like toddlers, and children ran forgotten on the maroon tiled floor.

“We have to do something,” I said under my breath. “We have to help these people.”

There were two people crying and holding each other, on the floor, not twenty feet from where Jay and I stood. They were sobbing so intensely that I could barely make out their facial features, and just watching them was enough to hurt my heart. Suddenly, I felt intensely guilty about being so selfish.

“This isn’t just about us,” I said quietly. “Come on.”

Jay followed me as I walked over to the women and knelt down to where they were kneeling. Putting on the brightest expression I could muster up in the circumstances, I reached into my bag and handed over the jumbo sized bottle of water that I’d bought for the flight.

“I think you could both use this a lot more than me,” I said, as casually as I could muster. The women broke their embrace and turned to me with red eyes and faces streaked with tears.

“Thank you,” one of them muttered before reaching forward and taking the bottle of water. She unscrewed the cap and took a long, deep drink before handing it to the other woman. After a few seconds, some of the color returned to their cheeks.

“Thank you,” the other woman said.

“Of course,” I said. “Is there anything we can help you with? Is there anyone you want us to call?”

The older of the two nodded. “My daughter,” she said. “She doesn’t know where I am, and she will fear the worst.”

I helped the woman call her daughter on Jay’s cell phone, taking the phone and explaining what had happened, then passing it back to the woman. The conversation took less than five minutes and by the time she’d hung up, the woman was crying again. But this time, I could tell, it was tears of relief and joy.

“Thank you so much,” the woman said. “Thank you, you are an angel for helping us.”

Jay had been standing off to the side and watching the whole thing, and when he rejoined me, he looked at me with clear admiration in his blue eyes. “You’re a bloody saint,” he told me. “I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to get someone like you.”

“It was the least I could do.”

We began the slow, exhausting process of moving around the airport and trying to comfort those who needed it the most. My heart broke multiple times for these people, these people who had lost a loved one, and I wished I could’ve helped to heal them all. The hardest was a boy who had watched his mother get on the plane—she was going to America to study abroad for the summer—and his father hadn’t been able to explain what happened. He was clearly still in shock, standing there listlessly while his son looked around with wide eyes, asking if his mother would ever come home now.

“They’re still looking for survivors,” I said softly to the father. “There’s a chance she made it.”

I didn’t want to give them false hope, but at the same time, hope was all we had right now, while we didn’t know what was going on.

Jay came up behind me and squatted down to the boy’s height. The boy, suddenly shy, darted behind his father. But Jay wasn’t deterred. “Hello there,” he said. “Do you like football?”

The little boy nodded, and he slowly peeked out from behind his father’s legs. His father was a young man, not much older than Jay and myself, who looked weary with grief. He watched carefully as Jay coaxed the boy out, then wrapped an arm around him and pulled him close.