Mirsada made lunch. Eric didn't show up on time, and she fumed until the phone rang at about 4 p.m. He had been tied up at one of the refugee camps. That evening, he finally drove up in his red, Russian rental car, and burst out its door.
Mirsada offered a hand to shake. He grabbed her and embraced her--which she assumed was another crazy American greeting. Then he told her he had only an hour to spend because the translator had to get back to Zagreb.
"I was pissed," she says. "I liked him, and I was surprised how much he really cared about me. I chose to trust him, because I didn't have anybody to trust. I was far from my family and didn't have very many friends." Life during wartime forces a person to make decisions he or she might not make otherwise. "I wanted him to stay with me," she says. He did, and the translator had to wait until morning to get home.
"We became instantly so close," Eric explains. "I was longing for someone in my life, and she was suffering from terrible loneliness and not being able to go on with her career. We were both searching for something, and we found it in each other."
By March, Eric's calls and letters had convinced Mirsada to come to Prescott; the official justification for such a rash act was that Eric could help her reach the media and talk about the plight of her country. She arrived on March 15, and Eric indeed put the media on full alert.
Mirsada taught herself to speak English. One day, while watching a local marathon race, she met Julie Williams, the women's cross-country coach at Yavapai College. Williams offered her a full scholarship on the spot. Mirsada got back in running shape, and by the end of the season, she had taken fourth place in the national junior college championships and sixth in an Arizona invitational race that included runners from major universities. She was offered a full scholarship to a university in Colorado, but chose to return this year to Yavapai College.
On January 1, 1994, she and Eric were married. The wedding was covered by national TV news. Eric landed a segment on the TV show A Current Affair; it portrayed the couple's fairy-tale meeting--without mentioning Eric's other crusade. They appeared on the Leeza Gibbons talk show in a segment about unlikely (but romantic) true loves; the women in the studio audience swooned at the tenderness of Eric's account. The men raised skeptical eyebrows.
But Eric Adam was living happily ever after.
Mirsada sometimes wishes that Eric could stop crusading so she could get to know him better.
"He'll see something on TV," she says, "and the next day, he'll say, 'Oh, I started a new project, but don't worry, you don't have to do anything.'"
It's no joke. A year ago August, he saw news reports on the Mississippi River floods, and the next thing Mirsada knew, they were driving cross-country in a U-Haul truck filled with relief supplies for Midwestern farmers.
He has already brought one injured Bosnian child to Flagstaff for medical treatment. Last month, he helped with a quick collection drive for Rwandan refugees. Last week, he saw a TV report about Cuban refugees at Guantanamo Bay . . .
She doesn't know why Eric carries on his causes. He doesn't know, either. An outsider might question if he's perhaps trying to atone for the sins of his youth. He confesses that if he weren't keeping busy that maybe he'd succumb to drinking again.
Substance abuse is a compulsion, and Adam has redirected that compulsion, used it to expand an innate instinct to do good, an instinct that most of us have, unfortunately, lost.
Mirsada loves him deeply and desperately, but she has her own feelings: a touch of survivor's guilt for her own sudden trip from the hell of Bosnia in wartime to the serenity of Prescott. When she first started training with the Yavapai College cross-country team, her coach says, Mirsada would startle like a war veteran every time a lizard dashed across the trail. Mirsada says she feels a bit like Alice through the Looking Glass, being magically plucked from one world to another. Eric is working to bring Mirsada's sister and her sister's children to Prescott.
And though she loves Eric deeply, Mirsada cringes at the sugar-coated marketing of their love story. Of the Leeza show, for example, she says, "After that interview, I said, 'Eric, I did a job, but I hate it.'"
While Eric has made a conscious choice to focus and refocus on the good deeds he's done and the serenity he feels, Mirsada is still tussling with her past and her future.
And, of course, the ghost of Suzi Hollowell follows them. Eric has no intention of exorcising it. Even Suzi's best friend in Montana has written to him and told him to give it up and go on with his life.
He wrote back, "I have gone on with my life--but this is something I'll never give up.
