Isaac came out from the bedroom while I was making my study of the refrigerator. I heard his footsteps stop behind me, but chose to ignore him.
“You came back for the chicken,” he said.
I laughed, but not too loudly. I straightened my face, closed the door, and pressed my back against it.
“It’s Saturday,” I said. I felt excited saying this. It was a beautiful morning, warm but not hot, the living room full of sunlight.
I had felt restless and scared since waking up, and now I had a vague idea of how to respond. “I think we should take a trip.”
He folded his arms, leaned against the wall, crossed his legs, and even pursed his lips.
“I thought you had to work.”
“I was wrong. I made a mistake.”
I waited him for him to state what was obvious. I was lying. I had run out on him that morning in a way that had felt final to both of us, but he seemed willing to act as if none of that mattered anymore.
“Chicago. I’ve always wanted to go. It’s the capital of the Midwest.”
“I never got closer than the airport.”
“Now is our chance,” I said.
We disagreed on whether we should leave right away. As Isaac made his argument for later, I made a mental list of everything I wanted to do before leaving. When he finished, I said, “We can stop and rest along the way, but it’s important we go now.”
He didn’t disagree. He asked: “Is that what you really want?”
“It is.”
I told him to pack as much as he could, and not to leave behind anything that was important.
While he packed, I showered. When I finished, I saw his toothbrush on the sink and put it in my mouth. I yelled from the bathroom, “I’m using your toothbrush.”
It felt more intimate than sex—a seemingly minor thing that any normal couple would have shared by now. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see all the reasons why I had never done so staring back at me.
When I came back to the bedroom, Isaac had laid out on the bed the one suit he owned, the one he had been wearing at the airport. On the floor was the same suitcase he had been carrying. I was surprised at how little he still had, and then I understood that the suitcase had been empty when he arrived: all the clothes inside it now, he had bought with me. The only original item was the notebook that sat on top.
He was looking at the suit.
“Do you mind if I wear it? It was the last thing I bought in Nairobi. I don’t want to fold it into such a small suitcase.”
I wrapped my arms around him from behind and held my face against his back. I felt the urge to tell him I loved him; it wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought, but it was the first time I was certain it was true. I pushed him onto the part of the bed that wasn’t covered by his suit, and took off my towel as I undressed him.
He reached for a condom, but I pulled his arm back and placed it around me.
“Is this because of the toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
He tried to pull me off him before he came, but I refused to let go. I looked ahead and had a sense of the doubt and anxiety that would follow, but when I looked beyond that for regret, I found none. I stayed on top of him for as long as possible. I saw him preparing to apologize.
“There is nothing to be sorry about,” I told him.
I made eggs while Isaac showered and put his suit on. When I first met him I had wanted to laugh at the idea that someone would get so dressed up to come to this town, where most men wore suits only to church, and then just for weddings and funerals. I had missed how handsome he looked in gray, how a suit aged him just slightly beyond his twenty-odd years to a point better matched to the sometimes grave, formal aura that surrounded him.
“I thought you didn’t touch eggs,” he said.
“I learned while you were away.”
I sat on the kitchen counter while he ate his breakfast at the table. I couldn’t help thinking of the hundreds of times I had watched my mother sit next to my father as he did the same. His daily breakfast consisted of two eggs, fried or scrambled, with bacon and toast on the side. She nervously watched him eat from her side of the table, as if she knew that it was merely a matter of time before there would be a final breakfast; it would never be acknowledged as such, and so she rehearsed the end daily for years in order to soften the blow.
Here was another difference between us: I knew the end was near. I was making it, and trying to devour every moment left.
Before we left, I asked Isaac if he was certain he had packed everything he needed for a long trip. “Just in case I kidnap you and you never come back.”
He held up his suitcase. “I’ve never had much to leave behind,” he said.
I didn’t say where we were going next, and Isaac didn’t ask. We skirted the center of town, drove past the new shopping malls to the eastern edge of Laurel, where my mother and I lived. I had never taken Isaac to that part of town, and I could tell from the way he stared out the window at the houses, which were larger than most homes in Laurel and were graced with wide, circular porches and acres of grass to look out upon, that this was new to him.
We pulled into the fourth house we passed.
“This is yours?” Isaac asked me.
I thought of it as my home, but never as mine. I don’t think any of us who lived there had any strong feeling toward it. My parents were the second people to own it, and I never gave much thought to what I would I do when I inherited it.
“I live here,” I said, “but it’s my mother’s house. My father didn’t want anything to do with it after the divorce.”
I asked him if he wanted to come in with me while I packed. He peered through the windshield as if trying to gauge the reception that would be waiting for him on the other side of the door. I knew better now than to guess what it would be.
“Is it okay if I just wait in the car?”
It was and it wasn’t, but I said yes, because I owed him that.
The front door was already half open. I knew from experience that my mother would have parted the curtains in the living room or in her bedroom as soon as she heard a car pull into the driveway. Still, I was taken aback at seeing her standing on the other side of the door, in an ankle-length blue floral dress that she used to say made her look matronly, as if she were hiding children and possibly some pies underneath the hem. She didn’t know what to do with her arms and hands. She unfolded and refolded them in the time it took me to enter and close the door.
“I heard your car from the kitchen,” she said.
“I was going to call and tell you I was coming.”
“This is still your home, Helen. Why would you ever do that?”
For all the love and affection that existed between us, we rarely hugged. Our gestures of affection had become increasingly girlish—we squeezed hands; occasionally, my mother held my forearm; I often caught her staring at me, waiting for me to notice she was watching me closely. I thought of that when I held my hand out to her. She took it, and I led her to the windows that looked out onto the driveway. The curtain was halfway parted.
“That’s the man I’ve been seeing,” I told her. “His name is Isaac.”
She didn’t look long; she had seen him as soon as we arrived and knew who he was to me.
“Does he always wear a suit?” she asked me.
“Only on special occasions.”
She gasped. She held her hand to her mouth as if that could hide it. Only then did I understand how she had interpreted “special occasion.” I began to laugh, harder than I should have.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her. “All we’re doing is driving to Chicago.” When that failed to calm her properly, I promised her that no other special occasion had been planned, or considered.
She moved away from the window. Her hands were confused again, twirling and tugging frantically.
“Is he coming in?”
“I asked him to, but he
said he preferred to wait in the car.”
Her instincts for proper behavior were off; she had no system of rules to apply. It was rude not to have him come in, but perhaps it was worse not to know how to respond if he did. I saw her worrying about where to sit and what to say, and how I would feel if she made no effort at all.
“Chicago,” she said.
“It was my idea. I’ve never been.”
“And do you have to go? I’m going to worry every minute about what may happen to you.”
She was breathing deeply, with her right hand clenched tightly in front of her lips as if she was trying to work her way to anger in order not to cry.
I went to close the curtains, afraid of what Isaac would think if he saw us; but he was no longer in the car. I turned and caught sight of him just as his form was coming up the porch. My mother opened the door for him before I knew what to say.
“Welcome,” she said. “My name is Audrey.”
A portion of every minute of Isaac’s life was spent acting, and so I shouldn’t have been surprised that when a performance was needed he could easily fill whatever role was called for. Isaac entered as either the embodiment or a caricature of an English gentleman. He bent slightly forward when he introduced himself, and there was a hint of the accent I hadn’t heard in months.
“My name is Isaac,” he said. “It’s a privilege to meet you.”
I kept from laughing for my mother’s sake and Isaac’s. They were both performing; I couldn’t have asked them to do more than that. Isaac complimented the house; “magnificent” was the word he chose. My mother downplayed the praise and then described the house as late Victorian, a phrase that I had never heard her use before, and which could only have been the result of having Isaac around. The house was as late Victorian as his accent. Only in the shortened history of the Midwest could these affectations thrive.
My mother suggested I take Isaac on a tour of the house while she prepared tea for us. I had lived in that house my entire life and never been asked to give a tour of it. It felt like going through a wedding album while the wedding was still going on: the past was all over the walls, in pictures and souvenirs, but because I was never far away, I rarely thought of them as markers of a time that had ended.
I led Isaac up the stairwell.
“I don’t know why, but every house in Laurel has black-and-white photos by the stairs,” I said.
At the very top were the only two pictures we had of my mother’s parents, both of whom died shortly after I was born.
“We’re the opposite of your family.” I pointed to the pictures, which were shot from too great a distance. “We don’t go back much further than this.”
“Look at the size of this house,” he said. “You’re only just beginning.”
Briefly, I saw the house through his eyes. It was built for a large family, for multiple generations to live together at the same time, and perhaps someday it would fulfill that design, but never with me.
I sent Isaac downstairs while I packed. I didn’t linger over anything in my room, which had grown sparer and sparer over the years as I quietly unwound my attachments, carting boxes of clothes and photographs into the basement, where I knew they were safe, until all that was left was a bed, a bookcase, and a desk that looked out onto a large backyard overrun with weeds. I had never made any serious plans to leave Laurel, and yet long before Isaac, a part of me was gone.
It took me a few minutes to pack. When I returned to the living room, Isaac and my mother had already started their tea. They were hardly speaking; both were focused on getting their cups to their lips without spilling. The act had gone on long enough. I kissed my mother on the cheek and whispered that it was time for us to leave. She held on to my wrist and whispered back: “Helen, please be careful who sees you. If not for yourself, then for his sake.”
ISAAC
When I woke the next morning, Isaac was standing over me, nudging me gently in the back with his foot. The courtyard was littered with still-drunk soldiers, many of whom had fallen asleep with empty bottles and their guns tucked in their arms. I had fallen asleep listening to a group of them debate whether they were revolutionaries or liberators. They seemed to split evenly down the middle until, finally, one pointed out that there was no rule saying they couldn’t be both. “We are revolutionary liberators,” he said, and to celebrate their new titles, they banged their bottles together, finished what was left in them, and then tossed them as far as they could over the hotel walls, to shatter on the road, where most children and many women walked barefoot.
I followed Isaac out of the courtyard. That we were leaving just before dawn, when there were still a few stars left on the northern edge of the sky, gave me hope that he had decided our life of war had gone on long enough. I had a general idea of where we were in the country, and I felt confident that if we had a car we could reach at least three different borders by midday, and that Joseph would be too concerned with his army’s next advance to chase us. I had dreamed of big cities my entire life, but what I wanted for us was to find the smallest village possible—an idyllic, forgotten hamlet, like the ones we had passed in the foothills, but near a river or, better yet, within earshot of a waterfall. There was so much vast, empty space across the continent that I had no reason to believe it wasn’t possible. We just had to find one of the dozens, or maybe even hundreds of hidden pockets where no one cared about borders.
I thought I had found a way to explain to Isaac why we had to leave. I was going to tell him that this wasn’t the fight he expected, and that there were other things that could be done with our lives but to do them we had to get out while we could. I whispered his name as I walked up the main road.
“Isaac,” I said, but, rather than turn around, he held up his hand and continued walking.
I was anxious but not scared. It was the best time to be alone in a village. There were a few signs of early-morning life in some of the houses farther up the road, and it was possible to believe at that hour that life here would go on as normal, that tea would be made and bread baked; men would go off to tend their fields while the women gathered water and dressed their children for school until the sun reached its peak and everyone retreated indoors to wait out the heat.
We continued up the main road in silence, listening to the last roosters left alive cackle at one another, until we reached the bronze fist where Joseph had delivered his speech a few days earlier. Once there, Isaac turned to me and said:
“Now we wait.”
“For what?”
He motioned with his finger for me to stop talking.
• • •
The sun was above the horizon when a man with a small boy and two donkeys trailing behind them emerged from the footpath that branched off the main road.
“This is where we say goodbye,” Isaac told me. I looked at the man and child closely. They were clearly father and son, with the same wide, sloping forehead; on the child it seemed to take too much space, but it gave the man a gentle, almost feminine quality.
“Why now?” I asked him.
“We’re leaving this evening,” he said. “Joseph has other villages he wants to conquer.”
“And where do I go?”
He pointed to the man, who appeared to be whispering something important to one of the donkeys.
“He has someplace safe to take you. Stay there. Rest. Get strong, and then go east. I’ve heard it’s quiet there. Whatever you do, don’t come back. Also, don’t go south; I hear there are problems there.”
“And north?”
“Not so good. There are more problems.”
“And what will you do?”
He threw his arm around my shoulder. He pointed straight ahead and then slowly moved his finger from left to right, drawing an imaginary line across the horizon.
“There is nothing else out there for me except this?”
We had more we wanted to say—there were apologies that should have been made, forgiveness to hav
e been granted—but the village was waking up, despite the late night. We could smell the charcoal burning in the gardens and hear people in the street. Joseph was certainly up by now.
“How long will you be gone?” I asked him.
“Joseph says it should be over in two days. He says there will be no resistance.”
It was the wrong question to ask when saying goodbye. The talk of war turned him. He snapped back into form.
“Enough of this,” he said.
He held out his hand. I shook it. He took a bundle of notes from his pocket and gave it to the man. They talked between themselves for a few seconds, and then Isaac gave him a pat on the back of his head. Before walking away, he said, “One donkey is yours if you want to keep it.”
Isaac turned south, back to the hotel, while I headed west, along the same path the man and his boy had come from. One of the small wonders of village life was how quickly nature reclaimed its dominance, as if the life of a town was little more than a minor disturbance to an otherwise wild world. After a few minutes of walking, there was hardly any sound other than that of birds; by the time we had traveled a half-mile, the trees had all but swallowed the footpath we were on. We walked for more than an hour, until we reached a clearing where maybe a dozen thatch-roofed huts stood a few feet apart from one another, each surrounded by a wooden fence to pen in the chickens, and the children when the adults were away. It was the idyllic corner of the world I had been hoping to find, and though that vision was little more than the fantasy of someone desperate for refuge, I was determined to preserve it for as long as possible. I knew it wouldn’t last; even if there wasn’t a war on the horizon, if I stayed long enough I’d find all the petty complaints and frustrations of life here just as easily I had found them in the capital and in my own childhood home. But there wasn’t much time anyway: Joseph’s soldiers were going to take the next city that evening, which meant many of them would leave within the hour. If they won, they would return within the next few days; if they were slaughtered, the army would finish the rest of them, holed up at the hotel. In either case, it was only a matter of time before nothing was safe.
All Our Names Page 18
