by Minot, Susan
Then my fist was limp beside my face and it was quiet. Some time passed, I don’t know how long.
I must have moved closer to the tree, because later I woke close to it. Ants were moving on my leg. The boulder in my throat was gone and instead I felt a space open in me. The space was soft. I sat up and brushed my shirt. I sat for a while. The bush had a few evening sounds but was more quiet.
When I stood up I had a feeling of peace. This was new. I walked without any other feeling back to camp. Dinner had been served and the children were sitting at the tables. Janet and Holly looked at me troubled, but I answered them with a peaceful face. I sat with them on the bench and listened. The sound of everyone talking was like a pretty song. People were like bells, each one ringing his or her own special sound.
After that day, when I see a person cry I see they are on their way to feeling better. Since that day I cried my heart onto the ground I am feeling a change might come to me.
I remember the lady from America and the journalists who were here. I remember they had been our friends.
This morning we are under the tree with some girls doing crochet. It is sunny and not so dusty after rain last night. The air is fresh. Simon is by himself on the playing field, kicking a ball with his crooked leg. Beside me Holly shakes bugs from her yarn. She is making yellow socks. She has no baby in mind, but says there will always be a baby coming to someone. Yellow works for a boy as well as a girl. She may offer them to Paulette, the new girl.
More boys run onto the field.
What are you watching out there? Emily says.
I do not answer. A few boys run around with Simon. It is not time yet for football or shop. It is still free time. Simon’s face turns toward the shade where we are and maybe he can see me. I think he finds my eye.
He starts running and does a little one-two-three move with the football, which ought to be wobbly with his warped leg, but he is like a goat, keeping his balance. When he kicks it to another boy, he bends low to the side. I feel the pull.
The last time I ran hard was when I was escaping. My arms hug my solid legs, my chin is on my knees. The girls, heads bent, talk like insects humming on a hot day. When Simon runs he dips from side to side, not showing on his face that it is hard for him. The ball is kicked hard and comes sailing off the field and rolls behind our tree where we sit. Simon runs toward it, running toward us. No girls notice, they are talking, and I do not know why, but I stand up and walk to the ball stopped against a dried-out log. I become someone else for a minute, someone happy. I put my foot on that ball.
Esther! Simon calls. Kick it!
I toe it with my sandal.
Pass! Come on! Here!
I pick it up to throw it. No, I say to myself. I pull back my foot and kick it. It goes sailing up higher than any of us thought. It goes to the other side of the field nearly to the marsh. Simon turns to chase it.
Do I stay? No. Do I walk back to the shade and sit? No. I run onto that field.
I run with the boys. I chase one with the ball and catch him and kick the ball from his feet. I am faster than some of them, I feel even faster than myself.
In the morning we wake and find Carol not in her bunk. Holly said she heard some movement in the night of her leaving. A search for her begins.
Later they find her in the marsh, drowned with her face in shallow water.
Her parents do not come. They tell us her parents are dead. We do not believe it. Carol knew her parents were not taking her back. She did not want to live more. Are we surprised? No.
We understand. Some of me goes with her now she is dead. I let Carol take that part away, the part that would want to die. Instead I would want to live.
The next day while everyone is drawing I pick up a blue pencil and piece of paper and think maybe I will draw this day. I will not draw so much, but something. I put lines, making a river and trees beside it and waves bumpy in it. In the middle I make a round shape. I draw myself, watching. I feel Simon over my shoulder.
What is this, he says. A snake?
A river, I say. This was a girl named Mary.
He looks at my picture, not speaking. I do not want him to speak. Then he takes it from my hands. Maybe I will show you how to draw a tree, he says.
Much time passes and still we do not hear anything from the lady from America so we do not know if she has explained our story. I begin to think of the future. I think maybe I would like to be a teacher.
20 / Don’t Go
I’M NOT WITH THIS anymore, he said.
They were in Harry’s room off the long downstairs hall. He lay on the bed that was his bed as a boy, a single mattress against the wall. One arm was tucked under his head on a pillow without a pillowcase, the other lay inert by his side. Jane sat near his inert hand. He was keeping his arms to himself, arms which at another time would have been pulling Jane over to him.
When I’m done with something, he said, that’s it.
His words struck like a bolt. She felt she was no longer sitting on the bed, but hovering above it.
She looked at his face, then away. Looking at him was not better, it was harder.
Okay, she said. On the floor by her feet was a straw rug with woven giraffes. She wasn’t going to fight it. How could she anyway? What could she say?
Should I go? she said.
No. He frowned. You stay. But I think I’m going to go flying with Andy. Go on a mission.
She waited.
There’s this place we’ve been wanting to check out.
Oh?
He didn’t say anything.
Where? she said.
In Marsabit.
She nodded. She had no idea where that was. There was silence. When? She said it as a double question, as if asking if she could ask.
Tomorrow.
She kept nodding. You should, she said. That’ll be good. And I should get to work.
His parents were leaving for a week, but she could stay in the guesthouse, he said, or whichever house she wanted. She said that would be great. She could start on the story with her impressions fresh. She didn’t say it would be good to concentrate on something other than him. Was it really okay with his parents?
Totally cool, he said. I’ll make sure with my mom.
She sat up and took a breath, not to look downcast. How long? she said, and immediately tried again with lightness. I mean, when will you be back?
He shrugged. He didn’t need to tell her these things now. It wasn’t her business so much anymore. She stood, releasing him.
Not too long, he said.
They’d gotten back to Nairobi that afternoon. Pierre was unceremoniously dropped off at a friend’s empty house in Karen, and when they stopped at Lana’s there were no invitations to come in for a drink or have dinner later. Don sauntered toward the cottage, carrying bags, and Lana stood at the truck window. She reached into the cab and her hand warmly pressed Jane and Harry, acknowledging the value of the trip. Then she sighed. Now how I am going to get rid of Don?
Jane returned with Harry to his house where she’d left some of her things. They unpacked the truck and threw out the trash in bins in the garage. Harry led her and her bag through the kitchen past a large living room set off by steps, with wide couches of no arms and a massive stone fireplace. A two-story glass window overlooked a lawn ending in dark woods topped with the bluish peaks of the Ngong Hills above. The last room at the end of the wing was his sister’s unused room. Emma had been living in Ireland for some years with her husband and children, having moved to where it was safer to raise a family. On one wall was a woodblock portrait of Mandela, and in a frame a photograph of young Emma and Harry cuddling a cheetah. The big house felt particularly solid and polished after the last two weeks.
Jane unpacked her black bag, pawing through flattened dirty clothes. She came across the oversized brown linen shirt Harry sometimes wore. She went back down the hall to his room. Here, she said. This is more you now.
He folded h
is arms, as if refusing it. Don’t you want a shirt that’s me? He was smiling.
No, I want you to have a shirt that’s me.
He took it and brought it to his nose. It smells like you, he said. I won’t wash it, just smell it now and then.
The smell will go away.
I won’t smell it all the time. He was trying to make her smile. With an effort she kept her face bright.
He looked at her face, assessing it, the way he looked at the sky. I’m going, he said. But I’m also not going.
The air darkened as she took a bath. She didn’t feel the loss of him yet, but knew it was coming and braced herself. She couldn’t tell how big or small the impact would be. She’d wait to find out. He was still nearby, so she didn’t have to feel him gone. He was under the same roof and her body knew it and felt reassured.
She lay in the water, trying to find more reassurance.
Okay, she thought. Okay. It’ll be okay. Okay was the most reassuring word she could come up with. It’s what she’d said to the girl Esther. It will be okay. It was the reassuring thing one said.
There was always life. At least I’m alive. At least she was still here. But here with herself, the reasons to be alive came flashing and they had to do with Harry. Those were the bright things in her. She allowed herself to note them and felt again the small shocks they gave, when he’d pulled her down the hall the rainy night in the Mara, with the loud mud and the warmth of his skin through his wet shirt. She thought of the night on the road back to Naivasha watching through the black windshield as he scooped up the body and carried it like a lover out of the headlights.
Her throat thickened.
She might be saying Okay, but No is what she was feeling. Yes, she had said to him, but inside she was refusing it, not ready to let him go. She would have to think of another perspective. One could manage most anything with the right perspective.
She zoomed into the future to picture him there. If he were in the future, then it meant he would not have gone.
Years would go by and she would still know him. They would always know one another. Some people you met and knew they would always be in your life, and hadn’t she known he was one of those people?
Way off in the future she would let him know how he had mattered to her.
She could tell him then, after she’d proven it with time, not now when it might seem she was asking for something back.
He would be married by then. His wife would be a great girl. She would be a flier too. They’d have two kids, or three, and live in a tree house or by the sea. And one night when she was visiting them, because she would always come back to Africa and he would be one of the reasons why, late some night when she was sitting with her old friend Harry, she would tell him without any drama how it had been for her back then, that is, now. She would not be causing any mischief, because she would have a husband too and they would all be friends and she would not want anything from him—only that he know, for the record, how he had added an important thing to her life. How, with him, she had found a new part of herself. To describe it now might look as if she were being dramatic. She had a fear of overdoing it, and appearing needy. So she would wait. She would easily wait for years, it would be all right to say, By the way, this is how much you meant to me. And this is how grateful I am for the new bit of life you gave me so long ago, lifting me out of a dead place where I’d been wasting for a long time. Maybe she would say she’d loved him.
He might say, I didn’t know. Or he might say, I was too young to know it. Or maybe he’d say, in his direct Harry way, Yes, I knew.
He might even add, I wasn’t where you were yet.
And she would say she had known that.
What she might say would wait and prove itself over time. Important things lasted and could wait.
There was little food in the kitchen but they located a box of spaghetti. Harry grated some rock-hard Parmesan he found sweating in the bread box. They drank Tusker from bottles and their conversation was oddly polite, as if they were just meeting, which in a way they were, being with each other in a new way. They ate at an old butcher block in the middle of the kitchen which unlike the other kitchens she’d seen in Karen houses looked twenty years old and scuffed. Usually one did not go into the kitchen, it being the staff’s domain. The rest of Harry’s parents’ house was polished with dark wood floors, but the kitchen looked lived-in and worn. When she asked, Harry told her about the school he went to in Langata where nearly all the students were white. His best friend growing up didn’t go to the school, but lived here, on the other side of the garage, in the staff’s quarters. Edgar was their servant Priscilla’s son. But when he was older he didn’t mix much outside the white Africans. Harry said that basically he had two friends who weren’t white which was a pretty pathetic percentage.
As they were doing the dishes, Harry’s parents returned in the back door, looking weathered and tan. Harry introduced them again to Jane, wiping her soapy hands. I read your book, his mother, Sheila, said. I liked it. She had short hair and looked nothing like Harry, with a slender face and thin neck. Harry’s father, Joe, had a beard and wore a plaid shirt, looking like a Peace Corps worker. They’d been out to dinner and were leaving early in the morning for a week in the north to inspect some cattle. Joe said he was done in and going to bed and mildly left the room. The master bedroom was far off, in another wing of the house Jane hadn’t seen.
Good trip? his mother said, picking up mail on the counter and glancing through it. She wore shorts and a sleeveless collared shirt.
Harry nodded. It was hectic, he said.
I bet.
Harry draped his arm over his mother’s shoulder, only slightly below his. He mentioned Jane staying in the guesthouse while they were gone, and Sheila said that was fine, her thoughts elsewhere.
She patted Harry’s back as she turned to go. Have good flights, she said, distracted.
You too, Harry said.
Oh. She stopped in the doorway, not turning around. Make sure Priscilla knows Jane is here.
After she’d gone, he said, They work too hard. But it’s good.
The television was in a small room off the long hall near the kitchen. Jane lay stomach-down on the rug looking through a book about Baron Blixen with black-and-white photographs of stylish white people standing beside dead wildlife or dressed in flapper outfits beside palm fronds. Harry turned on the TV. The sound was grating; she had been so far from it for weeks. The news was on: riots in East Kenya, blurry shots of people running through rising dust. An ad came on for a floor cleaner with white tile floors and yellow cartoon sparkles. Harry switched the channel. A turbaned woman was singing an African song, then two women in chairs were talking to each other. He stopped at a movie, a cheesy horror movie from the seventies. He slumped down, accepting it with a slack face. Jane tried ignoring him, and focused on the big-hatted men and carefree women on safari in laced boots and jodphurs. She would have liked to be blank now, too.
On the screen a girl with flipped-back hair was running past a pool at night. A boy scrambled over a fence. He landed and paused, his polo shirt tucked into high-belted pants. A wall of fatigue hit Jane. She knew she should go to bed. She was not looking forward to standing and walking back to the guest room. The movie flickered on. Someone screamed. There was a man in a mask. Another girl in shorts was making something in a blender, so she didn’t hear the scream.
Jane wondered if she might write him a note later and slip it into his knapsack, so he’d find it on his trip, setting up camp wherever that was. He would have it and think of her and maybe miss her. She would say, I told you I would wave goodbye. Or maybe not.
There was a loud banging on the door in the kitchen, echoing down the hall.
What the fuck, Harry said blandly and stood. He did not look alarmed. Maybe it’s Andy, he muttered, leaving the room.
His sneakers slapped down the hall. She pushed herself up and reached for the TV dial to turn down the soun
d, muting an ad for potato crisps. Maybe they could still stay together tonight in the same bed, chastely or not. Their time together had been short but full, strange and disorienting. They could at least still hold each other. Immediately she realized, No. Harry wasn’t like she was, wanting to cut corners. He was decisive and would stick to his word. When I’m done with something that’s it, he had said. She would be like Harry then, a person of her word. She would accept this is how it was.
She heard a male voice in the kitchen speaking Swahili, an African voice, not Andy’s. The voice sounded upset.
She hoisted herself off the rug, feeling thick and tired. Coming down the hall she met Harry’s silhouette. Something’s going on, he said, and turned around. She followed him into the kitchen where a young man in a blue buttoned shirt stood by the sink.
This is Murray. He says the askari’s gone.
Harry had opened a cabinet and was feeling around inside.
Murray nodded with a worried face. He was the younger brother of Harry’s childhood friend Edgar.
Some guys were down by the gate, Harry said, closing the cabinet, not finding what he was after.
Should you call the police?
Harry shook his head as if to say, Who really knows what’s going on, if anything. I’ll just go see, he said. The police are imbeciles anyway.
He looked Jane square in the face and held her shoulders. I want you to lock the door, he said. Come here, like this. He slid a thick bar across the door frame above the doorknob. And don’t let anyone in.
Okay.
Come on, Murray. Where’s Priscilla?
She is not here. This day she has gone to Kibera.
For the night? Harry sounded surprised. They stepped down to the driveway. Habari ya Edgar? he said, and before Jane could hear the answer she had shut the door and drawn the bolt.
The window over the kitchen sink faced the wing of the house with no view, so Jane went back down the hall to a laundry room where a window over the drier faced the driveway spotlit from the garage roof and the staff’s quarters beyond. Through heavy grating in front of the glass she watched Harry and Murray walk past the white truck parked past the garage door and out of the area lit by the spotlight. She saw them in shadow on the grass in front of the servants’ quarters and at the end of the lawn disappearing into the dark stand of pole-like trees. The woods ran along the winding driveway; they were taking a shortcut. Through the leaves’ ragged screen of black lace glowed a topaz streetlight at the end of the driveway where it met the Ndege Road.
