by Alix Ohlin
“How are you?” Grace said.
“I’m terrible,” she declared, then sat down with a flounce of blond hair. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the catastrophe. I’ve been grounded for weeks. No Ollie, no friends, no mall. My mom found my journal and just flipped. And the whole pregnancy thing? My God.”
“And how are you feeling about the whole pregnancy thing?”
“I’m feeling glad,” Annie said emphatically, “that it’s over.”
“Okay.” Grace felt like she was dealing with an entirely new creature, one who’d molted her previous adolescent skin and had become a shinier, wilder animal.
They talked for a few minutes—about schoolwork, friends, the braces coming off—before circling back to her parents and the turbulence of the past few weeks.
“So I told my teacher, Ms. Van den Berg, that I had the flu. And then I felt, like, ashamed, because lying was so easy. That’s what I never realized before, that you don’t lie, because you don’t think you can get away with it. But you’re really the only person who knows the difference.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” Grace said slowly. “Does this mean you’re not going to lie to your parents anymore?”
Annie laughed. “My parents,” she said, then sighed, shaking her head a little, as if they were her errant children and not the other way around. Something in her face softened then, and her expression grew sincere and sad. She folded her hands in her lap almost piously. “My father has a girlfriend who lives in Saint-Lambert,” she said, her voice quiet, resigned, its timbre altogether different from the bright prattle of the past minutes. “We know all about her. She used to be his secretary but now she just hangs out and he supports her. My parents were arguing about her the other night. They still think I fall asleep early, but at midnight I was just lying there listening. It sounds like she’s pregnant and having his baby. Wouldn’t that have been, like, hilarious, if she and I had had babies at the same time? What would that relationship even be?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said.
“Maybe I’d be my own aunt or something. And my mom’s threatening to have her own affair, as revenge. She’ll never leave my dad, we all know that. She’s too weak. I don’t think she’ll even have an affair. She’ll just get new prescriptions instead.”
She looked down at her hands as if in prayer. She was crying, a quick slipstream of tears that fell silently down her cheeks.
“It’s not your fault,” Grace said gently. “You can’t control any of it.”
“He used to—” she said, then stopped.
Grace waited.
“He used to come lie down with me at night and say I was his special girl. He doesn’t do it anymore.” Now she was crying harder, her shoulders shaking, snot cresting at her nose.
Grace gave her a tissue. “Tell me more about that.”
“No,” Annie said. “No.” When she lifted her face and wiped her eyes, she looked calmer and harder, and her facade reassembled itself like a sliding door closing across her features. The fact that there were cracks in her self-presentation, that she evidently had to work so hard to construct a mask of indifference, made her success at it that much more pitiable to Grace. She was practicing the skill of keeping others at a distance, and the older she got the more proficient she would likely become, at a cost borne mainly by herself.
“Annie,” Grace said firmly, “you’re sixteen. Soon you’ll be an adult.”
“Meaning what?” the girl demanded.
“You can be anything you want to be,” Grace said. “You don’t have to be like them.”
To her surprise, Annie smiled. She wiped her cheeks clean, smearing snot and makeup on the sleeve of her sweater. She seemed more immediately comforted by this thought than Grace had expected. “You know what, you’re right,” she said, suddenly standing up. “You’re totally and completely right.”
Grace’s stomach turned over. When a patient agreed so quickly, it was rarely a good sign. “Let’s talk about what this would mean for you, specifically,” she said.
“No, I think I’m good,” Annie said. Still smiling, she picked up her coat, and indeed she was radiant, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright. At the door she turned around and said, “Thank you, Grace. You’ve been a huge help.”
It was the first time she had ever expressed anything like gratitude. Then she was gone. Grace sat with her head in her hands. Something had just gone badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. The session had slipped through her fingers. She had let the girl go, and now, she felt sure, she’d never get her back.
That night Tug came over, and after she cooked dinner, they ate in silence. Grace couldn’t stop replaying her session with Annie, wondering how truthful her remarks about her father were, what had made her smile so brightly at the end, what Grace could have said or done differently. It had been like she was talking to a brand-new patient, someone she’d never even met before.
If Tug noticed her distraction, he didn’t show it. After they finished dinner, he washed the dishes while she read a magazine in the living room. It was only when he came in half an hour later and asked what was wrong that she realized she was crying.
She put the magazine down. “I can’t do this,” she said.
“What?”
He stood there, his face impassive, and she knew that he held himself apart from her just as the girl had. She couldn’t live with this in two places, at work and at home. It was too much. “I need to know,” she told him.
Tug made an exasperated sound, shrugged his shoulders, and glanced away. “It won’t change anything,” he said, still standing above her, refusing to sit down.
Still crying, she swallowed and said, as calmly as possible, “I disagree.”
“I’m not your patient, Grace,” he said, and his voice was rough. “You can’t fix me. I know this is all some big savior thing for you, but that’s not quite how I see it.”
Grace’s tears were falling freely now. She stood up and faced him, each of them hovering there, poised to leave the room, trembling a little. Whatever delicate balance they’d established between them was breaking down, careening away.
“I have no idea how you see it,” she said, “and until you can tell me, I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Oh, Gracie,” he said. “We’ve been having a good time.”
He put his arms around her and she closed her eyes, allowing herself to feel the warmth of his body, the scratch of his stubble against her cheek. Then she stepped away. “You should go,” she said.
She lay in bed waiting for him to call, or come back, but he had left without a word of dissent. Her thoughts drifted restlessly to Annie, who seemed to have been freed in some way that Grace had never intended. What had she said to give the girl that smile, so radiant and strange? After a while she started thinking about Tug and the dinner they’d had at the Greek restaurant. What she remembered was his story about the childhood friend who leapt off buildings, the tree climber, the trestle jumper. At the time she’d interpreted it as a story about someone you could only shake your head at, so incomprehensible were his choices. Now she realized that the story meant something different to Tug. To him it was a marvel. A wonder.
Even though he came back at five in the morning, apologized, crawled into bed, and promised to tell her everything, she understood that he wasn’t scornful of his friend, just envious of how little he cared about survival. If he had been able to join his friend, she thought, he would have. He wanted to be the one to jump into the air without worrying whether he’d land dead or alive.
The next night, after she got home from work, he poured them each a large glass of wine and started talking. He talked until midnight, hardly stopping except to refill their glasses and open new bottles. He seemed to require the wine to keep going; other than that, he needed no encouragement from Grace, no murmurs of attention. She sat there, and listened.
EIGHT
Kigali, 1994
WHEN TUG F
IRST set eyes on the country, he thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And he wasn’t someone who had dreamt of Africa in childhood and pictured himself exploring it in a safari jacket and jungle gear—though plenty of the North Americans and Europeans around him harbored precisely such fantasies. Some, to conceal their infatuation, spoke of Africa in carefully jaded tones. Others talked openly about their fascination with its rich, complicated history and their long-held desire to experience it in person (for men, this usually meant its women). Aid workers were romantics who pretended not to be, their personalities swinging like pendulums between idealism and pragmatism.
Months later, a woman working for the Red Cross asked him to spend the night, both of them sweating, drunk, and sloppy with loneliness. At three in the morning, her thigh sticking to his, she confided that as a child she’d been obsessed with Dian Fossey.
“I wanted to see the gorillas in the mist,” she said wryly. “I saw them the first week. Now I’ve been here two years.” A stocky, muscular former field hockey player, she turned surprisingly clingy and weepy in the night; she said she realized she had never cared about anything as much as she had about those gorillas. Tug felt, perhaps unfairly, that this was just something she said after sex, a bit of extra drama to keep the attention coming. Although he actually would have liked to hear more about the gorillas and what seeing them was like, he didn’t want to indulge her. No doubt sensing his skepticism, the gorilla woman—as he always thought of her afterward—ignored him in the morning, pretending nothing had happened between them.
To Tug, Rwanda was a surprise. He’d last been stationed in Guatemala, where he spent six months ferrying food and medicine to families in the department of Suchitepéquez after floods and landslides devastated the towns there. He had grown used to the country, liked the people, and his Spanish was pretty damn good. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to leave, but his father was seriously ill and he needed to get back home. He stayed for two years while his father went in and out of hospitals. His mother was frail and his sister, who lived in Toronto with her two children and a salesman husband who spent half his life out of town, had made it clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of their parents on her own.
This was when he met Marcie, who worked as a paralegal for his parents’ lawyer. She was blond, attractive, and extraordinarily capable in what he considered domestic matters. Tug knew how to rig tents and set up a basic medical facility, where in a given terrain the latrines should be dug, and that when you hand out rice you give it to the women first, never to men and especially never to young men. Around children with their hands outstretched he crackled with energy, thriving on their need. He could go weeks without sleeping more than three or four hours a night. At home in Canada, by contrast, he froze up. Faced with insurance companies, with the routine upkeep of his parents’ house, with his mother’s small talk about the neighbors, he barely had enough energy to get through the day.
But Marcie, thank God, was good at all of that. She didn’t mind paperwork, didn’t freak out when put on hold, listened to his mother solicitously. She wasn’t a traveler; she came from a large, close-knit family and hated to leave home. They spent every weekend together, and either she cooked or they had dinner with her parents in their sprawling farmhouse in Hudson. She always brought a casserole or cookies to his mother, who protested weakly, insincerely, and loved being fussed over. In almost no time at all, his family and hers were entwined; her parents often visited his father in the hospital, and they all spent Christmas together. After a year, he proposed to Marcie while they were on vacation in Florida, and they were married two months later in a small ceremony in Hudson. As he slipped the ring on her finger, she cried a little, tears crinkling her cheeks, and he thought, This is it. This is the shape my life will have.
When his father’s condition improved—at least, as much as a seventy-year-old man’s can—he contacted the NGO for a new posting. Marcie wasn’t thrilled with the separation but understood that he was itching to get back in the field. She admired his drive to help other people, and he basked in that, never wanting to admit that the exigency of it was like a drug, or how much adrenaline was involved. This was the first gap between them, and he told himself it wouldn’t matter, years on, when he was through with international aid and they were living a settled life together somewhere.
Rwanda was where they sent him. He was assigned the same tasks—assistance, medicine, infrastructure—but for different reasons, not natural disaster but civil conflicts that put the displaced in camps and the country on edge.
He knew little about the country, but when he looked out the plane window, he felt that he had seen it before, in films or on television or maybe—this was hokey, but also his actual thought—in dreams. The landscape was hilly, green, wreathed in clouds, incomparably beautiful, somehow both severe and lush. It looked otherworldly, somewhere you’d go after exhausting your time in the earth’s ordinary places. His heart lifted as it always did when he saw somewhere new: there was so much to see and do, and he felt the old energy returning, the sense of clear-eyed purpose that would help sculpt his days.
I wish Marcie could see this, he thought, and took a blurry photograph.
He had a room in a ramshackle, single-story housing complex along with some Belgian and Swiss workers. In the evenings they drank beer together in a hotel bar surrounded by other foreigners, mostly journalists, nurses, and UNAMIR personnel. In December of 1993, there was either nervous tension in the air or else everybody knew what was coming, he couldn’t say which. He had only just arrived, and as far as he knew maybe every day in Rwanda was like this. He had no perspective on the situation, and the others at the bar were of little help. Their attitude was that you should figure things out for yourself rather than be instructed; everybody considered this hard-won knowledge a mark of toughness. Laughing at the newcomers and their mistakes was a tradition that built morale among the ones who had been there longer.
At first the days were long, hot, and pleasantly full. The coordination of supplies in the camps was an endless task, and the supplies were inadequate to the enormity of the need. Reddish mud from the dirt roads coated his boots and clothes, and the boxes themselves, then dried to dust that ended up in his mouth and nose and ears. He worked under a bilingual Quebecois named Philippe who gave quick, clear orders in English and French. Tug set up dispensation stations for medicine and water and walked the camp, checking on conditions. He saw what appeared to be a dying woman, her sunken cheeks spotted with flies, and next to her a boy was nestled calmly against her bony knee. He checked her pulse—she was gone—and then asked around, but couldn’t find any relatives to claim the child.
Philippe told him that a group of nuns running an orphanage would take him, and added, “AIDS, most likely. Won’t be long.” He meant before the boy died. Tug took him over to the nuns, and he went along placidly. Probably he didn’t have enough calories in his system to make a fuss.
The housing complex was supervised by a resident manager, Etienne, and his wife, son, and daughter. In the late afternoon, when Tug returned home, the son would be kicking around a soccer ball made of banana-tree leaves with his friends in the courtyard, while his sister watched. Etienne was friendly and genial, and the collared shirts and brown pants he wore every day looked elegant on his tall, thin frame. His brother-in-law had studied at the University of Laval, he said, and told many stories of his life there. At one time Etienne and his wife had wanted to visit him in Quebec, perhaps studying there themselves.
“But,” he said, his voice trailing off, his delicate fingers making a vague wave, signaling, Tug supposed, a vast array of circumstance, economics, the pull and problems of home. “I am here instead,” he finished, and offered Tug a beer. Often they would spend an hour together like this, drinking beer in the late afternoons as the boys played around them. He asked Tug about Marcie, his family, and his education. And he explained that his wife’s family were Hutus, and that h
is own relatives had left Kigali and gone to the south.
“We stay here,” he said firmly, gesturing at the complex, where he swept the courtyard and greeted the residents regally, as if it were his kingdom.
He had heard from his brother-in-law about hockey, and especially about the Montreal Canadiens. He asked Tug about the Stanley Cup and his favorite players, and this—of all their discussions—captured his son’s attention. Yozefu was eleven years old and found this new sport intriguing. He demanded to know the rules and the names of the teams, how the game was played and for how long, and Tug was soon explaining the minutiae of penalty shots, sudden-death overtime, and off-sides. The boy and his friends clamored for more information. Tug, laughing, used a long, sturdy branch to maneuver their soccer ball around the courtyard, showing them the basics of stick handling.
Yozefu caught on quickly, moving the ball from side to side, imitating Tug’s lunging motions and kicks. Tug taught him to say, “He shoots, he scores!” and the boy ran around repeating this over and over, laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
In the doorway of the family’s apartment his sister stood in the shadows, staring fiercely, a half smile curtaining the whiteness of her teeth.
Then the boy stopped and asked Tug why the shoes with blades in them didn’t get stuck. Machete shoes, he called them, because that was the only kind of blade he could picture. And Tug started to answer, before realizing just how impossible it would be to explain. There was no way that Yozefu could understand the idea of a game played on ice, that he could imagine a rink or any part of winter at all.
So he just said the ground in Canada was different. The boy shrugged, and he and his friends played stickball for a while longer until they reverted back to soccer, sometimes shouting “He shoots, he scores!” for no reason, whenever they felt like it.
