“Easy now, it’s going to hurt for a while,” Mick says.
Rachel looks blankly at him.
“They put you under for the C-section. The doctor thought it was best.”
“Best?” Rachel searches her husband’s face: his skin is ghostly pale, purple-black under his eyes as if bruised. “No,” she says thickly, pulling at the bandage. “Too early.”
“Ray, there was so much blood. You must’ve felt…” Mick’s voice breaks into a sob. He presses knuckles against his forehead, hiding his face. “Earlier today, didn’t you feel something? Something wrong?”
Rachel raises a hand toward her husband. He seems impossibly far away. “Make them bring Serena. She needs her mother.”
Mick looks up, a flare of confusion rising from his neck to his cheeks. “Don’t you remember…” Rachel hears faint stray words, as if they are being blown around by a high wind: ambulance…umbilical cord…detached. And then a nurse is standing over her. Hysterical. Medication.
She pulls back the sheet, needs to get the hell out of bed. A sharp pain slices through her, as if ripping her daughter away all over again. “You’ll bring Serena,” she says weakly, resigned to letting the nurse tuck her back into bed, too tired to keep fighting. So tired. Of course, the baby is sleeping. They’ll bring her when she wakes up. Everything will be okay then.
THE NEXT TIME RACHEL AWAKENS, sunlight is flooding the room and a woman with flowing auburn hair is arranging flowers on a little table. “Mom?” she whispers, blinking awake, shading her eyes against the glare.
“I’m Molly,” the nurse says. “You’ve been asleep for quite a while, most of the day.”
Rachel blinks fully awake and sees that Molly’s hair is more brown than red. She sits up, fingertips cautiously grazing her stomach. The bandage. Her mom admitting that her father called. Mick sobbing. The ambulance. Was it all only a horrible dream? “I need my husband. Where is he?”
“He’ll be back soon.”
“My baby?”
Molly smoothes the blanket. “I’ll have a doctor come in.”
A few minutes later, an intern is explaining how the placenta separated from her uterine wall and caused all the bleeding. He’s so calm it’s unnerving. Rachel keeps nodding, as if to lob the words back at him, keep them from sinking in and becoming real. Initial tear so small it doesn’t show up on an ultrasound…blood clots can form behind the placenta and hide the tear… “Ms. Shepherd, nobody knows for certain what causes this. You wouldn’t necessarily feel the rupture when it occurred. Sometimes, if the placenta hasn’t attached correctly from the beginning, lots of movement can progressively cause the separation over a few weeks or sometimes only days.”
“I should have known.”
“It’s nobody’s fault. The ultrasound showed that everything was normal. This just happens sometimes. How could you have known?”
Rachel looks up to see her husband standing in the doorway and searches his eyes, waiting for him to agree with the intern. He’s just standing there. “Mick…” she reaches out her hand, keeps it there although her arm is weak and shaky. The way he’s regarding her hand, eyes narrowed, is frightening. It’s like he’s trying to decide whether or not to take it. “Stay with me,” she whispers, her throat parched.
Nobody leaves.
SIX
{ October 15, 2000 }
LILLIAN STABS A SHOVEL INTO THE RED CLAY and stomps a foot on the rusty metal head to get some leverage. For weeks she’s been working on this patch of land alongside the house, a few inches at a time. The morning sun shines generously, and then the roof throws a protective shadow in the heat of the afternoon. It’s perfect for the dahlias Nadine loves. Tucker bought peat moss and fertilizer in Kigali a few weeks ago, and he’s buying rosebushes in Nairobi to plant when the rainy season ends in December. Phlox, wild pansies, and ferns from the forest will have to do for now. At least this patch of land will look like a real garden when Naddie comes home for the holiday break next month. The perfect early Christmas present. She’s uncomfortable receiving gifts, been that way ever since first coming here to live. Always giving away her toys and clothes to the other kids. The only possessions that child’s protective of are her flute and a few photos Henry managed to recover from her folks’ house in the foothills on the other side of town. Those foothills were charred and barren for years; this is the first spring since the slaughter that they’re blanketed with white-blossomed coffee bushes again.
The shovel clangs against a patch of rocks. Lillian kneels, grunting as she heaves them aside. Anger is good fuel for doing something productive. She gouges her fingers under a stubborn slab of limestone, sweat dripping into her eyes.
“Hey, watch where you’re throwing those things.” Tucker approaches, a hand raised as if to fend off an attack. “A more paranoid guy might think you’re trying to bean him.”
“Not you,” Lillian says as he kneels beside her to study the boulder. “Rachel Shepherd sent another email yesterday. Poor gal had a miscarriage. She’s hurting bad. The baby. Her father. It’s all mixed up, and she wants me to help with the untangling.”
“She’s the one you’re tossing rocks at?”
“No, of course not.”
Tucker takes the shovel and cautiously nudges the ground, as if he’s exploring an open wound. “Henry might still be shooting travel videos for that outfit in London. I could give them a call.”
Lillian continues churning up the clay under the limestone with her fingers. If only it was that easy. Simply call. For eighteen years, Henry was here far more often than not and she never asked him to stay. Never asked him to come back, except for the one time. Vowed never to ask anything of him ever again. She turns away to wipe the sweat and something else that’s stinging her eyes with a kerchief tucked into the elastic waistband of her dungarees. Tucker pretends not to notice. He keeps poking around with the shovel until he finds a sweet spot where the earth gives a little, and wheedles out the thick slab.
“I’ll get that.” Lillian heaves the rock out, ignoring her grumbling lower back. He’s always been like this, trying to fix things for everyone. Sometimes it gets under her skin, the way he won’t give up. The way she lets him take care of her.
Tucker stands and brushes the dirt from his khaki pants, looks at her as if waiting for instructions. When she doesn’t give him any, he starts stacking the scattered rocks to make a wall on the side of the garden away from the house. “I’ll nail some barbed wire on top to keep out the monkeys and other rustlers.”
“Good thinking,” Lillian says. She hands him a good-sized chunk of limestone. It’s not his fault he believes there’s a fix for every problem. She could forgive Henry; to Tucker’s mind, it’s that simple. But he’s never been in love, not really, not in the entire six years she’s known him. Every relationship has stopped a bit shy of serious. As far as she can see, that’s his choice even though the woman is always the one who walks away. Always. He never allows them close enough to risk true loss. It’s not her place to bring up this observation though, just as it’s not on the table for him to comment on her feelings for Henry. A fair trade.
Eighteen years… Of course she still loves him. Misses him. Even when he was away for weeks at a time filming gorillas in the mountains, or shooting a commercial in London to pay for help with the spring harvest, she always felt him right beside her. He became a part of her, at first comfortable and then necessary. She never blamed him for leaving. In fact, she admired him for refusing to go when the Red Cross evacuated all foreigners. She still appreciates that he stayed until the Tutsi rebels took back the government in Kigali and ended the slaughter. Truth be told, she takes equal responsibility for the way things went wrong between them. The itch to roam, sometimes without the excuse of an assignment, and booze had always been easy escapes for Henry. She could have demanded more of him sooner, instead of telling herself he would ask if he needed her help. Now, Rachel Shepherd is asking. But it’s not the same. It’s not.
“Don’t mind this stormy spell. I’ll get over it.”
“At least give Henry’s daughter his mailing address in London. Hell, he might actually answer.”
Lillian squeezes his hand. She stopped looking for letters not so long before the emails started coming from Rachel Shepherd. Tucker’s still hoping one will show up. “Walk with me,” she says.
They head away from the house, past the grassy hillside where a few goats and a cow are grazing, and then across the gravel front yard toward the clinic. Lillian stops to point out a pair of gray cranes flying overhead, their golden crowns shimmering in the sunlight. The cranes disappeared during the slaughter, along with most of the other animals except domesticated dogs and cats, and the baboons. The wild animals could smell danger and death in the air, even the birds.
“They mate for life,” Tucker says and Lillian squeezes his arm, a gesture he mistakes for encouragement. “Rachel should write directly to her dad, not to you,” he rushes on. “Henry will want to know she’s asking about him, right? Henry will want to know she came all the way here to look for him, right? He’ll be psyched.”
“That’s all true.”
“Think about it. Wouldn’t it be good for Nadine, for all of us if—”
“Tucker,” Lillian says gently, “No.” Henry won’t come back. He can’t. He made that clear two years ago, during her last visit to London. That was the one time she asked him to return, not for herself but for Nadine. It still makes her angry, the thought of the International Tribunal subpoenaing a child to testify in a courtroom filled with hundreds of people, reporters’ cameras flashing, expecting her to relive the trauma of the church massacre where thousands of Tutsis from the region were lured with the promise of sanctuary. Naddie could have used Henry’s support to face Rahim Kensamara, her former neighbor, who was finally on trial along with six other Hutu men who had been in jail for four years.
Lillian can’t pretend to imagine what happened at the church to steal the light from Naddie’s eyes and render her practically mute. For months afterwards, the only person she would speak to was Henry. It was hard to believe this was the same thirteen-year-old girl who had spent countless afternoons on a stool in the kitchen, stirring cookie batter and singing made-up songs while Dahla, her mother, baked and cleaned. Even four years later, Naddie wasn’t much use at the trial in the international court in Arusha. She was unable to testify, paralyzed with fear.
“We can’t give up,” Tucker says. “At least, I can’t.”
“I never gave up,” Lillian says. “It was Henry’s choice to stay in London. Naddie needed him. I needed him.” What choice did she have but to give him an ultimatum? No more visits. No phone calls. No letters. What choice does she have now but to keep it?
Lillian’s spirits lift as they approach the Kwizera clinic. There’s already a line at the front door, and inside a doctor and a nurse who sometimes drive up from Kigali to help Tucker. Lillian shows a stethoscope to a young boy who’s afraid of needles and needs a measles vaccination, and then models for several other kids how to open wide and say, “Ahhh.” All the while, she writes a letter to Henry in her mind. She tells him how proud he would be of Tucker. The wooden shed they built has grown into a three-room clinic where parents from Mubaro bring their children for free vaccinations or to get a limb set instead of taking the bus to Ruhengeri, thirty kilometers away. She asks him what she should do about his daughter. Is there a choice she’s not seeing?
That evening, after all the children say goodnight and Tucker retires to the tent at the edge of the forest where he sleeps far more often than his room in the farmhouse, Lillian climbs the steps to the second floor. She pretends that going into Naddie’s room and kicking off her shoes to lie on the purple satin quilt is purely an act of missing her daughter. She lays her head on the pillow and looks up at the dreamcatcher overhead, hanging from a nail on the wall, white feathers swaying slightly in the breeze from the open window. Henry made this with Nadine. He assured her that the web of yarn and twigs would catch nightmares, even though they all had seen too much to ever again believe that dreams might be peaceful and safe. Henry slept on the floor of this room for months, holding onto Naddie’s fingers draped over the edge of the bed.
Lillian’s eyes dart around the room: There’s a bookcase lined with sheet music, books about birds—nature’s musicians, Henry told Naddie—and a full set of encyclopedias he used to teach all of the children English. On the wall there’s a Florida Gators baseball cap on a hook, hanging right next to a warrior headdress of crane feathers Naddie’s aunt and uncle brought from Swaziland when they visited a few months after the slaughter. They wanted to take her to live with them, but by then Kwizera was her home. Lillian reaches out to the bedside table crowded with photos, and plucks out one in a wooden frame imprinted with hearts: Henry is bent over Naddie, showing her how to use a camera. He is everywhere in this room, more so than any other place in the house. He loved Naddie, as he surely loved his own daughter. Does he think about them, love them, still?
Lillian glances up at the dreamcatcher, and then closes her eyes. She could use some sifting out of the images that come to her at night. She answers the emails from Rachel Shepherd in her dreams. The girl’s questions unearth memories, not about her life with Henry at Kwizera, that soil’s too fresh and soft—she might sink in completely if she treads there—but Atlanta. Back then, being brave was as easy as smiling at a white boy and slipping him her high school ID card, at least at first. There were months of talking on the payphone in the hallway of her dorm at Spelman. Henry had a steady girl in St. Augustine and Lillian was dating Samuel, a boy she had grown up alongside. But it didn’t matter; she and Henry weren’t dating—merely talking.
Henry came to Atlanta several times over that summer of 1965 to take photos at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee rallies against segregation, where a handful of white students were now showing up. Things were changing, slowly and not everywhere, but hope was palpable in Atlanta. There was a handful of restaurants in Sweet Auburn where they could eat dinner without catching stares and a fine jazz club, the Peacock, where music was all that mattered. In retrospect, it was the possibility of change, being part of making the world a better place, that made their budding relationship so exciting. She still remembers their first kiss at the Peacock. Muddy Waters was singing about getting his mojo workin’, begging his baby not to go.
Henry moved into a studio apartment near Spelman in September. During that year, Lillian spent more time in that one room with a pullout couch and hot plate than her dorm or her parents’ house. She and Henry built their own home, and laughed at the small-mindedness of folks who judged a person by the color of their skin. They could do better. The world was changing and they could wait.
The cold breeze of early morning awakens Lillian. The photo of Henry is still in her hand, on her chest. He never wanted to be a hero, never pretended he was changing the world, not during the year they were together in Atlanta, not when it came down to choosing her or a safe and comfortable life back in Florida with Merilee. Not here. Changing the world was her gig, he half-joked. He was along for the ride, enjoying the adventure of helping her. She replaces the photo on the table. She truly believed he would do the right thing when she asked him to come back for Nadine. What makes Tucker think he would come back now, because Rachel’s looking for him? Would he? She reaches up to pluck the dreamcatcher off the wall, and then places it on a hanger in the closet. She can’t afford to consider the possibility. Can’t afford to hope.
Downstairs in her bedroom she lights the kindling in the fieldstone fireplace, but it’s no use: the cold is emanating from her bones. She reaches under the bed where the computer is stashed, her hands trembling as she opens it to read the email from Henry’s daughter for the third or fourth time since yesterday morning. The last part is always where her eyes ling
er: My mom didn’t like to talk about my father, except to say we were better off without him. He became this larger-than-life mystery that could never be solved. Now, I need to find a way to reconnect with him—or at least my memories of him. Maybe the best I can hope for is to pack him away in the past and move forward with my life. Lillian, you’re the only one who can help me. I’m hoping that if I mine your memories, I’ll recover my own.
Lillian’s fingers rest heavily on the keyboard, her throat thick and dry like the clay in Naddie’s garden. When Henry first came here, the farm was falling apart. She was falling apart. She told him he could come and go as he pleased, in fact she preferred it that way as long as he helped her to keep Kwizera going. It was this place—the children—that kept her strong and rooted. It was this place she depended on, this place only, for years. Having Henry around was supposed to be a bonus. She never meant to grow to rely on him, didn’t realize how much until he told her he was leaving for good after the slaughter. She couldn’t accept it.
Was she wrong for going to see him in London every few months? Three years of pretending he wasn’t drinking too much, him pretending that’s why his hands were too shaky to take photos. Was she wrong for trying to force him into returning to Kwizera, where his family could help him? Where he was needed to help them. She was fool enough to believe that the past could be selectively forgotten, the parts that hurt blotted out and good parts kept intact. Henry insisted he had tried. Try harder. Go see a therapist. Keep trying. Now, she believes him. She can’t afford to risk the memories, not even the good ones that Rachel Shepherd should hear, can’t afford to risk the emptiness of losing him all over again.
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills Page 5
