In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

by Jennifer Haupt

  “Please, it’s Rachel. And, yes—yego. I’d like to talk more.”

  “Awesome. Goodnight, my new friend.”

  “Goodnight,” Rachel says. Could she and her brand new sort-of-sister really be friends? It seems more likely than her and Lillian winding up pals. And Tucker’s nice enough, but he has some kind of agenda that she can’t quite figure out.

  Rachel places the faded twine and twigs, wrapped in a blue bandana, by her pillow and climbs under the sheet for the first time. She hugs the pillow to her chest, conjuring up her childhood bedmate, Old Gold. She used to hold the stuffed dog close to her cheek, pretending that it was him crying, concentrating on the soft swish of her lashes against synthetic fur instead of the muffled yelling from the kitchen downstairs. In the morning, picking out the marshmallow charms from her cereal, she would reassure herself that it was all only a dream.

  The whir-click-whir of the fan crackles slightly. A downy feather pokes through the pillow and tickles her ear. The bad dreams stay in the net and melt away when the sun comes up, her father’s voice whispers. You’ll never even know they were there.

  He gave her egret feathers and blue string… They made a campfire in the backyard, now she sees it clearly: flames low enough to toast hot dogs and marshmallows, and fireflies sparking the air. Her mom thought it was a silly idea to dig up the grass, but that only made it more fun. An adventure she shared with her father. What ever happened to the dreamcatcher they made, anyway?

  The fireflies fade and the fan goes silent. Rachel slips into the dark place where she’s not sure if she dreams or not. This has never mattered; it’s not like dreams are real. But the next morning she wakes up with the sadness of something found and then lost, something that slipped away just before she opened her eyes.

  NINETEEN

  LILLIAN STOPS AT THE HALF-OPEN DOOR TO Rose’s room, hearing Nadine’s voice, and puts a hand to her chest as if to fill it with the sight of the two girls huddled together on the twin bed. She’s missed this while her daughter’s been away at school. On the floor is a mattress where Tucker usually sleeps when Rose is having a rough night. Nadine laid claim to it when she came home last week, and will probably sleep there for the entire two months she’s here, until after the New Year.

  “Go to sleep now, little one,” Nadine half-sings, snapping pink barrettes onto the ends of a dozen tight braids. “You need to rest and get stronger. Tucker’s orders.”

  “I’ve been in bed all day and yesterday, too.” Rose sits up straight and shakes her head, the barrettes clacking together. “How can he expect so much sleep to come with no playing?”

  Nadine clucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She pulls the hem of the quilt under the child’s chin as if to seal her in bed. “Perhaps a lullaby will help,” she says. “The one your Maman used to sing.”

  Lillian closes her eyes. The rich, low Kinyarwanda tones of her daughter’s voice could be evoked directly from the reddish-brown Virunga soil and the mountains, now dark silhouettes against silvery clouds outside the window. It’s a melody that Dahla sang to Nadine, but Rose doesn’t need to know that. She doesn’t need to know her own mother never had a chance to sing her a lullaby. It’s bad enough the child has to deal with inheriting a legacy of AIDS, the Hutu militia’s favorite weapon.

  Rose settles into a cocoon of blankets, arms crossed over the one-eyed lion that rises and falls on her chest. Lillian remembers well when this tattered king of the jungle was brand-new. Each child receives the gift of a friend they can set next to their pillow to help ward off bad dreams and, sometimes, vivid memories worse than nightmares. These leopards, lions and elephants are comforting, like the tales passed down from parent to child, about animal spirits who act as powerful protectors. Lillian gave Kingston to Rose the first day she arrived, and the scraggly beast still stays right by her side. Tucker has stitched him up twice: last summer, his tail split during a tug-of-war between Rose and Zeke, and another time those crafty baboons nabbed him off the back patio and littered his stuffing across the backyard.

  Lillian hears Tucker puttering in the kitchen. She walks briskly down the hall to make a cup of tea that will likely keep her up late. He’s at the kitchen table, a slab of mahogany etched with the names of every child who has lived here, flipping through a medical journal a tad too fast to be reading. “The girls are waiting,” she says, doling out a brief smile before turning her attention toward the stove to heat up the teapot. What else is she going to do, stay mad for another four days? Rachel’s keeping out of her way, mostly trailing after Tucker or Nadine. And, to be fair, it’s not so terrible having her around. When Rachel laughs, genuinely laughs loud and generous, Lillian hears a smattering of Henry. When she rolls her eyes and groans at her own corny jokes, something warm and familiar runs through Lillian, like the lullaby Naddie sings to comfort Rose.

  Tucker squeezes Lillian’s shoulders as he slides past. She reaches up to pat his hand, turns off the stove and follows him down the hall toward Rose’s room. They’ll talk later. She’s still riled that he sent Henry’s postcards to Rachel under false pretenses. The children come first; it’s always been that way, the thing that bonded them right from the start.

  Not long after Tucker first came here with Rose, he was back with two young boys. It broke her heart, telling him she couldn’t take in any more orphans for a while. She and Henry had set a limit, even if twelve was an arbitrary number. Why not fifteen? Twenty? No, they agreed on two or three beds in each of the four bedrooms in the main house, two cribs at the most in the farmhouse. Twelve. Period. They could never truly do enough. She didn’t see Tucker again until five months later, a week after the slaughter began, when he showed up on her front porch with Henry and Nadine in tow.

  Lillian stops in the front hall, just a minute to make sure the front door is locked, and tells Tucker to go on ahead. She peers out the rectangle of double-paned glass in the door, into the darkness. Back then, she had peeled back a corner of newspaper stuffed into an empty frame, the glass smashed with the butt of a gun, before unbolting the lock. They all stood there, staring at each other like strangers. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Tucker kept an arm around Henry, who was carrying a child so frail, her eyes vacant… This couldn’t be Dahla and Enoch’s precocious daughter. Lillian reached out to wipe a streak of dirt off the child’s face. A nearly inhuman moan, feral and guttural, rose from Naddie’s throat, a sound that still chills Lillian to the quick of her bones.

  “I found them in town, on my way here to help,” Tucker said. “Bodies everywhere, dead and alive. Nobody’s helping.”

  “You are,” Lillian replied, taking his arm to guide him inside. They walked through the dining room to the kitchen, stepping over teenagers curled up on the stone floor. There were so many kids that the older ones slept wherever they could find space, leaving the back bedrooms for the young ones to sleep two or three to a bed. It wasn’t safe to walk to and from the farmhouse. Henry wouldn’t look at her, but she smelled the fear—sulfuric and bitter—wicking off his body. She bit back her anger. Why? Why did he have to go into town yesterday with that damn camera? The anger felt good, better than the dread that had kept her up all night.

  Henry settled Nadine at the kitchen table. She stared at the cookie from a near-empty tin that Lillian placed in front of her along with a cup of watery powdered milk. The way that child clung to Henry’s hand was unsettling, the way he stood right beside her, both of them with arms taut. It was as if the flow of blood through their veins depended on maintaining that bond. As Lillian thinks back, it was probably only a few minutes she stood at the stove that no longer heated up, helplessly watching the two of them, but the silence seemed endless. And then, a baby’s cry rang out from the back of the house. A flash of panic crossed Tucker’s face.

  Lillian went to get Rose from her crib in the gathering room, and placed the squirming baby into the cradle of Tucker’s arms. A smile melted the grim lines on his face and lit a glimmer of hope
in her. “Our girl’s safe here,” she said, not at all sure that was true even though the Hutu soldiers who came to ransack her fields had assured her they had no interest in her bastard children. “We’re all safe.”

  A SMILE TUGS AT LILLIAN’S lips as she enters Rose’s room. Tucker is muscling his way in between the girls on the twin bed against the wall. He’s become like a son to her. How in the world is she supposed to stay mad?

  “Hey, how are my two favorite princesses?” he inquires. Nadine elbows him playfully as she inches over to make room.

  “I’m good,” Rose pipes up.

  Tucker brushes his fingers against her forehead. “Nice and cool, that is good.”

  “No hospital?”

  “Nope, that’s only for sick people. You’ll be back at school in another few days.”

  “And no needles.”

  “Now, I didn’t say that. I need to draw some blood to take to Ginny, that smart doc in London who’s helping you to get better. Just a vial, maybe two.”

  Rose huffs out a sigh, rolling her eyes toward Nadine.

  “He does enjoy being a nuisance and poking people,” Nadine whispers loudly around Tucker’s back, glancing clandestinely toward Lillian. “It’s why he became a doctor, yego?”

  Tucker grabs Rose’s pillow and feigns surprise when Nadine snatches it away, swiftly swatting him. He uses Rose, who’s giggling and clutching Kingston to her chest, as a shield. “Hey, Lil, help out a poor outnumbered guy, wouldja?” he pleads.

  “How is anyone supposed to sleep with this ruckus, right, Rosie?” Lillian takes the pillow from Nadine and returns it to the rightful owner. She nods at Tucker: yes, all is forgiven.

  Tucker and her daughter have always jousted like this. It’s how he coaxed her back from the darkness. After the church massacre, she wouldn’t play with the other children, always sticking close by Henry’s side. He was Naddie’s protector, while Tucker was the court jester, cajoling her traumatized soul into being a thirteen-year-old kid again, even if only for a few moments of exchanging jokes. Now, the two of them clown around to help Rose forget that she’s stuck in bed for sometimes weeks at a time.

  “It’s nice having you back home,” Lillian says, wrapping her arm around Nadine as they leave Tucker to settle Rose into sleep. “Sorry if I’m hovering, but I enjoy taking in every moment you’re here. It’s a mother’s right to hover, you know.”

  Nadine laughs softly, her breath warm against Lillian’s cheek as she deposits a kiss. “I’ve only been gone a short while. Besides, Nairobi’s not so far away.” Nadine hums Rose’s lullaby as they walk outside onto the front porch. Lillian leans over the thick wooden rail, her face tilted toward the night sky. She and Dahla sat out here many evenings, Dahla rocking her baby to sleep. Lillian got in the habit of reciting a Kinyarwandan prayer to the heavens above. “Lord,” she says now, “may my children have the peace in their sleep that is not always possible during waking hours.” This nightly ritual honors the memory of her friend, a moment that harnesses all the children of Rwanda—living and dead—in a prayer. “Amahoro,” Lillian says, eyes on the daughter she and Dahla share. Peace in Kinyarwanda. Amen.

  “Look, the crocodile is out tonight, still chasing after the elephant whose eye is the North Star,” Nadine whispers, as if trying not to disturb the twinkling animals outlined against the blue-black sky. She clucks her tongue. “When will the poor fellow learn?”

  “And there’s Kingston’s big paw.” Lillian points to the east. “Swatting at the moon so he can turn out the light and get some shut-eye.”

  “Papa Henry’s ridiculous stories…” Nadine tips her head against Lillian’s shoulder.

  “Your stories, too,” Lillian says. The two of them would sit for hours on these steps, wrapped in a single blanket, Nadine—or possibly both of them—mistrustful of sleep. Lillian sat in a wooden chair by the door and listened to their banter about the jungle animals twinkling above.

  “The night Papa Henry left, I sat here alone and looked for a story in the sky,” Nadine says dreamily. “I imagined him riding on the back of the elephant. I knew he would be gone a long time, and I was thankful he was in the company of the largest and wisest animal. I felt certain the elephant would take care of him.”

  Lillian wraps an arm around her daughter, remembering the night in mid-July when Henry told her he was leaving. The Tutsiled Rwandan Patriotic Front had surrounded Kigali and the fighting was winding down. They were celebrating with neighbors. They all pooled their meager canned supplies, courtesy of the Red Cross, for a stew: chipped beef, tomatoes, carrots, and onions. It was, at the time, a feast after three months of boiled potatoes and flat, tasteless teff bread cooked over a fire in the yard.

  After dinner, Henry drank banana beer and laughed with the men as if nothing was wrong. He washed the dishes while she dried, and together they tucked the children into their beds. After that, he packed his rucksack and left. Not a word for four months, when the phone lines were up and running again and he finally called from London.

  Lillian pulls Nadine closer, listening to her hum as they both gaze at the stars. I’m sorry, Lilly. I’m not as strong as you are. It was Henry’s pat explanation, and she had always accepted it. It had never been easy living here. The injustice. The disease. The heat. It’s why he left every few months, even when he didn’t have an assignment. He could only handle so much. They both knew it. She was stronger. What he never fully realized was that she drew on him for her strength. She depended on him. Nadine depended on him too.

  “You knew,” she says, squinting up at the sky. It still amazes and confuses her, the way Nadine wasn’t a bit upset when Henry left or when he didn’t show up for Rahim Kensamara’s trial. “You knew he wasn’t coming back.”

  Nadine shrugs. “My Zulu grandfather came to visit from Swaziland when I was quite small. He told me that his tribe believes the bull elephant’s tusks are wisdom sticks, holding knowledge of the future. They believe the males know when it’s their time to roam alone, and when it’s time to come back to the herd. Papa Henry will return, but it hasn’t been his time yet.” She takes Lillian’s hand, pulling her down the porch steps, to end the conversation Lillian suspects.

  She follows her daughter across the yard, in no hurry to retire and be alone with her own thoughts, happy to listen as Nadine bounces from one subject to another: when to plant dahlias in her Christmas garden, the opera she’s composing, what classes to take next semester. A girl in her jazz theory class, she’s from Sudan, is nice and they recently went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant—a first for both of them. Perhaps she’ll invite her to Kwizera for the holiday next spring. They could share a flat next year. Lillian rubs her arms as an uncomfortable thought crawls along under her skin. Nadine may need to miss next semester altogether if she’s subpoenaed to testify at a trial. She’s left two messages at the International Tribunal office in Kigali for Valeria Ogoni, the attorney who’s been calling Nadine at school. Why the deputy prosecutor hasn’t already issued a subpoena is a puzzle, but also a blessing. Maybe if she hears from another adult that Nadine doesn’t remember anything about the massacre, she’ll leave her alone.

  They walk along the perimeter of the vegetable garden which butts up against a dirt soccer field. Lillian stops to adjust the bow tie of a button-grinned scarecrow that was more of an art project for the kids than any real deterrent to the birds and monkeys. “Naddie, we should talk about the trial,” she says.

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Nadine replies curtly. “I don’t remember any more now than I did two years ago.” She clucks her tongue, bending to pull a large weed. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me before returning to school.”

  “The garden could certainly use your touch,” Lillian agrees. It’s not her call to press Naddie, to decide what she does or doesn’t remember.

  What Lillian will never forget is sitting next to the shaking seventeen-year-old girl at the high-profile trial of Rahim Kensamara and six other
men. They were accused of serving as precinct leaders in the Hutu military, hired by the government to recruit eight or ten locals who would cleanse each of their villages of Tutsis. Nadine sat beside her, stiff and quiet, in the packed courtroom in Arusha, eyes fixed on her hands, folded in her lap. She seemed oblivious to the witnesses who took the stand: several Hutu women verified that Kensamara and the others had recruited their husbands with the promise of great pay and a plan to exterminate thousands of Tutsis from the region in a matter of days. And then, an elderly Tutsi man from a town not far from Mubaro told how he and his neighbors went to the church with suitcases, lured by a supposed messenger of the priest with the promise of a safe haven. They were met by their Hutu neighbors wielding machetes, guns, broken bottles and boards studded with nails.

  “Why don’t you ask the children to help with harvesting these overgrown squash and yams before the market on Saturday?” Lillian says.

  “We’ll make it fun.” Nadine kisses both of her cheeks, the trial seemingly forgotten, but they both know that’s not true. It breaks Lillian’s heart, seeing how hard her daughter’s trying to be light and gay. They’ll invite the children from town, and have prizes for the fullest baskets but every child gets some kind of reward.

  “That sounds nice, sugar.” Lillian feels her daughter’s pulse in the trembling hand, warm and moist, on her arm.

  “I’ll invite Tucker, of course,” Nadine adds. “And Rachel, yes?”

  Lillian bites back a sigh.

  They walk back toward the house, and Nadine returns to the merits of composing the music to her opera before the words. Perhaps she’ll take a drama class next semester instead of all music electives. “Maman, what do you think?”

  “Well, let’s go over the pros and cons of each,” Lillian suggests to get her talking. Meanwhile, her mind sticks on the trial in Arusha two years ago. When the priest from the church in Mubaro walked up to the stand and swore on a bible to tell the truth, he looked straight at Nadine. The child didn’t look up but clutched Lillian’s hand so tightly her fingers went numb. When it was Naddie’s turn to testify, she froze. Her daughter seemed to leave her body, and Lillian imagined she had gone back to the nightmare of the massacre. She’ll call again, first thing tomorrow, and every day until she gets through to Valeria Ogoni. There’s no way she’s putting her daughter through that again.