In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

by Jennifer Haupt

  “But, it did last; he came after you,” Rachel prompts. “He came here to find you. Why?”

  “I sent Henry a letter not long after I bought Kwizera, not because I thought he’d come here but because I needed to remind myself that someone might actually believe I could pull this off. The place was a shambles. Nadine’s folks and your father helped me to bring Kwizera to life.”

  “How do you do it? Stay hopeful. Stay here.”

  “The children,” Lillian says. It’s a reflex. They have always been her hope. “I’m sorry,” she adds. “That was insensitive of me.”

  Rachel smiles down at her hand, cradling her stomach. “Once in a while, I still feel a little kick or jab of an elbow…” She looks up, her face questioning. “I never want that to go away.”

  “I admit, there was a time when I lost hope,” Lillian says. “Several years after Henry left Atlanta, I became engaged to a man—a good man—who was killed in the Vietnam War. I was three months pregnant when Samuel died. Our folks all thought it was best to give up the baby for adoption. I wasn’t strong enough to disagree. But I knew nobody could ever love that child as deeply as I did. It’s not the same as a miscarriage, but I do understand the ache you still feel. The loss.”

  “You’ve helped so many children since then,” Rachel says. “Lost so many.”

  “I had buried children before the genocide, but nothing could have prepared me…” Lillian shakes her head. At first, it was overwhelming. Henry and Tucker thought she didn’t see them going out each morning before dawn to bury the bodies. She let them think that for a while, let them believe they were doing something to lessen the pain. But after a few weeks, she couldn’t afford the sorrow. She was busy making sure there was water they could drink, hauling buckets from the river and boiling it over a fire in the yard, and food to eat, pooling resources with neighbors who also had a few vegetables or a cup of rice to add to a watery soup. There was no time to be slowed down by sorrow and it all became dammed up, stagnating inside of her like the putrid stream where dead bodies were dumped. But what is it that she truly wants to tell Henry’s daughter? What will help her deal with her loss?

  “After the fighting ended, I was completely drained. I needed help, but there was no one to help. Tucker took Rose and Nadine to Uganda to stay with a friend. Some of the other children had relatives they could live with, some stayed with families in town. Everyone was in shock, merely going through the motions. Bodies were buried. Trash was burned. There was no rebuilding, just clearing away the chaos. I had never been so scared in all my life. And then, your father left and things became worse. I was utterly alone.” That’s what broke open the dam inside of her. All the loss she had endured during the slaughter came pouring out, rushing through her veins, poisoning her soul. “The grief was so intense,” she says. “I had to shut everything off. The pain. The love. Everything. Over time, it became clear to me that Henry felt the same way.”

  Rachel leans toward her and takes her hand. “It was like that after Serena died. I came here to find my father because I wanted to feel again. What did you do?”

  “I went to my mother’s home in Atlanta.” Lillian stops, feels several sentences line up in her throat but can’t coax them out. She’s never told anyone about trying to find her son. The thought of finally seeing him was what gave her the strength to physically endure the trip back to Atlanta. But it won’t help Rachel to tell her that the adoption paperwork had been destroyed in a courthouse fire, so she skips over the part of the story where she couldn’t drag herself out of the bed in her childhood room for a full week. She had to find something—anything—to get her moving again.

  “I spent a lot of time at the cemetery with Daddy and Deirdre,” she says. Neither one of them would have stood for her wallowing in self-pity. “I had never taken the time to grieve for either one of them. It helped. I found a place to begin feeling again. A month later, I was ready to come home to Kwizera and start again.”

  “Was there a turning point?” Rachel asks. “How did you know you were ready to go home?”

  “A newspaper photo,” Lillian says. “There were lots of articles about the atrocities, photos of dismembered bodies, so many that I think people became numb. But this was a young woman sitting on the front porch of what was left of her home. Broken windows, the Kinyarwanda word for cockroach spray-painted in big letters across the front door. She was staring at her hands, folded in her lap. So defeated, like there was nothing she could do—not even whitewash her door. I saw myself in that photo. It snapped something back on, made me angry. Angry at myself—so many folks had suffered far greater losses. And, I was angry at Henry for leaving me alone with all that grief.”

  Rachel gets up gingerly and hobbles over to the desk to examine the corkboard jigsaw puzzle of photos, baubles, and notes that she and Naddie have spent so much time and love creating together. There’s something missing from the right upper corner: the dreamcatcher. Lillian recalls taking it off the wall above the bed and placing it in the closet when Rachel’s emails first set her mind down paths she didn’t trust her footing on. It pains her that, apparently, Henry’s daughter now feels the same way.

  “What made you come back while my father stayed away?” Rachel asks.

  Lillian shakes her head. It’s a fair question, one she has often considered but never answered to her own satisfaction.

  “He didn’t care about the children,” Rachel says, her voice high and wispy.

  “Of course—”

  “No, not the way you did.”

  Lillian stands behind Henry’s daughter and studies the pieces of his life, trying to discover some new clue: dozens of images of gorillas, the river, orchids. Only a few of the children.

  “If he did care,” Rachel continues slowly, “then why…” She turns around, eyes moist with wonder. Lillian can see straight through to the place where the pain of Henry leaving has pooled.

  “He loved you, sugar, truly he did,” Lillian says, her chest swelling with all she cannot say. For years, she encouraged Henry to reconnect with his daughter, make amends with his ex-wife. She was the one who insisted that he go to visit Rachel after Merilee wrote to tell him about her cancer diagnosis and their daughter’s whereabouts. Lillian agreed with Merilee: Rachel was going to need him. When Henry returned from New York and told her he had sat across the bar from his daughter, ordered a drink but hadn’t revealed who he was, hadn’t reached out and taken her hands… She couldn’t fathom it. He told her he didn’t know how to be Rachel’s father anymore. Truth was, he didn’t have it in him to stay and figure it out. That’s what kept her from answering Rachel’s emails; she told herself it was better that way. But now, Henry’s daughter is looking at her, waiting for some kind of truth she can live with.

  “He talked about you all the time,” Lillian begins. “He wrote postcards, the ones Tucker sent and more.”

  “Mom admitted he had called a few times during the first year after he left, but she wouldn’t let him speak to me. He could have mailed letters that she destroyed.”

  “Yes,” Lillian says carefully. “That is possible.” But, perhaps, Henry never mailed those letters with a return address because it was easier that way. He could tell himself he was being a good father, writing to his daughter, without the responsibility that would come along with any letters she mailed back.

  Rachel nods, hungry for more.

  “He tried to find you,” Lillian says, “in New York.”

  “When?”

  “Shortly after Merilee became ill. She wrote to tell Henry you were attending New York University.”

  “Two journalism classes in three years. My main priority was bartending at clubs so I could listen to bands for free.”

  “Yes, I remember Henry telling me about a place he went to called the Mud Room.”

  “CBGB’s—that’s right!”

  “He came home after five days. He couldn’t find your apartment, the address Merilee gave him didn’t exist… I
can’t recall exactly what happened.”

  “But he did look for me,” Rachel says. “He wanted to find me.”

  Lillian hugs her tightly, before more lies can begin. “I’m sorry, so very sorry, that Henry hasn’t come back,” she says, feeling the pain, not of her own loss, but of the inherent cruelty of the truth, knowing that if she is entirely honest Rachel’s face will forever change—the hope will drain right out of it—and she will be responsible for that.

  HOURS LATER, LILLIAN SITS ON the floor in the attic, a brown leather photo album open on her lap. She has studied each page, each note Henry wrote, trying to memorize the words and images that have been hers to access whenever she’s been lonely or simply needed to remember how to love him. Rachel’s right: he didn’t care about the orphans as deeply as she did. He loved them, in his way. But his passion was the images he saw through his camera lens, even when it meant ignoring what was right in front of him.

  The night Henry left, Lillian sat on a mattress, the only furniture in the room that had been a storage closet before the slaughter began. She held baby Rose in her arms. She watched him pack his rucksack. It didn’t take long; neither one of them had taken many things from the farmhouse after the Hutus ransacked it. She didn’t ask him to stay; how could she? Rahim Kensamara had come to their home several times since the fall of Kigali a few weeks earlier, asking about some photos Henry had apparently taken in town and elsewhere. He was polite. He was scared. The new government was Hutu, but making arrests. Rahim kept saying he trusted Henry and believed he had destroyed the incriminating film, but he kept coming back. Earlier that night he had arrived with four other men, all carrying guns, who searched through closets and drawers, and examined the floorboards for one that might come up easily.

  “They’re good, Lilly, I know they’re good,” Henry said, holding up the black plastic bag with six rolls of film that had been buried in the forest for the past month. He tucked it away in the lining of his jacket.

  “I’m sure,” she said flatly. She also knew Henry would rather sell these photos than use them to put war criminals away, but she couldn’t argue with him anymore. Now, Tucker was driving him to Kampala so he could rent a place and set up a darkroom, far away from the Hutus.

  Henry took her face in his hands, traced her jaw with his thumbs. “If these photos are as great as I think they are, magazines all over the world will want them. We’ll finally have enough money to hire more help—”

  “I don’t need more help,” Lillian said. “I need you.”

  “I’ll call from Kampala, or maybe London by the time the phone service is working here again. But don’t worry. I’ll call.”

  Lillian closes the album, smoothing her hand over the rough cover. Nearly four years of going to London, believing that, eventually, Henry would return. She believed in him, even seeing the well of his own faith subside, little by little, month by month. His skin seemed to develop a dusty film, his voice crackled, the moist light drained from his eyes.

  Why did he accept her ultimatum so easily? It’s been two years, not one phone call or letter. If she still had faith in Henry, she would have to believe something has prevented him from calling and asking for one more chance. Surely, he would beg her to come visit because he misses her touch, because without it he will turn to dust. It is also possible he has simply given up on their love. She does not know, not for sure.

  She looks around the attic, her own corkboard medley of the pieces of Henry’s life: the old VCR and box of movies they watched on Saturday nights, his paperback mysteries lined up on a bookshelf in the corner, and the hanging bag that protects the brown pin-striped suit he wore when they exchanged vows under the mopani tree. The uncertainty about why Henry hasn’t contacted her softens the hard pit in her gut. The uncertainty makes her hang onto these cherished memories. But the uncertainty comes at a high price: Bitterness. Longing. Anger. She has had to replace her faith in Henry with a story that he gave up on their love, just as he had done in Atlanta and then in New York with his daughter, because it became too difficult.

  Lillian clasps the album to her chest as she carries it downstairs to the room where Rachel is asleep. On the night Henry left, she told him straight out that she wouldn’t mail this album to his daughter. At the time, she called it a show of faith. He would come back and mail it himself. Several years went by, and that faith became something desperate and petty. She coveted these photos and postcards that did not belong to her. The hard pit in her stomach moves up into her chest. She hasn’t been protecting Rachel from the truth, not really. She’s been protecting herself.

  Depositing the album next to Rachel’s bed is like unyoking a heavy weight from around her neck, a weight that has not been altogether unpleasant. This sudden floaty sensation is freeing; it is equally terrifying. What will keep her anchored now? She retrieves the dreamcatcher from the closet and places it atop the album. What she does know, without a doubt, is that Henry’s daughter needs him to show up for her, perhaps in the only way he can, even if it means she must find a way to face the truth of the past six years. She must finally let him go.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  { London, August 1998 }

  AT FIRST THERE IS ONLY THE CEILING above him: a gray stubble of dust laced with broken strands of web, the Rorschach of rusted water that could be the eye and tusk of a warthog skull or the handle of a machete. There are no grains of glass scattered across balding carpet that was once blue or green, but there is the familiar film of lime and ash and something astringent, more like turpentine than gin, that coats his mouth. There is the ache behind his eyes that keeps his lids half-shut against the gray light seeping through a grime-mottled window, his face sunken into the damp pillow that seems to exhale his sour breath. There is the pounding at his temples but no heartbeat, no arms or legs cramped from too much time spent in this bed, no bladder that needs draining. There are no thoughts, only a single word: choices.

  Henry rises slowly onto his elbows, and then heaves one leg over the side of the bed, testing his footing. It has been two months—no, closer to three—since Lilly threw a bottle of banana gin against the wall behind the sofa bed to get his attention. Damn it, Henry, you have choices!

  He used to measure time by her phone calls, Sunday evening at nine like clockwork, and her visits every two months. And then, at some point everything slowed down—became harder. Was it when his hands started shaking so badly he could no longer shoot photos? He stopped caring about most everything after that. Maybe it was two years ago, when he bought a plane ticket to Kigali that he never used. Or last year, when he quit seeing that shrink with rodent eyes who kept yammering on about visualizing the beauty before the genocide, as if that was somehow possible. He tried for a few months, and then he simply pretended to try for a few months more. When he quit therapy altogether, Lilly wasn’t just angry. Disappointed. That’s the word she used.

  What is it they say about hindsight being 20/20? Looking back, he sees clearly that there was no specific event or two that he might be able to isolate, apologize for and expunge from his life. This slowing has been more of subtle shift since he left Kwizera. It’s as if the plates of the earth have been moving apart over the past four years in a glacial manner, undetected, carrying him farther and farther from Lilly, their family, his old self. It became increasingly difficult for Lilly to get here every two months, and then ten or twelve weeks, but it wasn’t only her doing, this fissure that developed between them. He began lying: he was travelling on assignment, too busy, even after he took a job at the bar downstairs because he couldn’t keep his hands still enough to hold a video camera and shoot footage for commercials.

  He gets to his feet, the debris from the gin bottle Lilly shattered in desperation no longer sharp, ingrained in the carpet or maybe in his skin; it’s impossible to tell anymore. He pads gingerly toward the bathroom as if hot-footing it across sand. The mirror over the cracked porcelain sink is particularly unkind this morning. Haircut, a voice in hi
s head says. His morning hygiene regimen is akin to the way a farmer might care for an old plow horse that has outlived its usefulness but he can’t bear to send the old boy to the glue factory, not today. He runs a toothbrush over his teeth, steps under the shower for a few minutes, skimming a bar of soap from chest to thigh, and then tosses on the same gravy-brown sweatshirt and faded jeans he’s worn for the past three days.

  Coffee, the voice commands and Henry marches off to the kitchen. Caffeine is a necessity in the morning, food more of a chore that can be put off until noon, just before he heads downstairs for his shift. Tommy doesn’t give him the evenings anymore, too many customers now that they serve chicken wings and stuffed mushrooms, too many fancy drinks. What the hell is a Long Island Iced Tea, anyway? He gets things mixed up, that’s okay, Tommy says, let the waitress mix the cocktails. But it’s not okay. Nothing is okay since Lilly left for good.

  She stood right here in this kitchen, he’s certain it was four months ago, sees it clearly now. I’ve been patient for four years, but I can’t pretend this is okay anymore. She swept her hand around the apartment, landing on a bottle of gin on the counter between them. She had stopped asking him to come home and he had stopped pretending the therapy was working, but now she asked one more time. Now, she told him, the asking wasn’t just for her. There was going to be a Tribunal trial for Rahim Kensamara and some other men in September. Nadine had been subpoenaed to testify. She needs you to come home and tell what you saw at the church, Lilly said. You were there. You can say the things she can’t.

  Henry’s heart quickens; he recalls a kind of panic rising as he placated Lilly. Of course he would come back for Naddie. How could he not? Four months was plenty of time to get himself together. He would contact that shrink with the rodent eyes again, how about that? He reached for the gin, thinking he would toss it down the sink. Instead, he froze. Choose me, Henry, Lilly said shakily. Choose me, or I won’t come back. Now, he raises a similar bottle to his lips and then wipes at his eyes, the image of Lilly—right there in front of him—fading. For chrissakes, she was under the mistaken impression he had choices. He couldn’t blame her for heaving the bottle against the wall. And then, she was gone.