In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

by Jennifer Haupt

  He never knew whether or not his dad was telling the truth about his mom dying in a car accident shortly after she left them. It seemed easiest to believe that was true. He would look up at the twinkling North Star, even years later in his backyard in Jacksonville with Rachel by his side, imagining his mom shining down on him. She was finally happy. Free. He imagines the piece of his soul that left him four years ago at the massacre is a shooting star, only it’s heading back up into the sky where it belongs. What would it be like, to truly be free?

  Henry walks into the forest and follows the river until he comes to the mopani tree at the bend, where he and Lilly spent many hours in the cradle of the thick roots, atop a blanket, sometimes with a thermos of lemonade. The ground is cold and hard. He digs into it with his pocketknife, and scrapes the clay with his fingernails. He takes from his rucksack a rusty metal box that he found last night, half buried with sticks and dirt, on the riverbank. It was the perfect size for the thirty-six photos of the massacre. Now, he places the box in the ground and tamps down the earth with his hands. He’ll slip a note under Lilly’s door, telling her where the photos are. Telling her he still loves her and he will always love her.

  He walks out of the forest, his step light, and heads across the soccer field toward the farmhouse like he’s simply coming back from a late-night stroll, will brush his teeth and splash warm water on his face before slipping into bed next to Lilly. For a moment, he can believe this is true.

  He stops, his heart quickening at the sound of something stirring in the field of sunflowers behind him. A shadow of clouds seems to slip over the stars, darkening the eyes of the dead, and his mind goes momentarily blank. It feels surprisingly nice. Suddenly, the rustling becomes footsteps, footsteps of the children he and Tucker buried in the field, the shadow seemingly springing to life. He turns around and heads back toward the woods, slowly, to give the shadow time to catch up with him and draw it away from the farmhouse.

  The shadow follows him, toys with him, as he walks through the forest, not so fast as to be suspicious. He wants, more than anything, to make it to the mopani tree. He hears a lion roaring, but that’s impossible. There haven’t been any lions, giraffes or elephants—not even zebra, caribou or impalas—in Rwanda since before the genocide. All the animals that didn’t have the sense to flee were killed for food or poached. The national parks are now refugee camps for thousands of Hutus, genocide criminals who were extradited from Zaire by the Rwandan government.

  When he gets to the mopani tree, he snaps the silver chain around his neck and drops it, along with the heart-shaped locket, under the tree where it will be easy for Lilly to find. At least she’ll know he was here. Then, he walks to the riverbank and waits, thinking back on the important moments of his life: when he first showed up at Kwizera, and realized he couldn’t leave; the wedding that only the baboons witnessed, right here. The first moment he saw Rachel squirming in Merilee’s arms; making pancakes with his daughter on Saturday mornings; the way she dragged a blanket into the backyard and sat next to him at night, both of them watching the stars. Driving his blue Skylark to Atlanta; walking into Ebenezer Church, scared and excited at the same time; Lilly waving at him.

  A shot rings out. He’s frozen in time. There is the pulpit with Reverend King raising his hand like a witness being sworn in as he speaks. There are rows of dark faces, turning to stare at him as he walks down the aisle. There is the girl who waved at him; she looks like an angel through his lens, shards of light from the stained glass window encircling her. He stops beside her, wants to stand in the light with her, that’s all he wants now. The light is warm and soothing; it washes over him. He falls into the light as his body sinks to the bottom of the river. Peaceful. Free.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Henry Shepherd is dead. RACHEL ONLY SU-perficially understands these words, keeps them at arm’s length while driving Christian’s truck to Ruhengeri. Nadine is in the back, Christian’s head cradled in her lap. Kinyarwanda whispers of sorrow, love and forgiveness float within Rachel’s grasp. She collects these words, stitches them together into a patchwork quilt of comprehension, along with the questions that remain. Why did Felix murder her father? How? Where is his body?

  She keeps her eyes on Tucker’s Jeep straight ahead. Felix is lying on the back seat, unconscious. In her mind, she sees a clear image of her father. He is sitting in a lawn chair in the backyard, head tilted up toward the stars. He is cold. Shivering. She longs to warm him somehow. She prays that Felix will make it through surgery. He’s the only one who can give her the final pieces of her father’s story so she may finally lay him to rest.

  At the hospital, Tucker tells an admitting nurse that the unconscious boy now on a stretcher has lost a lot of blood. Felix is taken down the hall to the Emergency Room. Luckily, the bullet that Nadine shot only grazed Christian’s shoulder. Tucker offers to dress his wound. The admitting nurse directs him to a room the size of the kitchen at Kwizera where about a dozen patients who have been assessed as stable rest on tight rows of cots.

  Rachel tries to stand out of the way, doesn’t know quite what to do with herself or how to help. Clearly, the hospital is short-staffed. She hasn’t seen anyone remotely resembling a doctor since they arrived. A woman wearing a navy dress, who may or may not be a nurse, provides Tucker with a roll of gauze, tape, and an industrial-sized bottle of Tylenol. There are no medical instruments in sight, not even a thermometer. Tucker goes in search of antiseptic, a surgical needle and thread. Nadine kneels on the floor beside her friend’s cot and holds his hand. Rachel offers to track down food and water, embarrassed to be encroaching on what is clearly an intimate moment even in the crowded room.

  She heads outside, into a courtyard teeming with activity. The air smells of ugali, a sweet cornmeal porridge, coffee, and the harsh scent of bleach. In the center is a makeshift kitchen: one woman stirs a black kettle simmering over a low fire, another sits cross-legged on the cement and slices bananas into a wooden bowl. At the far side of the small square, several other women hang towels to dry in the afternoon sun on a crowded rope clothesline tied between two acacia trees. Babies and toddlers splash in a big trough of water where clothes are also being washed. More mothers and children nap on thin squares of blankets on the dusty ground under the trees beyond the courtyard.

  Rachel nods at each woman she passes; there is a palpable exchange as their eyes meet. Nearby, a young woman, a baby in her arms, is struggling to hang a blanket on the rope line. Rachel takes one end of the blanket and clips it on with a clothespin, the child grasping at her hair. For a moment, she is connected with both mother and child.

  “My son’s papa is ill for many months,” the woman says. “You? Why are you here?”

  “My father.” Rachel gazes tenderly at the curly-haired boy who is busily sucking his fingers. “Do you mind if I hold him for a bit? Sawa?”

  She takes the child over to a nearby patch of shady grass, and sits with him in her lap. He coos and giggles as she shutters her hands over her face, and then removes them. The universal language of peek-a-boo. A few minutes later, the mother returns and offers a bowl of porridge.

  “Murakoze.” Rachel takes the bowl, the warmth travelling from her hands throughout her entire body. She watches the mother and child walk away, a soft longing cracking open the place where her tears have been frozen for years. She sits under the tree and cries for her father. For her mom. Serena. She cries alone, and yet there is the sense of being held by this courtyard filled with mothers and their children. She takes a bowl of porridge to her newly discovered shika. For the next few hours, she sits with Nadine while Christian sleeps and Tucker observes Felix’s surgery. No, she is not alone.

  Dead. LILLIAN PRESSES THE PHONE to her ear, the fist of her heart pounding out the flat syllable. Tucker sounds much farther away than Ruhengeri, the faint static-laced words barely reaching her as he relays Felix’s confession on the way to the hospital. Henry returned and the boy shot him. When and where, he
didn’t say. But, she knew.

  Her hand goes to the silver chain around her neck that she found under the mopani tree, not long before Rahim Kensamara’s trial in Arusha. She knelt in the dirt and clawed at the ground. The heart-shaped locket Henry had always worn around his neck was nowhere to be found. That was good, she assured herself; the chain could belong to anyone. And yet she has worn it ever since, the weight of the phantom locket hanging like a small vial, cold and metallic, just below the dip in her collarbone. This is where she has secreted away her grief and love for Henry during the past two years, intertwined like this chain. It was easier to pretend that he had chosen to abandon her and the children. It was easier to be angry. But she knew. “Rachel,” she says into the phone. “How is she?”

  Tell me, what did you love about my father? Please, I need to know.

  It was easier to believe she was protecting Henry’s daughter from knowing him fully because it would somehow hurt her. The truth is, she kept not only Henry’s photo album but also her own memories locked away to protect herself. If she were to unravel the love and share it, then the grief might also come undone.

  Tucker assures her that Rachel seems all right. She’s strong. But, of course, she’s worried that Felix won’t live to reveal what happened to her father. She needs to know. “Keep that boy alive,” Lillian says before hanging up.

  As the afternoon unfurls, the children opening Christmas presents, neighbors stopping by to exchange cookies and jars of homemade jam, Tucker’s words fade completely away. There is only the vibrating thud of a single dull beat against Lillian’s ribs, like sonar trying to locate a small vessel in a vast ocean. Dead, dead, dead.

  By the time the aunties arrive for Christmas dinner, the throbbing weight has dropped down into her stomach. She tries a few bites of chicken and sweet potato casserole. Even a thin slice of the cardamom-apple cake Julia brought for dessert is a chore to swallow. She imagines it would be a relief for the metal vial to crack open within her, a slight fissure from which drips something like mercury, hot and cloying, slowing down her heartbeat until it flattens out.

  She prays it won’t be like the last time she grieved for Henry, knowing in her heart that when he fled with the massacre photos to Kampala he wouldn’t return. Her grief was unexpected, spilling out all at once. Days after he left, she finally removed his razor from the edge of the bathroom sink, tested the dull blade against her thumb and then tossed it into the garbage. This single action released rush of pressure, like a spigot in her chest had been violently wrenched. She doubled over in pain, and then there was nothing.

  Nothing at all during the weeks she took care of everyone else, helping Tucker to pack and leave for Uganda with Nadine and Rose, making sure the other children who stayed at Kwizera during the slaughter all had somewhere to live while she supposedly cleaned up the farm. Nothing during the months resting at Mama’s house in Atlanta, as if she had a terminal illness and couldn’t care for her own needs. She searched for her son as a way to try and feel again, to find a way out of grief. Instead, when she hit a dead end, she discovered another antidote for grief: anger. That’s also what she felt, looking at the newspaper photo of a young Rwandan woman sitting on the porch of her ravaged home, helpless and defeated.

  Washing the dinner dishes beside Julia, Lillian looks out the window into the violet-blue dusk. The silhouettes of foil snowmen and stars are losing their shine as the sun goes down. Her hands suddenly go motionless in the tepid gray water. She could swear Henry is crouching just to the left of the fig tree, and when he sees her he moves out of sight. There’s a slight tug in her chest, part of her straining to detach and follow him into the darkness. Instead, she reaches out for the anchor of her friend’s arm. “Henry’s not coming back,” she says quietly, and then louder, “He’s dead.”

  “Oya,” Julia murmurs, as if she already knew. “Oya, inshuti.” Her touch, a brief gentle press of fingers on Lillian’s hand, seems to release tiny granules of relief from the metallic vial. No, this is not like the last time. The aunties. Naddie. Tucker. Henry’s daughter. This time, she is far from alone. The thought pearls into tears, but not for herself.

  “Julia,” she says, wiping the foam of soap bubbles on her hands briskly onto her apron. “There’s somewhere I need to go. Would you mind looking after the children?”

  Maura Kensamara is sitting on her front porch. It’s no surprise that she doesn’t stand to greet the Jeep, but she doesn’t so much as glance up as Lillian takes a basket of food from the backseat. Surely, she must be curious; for six years, they haven’t said a civil hello or even met each other’s eyes when passing on the street. Lillian walks up the steps and places the basket beside her. “You need to stay strong for your boys,” she says. “They need you strong.”

  Maura moves over, only slightly, and Lillian sits beside her to make a plate for each of them. They exchange a single word, a prayer, before they begin to eat: amahoro.

  WHEN RACHEL RETURNS TO KWIZERA, without Nadine who’s coming back with Tucker and Christian after Felix is out of surgery, the main house is dark and quiet. The electricity is off. Everyone must be asleep. She walks around back to the patio, looking for Lillian. A tiny tumbleweed of wrapping paper and tinsel scraps blows past her feet. It’s surreal; only hours earlier, the matriarch of Kwizera was helping children to open cheerfully wrapped presents that teetered in stacks under the now-barren fig tree.

  The kitchen door opens and Julia emerges, carrying a bowl of stew. “You need to eat, Madame.”

  Rachel sits at the nearest table, although she’s not the least bit hungry. “Where’s Lillian?” she asks.

  “She has gone for a while.”

  “Gone?”

  “Delivering dinner to someone in need.” Julia looks pointedly at the untouched bowl on the table.

  Rachel dips in the spoon and takes a courtesy bite. “How does Lillian do it?” she wonders aloud. “Take care of everyone else.” Pretend nothing is wrong.

  “We do what we must. We take care of each other in times of sorrow.” Julia stoops to pick up a stray foil star and places it on the table before she leaves.

  Rachel holds onto the ornament, her fingers smoothing out a bent edge, and watches Julia disappear down the driveway. The children. Lillian said they have always been her saving grace. They keep me focused on what’s important. Perhaps it isn’t that the Lady of Steel is as cold as she sometimes seems, but that she and the aunties have all been in a kind of survival mode just like the mothers in the hospital courtyard.

  She hangs the misfit star on the lowest branch of the fig tree, the slight weight of the soapstone heart in her skirt pocket shifting. A silent wish starts as a warm ache in her chest, and then flows into tears. It’s a wish she hasn’t dared to name for many years.

  RACHEL SITS CROSS-LEGGED, LEANING AGAINST the mahogany headboard, reviewing the photos and postcards her father never mailed, now floating around her on the satiny quilt as if adrift at sea. She leans down to reluctantly remove the last postcard from the stripped corkboard on the floor: a lion sunning on a boulder. The image that brought her here. She slots the card into a crinkled plastic sleeve in the photo album on her lap, her hand heavy with a kind of defeat. Another week, and then it’s back to New York, mixing drinks and listening to other peoples’ stories. Back to trying to figure out her own life.

  She glances out the window: it’s a clear night, the sky lit up with millions of glittering pixels. There’s the crocodile that her father showed her, and the lion’s paw. What was he really searching for in the images of the stars, sitting in his lawn chair in the backyard, night after night? Did he see Lillian’s face? The exciting life he left behind in Atlanta? Did he come here trying to discover something more than the good-enough job and family he had settled for? Her own search feels incomplete.

  There’s a tap on the half-open door. Rose peeks in, Kingston nestled snugly under her chin. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Rachel asks.

  “I usually have a
bedtime story.” Rose sighs. “Julia gave me my medicine, and then Thomas read from a book that wasn’t a bit interesting. I think it was something assigned for school.”

  “I’ve got a story for you.” Rachel scoops up the photos and moves them to the bedside table. She pulls back the quilt for Rose to climb in. “Once upon a time, there was a genie who buried a treasure somewhere in the desert,” she begins. The night her father left he told her a story… Where was the jinn’s treasure buried, anyway? “Wait, let’s start over.” She flips through the photo album, searching for something to begin a new story. “This is about my dad, Henry. You’re too young to remember him.”

  “Nadine’s Papa Henry?”

  “Papa Henry.” Rachel points to the postcard of a field of red and yellow rosebushes with Mt. Kenya towering in the background. “He worked at a flower farm in Kenya for a while.” Rose leans over her to get a better look. Rachel strokes her hair; she had wanted to tell her own daughter stories about her grandpa someday.

  She weaves a story about how Papa Henry talked to animals and travelled in search of adventures, her hand going to the necklace of chiseled animals still hanging over a corner of the board on the floor. She drapes the beads around Rose’s neck. “What do you think? Did Papa Henry ride a zebra or an elephant to work in the mornings?”

  “Perhaps a giraffe,” Nadine suggests from the doorway. Rose moves over for her to sit on the bed.

  Next, Rachel picks up the photo of a silverback gorilla climbing the hillside. He’s looking over his shoulder, as if inviting the photographer to come along. “Papa Henry had a best friend.” Rachel taps the photo against her palm. “His name was Max.” That’s what her father called the old gray gorilla at the zoo. The sad-looking animal always appeared to be waiting for them—or something, anyway—giant fingers gripping the metal bars. “They went on long walks every evening,” she continues, “talking about their day, my dad planting flowers and Max…” She looks at Rose. “What did he do all day?”