“He was magic, like that genie,” she pipes up.
“Well, Max was a very special gorilla.” Rachel flips through the photo album for the next piece of her story. She lands on a postcard of her father canoeing among the purple water lilies on Lake Kivu. “One day, Max surprised Papa Henry with a magic boat he made out of bamboo and banana leaves. He said it would take him wherever he wanted to go.”
“Anywhere?” Rose asks, her voice squeaky with awe.
Nadine reaches over her to turn the pages: photos of castles on the Rhine, Moroccan kasbahs, white powdery sand dunes. “Anywhere at all,” she says dreamily. She stops at an image of Lillian in the sunflower garden. It slides easily out of the cellophane sleeve and seems to come to life, the colors more vibrant against Nadine’s palm.
“Where did Papa Henry go?” Rose asks.
“He got into the boat, and then Max gave him a shove off into the water.” Rachel takes the photo from Nadine, her hand shaking. She thought her father was trying to be funny, leaning over the rail to console a smelly old gorilla, talking to him about what it might be like to roam free in the jungle. You’d like that, big guy, wouldn’t you? Get the heck outta here and pound your chest a little bit. Now, it occurs to her that he related to the trapped animal. He left to find freedom. And yet, he stayed here with Lillian and the children for nearly twenty years.
“The gorilla waved from the shore,” Nadine continues. “‘Have fun,’ Max shouted, ‘and make sure to keep your eye open for a beautiful princess.’”
Rose nods in approval at the photo of Lillian. “She does look like a princess.”
“And where do you think Papa Henry found his princess?” Rachel asks, shuffling through the photos on the bedside table of her father’s life in Rwanda: Lillian surrounded by kids on the front porch, a single tiger-striped orchid, Henry showing Naddie how to use a camera, the craggy fortress-like Virungas, a family of gorillas splashing in a lake, a lone vulture circling in the sky. These are the treasures her father discovered here.
Rose snuggles into her side and yawns. “He must have found Maman Lilly at home. Kwizera.”
Rachel turns off the lantern on the bedside table and lies down next to Rose, whose breath is already heavy. Nadine hums for a few minutes, and then there is silence as her shika also falls asleep. There is the gentle rocking of the mattress as someone sits on the end of the bed: Lillian. In the soft moonlight radiating through the window, it’s hard to see at first that her cheeks are glistening with tears. “Tucker’s home,” she says. “Felix didn’t make it.”
Rachel sits up slowly, so as not to awaken Rose or Nadine, and moves toward Lillian. This news makes her father’s death seem real. Final.
“How will I tell Maura?” Lillian asks. “How…”
Rachel holds out her hand, the heart-shaped locket in her palm. “I want you to have this. Christian gave it to me.”
Suddenly, Rachel’s hand begins to shake. Her father didn’t leave her and Merilee for another woman, he left to find a piece of himself the same way she did. He came here searching for freedom, and what he found was something stronger that kept him here, bound him to Lillian and his life at Kwizera. Family. That’s what she wished for earlier, on the tinfoil star. How had he ever given that up?
Lillian unsnaps the silver chain from around her neck and slips the locket onto it, then places the necklace on the bed between them. “This doesn’t truly belong to either one of us,” she says.
Rachel hangs it on a nail above the mahogany headboard.
THIRTY-EIGHT
{ December 31, 2000 }
THE SUITCASE SEEMS MUCH SMALLER than when Rachel unpacked it six weeks ago, even without most of the clothes she brought here. She doesn’t have the heart to reclaim her Scooby-Doo T-shirt from Rose. It’s tougher to part with her Knicks sweatshirt and favorite buttery Levis that took two years to break in, but Nadine wanted some authentic American clothes. She tamps down three batik skirts that were a fair trade, a filmy purple-green silk tunic that Lillian says doesn’t fit her anymore, and an assortment of handmade embroidered blouses. The photo album will take up the bulk of the carry-on bag. All that’s left on the bed is the album, a thin bolt of gold-threaded fabric left over from Lillian’s new kitchen curtains and the dreamcatcher.
She tucks away the bolt of fabric in the top drawer of Nadine’s dresser. Lillian will teach her how to sew during her next visit. Maybe if she takes on some extra shifts she can make enough money for a plane ticket by summer or next Christmas. Now that Felix is dead, the tribunal has lost interest in staging a gacaca trial in Mubaro in January, postponing it indefinitely and focusing on other more promising cases in Ruhengeri. Nadine is returning to school, Tucker is taking Rose to London for the upcoming school semester, maybe longer, to be close to the AIDS clinic… The truth is, she’s not at all sure when she’ll be back here. She places the photo album atop the dresser. Lillian may need it more than she does.
Nadine enters the bedroom with a gift wrapped in a slip of white tissue paper. It’s so light it could be nothing at all. “For the New Year,” she says. “I refuse to call this a going-away present.”
Rachel unwraps a long silvery feather from a crowned crane. She smiles at Nadine. They have often watched these majestic birds that have resided in Africa for some fifty million years, and marveled that some things of beauty can’t be extinguished.
“This morning, I went to visit Chrissie,” Nadine says. “A large crane landed outside his bedroom window and stood there for quite a while, stamping, shaking his golden bristles. I think he wanted to make sure we noticed him. And then, he flew away. He left this feather behind.”
“Maybe this was his gift for you and Chrissie.”
“And now I am passing it on to you, shika. The crane is a symbol of amahoro.”
“I like that. Peace.”
“Yes, and something more.” Nadine places her hand over Rachel’s fingers. “I told Chrissie I cannot forgive all that has happened, but I am no longer angry at him. There is nothing he could have done to stop the murders, he was a child—as I was. But, these horrible things did happen. Felix and their father…and Chrissie was part of it, too. All this cannot be erased, cannot be changed. I want him to be my friend again, but it will never be the same. We held each other and cried for a long time, for the loss and the love that will bind us forever. Amahoro.”
“Grief,” Rachel says. She picks up the dreamcatcher, the last item on the bed, and replaces one of the ragged feathers with the silvery new one. She hangs the web of sticks and yarn on the nail where the soapstone heart hung, only now it’s not there.
RACHEL HEARS THE COUNTDOWN TO midnight and the noisemakers that signify the New Year from where she is sitting on the bench atop the hill that overlooks Kwizera and the forest beyond. She twists her wedding band. It sticks at her knuckle, her hands falling into her lap. A few hours ago, she called Mick. Amahoro. She told him that’s her wish for both of them in the New Year. They need to grieve together over the loss of their daughter—find peace—before moving forward in different directions.
She imagines going home tomorrow, the two of them peeling away the Day-Glo Milky Way from the ceiling, removing chunky books from the shelves and taking apart the crib. After everything is packed into boxes addressed to Kwizera for Lillian to use or give away, they will drive high into the mountains. They will find a tall, thick pine tree that stands alone in the sunshine. They will bury Serena’s ashes in the snow. She imagines her father’s footprints materializing in the ash, just as they seemed to appear in the snow globe he sent from Mt. Kenya, and then the ground turning clean and white again. Only snow.
She sees the Jeep’s headlights on the driveway, in front of the farmhouse, and runs down the hill to meet Tucker. “I tried to make it by midnight,” he says, a soft apology in his kiss. He pulls a bottle of banana gin out of a brown paper bag on the front seat. “I came prepared for the pathetic and dateless route, just in case you were already out making c
hampagne toasts with some other guy.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” Rachel looks down at the gold band, which now slips easily over her knuckle. She cups the ring in her palm. “I spoke with Mick. We agreed. It’s over.”
Tucker takes her in his arms and kisses her hair. “Rough night,” he says. “Rachel, I’m sorry.”
“We both knew…” She takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. Being apart during the past six weeks has made it clear that they’ve both been living alone, even while sleeping together in the same bed, for years.
Tucker sits on the bottom step of the front porch and offers her the bottle. “Here’s to the many splendors of being single.”
“Cold cereal for dinner, no worries about hogging the bed.” She sniffs the gin—antiseptic and juniper, not at all sweet like bananas—and tips the bottle without putting her lips to the rim. The warm splash stings slightly, feels almost cleansing, as it goes down. She passes the bottle back to Tucker. “What else do you have?”
“Don’t forget keeping the toilet seat up.” He raises the bottle in a toast, and then takes a long swig. “As luck would have it, I have many words of wisdom for you about the joys of singlehood. At the top of the list is, of course, dating.” He cringes as if dipping a toe into an icy pond, and then launches into tales of his numerous dating fiascos. At first Rachel smiles mostly for his benefit, but then finds herself actually relaxing, laughing as she dredges up a few of her own fix-ups gone wrong before meeting Mick.
Mick. They were good together for a long while. They loved each other the best they could. They did their best. She moves closer to Tucker. Now, she wants to do better.
“And then,” he says, “there’s the date de résistance. A few years ago, I gathered my courage and asked out this gorgeous woman who’s a clerk at the bank I go to in Kigali. I was, of course, extremely smooth.”
Rachel links her arm through the crook of his elbow. “Do tell.”
Tucker clears his throat in mock annoyance. “Anyway, her father shows up at this classy restaurant in downtown Kigali with a cow and a goat, no lie.” He puts a hand over his eyes and shudders. “He was bringing me a taste of his daughter’s dowry. I was duly impressed; she was totally mortified.”
“Stop, please…” Rachel shuts him up with a kiss. “Before you scare me into running off to join a convent.”
“Ah, but there’s more,” he says. “We spent the rest of the evening walking with her father back to their farm—five miles in heels. The girl, not the cow. And then, I had to head back into the city again to retrieve my Jeep. I lost everything—the cow, the girl, the goat. A very bad date, indeed.”
Rachel kisses him again, long and deep. “I don’t want to date, that’s for sure.”
“What do you want?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I thought my marriage would last forever. Maybe I was expecting too much.”
“No, you deserve more.”
“We both do.” Rachel follows his gaze down to the brass ring on his pinky finger.
“Solange,” Tucker says. “Her name was Solange.”
Rachel listens quietly as he tells her about a nurse at the clinic in Kigali where the Red Cross first assigned him to work. Solange slept on a cot in the maternity ward, a big room with ten or twelve single beds squeezed into it, not just to take care of the patients but also because she was sending her paychecks to her father and five brothers in Uganda. They were Hutus but none of them supported the Rwandan government except her twin brother, Aaron.
“I didn’t know any of this for months after we met,” Tucker says, “but I could tell right away that Solange was strong and brave, in ways I wanted to be. She completed me. The family we were going to have was everything to both of us.”
“Rose,” Rachel says tenderly. Solange must be the nurse who helped Tucker to deliver her.
“We were going to build a family for her.”
“And you have.”
“We would take care of her. Together.” Tucker stands and takes a few steps, stops at the driveway as if waiting for someone to arrive. “The truth is, I can’t do it alone. I need to take Rose to London, not just for a few months.”
“But her family is here.” Rachel goes to plant herself in front of him. “Your family.”
“And you?”
“I’ll come back.” She places her hands on his shoulders, feels the tension as he cranes his neck to look past her. “Tucker, I’ll come back for you.”
“The AIDS clinic in London has a hospice for when Rose needs it.”
“Then, I’ll go with you.”
The tension transforms into a tremor that begins between his shoulders and releases down his spine. She holds onto him tightly and the tremor dissolves into tears. Her tears and his. No, she thinks, he wasn’t waiting for someone to arrive. He was watching Solange walk away. “Tucker,” she says, “let me be your family.”
THE STARS HAVE FADED, THE royal blue sky backlit by the promise of a sunrise. A new day; a new year. Rachel hears everything in the bright silence. She hears high flute-like notes that call across the soccer field: Phew. Phew-phew. A pair of Scops owls. She hears each step Lillian takes, the squeak of her swinging lantern, which carves a shaky path through the red clay. As they enter the forest, the pine trees seem to sigh, bristled branches heavy with dew. She hears the baritone grunts of groggy baboons not yet ready to start in with their wake-up wahoos.
Something snarls. Lillian shines the lantern into the trees. “Probably a baboon,” she says, but doesn’t move.
“We could go back,” Rachel suggests. “Get Tucker.”
“No.” Lillian starts walking again. Rachel stays a step behind and hangs onto the older woman’s rough hand. This walk was Lillian’s idea. She woke her up and insisted, it had to be now. Early. Just hours before Tucker drives her to the airport.
Lillian leads her down a path that she hasn’t taken on her daily hikes with Nadine. Or, maybe it’s just that everything looks different. The gray-pink light now filtering through the thick canopy makes it difficult to see. Invisible wings brush her bare arms, silky booby traps of webbing cling to her hair. The shadows in the trees could be animals or simply her imagination. It even smells different this time of day; the earth is damp and ripe. Alive and not. The forest of ghosts. Tucker said that’s what Lillian calls this place. She won’t allow the children to come here. Why did she bring her here, why now?
They head deeper into the forest, the morning chorus building in waves: Black-bellied seedcrackers, waxbills, spurfowl and bulbuls. Go-away-birds, starlings, weavers and bru-brus. Rachel mentally catalogues each coo and cackle. Nadine will be so impressed.
Lillian finally stops at a clearing and turns off the lantern. The cloudless sky is now the palest blue, a crown of soft light collecting in the silvery eucalyptus leaves. There are dozens of chunks of wood arranged in rows on the mossy ground, all with scratchy lettering. Red shirt. Kitten barrettes. Green eyes. Rachel has the sense of wandering into someplace forbidden and spins around, looking for Lillian, afraid she has disappeared.
Lillian is kneeling, not far away, in front of a tree stump topped with a cross, picking dead leaves off a patch of pansies. “Dahla,” she says softly. She runs her hand over the purple flowers. “I miss you, my friend.” She looks up, her eyes soft and moist. “I miss them all.”
Rachel offers her hand to help Lillian up, and then keeps holding on. They walk slowly, Lillian setting the pace. She stops and lays her hand atop each marker, whispers a name even if there’s not one carved in the wood. “There will always be more children who died than headstones,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if the name matches the body.”
“What matters is this place. The way you honored their lives.”
“Not me. It was Tucker and Henry. They got up early every morning during the first weeks and went out to find the bodies in the field. Henry thought I didn’t know. How could I not know?”
“He was protecting you.”
“It’s one of the reasons I loved him.”
Not much farther, near the river, there’s a mopani tree that towers above the other trees. Lillian steadies herself against the trunk as she speaks. “Your father used to claim these woods were enchanted. Magic flowed in the water, nourished the trees and animals. This was our special place before the graves. We said our commitment vows here.”
“I understand,” Rachel says. That’s why Lillian never joins her and Nadine on their walks. She can’t come here anymore. “Why did you bring me here? Why today?”
Lillian takes the soapstone heart necklace out of her pocket and lays it on the carpet of green and brown butterfly leaves between them. “I found this chain here on the riverbank, not long before Rahim Kensamara’s trial.”
“This is where Felix murdered my father?”
“We’ll never know for certain, but I like to think his spirit is resting here. The locket belongs here, too.”
Lillian takes a hand shovel out of her jacket pocket and digs up some dirt at the base of the mopani tree, in between the thick ropes of roots. Next, Rachel plunges the shovel into the ground with all of her might. It smacks something hard with a clang. She uncovers a metal box, offers it to Lillian, instinctually knowing that whatever is inside was meant for her to find.
Lillian raises her hand, like a shield. “I can’t,” she says.
Rachel opens the box and removes the photos inside, one by one, laying them on the butterfly leaves.
One…two…three…four…
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills Page 31
