A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  Hugh informed her that not only would she be taking pictures but she’d also need to demonstrate how to use the nets. He showed her how to do it, and though she explained how she’d spent a lifetime shying away from public speaking, she also realized that it was ludicrous to say no to this request, to any of it. They delivered the mosquito nets from morning until evening, and she found herself wondering if Hugh had known that without a camera she would have missed so many details. She zoomed in on children’s faces, on old men and women standing by, and snapped away on her digital Sony.

  Each time, with every village, as their boats grew closer to the beach, the men called into their bullhorns and the shoreline swarmed with people. As she took in the crowds assembled in their brightly colored clothing, it was impossible not to smile—even though she felt that smile spring quickly into embarrassment, because, my God, how little they were actually handing over. But the people gathered. The children sang. Teenagers—one girl in a black head scarf and white sunglasses, one boy with a serious expression that reminded her, curiously, of her father—mugged and boasted; they gathered and they cheered. There were speeches in Swahili, which she didn’t understand, and a Zambian doctor translated into a bullhorn as Rebecca demonstrated how to use the nets. In the face of kids dancing and singing over mosquito nets, one’s ego really did look like a little gleaming turd.

  After they’d delivered nets to eleven villages, after Rebecca had discovered and then grown used to the idea that she liked standing up in front of the crowds, the boat docked back at the lodge. Her ears were ringing and her body ached and her cheeks were sunburned, sore from smiling. The light was violet and silver.

  “The magic hour,” sighed Carol, the RN from Johns Hopkins, who was around the same age as Hugh. A speck of diamond glinted from the side of her aquiline nose.

  “The mosquito hour,” quipped Hugh, sitting down to the dinner prepared by Omar and the Dutch couple. “All these years I’ve been here—most of my life, really—and the goddamn little bugger’s still winning.”

  A round of agreement. Then everyone sat down: the two bearded American doctors (infectious diseases and tropical medicine—she’d missed their names), Carol the RN, Jerry the policy wonk, Omar, the Dutch owners, Rebecca, Hugh, and the two Zambians—Dr. Makasa and Dr. Alwani. Even though they’d all done their parts and had accomplished a great deal in one day, there were at least ten more villages that had been left out of this mission, due to the other trucks gone missing. And the reason those trucks didn’t arrive was the same reason that it took the mother of that poor alien-head baby eight full days to get to Veronica and Hugh: the pitted, flooded, much-lamented roads. The government, an NGO, USAID, the UN—somebody had to fix the goddamn roads.

  But after one beer (never had beer tasted so good), when Rebecca asked Infectious Diseases if the incidence of HIV would go up if those roads ever improved and there was more and more trucking access, the answer she received was an unqualified yes.

  Tropical Medicine held forth on malaria: rates of incidence and what these rates meant. But it was an argument about Mother Teresa that really became heated. Carol the RN had worked with her in the late sixties and had nothing but praise, while Jerry the policy wonk maintained that anyone who’d take money from the Duvalier family and in turn praise their rule was, at the very least, no saint. “Abortion is the greatest destroyer of world peace? She said that, you know. She did say that.”

  “So she was a Catholic!” cried Carol. “As are—face it—most of the people doing most of the good in Africa these days.”

  There was a great deal of drinking.

  As the evening wore on, Rebecca found herself considering Hugh again at a distance. Hugh wasn’t a doctor. He most certainly wasn’t a Catholic. He wasn’t a nurse or an anthropologist or an agricultural consultant. He hadn’t won any major prizes. If he’d improved the lot of any Tanzanians or Haitians—and he had, she’d done her research: His clinic in Dar had reduced malarial incidence rates by 68 percent the previous year; the clinic he’d set up in Haiti was thriving, staffed by Haitians and serving several rural villages—what set him apart from other well-meaning Westerners working in the Third World was this: He drew people in and he put them together and he seemed to know when to step back. He had assembled all of these impressive professionals who were interested in working with him; he’d raised the funds (though she guessed that much of his own, still-vague Shipley capital went into every project) and he’d worked with the necessary suppliers, making sure those supplies reached the people most desperate for them.

  She watched him rolling a cigarette, looking even more attractive than usual, and she decided it was because he seemed shy. She considered his self-deprecating nature, and what she realized then was that he’d likely been—much like her—afraid to fail.

  It struck her now that Hugh wasn’t really her father’s opposite, as she’d always thought of him. He was more like his complement. And though her father, too, had a distinct fear of failure, he didn’t ignore it—not at all; it positively drove him until he and the failure were in burning competition. It had driven him—she still couldn’t believe it—straight into prison.

  Rebecca wondered if Hugh and her father had ever talked about these things when they were young—when they were friends. She could picture it with such eerie clarity: her father saying to Hugh, You’re lucky. She could almost hear the pitch of his younger voice, a voice she’d never know. And she imagined Hugh looking physically pained to have that kind of attention. He had probably wasted time—years?—resenting the gift of his tremendous appeal, even as he’d learned how to use it.

  After nightfall, everyone went swimming. The water was warm, and these were loosely linked people in a foreign place. It was foreign even to the Zambian doctors, who both admitted they’d required persuading to come this far into the bush. People acted like friends in the water; people acted like children. The moonlight illuminated funny tan lines and nasty sunburns; an informal competition began for the worst one. Dr. Makasa taught a couple of local boys karate moves, and they practiced the moves on the shoreline.

  Hugh swam out into the distance, beginning laps back and forth, which for anyone else would have seemed strange at that hour, but with Hugh she was not surprised. It was only when everyone else had retired that he even looked up. When he did, Rebecca waved.

  He swam a plodding crawl, and when he came out of the water she looked away, aware of being too interested in his body. His skin was older, of course, but he had the kind of height that held everything in place. He wrapped himself in a towel and looked down at her sitting in the sand.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She appreciated that he didn’t ask what she was thanking him for. She also appreciated that he hadn’t asked her any questions about her life.

  “I would sit next to you, but let’s spare us both the embarrassment of my needing your help to get up.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You think I’m joking. I have a long, evidently very Western spine. And also sciatica. Old goat’s got sciatica.”

  Rebecca stood up. “Vivi has sciatica,” she said.

  He gave a fleeting smile. “My daughter’s very pregnant,” he said.

  “I’m afraid that’s different.”

  “Sciatica for a good cause?”

  “Indeed.” He shook out his hair like a dog. “And she’s young. Hers will vanish once she’s no longer carrying around an extra thirty pounds.”

  They walked to a bench. The air was still warm. Hugh sprayed them both liberally with a repellent called Doom; the smell was nasty but also enlivening. “Are you happy about the baby?” she asked, after a bout of coughing.

  “I am.” He nodded, clasping his hands together. Despite missing the better part of two fingers, he still had the best hands she’d ever seen. They were big and expressive; she imagined how her fingers would feel laced through each of his. “Brian’s a good kid.” />
  “Although Brian’s not really a kid.”

  She waited for him to meet her gaze. When she had it, when she had his blue eyes with their bleached lashes and big dark pupils, when his eyes settled on hers, she said, “None of us are kids anymore.”

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted. Nothing could ever happen. Because if it did, she’d never be able to look at Vivi again. She knew this. But she was heady and exhausted from the events of the day, and exhaustion made her reckless. She began working her fingers through her damp hair, wincing with nervousness each time she untangled a knot.

  “I’m just pleased to hear she’s happy,” Hugh went on. “You know, I wasn’t sure Vivi wanted children, but of course she does. Most people do, you know. I know I did.”

  Rebecca felt her face unfold into a weary grin. “Even though most of the world’s problems are due to overpopulation?”

  Hugh nodded. “I absolutely did. Do you?”

  She was flushed, not only with a sudden and unexpected longing—longing for children with a different, younger, unmarried, impossible Hugh—but also with embarrassment at this longing, which was no less than absurd. And she was angry with Hugh for bringing her own desire for children into the context of Vivi and Brian, for pointing out what they had in contrast with what she did not. She hadn’t been seeing Vivi’s pregnancy through that kind of selfish lens. But in this elemental setting, in the grip of undeniable, untenable desire—she was seeing it that way. There she was, thinking of herself as some kind of empty vessel. Or, to be accurate, she wasn’t thinking. She was wanting. And at the moment she wanted everything.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that this—today—would be such a big operation?” she said abruptly. “You made it sound like the two of us would be doling out some nets, nothing more than a weekly routine.”

  “Like a paper route?”

  “Something like that, yes.” She shook her head. “Those doctors are from top universities. These are volunteers with all kinds of credentials. Did you not want me to feel intimidated?”

  He considered it, shook his head. “I don’t think that was it. Your CV is plenty impressive. You have your own intimidating qualities.”

  “Oh.” She grimaced. “Right. And why, again, didn’t you tell me more about today’s project?”

  “I don’t know, it’s the way I do things. Maybe I was afraid of something going wrong. In fact—yes, okay? I was afraid of something going wrong. It happens. As you have seen already, it happens quite a lot; it’s … built in. So, as much as I’m focused, I try not to dwell on any one plan.”

  “Or on any one element of a plan.”

  “Right.”

  “Or any one person.”

  “Fine.”

  “Maybe that’s why you seem so aloof.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “Maybe.”

  The sky was tauntingly oppositional—ink black but also pale with the moon and clusters of stars—brighter and darker than any sky she’d ever seen. She smelled something mineral-dark, cold. She suddenly realized that she was incapable of seeing Hugh as separate from every other part of her life. She could not consider him without also considering her father or Vivi—and also her work (both what she had and hadn’t accomplished). He’d even roamed the perimeter of her consciousness during various romantic entanglements—Gabriel included—offering himself up as comparison. Because how could she have felt what she had felt on that day, that night, if he hadn’t felt it, too? But she had been fifteen, his daughter’s best friend. What did that mean about him, about Helen, if he had?

  Maybe it meant nothing. Nothing, after all, had happened.

  But, no. She always came back to no. The friction between them stemmed from a mutual transgression. Or the mutual desire to have transgressed.

  And now they were across the world in a wholly new place, but—and she wasn’t sure what this meant—every new place reminded her of an old place. The moon, after all, was still the moon.

  “I don’t mean to be aloof,” he said.

  “That’s like: Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

  “I don’t hate you,” he said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t holding a drink, a cigarette, or a set of keys; he wasn’t looking for them, either. But he still wasn’t looking at her.

  And then he was. His eyes were partially obscured by damp hair, but there was no mistaking his expression.

  The fine hairs on her arm stood up, and there was her body slipping into paraffin wax—warm, bewildered, stuck. She put her hand on his shoulder. His skin was still damp with the finest of lake-water silt. She felt heat and muscle, cool water and bone. He didn’t flinch, but he also didn’t move.

  “Rebecca,” he said. He shook his head.

  “I know,” she said. Because she did. She knew how painful it was to have this much sheer sensation and to know it was wholly wrong. Even if Helen has left him? A small voice asked. Even still.

  He shook his head again.

  “Tell me,” she whispered, “what.”

  He sat up straighter. She took her hand away.

  “Let’s just—let’s leave it,” he said.

  No was all she could think. No, let’s not. She returned her hand to his skin, closer to his neck, more confidently this time.

  But he grabbed her hands between both of his own. Those hands were finally touching hers, but it didn’t feel the way it had just a moment ago, when the air was charged.

  He was, she realized, trying to stop her. Shocked—even mortified—her mouth went utterly dry.

  She cleared her throat, parched. “I think I need to hear you say it.” Her voice was low, unfamiliar. She watched as a part of her bolted up and ran straight underwater. “I think you need to explain.” She kept looking for clues, searching his face, but his only expression was something like … patience. And so she looked away, locked eyes with the sand.

  “Rebecca,” he said gently, still holding her hand. “You’re Ed’s kid.”

  She shook her head. She took her hand away. “What does that even mean?” When her voice broke, he put his arm around her and she stopped fighting. “My father—” she started. Then she leaned into his chest: bare and wet and not for her. “You’re not even in touch with my father,” she said, laughing through the beginning of her tears. “You haven’t been friends for years.”

  She could feel him shrug as he held on to her. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Rebecca wasn’t exactly sure if she was crying because Hugh had rejected her or because she was experiencing embarrassment on an unprecedented level or because, at this distance, she could finally consider how her father was sleeping in a cell each night. She could finally think about the prison’s inmate’s handbook, which she’d read online, and how it contained a section nearly two pages long entitled: How to Prevent Sexually Abusive Behavior. Her father was in prison; he was in danger.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  She tried to get up, but he didn’t let her go.

  She thought of the missing mosquito nets, the missing trucks, her father and his cellmates—all missing from their desperate, exciting, pathetic, wretched, amazing lives. That baby’s swollen head and narrowed eyes no bigger than his mother’s yellow beads.

  Here was Hugh with his arm around her. They had no timeless, mutually transgressive understanding. He was her best friend’s father. Once upon a time—a time that evidently meant something to Hugh—he had been her father’s friend. This had been no one’s fantasy but hers, and here she was: a white woman in Africa, part of a misunderstanding.

  And so what? So what.

  This time, when she tried to pull away, he let her.

  “Thank you.” Her voice caught again, but as she stood, she looked out at the lake; she pulled herself together. “This has been a great opportunity.”

  As she walked away, she had a sudden flash of herself at sixteen, sitting at school assembly in a pair of
black tights. She was scratching at the last of her poison ivy, snagging her nails over her thighs and calves. What are you doing? whispered Vivi. Why did she remember this? But she did. Careful, Vivi said. You’re going to make a hole.

  She stayed another month. A routine unfolded: At the clinic, she learned how to prepare medicines—crushing the tablets and mixing the liquids. The work was menial, and it suited her. She assisted Tropical Medicine—Dr. Al Horowitz—who taught her how to take vitals. One morning a young man wandered in with an infected cut on his foot. An old woman stumbled in, crying that her uterus was falling out. She saw how Hugh spent most of his day on the phone: with the clinic in Dar; the local net company, which still hadn’t delivered the rest of the nets; the pharmaceutical representatives.

  She and Hugh barely spoke during the day. When she wanted to find out about logistics—meal times, meeting times, what to bring where—she asked Omar or another volunteer. If she passed Hugh at the clinic, she kept her head down. She kept a pocket journal with her at all times for the purpose of emergency scribbling. She developed an unprecedented ability to focus on plant life and found she was often squinting at imaginary faraway birds.

  But at night, while she drank the same three beers amidst doctors, workers, and missionaries, she and Hugh would inevitably end up in discussion, first among the others but eventually alone. Their conversations became increasingly personal. They talked about Helen, how he had cheated on her for years and how she’d finally had enough. How—as far as he knew—Vivi had no idea, not unless Helen had told her. Rebecca felt an odd lack of surprise at this news and felt even more unburdened from what she’d begun to think of as her crush. Also, she was flooded with memories that took on sudden meaning: How Hugh had obviously been in Anguilla before they all went on that trip. How that woman in the hammock nursing a newborn was beautiful. How Helen had seemed sad around that baby. Rebecca knew she was seeing everything through a particular, retrofitted lens (could he have really fathered that child?), but it had felt odd how he’d so clearly been to the island before and yet neither Helen nor Vivi seemed to acknowledge it.