But Liana thought none of these things. She thought only that this was another opportunity for adventure on the cheap, and at that time economy trumped all other considerations. Not because she was rude, or prone to take advantage by nature. She was merely young. A perfectly pleasant girl on her first big excursion abroad, she would doubtless grow into a better-socialized woman who would make exorbitant hotel reservations rather than dream of dumping herself on total strangers.
Yet midway through this casual mooching off the teeny-tiny-bit-pretentious photographer and her retired safari-guide husband (who likewise seemed rather self-impressed, considering that Liana had already run into a dozen masters of the savanna just like him), Liana entered one eerily elongated window during which her eventual capacity to make sterner judgments of her youthful impositions from the perspective of a more worldly adulthood became imperiled. A window after which there might be no woman. There might only, ever, have been a girl—remembered, guiltily, uneasily, resentfully, by her aging, unwilling hosts more often than they would have preferred.
Day four. She was staying only six nights—an eyeblink for a twenty-three-year-old, a “bloody long time” for the Brit who had groused to his wife under-breath about putting up “another dewy-eyed Yank who confuses a flight to Africa with a trip to the zoo.” Innocent of Beano’s less-than-charmed characterizations, Liana had already established a routine. Mornings were consumed with texting friends back in Milwaukee about her exotic situation, with regular refills of passion fruit juice. After lunch, she’d pile into the jeep with Regent to head to town for supplies, having tolerated the photographer’s ritual admonishment that Kilifi was heavily Muslim and it would be prudent to “cover up.” (Afternoons were hot. Even her muscle T clung uncomfortably, and Liana considered it a concession not to strip down to her running bra. She wasn’t about to drag on long pants to pander to a bunch of uptight foreigners she’d never see again; career expats like Regent were forever showing off how they were hip to local customs and you weren’t.) She never proffered a few hundred shillings to contribute to the grocery bill, not because she was cheap—though she was; at her age, that went without saying—but because the gesture never occurred to her. Back “home,” she would mobilize for a long, vigorous swim in Kilifi Creek, where she would work up an appetite for dinner.
As she sidled around the house in her bikini—gulping more passion fruit juice at the counter, grabbing a fresh towel—her exhibitionism was unconscious; call it instinctive, suggesting an inborn feel for barter. She lingered with Beano, inquiring about the biggest animal he’d ever shot, then commiserating about ivory poaching (always a crowd-pleaser) as she bound back her long blond hair, now bleached almost white. Raised arms made her stomach look flatter. Turning with a “cheerio!” that she’d picked up in Nairobi, Liana sashayed out the back porch and down the splintered wooden steps before cursing herself, because she should have worn flip-flops. Returning for shoes would ruin her exit, so she picked her way carefully down the overgrown dirt track to the beach in bare feet.
In Wisconsin, a “creek” was a shallow, burbling dribble with tadpoles that purled over rocks. Where Liana was from, you wouldn’t go for a serious swim in a “creek.” You’d splash up to your ankles while cupping your arches over mossy stones, arms extended for balance, though you almost always fell in. But everything in Africa was bigger. Emptying into the Indian Ocean, Kilifi Creek was a river—an impressively wide river at that, which opened into a giant lake sort of thing when she swam to the left and under the bridge. This time, in the interest of variety, she would strike out to the right.
The water was cold. Yipping at every advance, Liana struggled out to the depth of her upper thighs, gingerly avoiding sharp rocks. Regent and Beano may have referred to the shoreline as a “beach,” but there wasn’t a grain of sand in sight, and with all the green gunk along the bank, obstacles were hard to spot. Chiding herself not to be a wimp, she plunged forward. This was a familiar ritual of her childhood trips to Lake Winnebago: the shriek of inhalation, the hyperventilation, the panicked splashing to get the blood running, the soft surprise of how quickly the water feels warm.
Liana considered herself a strong swimmer, of a kind. That is, she’d never been comfortable with the gasping and thrashing of the crawl, which felt frenetic. But she was a virtuoso of the sidestroke, with a powerful scissor kick whose thrust carried her faster than many swimmers with inefficient crawls (much to their annoyance, as she’d verified in her college pool). The sidestroke was contemplative. Its rhythm was ideally calibrated for a breath on every other kick, and resting only one cheek in the water allowed her to look around. It was less rigorous than the butterfly but not as geriatric as the breaststroke, and after long enough you still got tired—marvelously so.
Pulling sufficiently far from the riverbank that she shouldn’t have to worry about hitting rocks with that scissor kick, Liana rounded to the right and rapidly hit her stride. The late-afternoon light had just begun to mellow. The shores were forested, with richly shaded inlets and copses. She didn’t know the names of the trees, but now that she was alone, with no one trying to make her feel ignorant about a continent of which white people tended to be curiously possessive, she didn’t care if those were acacias or junipers. They were green: good enough. Though Kilifi was renowned as a resort area for high-end tourists, and secreted any number of capacious houses like her hosts’, the canopy hid them well. It looked like wilderness: good enough. Gloriously, Liana didn’t have to watch out for the powerboats and Jet Skis that terrorized Lake Winnebago, and she was the only swimmer in sight. Africans, she’d been told (lord, how much she’d been told; every backpacker three days out of Jomo Kenyatta Airport was an expert), didn’t swim. Not only was the affluent safari set too lazy to get in the water; by this late in the afternoon they were already drunk.
This was the best part of the day. No more enthusiastic chatter about Regent’s latest work. For heaven’s sake, you’d think she might have finally discovered color photography at this late date. Blazing with yellow flora, red earth, and, at least outside Nairobi, unsullied azure sky, Africa was wasted on the woman. All she photographed was dust and poor people. It was a relief, too, not to have to seem fascinated as Beano lamented the unsustainable growth of the human population and the demise of Kenyan game, all the while having to pretend that she hadn’t heard variations on this same dirge dozens of times in a mere three weeks. Though she did hope that, before she hopped a ride back to Nairobi with Ponytail Guy, the couple would opt for a repeat of that antelope steak from the first night. The meat had been lean; rare in both senses of the word, it gave good text the next morning. There wasn’t much point in going all the way to Africa and then sitting around eating another hamburger.
Liana paused her reverie to check her position, and sure enough she’d drifted farther from the shore than was probably wise. She knew from the lake swims of childhood vacations that distance over water was hard to judge. If anything, the shore was farther away than it looked. So she pulled heavily to the right, and was struck by how long it took to make the trees appear appreciably larger. Just when she’d determined that land was within safe reach, she gave one more stiff kick, and her right foot struck rock.
The pain was sharp. Liana hated interrupting a swim, and she didn’t have much time before the equatorial sun set, as if someone had flicked a light switch. Nevertheless, she dropped her feet and discovered that this section of the creek was barely a foot and a half deep. No wonder she’d hit a rock. Sloshing to a sun-warmed outcrop, she examined the top of her foot, which began to gush blood as soon as she lifted it from the water. There was a flap. Something of a mess.
Even if she headed straight back to the Henleys’, all she could see was thicket—no path, much less a road. The only way to return and put some kind of dressing on this stupid thing was to swim. As she stumbled through the shallows, her foot smarted. Yet, bathed in the cool water, it quickly grew numb. Once she had slogged in deep eno
ugh to resume her sidestroke, Liana reasoned, Big deal, I cut my foot. The water would keep the laceration clean; the chill would stanch the bleeding. It didn’t really hurt much now, and the only decision was whether to cut the swim short. The silence pierced by tropical birdcalls was a relief, and Liana didn’t feel like showing up back at the house with too much time to kill with enraptured blah-blah before dinner. She’d promised herself that she’d swim at least a mile, and she couldn’t have done more than a quarter.
So Liana continued to the right, making damned sure to swim out far enough so that she was in no danger of hitting another rock. Still, the cut left her rattled. Her idyll had been violated. No longer gentle and welcoming, the shoreline shadows undulated with a hint of menace. The creek had bitten her. Now fitful, the sidestroke had transformed from luxury to chore. Possibly she’d tightened up from a queer encroaching fearfulness, or perhaps she was suffering from a trace of shock—unless, that is, the water had genuinely gotten colder. Once in a while she felt a flitter against her foot, like a fish, but it wasn’t a fish. It was the flap. Kind of creepy.
Liana resigned herself: this expedition was no longer fun. The light had taken a turn from golden to vermilion—a modulation she’d have found transfixing if only she were on dry land—and she still had to swim all the way back. Churning a short length farther to satisfy pride, she turned around.
And got nowhere. Stroking at full power, Liana could swear she was going backward. As long as she’d been swimming roughly in the same direction, the current hadn’t been noticeable. This was a creek, right? But an African creek. As for her having failed to detect the violent surge running at a forty-five-degree angle to the shoreline, an aphorism must have applied—something about never being aware of forces that are on your side until you defy them.
Liana made another assessment of her position. Her best guess was that the shore had drifted farther away again. Very much farther. The current had been pulling her out while she’d been dithering about the fish-flutter flap of her foot. Which was now the least of her problems. Because the shore was not only distant. It stopped.
Beyond the end of the land was nothing but water. Indian Ocean water. If she did not get out of the grip of the current, it would sweep her past that last little nub of the continent and out to sea. Suddenly the dearth of boats, Jet Skis, fellow swimmers, and visible residents or tourists, drunken or not, seemed far less glorious.
The sensation that descended was calm, determined, and quiet, though it was underwritten by a suppressed hysteria that it was not in her interest to indulge. Had she concentration to spare, she might have worked out that this whole emotional package was one of her first true tastes of adulthood: what happens when you realize that a great deal or even everything is at stake and that no one is going to help you. It was a feeling that some children probably did experience but shouldn’t. At least solitude discouraged theatrics. She had no audience to panic for. No one to exclaim to, no one to whom she might bemoan her quandary. It was all do, no say.
Swimming directly against the current had proved fruitless. Instead, Liana angled sharply toward the shore, so that she was cutting across the current. Though she was still pointed backward, in the direction of Regent and Beano’s place, this riptide would keep dragging her body to the left. Had she known her exact speed, and the exact rate at which the current was carrying her in the direction of the Indian Ocean, she would have been able to answer the question of whether she was about to die by solving a simple geometry problem. A point travels at a set speed at a set angle toward a plane of a set width while moving at a set speed to the left. Either it will intersect the plane or it will miss the plane and keep traveling into wide-open space. Liquid space, in this case.
Of course, she wasn’t in possession of these variables. So she swam as hard and as steadily as she knew how. There was little likelihood that suddenly adopting the crawl, at which she’d never been any good, would improve her chances, so the sidestroke it would remain. She trained her eyes on a distinctive rock formation as a navigational guide. Thinking about her foot wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about how exhausted she was wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about never having been all that proficient at geometry was hardly an assist, either, so she proceeded in a state of dumb animal optimism.
The last of the sun glinted through the trees and winked out. Technically, the residual threads of pink and gray in the early-evening sky were very pretty.
“Where is that blooming girl?” Beano said, and threw one of the leopard-print cushions onto the sofa. “She should have been back two hours ago. It’s dark. It’s Africa, she’s a baby, she knows absolutely nothing, and it’s dark.”
“Maybe she met someone, went for a drink,” Regent said.
“Our fetching little interloper’s meeting someone is exactly what I’m afraid of. And how’s she to go to town with some local rapist in only a bikini?”
“You would remember the bikini,” Regent said dryly.
“Damned if I understand why all these people rock up and suddenly they’re our problem.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but if she floats off into the night air never to be seen again, she is our problem. Maybe someone picked her up in a boat. Carried her round the southern bend to one of the resorts.”
“She’ll not have her phone on a swim, so she’s no means of giving us a shout if she’s in trouble. She’ll not have her wallet, either—if she even has one. Never so much as volunteers a bottle of wine, while hoovering up my best claret like there’s no tomorrow.”
“If anything has happened, you’ll regret having said that sort of thing.”
“Might as well gripe while I still can, then. You know, I don’t even know the girl’s surname? Much less whom to ring if she’s vanished. I can see it: having to comb through her kit, search out her passport. Bringing in the sodding police, who’ll expect chai just for answering the phone. No good ever comes from involving those thieving idiots in your life, and then there’ll be a manhunt. Thrashing the bush, prodding the shallows. And you know how the locals thrive on a mystery, especially when it involves a young lady—”
“They’re bored. We’re all bored. Which is why you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s not that late yet. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”
“I’m not bored, I’m hungry. Aziza probably started dinner at four—since she is bored—and you can bet it’s muck by now.”
Regent fetched a bowl of fried chickpea snacks, but despite Beano’s claim to an appetite he left them untouched. “Christ, I can see the whole thing,” he said, pacing. “It’ll turn into one of those cases. With the parents flying out and grilling all the servants and having meetings with the police. Expecting to stay here, of course, tearing hair and getting emotional while we urge them to please do eat some lunch. Going on tirades about how the local law enforcement is ineffectual and corrupt, and bringing in the FBI. Telling childhood anecdotes about their darling and expecting us to get tearful with them over the disappearance of some, I concede, quite agreeable twentysomething, but still a girl we’d barely met.”
“You like her,” Regent said. “You’re just ranting because you’re anxious.”
“She has a certain intrepid quality, which may be deadly, but which until it’s frightened out of her I rather admire,” he begrudged, then resumed the rant. “Oh, and there’ll be media. CNN and that. You know the Americans—they love innocent-abroad stories. But you’d think they’d learn their lesson. It beats me why their families keep letting kids holiday in Africa as if the whole world is a happy-clappy theme park. With all those carjackings on the coast road—”
“Ordinarily I’d agree with you, but there’s nothing especially African about going for a swim in a creek. She’s done it every other afternoon, so I’ve assumed she’s a passable swimmer. Do you think—would it help if we got a torch and went down to the dock? We could flash it about, shout her name out. She might jus
t be lost.”
“My throat hurts just thinking about it.” Still, Beano was heading to the entryway for his jacket when the back porch screen door creaked.
“Hi,” Liana said shyly. With luck, streaks of mud and a strong tan disguised what her weak, light-headed sensation suggested was a shocking pallor. She steadied herself by holding on to the sofa and got mud on the upholstery. “Sorry, I—swam a little farther than I’d planned. I hope you didn’t worry.”
“We did worry,” Regent said sternly. Her face flickered between anger and relief, an expression that reminded Liana of her mother. “It’s after dark.”
“I guess with the stars, the moon …” Liana covered. “It was so … peaceful.”
The moon, in fact, had been obscured by cloud for the bulk of her wet grope back. Most of which had been conducted on her hands and knees in shallow water along the shore—land she was not about to let out of her clutches for one minute. The muck had been treacherous with more biting rocks. For long periods, the vista had been so inky that she’d found the Henleys’ rickety rowboat dock only because she had bumped into it.
“What happened to your foot?” Regent cried.
“Oh, that. Oh, nuts. I’m getting blood on your floor.”
“Looks like a proper war wound, that,” Beano said boisterously.
“We’re going to get that cleaned right up.” Examining the wound, Regent exclaimed, “My dear girl, you’re shaking!”
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