The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  Adri’s house was a two-bedroom bungalow with a tiny, eat-in kitchen and a bathroom that was perpetually grimy, no matter how much she cleaned it. All inadequacies aside, Adri adored every inch of the six hundred square feet of her home.

  She had bunked with other coworkers, board members passing through, friends of friends. It was how things were done when space was at a premium and nothing quite worked out the way you hoped it would. A bigger house was in the works, but funding had dried up, and, for better or worse, Adri’s place was forced into service as home base. Once, when she was hosting the founder, his wife, and teenage son for a single night, Adri had slept in her bathtub, a late-nineteenth-century claw-footed monstrosity that had amazingly found its way to the west coast of Africa. But living with Caleb had come with a brand-new set of discomforts. The air was alive. Charged.

  He had earned his nursing degree after backpacking through Asia and deciding that life was too short to not make a difference. That’s how he introduced himself to her in their first email exchange: “I want to make a difference.” So did Adri, but his admission looked especially ingenuous in type. She liked him more than she wanted to, and bristled at the way he made her feel jaded.

  “Are you going for a swim?” Adri asked, fitting her key into the front door. Her back was to the ocean, and although the water was across the road and down a wide, orange beach, she could imagine that the spray licked the back of her neck, her bare arms.

  “Tonight?” Caleb sounded surprised. “The fence doesn’t go down the beach, Adri.” They could hear the beat of drums in the distance now, the swell and whoop of voices shouting for something they couldn’t make out and wouldn’t understand even if they could.

  “You think we’re safer in the house? They’re cement block walls. A hammer would take them down.”

  “You said we were safe.”

  “We are.”

  “But—”

  “I’m messing with you,” Adri said. She wrenched open the door and held it for him.

  Caleb was a year or two older than her twenty-six years, knocking on the door of thirty, but she couldn’t help feeling like the more experienced one. She interpreted his optimism as naïveté, and sometimes doubted the wisdom of the board of the nonprofit she worked for in appointing him her second-in-command. He was confident, enthusiastic, gorgeous. He was wreaking havoc in her carefully ordered world. And yet, Adri knew that pickings had to have been slim. Not many people wanted to live halfway around the world in an unstable country for little more than room, board, and the unfamiliar, often slightly rancid food they ate.

  Adri hadn’t known what she was getting herself into when she signed the contract fresh from college. She just wanted to get away. And Africa was as far away as she could imagine. The plan was to run and keep running—staying hadn’t really been an option, but the kids at the orphanages she served turned out to be a pure addiction. Adri loved them simply. Fiercely. They made Africa home.

  “Can I say something off the record?” Caleb said. He didn’t move to step into the house, but stood in the grass just off the cement slab that served as a front step. He blurted, “Sometimes I hate it here.”

  She didn’t know what to say. He had been her faithful sidekick for weeks, his enthusiasm a veneer that seemed impenetrably thick, slathered on with a heavy hand. Caleb had never once given her the impression that life in Africa struck him as anything other than a grand adventure. But here was something real; the riot had scratched the surface. Beneath was the flush of sincerity, something as heady and masculine as the scent of his skin before a swim. It tested the safe borders of their roommate/coworker relationship. The intimacy of it made Adri white-knuckle the edge of the door.

  Caleb ran his hands over his head, his eyes widening at the prickle of the buzz cut Adri had given him only a couple of days before. His hair had been camel-colored and just a little curly, but when he finally begged her to get rid of it for him, the cut had revealed dark roots that accented his jawline and sun-bright blue eyes. He was beautiful in a rugged, unexpected way, and that only made him more likable. Adri didn’t want to like him.

  “I don’t mean that,” Caleb said, dropping his hands to his sides. “I don’t hate it here.”

  “Yes, you do. At least, a little.” She almost said, We all do. But that was a terrible lie. And also the truth. Adri let the door fall shut behind her and tossed her pack onto the grass. “I shouldn’t have teased you. We shouldn’t have gone out today, and I shouldn’t have teased you.”

  Caleb looked up at the door frame of the house, the tile roof, and the crumbling breezeway blocks of the two front windows. His jaw hardened almost imperceptibly. “What if I want to go back?”

  He certainly wouldn’t be the first. “Why?”

  “Maybe I can’t cut it here. The schedule, the mosquitos, the sickness, the poverty. The kids. They break my heart, Adri. What are we doing? We’re not their parents, but that’s what they need. I feel like I’m drowning sometimes. It’s too much. We can’t help everyone, and I wonder if we’re helping anyone at all.”

  It was true, everything he said was true, but it felt like an attack all the same. She bristled, wanting to fight. But just as quickly as her anger had flared, it fizzled out and died. “Fine,” Adri sighed. “Whatever. I’m sure the board will want to hear from you before you make any travel arrangements, but this is hardly a prison. You’re free to go.” She indicated the door with an outstretched hand, inviting him to go inside and pack, to pretend that his third-world hiatus was nothing more than an inkblot on the predictable map of his life.

  He was embarrassed when he swept past. His head was down and he wouldn’t look at her. But just over the threshold, Caleb stopped and turned back. Stared her straight in the eye, boldly and without an ounce of guile. “You don’t have to stay here, either, you know. You’re not a prisoner.”

  The sun was beating against Adri’s auburn hair and sending little rivulets of sweat down the side of her face. But his words were a slap of ice water. Cold and so startling that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

  He must have sensed that he’d struck a nerve. “You could go home, Adrienne. You could come with me.”

  Caleb’s eyes betrayed him. She had assumed that he was after nothing more than a tropical fling, a no-strings-attached affair that he’d casually forget the moment he decided to shoulder his backpack and abandon her little corner of Africa in search of the next big thrill. She figured his tattoos lacked meaning and his Médicins Sans Frontières poster-boy persona were affectations. But standing across from him in the slanting light, Adri could almost believe that his offer was something more. Maybe he was something more.

  You could come with me.

  As if she could just leave it all behind and start over. As if she could be the girl she had been all those years ago, those years before she crossed an ocean and became a person that she didn’t recognize when she looked in the mirror. As if he could offer her the sort of new beginning that she had stopped dreaming about long ago. As if.

  If there was anything Adri knew, it was that some things could not be undone.

  “Go pack your stuff,” Adri said, turning away toward the ocean and the sunburned sand and the dark sliver of an impossibly thin fishing boat beyond the breakers. “I’m never going back.”

  And inside a zippered pocket of her cargo pants, her cell phone began to ring.

  2

  Adri swung her pack into the back of the land rover and slammed the hatch.

  “You’re not taking much,” Caleb said, putting his hand out for the keys.

  It had been a point of contention—who would drive to the airport—but in the end, Adri reluctantly conceded that if Caleb was going to stick around, he’d better learn to navigate the streets. If they could be called that. She handed him the key chain with what she hoped was a reproachful smile. But her face felt frozen, numb. She
felt numb, and had from the moment she answered the phone and heard her father’s voice.

  She’s gone, Adri. I’m sorry, baby, but you need to come home.

  Adri didn’t fight with her father. She never had. It was pointless to shout at a man who would never raise his voice back. But she had argued for almost an hour, begging him to take care of it for her, to somehow fix things so that she wouldn’t have to leave Africa. In the end, there was nothing for it. And if Adri was really honest with herself, there was a certain poetic justice in going back. She deserved it.

  Adri felt her heart squeeze to a pinprick. She tried to swallow and made herself focus on Caleb. His comment. “I don’t need to take much,” she said. “I won’t be gone long.”

  Caleb cocked an eyebrow and disappeared around the side of the Land Rover. “You said you wouldn’t be gone at all,” he called over the top of the dusty vehicle. “In fact, if I recall correctly, you said, and I quote, ‘I’m never going back.’ ”

  Adri wrenched open the door and swung herself inside. “And you said you hated it here. You said you were leaving.”

  “Yeah, well, things change. And you called it: it was a party, not an uprising.” He shrugged off the conversation with a casual lift of his shoulder.

  Adri didn’t want to let him off the hook that easily, but life here was nothing if not a flash of silver. The shuffle of the everyday was slow, almost tedious, and yet in less than a second the entire world could tip and change. A clear blue sky tore open along a hidden seam and spilled a storm so furious it ripped leaves from trees. A child who had previously refused even to look at Adri tucked himself beneath her arm and fell instantly and peacefully asleep with his cheek pressed tight against her chest. Adri understood the swift flip of emotion, the way it was possible to be tossed like a coin and land, unexpectedly, facedown.

  Caleb had watched her eyes, the way her knees buckled at her father’s proclamation, and he had fallen exactly where he needed to be. He hadn’t gone into the bungalow to pack his things. Instead, he made her a cup of tea and called the airline to search for a flight for Ms. Adrienne Claire Vogt. She couldn’t help but admire him for it.

  Watching him settle into the bucket seat, Adri wondered for a moment if she should say something, maybe thank you, but Caleb had already turned his attention to other things. He clicked his seat belt on and started the Land Rover with entirely too much relish. His throaty chuckle matched the growl of the SUV as he revved the engine.

  “You do know how to drive a standard, right?” Adri grabbed the gearshift as if to stop him from driving out of the compound, but Caleb seized the opportunity and covered her small hand with his own.

  “I think I remember,” he smirked. “But I suppose we could shift together.”

  Adri tried to wrench her hand away, but Caleb held on.

  “Hey, take a deep breath.” He ducked his head a little so that he could catch her eye. Giving her a sympathetic smile, he said, “Everything is going to be okay.”

  Adri snorted. “Here or there?”

  “Both. I’ve got things covered here, and you’ll take care of everything at home.”

  “This is home.”

  “This is where you came when you ran away from home.” Caleb searched her face for a moment, but he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. He lifted his hand and Adri snatched her arm away. Weaving her fingers together in her lap, she forced herself to look out the passenger window at her bungalow, the turquoise sea beyond.

  Her throat tightened at the sudden, shocking reality of leaving this place. Of going back to her provincial hometown in rural Iowa, and all the memories—all the people—she had tried hard to leave behind. She didn’t belong there anymore, and just the thought of going back was enough to make her break out in a cold sweat. She hadn’t been home in over three years. She hadn’t seen her father. Or Victoria. And now it was too late to say the things she had always hoped to say.

  But she couldn’t face all that just yet. Instead, as Caleb eased the Land Rover into reverse, she focused on the details. The way the sunlight waltzed with the leaves. A handsome little gecko on the side of her house. The plantains that hung heavy on the tree in her front yard.

  They would be ripe in a matter of days. She wondered if Caleb would remember to bring them to the cooks at the orphanage, or if they would rot on the branch and slip off the tree to molder on the ground.

  “Don’t forget—”

  “The bananas. I’ve got this, Adri.”

  “They’re plantains,” she muttered.

  “For the fufu. I know.”

  Caleb waved at Tamba and took a left out of the gate onto the only decent road in the entire country. It was relatively smooth black asphalt, an aberration in a city where the rest of the streets were unmapped and nearly impassable. The rainy season washed away gravel and left behind jagged rocks and deep craters where garbage and water collected in a septic soup diabolically perfect for mosquitos. It was the beginning of September, almost the end of the rainy season, but there were still several difficult weeks ahead. Adri glanced at Caleb out of the corner of her eye and hoped that he—and the Land Rover—would survive her absence.

  She couldn’t stop herself. “The mosquito nets—”

  “I’ll check them. And I’ll make sure Joseph gets his sickle cell meds and I won’t forget the community cookstove project meeting tomorrow afternoon.” Caleb bumped Adri’s elbow with his own. It was a consoling gesture, a reassurance of his dependability. “I promise to hug them every time I leave. Extra squeezes for Hannah and Lucia.”

  “Because they still cry every night.” She held herself rigid, willing the tears to evaporate before she had to wipe them and broadcast her weakness.

  Caleb dutifully kept his eyes on the road before them.

  It wasn’t far to the airport, less than an hour’s drive if there were no goats on the highway, but the route was clogged with history that made Adri catch her breath no matter how ordinary the landmarks became. There was the shell of a single ancient tank, vines twisting through the wreckage as if trying to hide the grisly reality of past violence. Here was the corner where a warlord had hid his troops in the jungle and ambushed unsuspecting travelers. There were bombed-out cars in the undergrowth and surely bones in the dirt. Who could forget? And yet there was grace in the lavender snowfall of jacaranda blooms beneath a lone, willowy tree. Pardon in the way a child brushed a petal from his head and sipped water from a plastic bag in the shade of his mother’s roadside stand.

  Adri gulped it all in, greedy, wanting. It was wild here, but safe. So different from home, where everything that seemed tame had fangs. She didn’t hate Blackhawk or the people there. She never had. But she could never quite seem to live gracefully beneath the weight of expectation. Adri had crumbled.

  Caleb was driving too fast. There wasn’t enough traffic. She’d be gone in a heartbeat. And that terrified her even more than all that waited at home.

  “Will you make it for the funeral?” Caleb asked after a while. Adri felt a jolt of annoyance, but he didn’t seem to be fishing for lurid details.

  “No.” It was one whispered word, but it sounded like a guilty admission to Adri’s ears. She cleared her throat. “No, Victoria wanted to be buried straightaway. There will be a memorial next week.”

  “Do you have to arrange that?”

  Her head whipped around. “I hope not.”

  “What exactly are you supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been the executor of a will before.”

  Caleb tried to give her a reassuring look. “Whatever you have to do, you’ll do it right.”

  “And you know this how?” Adri was too preoccupied to worry if she sounded snappy. But Caleb didn’t seem to mind the sharp edge in her voice.

  “I’ve never seen you give anything less than a hundred and ten percent,” he s
aid. “You’re more than a perfectionist, Adri.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He thought for a moment, his lips pressed in a tight line. “You’re a purist,” he finally concluded. “The journey matters to you as much as the end result.”

  Adri was rattled, but she hoped Caleb didn’t realize how much he had unnerved her. He was right. She could hardly brush her teeth without considering the consequences. When every action sent a ripple she couldn’t control out into a world she barely understood, it was impossible not to believe that her choices mattered. Adri swallowed. “What makes you think you know me?”

  “You wear your heart on your sleeve,” Caleb said simply. “You think you’re big and tough and untouchable, but you’re not.”

  Adri tried to laugh but only managed a strangled, choking sound. “I guess you have me pegged, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Caleb flicked his blinker on and turned down the winding road to the only airport in the country. Two sniper towers stood sentry on either side of the intersection, and long rolls of barbed wire unfurled above miles of chain link fencing. “It’s just that I’ve seen you with the kids, Adri. I know how much you love them and how much you’re willing to sacrifice for them. I can only assume you’ll extend the same care and consideration to settling your friend’s estate.”

  Adri didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.

  The airport parking lot was makeshift at best, and she was grateful when Caleb was forced to drop the disconcerting thread of their one-sided conversation and focus on finding an empty space. There were people everywhere, touching the SUV, rapping the glass with their knuckles and motioning that Caleb should roll down his window and listen to whatever sales pitch they had rehearsed. He ignored them all.

  “Was she a good friend?” Caleb finally broke the silence as he eased into an alarmingly narrow space in the midst of a swarming crowd. He tapped a teenage boy with his bumper in the process. The kid threw up his arms and shouted something vile at the Land Rover, but by some small miracle he kept walking. Caleb was unfazed, and Adri added an imaginary check mark to the running list of her coworker’s attributes. “Victoria, I mean. Were you two close?”