—
You’ve come from Nairobi,
she said.
—
I was in Limuru.
She was silent.
—
I needed to see you.
No man in evidence, despite the two of everything.
—
Your presence in the market was a shock,
he said.
I felt as if I were seeing a ghost.
—
You don’t believe in ghosts.
—
Having been in this country a year, I think I’d believe in almost anything.
They stood facing each other, not a foot apart. He could smell her soap or her shampoo.
—
Your hands shook,
he said boldly, and he could see that she was taken aback by this assertion. She moved a step away from him.
—
Simple shock doesn’t mean much in itself,
she said, not willing to credit the trembling hands.
Our time together ended so abruptly, there will always be a certain amount of shock associated with you, no matter what the circumstances.
An adequate defense. They moved further into the room. On the bookcase was a photograph, and he squinted in its direction. He recognized the cousins with whom Linda had grown up: Eileen and Michael and Tommy and Jack and the rest. A family grouping. There was another photograph, of Linda and a man. Who would be Peter, he thought. Not academic and anemic after all, but rather tall and dark and boyishly handsome. Smiling. A proprietary arm snaking around Linda’s slender waist. Her smile slightly less exuberant. Insanely, he took heart from this.
—
Can I get you something to drink?
—
Water would be good,
he said.
The birds outside were a frantic wind ensemble on a Sunday afternoon. They, too, signaled the approaching storm that blackened the kitchen window, even as sun poured in at the front of the house. A cool breeze, gusty, snapped blue-checked curtains. He watched her take a pitcher of water from the half fridge and pour him a glass.
—
It’s been purified,
she said, handing it to him.
He drank the ice-cold water and realized only then the terrible thirst his nerves had produced.
How are you?
he asked.
—
How am I?
Having come
—
having, against all the odds, found her again
—
he could not now speak. He sought desperately for a reference point.
—
Do you remember anything from the accident?
he asked.
She was silent, perhaps surprised by the question so soon.
—
I have a blank,
he said.
It begins with seeing the little girl on the tricycle and ends with my nose filling with water. When I couldn’t see you, I felt a sense of panic so terrifying that even now it can make me sweat.
She smiled and shook her head.
You were never any good at small talk.
She sat at the table, an invitation to join her. He shed his jacket, the sweat drenching him.
—
What happened to your jacket?
she asked.
—
It got washed by mistake in the bathtub.
She gave a small laugh. And for a moment, lit the room with sound. But then the light went out as abruptly as it had come.
Is the scar from then?
she asked.
He nodded.
—
It must have been bad,
she said.
—
I hardly noticed at the time. I didn’t feel a thing. Didn’t even realize the extent of it until my mother started screaming.
—
I remember the car tumbling,
she said, offering him a memory after all.
And I thought, This can’t be happening. The window brace, or whatever that piece between the windows is, buckled, and we rolled. I never lost consciousness. I swam out the other side and started shouting. Some boys were ice-fishing nearby. Well, you must know that. They got you out. It can’t have been a minute that you were unconscious. Though you were groggy, and the police put you on a stretcher.
—
I was calling your name.
—
They wrapped me in a blanket and took me away. I had burns on my side. They had to cut my clothes off me at the hospital.
—
Burns?
—
Scrapes. From what, I don’t know. The embankment, I guess.
—
I’m so sorry.
She took a sip of water, reached back and squeezed her hair, then brought it forward of her shoulder.
We did this already,
she said.
—
Do you live alone?
he asked.
She hesitated. She wiped her hands on her kanga. Her feet were bare. Callused on the heels.
More or less. Peter commutes.
—
Peter is?
—
My husband. He lives in Nairobi.
Thomas tried to deflect the blow.
Is that Peter?
he asked. He pointed to the picture.
—
Yes.
—
What’s he do?
—
He’s with the World Bank. He’s here working on a pesticide scheme.
—
You knew him before?
—
I met him here.
Thomas stood, the better able to process these unwelcome bits of information. He clenched and unclenched his hands. Restless, feeling jumpy.
—
Why the Peace Corps?
he asked.
She took another drink of water. She looked out the window at the incipient storm.
I had a friend,
she said ambiguously.
A great waft of scent blew in with a gust, like an announcement of a woman standing in a doorway.
—
It’s not so unusual, is it?
she added.
It seemed like the right thing to do.
Her shoulders brown and polished, her arms muscled. He wondered from what.
—
You’re reading Rilke,
he said, surveying the low bookcase. He examined the titles and the authors. Jerzy Kosinski. Dan Wakefield. Margaret Drabble. Sylvia Plath.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
—
I read anything I can get my hands on.
—
I guess so,
he said, fingering a copy of
Marathon Man.
—
I beg people to send me books. There’s a pitiful library in Njia. In Nairobi, I go to the McMillan Library at the British Council. I’ve been on a Margaret Drabble kick.
—
You teach.
She nodded.
—
What?
He picked up a copy of Anne Sexton and flipped through it. He distrusted confessional poetry.
—
A little bit of everything. The curriculum is based on the English system. There are exams the children have to pass. A levels and O levels and so forth. They have to memorize the counties of England. What good that will do them I’ve no idea.
Thomas laughed.
—
I teach thirty children in a cement room the size of a garage. I use books published in 1954 — giveaways from some village in Britain. They have peculiar English graffiti in them. “Arthur is a wanker,” and so on. What does your wife do?
Thomas leaned against the wall and rolled his shirtsleeves. The humidity had saturated the room. A crack of thunder startled both of them, though they might have expected it.
—
The storm,
she said.
She stood up and cranked the windows closed, even as the deluge began. The rain came straight down, at no angle, and created a dull roar on the tile roof so that they had to raise their voices. From somewhere outside the house, there was a wild riot of wind chimes.
—
My wife’s father was a missionary in Kenya shortly after World War II,
Thomas explained.
An Episcopal minister. He’s reverent about the time he spent here, says they were the best years of his life, et cetera, et cetera. Privately, I suspect there’s a woman somewhere in the story.
—
It’s a challenge any daughter might have to take on,
Linda said.
—
Regina has a fellowship to study the psychological effects of sub-Saharan diseases on children. What she sees is pretty grim,
he said.
—
Your wife must be very brave.
He felt cautious, discussing Regina. He wished they didn’t have to.
About this, very.
Linda turned her head away and gazed out at the storm. Nothing to see but sheets of rain. When it was over, he knew, white and cream petals would blanket the ground. There was a smell of ozone in the air that he particularly liked: it reminded him of summer afternoons as a boy.
—
You still wear the cross,
he said.
Her fingers automatically touched it.
I don’t know why.
Thomas was momentarily stung. He had, after all, given it to her.
—
God is everywhere in this country,
she said.
And yet, I hate Him passionately.
The comment was so startling, Thomas immediately forgot his hurt. The anger with which she’d spoken shocked him. He waited for her to explain.
—
You can’t even look at the rain, at its excess, and not think of God,
she said.
He’s everywhere you turn. And viciously cruel.
Even Thomas, whose own belief amounted to nothing, worried for her blasphemy.
—
So much poverty,
she said.
So much death and disease and heartache. You can blame colonialism, which is what everyone does. Or tribalism, as good a cause as any. But in the end, it’s God who allows it.
Thomas was impressed with the strength of her belief.
To hate so passionately is to value immensely,
he said.
Her cheeks were pinkened with her sudden passion, a frown between her brows. She wasn’t actually beautiful, though he and others had called her so. It was more that she was
pretty.
Which meant, he supposed,
accessible
in some undefined way.
—
You see a lot of poverty?
he asked.
She turned to him.
They have no shoes, Thomas.
—
The Kenyan elite. They, too, allow it,
he said.
—
You mean the Wabenzis?
she asked with evident distaste, using the common nickname for Kenyans who owned Mercedes-Benzes.
You mean the Africans who come in on foot and leave by jet?
She fingered her hair. It was drying, even in the humidity. She rose and went into a room he imagined to be the bedroom. She returned with a brush. She sat in an armchair and began to untangle her hair.
—
It’s not our struggle,
he said.
—
We borrow it while we’re here.
—
I didn’t want to come to Africa,
he said.
It was my wife’s idea. I’d just, believe it or not, learned the value of routine.
He paused, embarrassed.
I write,
he said.
She smiled. Not surprised.
What do you write?
He turned away.
Poetry,
he said, trying to make it a throw-away line. As if his entire life did not depend on it.
I don’t feel I belong here,
he said.
—
It can be a weird, dissonant life,
she said.
—
We live in Karen, in relative luxury, when all around us. . . . Well, you know as well as I do what’s all around us.
She nodded.
—
It’s not what I imagined,
he said.
All these paradoxes.
The neckline of her blouse revealed her collarbone. He was reminded of the sweater she had worn on the last day he had seen her. A pale blue sweater with an open collar. Her wool skirt had lain in soft folds around her shins in the car.
—
What did you do after Middlebury?
he asked.
—
I went to graduate school in Boston. In between, I taught high school in Newburyport.
—
You were in Boston and Newburyport? All that time?
Thomas, incredulous, calculated the distance between Newburyport and Cambridge. An hour at best. Two from Hull.