Meantime, Flicka was propped disjointedly on the kitchen stool like last season’s manikin. His father—predictably—was in the bathroom. Carol was gesturing toward breakfast more than making it. Ordinarily so efficient, she had put out a single box of cereal, but no bowls or spoons. Instead of getting out the milk, she’d got out the tonic water. When he walked in, she was standing in the middle of the room, frozen, as if about to do something but no longer remembering what that was. Like several he’d had to replace in his digital camera, Carol’s memory card was corrupted.
He led her to the table and sat her down; she was pliant. Since cards corrupt in discrete sectors, her brain started up again and proceeded to output what Carol Burdina was supposed to say. “We’ve really appreciated your hospitality the last few nights. But we can’t continue to impose … Maybe a hotel … The girls … They should go back to school.” But her heart wasn’t in it, and she sounded like a robot.
So he ignored her. “Glynis, Zach, my father, and I are leaving for the island of Pemba as soon as I can get flights out. You and the girls should come, too.”
Insofar as she had expectations—no, no, no, please make yourself at home for as long as you like—what he’d said defied them. A little cock of her head seemed to indicate that he’d got her attention. The film over Flicka’s eyes also appeared to clear.
Carol’s laugh was more of a hiccough. “You’re going to Africa.”
The inane punctuation “The handyman can ‘cause he mixes cement with love and makes the house work good!” made the proposed journey sound all the more absurd.
“That’s right. According to Jackson”—Shep had resolved not to avoid his friend’s mention—”you thought I’d never go.”
“Well, have a nice time,” she said blandly.
“You’re coming, too.”
However dispiritedly, her famous practicality roused. “Can’t. Flicka.”
“I know the FD will be challenging, but we’ll manage.”
“Hot,” said Carol.
“Cool towels, fans. When and where possible, air-conditioning.”
“Flying. Pressure.”
“All she has to do is swallow. She’s learned to swallow.”
“Drugs.”
“Internet.”
It was like badminton. The long point ended summarily with a neat smash from the stool:
“I’m going to Pemba.”
Carol turned to Flicka and sighed. “You can’t go to Africa.”
Tipping off her stool, Flicka navigated in a stooped zigzag across the kitchen by gripping a chair, the table, the vegetable storage baskets; lately Flicka made her way about a room with the agile, lateral clamber of Jeff Goldblum in the remake of The Fly. She pushed Heather from the sink, filled her water bottle, turned off the tap, and wiped a drizzle of spittle from her chin with her terrycloth wristband in one motion, and set about connecting the syringe to her g-tube for her usual on-the-hour hydration. It was a display of self-sufficiency that said, See? What about this tiresome business can’t be accomplished in Africa?
Shep had little doubt that previous to Wednesday night Carol would have proven far more adept at concocting irrefutable reasons why a disabled seventeen-year-old with a rare, degenerative disease could not take up residence on an island on the other side of the world with one underequipped hospital staffed by Chinese doctors, none of whom would know anything about managing an exclusively Jewish genetic condition called familial dysautonomia. But that systematic, brisk mother-of-two had been replaced by in some ways a more likeable woman who was utterly lost. Moreover, what she’d just been through must have impelled her to flee. Since so far she’d managed to escape only a piffling thirty miles north to Westchester, the only powerful objection that the New Carol might legitimately have raised to his proposal was that Africa was not nearly far enough away. So she imprudently abandoned her sensible medical line for a tactical error.
“Money,” she said. “We don’t have any.”
“You have less than no money,” he concurred. “I glanced at some of the credit card bills lying around Jackson’s computer at work. Which is all the more reason to cut and run. MasterCard won’t come after you off the coast of Zanzibar. Besides, I have money. Enough, if we’re frugal, to last all of us in Tanzania indefinitely. The Wapemba live on a couple dollars a day. We could at least budget five bucks.”
Her eyes drifted to the corn flakes, flickering with what seemed a hazy awareness of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of other rock-solid reasons that this preposterous plan was out of the question.
“Dad would want us to go,” said Flicka.
“She’s right,” Shep agreed. “Leave Jackson’s parents to arrange a memorial service if it makes them feel better. But I promise you, and I knew the guy almost as well as you did: no memorial to your husband would be more fitting than your getting out of here. If there is an afterlife with a small a, he’ll be thrilled to know that you took his kids and flew to Pemba.”
“… But there’s the inquest.”
“Incest?” Heather repeated merrily. “My friend Fiona says her family has incest!”
Yet another reason to leave the country. He asked, “Is there any question in your own mind about what happened?” She shook her head morosely. “Then why worry about an inquest?”
“I’m going with them, Mom,” Flicka announced with finality, leaning on the counter for balance as she drained the last of the water into her syringe, “whether you and Heather come or not.”
A talented manipulator of other people’s pity, Flicka had bossed her parents around for years. Now the facility could be deployed to far more tectonic effect than getting out of her math homework.
There remained one last invitation to issue—albeit the kind extended to folks who you already know can’t come to a party but whom you ask anyway as a gesture. Sure enough, when Shep explained about Pemba and how of course she was welcome to join them, Amelia was not about to drop everything: her friends, her job, her boyfriend. But she sounded a little confused, so he was careful thereafter to be crystal clear: “Your mother is dying, sweetheart, and she finally knows she’s dying, too. This is your one and only chance to say goodbye. And this time maybe you two can do better than, you know, lumpy versus smooth.”
The last time Amelia had driven up to Elmsford, she’d brought her new boyfriend—probably a decent kid, but no match for the awkwardness of the circumstances. His girlfriend’s flagging mother didn’t have the energy to ask all the solicitous questions that would have filled out a normal introduction: So where do you work? What are your ambitions? Where are your people from? Naturally the Food Channel was on, which must have helped to explain why they ended up spending the entire visit talking about potatoes.
Mashed potatoes, specifically: whether everyone preferred the silky, smooth sort with lots of cream, or the lumpy, bohemian type with chunks and skin. Shep had sat in. After a good twenty minutes of this micro-analysis of tuber preparation, it required the full force of his self-control to keep from leaping to his feet and exploding, Look, Teddy, or whatever your name is, I’m sure you’re a nice guy but I’m afraid we don’t have time to get to know you right now. So get out of the room; you don’t belong here, and your girlfriend only dragged you along to begin with as cover. To hide behind. And Amelia, as you can see your mother is in piss-poor shape, so you have no way of knowing whether this is the very last time you ever talk to her in your whole life. If you end up doomed to remember squandering those final few minutes on POTATOES you will never forgive yourself.
To the girl’s credit, blessed with the opportunity to retake that abysmal scene, Amelia made it up to Elmsford within the hour. She let herself in the front door just as Shep was logging off the British Airways website upstairs. When he hurried down to greet her, he was relieved she’d not brought the boyfriend, nor had she glittered her cleavage, caked her lashes, or plaited her hair. Pale, skinny, and ponytailed, Amelia in loose jeans and a rumpled sweatshirt was recogniz
ably the same kid he’d galloped around the yard on his back, and somehow this de-eroticized version made it easier to embrace his daughter full-bore without embarrassment. Yet that ravaged expression she wore was plenty adult, its etched quality suggesting that a better-than-oblivious relationship to her mother’s parlous condition had prevailed for some time.
Forewarned of Amelia’s arrival, Glynis had forced herself from bed, and now slipped unsteadily downstairs with a shake of her head at Shep; this was a proper entrance, and she didn’t want help. For the first time in weeks she’d put on real clothes, a favorite evening ensemble of ink-black rayon. Over a flowing blouse and matching slacks she wore a rippling floor-length robe trimmed in tiny, tasteful rhinestones. She had drawn on her eyebrows. Her intention, Shep intuited, was not disguise. It was a favor, as Amelia’s garb was also a favor: the mother would look her best, and the daughter would look her least adulterated.
As the three of them settled in the living room, Zach sidled into the doorway. At last there was no fevering about the kitchen, no boyfriend, no mashed potatoes. “I’m sorry I haven’t come up a little more often,” said Amelia, beside her mother on the couch. “It’s really hard for me to see you—deteriorated, Mom. I’ve always admired how beautiful you are, how—statuesque. How you hold yourself … above, apart. It hurts me, seeing you not be able to pull off the old class act anymore, no longer being able to act like some—queen. I know that’s no excuse. But I have tried to keep up with how you’re doing through Z.”
The parents turned an inquisitive glance toward their son in the doorway, and he nodded. “Yeah, she, like, at least texts five times a day. Whadda ya think? She’s my sister.”
“Why not text me?” asked Glynis.
“With Z …” Amelia looked away. “Well, from Z I’m sure to get an honest report.” She turned back to her mother. “I can’t stand the pretending. It’s fake, it’s gross, it’s … a violation. We’ve all been supposed to act as if you were getting better, and I just—I didn’t want to remember you that way.”
“I’m sorry too, then,” said Glynis, taking her daughter’s hands. “But we’re not pretending now, are we? So I have something for you. To remember me by.” Glynis lifted a box from beside the sofa that she must have placed there before Amelia’s arrival. Shep recognized his wife’s equivalent of his own battered red toolbox.
“I want you to have my old jewelry,” Glynis continued. “The things I made before I moved on to flatware. Many of these pieces are very dramatic, and most women wouldn’t, as you just put it yourself, be able to ‘pull them off.’ But you can. You, too, are statuesque, and you’ll do this work proud.”
“Oh!” Amelia cried with a girlish delight as she slid one of the serpentine bracelets up her slender arm. They were all there, the artifacts with which Shep had first fallen in love, including those morbid stickpins, like tiny bouquets of bird bones. “I used to try on these pieces as a kid when you weren’t home. In secret. I never told you, but later I started borrowing necklaces to go out, and I was scared you’d take my head off if you knew. I was terrified that I’d, like, scratch the finish, too. But everyone was blown away whenever I wore your work, and I always told them: my mother made this. They couldn’t believe it. So thank you, thank you! I can’t think of anything I’d want more.”
Mother and daughter reminisced, and described what they admired in each other; to keep it real, they also dredged up a few memories that were unpleasant. There were silences while they both wracked their brains for whatever they might berate themselves later for forgetting to say. In sporadic, headlong installments, Amelia was delivering one of the very “speeches” that from others had enraged her mother for the last year. Yet for the first time Glynis was able to sit still and listen and accept the compliments. There was nothing insensitive about talking as if she were about to die when she was.
The visit was warm enough and good enough that it didn’t need to be overly long.
“Have a great time in Africa,” said Amelia, standing. “I hope you make it to Pemba before …” She hesitated, then seemed to relish the new lack of pretense. “Before you die. And I hope the end—doesn’t hurt too much. I guess it may not have turned out quite the way you intended, but I still think you had a good life, Mom.”
Shep feared that his wife would shy away with something worthy of Pogatchnik like, “Well, it was what it was.” Instead Glynis shot her husband a long look before turning back to her daughter. “Yes, my dear,” she said. “I think I’ve had a good life, too.”
When the two women faced each other at the door, it was an odd moment but strangely simple—elegant, even. They hugged. Neither cried. Their leave-taking was dignified: one of those successful partings at which neither party would leave a sweater behind.
“Goodbye, Mom,” said Amelia.
“Goodbye, Amelia.” Glynis added with a wry little smile, “It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Yes,” said Amelia, her smile so identically wry, her tone so exactly duplicating the same dry, classy understatement, that these two had to be related. “It’s been nice knowing you, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Union Bancaire Privée Account Number 837-PO-4619
Statement for February 2006
Balance: $771,398.22
The journey itself resembled one of those charity events during which a valiant band of the severely handicapped improbably climb Mont Blanc; had they only signed up sponsors, their motley party of seven might have raised thousands for a good cause.
After the ninety-minute drive to Kennedy, Shep ditched his SUV in long-term parking, thinking: very long term. (So oriented toward acquisition, Americans cheated themselves of the joys of divestiture, thus far proving much more intense. With every all-in-one printer and pair of flannel-lined jeans he walked clean away from, Shep felt so much lighter that by the time they arrived at Gate 3A he might have flown to Pemba without the planes.) After three hours of loitering, the British Airways red-eye to London was seven hours, followed by a three-and-a-half-hour layover in Heathrow, an eight-and-a-half-hour flight on Kenya Airways to Nairobi, another two-hour layover, an hour-and-forty-minute flight to Zanzibar, a four-hour layover with no air-conditioning, which in hundred-degree heat with Flicka nearly proved catastrophic, a shaky half-hour flight in a twenty-seater prop whose faded appointments dated the plane back to about 1960, an hour’s tumble in a minivan, and a twenty-minute speedboat ride, the trip door to door—door loosely speaking, since their tented encampment didn’t really have one—took thirty-three hours.
Entertainments were numerous: helping his father shit within the confines of an airline head; glaring at fellow passengers who pretended not to stare at Flicka as she lifted her shirt and poured another airline miniature of bottled water into a plastic hole in her stomach; fielding icy offers of assistance from flight attendants who really meant, “Fucking hell, why me?” and “These emaciated cripples have no business flying, and they’d better not die on my plane;” continually moving Flicka’s portable oxygen tank out of the way of refreshment carts; trading off with Carol in reminding Flicka to swallow; doling out three complex sets of medications, and having to separate them out meticulously by shape and color when turbulence sent a lap load onto the floor and skittering under other passengers’ seats; going begging down the aisle for unused airline blankets to keep Glynis warm; buying kikois in Zanzibar’s grungy airport to soak in cold water and wipe Flicka down, although it was having remembered to pack the little portable fan that he’d propped on his computer terminal at the swelteringly overheated offices of Handy Randy that really saved the day—thank you, Pogatchnik.
The last bumpy leg on ZanAir was nauseating, the circulation no better than hot breath. Everyone fanned themselves with laminated escape instructions that, given the age of the plane, they should probably have been reading. Clutching his wife’s hand, Shep distracted himself by memorizing his first lesson in Swahili—”faste
n seatbelts”: fungu mikanda; “no smoking”: usivute sigara. Three of these passengers were near enough to it not to worry about imminent demise. Still, as the plane’s engines milled in a deafening grind whose fluctuations did not encourage confidence, he prayed to put a first toe on Pemba without freefalling five thousand feet beforehand.
At last the prop plane lurched above the Pemban shallows—a wide alabaster ripple of azures, emeralds, and aquas of a richness one rarely encountered outside computer animation—and then sailed over the lacy rim of a lambent white beach.
“Wow,” said Flicka, craning over Heather’s lap to gaze out the window.
“Oh, gross, you’re getting drool all over me again!” Heather complained, although she’d already dripped guava-banana yogurt down her shirt.
Glynis, too, was glued to her window. “Shepherd, it’s beautiful.” She sighed. “Maybe you were right.”
“Jesum crow, son,” said Gabe from the window seat in the next row. “And I thought I’d spend the rest of my days staring at nothing but that cheap reproduction of a Thomas Hart Benton at Twilight Glens.”
“Could have found this view on Google Earth without taking four different airplanes,” said Zach, who had chosen to sit glumly on his own.
“I always think of Africa as dry,” Carol marveled. “But this island looks so lush!”
Indeed, Pemba was densely forested, its terrain lumpy with hillocks, their thick, broad-leafed foliage of banyan trees and banana plants spangled with punctuating palms like asterisks. Tiny, humble patches of cultivation were threaded together with red dirt tracks that would hereafter supplant the West Side Highway. As they passed overhead, roofs of corrugated tin flared silver in the sun, as if the population of Pemba were flashing a greeting to their newest residents in Morse code.