When I got to the dining room, there was the usual ruckus I had come to associate with mealtime, and my eyes searched the room for the girls, and for Chris. I found Lillia and Grace ensconced on the other side of the room, laughing and roughhousing with their friends. Lillia looked up to catch me watching them and she nudged my sister, who looked around the room. I was still trying to beckon them over when I felt his hands on my shoulders.
“I’ve been looking for you. Shall we take our meals outside and talk?”
I turned to smile at him, and despite the weariness in his eyes, he smiled back.
“I think we have quite a lot of catching up to do. Although,” his eyes twinkled merrily, “I think I know a lot more about you than you know about me. Chicken bones, aside.”
I looked at him and he laughed at the confusion on my face.
“I got two new helpers this afternoon, both of whom know you very well. Your daughters are beautiful girls, inside and out. You can be proud of them.”
He went on to explain that Lillia had brought Paul in for a vaccination and had been so interested in the baby clinic that she and Grace stayed on to help throughout the rest of the afternoon.
“There’s more too,” he said with a smirk. “Apparently we have their benediction.”
I must have looked startled because he laughed out loud again.
“Camp rumor has us married already. I still think they came along to secretly check me out. Happily we all got along like a house afire. Imagine how awful it would have been if they’d hated me on sight?”
I sat back against the wall, balancing my plate on my knees, trying to find the right words.
“So correct me if I’m wrong, but we met once in a bar. Then ran into each other again here, in this half-hell. I have no idea why you are here or even how I came to be here, really. But now, thanks to some chicken bones and my well-meaning daughters, we are practically married?”
The more I spoke, the angrier I felt. I looked at him accusingly.
“How come you’re so sure about this?”
I gestured towards us.
“I mean, how can you possibly know that we’ll be suited? You know nothing about me. You don’t know what I have to do, you know nothing of my family and my life…”
Chris grabbed my hands and held them to his chest, a curiously reassuring movement that felt both intimate and loving.
“Listen, we’ve got the rest of our lives to talk about the details. Suffice to say that if I told you everything, you’d think I was nuts. I’ve been working in Africa for about ten years now. Until a couple of months ago, I was running the Medecins sans Frontières hospital over the border. It was all going well but I kept having the strangest dream about going home and singing in a bar.”
He shook his head.
“Definitely strange, considering I hadn’t played in years. And not just once, I must have dreamed the same dream a hundred times.”
He went quiet for a moment.
“I probably would have ignored everything and kept working, if…”
Chris looked up at the stars in the clear night sky.
“One night, the rebels came and attacked the hospital. There was nothing we could do except let them. By morning, the only ones left alive were us. The hospital was destroyed and all of the people, all of the patients we had tried so hard to save, they were all dead.”
I gasped, horror-struck and heartbroken for him. He contemplated his hands, face up in the moonlight, and I tried hard not imagine those lovely long fingers covered with blood.
He looked up at me and smiled sadly.
“Of course, we couldn’t stay after that. The hospital was closed down, the rebels came back and took what was left of it over.”
He shook his head.
“We had no medicine, no electricity. No food. And those of us who remained were terrified. We knew just how lucky we were to have escaped.”
I mumbled something about not being able to give more than your life, when I realized how stupid that must sound, so I shut my mouth and tried to look supportive.
When he reached over and took my hand again, I squeezed as hard as I could, letting him know that I was ready to listen when he wanted to talk.
“Suffice to say, they sent me home for three months, supposedly so they could work out my next posting, but really it was all about getting me out of the field for a while. But at home, there was nothing for me. Everyone – my friends and family – seemed so obsessed about their own silly little problems. I found myself pushing away just about everyone I knew or cared about, and when I found myself with a whiskey bottle in hand at four in the afternoon, I knew something had to give. So I wrote a couple of songs and started singing in a friend’s bar. One thing led to another and I started to play regularly, which was good, because I still wasn’t sleeping. It was all going OK – not great, but OK - until I heard about Ombeline.”
I started so suddenly the top of my head banged his chin.
“Ombeline? You know Ombeline?”
I looked at him, wide eyed with amazement.
“Ombeline and I have known each other for about sixteen years, since we worked together in the Peace Corps. She’s a wonderful girl. A little crazy but her heart is in the right place. But how do you know her?”
I explained about our long-term friendship and how her accident – and a whole lot of other reasons – brought us to Jinja. After my brief résumé, Chris pulled me close to him and drew my face up to his.
“Please don’t think I’m insane. I promise you that normally I don’t believe in all the airy fairy stuff that goes around, but to ignore this would be to spit in the eyes of the gods.”
I tried to demur but he kept on talking.
“When I had the first dream, I knew it was about you. Something was leading me to you, even though I didn’t have a clue who you were and to be honest, the very last thing on my mind was a relationship.”
He stopped, drew a deep breath, and then continued.
“I never intended to play in that bar that night – I only came in at the very last minute, to lend a hand to a friend who couldn’t play.”
Chris looked at me seriously.
“But when I was waiting backstage, a song – your song – came to mind. The music and the lyrics practically wrote themselves. And then I played the song, and saw you, and in that instant, my life changed. When you drove away and never called, I felt like it was a lesson: that somehow, my purpose in life was not to find love but to work in the service of others. It was an epiphany, a message of light sent to me at a moment when I was truly lost and didn’t know what to do with my life. I felt that if I’d lost you – the woman I know I was meant to spend the rest of my life with – then it was because my path lay elsewhere.”
“And here you are,” I said, leaning into him. In the moonlight, his green eyes glowed like emeralds. I snuggled into his chest, solid like the old oak of a family tree. I could feel his heart beating with love through his shirt, and I wanted more than anything to melt into his skin.
“You’re not the only one with a wacky story. I am the world’s most irresponsible mother. And a sleazy middle-aged woman to boot. Hell, I even went back to the bar, trying to find you. If that’s not slutty, I don’t know what is….”
I looked up at him.
“So to resume, I am a terrible mother who dropped everything and dragged her kids to the other side of the world, on a whim, all the while pining for some musician I’d met in a bar. You’re a guy who lost it – justifiably, I might add – and then defied reality by returning to the scene of the crime.”
I smirked up at him.
“And then, to make matters even more interesting, you pine after strange women you meet in bars, only to conjure them up in foreign countries. I’m wacky, you’re weird.”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“Either this is a love affair written by the gods, or else we both need heavy medication.”
He gazed at me a long moment a
nd then leaned in, and ever so gently, kissed me. The touch of his lips, soft as velvet but alive with the fire of a thousand fires, kick started my heart as if it had received a thousand volts. I kissed him back, losing myself in his mouth as if it were the center of the world, my world.
“So here we are.”
He pulled me to him tighter, as if he were afraid to lose me.
“I’m terrified to ask but I can’t not. What happens next?”
I looked up and saw the fear in his eyes. In the silence, I gazed up at the black night and focused on Cassiopeia, the constellation that had always bought me peace in my darkest hours. He took a deep breath and I turned my head to look at him.
“The question begs to be asked. On which level are we operating here?”
There was only one answer. If I had learned anything over the last few weeks, it was that sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. I had been led from one crazy circumstance to the next, right up until now. If this was love – and I felt sure it was – then the only thing left to do was jump.
Reaching up to touch his beautiful face, I said, “I think that we are operating on a level that brooks no argument.”
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and jumped.
“I think we have to recognize that we have been given the gift of love, and now it’s up to us to make it work.”
Suddenly giddy, I looked deep into his eyes and saw the confirmation of every single thing I was feeling.
“I don’t know how we are going to do this, or where. All I know is that I want to be with you, I want to hold you hand and follow the signs.”
Even as I spoke, I knew how crazy it sounded. I barely knew this man. I hardly had a job back home. I had two kids whose stability depended on me and me alone. It wasn’t that I was discounting all of that, only that I felt sure that everything would fall into place, as it should, when the time was right.
Chris smiled and ran his fingers down my cheek.
“I know. It’s madness but I’m with you. Let’s just commit to this love. Anything that doesn’t work out, we’ll fix it as we go along.”
Suddenly serious, he said, “I’m sure that we’ll come upon hard times, but I promise you, with every fiber of my being, that together, we will always find a solution. Always. As long as we are together.”
A lion called out in the darkness, and the clatter from the kitchen indicated that mealtime was over. Chris grabbed my hand and pulled me up.
“Let’s go talk to the girls. I get the feeling that they knew about this before we did. Apparently Lillia has been talking to the unicorn.”
He caught my concerned glance and smiled.
“The unicorn is the name the local medicine man goes by. Rumor has it that he turns himself into a unicorn and learns the future, and apparently the chicken bones did not lie.”
He grinned at me.
“She seemed to know all about us, even before we did.”
I stopped in the darkness and squeezed his hand.
“You realize that I come as a package deal? You not just getting a wife, you’re getting a family too. A house full of women.”
My mind flashed back to Mrs. Brinkley, who was as much a part of our family as anyone.
He laughed out loud.
“Honey, trust me, that’s not a problem. This may strike you as ironic but I have five sisters, and growing up, two of my aunts also lived with us. Believe me, a house full of women is less than unusual for me.”
As we walked along, hand in hand in the bright African darkness, I imagined all the things we had to learn about each other. Our childhoods, our families, our lives until now. Starting out as we were, a blank slate for one another: was this a blessing or a curse? If we knew nothing of each other, how could we take into account the complexities of each other’s personality. If we don’t know where the other has come from, can we ever really know them? But then, my heart argued, people change over the course of the years, so love means accepting the evolutions of our loved ones.
I was still tossing around these arguments and more, wondering what on earth I was going to say to my darling daughters.
“Hi, this is your mother, the voice of reason, and I’ve just fallen in love with someone I don’t know and we’re going to live happily ever after?”
Somehow, I knew I would have to slow this rollercoaster down and find a way to show them that I knew what I was doing, that I was not just rushing full steam ahead into the unknown.
But before I could say a word, one of Mama Akanit’s helpers grabbed Chris and dragged him off to look at a new arrival. I offered to come and help but Chris could see that I was exhausted and told me to get a good night’s sleep. With a brief but tender kiss, he told me that a date with Orpheus would help me to see more clearly and I loved him even more for being able to see past our love to my worries and fears.
And so, for the first time in a million years, I fell asleep safe in the knowledge that my heart had found its home.
14
Happily after