The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  As they round the corner of the house, Roger’s majordomo, Ezekiel, appears, two of the groom’s boys just behind him. He gestures the two boys forward, and they hold the horses’ reins close as Alec, Roger, and Penny slip down from their saddles. Roger’s boots have no sooner reached the earth than a tall, flame-colored dog lunges off the verandah to greet him.

  “Ah, good lad, Mwezi,” Roger says, running his palm along the backward ridge of hair on the hound’s spine. Penny calls the dog to her, and he obligingly steps close and leans against her for a moment, his tail thundering against the ground, before returning his attention to Roger. Penny watches the dog, how much she misses Lucky crystal clear in her face, and Alec is relieved when she’s distracted by Mfupi’s whickering.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Penny tells her pony. She hugs Mfupi again, kissing his soft, whiskery muzzle, then stands back as the boys lead the horses back to the stable to rub them down and ready them for the night. Roger and Ezekiel exchange a few animated sentences of Swahili, and the two men go inside, Ezekiel frowning, Mwezi trotting just behind. Alec has only a handful of words of Swahili, if that, but he’s seen how carefully Ezekiel watches Roger, as if he’s gauging how Roger’s health is doing from moment to moment. Roger is unquestionably diminished by the leukemia crawling through his veins, but equally clear is his refusal to slip quietly away and let it take him.

  “Let’s go see what Mummy is doing,” Alec says, and Penny follows him out to the lawn. The zebra is still there—or perhaps it’s another zebra, Alec has no idea—but June is just coming back through the gap in the plumbago hedge from the path that winds down to the shallow pond that Roger and his staff have created in one of the river’s curves.

  “You’re back,” she says, smiling broadly at them, and Penny runs and hugs her.

  “We saw ever so many giraffes,” Penny says, “and Uncle Roger says it’s all right if I try to pet a dik-dik next time I see one.”

  “They’re wild animals,” June says patiently.

  “Oh, I know,” Penny says, nodding sagely. “But they’re awfully little, and there was a girl who had one as a pet down at Lake Nakuru, Uncle Roger said.”

  Alec laughs. “Nevertheless.”

  Penny shrugs elaborately. “That doesn’t sound very wild to me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  At dinner, Penny chatters about the other animals they’d seen on their ride, June nodding and commenting. Roger is flushed with gin or the illness; they seem to manifest similarly, and both make him more inclined to bluff and bluster. Ezekiel hovers worriedly, choreographing the staff throughout the meal while Mwezi sprawls behind Roger’s chair, watching everything. The food has been unexpected, an idiosyncratic medley of English and Indian cuisines with a decidedly East African twist; Suresh, Roger’s cook, comes from an old Tamil family that’s been in Nairobi for generations. Tonight is grilled chicken in a coconut curry, a richly flavored rice pilau, potato samosas, and a kachumbari salad. Penny eats hungrily, seeming to relish the smoky yellow kuku paka that reminds Alec a bit of mulligatawny, and Alec looks up to find June watching their daughter, a faint, warm smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  As she finishes her curry, Penny asks Roger if they can go out and look for the leopard the next day. He laughs. “Perhaps,” he says, “but it’s damn hard to find a leopard if he doesn’t want to be found, particularly during the day.”

  She regards him patiently. “I mean quite early,” she clarifies.

  “I imagine Roger might want to sleep in,” June says. Roger gives her a look but doesn’t argue, to Alec’s relief. Perhaps he really is too worn-out. Roger takes umbrage, sometimes, if there’s any reference to his needing to take care of himself, as if he thinks they can’t see the sharpness of his cheekbones or the gaunt line of his shoulders in clothes grown a size too large.

  “We shall see,” he says at last, and Ezekiel gestures to his crew to bring out coffee service and dessert—sweet, doughy mandazi, and a special treat sent up from the coast, mabuyu, baobab seeds coated in a thick strawberry-flavored sugar.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, Roger builds a small fire in a pit out at the bottom of the lawn, and the adults sit companionably around it while Penny and Mwezi chase fireflies. Frogs and nightjars chorus up from the lake. The sky overhead is almost too clear, and there are so many stars that Alec can barely find half-remembered constellations, a task made more complicated by the nearness of the equator. Polaris is nearly out of sight along the northern horizon, and if they moved not even a hundred miles south it would be gone entirely, replaced by the equally distant Southern Cross. Shadows lunge and swoop through the smoke, bats flitting across Alec’s field of vision as they hunt through the air. In the distance, a hyena calls, its cry repeated by another until a whole pack of them is carrying on.

  June shudders. “I can’t seem to get used to that.”

  Roger grunts his assent. “Dreadful racket, isn’t it?” He drops a hand to soothe Mwezi, whose ears have lifted as he regards the night with a growl.

  “I like it,” Penny says. She pauses, frowning into the darkness. “Well, I don’t mean I like it, exactly, but I like how ferocious it is.”

  “I feel just the same,” Alec says. “Reminds me how wild the world really is.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be reminded,” June says, her voice wry. “But if I must be, I’d rather it wasn’t hyenas.”

  Alec smiles at her. They have never seen the world quite the same—for him, wonder exists in the reality he inhabits. A rock is a rock; the sky is the sky. Wild and unruly are not the goal, exactly, but they are part of that reality. For June, it’s quite different. Everything is patterns; she has always seen the world as a series of sets. It’s part of what makes her such a gifted mathematician and part of why, over the years, as she’s moved from teaching to research, she has built a name for herself in Fourier transforms. When she speaks of concepts like the harmonic analysis of topological groups, she lights up, and the language has a simple beauty to it, nearly musical in its orderly sequences of integers and signs, even though Alec rarely understands what she’s saying. She has always seen patterns, and he imagines that whatever she was doing during the war, whatever secret work she carried out in Ceylon and beyond, that gift was part of it.

  And Penny shares that sense—here on Roger’s land she has pointed to the ways the landscape repeats itself, the intervals between patches of bare soil, the measured stroll of a giraffe. Alec finds a sort of peace in watching her find a path that seems to him to bridge the ways she is most like him and most like June all at once.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning Alec wakes to find the clouds have lifted from Mount Kenya in the pink-and-golden dawn, the mountain dominating the entirety of the horizon and looming over a cluster of kudu standing hock-deep in the swirling waters. In the afternoon, raindrops the size of quarters churn the green-brown surface of the river into froth.

  When the rains clear, Alec and June take their tea on the verandah. Tea at Brightmere is a more English affair than dinner, and on days when they’re not out exploring it has felt like a decadent entrée to the end of the day. Today Suresh has baked scones riddled with sultanas, and one of the kitchen girls has brought the wide silver tray out to their table laden with the scones, a jar of hibiscus and papaya jam, and a dish of thick cream as well as a small pewter tray of the sticky sweet mabuyu. June pours the green tea into delicate Wedgwood cups and sits back. Alec takes a sip. The tea has a lush taste to it, but perhaps it’s his imagination, fueled by knowing that it’s come to Brightmere from the not-too-distant shores of Lake Victoria.

  “I still can’t quite believe this place,” June says, gesturing before them, where a giraffe sways beside an acacia not twenty yards away, grazing as the sheets of rain move off across the savannah, the clouds towe
ring beyond the mountain.

  Alec smiles. “I can understand why Roger came here when he had to leave India,” he says. The wound of India plucks at him again, and he sighs. It’s been four years now since June’s revelation, almost exactly, all of which they have spent trying to find their way back to the heart of the marriage, but that bafflement has never stopped rearing its head. And it doesn’t help that there are so many other bewilderments here at Brightmere, not least of them the eventual loss of his uncle, which he can almost see on the horizon.

  Does June have those moments too, where the world feels off its axis? Although she still sometimes falls prey to those staggering headaches, she has seemed to find a stasis of sorts—at least where her health is concerned. There have been no new tremors, and no new symptoms. But despite that relative stability, Alec now and again has noticed flickers of what seems like discontent. But instead of asking why he has always tried to accept not knowing, again, as gracefully as he can.

  A shift in the brush catches his eye, and a small herd of elephants moves out from the tree line, gray and shapeless at a distance and then suddenly disarmingly real. There are nine of them, led by their matriarch, whose tusks are nearly as long as June is tall. A mother elephant lays her trunk across the haunches of her baby to move him along, and Alec says, “My mother used to nudge me along rather like that.”

  “Not surprising,” June says. She regards him fondly. “I imagine you had stopped to look at a fern or something.” Alec chuckles, and the wound recedes again. There is no way to foresee how he will feel from moment to moment, or what will slap at him, even after all this time. He still has too many questions, too many doubts, even if he doesn’t often know what they are. It feels like days ago, not years, that elephants were an unbearable reminder, but now . . . Right now, sitting with June beneath the vast dome of sky, he’s all right.

  “Remind me to ask Penny how to keep track of which giraffe is which when she gets back,” he says; Penny has gone off in the Land Rover to Nakuru with Roger, Ezekiel, and Mwezi to collect the post.

  June nods, her mouth quirking up in a smile. “You asked her last night, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Alec concedes, “but I have the very devil of a time remembering. And she likes having all the answers.”

  “True,” June says. She turns and meets his eyes with that level stare that he’s loved his whole life. “You know she’s too clever for that school.” She pauses, and for just a moment her gaze goes faraway. “I want her to have every opportunity.”

  “Of course,” Alec says.

  June gives him a long, considering look, as if she’s weighing what to say. “She’s the best of both of us, Alec. And she should never have to make impossible choices about how best to use her gifts.”

  She’s right about Penny, though it’s hard for him to think about what she means when she talks about those choices. He loathes the idea of sending his daughter away somewhere. June and Penny are his world; other than Roger, they are his entire family. The fear of losing Penny last summer had sliced through him like a winter storm and scared him worse than anything ever had. Worse than cholera or the camps or all the rest of it put together. But if he’s honest, Penny is also too clever by half. And she has a bright future ahead of her, if he can let her go to it.

  He glances back at June, now sipping her tea and looking out over the glinting surface of the river. Africa has been a glory, but there have been difficult moments as well, and he doesn’t know if June has found peace here the same way that he has. The ways it reminds him of India are both soothing and challenging, and he can’t ask if it is the same for her, if the terrain, the people, the food, any of it, brings to mind her years in the East. Even thinking the question is too painful, though, riddled as it is with the fear that she won’t answer, or that asking will disturb their fragile equilibrium as it has so many times over the years. Instead he pushes it away. He has become adept at pushing away the doubts, and, especially since last summer, trying to be in the moment.

  So, this moment now: tea, elephants, a white-necked raven swooping across the horizon.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s just past dawn a few days later when the klaxon cawing of a hadeda ibis wakes him. Alec lies still a moment, disoriented, June curled lightly on her side next to him, lost in sleep. He regards her tenderly—even in sleep, her hand has just the hint of a tremor—and arranges the light blanket over her before he steps out of bed. He’s restless, and despite the early hour he dresses quickly and steps out onto the verandah. The ibis lofts into the morning, the iridescent green covert feathers lending its wings an almost supernatural gleam.

  The air is chilly and breathlessly clear beneath the immensity of sky. The moon has begun its descent, and ghostly Orion hovers overhead, Sirius still brilliant at his heel. There are so many stars that the crepuscular sky is softened into something tactile, almost mobile, like an animal’s pelt. He steps off the verandah, startled to find Penny outside already, crouching beside Ezekiel as they regard something on the ground.

  Penny turns and waves at him, and he almost pauses to talk, but she’s busy. Probably looking for leopard spoor, he realizes, although the idea that there may have been a leopard right outside the house leaves him anxious. For a moment he wonders where Roger is, then remembers that it’s still early.

  As Alec sets off down the path to the pond, birdsong ebbs and flows in the air: go-away birds, weavers, doves—so many Alec can’t tell them all apart. Around him, the stands of flowers and bamboo quiver with life. A monkey races along a branch overhead, shouting a warning. The sun continues its ascent behind him, light licking at the path and at Brightmere as Alec descends to the papyrus swamp that lines the shore. Suddenly a thundering roar splits the morning wide open. The birds and monkeys fall silent, and in the moment after the roar, Alec is astonished by the matching thunder of his heart. He stands taller and moves back from the shore, a bit uphill, trying to see where the vast sound came from. There—a single, massive lion standing on the opposite shore, not a hundred yards away.

  My God, Alec thinks. He turns to go back up the path to find his daughter—Penny will have heard the lion too, but he wants to be sure she can see the beast, that her Kenya is as rich with possibility as his boyhood in India had been. As he comes up the slope, there she is, staring out across the water through a pair of battered and oversize field glasses, the dawn lavendering her fair hair.

  “Daddy,” she says as he approaches, “did you see?”

  “I did,” he says.

  She lowers the field glasses, her eyes enormous. “I hoped and hoped, but Uncle Roger said lions don’t come very often.” She bites her lip. “I wish we could stay here forever, like Elspeth Huxley.” A pause. “Except we have to get Lucky and Mrs. Nesbit.”

  Alec laughs. She had read The Flame Trees of Thika on the ship out from London to Mombasa, and Huxley’s memoir of growing up in colonial Kenya had apparently taken root in Penny’s imagination. “I think Mrs. Nesbit would rather stay in Scotland,” he says, “and besides, what would your mother and I do for work?”

  Penny shrugs, unbothered by the logistics of adulthood, and lifts the field glasses to her face again to scan the horizon. “Lucky would like it here, like I do.”

  “I expect he would,” Alec says. He can almost see it too, the pair of them exploring the whole of the Rift Valley. He regards her again, teeming with emotion. Penny is a bit small for her age, all fawn legs and bird bones, but sound and strong. Sometimes he can see what she’ll look like as an adult—June’s eyes, his hair, and layered under everything else the profile of her namesake, Alec’s mother. She had stood just like this with field glasses, all those decades ago, watching foothills and a horizon of her own.

  When he turns to go back inside, he sees that June has come out to the verandah, her eyes shining as she too watches Penny. The morning sounds, and the lion, mu
st have woken her. There is a clarity to her wakefulness that Alec has always admired; she doesn’t bog in sleep the way he sometimes does. The way Penny does too, for that matter, as if the movement from asleep to awake involves a complicated border crossing of some sort. He takes a moment to regard June before he crosses to tell her good morning—how long has it been since he’s really looked at her? Really seen her? The early sun sparks mahogany in her hair. There is silver there now, but not much, and the handful of shimmering threads just add to the welter he feels when he looks at her.

  She turns and looks at him, smiling. It aches at him, and he stops to catch his breath, undone.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s likely he will never see Roger again; his uncle has seemed vital enough most of the time during their visit, but now and again . . . now and again there has been something else, a peculiar droop to the shoulders that had seemed so broad to Alec when he and Roger sailed from India, a stumble where there should have been the long stride of a cavalry officer. Roger is Alec’s last tie to India and the life he’d had there with his parents, and Alec is finding it hard to quell the mourning—already as tangible and brittle as a seashell, though Roger is still alive—through which he has no clear path.

  Tonight he considers the evening from the verandah, watching the grasses move like ocean in the breeze. The setting sun turns the landscape a bright gold and green that reminds him of summer skies filtered through palm leaves. Quite different from the way the sun smooths along the mossy old stones of Edinburgh, or the often washed-out Fenlands light of his adolescence.

  He sits, watching the sun dip below the edge of the world, and the moon rise to greet the soft speckled velvet of the sky. Unbidden, a memory of India comes—mangoes and scraping the fruit from its skin with his teeth under a tree, the rock bees swarming overhead. They had gone to the hill station at Ooty to escape the desultory, oppressive heat of Bombay, and he had thought the rock bees were following them. His mother had explained migration to him then; the bees wanted cooler air, too.