“I read about the land confiscation. Did that affect your family farm?”
Tru nodded. “It did. You should understand that there’s been a long history of wrongs committed in that country by people like my grandfather. Even so, the transition was brutal. My stepfather knew a lot of people in the government, and because of that, he thought that he would be protected. But one morning, a group of soldiers and government officials showed up and surrounded the property. The officials had legal documents stating that the farm had been seized, along with all of its assets. Everything. My stepfather and half brothers were given twenty minutes to gather their personal things, and were escorted off the property at gunpoint. A few of our workers protested and they were shot on the spot. And just like that, the farm and all the land was no longer theirs. There was nothing they could do. That was in 2002. I was in Botswana by then, and I was told that my stepfather went downhill pretty quickly. He started drinking heavily, and he committed suicide about a year later.”
She thought back to Tru’s family history. It felt epic and dark, almost Shakespearean. “That’s terrible.”
“It was. And still is, even for the people who received the land. They didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t know how to maintain the equipment or the irrigation methods, and they didn’t rotate the crops correctly. Now nothing is being grown at all. Our farm turned into a squatters’ camp, and the same thing has happened all over the country. Add in the currency collapse, and…”
When he trailed off, Hope tried to imagine it. “It sounds like you got out just in time.”
“It makes me sad, though. Zimbabwe will always be my home.”
“What about your half brothers?”
Tru drained his glass and set it on the table. “Both are in Tanzania. Both are farming again, but it’s nothing like it was before. They don’t have much land, and what they do have isn’t nearly as fertile as the old farm. But the only reason I know that is because they had to borrow money from me, and they’re not always able to make the payments.”
“That was kind of you. To help them, I mean.”
“They had no more ability to choose the family they were born into than I did. Beyond that, though, I think it’s what my mum would have wanted me to do.”
“What about your biological father? Did you ever see him again?”
“No,” Tru said. “We spoke on the phone a couple of weeks after I returned to Zimbabwe, but he passed away not long after that.”
“How about his other children? Did you ever change your mind about meeting them?”
“No,” Tru answered. “And I’m fairly sure they didn’t want to get to know me, either. The letter from the attorney informing me of my father’s death made that clear. I don’t know their reasons—maybe it was because I was a reminder that their mother wasn’t the only woman our father loved, or maybe they were worried about an inheritance, but I saw no reason to ignore their wishes. Like my father, they were strangers.”
“I’m still glad you had a chance to meet him.”
He turned his gaze toward the fire. “I am, too. I still have the photographs and drawings he gave me. It seems like so long ago,” he said.
“It has been a long time,” she said quietly.
“Too long,” he said, taking her hand, and she knew that he was talking about her. She felt her cheeks flush, even as his thumb began to caress her skin, his touch achingly familiar. How was it possible that they’d found each other again? And what was happening to them now? He seemed unchanged from the man she’d once fallen for, but it made her think again how different her own life had become. Where he was as handsome as ever, she felt her age; where he seemed at ease in her presence, his touch triggered another wave of emotion. It was overwhelming, almost too much, and she squeezed his hand before releasing it. She wasn’t ready for that much intimacy yet, but she gave an encouraging smile before sitting up straight.
“So, let me see if I have this straight. You were in Hwange until…1999 or 2000? And then you moved to Botswana?”
He nodded. “1999. I was in Botswana for five years.”
“And then?”
“I think, for that, I’ll probably need another glass of wine.”
“Let me get it.” Taking his glass, she retreated to the kitchen before returning a minute later. She got comfortable beneath the blanket again, thinking the room was warming up nicely. Cozy. In many ways, it had already been a perfect afternoon.
“All right,” she said, “what year was this?”
“2004.”
“What happened?”
“I was in an accident,” he said. “A rather bad one.”
“How bad?”
He took a sip of wine, his eyes on hers. “I died.”
Dying
As he lay in the ditch by the side of the highway, Tru could feel his life slipping away. He was only dimly aware of his overturned truck with the demolished front end, and of the way one of the tires was finally rotating to a stop; he barely noticed the people rushing toward him. He wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened, or why the world seemed blurry. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t seem to move his legs, or what was causing the relentless waves of pain throughout his entire body.
Nor, when he finally woke in a hospital he didn’t recognize in an entirely different country, would he remember the accident at all. He remembered that he had been returning to the lodge after spending a few days in Gaborone, but only learned later from the nurse that an oncoming supply truck in the opposite lane had suddenly crossed into the path of his pickup. Tru hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and in the collision, he’d rocketed through the windshield, cracking his skull and landing forty feet away, which caused eighteen more bones to break, including both femurs, all the bones in his right arm, three vertebrae, and five ribs. He was loaded into a vegetable cart by strangers and rushed to a temporary NGO clinic that was offering vaccinations at a nearby village. It had neither the equipment, medicine, or supplies that Tru needed, nor was a doctor even present. The floor was dirt, and the room was filled with children who had learned to ignore the flies that swarmed over their faces and limbs. The nurse was from Sweden, young and overwhelmed, and had no idea what to do when Tru was rolled into the waiting room. But people expected her to do something—anything—so she moved toward the cart and checked for a pulse. There was nothing. She checked the carotid artery. Still nothing. She put her ear to Tru’s mouth and checked for breathing. She heard and felt nothing, then raced toward her bag for a stethoscope. She placed it on his chest and listened carefully for the faintest murmur without hearing anything before finally giving up. Tru was dead.
The owner of the vegetable cart asked that the body be placed elsewhere, so he could go back and retrieve his vegetables before they were all stolen. There was an argument about whether he should wait for the police, but the owner shouted the loudest and his opinion carried the day. He and the father of one of the children lifted Tru’s body from the cart. The bones clicked and made grinding noises as Tru was placed on the floor in the corner, and the nurse draped a blanket over his body. People made room for the corpse, but otherwise ignored it. The owner of the vegetable cart vanished back onto the street and the nurse continued to administer injections.
Sometime later, Tru coughed.
He was brought to the hospital in Gaborone in the bed of someone’s truck. From the village, it took more than an hour to get there. When he was admitted, there was little the emergency doctor thought he could do. It was a wonder Tru remained alive. His stretcher was left in a crowded hallway while the hospital staff waited for him to die. Maybe minutes, they thought, no more than half an hour. By then, the sun was going down.
Tru didn’t die. He survived overnight, but soon an infection set in. The hospital was short on antibiotics and didn’t want to waste them. Tru’s fever rose and his brain began to swell. Two days passed, then three, and still he lingered somewhere between life and death. By then, Andrew had
been contacted through his listing as next of kin on his ID, and had flown from England to be with his father. Alerted by Andrew, Kim also flew in from Johannesburg, where she was living at the time. An emergency medical flight was arranged, and Tru was flown to a trauma hospital in South Africa. He somehow survived that flight, too, and was given massive infusions of antibiotics while the doctors drained the fluid from his brain. He remained unconscious for eight days. On day nine, his fever broke, and he woke to see Andrew by his bedside.
He stayed in the hospital for seven more weeks while one by one his bones were reset, casted, and healed. Afterward, unable to walk, fighting double vision, and constantly plagued by vertigo, he was moved to a rehabilitation facility.
He was there for nearly three years.
* * *
At the cottage, the firelight flickered in Hope’s eyes like candles, and Tru thought again that she was as beautiful as she’d been so long ago. Maybe more so. In the soft lines near her eyes, he saw wisdom and a hard-won serenity. Her face was full of grace.
He knew the years hadn’t been easy for her. Though she hadn’t spoken much about her marriage to Josh, he guessed she was avoiding the subject to spare not only Tru’s feelings but her own.
Meanwhile, she stared at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s…one of the most terrible things I’ve ever heard. How did you survive?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you really dead?”
“That’s what I was told. I called the nurse at the vaccination clinic about a year after the accident, and she swore that I had no vitals at all. She said that when I coughed, half of the patients in the room screamed. It made me laugh at the time.”
“You’re trying to be funny, but there’s nothing funny about any of that.”
“No,” he agreed. “There wasn’t.” He touched his temple, where his hair had turned white. “I had a traumatic brain injury. Some pieces of my skull were driven into my brain, and for a long time, the wiring was all messed up. After I finally woke, I would talk to Andrew or the doctors, thinking that I was saying one thing, but actually I was saying something entirely different. I’d think I was saying, ‘Good morning,’ and what the doctors would hear was ‘Plums cry on boats.’ It was incredibly frustrating, and because my right arm was so smashed up, I couldn’t write, either. Eventually, some of the wiring started to get straightened out. It was slow going, but even when I could speak and made sense, there were ridiculous gaps in my memory. I’d forget words, usually the simple things. I’d have to say ‘that thing you use to eat, the pokey silver thing you hold in your hand,’ instead of ‘fork.’ While that was occurring, the doctors also weren’t sure whether my paralysis was temporary or permanent. There was a lot of lingering swelling in my spine because of the broken vertebrae, and even after they put in rods, it took a long time for the swelling to go down.”
“Oh, Tru…I wish I would have known,” she said, her voice beginning to crack.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he pointed out.
“Still,” she said, drawing her knees up under the blanket. “That’s when I was trying to find you. I never thought to check the hospitals.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I wish I could have been there for you.”
“I wasn’t alone,” he said. “Andrew would come to visit whenever he had the chance. Kim visited from time to time as well. And Romy somehow learned what had happened. It took him five days on a bus to reach the rehabilitation center, but he stayed for a week. All their visits were hard for me, though. Especially during the first year. I was in a lot of pain, I couldn’t really communicate, and I knew they were as frightened as I was. I knew they had the same questions I did: Would I ever walk again? Would I be able to speak normally? Would I ever be able to live on my own? It was hard enough already, without feeling their worries, too.”
“How long was it until you started getting better?”
“The double vision improved within a month, but everything was still miserably out of focus for maybe six months after that. I was able to sit up in bed after three or four months. Movement in my toes came next, but some of the bones in my legs hadn’t been set properly, so they had to rebreak and reset them. Then there were the brain surgeries, and the spinal surgery, and…it was an experience I’d rather not repeat.”
“When did you realize that you’d be able to walk again?”
“Moving my toes was a good start, but it seemed to take forever to be able to move my feet. And walking was out of the question, at least in the beginning. I had to learn how to stand again, but the muscles in my legs had atrophied and my nerves still weren’t firing correctly. I’d experience intense, shooting pains all the way down the sciatic nerve. Sometimes I’d take a supported step—with bars on either side of me—but then I suddenly wouldn’t be able to move my rear leg at all. Like the connection between my brain and my legs had suddenly been severed. Sometime around the year mark, I was finally able to cross the room with support. It was only ten feet or so and my left foot dragged a bit…but I actually wept. It was the first time I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I knew that if I kept working at it, I might one day be able to leave the clinic.”
“That must have been nightmarish for you.”
“Actually, I have trouble remembering all of it. It feels so distant now…those days and weeks and months and years sort of run together.”
She studied him. “I would never have known any of this unless you told me. You seem…the same as you were back then. I noticed the limp, but it’s so slight…”
“I have to stay active, which means I keep to a rather stringent exercise routine. I walk a lot. That helps with the pain.”
“Is there a lot of pain anymore?”
“Some, but the exercise makes a big difference.”
“It must have been really hard for Andrew to see you like that.”
“It’s still hard for him to talk about how I looked when he saw me in the hospital in Botswana. Or how worried he’d been on the flight, and while waiting for me to wake at the hospital in South Africa. He remained by my side for the duration of my stay at the hospital. I will say that he and Kim kept their wits about them. Had they not made arrangements for a medical flight, I doubt I would have survived. But once I was in the rehabilitation facility, Andrew was always more optimistic than I was whenever he saw me. Because he only saw me once every two or three months, my improvement, to him, was proceeding in leaps and bounds. To me, obviously, it felt altogether different.”
“And you said you were there for three years?”
“In the last year, I no longer lived on-site. I still had hours of therapy every day, but it felt as if I’d been released from jail. I’d gone outside only rarely in the first two years. If I never see another fluorescent tube again in my life, it’ll still be too soon.”
“I feel so bad for you.”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m doing well now. And believe it or not, I met some wonderful people. The physical therapist, the speech therapist, my doctors and nurses. They were outstanding. But it’s a strange period to remember, because it sometimes feels as if I took a three-year pause on actually living my life. Which in a way I did, I suppose.”
She inhaled slowly, as though absorbing the warmth of the fire. Then: “You’re a lot stronger than I probably would have been about the whole thing.”
“Not really. Don’t think for a second that I was unfazed. I was on antidepressants for almost a year.”
“I think that’s understandable,” she said. “You were traumatized in every way.”
For a while they both stared into the fire, Hope’s feet snuggled close to his legs under the blanket. He had the feeling that she was still trying to make sense of the things he’d told her and how close they’d come to losing each other forever. Here and now, the idea felt incomprehensible to him, a near miss too harrowing
to grasp, but then again, everything about today was unfathomable. That they were sitting beside each other on the couch right now felt both surreal and wildly romantic until Tru’s stomach gave an audible growl.
Hope laughed. “You must be starving.” She threw off the blanket. “I’m getting hungry, too. Are you up for some chicken salad? Over some greens? If you’d rather, I also have salmon or shrimp.”
“A salad sounds perfect,” he said.
She stood. “I’ll get it started.”
“Can I help?” Tru asked, stretching.
“I really don’t need much help, but I wouldn’t mind the company.”
Hope draped the blanket on the couch and they carried their wineglasses into the kitchen. As Hope opened the refrigerator, he leaned against the counter, watching her. She pulled out romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and sliced peppers of various colors, and he reflected on what she’d told him that afternoon. The disappointments she’d experienced hadn’t hardened into either anger or bitterness, but rather acceptance that life seldom turns out the way that one imagines it will.
She seemed to sense what he was thinking because she smiled. Reaching into the drawer, she pulled out a small knife, then a cutting board.
“Are you sure I can’t help?” he asked.
“This won’t take long at all, but how about you grab the plates and forks? They’re in the cabinet by the sink.”
At her instruction, he placed the plates next to the cutting board and watched as she sliced the vegetables. Next, she tossed and dressed the salad in a bowl with a little lemon juice and olive oil before arranging two servings on the plates. Finally, she added a scoop of chicken salad to each. He’d imagined being in a kitchen with her a thousand times in the last twenty-four years, just like this.
“Voilà.”
“It looks delicious,” he said, following her to the table.
After putting her plate down, she motioned toward the refrigerator. “Do you want some more wine?” she asked.
“No, thank you. Two glasses is my limit these days.”
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