So they waited, watching the sun sink and the big jet planes coasting into the airport.
Mariama sat with the mother and daughter. The little girl was worse. Though she seemed to be awake, and would nod or shake her head when asked questions, she rarely opened her eyes.
When the sun dipped below the horizon, the captain aimed the Sophe at the beach. The houses and hotels were lit like stars, constellations, and still the jets came in from Portugal and England and Italy. The same countries that supplied boats and planes to keep Africans out of the Canary Islands sent thousands of their own citizens to the same place.
The woman looked down at her daughter, then back up. “Will you help us get to shore?”
Mariama paused and then said, “Yes. Of course.”
The woman’s smile reflected the light of the hotels, the silvery water. “Then we will finally be safe.”
Mariama thought, No.
No, we won’t.
* * *
WHEN THEY WERE perhaps fifty feet from the beach, the captain brought the boat to a halt. Over the subdued mutter of the idling engine, they could hear music. But the beach itself seemed deserted.
“The tide is low, and the water is shallow,” the captain said. “I cannot go in any farther.”
One by one, stiff on their feet, the men and women clambered over the side of the little fishing boat and splashed into the water. Some made little sounds of fear as they went, but none hesitated. They could see their goal just ahead.
No one said good-bye.
Soon just the three of them and the captain remained on board. “Hurry!” he said. “Or I will take you back with me.”
Mariama went over first, landing in warm, calm water that reached barely to her waist. The woman, struggling, lifted her daughter over the railing and into her arms. Getting a grip on the limp figure, Mariama felt the girl’s rounded, swollen belly bump against her side.
She thought: If I were truly brave, I would drop you now. I would swim away and let you drown.
It would be a blessing.
Instead she kept the girl’s head above the surface as the mother splashed into the water. Then, together, they made their slow way through the placid ocean and up onto the beach.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER Mariama had showered and changed into a colorful print skirt and a dark blue blouse and was sitting in the living room of a small house in Fuerteventura. The house’s residents—mother, father, and five daughters—perched on chairs and the sofa and stared at her.
They were making sure she was eating well, as they’d promised Mariama’s father they would.
Seydou Honso might have been confined to Senegal, but he still had plenty of friends elsewhere, including here. People who owed him allegiance (or favors) and were willing to hide his refugee daughter from the authorities and make sure she was dressed and fed.
Especially if Seydou paid, which he had. Money needed no passport to travel.
Mariama was grateful, but impatient. She wanted to move on right away. The sick girl on the boat had shown her how much she needed to hurry.
But the family told her that her transport onward wouldn’t be departing for three days. There was nothing they could do to speed it up. And anyway, as the mother pointed out, she would do no good if she died from exhaustion or starvation on the way.
So she stayed, and she rested, and she ate well. The fish-and-tomato stew they called tieboudienne, the baobab drink bouyi, and other Senegalese specialties that made her miss Mpack with an ache that filled her chest.
She spent most of her time thinking about the enormity of the task that lay ahead. Every once in a while, when no one was looking, she took the locket from around her neck and popped it open.
Just looking at it gave her strength.
* * *
LATE THE THIRD night, she was woken by a knock on the door of her bedroom. She’d been dreaming of the boat, and even when she awoke, disoriented, she felt like her bed was rocking on treacherous swells.
One of the daughters leaned in through the doorway and said in an apologetic tone, “You asked to be called if there were any messages for you.”
Mariama said, “Of course. Thank you. I will be right there.”
After washing her face, she followed the girl into the kitchen. A computer sat on the table, its screen bright in the dimness. Without a word, the girl turned and left. They were willing to shelter her, these nice people, but they didn’t want to know a thing about her plans.
She sat down in front of the computer, marveling. Just days ago, on the boat, she’d been dangling like a puppet over the very edge of the world. How easily she could have fallen off, sharing the fate of the people in the doomed dhow.
And yet here she was, all the miracles of the modern age at her fingertips.
It was absurd.
She bent over the screen. The name of the person who’d sent the message was unfamiliar, but the code she and her father had agreed on was there. The message was from him.
Only there was no message. Just a link. Compressing her lips, Mariama clicked on it.
At first it still didn’t make any sense. It was just an article about the death of some American expatriate in Tanzania. Only when Mariama read through did she begin to understand what it meant and what its consequences might be.
She felt cold. While she sat here, events were spinning on—and out of control—without her.
She took in a long breath to calm herself. Then leaned forward over the keyboard and began to compose a message of her own.
NINE
Manhattan
TREY COULD BLAME his relentless yen to travel on his parents.
His father, Thomas, was a specialist in respiratory diseases, but unlike most doctors he’d never chosen a sedentary life at a hospital, HMO, or university. Instead, as if something were chasing him, he stayed on the move, spending a few months here, a year there.
He’d had a willing conspirator in Trey’s mother, Katherine. She was a writer, and her ongoing series of columns for Adventure Travel magazine, detailing life on the run with a husband and two young sons, had proven very popular.
By the time he was fifteen, Trey had visited more than thirty countries. If his family never stayed put long enough for him to make friends, to learn what it was like to live in human society instead of just skim over it, he didn’t mind. He was sure that the trade-off was worth it.
His brother, Christopher, disagreed. “You just don’t know any different,” he told Trey when they were teenagers. “You’ve never learned how satisfying it is to grow roots.”
“You haven’t, either,” Trey pointed out.
“That’s true.” Christopher thought about it. “But there’s a difference. As soon as I can, I’m going to. Deep roots.”
And then Christopher went out and did it. Grew roots. When he reached the age of eighteen, he went back to Australia, always his favorite among the places they’d visited, got a job, and settled down in Port Douglas, Queensland. Eventually he fell in love with a woman there and got married.
Just like normal people did.
Christopher and Margie still lived in Port Douglas and had produced two children. Twin girls, whom Trey had seen only a handful of times over the years.
On his most recent visit, three years earlier, he found himself driven to explain himself to his brother. They were sitting on the porch of Christopher’s house at dusk, drinking Fourex Gold and watching a steady stream of flying foxes winging past, dark silhouettes against a celadon sky.
In halting words, he tried to describe why he couldn’t stay still. How the world seemed like such a fragile place, and that by going where it was most fragile, most endangered, he might be able to make a difference.
Christopher smiled at him over his beer. “Dad used to use exactly the same excuse when he dra
gged us around.”
Trey was struck silent.
“But that’s okay.” Christopher leaned his head back and looked up at the darkening sky. “He was who he was, and you are what you are.” He laughed. “At least you’re not inflicting your compulsions on your own kids.”
Right then, the twins came home from a play date, and Christopher’s face lit up. He looked happy in a way that made Trey feel ashamed of himself.
But not for long. The next morning he was off again, spinning round the world, just as his father had.
* * *
WOULD THOMAS AND Katherine have been proud of him? He liked to believe so, but he’d never know for sure.
Early in his career, Thomas had seen the field of respiratory medicine morph into something almost unrecognizable. Every year seemed to see the emergence of a new or resurgent respiratory disease. AIDS-associated pneumonias. Legionnaires’ disease. SARS. Bird flu. Even tuberculosis, once considered nearly eradicated, came roaring back, more deadly than ever.
Not all the diseases sprouting like vile mushrooms all over the world had names. Some unidentified ones were so ferocious—and so little understood—that the physicians hurrying to study and treat them knew that doing so might be suicidal.
When Trey was in his second year of college, Thomas Gilliard was summoned to Guangdong Province in China to investigate one such newly hatched disease. Katherine went along, as she always did.
Three days after seeing his first patient, Thomas fell ill. His lungs filled with fluid, then with blood, and less than forty-eight hours later he was dead.
Katherine had been warned to stay away from him, but ignored this advice. Even before Thomas died, she’d begun to experience the same symptoms. Her death came three days after his.
And Trey, world traveler, just nineteen, found himself accompanying his parents’ bodies back to the United States.
Back home. As if they’d ever truly had a home.
* * *
“YOU LOOK LIKE a poster for Reading Is Fundamental,” Jack said.
Trey looked up. The open books before him bore titles like A Young Man’s Grand Adventures in Afrique Ouest Français (Colonel Fitzwilliam Wallis, First Bengal Lancers, Ret., 1878) and Into the Jungles of the Camerouns with Gun and Knitting Needles (Lady Mary Maurice Smith, Women’s Goodwill Society, 1904). Books that were mirrors of a time when the world was an empty map, where grand adventures were still possible.
“Found nothing, huh?” Jack said.
Trey shook his head. No mention of monkey-killing wasps in the rain forests of Senegal or anywhere else the peripatetic Victorian authors had traveled.
He lifted the book by Lady Mary and watched as fragments of the deteriorating, yellow-orange pages drifted down onto his lap. Books like these were another thing in the process of vanishing, unnoticed and unmourned. When they were gone—and libraries were relentlessly clearing shelf space to make room for computer terminals—they’d be gone forever.
If something wasn’t at the tip of your keyboarding fingers, it wouldn’t exist.
Jack, who considered Trey sentimental about such things, moved easily back and forth between the two worlds. Entirely comfortable in the wilderness, chasing after new species on mountaintops, in swamps and forests, he was equally content traveling across time and space on the Internet.
He saw Trey looking at the paper dandruff on his lap and said, “Get used to it. Scientists can’t survive without technology.”
“Then I guess it’s lucky,” Trey said, “that I’m no scientist.”
“Lucky for us, at least.” Jack’s gaze moved to his computer. “Come here.”
When Trey stood behind him, he gestured at the screen.
“Here’s what I’ve done,” he said. “Should I send it out?”
He’d created a kind of garish advertisement, like something that might have touted an old-time Coney Island sideshow. At its center was Jack’s drawing of the wasp. Above the illustration were the words “Have You Seen This Bug?” in big red-and-white letters, and the space below contained a description of the wasp’s size and where Trey had seen it, a smaller sketch of one of the colony’s mounds with a wasp perched on top of it, contact information, and a warning (“Dangerous! Do not approach.”) that Trey was sure would be ignored.
“Who will receive this?” he asked.
“Well.” Jack took a second to think about it. “I’ll send it to every bug hunter I know, for starters. Every entomology department in every university, of course. Nature-travel and bird-tour companies. I’ll also be posting it on my bug blog, Facebook and Twitter of course, my Tumblr and Pinterest—”
He grinned at Trey’s expression. “Social-media sites where not only scientists, but real people, will see it. That’s the key, I think. I want someone I’ll never meet to tell someone else I’ll never meet, ‘Hey, doesn’t this look like the wasp you stepped on when we were playing tennis at Club Med this spring?’”
Trey was silent.
“Gotta look for help,” Jack said. “Way of the world.”
After a moment, Trey nodded. You couldn’t always do everything yourself. He understood that.
Hated, but understood.
“Send it,” he said.
* * *
SOON AFTERWARD, HE headed back to his apartment in Brooklyn’s upscale Park Slope neighborhood. His parents had bought it once he and Christopher grown, a place on the ground floor of a four-story yellow-brick building just a few blocks from Prospect Park. Worth a fortune these days because of the neighborhood, but it was nothing glamorous: one bedroom, one bath, a foldout couch in the living/dining room, separated by a counter from the tiny kitchen.
More a place for stopping off to do laundry between trips than a real home.
After they’d died, Trey and Christopher had inherited it jointly. Christopher, just twenty-two but already settled in Australia, had wanted nothing to do with it, even refusing Trey’s offer to buy out his half.
“You sell it, give me my share,” he’d said. “Till then, feel free to live there.”
So that was what Trey did, as much as he lived anywhere.
* * *
HE SAT AT the little table in the dining area and powered up his laptop. Despite Jack’s jibes, he knew his way around the Internet.
He had no choice. The ability to use a computer was nearly as essential to his (tenuous) relationship with his employers as his skill at returning from the wilderness with data no one else could obtain.
He got no pleasure from computer literacy. But all Jack’s talk about social media had reminded him that days had passed since he’d been online. With a sigh, he logged on.
And then, right away, almost deleted the most important e-mail of his life because it looked like spam.
It had come from a travel company in the Canary Islands. Unsurprisingly, Trey had ended up on countless travel e-mail lists, and at first he assumed this one was just another advertisement.
Except for the subject heading. It didn’t advertise cheap vacations in Majorca, time shares on Grand Canary, easy hops to Casablanca.
It just said: “This time . . .”
Trey looked at it and thought, What does that mean?
So instead of deleting the e-mail unread, he opened it.
It contained three short lines of text. The first said, “. . . you don’t have to flee.”
The second: “Sheila Connelly.”
And the third: “Find her.”
Trey sat looking at the screen. Thinking.
Then he reached for his phone and called Jack.
TEN
DESPITE THE HOUR, Jack was still in his office. No surprise to Trey, who knew that Jack frequently stayed at work long after the museum closed, even through the night.
This had always been true, but even more so since his divorce had elim
inated his main reason for setting foot outside.
Not that he was ever alone in the vast building. Jack was far from the only museum scientist at work during the dead of night, when the streets outside were quiet but for an occasional bus or taxi, and even Central Park itself seemed to sleep. You could concentrate better, they believed. Gain perspective that was impossible in the glaring light and endless noise of the city day.
Trey didn’t need convincing. It was his favorite time at the museum as well. With only scattered emergency bulbs casting a feeble glow, the tigers and gorillas in their darkened dioramas, the shadowy dinosaur skeletons, the great blue whale dominating its ocean room, all managed to capture some of the magic—some of the awe—of the living creatures they evoked.
Plus, when he visited at night, the place was deserted. That was always a good thing.
* * *
ONLY THE COMPUTER screen and a bumblebee-shaped child’s night-light illuminated the office. Jack had opened a window, and Trey felt the night’s cold, damp exhalation as a prickle on his skin. Taking a breath and holding it, he could detect, at the very edge of his hearing, a series of staccato, high-pitched cries: the contact calls of a flock of birds—he heard orioles, tanagers, and grosbeaks—migrating north over the city.
Trey had forwarded the e-mail to Jack. Now they stood looking at it again, though they’d both long since memorized the brief message.
“It’s Mariama,” Trey said.
Jack frowned. He’d been frowning since Trey arrived. “And you’re sure of this how, Sherlock?”
“The word ‘flee,’” Trey said.
Jack’s frown deepened into a scowl. “But why go through”—he gestured at the screen—“this gobbledygook? Why use someone else’s account? Why not just say, ‘Hey, Trey. It’s Mariama. How ya doin’?”
Trey said, “I don’t know. Maybe she’s protecting herself . . . or someone else.”
“And maybe you’re grasping at straws, Scarecrow.”
Invasive Species Page 7