In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills

by Jennifer Haupt

  Henry jangles the ice in his glass, buying time while Rachel heads toward the guy with a guitar. He studies his face, gray and sagging, in the cloudy mirror behind the bar. Suddenly, there he is, grinning proudly in the front row at his daughter’s high school graduation. His face turns stern, grilling her prom date, and then patient as he sits in the passenger seat of a Buick and explains how to parallel park. He sees the two of them gluing together a seventh-grade science project of ping-pong balls that revolve around a tennis-ball sun. He closes his eyes and imagines her floating next to him; snorkeling in the Bahamas, he’s always wanted to learn; or fishing off Key West like he did with his dad a few summers, before his mom left and Roy Shepherd stopped doing much of anything with him.

  His stomach turns sour with the memory of switching off a snowy TV, and then reading and rereading the same grimy comic books in bed, praying that the bastard would stumble home too plastered to come into his room. Sometimes, Roy Shepherd would sink to his knees, sniveling and begging for forgiveness. But more often he already had his belt drawn, cussing Henry out as if he had been the one responsible for smacking his mom around for years, until she finally got the hell out of there. Henry kept his mouth shut, and kept a baseball bat by his bed. He was big enough, at fifteen, for the football coach to keep trying to wheedle him into playing instead of taking photos from the sidelines and, anyway, Roy Shepherd preferred beating up women who couldn’t fight back.

  Henry cuts a glance at Rachel, still at the other end of the bar. She gives him a quick smile, raises her eyebrows: Anything else? He opens his mouth but his lips are gummy, the sour tang of whiskey now on his tongue. He shakes his head, places his hand flat over his glass. No, nothing else. Nothing at all.

  Outside, the sidewalk is slick, snow crunching under Henry’s feet. He walks at a clip toward his hotel, chin tucked into his coat collar, the bitter cold at odds with the whiskey sloshing, burning, somewhere between his gut and his throat. He races down an alley, braces his hands on a dumpster and pukes. One final heaving shudder rocks his body, the smell of his own self-loathing more rank than anything emanating from the garbage bin. He sees Roy Shepherd, smugly leering at him from the mirror behind the bar as he slipped a fifty-dollar bill under his glass and slunk out the door. There was a reason his old man regarded him with such disdain, a secret they shared: Roy Shepherd was a fucking coward at heart, even with the police badge and the gun. Yeah, boy, we’ve got something in common all right.

  FOURTEEN

  { November 15, 2000: Nairobi Airport }

  A WARM CURRENT OF BODIES SWEEPS RA-chel down the narrow hallway leading from the plane and into the airport, ebbing out into the terminal, leaving her exposed and alone. She’s exhausted, unable to process the blur of signs on the surrounding shops, and stops to get her bearings through smell: curry, strong tobacco, pizza, a swirl of floral perfume, coffee. Definitely coffee. She follows the aroma into a nearby café and instead orders tea to settle her stomach from flying. It comes dark and thick with a creamy skin, more like a latte, and is sweet and soothing going down. She double-checks the contents of a manila envelope in the front pocket of her daypack—boarding pass for Kigali, passport, email from Lillian, and the postcards from her father—and then heads back into the terminal, ready for the last leg of her journey.

  The international transit lounge is a labyrinth of people sprawled out on cracked beige chairs. The floor sucks at the soles of her black high-tops as she searches for a seat. She glances at a light-skinned black man whose soft features are almost boyish except for the grooved parentheses framing his mouth. He’s obviously checking her out, his sunglasses dark but plenty transparent, bobbing his head slightly as if listening to a song only he can hear. American surf bum, she decides: the faded yellow UCLA T-shirt and Reef sandals are giveaways. Probably waiting for a buddy he’s meeting up with to chase waves in Morocco.

  “Go ahead, sit,” he says, swiping a book off the seat next to him, a little too eager.

  “That’s okay…” But the computer bag on Rachel’s frozen shoulder slides off, like it has a mind of its own. Her abdominal muscles tense protectively, out of habit, as she bends to secure the bag between her knees. It’s been two months since the miscarriage, but she still sometimes feels the echo of tiny kicks against her ribs. The lounge is eerily quiet except for a cough here, snoring there. She glances at her watch. Did she reset it in London? Is it six or seven hours later in New York?

  “My husband,” she says, producing her phone from her jacket as evidence that she’s not in the market for a travel buddy. “He’ll be expecting—”

  “No, yeah, sure,” Surfer Dude interrupts. “He’ll want to know you arrived safely. Go ahead, call.”

  Rachel curls into the wall for privacy. Her heart sinks into the place where she knows Mick’s not remotely expecting to hear from her. He stoically drove her to the airport, like it was his duty, both of them quietly studying the traffic. The polite patter of flat optimism had tapped out weeks ago. We’ll work it out. After the New Year. We both need time. Time to think. Heal. The thought of six weeks apart was a relief. And yet she stood at the airport curb, her fingers warm on the spot where he had pecked her cheek, moments after he drove away. A part of her had hoped he would ask her to stay, not because he wanted to try and have another baby but because he wanted her.

  Surfer Dude is eyeing her, so she presses the call button. “Honey, it’s me,” she says brightly as voicemail picks up. “Well, I made it to Nairobi. My flight to Kigali doesn’t leave for three hours, so call me back when you get this. Whenever. Or, I’ll call you from Rwanda.” She snaps shut the phone and places it to her temple. Call me.

  Surfer Dude clears his throat. “You can call on a landline from Rwanda. No cell reception,” he says, as if listening in on her conversation is entirely acceptable. “Still using walkie-talkies.”

  Rachel begins rifling through her bag for the latest National Enquirer, a guilty pleasure reserved for sick days in bed and plane rides. Surfer Dude is either flirting or simply killing time, she can’t decide which one as she leafs through the magazine. She studies him out of the corner of her eye. He’s handsome in an off-handed way, lanky frame but not exactly tall, square jaw, a bump on the bridge of his nose that seems like an afterthought. He’s staring into space, tapping a finger against his knee. Probably keeping time to that song in his head. His smell makes her glance up: something sweet. Bright in contrast to the stale, dank room. “Have you been?” she asks. “Rwanda?”

  He smiles, seemingly grateful for the opening. “I’m on that flight to Kigali. I live there.”

  “Live there?”

  “Going on nine years.”

  “What brought you there?”

  “I went to volunteer with the Red Cross, one thing led to another…” He shrugs. “Long story. You got three hours?”

  Rachel flips shut the magazine and holds out her hand. “Yeah, I do. Rachel Shepherd.”

  “Daniel Tucker.”

  “Nice to meet you, Daniel.”

  “It’s Tucker. Daniel is my dad.”

  His grip is firm and reassuring. Rachel reclaims her hand, eyes dropping to his UCLA T-shirt. “So…Tucker. You’re from California?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, but that was a long time ago.” He removes his glasses, his eyes are a soft green. Sad.

  Rachel makes her own eyes vacant, fumbles in her bag, a hand landing on her CD player and headphones. “I really need to rest before our flight, time change and all.”

  “Sure, we can talk on the plane. I’ll watch your stuff while you catch some Zs.”

  “Thanks, I’ll just listen to a song or two.” Rachel clicks on Ella Fitzgerald and tips back her head against the wall. The song’s barely begun though, it seems, when someone gently taps her awake.

  “Excuse me, miss,” apologizes the agent who checked her into the transit lounge earlier. “Boarding for your flight to Kigali begins shortly.”

  Rachel snaps wide awake. She spie
s the Updike book that Tucker was reading on the vinyl chair: both he and her computer bag are gone. Shit. “The guy who was sitting here…” Stupid, stupid, stupid, trusting him. She locks onto the agent’s placid eyes as the room becomes louder, the air thicker. “Tallish, thin, a blue bandana. Have you seen him? He took my bag.”

  “You have two options, miss. Board your plane, or go to the security office and file a stolen property report. The next flight to Kigali leaves tomorrow at the same time.”

  An oily film slicks over Rachel’s face as she gets up and tugs at the suitcase wedged under her seat. Take all the time you need. Mick’s voice was so quiet when she first asked if six weeks away was too long. A white flag of defeat. The quietness settled into their relationship, like a deep unnatural sleep. The suitcase wheels seem to catch on each groove in the tile floor. “C’mon, damn it,” Rachel hisses. She’s not ready to give up. Lillian will be waiting for her in Kigali. She’ll confirm that it’s Henry Shepherd who is somehow broken, couldn’t make his marriage work or be a decent parent. He’s the broken one.

  She squints bleary-eyed down two flights of steps leading to the main corridor, rubs her aching shoulder. A gentle shove is all it takes and her luggage loudly thumps its way to the landing below. She runs down the stairs, kneels to assess the damage, and then looks up when someone calls her name. Tucker is leaning over the railing.

  “It kind of got away from me,” Rachel says with an edge. “Hey, my computer!”

  Tucker bounds down the steps two at a time, an orange duffle slung over one shoulder and her slim canvas bag on the other. “I went for coffee, came back and you’d split. Your bag was at the end of the row where we were sitting. Sorry, no laptop.”

  Rachel unzips the too-light bag and shakily pulls out the manila envelope, relief draining her of the strength needed to hang onto it. The contents scatter across the dirty tile floor. She scoops up the postcards, holding them to her chest.

  “Let me help.” Tucker offers her his hand. Roses. Weird, but that’s the smell. Rachel takes a deep breath as her fingers interlock with his.

  “The plane to Kigali,” she says shakily, “I have to get on it. I’m meeting someone.”

  “I know.” Tucker squeezes her hand. “I’m your ride to Kwizera.”

  RACHEL IS THE LAST ONE off the plane in Kigali. She stops on the metal staircase down to the tarmac and hangs onto the rail, momentarily dizzy from the bright sun and balmy breeze. Real air! After thirty-six hours of planes and airports, it’s intoxicating. She inhales long, greedy breaths and surveys the surroundings. For an international airport, it’s surprisingly small: a single runway lined with scrawny palm trees that look sadly out of place. The sunlight is trapped above the silver belly of clouds that forecast rain, but in the distance there’s some patchy hope: the vague outline of reddish-brown rolling hills. She shades her eyes to scout out Tucker, who disappeared from his seat next to her shortly after the plane took off. He said he was going into the cockpit to chat up the pilot, a friend of his, and would meet up with her when they landed.

  She doesn’t see him at the gate or while going through customs. Funny, she thinks while waiting for her checked bag, she’s usually the one asking questions, in bartender-shrink mode whether pouring drinks or not, but Tucker got her talking about moving to New York by herself straight out of high school. She had wanted to escape from staid suburban Jacksonville, loved the energy of the city, the possibilities, even though it meant sharing a one-bedroom walk-up with two other women. She knows hardly anything about Surfer Dude, except that he sometimes lives at Kwizera and knew her father, but not well. When she asked for details about Henry Shepherd, all he would say was, “That’s Lillian’s story to tell.”

  Tucker is leaning against the hood of a green Jeep parked at the airport curb. Rachel drops her bag a few yards away and studies him: His face is tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, elbows winged out. His skin has a light coppery glow compared to the dark-skinned Africans milling about, his features more closely resembling her thin European nose and lips. She rubs her bare arms, feels almost naked. There’s a hushed hum as people walk by and stare: Mzunga… White person. That much, she understands. It’s unnerving to think Surfer Dude is the closest thing she has to a friend here.

  “Over here!” Tucker waves, and then slides behind the wheel. Rachel doesn’t budge. “How do you know Lillian?” she asks. “I mean, why did she send you to get me?”

  Tucker looks genuinely confused.

  “It’s just…well, you could be anyone.”

  “So could you.” Tucker leans over to open the passenger door. “Tell you what, let’s do this twenty questions thing on the road. If we don’t get going now, we’ll be driving in the dark. Trust me, not good.”

  Rachel is met by a lush wall of perfumed air as she gets into the Jeep. There are a half-dozen thorny bushes in the backseat, dripping with red buds. “Roses,” she says. That’s what she smelled in the airport. Mystery solved.

  “Lillian’s a nut for all kinds, and you can’t find American Beauties in Rwanda,” Tucker says. “My friend let me stash these in the cockpit.”

  American Beauties. Rachel makes a mental note. “What else does Lillian like, besides flowers? What’s she like?”

  “She’s…” Tucker tilts his head one way and then the other. He gives up with a shrug.

  “So, how do you know her?”

  “That’s at least twenty questions rolled into one. The short answer is that Kwizera is my home when I’m not working in Kigali. The longer version requires a bottle of banana gin and a lime.”

  There’s a single paved road leading out of the airport, with a sign pointing toward Kigali. Tucker turns the other way. The land is cracked and dry, with few hints of green in the yards of the intermittent compact cement and brick houses. Rachel runs her fingers across the pane of the window, as if that might erase the dust clinging to other side. “How’s Lillian going to keep those flowers alive?” she wonders aloud.

  “The land’s different up north, away from the city,” Tucker explains. “There’s still clay but you can break it up, mix it in with richer soil from the mountains.”

  “The volcanic ash,” Rachel says to show she’s done her homework.

  “That, and the bodies.”

  The warm air turns thick and hot; Rachel can’t get enough into her lungs. He’s talking about the genocide, of course. Hundreds of thousands of bodies. Her father left during the genocide. Disappeared. That’s how Lillian put it. “Some people escaped, didn’t they?” she asks.

  “There’s only one road, through the mountains, that leads into Uganda and the Hutus had it locked down tight,” Tucker says. “There was a stream of people—entire families—mostly walking. Anyone with a Tutsi ID, or without any ID at all, was shot. The Hutus hunted them down like animals in the forests and the rivers, where people hid underwater breathing through reeds.”

  Rachel cracks her window and cups a hand over her mouth and nose, but the dust sifts through her fingers; it’s everywhere. Her eyes, her mouth. Lungs. The smell of roses is now cloying, almost nauseating, in the heat. What did her father find here? What kept him here? What finally made him leave? Her eyes sting; she wipes the grit off her lips with two fingers, rubbing smooth the dry cracks. This is the question she most wants to ask Lillian: How did her father disappear? And Tucker keeps right on talking. Bodies stacked like firewood along this highway that runs from Kigali north into Uganda…people hiding under the dead…nobody escaped.

  “Slow down a little?” she asks weakly as Tucker takes a hairpin turn, quite possibly interrupting him. She barely hears her own voice above the rumbling of the Jeep, or maybe it’s just the pounding of blood in her ears.

  “Yeah, sure.” Tucker offers a slight smile and takes a hand off the wheel. His touch on her bare shoulder, barely a brush of his fingers, is jolting. She feels exactly how tense her body is. Like a spring trap. He squints through the dusty windshield as if searching for something to
say. “The land, the people…despite everything, it’s all so beautiful. Still.” And then he’s quiet, either lost in his thoughts or he figures there’s nothing else that needs to be explained as the Jeep rattles into the steep foothills.

  He’s right, the landscape changes dramatically as they continue to climb, turning from brown and gray to a palette of greens, some hues that Rachel has never seen before, mixed with sienna-red clay, amber grass, the light and shade of the clouds passing overhead. The dust dissipates and there’s a slight cool undercurrent in the breeze, so she rolls her window completely down and takes in the scenery: tiered foothills ribboned with banana trees, and lower bushes thick with white clusters of flowers that must be coffee or tea.

  Women wrapped in swaths of colorful fabric, faces shaded by wide-brimmed straw hats, till the earth or fill baskets. Some have babies swaddled to their backs; all have children working by their sides. The younger children shout and wave as the Jeep chugs by, the older ones stare, and the women continue working. Rachel imagines her father, camera to his eye, capturing all of this.

  An hour later, the road flattens out into the first real town they’ve come across since leaving the airport. The houses are made of mud plaster with sticks woven into the walls. Young children chase each other through narrow yards of dirt and scrubby grass, weaving past women hanging laundry on low wooden fences and stirring metal pots over fire pits in front yards. Other young mothers sit in groups of two or three in the patchy shade of tiny porches, babies squirming in their arms. Rachel leans out the window to inhale something spicy and sweet in the air. She so wants to be swept away by all this, as her father surely was.

  The Jeep stops and a handful of children approach, calling “Muraho, Doctor Tucker, Muraho!”