Tucker opens his door to high-five each of the kids. “There’s no hospital in town so they come to Kwizera,” he explains. “I run a little clinic there a few days each week with a doctor and a few nurses from the clinic where I work in Kigali.”
“So, you’re a doctor,” Rachel says skeptically. From surfer dude to doctor—didn’t see that one coming.
“I was burnt out after the first year of my residency at UCLA, took a break to come here and volunteer with the Red Cross.” Tucker digs through a paper sack he grabbed from the back seat. “I finished up my residency in Kigali. Never did figure out a reason to go back.” He produces a handful of small wooden giraffes and hippos for the children, who regard him as if he’s a magician. He leans toward a bold boy who has stepped forward. “Go ahead, take one,” he says, and then to Rachel, “I kind of cleaned out a shop at the airport.”
She places a hand to her throat. The necklace she found in her mom’s things had animal beads just like these.
The other children step forward, one at a time, to accept their gift from Tucker and bow. Some deposit a swift kiss on his cheek. The last one, a small girl, leans into the Jeep to hug him, giggling as if on a dare, and then the group scatters.
Tucker starts to put the bag in the back seat, and then stops. “Maybe you can give me a female perspective on something.” He pulls out a bundle of white tissue paper and carefully unwraps a necklace with tiny porcelain butterflies fluttering on a delicate silver chain. “Do you think a seven-year-old girl would dig this?” he asks. “Seems sort of cheesy, but my Rosie’s a sucker for butterflies.”
“It’s perfect,” Rachel says, brushing pastel wings with her finger. “Any little girl would love it. Rosie. She’s your daughter?”
“I like to think she’s mine.” Tucker loops the necklace over the rearview mirror. “Not by blood, but by everything that really matters. Y’know?”
“Of course.” Rachel’s hand goes to her stomach, as if to catch the threads of sadness unspooling throughout her body.
“I’m sorry,” Tucker says, “about your loss. The baby. I can see why it would bring up stuff about when your dad left. Losing him. Finding him.”
“Lillian told you?” Rachel asks. “Wait…my emails. She showed you?”
Tucker fumbles with his keys in the ignition.
“Those were personal.” Rachel pinches the bridge of her nose. The words weren’t meant for Tucker, not even really for Lillian. They were meant for her father. There’s a tap on her windowsill: the girl who hugged Tucker is holding out her palm, offering the carved hippo.
“For you, Madame. Bien?”
“Merci. Très bien.” Rachel squeezes the girl’s hand as she accepts the gift, and then looks at Tucker. “Sorry I blew up. I’m sure you were simply trying…” What? She’s not sure.
“Not a problem. My bad.” He offers the girl another figurine and turns the key in the ignition. “Tell you what, I’ll make it up to you. I know a place not far from here that will blow your mind. Guaranteed.”
Tucker pulls off the road, onto a dirt path that Rachel would never have suspected leads anywhere. The winding path descends, the hills rising steeper, and the houses are spread farther apart. In some of the scrubby front yards there’s a single goat tied to a post or a cow so thin it would hardly be worth slaughtering. The Jeep stops at the edge of a marshy field; an emerald lake reflects the surrounding emerald hills. “This is it,” Tucker says. “Lake Kivu.”
“Well, you’ve succeeded in blowing my mind,” Rachel says as she gets out of the Jeep. It’s the same lake that’s depicted on one of the postcards from her father. Pink-winged geese glide among oversized purple lilies that bow over the water like ladies-in-waiting. She can practically picture Henry Shepherd paddling in his canoe.
“Come on.” Tucker’s already heading toward the field. “Sometimes there’s a boardwalk leading to the lake. Hasn’t been raining much lately, it should be here.”
Rachel follows him out onto a succession of thin wooden planks, jumping over oozing mud from one section to the next, her heart beating fast as she loses her balance and grabs his hand. Halfway across the boardwalk, Tucker stops abruptly. “Bingo, zebras at ten o’clock,” he whispers, pointing to three large animals and two smaller ones approaching the lake. The family is so close that Rachel hears their hooves sloshing through the mucky grass. She starts to crouch, but there’s nowhere to hide.
“Relax,” Tucker says. “They don’t know to be afraid of us. Just keep a polite distance.”
The air vibrates with a series of high-pitched beeps and whistles as a spray of vibrant green and orange parakeets arcs overhead. The zebras, startled, lope away as quickly as they appeared. “That was a bonus,” Tucker says, shading his face with his hand as he appraises the sky. “Welcome to Rwanda.”
Rachel stands still, barely daring to breathe and disturb the magic around them, this vortex of energy that dozens of tiny wings have stirred up. This is what her father discovered in Africa, what he fell in love with here. She knows it. For a brief moment, she knows him again.
FIFTEEN
YOU’VE GOTTA BE HUNGRY,” TUCKER SAYS, slowing down like he’s looking for a restaurant in the middle of nowhere among the mud-brick houses with tin roofs. She keeps insisting she’s not hungry, not tired, not scared out of her gourd to have the tables turned and be the one whose skin color turns everyone’s heads as they drive by. “It’s not that they’re rude, just honest,” he says as they pass two boys trying to herd a steer down the road with sticks. They don’t return her wave, but instead wear their frank curiosity in a squint and a frown. “They’re easy to read. No bullshit.”
He glances at Rachel. She has a pretty convincing poker face, but he notices her hands: one tightly fisted around the phone in her lap, not that her husband can answer her SOS. That thing is worthless here. The other hand grips the door handle, prepared for a quick escape. She’s nervous. Guarded. Has no idea how easy she is to read. When he first came here, he wore the same frozen half-smile that’s precariously clinging to her face. He was terrified people might see how completely unsure he was of what he was supposed to be doing at the hospital in Kigali where the Red Cross placed him as a medical technician.
Growing up, Tucker had heard the story of his father’s success, a story that made Horatio Alger look like a slacker, innumerable times. Daniel Tucker, Sr. had busted his ass to pull himself out of Watts in the early sixties and earned the UCLA trifecta: pre-med and med school scholarships, and then the first black residency in cardiology at the prestigious university. It had always been expected that “little Tucker” would follow in his dad’s footsteps, like yet another reward or reparation for all of the dude’s hard work and sacrifice.
You have no idea, his dad would say, wagging his head. Clearly, his disappointment in his only son saddened him beyond words. Tucker’s dad seemed to want him to struggle, like he had, even though their split-level in Brentwood was a million miles away from Watts. Struggle was the last thing that Tucker wanted. He kept his mouth shut, his grades up, and his room clean. He followed the rules, except for a brief stoned and stupid period in high school. He just wanted to be fucking good. Isn’t that all every kid wants? Isn’t that what his dad wanted of him?
It wasn’t until the last year of medical school at UCLA that Tucker began to question the gift of this life his dad had given him. After a full day of classes and studying into the evening, instead of sleeping he would drive to Playa del Ray, away from the city lights, and climb up a lifeguard tower. He spent hours in that hard wooden chair, surveying the silver-crested waves rolling in and crashing against the boulders at the far end of the sandy strip. He tried to imagine who he might be if it were his choice, and always came up blank. He didn’t have a clue. The question haunted him. And then, a year into his residency in cardiac surgery, the question paralyzed him. He stood over a steaming warm body, staring at a human heart pumping blood, frozen by the knowledge that he wasn’t sure why�
�or if—he wanted to be a surgeon or even a physician.
He couldn’t quit. Daniel Senior didn’t raise a quitter. His mom assured him that the uncertainty was merely a phase, they didn’t need to bother his dad. Three months later, after an incident involving stolen supplies donated to a free clinic, Tucker’s chief resident requested his departure. He suggested that the pressure of being a surgeon wasn’t for him. Tucker did not disagree. He signed up with the Red Cross and came here, to the heart of struggle, to find out not just what kind of doctor he wanted to be but what kind of man.
“Shouldn’t we skip lunch and head straight to Kwizera?” Rachel says. “I mean, Lillian’s waiting for us. Right?”
“There’s a café back this way a bit.” Tucker waves a hand evasively out the window and turns onto the main road, back in the direction of Kigali. He needs time, just a little more time, to let Lillian digest the phone message he left from the airport payphone. I’m coming home with a guest, Rachel Shepherd. We’ll be there around sundown. It’s the right thing to do. You’ll see.
He can practically smell the tension as Rachel asks why he’s turning back—she’s just said she’s not hungry. “It’s around here somewhere,” he mumbles, slowing down even though they’re still miles away from anything resembling a town. The Jeep lurches as they hit a deep pothole. He reflexively makes his arm a safety bar between Rachel and the dashboard.
“You’ll like this place, it has character.” Tucker offers a smile and she returns it. She wants to trust him, needs to trust somebody. Who else does she have? He suspects the phone in her lap wouldn’t ring, even if there was cell reception.
The butterfly necklace hanging from the rearview mirror has slid down against the window, the ceramic beads clanking together. Rachel reaches up to hook it back onto the mirror. “Wouldn’t want your little girl’s necklace to get chipped,” she says. “What does Rosie like besides butterflies?”
“She’s got this lion, Kingston. He’s raggedy and is missing an eye, but she won’t go to sleep without him.”
“I had a stuffed dog, Old Gold. He was my protector.”
“Rose needs lion-sized protection. Between Kingston and Lillian, she has her bases covered when I’m in Kigali.”
“Sounds like a pretty tight family.”
“Yeah, it is.” Tucker cuts a quick glance toward Rachel. Maybe he’s not giving her enough credit. She might understand why he brought her here. “I owe Lillian a lot,” he says. “She took in Rosie when she was an infant. Hell, she took me in too.”
Rachel lets go of the door handle and turns her full attention toward him as he recalls how he and a nurse delivered the premature baby together. Solange. He still can’t say her name aloud.
He hasn’t even told Lillian that Solange was his fiancée and they thought of the baby as their own for two months, but it seemed like much longer. They fed and bathed her, cared for her, while her mother lay in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask over her face and fought a losing battle against tuberculosis.
He clenches his fist, tightening the thick watchband made of leather that Solange’s father tanned himself. It had taken Tucker six months of Sunday dinners at her family’s farm, on the other side of the Virungas in Uganda, before Moses allowed his only daughter to go alone on a real date with him. This watch was a present from her for their first anniversary as a couple. He flexes his hand and clenches it again. Next April marks seven years since she died. He still hears her heartbeat in the ticking watch.
“You have to trick her into sleep,” Solange chided, taking the fussy infant from his seemingly too-big hands and humming, holding the unnamed baby girl to her chest. “The vibrations, that’s what does it.”
Tucker sat next to his fiancée, his head on her shoulder while he rested his eyes. “Lucky baby,” he murmured.
It wasn’t UCLA by a long shot, but he could take on as many patients as he could handle and specializing wasn’t an option. He did everything from setting bones, to advising new mothers how to keep their babies healthy, to cardiac surgery. That was both the upside and downside of staying here to finish his residency after his two-year contract with the Red Cross ran out in 1993. There were always more bodies that needed stitching up, especially later that year when the mass murders of Tutsis across the border in Burundi began spilling over into Rwanda.
At that time, Radio Rwanda began stepping up their hate-laced broadcasts. They fervently warned that the Tutsis were preparing to take back their power, threatening the livelihood and well-being of their Hutu neighbors. Tucker was worried about the increase in attacks against Tutsi communities in the rural villages surrounding Kigali. The wounded were filling up medical centers all over the city. But all four of Solange’s brothers were training to be soldiers in the new Hutu militia, the Interahamwe. Surely they would warn her if she were in danger in the city.
“We never named her, as a vote of confidence that her mom would pull through,” Tucker says softly, lost in his memories, barely aware of Rachel beside him in the passenger seat. Solange gave each newly born baby two gifts: a smooth, round river rock, thought to hold the blessing of the Rwandan god Imana, and a white crane feather symbolizing a long life. In the end, it wasn’t tuberculosis or AIDS that killed Rose’s mother. It was an attack by a small group of soldiers, blowing whistles and swinging machetes. All of the medical staff and patients who could jumped out of windows and ran like hell. Those patients tied to their beds with respirators and tubes were murdered in a dress rehearsal for the countrywide massacre that would ensue five months later.
What Tucker remembers most is laughter. Crazy-ass high, unhinged laughter that he sometimes hears in his sleep. It could almost be jackals except for the cruel edge. Definitely human.
The same five guys arrived every few days. The hospital on a hillside where Tucker and a handful of other Red Cross medics worked was their beat. They blew whistles, waved machetes, and yelled as they walked through the halls. Tutsi cockroaches, give yourselves up peaceably. Don’t force us to hurt innocent people. They never touched the staff; maybe that’s why nobody fought back—not that they could have. At least, that’s how they consoled each other while the soldiers checked patient ID cards, pulled out IVs and dragged the Tutsi men out to the courtyard, the women to the basement where their screams could only be imagined.
This one soldier carried a rifle, the only one of them who wore an actual uniform: camouflage fatigues and a black beret. Tucker asked how he decided who to shoot and who was hacked to death, not really expecting an answer. “Easy,” the guy said, “whoever has money for ammunition.” He laughed shrilly, clapped a hand over his mouth. That’s when it hit Tucker: this soldier wearing a beret and a clip of bullets over his shoulder was only a kid. It all could have been a fucking video game. It still scares the shit out of him to think how every few days, with the arrival of the soldiers his limbs became noticeably heavier. A dusty film settled deep into his joints. At night, Solange’s tears fell on his skin, rejuvenated him.
“How did she get her name?” Rachel startles Tucker, touching his arm. It’s probably not the first time she’s asked.
“Lillian,” he says. “Someone from the Red Cross knew about Kwizera. When we showed up, Lil looked at Rose like she recognized her—already loved her.” He was convinced that some force stronger and smarter than he was found both the baby and him a new home. He and Solange promised each other they would build a family for Rose. That promise is what keeps him here, keeps him sane.
TUCKER PARKS RACHEL AT ONE of the two white plastic tables on a thin slice of sidewalk and goes inside a cinder-block storefront that looks more like somebody’s home than a bar: a single room with cushions on the floor and a white fridge smudged with fingerprints against the wall. There’s a guy sitting at the only table, making cheese sandwiches in what appears to be a George Foreman mini-grill.
“Deux fromage,” Tucker says, taking two clear bottles of homebrewed lager, probably made from corn, from the fridge. He looks at
the payphone on the wall for a long moment and takes a swig from his bottle, before picking up the receiver and dialing. He glances out the window at Henry’s daughter. What can Lillian do but like her—at least accept that she’s here?
Two elderly men are playing mancala at the table next to Rachel, but nobody’s moving the colored marbles while they talk in low voices and cut glances toward the pretty white woman with long curly hair piled atop her head. Her hair. It looks windblown even in the still air, tendrils curling down the nape of her neck. “We’ll be there soon,” Tucker says to the answering machine. “Don’t worry, she’s cool.” One of the men motions for Rachel to join them, and she moves her chair toward their table. “Just give her a chance. Tell her a few stories about her dad, that’s all I’m asking. Give Henry a chance to show up for both of you.”
Tucker stands by the window and waits for his order, the lukewarm lager soothing his nerves. There’s no use rushing this dude. He fiddles with the radio, trying to tune in a fuzzy Madonna song, while flies bounce off the slices of bread slathered with a glossy substance that could just as easily be car lube as butter. Laughter floats through the open window: the old men are showing Rachel how to play mancala. She points to a pocket of marbles on the wooden board and the guy with no visible teeth claps his hands while his opponent groans. It’s obvious who she’s pinch-hitting for. She sees Tucker and gives him a thumbs-up. He returns the gesture, for the first time really believing it wasn’t a mistake inviting her here. There’s something about her; Henry had it too, a warm, open smile that starts in her eyes and pulls people in.
Tucker offers Rachel a beer and a greasy cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper. “Did you get hold of Lillian?” she asks, gives the sandwich a cursory sniff and sets it aside.
“Not exactly.”
“But she knows we’re on our way.”
Tucker unwraps his sandwich, inspects the glistening bread. “I left a phone message at the airport, and then just now.”
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills Page 12