“Does she have a name?” Rebecca asked.
“Who?” he asked, looking oddly defensive.
“The ship,” she said. “The one you were just telling me about.”
“I’m sorry,” he acknowledged. “I’m distracted.”
Here was the same man who’d looked at her madly while he was in pain and who, during a brief private moment in an Anguillan doctor’s clinic, told her that she was an angel. She felt the alcohol rush through her now with so much sensation she thought she might get up from her chair and just sit in his lap. Just fold around him. As if, in doing so, she might flood him with the same feeling. To rid herself of it. Get it out. Get it done.
Instead, she took another sip. “You’re distracted by …”
“Listen,” he said. His wild brows were furrowed. His elbows were on the table.
“Hugh?”
“Helen left me.”
“What?” She thought, for one crazed moment, that he must be lying, that he would mine her sympathies at any cost. And then she thought, No, she’s actually left him. She could see it in his eyes. But how was that even possible? It was possible. And he was telling her this why? Why? Because he wanted her to know that he was free.
Shut it down, she thought. Get ahold of yourself and—Forget about your father, but for Vivi. For Vivi, just shut it down.
“I—it’s been coming.”
“What do you mean, it’s been coming? Vivi didn’t even say anything.”
“That’s because—” He shook his head. “That’s because Vivi doesn’t know.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She was reeling—both with shock and a sheepish streak of utter, selfish delight.
He shook his head. “We’re going to tell her. We’ll find the right time. I’m afraid I just had to tell you. I’m … I’m not doing all that well.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Well, that makes sense. That you wouldn’t be, I mean.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No,” she said, relaxing somewhat. She had the first stirrings of sadness for Vivi, for whom—maybe now especially—this news would be devastating. She might have known more than she ever let on about her parents’ discontentment, but there was no way she’d be prepared for this. “No, I’m glad you did.”
She was suddenly desperate to find out if he was telling her this news—at least in part—as a way to ignite what had been lying dormant between them for all these years. She wanted to search his face for clues, but she was too cowardly for that. And so, for lack of a better alternative, she looked up at the stars. She imagined all the humans throughout time in socially uncomfortable situations who’d done the same thing with those same constellations. She could imagine the stars whispering: some disdainful, some amused. Mortals, they’d say, pointedly throwing off a bit more light.
“Let’s not talk about it further,” he was saying.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“And, look,” he said, brightening, “this is a valuable trip you’ve taken.” She couldn’t help but notice that his upbeat turn was entirely unconvincing. “I’m glad you’ve come,” he continued. “When I was young, it was considered shocking that I went off to Africa in the first place, forget about not coming back. But I was a dilettante—I can say that now—and I didn’t start with any real ambition. And it’s not like my absence was any sacrifice for the American workforce, that’s for certain. Not like your father—he always knew what he was doing, and he always knew how to get what he wanted.”
“Yes, well, we both know how that turned out. I would imagine that even you saw the Times article.”
In the absence of Hugh’s response, there was only the slightest breeze.
She continued: “He’s in jail, you know. Jail. For corruption—years of it. You do know he’s in jail, right?”
Hugh looked out at the water and drank. She noticed that his eyes closed slightly as he did so.
“Rebecca?” He leaned forward at last. “Do me a favor and don’t knock your dad.”
“Okay,” she said, taken by surprise.
“And don’t count him out. Not yet.”
“Fine,” she said. Her face was burning; her head was spinning. How could Hugh Shipley be the one to suggest that she was being too harsh?
“Rebecca?”
“I said fine. I hear you.”
Omar arrived once again, set down two small plates. “Ginger cake,” he announced.
“Delightful.” Hugh smiled.
“Thank you,” said Rebecca.
They each took a bite.
“This is delicious, isn’t it?” asked Hugh.
“Completely,” said Rebecca.
She looked up at the thatched roof, out at the still black water. For that moment it was hard not to feel as if she and Hugh were simply away on vacation together a couple of years from now. She let herself imagine that, after the Shipleys’ quick and painless divorce, Helen was elsewhere, ecstatic with a second husband. She let herself envision that Vivi, who had it all now—baby, career, Brian—stood behind all of her years of insistence on romance and gracefully accepted the fact that her best friend and her father were in love. In this fantasy, Rebecca realized, her father had to be dead. He was dead and she was guilty and grieving. That was why, she realized—as if any part of this fantasy had any foothold in reality—she and Hugh were on a lakeside vacation: He was helping her through her grief.
A pale pig was rooting around in the sand. A brown dog came up beside the pig. Rebecca pointed to the animals, and Hugh raised his glass in their direction.
She said, “There’s a pig on the beach.”
“And a dog,” said Hugh, finally lightening up.
The water gently lapped on the shore. Candle flames slanted one way and then the other. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
She was no longer fifteen. She was, in fact, a woman in her thirties. She wasn’t going to do anything about the feeling, so she might as well go ahead and admit, if only to herself, that in the absence of nuance—fantasy, infatuation, girlhood crush born of an accidental intimacy—this is what she’d have to call her feelings for Hugh: love. And not just in her fantasy. She might be a grown woman, she may have come to understand Hugh and the world at large a bit better than she did sixteen years ago, but here she was and it felt basically the same as it had when she was with him in the kitchen in Aunt Kitty’s Anguillan villa. She allowed herself to hear her father’s words and to acknowledge that he might just be right about this one: People don’t change.
“Right,” he said, suddenly pushing back his chair. “So, I doubt you’ll need to set an alarm, but you might want to.” He stood up in three neat stages. If he was drunk, there was no way to tell. “We need to leave by six-thirty.”
He didn’t touch her shoulder or even look in her direction before heading for his tent, stumbling under the cover of darkness. And this absence of touch felt more thrilling somehow, as if he couldn’t possibly touch her at this hour in this place without an obvious absence of propriety. The breeze was so light and the air so warm, but she was not distracted by the beauty of it all or even by the strangeness of where she was sitting. She wasn’t distracted, not exactly. But it was as if everything—not only malaria and the absence of basic health care for nearly fifteen million people (how was that even possible?) but also her own minuscule embers of personal failure—everything seemed as far from here as civilization, which seemed even farther than the sky.
She couldn’t have said what exactly happened between sleep and the morning’s pitted road, but she knew that her head was pounding and a bug bite throbbed behind her knee. She knew she’d overslept and she knew that Hugh was aggravated (What happened, Rebecca, with the alarm?). He was aggravated but he was quiet, so when they pulled up to the missionary’s hut and Hugh—suddenly furious—said, “Where the hell are they?” before banging his fist on the steering wheel, it was like hearing a car backfire: She had to catch her
breath. Before this trip Rebecca had certainly seen Hugh angry, but—excepting the long-ago moment when he’d insisted that she drive him to the doctor (and that was scared, she reasoned)—she’d never seen him truly mad with anyone besides himself.
“Goddamn it!” he said, getting out of the car and stretching his legs. “Where in God’s name are the trucks?”
“Hugh, please,” said a stout pale woman who was standing in the dirt drive and sipping from an aluminum mug. “I know you and I both agree that He has nothing to do with this.”
“Veronica,” he yelled. He slammed shut the Land Rover’s door. “Where are the trucks?”
“Good morning,” she said sternly. Irish.
“They promised,” said Hugh. “They swore to me that the trucks would be here with the nets. Trucks. Nets. Jesus, it is just not that complicated.”
Veronica shook her head. She was probably somewhere around Hugh’s age and had a blond pageboy that was basically a bowl cut, but the hair itself was gorgeous; she probably grew it and cut it yearly, sold the hair, and gave the money away. Hugh had told Rebecca that Veronica was a missionary and that she’d been living on the lake for a good thirty years. She had the eerie calm of someone who knows that she is, in fact, indispensable.
“Yes, well …” Veronica squinted at Hugh with something like sympathy. She was obviously waiting for him to remember that he was too old and too experienced to expect more than this.
“The problem with this country is that people stop expecting anything to work.” Hugh stood with his feet firmly planted in the dirt of her drive. “I’m not getting on that train. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Veronica. “And who’s this, then?” she asked, nodding toward Rebecca, who took it as her cue to get out of the car.
“Rebecca here has come all the way from New York City. She’s young and able and I am not paying her a dime. And, believe me, she’s not going to hang around forever.”
“I’m not that young,” said Rebecca.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Veronica. “Are you a doctor, then?”
“No,” said Rebecca. “Lawyer.”
“Well, then.” She looked at Hugh oddly. “I see.”
Rebecca watched as Hugh made phone calls, trying to track down the missing trucks. He yelled into his cellphone, and, when that connection failed because his battery died, he yelled into Veronica’s. Veronica’s house was small—a hut, really—but it had a generous back porch, where Rebecca watched a beetle nearly the size of Hugh’s cellphone dig around in the dirt. A cat slunk beneath a drooping palm. The violet sky was cloudless, save one massive gathering at the edge of this morning’s horizon, shot through with milk-white sun. And as she watched Hugh yell and curse at the local trucking outfit, she noticed that his agitation did nothing to detract from his appeal; she was only mildly ashamed that witnessing someone’s so normally charming manner undergo such a complete transformation could produce this kind of thrill.
He lost it, she imagined telling her father in earlier, happier days. He really did.
Then again. She did not want to think about her father.
She’d received eight letters since he’d started his prison sentence two months earlier. For the first time in my life, he’d written, I’ve gone ahead and grown a beard. Let me tell you, I look like a terrorist, but I figure, if not now, when? His lawyer had secured him a spot upstate in Otisville—a prison that was evidently not nearly as cushy as the one where Martha Stewart had recently served, but it had been built (with a kosher meal option, with an in-house rabbi) as an answer to the evidently significant number of Orthodox Jewish criminals in the tristate area, who’d tried to make the case that serving time forced them to give up their religious lifestyle and thus violated their First Amendment rights. Talk about chutzpah, her father’s lawyer had said when he suggested Otisville. Her father had agreed that a jail populated by Jews sounded safer, even if it irked him to think this, even if it was, in fact, a medium-security prison filled with a diverse assortment of criminals, including the coke dealer played by Johnny Depp in the movie Blow.
After a lifetime of being uninterested in cards, he’d borrowed a book from the lending library, taught himself poker, and joined a biweekly card game with a loan shark, a counterfeiter, a bank robber, and a “very bright” drug dealer from Nyack. He’d soon celebrate Passover in the only federal penitentiary that hosted a seder. She imagined him mumbling the kiddush, singing Dayenu, drinking grape juice instead of wine.
She’d written him back but not often, and she’d let him know about her last dentist appointment, when she was forced to keep her mouth open while Dr. Glasser speculated about her father’s case. What the hell was he thinking? asked Glasser. Okay, you can spit now. She told him about the pharmacy on Madison, where she stopped for her favorite lip gloss and bumped into Mrs. Switt from their old apartment building, and although Rebecca had tried to avoid her, Mrs. Switt had greeted her not only as if someone had died but as if maybe Rebecca were the murderer.
He hadn’t allowed her to visit, and she had been relieved.
In fact, she’d debated even telling him about her plans to come to Africa, not wanting to hear his inevitably strong opinions, but that inner debate didn’t last long, because the guilt was simply too fierce. And because she was her father’s daughter and was raised to imagine the worst—her own death by small-plane crash, for instance—she couldn’t do that to him without at least the knowledge that she had gone in the first place. She’d expected him to immediately discourage this trip, and he had. In fact, five of the eight letters had consisted of diatribes against her plans.
She booked the ticket anyway and sent him a letter saying so. Neither of which had been remotely easy for her to do. In a shocking turn of events, she received a letter back, which said: Okay, then. See Goldfarb for the shots and the antimalarial prescription. Followed by exhaustive advice—pages—about the pitfalls of exchanging money.
“I sent the deposit,” Hugh now said into the phone. “There was an explicit expectation that those nets were going to be here before me. Is that what happened?”
“Hugh,” said Veronica.
Hugh waved her away. “I am asking you, is that what happened?”
“Rebecca,” said Veronica. “He needs to get off the telephone.”
“I’m sure he will, but—”
“Hugh,” Veronica insisted loudly, and when he continued to ignore her, she turned to Rebecca and said, “Come.”
Rebecca felt like a poorly trained dog as she followed Veronica around the house to the drive, where an African woman in bright pink cloth was sitting on the ground. She was holding a baby and weeping. “Shush now,” Veronica soothingly told the woman. “Shush now, darling. You’re here.”
Rebecca came closer and saw that the baby’s head was swollen so that he looked like a caricature of an alien baby, his forehead enormous and broad.
“This woman has walked eight days to find me,” Veronica told her. “Now go get your friend Hugh.”
So Rebecca—reeling—ran to get him, and when he waved her away, she found herself literally yanking the phone from his hand, shocked at her own gall. Shocked at how such proximity to Hugh was completely exhilarating. “You’ll call back,” she said, her heart speeding.
“How dare you?” he asked. His face was red, his voice hoarse. But though she’d surprised him, he did not look thrown off balance.
“Just come,” said Rebecca, with a good approximation of calm, but she was sweating and shaken from not only the look that had passed across his face when she’d grabbed the phone but the strength in his resistance.
Still, he followed her around to the drive. And when Hugh saw the woman and baby, his face lost every stitch of aggravation; he knelt down on the ground and greeted the mother. She was wearing yellow beaded earrings, she looked tired but elegant, and Rebecca tried to conceive of how she’d managed to put in those earrings at some point before endeavoring to walk eight days. How she had managed
to tie the sling, to put the baby inside. Hugh took the baby in his arms, stroked the baby’s cheek. He spoke to the mother in Swahili, and the mother nodded and nodded. She didn’t cry.
Hugh nodded as well. “There’s a procedure,” he said. “They need to get to Dar.”
He spoke to the mother again, and Rebecca assumed this is what he told her, but her expression still didn’t change. He said something else to the mother before returning her baby.
“Can you go?” Hugh asked Veronica. “Can you go with her to Dar?”
It was an enormous request and an expensive one (even if Hugh was presumably paying), and Veronica’s face reflected this. But Rebecca realized that this was Hugh’s alter ego, the side of him that came alive only when in crisis, the part of him that could easily ask for whatever it was he wanted.
“I don’t know,” Veronica said, “I—”
“I’d take them myself,” he said. “But right now more nets are coming, Veronica. One truck’s worth, anyway. It’s on the road. If you take them to Dar, I promise I’ll join you as soon as I hear from you that the surgery is a go.”
“What can I do?” asked Rebecca. “Can I do something?”
“You? You’re going to help carry the nets. And you’re going to take pictures.”
“Take pictures?”
“You still take pictures, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“How do you think I raise money for all of this? The pictures are important, trust me.”
“If it’s so important, why didn’t you mention it before now?”
“I’ll go to Dar,” said Veronica.
“Good,” said Hugh. He took the mother’s hand and—looking as if he had all the time in the world—began to explain.
The nets came the next morning. They came before sunrise and, within a day, Hugh had made contact with a team that he’d obviously assembled long before Rebecca arrived. She was beginning to understand the way he worked, if not why he worked this way, and would bet he had at least two other photographers lined up besides her. She wondered why he’d neglected to mention the scope of this operation. Six people came by boat—volunteers from Tanzania, the U.K., and the United States. Donning orange life jackets, they arrived as the sun was rising. They disembarked; introductions were made. The nets were packaged in large plastic bundles, and Rebecca joined in hauling them from the truck containers into the low wooden boats manned by local men.
A Dual Inheritance Page 41