“Promise?” muffled from his shoulder.
“I promise. It will never ever change no matter what you do or say, you’re part of this family forever, whether you want to be or not,” he declares.
“What about my Thyopia poppy?” she peeps from his chest.
“He’s your poppy too. But so am I.”
“Two poppys.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” she begins to cry again.
“No, shhh. Nothing to be sorry for.”
Sitting up, Parker watches them from his bed. “Sheesh,” he says.
“YOU SHUT UP, PARKER!” Sheba bellows over Zan’s shoulder.
“Parker, go to sleep,” says Zan.
Parker plops his head back down on the pillow. “Who can sleep?”
Almost instantly Sheba is out, snoring in the other bed. Parker doesn’t groan in protest because he has a vested interest in his sister sleeping, and then from the bed he rises to retrieve his father’s laptop. “What are you doing?” says Zan.
“I want to film her sleeping,” the boy says. “She says she never snores. She’s got the zombie eyes, which creep me out but would be über-tight to have a movie of.”
“Go back to bed,” Zan says. For a few minutes the father and son sit watching the girl and listening; Zan looks at Parker. Hesitantly, sensing an opportunity in the quiet of the night, Zan begins, “Uh, Parker, listen . . . ”
“The heck, Zan,” the boy says, “we’re not going to have the Talk, are we?” and retreats back to beneath his pillow.
They wait for Viv. It seems clear to Zan that something is wrong. From his cell phone, he never reaches anyone in Ethiopia, as if the country at the beginning of time is inside its own time; and whatever information Molly ever had about Viv only becomes more vague like the rest of Molly, who becomes more enervated and remote.
The morning after her midnight explosion, calmly Sheba tries to explain to her father. “I have to let out the fear. The fear comes in,” she inhales, “it must go out.”
Zan would fire Molly except that, besides the fact he needs a nanny, he can’t bring himself to sever the only person who’s claimed recent contact with Viv, however speciously. Moreover there’s Sheba’s growing attraction to her—a manifestation, maybe, of all the coming conflicts over identity. As the little black girl becomes more racially conscious in her white family, is it a function of a larger dislocation having to do with orphanhood, or in fact is there no dislocation larger than the racial, including orphanhood?
Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can’t name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they’re secrets. Calls to the bank about the mortgage, difficult enough back home, are impossible, particularly within constant earshot of the children; money dwindles. The £3,500 wired to his bank account by the university has been consumed by the cost of three extra round-trip tickets to London and Viv’s flight onto Addis Ababa. At the moment there isn’t enough available credit on the single remaining card to cover the hotel bill. Zan envisions a three-in-the-morning escape, involving suitcases hurled from the window to the street below, and shushed children as they creep downstairs past the front desk.
He takes the kids and Molly to Hampton Court outside London where the Thames turns south and west. It’s twenty minutes beyond the university on the same train out of Waterloo that they took to and from Zan’s lecture; on the way the nanny’s transistor plays yet another song by the girl’s favorite singer: Jasmine, I saw you peeping, and Parker rises from his seat and moves to the other end of the train.
Disembarking at Hampton Court, the four have lunch at a pub down the road. Parker listens to headphones plugged into the little green music player hanging around his neck; Sheba plays with Molly’s old camera. The group follows a small red bridge that leads to the palace. On this day the rare fine weather they’ve had in London finally succumbs to the norm, the palace’s bright sunlight-hued red and verdant rolling grounds clashing with the dark billows of gray rolling cross the sky.
Fully as Zan expected, the children’s fascination with the palace is minimal. Tales of wayward clergy and various kingly wives drugged or beheaded, or dying in childbirth, whose ghosts still reside only make Parker and Sheba uneasy or give rise to questions that Zan can’t answer. If he’s being honest, Zan’s interest in the palace isn’t so keen either, or maybe he’s just distracted; in any case the father, son, daughter and nanny move beyond the house onto the grounds where the court’s famous three-hundred-year-old maze rises against the blue and black sky in passages of brilliant foliage. Also fully as Zan expected, Parker and Sheba find the maze more interesting. The skies continue to threaten. “It’s starting to rain,” Zan says, as though the kids possibly would find this relevant; the boy and girl dash into the maze with the nanny behind. “Don’t get lost,” the father advises absurdly.
Nobody really gets lost in there, Zan is assuring himself at the maze’s mouth when, twenty minutes later, first Parker re-appears and then Molly, without Sheba.
Molly looks at Parker, Parker looks back at her. Molly looks at Zan, shaken. “I thought she was with you!” she says to the boy.
“She was with you,” says Parker.
“You lost her on purpose!” says Molly.
“Hey,” says Zan.
“I did not!” the boy cries. “She was with you!”
From far off near the middle of the maze, they all hear the rise of a small and distant voice singing. Jasmine, I saw you peeping. Zan is furious but there’s no time for that; as calmly as he can, he says to Parker and Molly, “All right, let’s go back in and get her. Keep one hand on the same wall of the maze as you go in—that way you can follow it back out and not get lost.” He can hear it now, for years to come: You left me in the maze! As he follows the other two, Sheba’s song continues to drift back to them through the hedge.
The three dart back and forth within the maze when there comes “HEY, WHERE IS EVERYBODY ANYWAY!” rattling the foliage like she’s just around every corner. Then, much less certain, “Hey?”
“Sheba!” calls Zan.
“Molly!” the girl calls back.
“Sheba!” Zan says.
“Molly!” Sheba’s voice sounds on the move but in the maze Zan can’t be sure, since he’s on the move too. “Sheba,” says Zan, “just stay in one place! We’ll come to you!”
“Molly!” She’s beginning to cry now.
“Just stay in one place, Sheba!” Zan adds, “It’s Poppy.”
“Molly!” the girl keeps answering, crying now. It seems to Zan that the hedges grow higher and closer together. “Zema!” he hears Molly call.
Zan stops. He hasn’t heard Molly call the girl this before; he tries to think if he ever used that name in front of her. “Sheba,” he calls again, “please answer! Please answer Poppy!”
“Molly!” the girl cries. “Molly, Molly, Molly!”
He turns a final corner to find Sheba mid-passage just as, at the passage’s other end, the nanny turns her corner as well—and Sheba runs to her. Did the girl see the father before she saw Molly? Was a choice actually made, or would she have run to him had he turned his corner a split second sooner? Sheba runs into Molly’s arms and, catching the girl, the woman looks up at Zan; she’s terrified. “I’m sorry!” she blurts. “I . . . she just saw me first! She’s scared! I didn’t mean to lose her, I thought she was with the boy and I shouldn’t have said that to Parker, please don’t . . . ” and behind him, Zan hears Parker’s footsteps as the boy stumbles onto the scene.
Please don’t . . . ? Is it merely the prospect of losing a job that has so riveted her? or something more. “She’s all right,” Zan says hollowly, “that’s all that matters,” and the girl says to Molly, “Chillax, sweet cheeks.” Watching the two of them, Zan backs away and turns to the passage out, trusting they’ll follow.
On the train from Hampton back to London, Molly sits staring out the window stricken, some private prophecy having been fu
lfilled, and almost unconsciously grabs the girl close to her so hard that Sheba, who usually presses herself into others as if to meld her body to theirs, pulls away.
Five days after his lecture at the university, Zan meets J. Willkie Brown at the pub off Leicester Square. “Well,” Brown says, arriving after Zan, “the kids?”
“With Molly,” Zan says. “Thanks for coming.”
“Right. African lady with the English name.”
“James . . . ”
“Anything from the bar?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’ll have a pint,” Brown says, signaling to the bar.
“James, listen,” says Zan. “You had nothing to do with setting it up, right?”
“Setting up what?”
“The nanny.”
“Sorry about that,” he allows, “I know I told you I would—”
“Forget that,” Zan says, “but then where did she come from?”
“Must have heard . . . ” Brown thinks, scratches behind his ear, then shrugs. “Don’t know,” not finding it that interesting or understanding why Zan does.
Zan points out the window of the pub. “Our second day in London,” he says, “or maybe it was the third, I forget . . . before I met you, before Viv vanished, the kids and I sat here at this same table and Sheba was watching someone right out that window, there across the street—and it was Molly, staring back. A day or so later, she shows up at the hotel and says, Here I am, the nanny.”
“That is peculiar, isn’t it?” says Brown.
Jesus, you think so? Zan wants to reach across the table and grab Brown by the lapels; the British diffidence is driving him nuts. “Now,” he says, “Molly claims she heard we needed a nanny from Viv—who I haven’t heard from at all. Nothing. No email, no phone call, I can’t reach anyone in Ethiopia . . . ”
“Viv is a resilient woman,” says Brown.
“Will you stop saying that?” Zan hears his voice rise. “I know she’s resilient. I also know she’s driven about this thing with Sheba’s mother, that this whole business has become a moral crisis for her—”
“She can hardly hold herself responsible—”
“I know that . . . ”
“Right. Ronnie Joe . . . ”
“Ronnie Jack Flowers . . . I know all this. Doesn’t matter what perspective you or I hold on it, what matters is how Viv feels about it and whatever lengths she’s compelled to go to in order to find or help someone who may or may not be Sheba’s mother—and no sooner does Viv go looking for Sheba’s mother and suddenly become incommunicado than Molly shows up.”
The other man frowns. “Not sure I follow that last bit.”
“Never mind,” Zan shakes his head. He doesn’t want to explain the crazy thing that’s been in his head since Molly appeared. “What’s important at this point is finding Viv.”
“Of course.”
“Until then, we’re stuck in London,” and we have no money and we’re about to lose our house but he doesn’t want to explain that either.
Brown replies, “Let me see who I can talk to.”
First useful thing you’ve said, thinks Zan.
That night as both kids sleep, Zan surrenders to his insomnia and turns on the TV. The sound is down so low he can’t be sure, but back home the BBC seems to find the new president somber before his time. It’s a strange thing to witness from five thousand miles away, but Zan suspects that many people, from the woman on the plane to his anarchist friend in Texas, will take some satisfaction in this. For his part Zan takes solace in the same presidential ego that others consider so intolerable; the new president hasn’t merely a political sense of himself but an historic one. Mere elections are small potatoes for him. He’s running for history. He’s running for greatness, and in the eyes of history, whether he’s a megalomaniac, as is entirely possible, depends only and entirely on whether he succeeds.
In his lifetime, Zan doesn’t remember a president’s very identity being such a point of political contention. He doesn’t remember large segments of the public twenty-five years ago debating whether the president at that time secretly had been born in Ireland. The new president’s race is part of his political identity; the two can’t be extricated; and if, as some indicate, his racial identity is a creation, if he taught himself—even for purely political purposes—how to be black, how to talk or walk black, only to later teach himself how to be a little whiter, does that make his identity more a creation than anyone else’s? Doesn’t everyone choose aspects of his or her identity, or is race the rubicon of authenticity?
Zan began pondering race when he was younger only because he began pondering his country, and knew that it wasn’t possible to understand his country without pondering slavery and it wasn’t possible to understand slavery without pondering race. He considered how his countrymen from Africa were the only ones who didn’t choose to be there; Africans were compelled to come and only once they were made to come did they choose to stay. Did that make them, then, the true owners of the country’s great idea, by virtue of having accepted the country in the face of so many reasons not to? If the country is more an idea than a place then are those who were so compelled its true occupants, given how the country’s promise to them was broken before it was offered?
When Brown calls, the expeditious response that should be reassuring seems suspicious in a way that even Zan knows is unreasonable, his mind reverberating with half-baked conspiracy theories even his paranoia finds far-fetched. “Look here,” Brown says, “I got you a meeting tomorrow with the Ethiopian ambassador in London. If anyone can sort this out, I feel certain he can,” and to Zan the “if” and “certain” seem conspicuously at odds with each other.
Only later will Zan consider how fateful is the turn of the following day when Parker insists on accompanying his father to the embassy rather than remain with Molly and Sheba. “I want to go with you,” he declares in his newly adolescent way that brooks no argument.
“Why does Parker get to go?” Sheba asks, but Zan is struck by how perfunctory her protest is. “I promise,” he answers, “you’ll prefer being with Molly.”
“You’re not going, buttmunch,” says Parker.
“Knock it off,” Zan says to his son, but his daughter already has conceded the point more readily than she’s conceded anything, and taken hold of the nanny’s hand.
After the incident at Hampton Court and the maze, Molly’s manner has vacillated between warmth and remove, her speech to Zan more terse as she becomes with Sheba more expansive. On this unseasonably warm morning she seems positively frail; having shed her voluptuousness, she looks as though she’s lost ten pounds, and her skin pales to the color of sand and then ash. Since Zan and the children first saw her standing on the street outside the pub at Leicester Square watching them back, she’s been diminishing. In her approach up the street, she’s exhausted.
Most notably the music from her that filled the hotel room the first day fades, phasing in and out in wails and trebles. “Are you all right?” Zan says.
“Yes,” she says. She rubs her finger against Sheba’s cheek.
“Parker and I are going to the Ethiopian embassy. I imagine you know where it is.”
“Why would I know where it is?” says the woman, and Zan thinks to himself, Did I say something so offensive? “It’s on Kensington Road,” he answers, “across from Hyde Park, a little west of Knightsbridge. I don’t know what’s around there to do with Sheba but we can meet in the park afterward or if you want to take her on a walk, maybe we can eat something or get a soda for the kids at the pub where we first saw you. Parker will be hungry.”
Molly says, “What pub?”
“The one off Leicester Square that—”
“I don’t know it,” she says.
He says, “You do.” Did they ever actually talk about that afternoon they saw each other there, or is this a conversation that took place in his head, so vivid yet never in fact spoken? “You’ve been there,” he pers
ists, “well, maybe not inside, but outside.”
“I don’t know it,” she says firmly.
The tone is becoming antagonistic. “Let’s meet then,” Zan says, “across the street at the park.”
“It’s a big park,” she says.
“The embassy is at Kensington and Exhibition Road.”
Actually it’s on a small sidestreet called Prince’s Gate. Zan has imagined a consulate out of the movies, a compound with a yard and guards everywhere; but the Ethiopian embassy doesn’t even occupy the whole building, rather the middle floors where there’s a single security entrance that’s more intent on not seeming rude than secure.
The display case in the lobby features not the usual artifacts but different kinds of coffee. Parker hoped to see weapons, shrunken heads, the poisoned tips of pygmies’ arrows. “They don’t have pygmies and shrunken heads in Ethiopia,” says Zan.
Zan expects an ambassador out of the movies too, formal and in a coat and tie, with cufflinks gleaming so bright Zan can see their glow from beneath the coat sleeves. Rather the ambassador wears a cardigan, with sleeves pushed up his arms. If this were L.A., thinks Zan, he’d be in a t-shirt.
The ambassador listens intently. Watching Parker out of the corner of his eye, Zan calibrates his case, trying to say something that won’t alarm his son while still striking a tone of urgency. The ambassador, Zan is impressed to note, seems to grasp the situation and rather expertly registers measured and not undue concern. This is why he’s a diplomat, Zan realizes. “You understand,” the ambassador says sympathetically, “that my country still has its technological challenges, and so therefore sometimes internet service, for instance, can be down for days. And mobile service . . . ” He shrugs. “It’s not so unusual for you to not have heard anything.”
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