Tizita

by Sharon Heath

  “Fleur,” Adam whispered. “Oh, Fleur.” Sucking my bleeding finger, I could barely breathe.

  “Good God, woman,” Melky boomed, “that was a hell of a feat. You must have the best vision on the planet.” Realizing I was currently beyond reach, he turned to Adam. “She’s got a surgeon’s hands. Glad she’s doing some important work, or I’d suggest she change professions.”

  “She’s got vision, all right, in more ways than one. Plus, she’s the sweetest soul I know,” is how Adam replied. But I barely noticed. I was in shock, trembling.

  After that, our ride to Bole was pretty anticlimactic. Once he’d made sure a porter was doing the right thing with our luggage, Melky offered us warm bear hugs followed by a brotherly pat on Adam’s shoulder with a solemn, “Let’s keep up the energy for Arsenal.” Then, making some poor excuse that he needed to convey a message to me from Jane, he pulled me aside and murmured in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “So. Makeda. Do you happen to know if she has a boyfriend?”

  I stared and then bumbled, “Well, as a matter of fact, I do. I mean, no. No, she doesn’t.”

  He hesitated. “Do you think it would be amiss if I called on her?”

  This big man’s voice was actually shaking. Was it like this for all of us? Poor us. “Why not?”

  Afterward, Adam asked me what he’d said. It shouldn’t have been hard to explain, but I felt a strange reluctance to tell him. “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  And I knew it would most likely end up being nothing. Then again, I couldn’t help but imagine.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Fleur

  IT TOOK US twenty-four hours and thirty-five minutes to get back to L.A. On the first leg of our journey, we shared a row with a white-collared Anglican priest, who insisted we call him Bertie and who was on his way to a conference in New York after what sounded like a failed assignment in Addis Ababa. He seemed eager to convince us of the primitivity of Ethiopian religious life, pursing his thin, pink lips to resemble a cat’s butt. Adam and I rolled our eyes at each other when he wasn’t looking. Remembering the angel goat of the young girl at Aksum and the generous humanity of Father Wendimu, “Bertie’s” comments hardly endeared him to me.

  Somewhere between Bole Airport and JFK, I fell asleep and was wakened by the voice of a stewardess asking, “Do you think she wants lunch?” I opened my eyes and realized I’d slept with my head on Adam’s shoulder. I felt a reluctance to move, but did as soon as I sensed his and the stewardess’ eyes upon me. Her glance was friendly, but impersonal; his was warm and melty. Was I reading too much into it? I told myself to stop being so fanciful. Adam was my first and oldest friend, and if he still possessed an uncanny gift for bringing tingly feelings to my tweeter, I needed, as Nana might have said, to put a lid on it. Actually, it wouldn’t hurt to send my desire on hiatus for a nice long time. Nothing good seemed to ever come of it.

  I distracted myself by recalling the little sparrow in the rose bush, how quickly it had taken flight once its way had been cleared. So different from the baby bird on Father’s lawn. I’d tried so desperately to revive that one’s barely beating heart with my makeshift dropper filled with warm milk, but I hadn’t done anything but accelerate its death. I knew Sammie would say it was some sort of sign once I told her about my success this time around, but a sign of what?

  Adam excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I noticed that his limp was more pronounced than usual, undoubtedly thanks to sitting in a sardine box much too long. I felt a pang of guilt that he hadn’t been able to move about sooner with me snoring and drooling on his shoulder.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a peep out of Bertie and allowed my eyes to drift to his seat. He was dead to the world, which I decided was just fine by me.

  Right about then, I also realized the couple in the row behind me were having a rather muted argument, but an argument nonetheless. The man hissed, “So who do you think you’re punishing more, me or you?”

  For some reason, it struck me as funny, and I had to clamp my lips shut not to laugh. When I saw Adam coming up the aisle, I was dying to tell him, but he was busy doing a do-si-do with the stewardess approaching from the other direction, who placed plates of astonishingly yummy smelling food on our hastily assembled trays as soon as he sat down. I devoured my chicken teriyaki, mushroom risotto with green beans and rolls and butter and coconut cheesecake at a record pace and capped it off with a burp, for which I immediately apologized, mortified.

  Adam grinned. “I think it’s the Chinese who feel there’s no better way for thanking the host for a great meal than a noisy belch.”

  I clapped a hand to my mouth. “Was it that loud?”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No, no. Nothing like that. More like a little hiccup.”

  I looked down at my dishes, where barely a crumb reposed. “God, I might as well have licked the plates clean. I’ve been eating like there’s no tomorrow.” Which immediately sent me down a mental Chutes and Ladders to Bob’s conviction that our species was busily ensuring there would be no tomorrow. I grabbed Adam’s arm and with some urgency said, “Adam, do you really think P.D. can rid us of our dependence on fossil fuels?”

  And like scientists the world over, he took a long a pause and responded in a considered tone, “I think we have some reason to be optimistic that we can make a meaningful dent. But you know as well as I do that there are untold numbers of variables at play.”

  “But what about the Precautionary Principle?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s something Bob told me about.” I blushed, but forged on. “He’s very ecologically-minded. They made it part of the Kyoto Protocol. It’s the idea that scientific advances that might harm people or the environment should have the burden of proof that they’ll do no real harm before they’re applied, rather than afterward.”

  Adam frowned a bit, then slapped his knee. “Oh course. I heard about it recently on Science Friday. Great show. Real science. Cutting edge stuff. Ever listen to it?”

  But I wasn’t ready to go there. “Adam, we’re going to have to be very careful how we use C-Voids to facilitate dematerialization and rematerialization. When we get home, I want to make sure the team agrees that we aim for a result that isn’t harmful.”

  Adam sighed. “They’ll agree, Fleur, but can we anticipate its long-term impact? Don’t foget the Butterfly Effect.”

  “I know, I know, but I don’t want to be an Einstein, regretting the mass destruction coming out of his discovery of the equation of matter and energy.”

  “Sweetheart,” Adam said, “I’m right there with you, and it’s to your credit that we’re not accepting any funding from oil companies, but I’m afraid that once an idea becomes public, we lose control over its application. We just have to hope that P.D. will result in significantly more good than harm.”

  The name Sweetheart only intensified my feelings. “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Maybe Sammie’s right. She’s always quoting that line of Jung’s that the fate of the world hangs on the fragile thread of the individual human psyche.”

  Adam’s eyes strayed to Bertie, and he made a face. “Well, let’s hope he didn’t mean just any psyche, because in that case, we’re fucked.”

  We had a two-hour layover at JFK that we quickly learned was more likely to be at least five, thanks to a hurricane called Frank heading for North Carolina and lousing up air traffic everywhere. Hoping it wouldn’t prove to be as destructive as its namesake (my father), I persuaded Adam to take a cab ride with me to visit some of our old haunts in Manhattan. The gate agent was confident we’d be fine if we made it back to JFK in a few hours.

  We were nearing Mother’s penthouse when I spied the Italianate townhouse where, as an eleven-year-old girl, I’d naively agreed to meet the older boy who’d called me Beautiful. I shouted, “Stop!” to our cabbie and was out of the taxi as soon as he pulled to the curb. Adam flew after me. Furtively looking around and seeing no one peering down from th
e dark green shuttered windows, I let myself into the familiar garden filled with giant ferns and tropical flowers. Adam was quickly at my side, hissing into my ear, “Fleur, this is private property. You can’t do this.”

  I hissed back, “Do you know where we are?”

  He cocked his head, and I told him. He knew the story, but he’d never seen the place where I’d met up in the middle of the night with the stranger who’d dared me to jump, stark naked, into the icy pond—this pond—my nipples jutting erectly from my newly sprouting breasts and the older boy masturbating, though I didn’t understand it at the time, and then the whole scene being lit up like a movie set with a policeman’s gun pointing right in my face.

  What a child I’d been! I started to cry. “Do you think this is why I ended up becoming such a slut?”

  Adam looked as though he wanted to punch me. He took me by the shoulders and marched me out of the garden, stopping only to latch the scrolling wrought iron gate behind us. “That’s just plain dumb, Fleur. Stop punishing yourself. First of all, you were a babe in the woods when that juvenile delinquent preyed on you. Second, you are hardly a slut.” As an aside, he murmured, “It’s a sexist word, anyway.”

  I could sense the cabbie’s brown eyes boring into me, and I think Adam did, too. He ran over, paid him some money and the cab took off with a squeal. Adam ushered me around the corner to a bus bench, actually the bench Uncle Bob had hid behind when the Boy Who Called Me Beautiful had first approached. When I’d embarked on my first lone foray exploring the city streets of Manhattan after Mother moved us here from Father’s Main Line estate, I’d felt safer when my shrinkable Uncle Bob had offered to skip along with me. A fat lot of good my imaginary friend had been.

  “How old are you?” Adam was asking me.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “How many guys have you slept with?”

  “Three.”

  “Do you think that makes you promiscuous?”

  “Well, probably not, but I shouldn’t have slept with Hector Hernandez, shouldn’t have killed Baby X, and shouldn’t have had sex with Bob.”

  “Sex with Bob? Bob who?”

  I squirmed.

  “Surely not Bob Ballantine.”

  I’d done it again. “It was only the one time. And Sammie said it was just a rebound shag.”

  For one long moment Adam looked absolutely stricken, and then he started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. I felt mortified, but then he seemed to realize what his laughter was doing to me, and he abruptly stopped.

  He shook his head. “Oh, hell. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s myself I’m laughing at, not you.”

  Confused and more than a little hurt, I waited for him to explain, but he looked down at his watch, exclaimed, “Holy shit, we’re going to miss our plane,” and stood up, waving his hand until another cabbie stopped for us.

  We had to dash inside the United terminal as soon as Adam paid our driver, stopping only to check the board for our departure gate and begging to be allowed to go right to the front of the security checkpoint. We got no end of dirty looks for holding up our flight, and, suffused with guilt, I was soaked in sweat by the time we took off. Adam was unaccountably quiet during most of the flight. I fell asleep again, but this time turned away from him with my face plowed into my folded up hoodie.

  As soon as we landed, Adam seemed rushed as he grabbed my hand, led me out of the plane, and pulled me toward the baggage carousel. But we needn’t have hurried. After fruitlessly waiting for our bags and my boxes to slide down the chute, we spent a miserable forty-five minutes haggling with a harassed clerk before it was finally pinned down that our luggage had been removed from our plane for security reasons when it had seemed we wouldn’t show for our scheduled flight. The clerk promised she’d make sure it would be put on the next flight to L.A. and that it would be delivered to us within the next twenty-four hours. Disheartened, we turned away from the counter. We were both beyond exhausted.

  Luckily, we were able to catch a cab immediately, and our driver turned out to be a friendly and garrulous expat Scot with exuberant bright red eyebrows and a faceful of freckles. He insisted on shaking hands with both of us, introducing himself as Donald Mackenzie, and when he turned on his CD player, he loudly sang along with a catchy tune about walking five hundred miles that I’d never heard before.

  We’d realized as soon as we’d exited the terminal that SoCal was suffering yet another heat wave. I could actually see waves of heat shimmering over the asphalt once we broke free of LAX. The cab’s air conditioning wasn’t working all that well, and we rolled down our windows. Blasts of hot air hit our weary faces.

  “Hotter’n hell, ain’t it?” editorialized Donald. “You two have a pool where you’re heading?”

  I shook my head, but Adam leaned forward suddenly and said, “Hey, listen, Donald, it’s still soon enough to take PCH north. Would you mind heading for Santa Monica beach instead?”

  I saw Donald’s eyes seek mine in the rearview mirror. I turned to Adam. “What—”

  He interrupted hastily, lowering his voice now so that I had to lean closer to hear him. “Listen, Fleur, I know we’re both knackered, but it really is such a perfect beach day. Admit it, we’re going to be working our asses off in no time. Let’s extend the holiday for a few more hours. Will you come to the beach with me?”

  “Come to the beach? Are you crazy?”

  He laughed. “Maybe. C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

  “But we’ve just flown for more than twenty-four hours and people are waiting for us and we’re not even dressed for—”

  “If we stop at Shutters, we can buy bathing suits and towels and be on the beach in no time.”

  He fastened his gaze on me, his green eyes expectant despite the fact that they were red-rimmed with fatigue. I was aware of Donald following our conversation. He actually turned off the music and contributed, “Ach, girl, the man’s offering you a swim in that gorgeous ocean on a day like this? If I didn’t have to earn my scran and scoop, I’d be joining you two myself.”

  I laughed and commented drily, “Oh, all right. I see I’m outnumbered. I’ll do it, Adam, but we’d better call Gwennie and Mother or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Fleur

  IN MY POST-FLIGHT haze, I’d forgotten that Shutters was virtually next door to Casa del Mar. Was it really only a few months ago that I’d toasted my 21st birthday with Sammie and Jacob and Assefa?

  Oh, Assefa, where are you now? Will your Hanging Man find his peace? Will I ever be less haunted by the memory of you? Dukula. You called me your Dukula. Will I always be tied to people who name me?

  Adam was fiddling in his wallet for his credit card. I knew it would be useless to offer to pay half. Shutters was quieter than usual, probably because this heat wave had struck far from the normal tourist season. I speculated as much to Donald, adding, “Thanks to climate change, travel agents could probably make a fortune exploiting the shifting weather patterns.” I was rewarded with the sort of empty expression people assume when reminded of what we’re doing to our planet.

  Instead, he wrote down his cell number on a card and handed it to Adam. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam took him up on his invitation to go out sometime for a pint. I could hear him singing loudly as the cab pulled away.

  Adam seemed to have picked up steam at the prospect of a swim, and I had to admit I felt a little excited by our impromptu detour from the expected road of going home to share a few brief highlights of our journey with the Fiskes before passing out from jetlag. Adam went over to the check-in desk to speak with a pair of toothy clerks behind the counter and returned a few minutes later reporting our clothes would be safe while we swam. We proceeded down a burnished wood hallway to find a gift shop as upscale as the beach-clubbish hotel itself, where the labels on most of the items proclaimed James Perse had designed them exclusively for Shutters.

  I selected the cheapest pair of flip-flops they had, a plain wh
ite beach towel, and a turquoise bathing suit that left the largest amount possible (not much) to the imagination. Changing in a lemon-scented restroom that was roomy enough for a small homeless encampment, I emerged to pass to a waiting Adam the clothes I’d flown in, all balled up around my stinky tennis shoes. He delivered them along with his own to the concierge. I was impressed by the generosity of the hotel staff to store our gear like this until it occurred to me that he might have offered them a tip.

  When he returned to me, grinning lopsidedly in his new red and white, floral Hawaiian trunks and a pair of flip-flops, his towel flung rakishly over one shoulder, I noted that he was more fit than I remembered, his torso lean and long with a virile blanket of chestnut chest hair. Though he had to be as weary as I was, his limp was barely noticeable. I have to confess that my tweeter was moist enough to make me worry I’d make an audible little swish with each step as we crossed the skaters on the boardwalk. We passed a hundred Stephanie Seidenfelds as we trudged across the broad stretch of sand, but Adam didn’t seem to notice. As we neared the sea, its roar made conversation impossible, but who cared? We were enveloped by the sound, each muscle of our airplane-compressed bodies releasing to the salty, serenading wind.

  Closer to the shore, we cased out the crowded sand for a vacant spot to lay down our towels. There were people everywhere, their shouting voices joining the tumult of the waves. Flitting past sand castles and seaweed were various species of shorebirds—here a Snowy Plover, there a Sanderling, and everywhere the ubiquitous seagulls with their lonesome, echoing cries.

  Adam thought he’d found a good place, but I caught sight of a cloud of flies hovering over something suspiciously visceral on the wet sand nearby and, immediately averting my eyes—I know I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing out—I enjoined him to keep walking. We had to go a bit further afield before we found a place to settle, squeezed between a family with a handful of kids who were happily spread out across a couple of overlapping blankets, mariachi music blaring from their radio, and two couples dead asleep on their towels, their pale pink backs looking uniformly about to burn.