So Much for That (51 page)

“Well, have a nice time,” she said blandly.

“You’re coming, too.”

However dispiritedly, her famous practicality roused. “Can’t. Flicka.”

“I know the FD will be challenging, but we’ll manage.”

“Hot,” said Carol.

“Cool towels, fans. When and where possible, air-conditioning.”

“Flying. Pressure.”

“All she has to do is swallow. She’s learned to swallow.”

“Drugs.”

“Internet.”

It was like badminton. The long point ended summarily with a neat smash from the stool:

“I’m going to Pemba.”

Carol turned to Flicka and sighed. “You can’t go to Africa.”

Tipping off her stool, Flicka navigated in a stooped zigzag across the kitchen by gripping a chair, the table, the vegetable storage baskets; lately Flicka made her way about a room with the agile, lateral clamber of Jeff Goldblum in the remake of
The Fly
. She pushed Heather from the sink, filled her water bottle, turned off the tap, and wiped a drizzle of spittle from her chin with her terrycloth wristband in one motion, and set about connecting the syringe to her g-tube for her usual on-the-hour hydration. It was a display of self-sufficiency that said,
See? What about this tiresome business can’t be accomplished in Africa?

Shep had little doubt that previous to Wednesday night Carol would have proven far more adept at concocting irrefutable reasons why a disabled seventeen-year-old with a rare, degenerative disease could not take up residence on an island on the other side of the world with one underequipped hospital staffed by Chinese doctors, none of whom would know anything about managing an exclusively Jewish genetic condition called familial dysautonomia. But that systematic, brisk mother-of-two had been replaced by in some ways a more
likeable woman who was utterly lost. Moreover, what she’d just been through must have impelled her to flee. Since so far she’d managed to escape only a piffling thirty miles north to Westchester, the only powerful objection that the New Carol might legitimately have raised to his proposal was that Africa was not nearly far enough away. So she imprudently abandoned her sensible medical line for a tactical error.

“money,” she said. “We don’t have any.”

“You have less than no money,” he concurred. “I glanced at some of the credit card bills lying around Jackson’s computer at work. Which is all the more reason to cut and run. MasterCard won’t come after you off the coast of Zanzibar. Besides, I have money. Enough, if we’re frugal, to last all of us in Tanzania indefinitely. The Wapemba live on a couple dollars a day. We could at least budget five bucks.”

Her eyes drifted to the corn flakes, flickering with what seemed a hazy awareness of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of other rock-solid reasons that this preposterous plan was out of the question.

“Dad would want us to go,” said Flicka.

“She’s right,” Shep agreed. “Leave Jackson’s parents to arrange a memorial service if it makes them feel better. But I promise you, and I knew the guy almost as well as you did: no memorial to your husband would be more fitting than your getting out of here. If there is an afterlife with a small
a
, he’ll be thrilled to know that you took his kids and flew to Pemba.”

“…But there’s the inquest.”

“Incest?” Heather repeated merrily. “My friend Fiona says her family has incest!”

Yet another reason to leave the country. He asked, “Is there any question in your own mind about what happened?” She shook her head morosely. “Then why worry about an inquest?”

“I’m going with them, Mom,” Flicka announced with finality, leaning on the counter for balance as she drained the last of the water into her syringe, “whether you and Heather come or not.”

A talented manipulator of other people’s pity, Flicka had bossed her parents around for years. Now the facility could be deployed to far more tectonic effect than getting out of her math homework.

T
here remained one last invitation to issue—albeit the kind extended to folks who you already know can’t come to a party but whom you ask anyway as a gesture. Sure enough, when Shep explained about Pemba and how of course she was welcome to join them, Amelia was not about to drop everything: her friends, her job, her boyfriend. But she sounded a little confused, so he was careful thereafter to be crystal clear: “Your mother is dying, sweetheart, and she finally knows she’s dying, too. This is your one and only chance to say goodbye. And this time maybe you two can do better than, you know, lumpy versus smooth.”

The last time Amelia had driven up to Elmsford, she’d brought her new boyfriend—probably a decent kid, but no match for the awkwardness of the circumstances. His girlfriend’s flagging mother didn’t have the energy to ask all the solicitous questions that would have filled out a normal introduction: So where do you work? What are your ambitions? Where are your people from? Naturally the Food Channel was on, which must have helped to explain why they ended up spending the entire visit talking about potatoes.

Mashed potatoes, specifically: whether everyone preferred the silky, smooth sort with lots of cream, or the lumpy, bohemian type with chunks and skin. Shep had sat in. After a good twenty minutes of this micro-analysis of tuber preparation, it required the full force of his self-control to keep from leaping to his feet and exploding,
Look, Teddy, or whatever your name is, I’m sure you’re a nice guy but I’m afraid we don’t have time to get to know you right now. So get out of the room; you don’t belong here, and your girlfriend only dragged you along to begin with as cover. To hide behind. And Amelia, as you can see your mother is in piss-poor shape, so you have no way of knowing whether this is the very last time you ever talk to her in your whole life. If you end up doomed to remember squandering those final few minutes on POTATOES you will never forgive yourself.

To the girl’s credit, blessed with the opportunity to retake that abysmal scene, Amelia made it up to Elmsford within the hour. She let herself in the front door just as Shep was logging off the British Airways website upstairs. When he hurried down to greet her, he was relieved she’d
not brought the boyfriend, nor had she glittered her cleavage, caked her lashes, or plaited her hair. Pale, skinny, and ponytailed, Amelia in loose jeans and a rumpled sweatshirt was recognizably the same kid he’d galloped around the yard on his back, and somehow this de-eroticized version made it easier to embrace his daughter full-bore without embarrassment. Yet that ravaged expression she wore was plenty adult, its etched quality suggesting that a better-than-oblivious relationship to her mother’s parlous condition had prevailed for some time.

Forewarned of Amelia’s arrival, Glynis had forced herself from bed, and now slipped unsteadily downstairs with a shake of her head at Shep; this was a proper entrance, and she didn’t want help. For the first time in weeks she’d put on real clothes, a favorite evening ensemble of ink-black rayon. Over a flowing blouse and matching slacks she wore a rippling floor-length robe trimmed in tiny, tasteful rhinestones. She had drawn on her eyebrows. Her intention, Shep intuited, was not disguise. It was a favor, as Amelia’s garb was also a favor: the mother would look her best, and the daughter would look her least adulterated.

As the three of them settled in the living room, Zach sidled into the doorway. At last there was no fevering about the kitchen, no boyfriend, no mashed potatoes. “I’m sorry I haven’t come up a little more often,” said Amelia, beside her mother on the couch. “It’s really hard for me to see you—deteriorated, Mom. I’ve always admired how beautiful you are, how—statuesque. How you hold yourself…above, apart. It hurts me, seeing you not be able to pull off the old class act anymore, no longer being able to act like some—queen. I know that’s no excuse. But I have tried to keep up with how you’re doing through Z.”

The parents turned an inquisitive glance toward their son in the doorway, and he nodded. “Yeah, she, like, at least texts five times a day. Whadda ya think? She’s my sister.”

“Why not text me?” asked Glynis.

“With Z…” Amelia looked away. “Well, from Z I’m sure to get an honest report.” She turned back to her mother. “I can’t stand the pretending. It’s fake, it’s gross, it’s…a violation. We’ve all been supposed
to act as if you were getting better, and I just—I didn’t want to remember you that way.”

“I’m sorry too, then,” said Glynis, taking her daughter’s hands. “But we’re not pretending now, are we? So I have something for you. To remember me by.” Glynis lifted a box from beside the sofa that she must have placed there before Amelia’s arrival. Shep recognized his wife’s equivalent of his own battered red toolbox.

“I want you to have my old jewelry,” Glynis continued. “The things I made before I moved on to flatware. Many of these pieces are very dramatic, and most women wouldn’t, as you just put it yourself, be able to ‘pull them off.’ But you can. You, too, are
statuesque
, and you’ll do this work proud.”

“Oh!” Amelia cried with a girlish delight as she slid one of the serpentine bracelets up her slender arm. They were all there, the artifacts with which Shep had first fallen in love, including those morbid stickpins, like tiny bouquets of bird bones. “I used to try on these pieces as a kid when you weren’t home. In secret. I never told you, but later I started borrowing necklaces to go out, and I was scared you’d take my head off if you knew. I was terrified that I’d, like, scratch the finish, too. But everyone was blown away whenever I wore your work, and I always told them:
my mother made this
. They couldn’t believe it. So thank you, thank you! I can’t think of anything I’d want more.”

Mother and daughter reminisced, and described what they admired in each other; to keep it real, they also dredged up a few memories that were unpleasant. There were silences while they both wracked their brains for whatever they might berate themselves later for forgetting to say. In sporadic, headlong installments, Amelia was delivering one of the very “speeches” that from others had enraged her mother for the last year. Yet for the first time Glynis was able to sit still and listen and accept the compliments. There was nothing insensitive about talking as if she were about to die when she was.

The visit was warm enough and good enough that it didn’t need to be overly long.

“Have a great time in Africa,” said Amelia, standing. “I hope you make it to Pemba before…” She hesitated, then seemed to relish the new lack of pretense. “Before you die. And I hope the end—doesn’t hurt too much. I guess it may not have turned out quite the way you intended, but I still think you had a good life, Mom.”

Shep feared that his wife would shy away with something worthy of Pogatchnik like, “Well, it was what it was.” Instead Glynis shot her husband a long look before turning back to her daughter. “Yes, my dear,” she said. “I think I’ve had a good life, too.”

When the two women faced each other at the door, it was an odd moment but strangely simple—elegant, even. They hugged. Neither cried. Their leave-taking was dignified: one of those successful partings at which neither party would leave a sweater behind.

“Goodbye, Mom,” said Amelia.

“Goodbye, Amelia.” Glynis added with a wry little smile, “It’s been nice knowing you.”

“Yes,” said Amelia, her smile so identically wry, her tone so exactly duplicating the same dry, classy understatement, that these two had to be related. “It’s been nice knowing you, too.”

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Union Bancaire Privée Account Number 837-PO-4619
Statement for February 2006
Balance: $771,398.22

T
he journey itself resembled one of those charity events during which a valiant band of the severely handicapped improbably climb Mont Blanc; had they only signed up sponsors, their motley party of seven might have raised thousands for a good cause.

After the ninety-minute drive to Kennedy, Shep ditched his SUV in long-term parking, thinking:
very long term
. (So oriented toward acquisition, Americans cheated themselves of the joys of divestiture, thus far proving much more intense. With every all-in-one printer and pair of flannel-lined jeans he walked clean away from, Shep felt so much lighter that by the time they arrived at Gate 3A he might have flown to Pemba without the planes.) After three hours of loitering, the British Airways red-eye to London was seven hours, followed by a three-and-a-half-hour layover in Heathrow, an eight-and-a-half-hour flight on Kenya Airways to Nairobi, another two-hour layover, an hour-and-forty-minute flight to Zanzibar, a four-hour layover with no air-conditioning, which in
hundred-degree heat with Flicka nearly proved catastrophic, a shaky half-hour flight in a twenty-seater prop whose faded appointments dated the plane back to about 1960, an hour’s tumble in a minivan, and a twenty-minute speedboat ride, the trip door to door—
door
loosely speaking, since their tented encampment didn’t really have one—took thirty-three hours.

Entertainments were numerous: helping his father shit within the confines of an airline head; glaring at fellow passengers who pretended not to stare at Flicka as she lifted her shirt and poured another airline miniature of bottled water into a plastic hole in her stomach; fielding icy offers of assistance from flight attendants who really meant, “Fucking hell, why me?” and “These emaciated cripples have no business flying, and they’d better not die on my plane” continually moving Flicka’s portable oxygen tank out of the way of refreshment carts; trading off with Carol in reminding Flicka to swallow; doling out three complex sets of medications, and having to separate them out meticulously by shape and color when turbulence sent a lap load onto the floor and skittering under other passengers’ seats; going begging down the aisle for unused airline blankets to keep Glynis warm; buying
kikois
in Zanzibar’s grungy airport to soak in cold water and wipe Flicka down, although it was having remembered to pack the little portable fan that he’d propped on his computer terminal at the swelteringly overheated offices of Handy Randy that really saved the day—thank you, Pogatchnik.

The last bumpy leg on ZanAir was nauseating, the circulation no better than hot breath. Everyone fanned themselves with laminated escape instructions that, given the age of the plane, they should probably have been reading. Clutching his wife’s hand, Shep distracted himself by memorizing his first lesson in Swahili—“fasten seatbelts”:
fungu mikanda
; “no smoking”:
usivute sigara
. Three of these passengers were near enough to it not to worry about imminent demise. Still, as the plane’s engines milled in a deafening grind whose fluctuations did not encourage confidence, he prayed to put a first toe on Pemba without freefalling five thousand feet beforehand.

At last the prop plane lurched above the Pemban shallows—a wide alabaster ripple of azures, emeralds, and aquas of a richness one rarely encountered outside computer animation—and then sailed over the lacy rim of a lambent white beach.

“Wow,” said Flicka, craning over Heather’s lap to gaze out the window.

“Oh, gross, you’re getting drool all over me again!” Heather complained, although she’d already dripped guava-banana yogurt down her shirt.

Glynis, too, was glued to her window. “Shepherd, it’s beautiful.” She sighed. “Maybe you were right.”

“Jesum crow, son,” said Gabe from the window seat in the next row. “And I thought I’d spend the rest of my days staring at nothing but that cheap reproduction of a Thomas Hart Benton at Twilight Glens.”

“Could have found this view on Google Earth without taking four different airplanes,” said Zach, who had chosen to sit glumly on his own.

“I always think of Africa as dry,” Carol marveled. “But this island looks so lush!”

Indeed, Pemba was densely forested, its terrain lumpy with hillocks, their thick, broad-leafed foliage of banyan trees and banana plants span-gled with punctuating palms like asterisks. Tiny, humble patches of cultivation were threaded together with red dirt tracks that would hereafter supplant the West Side Highway. As they passed overhead, roofs of corrugated tin flared silver in the sun, as if the population of Pemba were flashing a greeting to their newest residents in Morse code.

They landed at an airport that Glynis declared “adorable.” With a tiny hexagonal watchtower striped in Fanta orange and baby blue, it looked like a toy. The terminal itself was the size of a one-room schoolhouse. After the oppressive seriousness of the last year, Shep welcomed a locale that shrank the accoutrements of Western civilization into playful assemblages that might have been made from Legos.

Lifting his wife, father, and afflicted seventeen-year-old ward from the plane to the three waiting wheelchairs that Fundu Lagoon had
thoughtfully organized in advance—they were all so exhausted that even Flicka did not resist—Shep was niggled by his first trace of disappointment. Sniffing the thick, otherwise pungent air as it baked back from the tarmac, he could detect a vague floral sweetness mixing with the reek of airline fumes, but—
no cloves
. Even as their party was loaded by a jovial, muscular driver and the minivan got under way, Shep kept inhaling, sticking his nose out the crack of the van’s window with a petulance he could not repress. It was just an idea he’d latched onto, from a snippet he’d read online, but for some reason it had become terribly important to him that the entire island of Pemba would smell like pumpkin pie.

The drive was still enchanting. Between the airport in Chake Chake and the port of Mkoani they traveled one of Pemba’s few paved roads, so that if anything the vistas went by too quickly: trees drooping with papayas whose contour reminded Shep with chagrin of his father’s aged testicles, immature mangos shaped like lima beans, bulbs of breadfruit spiked like maritime mines. Traffic must have been rare, since as their vehicle passed local women in harlequin
kangas
rose from the shade of their porches to stare. Surveying the housing stock, Shep considered whether to build Chez Knacker with the less attractive cinderblocks of which the newer houses were made, or to go native and learn to construct the more traditional architecture of thatched coconut-palm roofing and mud walls dried on a frame of sticks. The latter, claimed their driver, lasted a good forty years, and their rooms were cool.

Yet as they drew toward the port where Fundu’s speedboat would meet them, the roadside was soon lined with straw mats, nubbled with a thin crumble in hues from green to brown. As the mats grew in density—by the edge of town the nubble was spread on the road’s meridian, and out onto the tarmac itself—the van gradually infused with the aroma of pumpkin pie.
Cloves
, spread to dry in sun. Inhaling deeply, Shep sat back in satisfaction. The Afterlife had begun.

A
t $1,250 per night, the “superior suite” at Fundu Lagoon—the very last and most expensive set of tents a ten-minute walk from the main
resort, providing maximum privacy—was hardly where Shep planned to hunker down for keeps. At that rate, the Forge Craft settlement would last no more than a couple of years. Yet the resort’s comically palatial luxury was perfect for this recuperative pause: catered meals, towels the size of bedsheets in high thread-count Egyptian cotton, and their encampment’s generous provision of everything that Shep might have forgotten: floppy straw sun hats, sandalwood shampoo, organic hibiscus teabags, bug spray, mosquito coils, straw carrier bags for beachcombing, and a copy of
Africa Birds and Birding
, not to mention the iced bottle of champagne and chilled glasses that greeted them on arrival.

Indeed, it was the champagne that inspired his immediate solution to what to do about Flicka, whose blood pressure was soaring in the heat. Since the little round plunge pool on their deck was essentially a champagne bucket writ large, it was the perfect place to stick Flicka, who could dangle in the cool blue water through the heat of the day. Snorkeling expeditions to the reef, diving lessons, and dawn speedboat trips to careen through cavorting pods of spinner dolphins would keep Zach from grumbling that there was nothing to do; as soon as he’d ditched his bag at their encampment, the kid made a beeline for the computer with broadband in the entertainment tent, having perhaps interpreted the sweat along his hairline as an early sign of Internet cold Turkey. Shep’s father may have been going through newspaper withdrawal himself, but immediately set up shop in a deck chair in the shade of a wide umbrella, stripped down to his boxers. Sipping champagne and gazing out to the deserted beach while
daos
and
mtumbwis
sailed lazily across the horizon, he seemed sufficiently to savor his miraculous rescue from the lifeless four walls of Twilight Glens to live without
The New York Times.
Instead he drew out the first of the stack of Ruth Rendell and Walter Mosley novels that his son had stashed in his luggage—the very variety of fiction that had been Gabriel Knacker’s undoing on the staircase on Mt. Forist Street. After exploring the big main tent and indoor bathroom, playing with the outdoor shower, clambering up to the second floor of the adjoining tent to play with the beaded curtains of mangrove seeds, Heather squeezed into her swimming suit and tumbled
to the water. Carol kept an eye on her, but at low tide the girl walked for ten minutes straight out and never submerged deeper than her knees. In her first hour at Fundu, Heather had already got more exercise than Shep had seen the girl take for the last ten days.

He settled Glynis onto the wide white canopied mattress to rest. A staff member arrived promptly with a tall glass of fresh passion-fruit juice and a straw at his request, although he also fed his wife a christening sip or two from his champagne. He eased off the remainder of her velour lounge suit—all that she could stand against her skin these last few months—and tenderly clad her in a soft, thin muslin dress he had snagged from Fundu’s gift shop on the way in. Glynis smoothed her hand across the starched and ironed white sheets and glanced overhead at the gathered mosquito netting.

“So this is my death bed,” she said simply.

“It’s better than that snarl of blankets on Crescent Drive, isn’t it? And at least here we don’t have to pay any extra to heat the room to ninety.”

She smiled. “But whatever am I going to do without the Food Channel?”

“From the sample menus I read online? Grilled wahoo, Thai beef salad, baked lemon soufflé? You’re living in the Food Channel.”

“Well, it’s pretty amazing, Shepherd. Though getting here was horrible.”

“I know. I knew it would be horrible.”

“I couldn’t do that again. I guess not having to is one merit of the one-way trip.”

“It’s one-way for me, too.”

“You’re sure you’ll stay here?” This was her first tentative inquiry about Shep’s real pending Afterlife: life after Glynis. “It’s only been a few hours.”

“I was sure before the props on the plane stopped spinning. And then on the drive to Mkoani…You can tell, they work hard here. They may have cell phones now, but everything is still pretty primitive. More bikes and oxcarts than cars. You want fish, you catch it. You want a banana, you pick it. Suits me. And did you notice all the men by the
side of the road—re-soling shoes, fiddling with upended bikes, taking fridges apart? I’m so sick of being told in the States, oh, that would cost more to fix than it’s worth, just buy another one. In Pemba, imports are expensive, labor’s cheap, and people are poor. So they repair things, keep old appliances running. That’s more my nature. I mean, this is a handyman’s paradise. I think I could come to understand this life. I don’t think I did, the other.”

“Maybe I didn’t, either,” she said sadly. “I got so caught up in…You’re not an artist, but in my field things can start to seem so—adversarial. Not only with the rest of the world, but with yourself. Wrestling over whether your stuff is any good. But Ruby is probably right. You just make something and then make something else. It’s ordinary. Not so different from being a handyman after all. I wish I’d got that from the beginning.”

“Worrying about what flatware you did or didn’t produce—you can let that go now, too. Look around you. Does it seem to matter?”

The mangrove seed curtains rattled gently in the breeze. A vervet monkey ventured brazenly to the deck and snatched half of Gabe’s grilled cheese sandwich. The sun notched closer to the horizon, bathing the encampment in the syrup of a late-harvest Riesling.

“Not especially,” said Glynis. “Something about the air, the languor here. It’s hard to imagine anything mattering especially.”

“I’ll tell you what matters,” Shep said wistfully. “We should have moved here in 1997.”

F
or the following few days—seemingly an infinity at the time, but less than a week—Glynis miraculously rallied, and Shep allowed himself to hope that Philip Goldman’s prognosis had been too pessimistic. They went for dawdling rambles along the beach, bending down for conch shells. They watched crabs skitter to their holes, birds swoop over the banyan trees, schools of tiny silver fish flash into the air beside the pier and patter back to the surface with a rippling plash. Late afternoons when the ruthless sun had softened, he took his wife’s hand and led
her into the shallow sea, where the sand was fine and clean, the water almost hot from the day’s equatorial bask. In the vast, wooden-slatted shower stall, he soaped the salt from her skin and rinsed the grains from between her toes. Making free with the gift shop, he clad her for dinner in filmy cotton shifts, wrapping soft Indian scarves around her scalp. To fend off mosquitoes, he dabbed deet behind her ears like fine perfume. At sunset, they idled at the bar at the base of the pier, where Glynis ordered complicated papaya-and-vodka cocktails for the hell of it. She may not have made it through most of them, but mortality is the ultimate liberator, and one of the many things that didn’t matter anymore was her alcohol intake.