A Dual Inheritance (55 page)

He shook his head again.

“Tell me,” she whispered, “what.”

He sat up straighter. She took her hand away.

“Let’s just—let’s leave it,” he said.

No
was all she could think.
No, let’s not
. She returned her hand to his skin, closer to his neck, more confidently this time.

But he grabbed her hands between both of his own. Those hands were finally touching hers, but it didn’t feel the way it had just a moment ago, when the air was charged.

He was, she realized, trying to stop her. Shocked—even mortified—her mouth went utterly dry.

She cleared her throat, parched. “I think I need to hear you say it.” Her voice was low, unfamiliar. She watched as a part of her bolted up and ran straight underwater. “I think you need to explain.” She kept looking for clues, searching his face, but his only expression was something like
 … patience
. And so she looked away, locked eyes with the sand.

“Rebecca,” he said gently, still holding her hand. “You’re Ed’s kid.”

She shook her head. She took her hand away. “What does that even mean?” When her voice broke, he put his arm around her and she stopped fighting. “My father—” she started. Then she leaned into his chest: bare and wet and not for her. “You’re not even in touch with my father,” she said, laughing through the beginning of her tears. “You haven’t been friends for years.”

She could feel him shrug as he held on to her. “Doesn’t matter.”

Rebecca wasn’t exactly sure if she was crying because Hugh had rejected her or because she was experiencing embarrassment on an unprecedented level or because, at this distance, she could finally consider how her father was sleeping in a cell each night. She could finally think about the prison’s inmate’s handbook, which she’d read online, and how it contained a section nearly two pages long entitled:
How to Prevent Sexually Abusive Behavior
. Her father was in prison; he was in danger.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

She tried to get up, but he didn’t let her go.

She thought of the missing mosquito nets, the missing trucks, her father and his cellmates—all missing from their desperate, exciting, pathetic, wretched, amazing lives. That baby’s swollen head and narrowed eyes no bigger than his mother’s yellow beads.

Here was Hugh with his arm around her. They had no timeless, mutually transgressive understanding. He was her best friend’s father. Once upon a time—a time that evidently meant something to Hugh—he had been her father’s friend. This had been no one’s fantasy but hers, and here she was: a white woman in Africa, part of a
misunderstanding
.

And so what?
So what
.

This time, when she tried to pull away, he let her.

“Thank you.” Her voice caught again, but as she stood, she looked out at the lake; she pulled herself together. “This has been a great opportunity.”

As she walked away, she had a sudden flash of herself at sixteen, sitting at school assembly in a pair of black tights. She was scratching at the last of her poison ivy, snagging her nails over her thighs and calves.
What are you doing?
whispered Vivi. Why did she remember this? But she did.
Careful
, Vivi said.
You’re going to make a hole
.

She stayed another month. A routine unfolded: At the clinic, she learned how to prepare medicines—crushing the tablets and mixing the liquids. The work was menial, and it suited her. She assisted Tropical Medicine—Dr. Al Horowitz—who taught her how to take vitals. One morning a young man wandered in with an infected cut on his foot. An old woman stumbled in, crying that her uterus was falling out. She saw how Hugh spent most of his day on the phone: with the clinic in Dar; the local net company, which still hadn’t delivered the rest of the nets; the pharmaceutical representatives.

She and Hugh barely spoke during the day. When she wanted to find out about logistics—meal times, meeting times, what to bring where—she asked Omar or another volunteer. If she passed Hugh at the clinic, she kept her head down. She kept a pocket journal with her at all times for the purpose of emergency scribbling. She developed an unprecedented ability to focus on plant life and found she was often squinting at imaginary faraway birds.

But at night, while she drank the same three beers amidst doctors,
workers, and missionaries, she and Hugh would inevitably end up in discussion, first among the others but eventually alone. Their conversations became increasingly personal. They talked about Helen, how he had cheated on her for years and how she’d finally had enough. How—as far as he knew—Vivi had no idea, not unless Helen had told her. Rebecca felt an odd lack of surprise at this news and felt even more unburdened from what she’d begun to think of as her crush. Also, she was flooded with memories that took on sudden meaning: How Hugh had obviously been in Anguilla before they all went on that trip. How that woman in the hammock nursing a newborn was beautiful. How Helen had seemed sad around that baby. Rebecca knew she was seeing everything through a particular, retrofitted lens (could he have really fathered that child?), but it
had
felt odd how he’d so clearly been to the island before and yet neither Helen nor Vivi seemed to acknowledge it.

She asked if he was sorry, and he told her how
sorry
was irrelevant when it came to such matters, especially after so much time.

“Even so,” said Rebecca. “Are you?”

“Of course I am,” said Hugh. “Jesus.”

“I don’t mean to press you on it,” she said quickly.

“Sure you do,” said Hugh. “And I deserve it.”

But he excused himself soon after that. And the following evening, he had his dinner—and presumably his after-dinner drinks—elsewhere.

One night, on the shore, she sat with Hugh atop an overturned boat. Behind them, on the terrace, a birthday dinner continued: clinking bottles and laughter; Carol the RN was sixty.

“So what happened with you and my father?” Rebecca finally asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why did you lose touch?”

Hugh didn’t answer immediately; he took a drag of his cigarette. “Your father cut me off.”

“He—what? No, he didn’t.”

Hugh shook his head, as if this fact surprised him, too. “Over some pointless conversation about the goddamn nation of Israel.” He added, “No offense.”

She found she was unable to look at him, out of something like embarrassment on everyone’s behalf. “But,
really
? I mean, I know he can be … forceful on the subject, but he never mentioned anything like that. He only said you drifted apart.”

“There was no drifting. Have you ever known your father to
drift
? In any way whatsoever?”

When she turned to look at him, he was staring out at the water.

“Hugh?”

“Look,” he said, and pointed. And while at first she was irritated with his shifting focus, she saw that, in the distance, there was an unmistakable glow.

He slowly stood up as a ship came into view. “There she is,” he said. “The only passenger and cargo ferry for the entire lake. She’s it, and she’s extraordinary, so make sure you get a good look.” He called out to the tableful of people behind them, “The
Liemba
, ladies and gentlemen!” He gazed across the water, as if this ship were, in fact, his new romance. “Just watch,” he whispered. Before he sat back down, he held up his hand, as if marking the location of the boat. For a moment he looked almost infirm, and then it dawned on Rebecca that Hugh was exceptionally drunk.

The table quieted; someone blew out the candles so they could get a better look, and within moments the dark lake erupted with small kerosene flames, lanterns shining from small wooden skiffs laden with sacks.
Rice
, Carol explained.
Sugar. Pineapples. Cassava
. Rebecca could see the glinting silver of what Hugh identified as piles of dried fish. He explained with peculiar reverence how the goods were transferred from the bobbing wooden boats up onto the
Liemba
’s deck. Most goods were going to the Congo, he explained, which was larger than the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, and Germany combined.

If Rebecca strained, she could hear passengers crying out to one another in the universal language of impatience. She could imagine the
crowds, determined to find their place on the ship for the night. She took out her camera and aimed it toward the ship, so regal and glittery from where she was sitting, though she could only imagine the foul-smelling chaos of so many people and their belongings.

Weeks later, after the swollen-headed baby (whose name, she’d learn, was Abasi) had made it through a successful surgery, after he’d returned to his family with bright eyes and a tiny scar, and after Rebecca was back in her own apartment, which looked out on a row of brownstones and one ancient cigar shop, she would log hours staring at her laptop screen in the midst of an unavoidable job search. One day when she was particularly discouraged, she distracted herself by downloading this particular series of photographs: the
Liemba
, all blurry glows and traces of sparkle on a background of solid black. And there was another picture. She realized that she must have aimed slightly to the right, because, just for one mistake of a shot, there was no
Liemba
, no blur of light—only the edge of Hugh in flash-blighted profile, with the tail end of his cigarette dangling from his lips, as if he’d forgotten about it.

Soon after, she got a phone call in the middle of the night—
Hello
? she asked, breathless, assuming it was Vivi, gone into labor. But it was Hugh—so odd to hear from Hugh—and he didn’t even say hello.
You won’t fucking believe this
is how he started, and he explained how Abasi—sometime after the follow-up visit—ran a high fever. He relayed how the baby was admitted to the hospital, the same national hospital where he’d had the successful surgery, and how, there in the hospital, the nurses determined—
without a blood test
, he shouted,
without administering antibiotics
—that there was nothing to be done.

The mother would have been there, too, of course. The mother would have been there in that hospital in Dar es Salaam. Rebecca had learned her name but would always think of her just this way:
the mother
. She would think of her when Vivi’s healthy baby was born. And years after that, when her own children made their way into this world:
the mother
.

They talked for hours that night, Hugh and Rebecca, their disembodied voices rising and falling. About an hour into the conversation it came to her again: She was talking on the phone with Hugh. Even stranger: Whatever spell she’d been under for lo those many years—it had evidently lifted. And so she kept talking to him: She lay on her bed, wandered to the kitchen; she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder and felt such tremendous relief because, my God, what a mess she’d almost made.

Toward the end of their conversation, some three hours later, toward dawn, Rebecca lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. She was abruptly back on that single-prop plane, flying over Lake Tanganyika. The propeller whirred loudly, sweat was drying on her skin, and before she remembered to be terrified, she found herself looking out the window and thinking:
what a view
.

“A few what?” asked Hugh. “Did you just say
a few
?”

“I must have been dreaming,” said Rebecca, disoriented. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“You should be asleep,” he said.

“No, no, I’m awake,” she reassured him. Her heart was suddenly racing. “I’m awake now.”

Chapter Nineteen

An Invitation, 2010

Vivi and Brian are getting hitched
.
 
(Only family)
Won’t you come celebrate the very next day?
Sunday, September Twenty-Sixth, 2010
Eleven o’clock in the morning
.
Veuve Clicquot and brunch
.
Grandmother Ordway’s house on Fishers Island
.
Circle YES PLEASE or NO THANK YOU and send this paper back to us!
XOXO
Vivi, Brian, Lukas, Sabine, and Gisella

The invitation looked as though someone had scrawled the information with a Sharpie, while in a rush, on a paper bag. It came with an accompanying “Travel Information Kit” and a picture of Vivi and Brian and their three blond children, who had presumably kept the couple so damn busy that they’d never found the time—up until the
very second
when someone had scrawled this pathetic invitation—to consider getting married.

Despite his early suspicions that she was a bad influence on Rebecca, and despite the exceptionally strange fact of who her parents were, Ed was fond of Vivi and always had been, ever since the moment she’d shaken his hand at JFK, looking like the spawn of Bo Derek, after Rebecca (still a shocking fact) had snuck off to Anguilla with the Shipleys. But this was ridiculous. If Guy Ordway had lived to see this invitation, trusts might have been revoked.

And what kind of schmuck did they take him for? Evidently one who would travel all the way to an island off the coast of Connecticut for a day trip, for a glass of bubbly and some bacon.

Though he did wonder which one of them had come up with the idea of inviting him. Was he simply Rebecca’s father now? Rebecca’s father, who had been morally and financially gutted? Or was he Hugh’s old friend? And, most relevant, what was he now—if anything—to Helen?

This shoddy and affected invitation, which had been waiting for him when he’d returned home that muggy evening, was the ostensible reason for his daily phone call to his daughter. He sat at his desk, in his crappy Hell’s Kitchen (
Midtown West
) rental, looking over the view of buildings upon buildings, the nothing-special view of bright lights and traffic to which he’d never grown accustomed, and he complained. He ranted about how nothing was taken seriously anymore. How nobody had any respect for life’s rituals, life’s ceremonies. Forget about how people were swearing on television and joking about every last thing—not that he didn’t have a sense of goddamn humor, but did
every last thing need to be a joke?