The Darling (9 page)

Basically, it was a childish fantasy, wanting to survive your own death so you could overhear the postmortem, read your own obituary, attend your own funeral, and I indulged it often. But at the same time I was aware of something rumbling beneath it, a hidden desire to get caught, to fail in a spectacular, even suicidal way, and it made me very nervous. It was the feeling I sometimes got driving over a high bridge: one quick tug of the steering wheel to the right, and it’s over the edge and straight down. I had to force myself consciously to resist that impulse, or else pretend that I wasn’t on a bridge—no, I was driving across the Plains, somewhere west of Iowa, nothing but flat, solid, grassy ground beneath me stretching from horizon to horizon.

WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING
with me in the basement or driving his cab, Zack had taken to traveling to New York City for days at a time. “I’m making some very cool contact down there with our black comrades-in-arms,” he told me. “These brothers, man, they’re the forward force of the revolution, the elite corps. A lot of them have been in the joint, some of the brothers are vets back from ’Nam, man. And they’re
pissed
. They make Weather look like candy stripers, man.”

I asked him if they were Black Panthers, but he said, “No way, these guys are in deep cover, man. And the kind of action they’re into is almost beyond politics. These brothers are much heavier than the Panthers.” Again, I believed about half of what he told me. But the half I believed lifted my spirits. For years, ever since the Civil Rights movement got taken over by blacks, and the white college kids like me and the white lawyers and clergymen were sent home from the South, leaving us with only the splinters that were left of the antiwar movement—SDS, Weatherman, the Yippies, Diggers, and so on, all of whom were white and middle class—I’d felt somehow cheated out of my true mission, as if in my chosen line of work I’d been deprived of an essential tool, and that tool was black people. Practically from childhood, and especially in high school and college—thanks to my father’s old-time New England hierarchy of values, I’m sure, and his heavy emphasis on noblesse oblige—my heroes had been the nineteenth-century white abolitionists, most of whom were educated, upper-class women from New England. Like me. And my father had nothing for those women but unqualified praise and admiration. “Among all our distinguished ancestors, Hannah, those female abolitionists are the ones I hold in highest regard. The others, the men, all they ever did was make money. Until I came along,” he’d add, laughing, as if he, a world-famous pediatrician who wrote best-selling books on child care, had somehow managed to avoid making money.

I wanted to know more about these mysterious black proletarian warriors in New York City with whom Zack claimed to have initiated an alliance. But beyond offering hints, winks, and vague allusions to plans for bank robberies and high-jacked armored trucks and heavy weaponry, he wouldn’t tell me anything specific or concrete, which disappointed me, and after a while I figured they were largely a blend of rumor and fantasy cooked up by Zack and some of his male friends, the New York–based members of Weather. Radical white-boy wet dreams.

Until the late-winter night that he came banging on our door at two
A.M.
When I let him in, he collapsed on the floor in the hallway, bleeding through his jacket, and I knew right away it was from a bullet wound. I’d seen enough of them in the emergency room at Peter Bent Brigham not to confuse a bullet wound with any other kind of injury—it was usually the face of the victim that gave it away, scared, in pain, but mainly surprised. Zack had that look.

I helped him to his feet and led him into the kitchen, where he let go of all restraint and like a child terrified by a nightmare—suddenly awake and safe in his own bed—began to sob. Carol and I carefully removed his torn, blood-soaked jean jacket and shirt, and I saw that the bullet had gone cleanly through his shoulder and seemed to have missed bone and arteries.

“It’s not as bad as it looks, but you’ve lost some blood. You’re going to have to get to the hospital,” I told him.

“No! I can’t!
You
fix it!” he cried, as if I were his mommy.

“Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Carol asked him.

“Jesus,
you
tell her,” he said to me.

Bettina had come into the kitchen and stood by the door in her pajamas, looking scared and confused. “Carol, take care of Bettina,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Carol obeyed and scooted Bettina towards her bedroom. “Zack’s okay, honey!” I called to the child. “He just had an accident, that’s all!”

I knew enough anatomy and emergency first aid to clean the wound quickly and staunch the bleeding, and when Zack had recovered himself sufficiently to ask for whiskey—a line he probably took from a Western movie—I knew he’d not lost as much blood as I’d feared.

“You going to tell me what happened?” I asked and poured him a teacup of Jim Beam.

Carol had returned to the kitchen, and Zack jerked his head in her direction. “I’ll have to tell you later, man.”

“Carol, please, we need some privacy,” I said.

“This is weird,” she said. She walked back into the living room, flipped on the TV, dropped herself onto the sofa, and sulked.

“Oh, man, she drives me crazy sometimes. Now, Jesus,
you
. Fucking public enemy number one.”

Carol flipped off the TV, got up, and stuck her head into the kitchen. “I’m goin’ to bed, Don. You comin’?”

I was at the sink scrubbing the bloodstains out of Zack’s jean jacket and denim shirt, and shot her a dirty look. Then felt sorry for it. All she wanted from me was a little straightforward affection mixed with respect—no reason to treat her like a dumb dog. The bedroom door closed behind her, and Zack was already talking.

He’d blown it, he explained, blown it big time, and we were going to have to leave the apartment, get out of New Bedford, out of the country, probably. We not only, as always, had the FBI sniffing after us, but now we were also being hunted down by these black guerillas from New York City, Zack’s very heavy dudes who, he had suddenly discovered, were not Maoist revolutionaries after all, but gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers. “The real thing, man!”

He’d tried to draw a line, he said, on dealing drugs, specifically heroin, and in Newark, on the way to make a buy, they’d had an argument, a misunderstanding, actually, based not on money, he assured me, but principles. Although they had thought it was about money, which is why the misunderstanding had gotten out of hand, so to speak, and they’d suddenly turned on him. He was lucky to have gotten out of there and back here alive, he said. And now these guys were more dangerous to us than the FBI was, because he knew stuff about them that no one else did, and they knew our names and where we lived, the city of New Bedford, at least, but not the actual street address, he assured me. So we had a little time, maybe a day or two, before they came knocking on the door.

“What the hell do you mean
us
and
we?
What the hell did you tell them about
me?
”

“Nothing, man, just your name in passing, you know, on account of the Weather thing. I mean, you think you’re only a peon in the Movement, but you’re well known, man, a poster girl. You were sort of like my bona fides, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Who are these people anyhow? I mean, really? I thought they were SLA or Black Liberation Army. Borderline, but more or less legitimate.”

“Well, yeah, I guess at first I did, too. But they sort of work both sides of the street, play one side off against the other. Look, Hannah, I got confused…”

“Dawn.”

“Yeah, sorry. Dawn. But you know what I mean. Christ, half of Weather and half the Panthers are FBI informers. Half the Klan is on the federal payroll. The Muslims killed Malcolm, and J. Edgar Hoover probably had Martin killed, and who the hell knows who killed Bobby and JFK? Probably LBJ. The point is, there’s nobody left who isn’t wearing some kind of disguise. So who do you trust?”

“You trusted these New York guys, obviously. And I guess they trusted you enough to let you know too much.”

“Mistake. Big mistake. On both parts, mine and theirs.”

In a strange way, I felt almost relieved that everything seemed to be coming undone, and it was difficult not to show it. “Do they know me as Hannah Musgrave or Dawn Carrington? Or both?”

“Oh, no, just Hannah Musgrave, your poster-girl name,” he said, but I knew he was lying.

“What about Carol?”

“She’s cool. I never mentioned her. No reason to.”

That much I did believe. To Zack, Carol and Bettina were like my houseplants. “Where will you go?”

“Way I figure, it’s gotta be back to Ghana, man. Tomorrow. I’ve got enough bread to get me there, and I know how to get by okay in Accra. It’s a very cool city, man, especially for Americans.”

“Lucky you. But where am I supposed to go? Tell me that. I’ve got less than a month’s pay in my checking account, and then I’m broke. And I can’t just walk out on Carol, not without at least leaving her enough for the goddamn rent. This is fucking ridiculous, Zack!”

“No, no, it’s not. You should come with me to Ghana. I feel guilty for this, man. Really. I’ll pay your way; it’s the least I can do. I’ll make a stop at the friendly family trust officer in Boston in the morning, and we can be taking off from Logan on Air Ghana by lunchtime.” He said he knew people in Accra who would find me a job. As it happens, people with my skills, hospital skills, Harvard Medical School skills, were highly employable in Ghana.

“It’s a chance to start over.” He passed his gaze over the apartment. “This, all of it, everything you’ve got here, this slummy apartment, the little girlfriend, the job at the hospital, even the bomb-making in the basement—it may be your way of stopping the War Machine, it may even be your way of starting the Revolution. But it’s bullshit.”

“You didn’t think so yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, yesterday I had more time to play with, time for finding out what’s bullshit and what isn’t, and yesterday I hadn’t been shot yet by a crazed, paranoid black guy who couldn’t tell the difference between liberating the people and selling them drugs. I’m outa here in the morning, and with this arm and the painkillers that you’re gonna score for me at Peter Bent Brigham, I’ll need someone to drive for me. We can commandeer my cab and drop it off at the airport, and twelve hours later we’ll be kicking back in Accra.”

I stood and walked to the window and looked down at the wet, gray street and the triple-decker houses that lined it on both sides. It was five-thirty in the morning. The sky was pinking in the east, out beyond the bay—in the direction of Africa.
It must be midday in Africa
, I thought. The street below seemed cold and colorless, as if it existed only in grainy black and white, and the radiators hissed and banged as the coal-burning furnace in the basement kicked in, and the darkened hallway smelled of corned beef and cabbage and moldy, wet, threadbare carpeting on the stairs. An empty municipal bus began its roundup of the first-shift mill workers. I could see my car down on the street where I’d parked it, the beat-up old Karmann-Ghia I’d bought in Cleveland. I’ll leave the car keys on the kitchen table for Carol, I decided. And a check for what’s left in my account.

“Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Providing we go now, this minute. If I wait around, I’ll change my mind.”

“Cool. What about Carol and the kid? Doncha wanna wake them up?”

“No. Let’s go now. I’m basically all packed anyhow. I’ve been packed for months. Half expecting this, I guess.”

“No shit? Don’t you want to say goodbye?”

“I hate goodbyes.”

“Man, you are
cold
.”

“Who is? Hannah or Dawn? No, you’re right,” I said and started towards my workroom to get the duffel with my belongings. “I am cold. Both Hannah and Dawn, we’re like icebergs.”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, you’ll see, man. Africa’s gonna melt you.”

AND SO, LIKE
water following gravity, my course and rate of descent more or less determined by the lay of the land and by whomever or whatever happened to lie in my path or by my side, I came to Ghana, a place that on my mental map of Africa was located in the region marked “unexplored.” When you let go of your life like that, unexpected turns occur, and before long your life’s path has become a snarl of zigs and zags. It’s how one comes up with what’s called “an interesting life,” I guess. And my brief stay in Ghana with Zack was merely that, another zig, another zag—the makings of an interesting life.

It was more complicated than that, of course, but I didn’t realize it at the time it was happening. One never does. I was, in a sense, passively following Zack, who knew how to disappear safely and, as it turned out, comfortably in far-off Ghana. But he wasn’t leading me, and he certainly wasn’t dominating me. He was a facilitator, one of any number of people who could just as easily have played the role as he. Or the role of comrade-in-arms. Or lover. Back then they were all essentially the same to me.

The truth is, I used Zack. Just as I had used Carol. I wasn’t as passive as I seemed. Almost without knowing it I’d reached a point, long before I ran out on Carol and fled New Bedford, where I wanted desperately for my old life to be over and a new one to begin. But I had no idea how to go about it—without turning myself in to the FBI. And there was no way I’d do that.

It wasn’t the likelihood of spending a year or three or even more behind bars that kept me from turning myself in—I might actually have welcomed jail time, a few years to reflect and pay mild penance; a time to organize my warring memories into a coherent narrative. It would have meant publicly voiding my previous life, however, canceling it out, erasing all its meaning, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. My life so far had cost me and everyone who ever loved me and everyone whom I had loved too much, way too much, for me simply to say, “I’m sorry, Daddy, and I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, everybody. I have for more than ten years been making a terrible mistake. And, oh yes, everyone who was led to believe that I was someone other than I am, my apologies to you, too. It was all a dumb mistake, Carol. All of it.”