Thirty Girls (35 page)

Jane unpacked her black bag, pawing through flattened dirty clothes. She came across the oversized brown linen shirt Harry sometimes wore. She went back down the hall to his room. Here, she said. This is more you now.

He folded his arms, as if refusing it. Don’t you want a shirt that’s me? He was smiling.

No, I want you to have a shirt that’s me.

He took it and brought it to his nose. It smells like you, he said. I won’t wash it, just smell it now and then.

The smell will go away.

I won’t smell it all the time. He was trying to make her smile. With an effort she kept her face bright.

He looked at her face, assessing it, the way he looked at the sky. I’m going, he said. But I’m also not going.

The air darkened as she took a bath. She didn’t feel the loss of him yet, but knew it was coming and braced herself. She couldn’t tell how big or small the impact would be. She’d wait to find out. He was still nearby, so she didn’t have to feel him gone. He was under the same roof and her body knew it and felt reassured.

She lay in the water, trying to find more reassurance.

Okay, she thought. Okay. It’ll be okay.
Okay
was the most reassuring word she could come up with. It’s what she’d said to the girl Esther. It will be okay. It was the reassuring thing one said.

There was always life. At least I’m alive. At least she was still here. But here with herself, the reasons to be alive came flashing and they had to do with Harry. Those were the bright things in her. She allowed herself to note them and felt again the small shocks they gave, when he’d pulled her down the hall the rainy night in the Mara, with the loud mud and the warmth of his skin through his wet shirt. She thought of the night on the road back to Naivasha watching through the black windshield as he scooped up the body and carried it like a lover out of the headlights.

Her throat thickened.

She might be saying Okay, but No is what she was feeling. Yes, she had said to him, but inside she was refusing it, not ready to let him go. She would have to think of another perspective. One could manage most anything with the right perspective.

She zoomed into the future to picture him there. If he were in the future, then it meant he would not have gone.

Years would go by and she would still know him. They would always know one another. Some people you met and knew they would always be in your life, and hadn’t she known he was one of those people?

Way off in the future she would let him know how he had mattered to her.

She could tell him then, after she’d proven it with time, not now when it might seem she was asking for something back.

He would be married by then. His wife would be a great girl. She would be a flier too. They’d have two kids, or three, and live in a tree house or by the sea. And one night when she was visiting them, because she would always come back to Africa and he would be one of the reasons why, late some night when she was sitting with her old friend Harry, she would tell him without any drama how it had been for her back then, that is, now. She would not be causing any mischief, because she would have a husband too and they would all be friends and she would not want anything from him—only that he know, for the record, how he had added an important thing to her life. How, with him, she had found a new part of herself. To describe it now might look as if she were being
dramatic. She had a fear of overdoing it, and appearing needy. So she would wait. She would easily wait for years, it would be all right to say, By the way, this is how much you meant to me. And this is how grateful I am for the new bit of life you gave me so long ago, lifting me out of a dead place where I’d been wasting for a long time. Maybe she would say she’d loved him.

He might say, I didn’t know. Or he might say, I was too young to know it. Or maybe he’d say, in his direct Harry way, Yes, I knew.

He might even add, I wasn’t where you were yet.

And she would say she had known that.

What she might say would wait and prove itself over time. Important things lasted and could wait.

There was little food in the kitchen but they located a box of spaghetti. Harry grated some rock-hard Parmesan he found sweating in the bread box. They drank Tusker from bottles and their conversation was oddly polite, as if they were just meeting, which in a way they were, being with each other in a new way. They ate at an old butcher block in the middle of the kitchen which unlike the other kitchens she’d seen in Karen houses looked twenty years old and scuffed. Usually one did not go into the kitchen, it being the staff’s domain. The rest of Harry’s parents’ house was polished with dark wood floors, but the kitchen looked lived-in and worn. When she asked, Harry told her about the school he went to in Langata where nearly all the students were white. His best friend growing up didn’t go to the school, but lived here, on the other side of the garage, in the staff’s quarters. Edgar was their servant Priscilla’s son. But when he was older he didn’t mix much outside the white Africans. Harry said that basically he had two friends who weren’t white which was a pretty pathetic percentage.

As they were doing the dishes, Harry’s parents returned in the back door, looking weathered and tan. Harry introduced them again to Jane, wiping her soapy hands. I read your book, his mother, Sheila, said. I liked it. She had short hair and looked nothing like Harry, with a slender face and thin neck. Harry’s father, Joe, had a beard and wore a plaid shirt, looking like a Peace Corps worker. They’d been out to dinner and were
leaving early in the morning for a week in the north to inspect some cattle. Joe said he was done in and going to bed and mildly left the room. The master bedroom was far off, in another wing of the house Jane hadn’t seen.

Good trip? his mother said, picking up mail on the counter and glancing through it. She wore shorts and a sleeveless collared shirt.

Harry nodded. It was hectic, he said.

I bet.

Harry draped his arm over his mother’s shoulder, only slightly below his. He mentioned Jane staying in the guesthouse while they were gone, and Sheila said that was fine, her thoughts elsewhere.

She patted Harry’s back as she turned to go. Have good flights, she said, distracted.

You too, Harry said.

Oh. She stopped in the doorway, not turning around. Make sure Priscilla knows Jane is here.

After she’d gone, he said, They work too hard. But it’s good.

The television was in a small room off the long hall near the kitchen. Jane lay stomach-down on the rug looking through a book about Baron Blixen with black-and-white photographs of stylish white people standing beside dead wildlife or dressed in flapper outfits beside palm fronds. Harry turned on the TV. The sound was grating; she had been so far from it for weeks. The news was on: riots in East Kenya, blurry shots of people running through rising dust. An ad came on for a floor cleaner with white tile floors and yellow cartoon sparkles. Harry switched the channel. A turbaned woman was singing an African song, then two women in chairs were talking to each other. He stopped at a movie, a cheesy horror movie from the seventies. He slumped down, accepting it with a slack face. Jane tried ignoring him, and focused on the big-hatted men and carefree women on safari in laced boots and jodphurs. She would have liked to be blank now, too.

On the screen a girl with flipped-back hair was running past a pool at night. A boy scrambled over a fence. He landed and paused, his polo shirt tucked into high-belted pants. A wall of fatigue hit Jane. She knew
she should go to bed. She was not looking forward to standing and walking back to the guest room. The movie flickered on. Someone screamed. There was a man in a mask. Another girl in shorts was making something in a blender, so she didn’t hear the scream.

Jane wondered if she might write him a note later and slip it into his knapsack, so he’d find it on his trip, setting up camp wherever that was. He would have it and think of her and maybe miss her. She would say, I told you I would wave goodbye. Or maybe not.

There was a loud banging on the door in the kitchen, echoing down the hall.

What the fuck, Harry said blandly and stood. He did not look alarmed. Maybe it’s Andy, he muttered, leaving the room.

His sneakers slapped down the hall. She pushed herself up and reached for the TV dial to turn down the sound, muting an ad for potato crisps. Maybe they could still stay together tonight in the same bed, chastely or not. Their time together had been short but full, strange and disorienting. They could at least still hold each other. Immediately she realized, No. Harry wasn’t like she was, wanting to cut corners. He was decisive and would stick to his word.
When I’m done with something that’s it
, he had said. She would be like Harry then, a person of her word. She would accept this is how it was.

She heard a male voice in the kitchen speaking Swahili, an African voice, not Andy’s. The voice sounded upset.

She hoisted herself off the rug, feeling thick and tired. Coming down the hall she met Harry’s silhouette. Something’s going on, he said, and turned around. She followed him into the kitchen where a young man in a blue buttoned shirt stood by the sink.

This is Murray. He says the askari’s gone.

Harry had opened a cabinet and was feeling around inside.

Murray nodded with a worried face. He was the younger brother of Harry’s childhood friend Edgar.

Some guys were down by the gate, Harry said, closing the cabinet, not finding what he was after.

Should you call the police?

Harry shook his head as if to say, Who really knows what’s going on, if anything. I’ll just go see, he said. The police are imbeciles anyway.

He looked Jane square in the face and held her shoulders. I want you to lock the door, he said. Come here, like this. He slid a thick bar across the door frame above the doorknob. And don’t let anyone in.

Okay.

Come on, Murray. Where’s Priscilla?

She is not here. This day she has gone to Kibera.

For the night? Harry sounded surprised. They stepped down to the driveway. Habari ya Edgar? he said, and before Jane could hear the answer she had shut the door and drawn the bolt.

The window over the kitchen sink faced the wing of the house with no view, so Jane went back down the hall to a laundry room where a window over the drier faced the driveway spotlit from the garage roof and the staff’s quarters beyond. Through heavy grating in front of the glass she watched Harry and Murray walk past the white truck parked past the garage door and out of the area lit by the spotlight. She saw them in shadow on the grass in front of the servants’ quarters and at the end of the lawn disappearing into the dark stand of pole-like trees. The woods ran along the winding driveway; they were taking a shortcut. Through the leaves’ ragged screen of black lace glowed a topaz streetlight at the end of the driveway where it met the Ndege Road.

She felt for a latch and opened the window like a door. Warm air came through the grate and the very distant sound of voices. They didn’t sound confrontational. She tried to make out Harry’s voice, but it was too faint to tell. Then the voices got louder and were shouting. Was one Harry? She knelt up on the drier and pulled herself to the grate. There was a loud crack, and for an instant she thought it was her knee denting the drier then immediately realized the sound came from outside and an electric jolt in her body told her before her mind did that it was a gunshot. She froze. The air seemed to change into something solid, forming around the fact that something terrible had just happened.

She pulled herself near the bars. Harry! she screamed. Harry! She was screaming at nothing, and nothing answered.

She jumped off the drier and ran down the hall toward the phone. Footsteps came padding out of the deeper darkness of the house, and
Sheila appeared in a loose sleeveless shirt and pajama pants to her shins. She held a wooden stick with a round ball on the end. What is it? she said firmly and fast, managing to sound both urgent and calm.

Harry went down to the gate—

Joe! Sheila called, not taking her eyes off Jane. Joe! Then to Jane, What happened?

Jane told her. I was about to call the police.

Joe hurried by them, shirtless, his neck tan, his torso pale. I’ve got it, he said. Sheila and Jane followed him to the kitchen.

Sheila opened a cabinet different from the one Harry had opened and took out a flashlight. She pulled back the bolt on the door and hurried down the steps through the open doorway. Jane saw the beam of the flashlight bobbing up and down and the stick in her hand as she ran toward the trees.

Harry! she called. Harry! A voice answered. Murray! she screamed. Ni wapi? Where are you? Hapa, came the distant reply. Here. The flashlight flickered like heat lightning across the tree trunks.

Joe hung up the phone on its small table outside the kitchen door. Police are coming, he said. He should have woken us up, he continued in a tremulous voice. He opened a drawer and took out a knife.

Jane stood useless. Murray said the askari had gone, Jane found herself saying.
Murray
. Why was she even saying the name Murray? She didn’t know Murray.

Joe shoved his feet into a pair of canvas shoes by the door and grabbed a jacket from a crowded hook. Lock the door after me, he said. Apparently this is what the guest was told. Jane stood in the doorway and watched Harry’s father hurry toward the trees and meet a figure emerging from the darkness. It was Murray.

Mama says you will call the ambulance, he said.

Jesus God, Joe said, wheeling around. You go back with Mama, he said, and Murray turned around. Jane stood aside as Joe rushed past her to the phone. He dialed. Bloody hell! he said. He hung up and dialed again. His body was turning side to side, wanting to move but tethered to the coiled line.

Jane stepped outside down the kitchen step. Her throat was pounding. She walked crunching the gravel. Past the garage in the staff house
a door was open to a yellow hallway and she saw a woman standing on the grass, the backs of her legs and the hem of a dress picked out in the light from the door.