Winter Garden (9 page)

“Her mind seems to be fine, Meredith.”

“But—”

“She’s grieving. Give her some time.”

“But—”

“There’s no normal way to handle a thing like this. They were married for five decades and now she’s alone. Just listen to her, if you can; talk to her. And don’t let her be alone too much.”

“Believe me, Jim, my mom is alone whether I am in the room or not.”

“So be alone together.”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. “Right. Thanks, Jim, for seeing us. Now I need to get her home and get back to work. I have a two-fifteen meeting.”

“Maybe you should try slowing down. I can give you a sleeping pill prescription if you’d like.”

Meredith wished she had ten bucks for every time someone—especially her husband—had given her that advice. She’d be on a Mexican beach with the money. “Sure, Jim,” she said. “I’ll stop and smell the roses.”

On a blistering hot day, more than one month after she’d left Washington State, Nina stood amid a sea of desperate, starving refugees. As far as she could see, there were people huddled in front of dirty, sagging tents. Their situation was critical; many of them had come in bleeding or shot or raped, but their stoicism was remarkable. Heat and dust beat down on them; they walked miles for a bucket of water, waited hours for a measure of rice from the Red Cross, but still there were children playing in the dirt; every now and then the sound of laughter rose above the crying.

Nina was as filthy and tired and hungry as those around her. She’d lived in this camp for two weeks now. Before that, she’d been in Sierra Leone, ducking and hiding to avoid being shot or raped herself.

She squatted down in the dry, dirty red soil. The humming sound of the camp was overwhelming, a combination of bugs and voices and distant machinery. Off to the left, a tattered medical flag fluttered above an army-issue tent. Hundreds of injured people stood patiently in line for help.

In front of her, sprawled half in and half out of a tent, an old, wizened black man lay in his wife’s arms. He’d recently lost a leg, and the bloody stump seeped red beneath the blanket that was wrapped around him. His wife had been with him for hours, propping him up, although her own emaciated body had to be aching. She tipped precious drops of water into his mouth.

Nina capped her lens and stood up. Staring out over the camp, she felt an exhaustion that was new for her. For the first time in her career, the tragedy of it all was nearly unbearable. It wasn’t worse here than where she’d been before. That wasn’t it. The situation hadn’t changed. She had. She carried grief with her everywhere, and the burden of it made compartmentalization impossible.

People usually thought her work was about being there, as if anyone could just point and shoot, but the truth was that her photographs were an extension of who she was, what she thought, how she felt. It took perfect concentration to capture the exquisite pain of personal tragedy on film. You had to be there one hundred percent, in the moment—but it had to be their moment.

She opened her pack and pulled out her satellite phone. Walking as far east as she dared, she set up the equipment, positioned the satellite, and called Danny.

At the sound of his voice, she felt something in her chest relax. “Danny,” she said, yelling to be heard over the static.

“Nina, love. I thought you’d forgotten me. Where are you?”

She winced at that. “Guinea. You?”

“Zambia.”

“I’m tired,” she said, surprising herself. She couldn’t remember ever saying that before, not while she was working.

“I can be at Mnemba Island by Wednesday.”

Blue water. White sand. Ice. Sex. “I’m in.”

She disconnected the call and packed her phone back up. Slinging the strap over her shoulder, she headed back to the camp. A line of new Red Cross trucks had arrived and the pandemonium of food distribution was going on. She sidestepped a pair of women carrying a box of supplies and went past the tent where she’d been taking pictures.

The man in the bloody bandages had died. The woman still sat behind him, rocking him in her arms, singing to him.

Nina stopped and took a picture, but this time the lens was no protection, and when she eased the camera from her eye, she realized she was crying.

From her comfortable, air-conditioned seat in the back of an SUV, Nina stared through the window at the scenery of Zanzibar. The narrow, twisting streets were teeming with people: women draped in the traditional Muslim veils and robes, schoolchildren in blue and white uniforms, men standing in groups. On the side of the road, vendors tried to sell anything they could, from fruits and vegetables to tennis shoes to barely used T-shirts. In the jungle behind the road, women—most with babies on their backs or in their arms—picked cloves; the spices lay in cinnamon-colored swatches on the sides of the road, drying in the hot sun.

When the cab finally left the main road and turned onto the dirt path that led to the beach, Nina hung on to the door handle for dear life. The road here was pure coral—as was the island—and tires could blow in a second. Their speed slowed; they inched past villages set up in the middle of nothing; cattle penned in makeshift corrals, women in brightly colored veils and dresses gathering sticks, children pumping together at the well for water. The houses were small and dark and made of whatever was handy—sticks, mud, chunks of coral—and everything wore the red cast of the dirt.

At the end of the road, the beach was a hive of activity. Wooden boats bobbed in the shallow water, while men tended to nets spread out on the sand. Raggedly dressed boys haunted the area, hoping for tourists, offering to pose for photographs in exchange for American dollars.

The minute she stepped onto the sleek white motorboat, she realized how tense she’d been. A knot in her neck relaxed. She felt the sea air on her dirty face, whipping through her matted hair as they sped across the flat sea. It occurred to her, as she breathed in the salty air, how lucky she was in this life, even with her grief. She could leave the terrible places behind, change her future with a phone call and an airplane ticket.

The private island—Mnemba—was a small atoll in the Zanzibar archipelago, and when she arrived, the island’s manager, Zoltan, was there with a glass of white wine and a cool, wet rag. When he saw Nina, his dark, handsome face broke into a wide grin. “I am glad to see you again.”

She jumped out of the boat and into the warm water, making sure to hold her gear bag high above her head. “Thanks, Zoltan. I’m glad to be here.” She took the wine from him. “Is Danny here?”

“He’s in number seven.”

She slung the camera bag and backpack strap over her shoulder and made her way down the beach. The sand was as white as the coral from which it had been formed, and the water was a remarkable shade of aquamarine. Almost exactly the color of her mother’s eyes.

There were nine private bandas on the island—thatch-roofed, open-sided cottages—each hidden from view by dense vegetation. The only time guests saw each other, or the staff, was for meals in the dining hut or at sunset, when cocktails were set up on a table at the beach in front of each banda.

Nina saw the discreet #7 sign on the beachside lounge chairs and followed the sand path to the banda. A pair of tiny antelope, no larger than rabbits, with antlers as sharp as ice picks, bounded across the path and disappeared.

She saw Danny before he saw her. He was in one of the woven bamboo chairs, with his bare feet propped on a coffee table, sipping a beer and reading. She leaned against the wooden railing. “That beer isn’t quite the best-looking thing in the room, but it’s close.”

Danny tossed down his book and stood up. Even in his worn, overwashed khaki shorts, with his long black hair in need of a good cutting, and his shadowy, stubble-coated jaw, he looked beautiful. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her until she pushed him away, laughing. “I’m filthy,” she said.

“It’s what I love best about you,” he said, kissing the grimy palm of her hand.

“I need a shower,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. He took her by the hand and led her through the bedroom and down the wooden walkway to the bathroom and the outside shower. Beneath the spray of hot water, she peeled out of her bra and shorts and panties, kicking the sopping garments aside. Danny washed her in a way that was pure foreplay, and when the soap was still sliding down her slick body, and she reached for him, all it took was a touch. He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.

Later, when they both could breathe again, they lay entwined on the net-draped bed. “Wow,” she said, her head cradled in the crook of his arm. “I forgot how good we are at that.”

“We’re good at a lot of things.”

“I know. But we’re really good at that.”

There was a pause, and in it she knew he was going to say what she didn’t want to hear. “I had to hear from Sylvie that your da died.”

“What was I supposed to do? Call and cry? Tell you he was dying?”

He rolled onto his side, pulling her with him until they lay facing each other. His hand slid down her back and rested on the curve of her hip. “I’m from Dublin, remember? I know about losin’ people, Nina. I know how it sits inside you like battery acid, burnin’ through. And I know about runnin’ from it. You’re not the only one in Africa, are you?”

“What do you want from me, Danny? What?”

“Tell me about your da.”

She stared at him, feeling cornered. She wanted to give him what he wanted, but she couldn’t. Her feelings, her loss, were so intense that if she let herself feel all of it, she’d never find a way back.

“I don’t know how. He was . . . my sun, I guess.”

“I love you like that,” he said quietly.

Nina wished that made her feel better, but it didn’t. She knew about unequal love, how you could be crushed from the inside if one person was more in love than the other. Hadn’t she sometimes seen that kind of wreckage in Dad’s eyes when he looked at Mom? She was sure she had. And once you’d seen that kind of pain, you didn’t forget it. If Danny ever looked at her like that it would break her heart. And he would. Sooner or later he’d figure out that she might have loved her dad, but she was more like her mom.

“Can’t we just—”

“For now,” he said, but she knew it wouldn’t end here.

The thought of losing him made her feel strangely anxious, so she did what she always did when her emotions were too sharp to bear: she let her hands slide down his bare chest, to the line of hair from his navel and still downward, and when she touched him and felt how hard he was for her, she knew he was still hers.

For now.

The sky is slate-gray and swollen with clouds. A lone seagull wheels overhead, battling the wind, cawing. She is little, a girl with long brown pigtails and skinned knees. Running after him. A kite skips on the sand in front of her, twisting; it flips away before she can reach it.

“Daddy,” she yells, knowing he is too far ahead. He can’t hear her. “I’m back here—”

Meredith awoke in a panic. She sat up in bed and looked around, knowing he wouldn’t be here. It was another dream.

Still tired and aching from a night spent turning beneath the covers, she eased out of bed, being careful not to waken Jeff. She went to the window and stared out at the darkness. Dawn hadn’t shown its face yet. She crossed her arms tightly, trying to hold herself together. It felt as if pieces of her soul were falling away lately, like some ugly form of spiritual leprosy.

“Come back to bed, Mere.”

She didn’t look back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Why don’t you sleep in today?”

It sounded good, the idea that she could bury herself in his arms and under the blankets and just sleep while life ticked on without her. “I wish I could,” she said, already thinking of what she needed to do this morning. As long as she was up, she could get to work on the quarterly taxes. She had a meeting with the accountant next week and she needed to be ready.

Jeff got out of bed and came up behind her. She saw a silvered image of their faces in the blackened window.

“You take care of everything and everyone, Mere. But who takes care of you?”

She turned to him, let him hold her. “You do.”

“Me?” he said sharply. “I’m one more thing on your To-Do list.”

At another time—last year, maybe—she would have told him that wasn’t fair, fought with him about it, but she was too depleted now to bother.

“Not now, Jeff,” was all she could think to say. “I can’t have this conversation.”

“I know how much you’re hurting—”

“Of course I’m hurting. My dad died.”

“There’s more to it than that. You’re doing too much,” he said quietly. “You’re still hell-bent on getting her attention, just like—”

“What am I supposed to do? Ignore her? Or maybe I should quit my job?”

“Hire someone. She doesn’t give a shit if you’re there. I know it hurts, baby, but she’s never cared.”

“I can’t. She won’t let me. And I promised Dad.”

“What if she breaks you? Is that what your dad wanted? Does she ever even look at you?”

She knew he was right. In times like these she wished they hadn’t been together so long, that he hadn’t seen so much. But he’d been there on the night of the play—and other nights like it—and he knew her heart and how much pain it sometimes held. “It’s not about her, even. You know that. It’s about me. Who I am. I just can’t let it . . . let her go.”

“Your dad was worried about this, remember? He was afraid our family would break apart without him, and he was right. We’re falling apart. You’re falling apart and you won’t let anyone help you.”

“Doc Burns says Mom will be okay in a little while. Once she’s fine, I promise I’ll hire someone to clean her house and pay her bills, okay?”

“You promise?”

She kissed him lightly on the lips. It was over. For now. “I’ll be back for breakfast, okay? I’ll make us omelets and fruit. Just you and me.”

Easing away from him, she headed for the bathroom. As she was closing the door, she thought she heard him say something. She caught the word worried and closed the door.

In the dark, she dressed in her running clothes and left the bedroom. Downstairs, she turned on the coffeepot and collected the dogs and headed out into the cold early February darkness.