“What the hell has gotten into you, Peño?”
Lyle stared at his glass. Melanie exhaled. “I’ll have a seltzer”—she looked at Lyle—“because I want to sleep on the plane, not because I’m taking your shit.”
“Lemon?” the bartender asked.
“Sure.”
The bartender sent a flash of anger at Lyle. This guy had no idea how good he had it. His wife was a knockout. Not like cheerleader knockout, which in the bartender’s simplistic female taxonomy was the top of the food chain, but wife knockout. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a baggy maroon V-neck sweater that, by contrast, gave her skin a pale tint. Originally, she’d purchased the sweater for Lyle but he’d shrunk it enough in the dryer that it no longer fit in the shoulders.
Lyle drained his shots in two drags. Held the glass up to the bartender.
“Are you still serving food?” Melanie asked.
The bartender pulled a menu from under the counter and slid it forward. “The au jus gets raves. Comes with fries.”
“Perfect. We’ll have two. I’m ravenous,” she said. “Can you put them in before we have another round?” To Lyle: “Like you said, Peño; Michael’s paying. We might as well have a last decent meal.”
“Go home, Melanie.”
“Peño! What the fuck!”
“It’s not safe for you where we’re going.”
“So, Lyle, this is new, this is fascinating.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve got all kinds of psychological flaws, but being bossy isn’t one of them.”
“There you go, that’s the spirit, Melanie.”
“Jesus.” She’d never heard him like this, not quite. But she had felt it building. For well more than a year, he’d been changing. She just assumed it was because he’d been to one tragedy after the next, one more village, one more filthy apartment building with stricken children; such things would take their toll on anyone. She’d tried to be sympathetic. She knew in her heart what Lyle confessed to her with his eyes: love, real connection, genuine passion—it made up for everything else. Nothing could be more trite but, simply, true, this physician healed himself by feeling connected. Those weren’t words he’d have used. But she knew and he knew she knew. And yet, for all her efforts, he became increasingly beyond reach. She stared at him staring at his glass. “I’d chalk this up to whatever horror is on those pictures Michael’s carrying around in his jacket but you’ve been like this for… weeks.”
“Is that all?”
“No. No, Lyle, you’re right. For six months.”
“Like what?”
“Um, reserved, distant, surly, angry, sullen, terse. Ring a bell?”
Lyle grimaced. Maybe it had been after he returned from that well poisoning in South Korea, an ugly bacteria caused by a local official who had embezzled money intended for sewage treatment and invested it into ounces of gold. A week of sullen behavior followed, then two, then halfway through the third, Melanie, sick of it, went dancing with her friends until 3 a.m. on a Thursday.
“Nice outfit,” was Lyle’s single rejoinder in the morning, looking at her skirt next to the bed.
“I have a right to defend myself,” Melanie responded, the sympathy squeezed out of her voice.
“Against what?”
“Invasion of the body snatchers. I want to help you. I’m here to help you. But I have a life and I won’t let you take my hand and yank me over a cliff.”
In the months that followed, she’d vacillate between trying to reach him and making sure she continued to exist. She indulged an entrepreneurial bug and signed up for an evening class at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Things at home didn’t feel hostile, more like that proverbial frog in simmering water that would eventually boil.
Lyle looked at Melanie over his empty shot glass.
“So why are you here, Mel?”
“Because I’m looking for you.”
It was a striking thing to say, especially the plaintive way she said it. He turned to her, even though doing so meant he was abandoning his stubborn self-imprisonment.
“I can’t find you in our home, our bed, not in our conversations, not at the lab,” Melanie said. “I’m going to see if I can find you… I don’t know… in Africa, in a tent, surrounded by…” She had tears in her eyes. Lyle cleared his throat. She was softening him and he was fighting it.
“By… all that sickness.” She chose the word over disease. “You shine there, you are magnificent, when you are called upon. I don’t think you can hide from me there.”
She put her hand on his knee. Lyle felt warmth course up his thigh. He looked for the bartender, a lifeline. Melanie squeezed his leg. The bartender appeared with two heaping plates of French dip and fries.
He wanted to beg her to go home. She shouldn’t be going, not now, and not on this one. He looked at her, desperate to say something, and, yes, God, she was beautiful, particularly with this pink hue to her skin, and even with a slight puffiness around her blue eyes. Lyle tried to get words out—don’t go—and instead took his last gulp of booze and felt defeat.
Fourteen hours later, they landed in Amsterdam for a brief layover before flying to Arusha. Before touchdown, Lyle had awakened with his head on Melanie’s shoulder and seemed to have forgotten whatever was fueling his mood. Until he got his bearings. Then, fully awake, he withdrew from Melanie, smiled thinly, asked Michael to hand him the briefing folder. He looked at the pictures and the medical reports. He immediately homed in on the anomaly, the thing he’d noticed when Michael had first told him what was happening near the border. This wasn’t ordinary, this situation. He pushed his reading glasses back on his nose and let himself dive into the folder.
And Melanie let him get away with it even though she sensed he was retreating into the work as much as embracing it. This was, she thought, a legitimate excuse, to let things settle down. Maybe she’d discover him again.
Not likely. Not with the secret he was keeping from her.
Thirteen
“Are those two giraffes…” Melanie’s voice trailed off.
“It’s a wonder the first time you see it,” Michael said. “Now you understand men.”
They traveled south through the plains in a yellow Land Cruiser, open top, the size of a small bus. It was an angular thing, exposed metal bars, a safari vehicle but without any of the fancy signs or branding of a commercial company. Government issue. To the left, under an acacia tree, two giraffes held the bizarre pose. One had mounted the other.
“Men? They’re not mating,” Melanie said.
“Nope. Guess again.”
She shrugged.
“The one on top just beat the other in a fight. His reward is this expression of dominance.”
“Prison rules,” Melanie said. “You see that, Peño?”
He sat in a seat across the aisle, reading from a file. He glanced at Melanie. “I think you should go back to the hotel.”
She looked away.
“Dr. Martin. Tsetse,” Michael said. Lyle didn’t even notice the fly on his wide-brim beige hat gunning ultimately for his cheek. Michael stood and swatted the air, sending the fly on its way.
“Lost when he’s working,” Melanie said. But she was making excuses—for him, and for herself. They’d had a brief layover in the Arusha Hotel after that exquisite landing near Kilimanjaro. Lyle had sat on the bed, eyes half closed. By that point, Melanie had given up trying to coddle him into conversation. But at one point she came out of the bathroom determined to confront him, bring her nuclear weapon and clear the air. Couldn’t do it. She’d been having trouble sleeping and felt like she might be getting a cold.