It was the first time she had ever expressed anything like gratitude. Then she was gone. Grace sat with her head in her hands. Something had just gone badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. The session had slipped through her fingers. She had let the girl go, and now, she felt sure, she’d never get her back.
That night Tug came over, and after she cooked dinner, they ate in silence. Grace couldn’t stop replaying her session with Annie, wondering how truthful her remarks about her father were, what had made her smile so brightly at the end, what Grace could have said or done differently. It had been like she was talking to a brand-new patient, someone she’d never even met before.
If Tug noticed her distraction, he didn’t show it. After they finished dinner, he washed the dishes while she read a magazine in the living room. It was only when he came in half an hour later and asked what was wrong that she realized she was crying.
She put the magazine down. “I can’t do this,” she said.
“What?”
He stood there, his face impassive, and she knew that he held himself apart from her just as the girl had. She couldn’t live with this in two places, at work and at home. It was too much. “I need to know,” she told him.
Tug made an exasperated sound, shrugged his shoulders, and glanced away. “It won’t change anything,” he said, still standing above her, refusing to sit down.
Still crying, she swallowed and said, as calmly as possible, “I disagree.”
“I’m not your patient, Grace,” he said, and his voice was rough. “You can’t fix me. I know this is all some big savior thing for you, but that’s not quite how I see it.”
Grace’s tears were falling freely now. She stood up and faced him, each of them hovering there, poised to leave the room, trembling a little. Whatever delicate balance they’d established between them was breaking down, careening away.
“I have no idea how you see it,” she said, “and until you can tell me, I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Oh, Gracie,” he said. “We’ve been having a good time.”
He put his arms around her and she closed her eyes, allowing herself to feel the warmth of his body, the scratch of his stubble against her cheek. Then she stepped away. “You should go,” she said.
She lay in bed waiting for him to call, or come back, but he had left without a word of dissent. Her thoughts drifted restlessly to Annie, who seemed to have been freed in some way that Grace had never intended. What had she said to give the girl that smile, so radiant and strange? After a while she started thinking about Tug and the dinner they’d had at the Greek restaurant. What she remembered was his story about the childhood friend who leapt off buildings, the tree climber, the trestle jumper. At the time she’d interpreted it as a story about someone you could only shake your head at, so incomprehensible were his choices. Now she realized that the story meant something different to Tug. To him it was a marvel. A wonder.
Even though he came back at five in the morning, apologized, crawled into bed, and promised to tell her everything, she understood that he wasn’t scornful of his friend, just envious of how little he cared about survival. If he had been able to join his friend, she thought, he would have. He wanted to be the one to jump into the air without worrying whether he’d land dead or alive.
The next night, after she got home from work, he poured them each a large glass of wine and started talking. He talked until midnight, hardly stopping except to refill their glasses and open new bottles. He seemed to require the wine to keep going; other than that, he needed no encouragement from Grace, no murmurs of attention. She sat there, and listened.
EIGHT
Kigali, 1994
WHEN TUG FIRST set eyes on the country, he thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And he wasn’t someone who had dreamt of Africa in childhood and pictured himself exploring it in a safari jacket and jungle gear — though plenty of the North Americans and Europeans around him harbored precisely such fantasies. Some, to conceal their infatuation, spoke of Africa in carefully jaded tones. Others talked openly about their fascination with its rich, complicated history and their long-held desire to experience it in person (for men, this usually meant its women). Aid workers were romantics who pretended not to be, their personalities swinging like pendulums between idealism and pragmatism.
Months later, a woman working for the Red Cross asked him to spend the night, both of them sweating, drunk, and sloppy with loneliness. At three in the morning, her thigh sticking to his, she confided that as a child she’d been obsessed with Dian Fossey.
“I wanted to see the gorillas in the mist,” she said wryly. “I saw them the first week. Now I’ve been here two years.” A stocky, muscular former field hockey player, she turned surprisingly clingy and weepy in the night; she said she realized she had never cared about anything as much as she had about those gorillas. Tug felt, perhaps unfairly, that this was just something she said after sex, a bit of extra drama to keep the attention coming. Although he actually would have liked to hear more about the gorillas and what seeing them was like, he didn’t want to indulge her. No doubt sensing his skepticism, the gorilla woman — as he always thought of her afterward — ignored him in the morning, pretending nothing had happened between them.
To Tug, Rwanda was a surprise. He’d last been stationed in Guatemala, where he spent six months ferrying food and medicine to families in the department of Suchitepéquez after floods and landslides devastated the towns there. He had grown used to the country, liked the people, and his Spanish was pretty damn good. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to leave, but his father was seriously ill and he needed to get back home. He stayed for two years while his father went in and out of hospitals. His mother was frail and his sister, who lived in Toronto with her two children and a salesman husband who spent half his life out of town, had made it clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of their parents on her own.
This was when he met Marcie, who worked as a paralegal for his parents’ lawyer. She was blond, attractive, and extraordinarily capable in what he considered domestic matters. Tug knew how to rig tents and set up a basic medical facility, where in a given terrain the latrines should be dug, and that when you hand out rice you give it to the women first, never to men and especially never to young men. Around children with their hands outstretched he crackled with energy, thriving on their need. He could go weeks without sleeping more than three or four hours a night. At home in Canada, by contrast, he froze up. Faced with insurance companies, with the routine upkeep of his parents’ house, with his mother’s small talk about the neighbors, he barely had enough energy to get through the day.
But Marcie, thank God, was good at all of that. She didn’t mind paperwork, didn’t freak out when put on hold, listened to his mother solicitously. She wasn’t a traveler; she came from a large, close-knit family and hated to leave home. They spent every weekend together, and either she cooked or they had dinner with her parents in their sprawling farmhouse in Hudson. She always brought a casserole or cookies to his mother, who protested weakly, insincerely, and loved being fussed over. In almost no time at all, his family and hers were entwined; her parents often visited his father in the hospital, and they all spent Christmas together. After a year, he proposed to Marcie while they were on vacation in Florida, and they were married two months later in a small ceremony in Hudson. As he slipped the ring on her finger, she cried a little, tears crinkling her cheeks, and he thought, This is it. This is the shape my life will have.