“Mother?” said Dr. Gaynor as she heard pips, some crackling, the tinny sound of a phone ringing far off across oceans, then a click and someone answering, her mother’s aide no doubt.
“Mother?”
“Wait a minute, Dr. Gaynor,” and then there was her mother’s voice, soft but querulous, “Who’s this? Who’s this?” speaking in an unpleasant tone she had developed after her stroke.
“It’s Helen, Mom. It’s not Friday, but I had some free time so how are you, did you have a good week?”
“Edward Allen?”
“No, Mother, Helen, your daughter.”
“I don’t have a daughter, I have two boys, Christopher and Kevin, do you know my sons?”
“Mother, Kevin was our father, you mean Chris and Ted, are they there with you? Put Chris on...”
But the phone made a banging noise and went silent. The aide’s voice came back on. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gaynor, your mother dropped the phone. She’s been very agitated recently. Also very incontinent.” Incontinent? That was new.
Suddenly the line disconnected, and Dr. Gaynor decided not to try to call back. She felt very disturbed by the call, considered for a brief moment flying back to check on her mother, then thought she had best wait for December, when her annual holiday came up.
But scarcely a week later Dr. Gaynor found herself flying back to Pittsburgh to attend her mother’s funeral. She was now sitting with her two brothers on folding chairs in the sanctuary room of the funeral home. She was far from Chitipa, far from her missing purse, far from the rabid dead boy, and now, finding herself so quickly here in the States, a small part of Dr. Gaynor worried that her phone call from Africa may have triggered some final insult to her mother’s fragile mind that had killed her. But Dr. Gaynor’s guilt hardly found root, for she immediately said to herself that her mother hadn’t even recognized her voice, so how could this have set off anything?
Dr. Gaynor looked around. Attendance was sparse. Her brothers, Chris and Ted, sat with her in the front row of chairs, while behind were Chris’s latest wife and two of his four children. Ted had come with his partner; there were also several aides and colleagues from the nursing home. Their mother had put resuscitation orders on her advance directive, because, she wrote, she was Catholic and not to do so was a sin. Where she picked up this idea, her sons didn’t know, for she had only been an Easter-and-Christmas Episcopalian most of her life.
“Catholic?” Dr. Gaynor said in a tone of bemusement to her brother Chris, who had picked her up at the airport in his SUV that he was going to get rid of because of the gas, because of the bad times, because of his wife ruining its gears. As they drove directly from the airport to the funeral home, he went on and on in his explosive, bad-tempered way. Dr. Gaynor just repeated, “Catholic? Whatever put that in her mind?”
“At least she didn’t leave everything to the church!” her older brother snapped. “She was really getting loony at the end.”
“They had her on a lot of antidepressants and other medication,” Dr. Gaynor said, intending to explain how these affected the elderly, but Chris had already moved on to fulminate about some oxygen therapy expense the home had ordered for their mother without his consent.
Now, in the sanctuary, as the taped music poured over them, Dr. Gaynor said again to her brothers that she found it odd how her mother had died so quickly. It had been less than a week since Dr. Gaynor had called her; it had been the day that a rabid boy came to her hospital and died and she felt like calling her mother. Her mother hadn’t seemed herself then. Was the doctor visiting her on schedule? The nurses checking her vitals and giving her meds?
“Listen, we should be thankful!” said Chris, her older brother, testily. “They were going to have to move her up to the Alzheimer’s floor, and that would have cost us all double what we’ve been paying.”
Dr. Gaynor did not like her older brother’s complaining tone, which had begun to sound so much like her now-dead mother’s. “Why was that a problem? I was willing to pay. You know I’ve always been good for that!” she said curtly.
“You’re always good for the money. It’s the heavy hauling you run out on.” And on that sharp note, still resonating after the funeral and reception and after more sibling bickering, Dr. Gaynor flew back to Lilongwe, the capital. Yes, God bless everyone, no exceptions, as you would say, Robinson, she said to herself angrily as she thought about her brothers and thought about her mother and looked at the blank landscape of gray clouds from the plane window.
She had already made an international call to Michael, a fellow expat doctor working in Zomba, that she was stopping over in Lilongwe to pick up some supplies before going back to Chitipa and could he come up to see her. Michael and Dr. Gaynor had met at a medical symposium in Lilongwe a year ago and saw immediately they were kindred spirits; it had taken a while for them to sort out the personal aspects, the carnal side of the relationship lasting less than six months. Now they were just best friends, as they told one another, the best of best friends. And Mike was Dr. Gaynor’s best friend. She felt she could tell him anything, and had already told him about her stolen purse by someone called Hastings — Hastings! How the locals loved these English names! — and she had told him about the rabid boy and his fear of her, and how that somehow made her call her mother, who then died, not right after the call, but two days later. Michael had just laughed at her concern that these events could in any way be connected. None of her assistant Robinson’s God’s plan here, he said, just life as usual.
This Dr. Gaynor was thinking about, yes, life as usual, as here she was back in a cat’s whisker to the heat and bustle of Lilongwe, when she turned down Chilembwe Road to the newly refurbished Capital Hotel at the northern end of the city. It was a major hotel, with a long tree-lined driveway and portico under which taxis let out their customers, a doorman in white gloves opening the doors.
Lilongwe, even though the biggest city in Malawi, didn’t really have a center. Like many African cities, it had grown this way and that, from being no more than a cluster of vendors along the side of the road in precolonial times to an open-air market that added a craft market, then morphed into Asian-owned shops next to bus stations and Spar markets, finally now a jacaranda-lined, spread-out capital city, with glassy high-rises and grand-looking stone-and-brick government buildings, all interconnected by small shopping malls, so one either had to find a bus or grab a matola taxi to get from one part of the city to another.
It could become something like Calcutta in time, Dr. Gaynor thought as she walked back to the hotel, her large backpack now filled with boxes of real Band-Aids she had bought at the pharmacy in the small mall she had just visited. Her backpack also contained twelve boxes of rubber gloves, ten boxes of disposable needles, and other ordinary items taken for granted in stateside hospitals, items like the newer type of paper tape instead of the old-fashioned adhesive tape, which was an insult to the skin.
Pleased with her day’s shopping, and the small mall being so close to her hotel, she had decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. So when the attack came, she was furious with herself. Everyone knew muggings were frequent near the fancy hotels and restaurants, where the mzungus came to spend money. However, since she could see the hotel’s driveway right ahead, she had no expectation that anyone would dare to mug her so close.