~ ~ ~
Viv says something and he leans over to her, his ear in her turquoise hair. “Everyone told me to leave it alone,” he hears her mutter, “everyone told me and I wouldn’t.
Zan is furious at the email and all its vague implications. “You don’t know what’s happened,” he argues. “We don’t know that this mystery person, whoever she is, is Sheba’s mother. I mean, we can’t tell that there even is such a person.”
Viv doesn’t answer.
“All we know,” says Zan, “is that some woman he thought he was looking for and that he never found might have. . left the country, or. . ”
“. . or been thrown in jail, or worse,” she finally turns to him. Her face is red.
“The odds are she isn’t even Sheba’s mother,” but as soon as he’s said it, he knows what she’ll say.
“So? I still got an innocent woman thrown in jail. Or worse.” Every time she says “or worse,” it becomes worse.
“You don’t know that. We don’t know anything.”
She searches his eyes and whispers, “Zan, they think we bought Sheba.”
~ ~ ~
It’s hard to know how long she’s been thinking it when she says, “I have to go.” Later he feels sure she’s been considering it awhile, maybe before the email.
“Go?” he says, at first genuinely confused. They’re upstairs sitting on their bed. She’s been distraught all day, more than any time since her art was stolen two years ago, succumbing to an unshakeable silence, and only does her voice find its usual spiritedness when she says, “To Addis Ababa.”
~ ~ ~
When she was in her late twenties, Viv returned to Africa for the first time since she lived there as a girl, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Immediately following this successful ascent — a framed certificate on the wall attests to the achievement — she sat for some hours at Kilimanjaro’s nearest airport drinking with a number of other overly exuberant western adventurers who at some point realized they had drunk their way through the week’s one and only flight to Europe.
~ ~ ~
This discovery was followed by a mad drive through the night to the next airport, across hundreds of kilometers of revolution-beset african desert in an outlandish episode that involved no gas and “borrowed” cars and armed soldiers and herds of zebra crashing into them. The story always has summed up for Zan what he loves and admires about Viv, and the ways in which they’re different. On the one hand, Zan’s soul will pass through many lives before one of them steps foot on Mount Kilimanjaro. On the other hand, there’s not the remotest possibility that Zan ever would have missed that flight.
It’s possible, Zan believes, that this now almost legendary chapter in Viv’s life imbued her with a. . unique sense of life’s odds and risks. Interestingly, motherhood threw life into the gear of fear, in which Viv worries about things that Zan takes in stride, maybe too much so.
~ ~ ~
In any case Zan has come to understand well enough his dynamic with Viv that he knows to fully express what he feels about her returning to Ethiopia would be counter-productive. Rather he takes a deep breath and attempts to modulate his agitation. “Baby,” he says, “it’s not a good idea.”
For a moment she sinks back into the afternoon’s abyss.
“If nothing has happened, if this woman doesn’t even exist let alone is in jail, then it’s a waste of time. If something has happened and the police are arresting people, it’s all the more reason you shouldn’t go.”
“We could all travel with you to London,” she urges, and now it’s clear this indeed has been going around in her head awhile, “for your lecture, or residency, or whatever it is. . the kids can stay with you and I can go onto Addis and you’ll wait for me in London.” She says, “I know it’s a lot to ask but we talked about it anyway.”
“Talked about what?”
“Going to London with you.”
More harshly than he intends, he says, “We never talked about that,” then, “sometimes you think about telling me something and once you’ve thought it, then you think you’ve done it.”
“Sometimes,” she answers, “maybe you just don’t remember me telling you,” and bursts into tears.
~ ~ ~
She cries in bed while Zan holds her, until both hear the creak of the bedroom floor. They look up to see Sheba in her Avengers underpants, thumb in mouth, watching, frightened. “Mama?” she says, “Poppy?” and Zan and Viv know the girl believes every drama is a signal that life is about to leave her behind or hand her off to someone else.
“It’s O.K.,” Viv says, “Mama’s O.K.,” and opens her arms and the child falls into them. No one speaks for a while and after a minute Zan says, “We’ll do what you want.”
~ ~ ~
Over the coming days Viv rides a roller coast of highs and lows. Every new twenty-four-hour cycle brings a new email resolving nothing, and adamantly she won’t be dissuaded by circumstance or Zan that she is directly responsible for what’s transpired and setting in motion a chain of events, even as it’s unclear what that chain is or what’s the consequence of the motion that is its result. With this, Zan realizes that, whatever the risk, Viv’s trip to Ethiopia is inevitable. No one will be able to live with Viv otherwise, least of all Viv herself.
Lying in bed in the dark, she says, “What if the bank takes the house while we’re gone?” It’s the night before they leave for London. Zan is encouraged by the question not because he believes Viv will abandon her plan to go — at this point he’s no longer sure she should — but because, in what quickly has become the all-consuming Ethiopian drama, she hasn’t forgotten other realities.
“Well?” she says.
“I guess whether we’re here when they take it isn’t going to matter.”
“When?”
“If.”
“You said when.”
~ ~ ~
The flight for London departs at seven the next evening. Leaving for the airport that afternoon, Zan and Viv gaze around at the house before locking the door behind them.
As they wait at their gate for the flight, Zan watches a news cable channel on the television. Parker listens to the fluorescent-green music player around his neck and Sheba climbs over all the furniture in the terminal.