I started taking long walks, stopping to examine pitcher plants and scorpions and huge Malagasy tombs — stone compounds decorated with bright geometric paintings and animal skulls. I said prayers outside the tombs, my folded hands smudged with red, and asked whoever was supposed to be listening to not let my organs morph into stone, for I kept dreaming everything inside me was oblong and gray. I took pictures until my film ran out. The last photo was of a passing bus. The hubcaps were dented and rusted, the windows rolled down. Everyone on the bus was singing. Sometimes, for no reason at all, I broke out running and kept going until my knees gave and I was gasping for air.
I found a little bar on the village outskirts, a dusty tin-roofed shack with wobbly chairs and an old radio that played dance music. On my first visit, the bartender filled my glass with a clear liquor that burned my throat. I returned every day for two weeks. I never saw another customer, but I didn’t mind. I thought the solitude, the time away from the hotel, would help me sort out my life. I liked to think about what I would do once I returned to New York. Re-enroll in high school, get back on the swim team, practice with more dedication than anyone else. Sometimes I wondered what Daud would think if he saw me sitting in the bar, my sweat-soaked tank top clinging to my skin; I had seen the way my mother touched his forearm when she laughed, detected the smoothness in his voice when he called her June. One afternoon, after leaving the bar, I got dizzy and vomited on a plant with pointed leaves. I didn’t go back again. During my time there, the only words the bartender and I ever exchanged were when I thanked him—misaotra—for the drinks.
It wasn’t much longer before I heard Daud’s voice in my mother’s room for the first time. I listened carefully, but the sound of the Indris increased at night, and I just caught whispers and laughter and then Daud’s humming. At dinner the next evening, my mother kept throwing significant glances in his direction, and he reached across the table to brush strands of hair from her face. It soon became their habit to only discuss fieldwork, rarely speaking to me directly. I sometimes caught my mother looking at Daud with a kind of possessiveness as she closed me out of conversations by talking science. I was left to drift in my imagination, to picture what my life would look like if I was away from here.
“Did you hear about the spider monkeys that attacked a tourist in Manja?” I asked them one night, just to see if I could get their attention. They had been talking about the nesting patterns of Pygmy Mouse lemurs for an hour. “I heard they scratched out an Italian woman’s eye.”
“Spider monkeys aren’t naturally aggressive,” Daud said. “They must have been provoked.”
“And there aren’t spider monkeys in Manja.” For the first time that evening, my mother turned to me. “It seems your source was wrong, Celia.”
She and Daud resumed their conversation about Pygmy Mouse lemurs. I went upstairs and took out the shoebox that held my money. I fanned the foreign bills across the floor and made uneven stacks with the coins. I spent the rest of the evening using my stash to create little towers and bridges and moats, a city of paper and metal, an escape.
My walks started getting longer, bringing me all the way to the coast. It took over an hour, but being near the water made me feel less restless. By the shoreline, the foliage was paler and drier, the hills lower, and then the landscape broadened into a wide curve of sand, speckled with gray rock and sea foam. I would wade up to my knees, nervous of going too far, of riptides and sharks. Each time, I promised myself I’d go far enough to feel the sandy floor disappear beneath me, the chill of deeper waters, but I never did. I was always looking for a point I could swim towards — a little clump of land or a large rock — but there was nothing: no land, just the sea, beaming like the sun had cracked open and seeped into the waves.
One afternoon, as I walked down the path that led to the sea, I heard a rumbling noise and turned to see a Jeep slowing beside me, Daud in the driver’s seat, alone and waving. He offered me a ride. When I got in, I asked why he wasn’t in the field with my mother, and he said they’d been working nonstop for weeks and he was taking a break.
“Thought I’d go for a drive,” he said. “Maybe see the ocean.”
“I go there all the time.” I took my hair, stiff from sun and seawater, down and shook my head.
“Long walk,” he said.
“It’s worth it.”
When we arrived, he parked on the edge of the beach. The ocean was blue and quiet. Daud removed his hiking boots, then peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it onto the hood of the jeep. I touched the point of his shoulder and, trying to channel the confidence of my mother’s voice, asked if he wanted to swim with me.
“You should be careful,” he said. “There are strong currents if you go out too far.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said.
“Then you lead the way.”
I jogged across the hot sand and into the ocean, hesitating when the water crossed my knees, but I heard Daud’s footsteps behind me and kept going. After the water covered my shoulders, I swung my arms and kicked my legs, trying to look practiced and at ease. When I finally stilled, the muscles in my thighs quivering, I turned in the water. The coast was about half a mile away, shimmering like cut glass. Daud moved towards me in a leisurely freestyle.
“You’ve got good speed,” Daud said when he reached me, his face wet and gleaming.
“I won three division swimming championships in high school.” I thought of the trophies in my bedroom, the marble columns with little plastic swimmers affixed to the top. “I was runner-up in a state championship too. I would have gone to regionals if I hadn’t left school to travel.”
“Your mother must be proud,” he said.
I looked across the water, not telling him my father was the only one who ever attended my meets or photographed me holding my trophies. I asked Daud about what surrounded Madagascar; he said the Mozambique Channel was six hundred miles to the west, the Mascarene Islands five hundred miles to the east.
“The record for long-distance swimming is just over two thousand miles, set by Martin Strel when he swam the
Mississippi,” I said. “So it would be possible to swim the Mozambique Channel or reach the Mascarene Islands.”
“Open water swimming is different,” Daud said. “They’re no lanes, no one to blow the whistle.”
“I know.” I pictured us going even farther, the low roar of the ocean filling my ears. “That’s why I want it.”