Burridge Unbound (16 page)

“Is Daddy going back where the kidnappers got him?”

“It’s okay,” I tell Patrick, reach back to hold his hand. He’s shaking, brim-full with tears. “The kidnappers won’t get me again. That’s all over.”

“But they got you last time. They almost killed you – you
told
me!”

“There aren’t any more kidnappers,” I tell him. “It’s not the same place. They’re trying to get better, and I have to help them, and maybe I can get better myself.” I turn to Maryse. “Please listen,” I say, quietly so she will. “I have to do whatever it takes to free myself.”

“There are other ways you can be helped,” she says, so angry.

“No, that’s it,” I say, “I can’t
be
helped, we saw that, you did your best–” I fail to keep the bitterness from my voice, see it register in her eyes. “I have to help myself,” I say. “It was all done to me, I was powerless. But this is different. This is
my
choice. A chance to
do
something. It’s different and it’s what I need.”

I realize it now. This is the only thing to do.

“I’ll write to you,” I say to Patrick. “Every day, on the e-mail, you watch.”

“Do you
promise?”

Maryse looks at me, full of doubt and reproach.

“Absolutely,” I say.

We talk for another hour, in the rain in the traffic and later parked on the street by my apartment. Back and forth, with tears and hugs and painful silences. But it’s clear now for the first time in ages. It feels both sad and light, a relief and an ache for what’s to come.

I have to return to Santa Irene. If it kills me, well … there would still be a freedom in that.

We talk it through in ever-tightening circles, until finally we are wrung dry and it really is time to go. Then I stand on the street in the diminishing rain and watch the spot where my family used to be.

T
he movie on the plane is a Chinese martial-arts extravaganza with English subtitles. I leave off my earphones but sit fascinated by the image on the tiny screen – the hero prince scales the wooden tower, fighting off ten, twelve, fifteen attackers at a time, then reaches the princess at the top only to find that
she’s
a martial-arts master too, who boots him off when he isn’t looking. Back up he fights, one hand holding flowers, and when he reaches the top this time they’re joined by … 
his wife
, also a martial-arts master. Now he must fend off attacks from both women, somehow explain to his wife why he’s bringing flowers to the princess, and still woo the princess at the same time.
“You don’t love me!”
the wife proclaims and leaps from the tower. Our hero goes after her, breaking the laws of gravity to catch up, grab her, and snag a ledge halfway down. Then the princess throws
herself
off the tower and so our hero must go after her as well …

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of phone calls and negotiations, of doctors’ visits and international briefings,
meetings at Foreign Affairs and at the Santa Irenian embassy, of visa applications and last-minute packing, of scrawled messages, mass e-mails, hurried goodbyes. When I phoned, Suli agreed to forty-five thousand dollars plus expenses for three months – enough to pay me and Joanne decently and still make Derrick happy. I’ve left him back in the office with something to work with.

Oddly enough, after Maryse my worst argument was with Joanne – she still thinks I shouldn’t have accepted, was even reluctant to agree to accompany me. But she’s here. I finally convinced her I wouldn’t have even thought of going if I wasn’t sure she’d be with me. She’s worried about her mother’s health, too, but the latest prognosis was guardedly optimistic, in the short run at least.

Everything done under pressure, the rush of the decision and the hundred subsequent things to do. Now these hours on the plane seem unreal, a weird nowhere between the past and the future. The slow squeeze of time. Through the many trips up and down the aisle to spell my leg, through the rubber duck à l’orange and gazing at the floor of clouds, the little plastic packets of salted peanuts and chemical-cheese crackers and endless rounds of juice and tea and coffee and water.

Joanne has been uncharacteristically quiet. I ask her how she’s doing and she says, “Fine,” abruptly.

“Fine?” I say back to her.

She says it again, “Fine,” without looking at me. She has a book turned face down on her lap and her eyes are half closed.

“Last time I made this flight,” I say, “Maryse got a terrible headache. I think it lasted her whole time in Santa Irene. They recycle the air on these flights so it feels like the oxygen disappears.”

Joanne doesn’t respond.

“People were smoking on that flight, though,” I continue. “All those Asian businessmen. What’s your book about?”

“Damn!” she says, rising abruptly and hurrying down the aisle to the washrooms. She darts in front of a woman with a small child and into the next available stall. I crane to see through the gap in the headrests of the seats in front of me. The door stays closed a long time. The woman ushers her child into the cubicle beside Joanne’s, and they finish and leave but Joanne’s door stays closed.

I walk up and down the aisle, my leg feeling angry – it’s the best way I can describe it, as if it needs to lash out at something. The warrior on screen is battling the many forces of evil while, for some reason, trying to keep his mother-in-law balanced on a pole in the courtyard.

I return to my seat, sit quietly and breathe. Tuck my chin in, fold my hands in my lap. Little sips of air, but controlled from the abdomen. Tongue on the roof of the mouth. What was it Wu said to me? That in ancient days in the night darkness men and women were like animals and stayed quiet so as not to draw attention to themselves. So they had plenty of time to learn how to breathe.

Joanne comes back grey-faced, her gait unsteady.

“Are you all right?”

She sits hard, puts her head down immediately, fingers on her temples.

“What is it? Have you got a headache?”

An old Mediterranean-looking man gazes across the aisle at Joanne then looks away. Joanne pushes her hands between her knees and keeps her head down.

“Joanne! What is it?”

I reach across to put my arm around her and in a minute a stewardess is kneeling in the aisle beside her.

“Are you all right, ma’am? Is there something I can help with?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just getting worse and worse on airplanes, that’s all.”

She refuses juice, ginger ale, water, a warm blanket. “It’ll pass,” she says.

And it does, slowly. Somewhere over the Pacific, after the movie has ended and most of the passengers have gone to sleep, the colour comes back to her face, she breathes easier. I ask her if she’s feeling better and she nods, gets up, takes a walk. Some minutes later she comes back carrying a cup of tea.

“Just a few more hours,” I say. We’re changing flights in Hong Kong, will head south to Santa Irene after that.

“Yes.” But she doesn’t look at me.

“It’s a long trip.”

She picks up her book, reads a few pages. I close my eyes.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she says suddenly.

Oh no. “What?” I say. “We discussed this.”

“Look at me, I didn’t even get my hair cut. I
hate
long hair in the tropics. I always get it cut before I go. But I didn’t think you’d actually carry this through. It might be right for you but it isn’t right for me. I’ve had this bad feeling for a while. I shouldn’t have come.”

“Are you worried about your mother?” I ask.

“It’s that and other things,” she says.

“What other things?”

The drone of the engines; a stewardess wanders by with extra blankets.

“I’m just not supposed to be doing this now,” she says.

“What are you supposed to be doing?”

Sips of tea, fingers drumming slowly on the plastic tray in front of her. This drowsy, light, nowhere state.

“I have a weakness for running off,” she says. “It’s a bit of an addiction. The next crisis. All that adrenaline, it’s a real high until you crash. Like Rwanda, that was a crash for me. I decided to change my plan after that. I wasn’t going to run off. I was going to stick things out back home.”

“This is only for three months,” I say. “Besides, we discussed this.”

“I know.”

“You’re mostly worried about your mom.”

“No. Yes, of course. But she’ll be all right.”

Then it’s someone else, I think. I’ve been so stupid.

“There’s always the phone,” I say. “You can send e-mails.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s her private life, why should she? I’ve railroaded her into going, taken her for granted, been so self-centred.

Time crawling, endless clouds passing below. I try to think of what to say.

“You said you wanted to stick things out,” I say. “Is there anybody in particular? Besides your mother?”

“There was the wrong guy,” she says, still not looking at me. “I tend to go for the wrong guy.”

I wait for more but she glances at her book, flips another page.

“What kind of guy is the wrong guy?”

She thinks about it for too long, until I’m not sure she’s going to answer. Finally she says, “Boyish, unstable, dangerous types, into adventure, hardship. Impatient for the next flight out. Not good father material.”

“So you want to have kids?”

Another thoughtful pause, before her reluctant reply. “Sure, I want to have kids.”

She goes back to reading her book. I flip through a glossy in-flight travel magazine.

“I’ve got four younger brothers,” she says after a while. “We were terribly suburban. My parents used to pile us into a station wagon at night in our pyjamas and we’d ride around looking at the lights. Everybody’s normal except for me. Regular jobs, spouses, houses in the suburbs, their own kids growing so fast. I was the one who had to go off. But now I’m thirty-five and I don’t want to miss out. You know, huddling over mouldy rations in a little tent in a cholera-infested corner of the world is not the best way to raise a family. Aid workers live the life for a while and then either it consumes them or they go on to something else. I thought I’d gone on to something else.”

It’s all she wants to say, so I get up and stretch my legs. This quiet, sleeping warehouse of people. The shades are drawn except for one window near the washrooms, bright sun beaming in.

When I get back she says, “I wasn’t in Rwanda for the real horror.” Her face tight, eyes on mine for a moment then shifting away. “You asked about it so I’m going to tell you.”

“All right,” I say. I didn’t really ask, I think, but stay quiet.

“Things had calmed down when we went back in. There was a lot of … silence, really. Psychological clamping … because life keeps going, right? The rivers flow blood for a while but then you have to eat, you need a roof and somewhere to sleep. The darkness passes like something else you dreamed. Babies.” She pauses at the word.

“Babies?”

“Well,” she says, her voice faltering just a bit, “they keep getting born, don’t they? The darkness comes and everything’s
turned upside down and it seems like the end of life as you’ve known it – the end of life, period, for so many …” She takes a deep breath. “The babies keep pushing out. They
demand
to get here. It’s what I was doing in our little hospital outside Kigali. Delivering babies. Tutsis mostly, genocide survivors, now pushing out babies. It was like seeing the first green growth in an area flattened by forest fire. You know? It seems so desolate. And yet the next season there they are, the seedlings.”

“Yes.”

“I remember one birth, a breech, the mother was in terrific pain. I’ve never sweated so much, I felt like
I’d
given birth. She came out finally, backwards and purple, the cord wrapped round her neck. I don’t know how she survived, or the mother, for that matter. A beautiful young woman, strong as rain. I remember she moaned. The African women I know didn’t make a peep while giving birth, they were
silent
. So to have that woman moan … It really felt like we were on the edge of life and death.

“Oh God,” she says. “Some nurse I turned out to be.”

“You’re a magnificent nurse. Where do you think I’d be without you?”

She looks at me briefly, turns abruptly away. “The local women usually gave birth in their homes. Without help, or just with their mother or sister or someone. I made it an issue to have them come to the hospital. Too many were dying, or the babies weren’t getting their shots. There was one night we had fourteen babies with us. Fourteen. All collected together.”

I just stay quiet.

“It was so stupid of us. Of
me
. We were thinking of security all the time and yet weren’t thinking. I was so proud. Fourteen babies.” Tears come down now and the words stop for a time.

“So in the night some men came. Probably it was men.
With machetes. They weren’t particularly quiet about it and yet no one saw them. Or no one would say they saw them. Someone must’ve. There were so many rumours. That it was the Interahamwe militia attacking because these were ‘genocide witnesses.’ They were babies, for Christ’s sake, they weren’t witnesses. That it was the Patriotic Army attacking because they thought our guard had worked for the former government. Johnny. Jean Batiste Mbyanuwama. They hacked off his arms and legs.”

Wiping her eyes. It always comes back to bad news, I think.

“And the babies?” I ask. Because I have to.

“They laid them out on the dirt road in front of the hospital,” she says. “Their bellys had been split open and their guts pulled out.”

I try to put my arm around her but it’s awkward in these seats, and she has large shoulders. “I’m all right,” she says. “I’m all right.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I blurt. “You can go home if you want.”

“And what would
you
do?” she asks, smiling suddenly, her face still soaked.

“I’d go back with you, of course. You know I could never do this without you.”

“Well then, I’m screwed,” she says softly. She goes quiet again, then says, “We need a safe thought for you. For Santa Irene, in case you feel a twister coming on. You’ll need something to grab onto for protection, a mental life preserver. Have you got something?”