A Dual Inheritance (51 page)

“I guess,” said Vivi. “But he had been operating under the impression that you both wanted the same things. Right?”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying that when you met, and for a good couple of years, he thought you were after the same life. So he probably felt judged when you stepped off—what do you call it?”

“The moving sidewalk,” Rebecca said.

“Right,” Vivi said. “I love that image.”

“Judged?”

“Yes, judged.”

“What are you trying to do to me? It’s over. Vivi, he left me.”

“I know.”

“And
I
know you’re a great big fan of his, but Gabriel only loved me when he thought my drive was really drive and not sheer anxiety.”

“I just can’t believe that.”

What Rebecca chose not to mention was that, despite how driven Gabriel was (and he
was
, and she’d loved that about him!), he’d always made a point of turning his BlackBerry off when at all possible. What Rebecca also chose not to mention was that his impatience with her had more than a little something to do with the fact that she was constantly checking messages and returning phone calls and that, when she finally went ahead and quit her job and
still
couldn’t manage to find a way to stop doing either one of these things, when she was still anxious and resisted his (and her therapist’s) suggestions to make time for him even when she had nothing
but
time—this was when their relationship took a truly bad turn.

“Look,” Rebecca insisted, “people like Gabriel get it done. And he didn’t have the patience for my … current ambivalence with, well, pretty much everything. I was—I
am
pretty directionless right now. I’m not entirely sure I blame him. He’s basically a good person. Whatever that means.”

“Don’t you know?”

Rebecca slowly shook her head.

“Well, that makes sense,” Vivi acknowledged. “That you would feel confused about that these days. I mean, with your dad—”

“I said I don’t know,” Rebecca said, hoping to put an end to this thread of conversation.

Vivi, to her credit, went silent. Until: “Sometimes you just remind me so much of my father.”

Rebecca’s stomach was suddenly far too full. She felt nerves spike her gut and wished she’d stuck to olives. “I remind you of your father?”

“What—I’ve said that before.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. Of course I have.”

“How do you mean?” asked Rebecca, as if she was only vaguely interested in knowing.

“Well, you know, you’re both kind of idealistic and passionate and also kind of difficult.” She winced. “You’re both difficult to talk to sometimes. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “Don’t be.”

The waiter, with excellent timing, set down another martini. Rebecca took a greedy sip.

“Okay,” Vivi said, dispensing with her worried expression. “Okay, listen. I have a brilliant idea.”

“Yes?”

“Go see him.”

“Go see who?”

“My father.”

Rebecca felt her stomach flip straight into her throat. As if she hadn’t thought of that already, over so many years, with accompanying fantasy scenarios of how such a visit might go. Thinking of Hugh never changed. No matter what her life looked like. And though she’d seen him at Vivi’s college graduation—and several times during that visit, once with her own father present—when Rebecca thought about Hugh Shipley it was always the two of them together in an unfamiliar room.

“Go see your father?” she finally managed.

“I mean go work for him,” said Vivi.

“Volunteer?”

“You obviously need a real change. And of course he always needs help. You have an Ivy League law degree and you’ve just—of your own accord—left one of the most powerful firms in the free world. So you
need to figure some shit out. My parents are good at hosting confused people and—”

“I don’t want to be that person.”

“What person?”

“That person—you know—who travels to Africa because they’re
confused
.”

“My father did it.” Vivi shrugged.

“That was the sixties. We know better now.”

“You should call him. You should go.”

Rebecca started to feel an uncomfortable pounding in her chest. She imagined sitting down at her butcher-block table and dialing Hugh and Helen’s number in Dar es Salaam.
Hello?
She could imagine Hugh’s voice—the somehow intimate timbre of it—and, stomach dropping, ears popping, she felt as if she were taking an elevator to the world’s highest floor.

“Really?” she asked Vivi.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Rebecca sat back. She set her drink down. “You know, your parents did invite me.”

“When?”

“A long time ago, but they did. They said it was an open invitation to visit wherever they moved in the world.” She neglected to mention that Helen had issued the invitation during Vivi’s high school graduation and that Rebecca was pretty sure that, even then, she hadn’t meant it.

“Open invitation?” said Vivi now. “Well—so if they said that …”

Rebecca smiled at Vivi’s enthusiasm, at her unflappable belief in dramatic solutions. Inside, though, she was already mentally creating a checklist: vaccinations, sublet her apartment, find someone decent to cover her volunteer shift at the domestic-violence hotline, decide whether or not to let her father know …

“It’s funny about your parents. All this time and I’ve never seen them at home. I can’t quite picture them at home anywhere.”

Vivi shrugged. “They’re liminal creatures.”

Rebecca took the last delicious sip of her drink. “Maybe I am, too.”

“You?” asked Vivi. “I don’t think so. I think you like to be right in the juicy center. Right now you’re just not sure exactly which center.”

“That’s generous,” Rebecca said. And she meant it. “That’s a very generous read.” And right then—as if the news had taken exactly this long to sink in—she put her hand on Vivi’s belly.

“You’re going to be fine,” Vivi said.

Rebecca found that her breath was matched with Vivi’s, and for the first time all evening, she actually felt like talking. “My father’s going to jail.”

“You don’t know that yet,” Vivi said.

“I do,” whispered Rebecca. “I found out yesterday. He was sentenced to a year.”

She was grateful for Vivi’s silence. How she only put her hand on top of Rebecca’s and together they waited for movement, some simple proof of life.

“He’s not moving now,” said Vivi. “He’s a morning kind of guy.”

“A boy?”

Vivi nodded.

“You found out?”

She shook her head. “But I know.”

Rebecca did not say that she had only a fifty–fifty chance of being correct. And she also didn’t take her hand away.

Chapter Eighteen

Africa, April 2005

Hugh made his way slowly through the airport in Dar es Salaam. Past the lipstick-red chairs and the hand-painted signs, past Indian women in saris and African men in dashikis and tracksuits and baggy jeans, through a group of pale spotty teenagers—whom Rebecca pegged as missionaries—Hugh Shipley came forward. His face was as tanned and craggy and stubbornly handsome as ever, and his hair—though thinner in front—still reminded her of all those boarding school boys. He was wearing his uniform—white linen shirt, khaki pants—and looked as if he hadn’t changed clothes since the last time she’d seen him, ten years earlier with Vivi, when they’d all had an early dinner not far from campus, somewhere on Broadway.

His two fingers were still missing. The lack of those fingers was such an integral part of him; one could argue it was the most notable aspect of his appearance, and it amazed her not only that the lack was permanent but that she’d been the last person to see Hugh with ten fingers. No one was more entrenched with the story of that particular loss.

Now he kissed Rebecca’s cheek, and—when she briefly closed her eyes—she tricked herself into smelling not his ripe and unfamiliar stink but the mussels and French fries they’d all eaten together, the salt he’d
sprinkled in his beer. Hugh needed a shower, yes, but there was also something unequivocally pleasing about this familiar greeting; they were friends, old family friends. She felt relieved and also—what? Apprehensive?
Was
she apprehensive? Because here was Hugh and she was still maddeningly attracted to him. All the alcohol and tropical maladies hadn’t claimed him, not yet. “Rebecca,” he said.

Hugh exchanged greetings—
Jambo! Mambo! Habari!
—with so many people as they continued through the airport that Rebecca began repeating
Jambo
or
Mambo
or
Habari
along with him. Two men and one woman separately said,
Hello, sister
, as she passed, which made her blush with ridiculous pleasure, even if this greeting was twice followed by offers to sell her bargain DVDs.

As they walked toward the baggage claim, Hugh calmly explained that there wasn’t any time for her to so much as say hello to Helen and spend one night with them. “In fact,” he said, finally stopping and glancing at his watch, “if you need to use the bathroom, now’s the time.”

“You mean we’re going this minute?” asked Rebecca. She’d been traveling for nearly twenty hours. Her mouth felt like a petri dish and her joints were aching; she could smell herself in this heat, and the scent was
eau de airplane blanket, eau de airplane lasagna
. She had counted on at least a shower and a meal at Hugh and Helen’s before heading into one of the world’s most remote regions, to a town that wasn’t listed on most Tanzanian maps.

Hugh nodded. “Helen is embarrassed that I’m not letting you rest. But the trucks are arriving tomorrow and we have to be there—if not to receive them, then
right
after—or the whole operation will be shot to hell.”

“Of course,” said Rebecca, not comprehending a thing.

Hugh took Rebecca’s bag, said something in Swahili to two men, and told Rebecca to follow him. What else would she do? She’d even explicitly agreed to this—to follow what he said—during the one brief phone conversation they’d had before she booked the ticket. She’d hoped to offer legal services—something specific—but he said she’d caught him
at a moment when what he needed most was an extra set of hands and company he could stand. He’d offered her heat (and he wasn’t kidding; it must have been well over one hundred degrees) and the opportunity to visit Lake Tanganyika, where she could help distribute mosquito nets.

Sign me up
, she’d said.

And though she knew that to some extent she wanted to do this in order to put off her own unpleasant personal decision-making, she also knew that she’d always had a healthy interest in Hugh’s career, quite apart from her debatably healthy interest in Hugh himself.

You’re sure you want to come?
he’d asked, before hanging up.

I’m sure
.

I have to tell you, I’m surprised. You have never struck me as that girl who’s always dreamed of an African adventure
.

Well, I’m not
, she’d said.
Of course I’m not
.

There was silence. And in that silence: worn rubber handlebars sloughed off onto her sweaty hands; Hugh leaned solidly onto her back; and there they were on an island road—blazing bright sun and dark-green shade—up into the hills.

But
, she’d said,
delivering mosquito nets to impoverished people hardly sounds like safari
.

And she could picture his grin, his vodka sweating next to the phone in a place that she’d never seen.
Okay
, he said.

Okay, you want me to come?

Good ol’ Rebecca. You’ve always tried to be helpful
.

Why does that sound insulting?

It isn’t
. He cleared his throat.
You want to help? You can come
.

I do
, she said.
I want to. And I’ve seen pictures of the lake. I won’t lie—beauty doesn’t hurt
.

It never does
, he said.

On the runway, the light was painfully bright and their five-seater had ominous-looking red flames painted on the wings. Either way, she had vowed to herself not to express anything close to fear over flying. Or
reptiles or insects: She’d mentally prepared herself for snakes coiled in corners and spiders crawling out of drains. Still, when Hugh pointed out the window to the shockingly blue expanse of water, she wished she could simply marvel, instead of imagining falling straight out into it—sky, lake, death. She stiffly gave Hugh a thumbs-up and was pleased that at least she got a laugh.

Two hours that felt like less and more all at once and then finally down, down on the ground. Oh, how she loved that moment. She could imagine forgetting the landing strip, the rocky brown earth and fat trees, but never the pitted dirt roads whose shocks she felt in her bowels, or the low huts, tall grasses, and three brown bulls stolidly blocking traffic. She would never forget the cluster of boys who emerged with the traffic and crowded the Land Rover, to whom Hugh gave pens and candy. They were wearing strikingly clean plaid button-down shirts, as if a bonanza of American Eagle overstock had come in just that week. With their oddly grown-up posturing and their wide warm smiles, they could have sold her anything. She’d never forget those boys. Or the one girl among all those boys, a yellow polyester cheongsam hanging down to her bony ankles.

Just before dusk, against a pink and purple backdrop of a sky straight out of the early days of Technicolor, they arrived at a series of conical huts built along the lakeshore. There was a main bar area in a larger hut with swept-clean floors, flowers in vases, and billowy white curtains. There were tea candles, tables set for dinner.

“Are you serious?” asked Rebecca, punch-drunk; her giddiness went beyond jet lag.

“What.”

“This is a bit more Isak Dinesen than I pictured.”

“It won’t all be like this,” Hugh said, somewhere between sheepish and proud. “See you in twenty minutes?” he asked, without exactly asking. “I prefer to sleep in a tent,” he said, wandering off. She had to roll her eyes
—of course you do
.