These Dreams of You (13 page)

T
hey get to the station in time for the night's last express back to London. On the platform the two men shake hands; Brown watches the nanny pull Sheba onto the train, Parker leading the way. “So it's working out, then,” Brown says.

“I think so,” Zan answers. “In the back of her four-year-old little brain is always the question whether we'll be one more family who sends her away. So everything's a test, of course, to see if she can push us to do it.”

“Oh,” says Brown, “yes, quite. I meant the nanny, what's her name.”

“Molly.”

“Molly, right. Odd name for an African bird, isn't it? I assume that's what she is, African. I meant you worked it out with the child-care.”

“It's strange,” Zan says, the train starting to move, “because we actually saw her, the afternoon before she came to the room, in a . . . peculiar way . . . at the pub where . . . wait,” he says, stepping onto the train, “what?”

“How's that?” says Brown, walking alongside, trying to keep pace.

“
I
worked it out? Didn't
you
work it out?”

“Uh,” the other man says, the train speeding up and leaving him behind, “you know I intended to, but . . . ”

“But I thought
you
arranged it,” Zan calls from the train.

“Have a good rest of your stay,” Brown calls back, waving. “Regards to Viv, if you hear from her.”

D
id he say if? Over the building roar of the train, Zan strains to hear the word's echo: Or maybe he said when. Was it when, or if? A few minutes later in their seats, Molly says, “No, it was Mrs. Nordhoc who arranged it. Sorry. I thought you understood.” On the seat beside her sits a small portable radio; a blip of music comes from its speaker. When the nanny holds the radio up to Sheba's head, the signal comes through more clearly. In fascination Parker stares not at the effect his sister has on the transistor but the obsolete device itself. “That radio looks as old as your camera,” he murmurs before sinking back in his seat to the slight sway of the train.

Z
an says to the nanny, “Viv arranged it?” Sheba is about to fall asleep, her eyes drooping. “Don't let her fall asleep,” says Parker to Molly.

“Parker,” Zan says to the boy's tone, but then to the woman, “I'm afraid he's right. She'll nap half an hour and be up the rest of the night. They've still got some jetlag anyway.” Molly rustles Sheba a few blinks back into consciousness, turning up the radio in the seat beside her; she moves the knob from station to station until she finds the song. Sheba's head perks up. “Oh my god, seriously?” Parker groans from half-sleep; Sheba looks at Molly and smiles.
We can be heroes just for one day.
“I like this song!” says Sheba.

“I know,” Molly smiles back.

You know? thinks Zan. “You heard from Viv?”

“Well,” the nanny seems to sort through her sentences over the song, “not directly. Through a friend. A friend of a friend in Addis.” She sings softly along with Sheba and stares out the window of the train.

“But when?” says Zan.

“A few days ago, I think it was?” She says, “No, of course it must have been longer than that. A week or more?”

“A friend of a friend? Can I contact this person?”

“It's difficult,” Molly nods, “very poor mobile service, you know, and email . . . ” and turns back to the window.

“I ask because I haven't heard anything from her in days.”

“I am certain that she is all right,” Molly answers,
“as long as she remains in Addis Ababa.”

I
t may be that Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence, but he would find Molly's appearance more reassuring if it somehow were more explicable. He would feel more reassured if Zan had mentioned in the email to Viv the need for a nanny
before
the afternoon they saw Molly outside the pub. In that case Zan can imagine scenarios, slightly far-flung though all of them are, by which a young London woman—alerted to the situation of a white foreigner in town with two kids, one a young black girl—would happen to pass by the pub and take notice. But in any case, wouldn't Viv have written something? Maybe, as Molly indicated, Viv said something to someone in Ethiopia, who then said, Oh I know a woman in London, and then Viv forgot in the midst of everything going on. As Zan too often reminds her, sometimes she thinks of telling him something and then later remembers doing it though she hasn't.

Zan would find Molly's mysteriousness, and all the mysteries that her mysteriousness engenders, more purely irritating if it weren't for the sense he has—which has grown as surely as the transmissions from Molly's and Sheba's bodies together—that the woman is haunted. Or she is more than haunted, she's branded by a secret, and all that lies between her and her secret is everything about her that's so indefinite. There's no way for him to know if Molly has come to Sheba to try and live down this secret or to try and draw closer to a resolution; but this is the one thing about her that Zan knows is no accident, even among all his other conjectures, the most prominent of which is whether, for all concerned, hers is a secret to either be unlocked, or locked away for good.

A
t the hotel, he carries his daughter up to the room and lays her down in the larger bed. For a while Parker plunders cyberspace on his father's laptop. Sheba sleeps what her brother calls the zombie sleep, eyes not fully shut, lids only half lowered; the distant music that the girl transmits rises off her sleeping body like steam off a summer sidewalk. Brushing Sheba's hair from her eyes, Zan is reminded that he promised Viv to find a salon for her in London, and that reminds him to check his email where, after the long day, he feels certain there will be a message. When there isn't, it's all the more of a shock.

Zan turns from the laptop and looks at his daughter where she sleeps, noting how the girl was different today with Molly, less manic, tethered to something or someone she's never been before. Two hours later, unaware that he's fallen asleep, Zan wakes to the sound of weeping.

S
heba isn't in the bed next to him. The sound of crying comes from the bathroom where the door is closed.
In the dark Zan rises from the bed, looks over at Parker, goes to the bathroom where the door is locked. “Sheba,” he calls through the door.

“Go away,” comes a little voice.

“Sheba.”

“Leave me alone.”

“What's wrong?”

“Leave me alone.”

“What is it?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Sheba, open the door.”

F
or half a moment he wonders if he should leave her but he says, “Sheba. Did you have a bad dream?” She just cries. “Sheba?”

“No.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“No.”

“You have to let me in.”

He hears her unlock the door.

S
he's sitting on the bathroom floor. Because he's still only half conscious and his brain is full of vodka, Viv, Molly, J. Willkie Brown and Ronnie Jack Flowers, he belatedly registers that this is something new, the four-year-old sitting on the bathroom floor crying, and that this is not crying for attention, this is crying in private, the way grown-ups do when they want no one to know. She looks up at him. “You don't love me as much as Parker,” she says simply.

“Sheba,” he says.

“You can't.” It's not even an accusation. It's worse, what the girl considers a realization.

“That's not true,” Zan says.

“You
can't
,” she repeats, as though begging him just to confirm it.

“It's not true,” he says firmly, and bends down to pick her up.

F
or a moment he has her, pulling her to him, when she explodes and pushes him away. “It
is
true! It
is
true! Congratulations, Parker!” she calls into the dark of the next room, “bravo! They love you more! What the hell is wrong with you people? Why did you bring me from Thyopia,” as she calls it, the only thing she says now that remotely sounds like a four-year-old, “if you can't love me as much as Parker? I want to be back in Thyopia where I was born and not here with some old family that's just mean to me and rude. I would rather live in Thyopia for the rest of my life. Why didn't you adopt a white daughter? This isn't my real family, I was never in Mama's fucked-up tummy! What the hell do you want from me? I hate you all! You don't pay any fucked-up attention to me anyway! I know why Mama went back—to make them trade another kid for me! Some fucked-up white kid! What do you want with me anyway? I'll put the
hurt
on you, young man!” she warns him. “You can't tell me what to do!
I'm a professional!
You left me in the car!
You can't tell me . . . you can't . . . ” and then, exhausted, “I'm sorry,” she begins to sob, “Poppy, I'm sorry,” pleading, “I'm only four, I'm not twelve like Parker, I act braver than I am . . . I don't . . . ” and she speaks as though from somewhere out of time, from some vantage point out of age, seeing herself in a way that Zan never knew a four-year-old could see herself, talking about herself as Zan might or another grown up. “I'm sorry,” sobbing, “Poppy . . . ”

Z
an sweeps her into his arms more determinedly than any time since he first swept her out of the backseat of the car bringing her home from the airport, and says, “Shhh, shhh, listen to me,” he clutches her to his chest and she squeezes his neck, “listen to me. Are you listening?”

A muffled reply comes from his shoulder.

“I love you. You're my little girl. I love you and Parker the same. Mama loves you and Parker the same. You're a member of this family and always will be. It will never, ever, ever change.”

“Promise?” muffled from his shoulder.

“I promise. It will never ever change no matter what you do or say, you're part of this family forever, whether you want to be or not,” he declares.

“What about my Thyopia poppy?” she peeps from his chest.

“He's your poppy too. But so am I.”

“Two poppys.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry,” she begins to cry again.

“No, shhh. Nothing to be sorry for.”

S
itting up, Parker watches them from his bed. “Sheesh,” he says.
“YOU SHUT UP, PARKER!” Sheba bellows over Zan's shoulder.

“Parker, go to sleep,” says Zan.

Parker plops his head back down on the pillow. “Who can sleep?”

A
lmost instantly Sheba is out, snoring in the other bed. Parker doesn't groan in protest because he has a vested interest in his sister sleeping, and then from the bed he rises to retrieve his father's laptop. “What are you doing?” says Zan.

“I want to film her sleeping,” the boy says. “She says she never snores. She's got the zombie eyes, which creep me out but would be über-tight to have a movie of.”

“Go back to bed,” Zan says. For a few minutes the father and son sit watching the girl and listening; Zan looks at Parker. Hesitantly, sensing an opportunity in the quiet of the night, Zan begins, “Uh, Parker, listen . . . ”

“The heck, Zan,” the boy says, “we're not going to have the Talk, are we?” and retreats back to beneath his pillow.

T
hey wait for Viv. It seems clear to Zan that something is wrong. From his cell phone, he never reaches anyone in Ethiopia, as if the country at the beginning of time is inside its own time; and whatever information Molly ever had about Viv only becomes more vague like the rest of Molly, who becomes more enervated and remote.

The morning after her midnight explosion, calmly Sheba tries to explain to her father. “I have to let out the fear. The fear comes in,” she inhales, “it must go out.”

Z
an would fire Molly except that, besides the fact he needs a nanny, he can't bring himself to sever the only person who's claimed recent contact with Viv, however speciously. Moreover there's Sheba's growing attraction to her—a manifestation, maybe, of all the coming conflicts over identity. As the little black girl becomes more racially conscious in her white family, is it a function of a larger dislocation having to do with orphanhood, or in fact is there no dislocation larger than the racial, including orphanhood?

Zan feels a prisoner of mysteries he can't name let alone solve, and implications of secrets so secret he barely knows they're secrets. Calls to the bank about the mortgage, difficult enough back home, are impossible, particularly within constant earshot of the children; money dwindles. The £3,500 wired to his bank account by the university has been consumed by the cost of three extra round-trip tickets to London and Viv's flight onto Addis Ababa. At the moment there isn't enough available credit on the single remaining card to cover the hotel bill. Zan envisions a three-in-the-morning escape, involving suitcases hurled from the window to the street below, and shushed children as they creep downstairs past the front desk.

H
e takes the kids and Molly to Hampton Court outside London where the Thames turns south and west. It's twenty minutes beyond the university on the same train out of Waterloo that they took to and from Zan's lecture; on the way the nanny's transistor plays yet another song by the girl's favorite singer:
Jasmine, I saw you peeping
, and Parker rises from his seat and moves to the other end of the train.

D
isembarking at Hampton Court, the four have lunch at a pub down the road. Parker listens to headphones plugged into the little green music player hanging around his neck; Sheba plays with Molly's old camera. The group follows a small red bridge that leads to the palace. On this day the rare fine weather they've had in London finally succumbs to the norm, the palace's bright sunlight-hued red and verdant rolling grounds clashing with the dark billows of gray rolling cross the sky.

Fully as Zan expected, the children's fascination with the palace is minimal. Tales of wayward clergy and various kingly wives drugged or beheaded, or dying in childbirth, whose ghosts still reside only make Parker and Sheba uneasy or give rise to questions that Zan can't answer. If he's being honest, Zan's interest in the palace isn't so keen either, or maybe he's just distracted; in any case the father, son, daughter and nanny move beyond the house onto the grounds where the court's famous three-hundred-year-old maze rises against the blue and black sky in passages of brilliant foliage. Also fully as Zan expected, Parker and Sheba find the maze more interesting. The skies continue to threaten. “It's starting to rain,” Zan says, as though the kids possibly would find this relevant; the boy and girl dash into the maze with the nanny behind. “Don't get lost,” the father advises absurdly.