In the darkness of a hotel room in a small town in Kenya, I awake to the sound of a ringing phone. There’s only one telephone in the entire establishment, on the reception desk a few feet from the door to my room. It takes a long time for someone to answer, and then there’s a muffled voice, footsteps, a soft knock on the door to my room. I stand up from the bed, the cement floor cool under my feet, and when I open the door the night clerk is holding the telephone in one hand, the receiver in the other — my room is close enough to the reception desk that the cord just makes it — and he passes me the receiver without a word. It’s difficult to decipher his expression; somewhere between annoyance and concern.
“Hello?”
“It’s your mother,” she says, on a line indistinct with spectacular distance.
“Oh…” I’m blinking, not quite awake, the night clerk watching me. “Listen, it’s wonderful to hear your voice, and I apologize for not writing more often, it’s just that it’s—”
“I know what time zone you’re in, Zed.” Of course she does; there’s a world map in the study of my childhood apartment. I imagine her there now, looking out the window at Central Park, and suddenly miss her for the first time in years. “Why aren’t you at home with Claire?” she asks. “I just called over there and she said you were here.”
“It’s a long story. Is something wrong?”
“Zed, something’s happened to your brother. I need you to go to Montreal.”
“Oh God, is he—”
“I don’t know,” she says, and for the first time I hear her desperation. “Apparently he’s had a nervous breakdown. Some kind of collapse. He never tells me anything, Zed, and then I get a call telling me that he’s at a hospital in a foreign country where I didn’t even know he’d gone in the first place and they say he won’t talk, and someone’s got to bring him home to New York. I’d go myself, but they say there was a letter to you in his pocket, and I just, I don’t even know him anymore, Zed.” She is crying. “He was always closer to you. I thought it should be you, I don’t—”
“It’s okay.” I turn away from the night clerk for some semblance of privacy; the night clerk, perhaps understanding this, turns slightly away from me. “Of course I’ll go to Montreal. But listen, is there any way you could pay for my ticket? I don’t have a lot of—”
“Of course,” my mother says. “Of course I’ll buy your ticket.”
“Thank you.” I’m silent for a moment, straining to hear her. She’s telling me about my brother, about the call from the hospital. “It’s alright,” I say, again. “I’m ten hours by car from Nairobi. I can be in Montreal within a day or two.”
“We’re closer to two days,” the night clerk says apologetically, when I give him back the receiver.
“What?”
“From Nairobi,” the night clerk says.
* * *
Six days later in an airport I watch Toronto disappear. I can’t remember the last time I saw snow; I stand by the glass wall of the terminal as the first snowflakes fall, and in a moment it’s become a storm. The airport is some miles from the city centre and from this distance the city looks like something from a fairytale, spired and fragile; it begins fading out as the snow starts falling, and then it’s gone all at once. Within minutes the tarmac fades out too, then the airplanes just outside the windows are gone and all I can see is the snow falling, my face reflected in the glass. A few seconds later all that remains of the world outside the terminal are the dim movements of airport vehicles, their lights watery splashes of yellow and pink, moving at a snail’s pace down below.
The announcements begin almost immediately: all flights are delayed until further notice. I turn away from the glass and meet the eyes of two or three of my fellow travelers, and I feel my usual absurd delight at having something in common with other people for a moment or two. I find an unoccupied seat, hold my bag on my lap for safekeeping — I traveled out of Africa with only carry-on luggage, and after a near-disaster in the Nairobi airport I’m concerned about theft — and I think that I’ll just close my eyes for a moment or two, since I’ve just crossed eight time zones and I’ve barely slept in days.
When I wake the light in the terminal has changed. The windows are all reflection and movement, an unceasing shimmer of night snow on the other side of the glass. I’m disoriented and my throat is dry. I can see myself in the window, pale and unshaven with hair standing on end, and the woman sitting two seats away is looking at me. I meet her eyes in the reflection.
“You were sleeping for a long time,” she says softly. There’s a hushed quality to the terminal. We’re surrounded by other stranded travelers, but all of them are sleeping or staring silently at screens.
I turn away from the reflection to look at her directly.
“I’ve been traveling for a long time,” I say.
“How long?”
“I started six days ago in Kenya.” She raises her eyebrows and I start to explain how it took me so long to get here, but it suddenly all seems very tedious: the three days it ended up taking me to get to Nairobi, the eighteen-hour wait for a flight to London, the twelve-hour stopover in Heathrow before the flight to Toronto, all the delays inbetween. “I’m trying to get to Montreal.”
“All the flights have been canceled or delayed till morning.” Her voice is kind. A faint Quebecois accent.
I glance at my wrist and then remember that I traded my watch and twenty dollars for a ride from the town of Isiolo to the Nairobi airport. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Two a.m.”
She seems to be in her late twenties, with dark eyes and close-cropped brown hair. I extend my hand and say, “Zed Jacobs.”
“Emmanuelle,” she says. “Emmanuelle LeBarge.”
I tell her that I’m pleased to meet her, but the truth is I’m not pleased about anything. After all these days I’m within two hours of Montreal and those two hours might as well be a thousand miles; I’m so close to my brother and still so useless to him, and the snow falls unceasing in the darkness. After a while Emmanuelle closes her eyes, but I’m too fretful to sleep. I take my bag and set off under the fluorescent lights, shave with handsoap in a men’s room sink and then walk up and down the terminal a few times with bits of bloody toilet paper stuck to my face until I find an exhausted-looking airline representative who confirms what Emmanuelle just said. No flights til morning at the earliest. I find a payphone, insert my credit card and call Claire in Africa, but it occurs to me as I dial that I’m not sure if she’s my girlfriend anymore or if I’m going to see her again, and then it occurs to me that a payphone call from Lester B. Pearson International Airport to rural Kenya will probably cost me a small fortune, so I hang up before she answers.
Part Two
Claire in Africa: in another lifetime she was pale, translucent almost, but now her skin is tanned and freckled, sun-damaged, sun-born, and her eyes are blazing blue like a desert prophet’s. She’s the daughter of missionaries. She has a picture that was taken in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport some years ago, her family gathered for one last picture before Africa. They’re a happy-looking family. everyone is blue-eyed and smiling and blonde. It must have been an exciting day. Claire was seventeen I study the photograph sometimes and barely recognize her; in the picture she’s a delicate-looking girl with long blonde hair in a ponytail but now it’s cut short against her skull, hidden under the bandanna she wears to block sweat and the sun. When she unwraps the bandanna at night and runs her fingers through her sweat-curled hair I always have the feeling of witnessing a ritual.
Claire is my religion, but religion’s what she’s lost. I imagine her family studies that photograph too on the other side of the Atlantic, perhaps looking for signs. That was the last family portrait. They came back without her. In the picture there’s a matching cross hanging from every neck but that was seven years ago, that was another lifetime, now she’s twenty-four and they all pray for her daily and they talk to her about Jesus but she’s lost her faith. Not just her faith: she’s discarded her name. The name on her passport is Jillian Claire. Her brother is Joseph Christian. Her little sister is Jessica Christine. The initials are not a coincidence. But now she’s slipped into a new life and become a new person, she’s dropped her first name and her parents are beside themselves. At night she stands in our living room in Kenya with the phone pressed against her face, straining to hear through static.
“Difficult,” she says. “I said it’s difficult. No, I… I appreciate that, Mom, you know I do, but — no, it isn’t Zed. It isn’t him. I’m here by my own choice. We’ve talked about this. No, I… what? I’m sorry. It’s a bad connection. I can’t hear you that well. Yes, but I don’t… no, I said that the work’s difficult, not that I want to come back to Minnesota. No, it isn’t home. I am home, Mom. I am standing in my living room. No, don’t pray for me, please, I don’t need praying for…” (This can go on for hours. There are colossal breakdowns in communication. The phone calls are pleasant for no one, but her parents are paying for our satellite phone service.)
We’ve been here for some time together, working for an American non-profit in exchange for housing and a small stipend, doing our best at a residential facility for AIDS orphans and an attached hospital. I met her when she was twenty-two, the year after her family left her here, but left is the wrong word: when they returned to the United States she refused to go back with them. She loved Kenya. She told her shocked parents that she felt more at home here than she ever had in the suburbs of Minnesota. She dropped her first name, stopped wearing her cross, found lodging with a woman who worked at the hospital and stayed on in the town without her family, working.
“No, it isn’t God’s work.” In half of my memories of our life together she’s on the phone with her family, and when I close my eyes in the airport in Toronto I can play every conversation back in my head. She’s speaking with her mother. Her face is flushed. The fan shifts hot air through the room; there is sweat on her forehead, she swipes it away with the back of her hand and keeps talking. “It’s human work. I don’t see what God has to do with it… no please, I swear, I am not trying to provoke you…”
I watch the atmosphere turn dark around her, storms passing over her face. She loves her family but they make her furious, and when she hangs up the phone the air around her carries an electrical charge. She stands still for a moment by the window and she’s soothed, or so at least it seems from the bed, by the blackness of the street outside. We live in a small place and it gets very dark at night. She turns to look at me where I lie pretending to read and then she comes to me slowly, surrendering in increments as she crosses the room. She pauses by a side table to unwrap the bandanna; she runs her hands through her hair, short blonde curls tight with sweat against her head, and at the dresser she takes off her Medic Alert bracelet — Syncope — and the blue bead necklace she wears every day; a gift from her little sister before the family returned to the United States, before the tortuous phone calls between Minneapolis and Kenya on wavering connections late at night. The satellite that beams her voice into suburban Minnesota moves silently away from us into space and she takes off her watch, lays it flat on the side table between the bracelet and the beads; she lifts the mosquito netting that hangs over the bed and in that motion, that lifting, brings herself into the foreground of my sight. By the time she lies on the bed beside me the electrical storm has dissipated and she is Claire again, sweaty and a little sad, looking at me with those startling pale blue eyes. Sometimes I read to her before we go to sleep. Poetry, mostly: Leonard Cohen, Yeats, the Song of Songs. Who is she who comes up from the desert / leaning upon her beloved?
But that was then. It’s been two months since we started fighting, small things at first and then larger and larger, and all of these skirmishes were cover for the fight we weren’t having, which involved the fact that we’d been living together for two years and she wanted to get married. She’s forsaken faith, name, and country, but it’s hard to reinvent yourself completely and she was raised a certain way. I love her, but I’m not so sure about marriage in general. My father left when I was six and I never saw him again.
A week before my mother called from New York I moved into a hotel across town. We call it a trial separation but it feels more like a trial, period, like the trials of the saints. The room is small and comfortless and I am lonely at night. It’s just so we can have a little space, we tell each other brightly, just so we can think about things, but neither of us are stupid and we both know this is how endings begin. There’s the trial separation, then the real separation, then someone decides to do something decisive like leave town and that’s it. I work all day at the hospital — we see each other there and are painfully cordial — and in my hotel room I lie alone on my bed in the evenings, reading and then staring at the ceiling and thinking about whether I can marry her or not, whether a propensity for leaving one’s wife might be hereditary, whether I might possibly be able to live without her, whether I’ll ever live with her again. And then one night I wake at 3 a.m. to the sound of a ringing phone, the night clerk brings it to my door and it’s my mother.
My first thought when I hang up is that I want to see Claire. I dress quickly in the room, thank the night clerk and walk out into the quiet streets. My way is lit mostly by the moon.
Lights are on in the house. Claire opens the door immediately when I knock.
“You should ask who it is first.”
“I knew it was you, Zed.” She’s bright-eyed and fully dressed. I lock the door behind me and surreptitiously look for evidence of infidelity as I turn back toward her, but see nothing. Her bandanna is hanging to dry above the sink, a splash of red cotton.
“Your mother asked why you weren’t here,” Claire says. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry, Claire.”
Claire lies down on the bed and stares at the ceiling, so I lie down beside her and tell her I have to go get my brother in Montreal. It’s nice to be here again, so close to her. After a moment she turns over onto her side to look at me.
“What does your mother want you to do?”
“I have to take him back to New York, I guess. Eli’s had some kind of a — some kind of a—” and the obvious word is breakdown, but for nearly the first time in my life I find myself at a loss for words; I try to say breakdown and all I can think of is Eli’s prom night, when the rented convertible he and his girlfriend were driving broke down upstate, two hours north of the city — God knows what the hell they were doing up in Sullivan County at 1 a.m. anyway, I didn’t want to ask — and I had to get Mom’s car out of the garage on East 82nd Street and drive up and get them. They were on a back road and it took a long time to get there. Eli guided me in by cell phone and at 3:30 a.m. I found them — my brother and his high school girlfriend Lorie, the two of them lying on the hood of the darkened car looking up at the stars on a side road, and I think they were high but I’ve always been a terrible judge of whether people are high or not and anyway it didn’t really matter.
“They’re so fucking bright up here,” Eli said, “I mean once you get outside the city,” and I never was one to decline an experience so I lay down on the hood beside them for an hour and the breakdown of the car seemed like a gift of some kind, a perfection, the only time in my life I ever lay on the hood of a car staring up at the stars with my brother beside me.
“—A collapse,” I tell Claire, all these years later in Kenya. “He’s had some kind of collapse.”
“In Montreal? He was traveling?”
“Yeah, I guess. Something to do with a girl.”
She is watching me, biting her lip. “When are you leaving?”
“As soon as possible.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
She lies on her back. The ceiling above us is blurred through the mosquito nets. I think of all the nights I’ve slept on this bed beside her. There are hours to go before morning. After a long time she asks, “What’s your brother like?”
“Eli’s smart. A little aimless. Shiftless might be too strong, but he’s lacking something… I don’t know, there’s an absence of drive. I don’t think he’s exactly the man he wanted to be, if that makes any sense.”
“It does.” I glance at her and she’s closed her eyes. “Is he like you?”
“Like me?”
“You know what I mean, Zed.”
What she means is, did Eli skip four grades in elementary school? Did he obtain his first Masters degree at seventeen?
“No,” I say. “He’s not like me.”
“Then it must have been hard being your little brother.”
“Yes. I think it probably was.”
“Listen,” she says, “it’s hard being here in this town. With you. The way things are now with us.”
“I know.”
“I mean I can’t sleep at night. I see you during the day at work and I just want to… it’s so hard, Zed. I didn’t think it would be this difficult.”
“I know.”
“So I don’t think you should come back here,” Claire says, “unless you’re definitely going to marry me.”
Part Three
At 4 a.m. in the airport all is quiet and still. Travelers sleep in groups or alone, draped over chairs or curled up on the carpet; they shift sometimes, half-awake, half-dreaming, and otherwise there’s almost no movement in the vastness of the terminal. All the stores are closed, except for a coffee-and-donut stand staffed by a sleepy-eyed girl who looks no older than fifteen. The lights buzz softly overhead; otherwise the quiet is all but absolute.
After not calling Claire I walk up and down the terminal for an hour and then go back to my gate and sit down beside Emmanuelle. She smiles when I look at her. Everyone around us is sleeping and it makes me feel oddly invincible, as if we’re the last two people who haven’t fallen under a spell.
“Where were you going?” I ask her.
“It’s a long story,” she says.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Oh no,” she says, “it’s not that at all, I don’t mind telling it. It’s just that it’s complicated, so if you were looking for a short answer…”
“I think we’ve got time.”
“I’m a deserter,” she says.
I think for a moment of what I can remember about Canada’s present military commitments, and then say, “Afghanistan?”
“Not a war,” she says. “A family.”
“A family.” I’m watching her face.
“It’s a long story,” she says. “I was young. I didn’t get along with my husband and then we had a kid, and I wasn’t sure I’d even wanted a kid in the first place. Anyway, you don’t want to hear all this.”
“Are you going to see them?”
“I heard they were in Halifax,” she says. “That’s where I’m going.”
“I see.”
“Just to see them,” she says. “To see if they’ll talk to me. I don’t expect anything.”
“I hope they’ll talk to you.” I’m not sure what to say. She starts to tell me about her husband, about the son she abandoned, his temper tantrums and the hopelessness she felt when she couldn’t calm him down, and I keep thinking about the word she used. Deserter. Deserter. Deserters used to be shot. I watch her face and my thoughts drift back to my first Master’s degree, which involved 20th century European history; my dissertation concerned the Hitler Youth. There were child deserters in Nazi Germany, in the dying days toward the end when the Third Reich was running out of men so they started sending out children, boys who saluted their parents in the front parlour and then picked up their satchels and went out into hell. All of them were terrified and some of them fled. Strange that this thought should lead back to Claire so quickly, but it does: there’s an ex-child-soldier at the orphanage in our town in Kenya, a deserter as well. He told the orphanage director that he was a soldier in another country and he ran away, but he doesn’t want to talk about it and no one forces him. He’d somehow made his way to Kenya, where an aunt lived, but she was already sick by the time he arrived; he came with her to the hospital and she was dead in a week. He’s a quiet boy, ten or eleven, and he calls himself Len. He goes to school and tends to a delicate rock garden that takes up two square feet in a corner by the trash bins. Claire brings him food and they eat lunch together; Claire talking, Len silent, but he’ll smile sometimes at something she says. The thought of them together makes me miss Claire with such force that I have to close my eyes for a moment.
“I’m sorry. It’s a disconcerting story,” Emmanuelle says.
“It’s okay. I’m just tired.” I try to smile, but my face won’t cooperate. “How long ago did you leave?”
“Ten years.” She’s quiet for a moment. “You don’t know what it means to be alone,” she said, “until you leave someone and they don’t come after you.”
Part Four
By morning the snow is beginning to subside. I’d drifted off sometime around 5 a.m.; when I wake it’s nearly seven and Emmanuelle is sleeping in the seat beside me. I go back to the payphone and call my mother in New York.
“I’m almost there,” I tell her. “I’m so close. I was delayed by a snow storm.”
She says, “I’m glad he has you.” She gives me the name and number of the doctor in Montreal who she’s been speaking with. It’s early, still dark outside, but to my enormous surprise the doctor answers on the second ring.
“What’s Eli’s condition?” I ask, when the introductions are through. “My mother said he had some kind of nervous collapse.”
“It’s…” The doctor hesitates, apparently struggling for words. “Look, he was a witness to something,” he says finally. “He may have been a bit on the fragile side to start out with, but this wasn’t just a nervous collapse out of the blue. The story I got from the police was that a girl jumped in front of a subway train, a friend of his, maybe a girlfriend, and witnesses say he was running down the platform toward her.”
“Did he get there on time?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“The train was coming into the station. Your brother got there too late.”
“So she was hit by a train, and he saw it happen.”
“No, that’s the mistake people make,” the doctor says. “People think of it as being hit by a train, a kind of clean death by impact, like a bird hitting a glass window and falling down dead on the grass without a feather out of place. But it isn’t the impact that kills them, or even if it is — am I being too graphic for you? — there’s still the matter of what happens next, if you get my drift.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, look, stop me if this is too awful, but think about it. The body falls down to the track, but the train hasn’t stopped yet. Try not to visualize this next part, you’ll be up all night. It’s a question of what happens to a soft human body when it’s caught on the undercarriage of a hard moving train, between steel tracks and wheels and heavy moving machinery, and then imagine that you saw all that, all that blood and all those pieces on the metal tracks, the mangling, and then consider that perhaps you knew the girl in question and cared about her a little.”
I swallow hard and have to close my eyes for a second. I think of Claire and of a dead crushed bird I saw on a highway a few days back.
“So he lies in the hospital bed and won’t speak,” I say finally. “That’s what my mother told me.”
“Right. He hasn’t said a word in two weeks, and as such went unidentified until his jacket turned up with his wallet and a letter addressed to you in the pocket.”
“What do you mean, until his jacket turned up?”
“It got lost in the E.R. It’s chaos down there. These things happen.”
“What happens if you talk to him?”
“Nothing,” the doctor says. “He stares right through you. He’s in shock.”
“What does he need?”
“He needs to be taken home, Zed. He needs to rest in familiar surroundings. I believe he’ll eventually be fine, but he needs someone to take care of him for awhile.”
* * *
A memory of my brother: we were nine and eleven years old, painting on his bedroom walls. Our mother had had the room painted blue, but the painter wasn’t a professional, just the next-door neighbor’s teenage son who liked painting walls, and he ran out of paint halfway through and ended up mixing two colors together, and it gave the room an oddly streaked, almost aquatic look. Eli said, “It’s like being underwater,” and I said, “Let’s paint some fish,” and we did. Our mother was thrilled. She brought a professional in, a moody twentysomething trying to pay his way through art school, and he painted the door to look like the entrance to an undersea cave. He painted seaweed around our fish, and when he was done he forbade us to paint any more; he said the balance of fish and seaweed and water bubbles was perfect. We nodded, and then after we were supposed to be asleep that night we snuck back into the room and painted for hours; schools of bright fish, orange mostly, some playing basketball, all of them grinning. Eli painted one with dark glasses. One of mine had a cigarette. I’d skipped three years of school by then and I felt distant from my brother, who was pulling in A minuses and Bs in a class full of boys and girls his own age. I was in a classroom full of teenagers at Stuyvesant and none of them would talk to me. I painted and painted and the thought occurred to me that I was having fun, and at the same moment I realized that having fun wasn’t something that happened very often, so I didn’t want the moment to end. Sometime before morning I turned around and Eli had fallen asleep on the floor, a paintbrush still in his hand and a streak of blue on his face; he was too big for me to carry but I half-woke him and walked him to bed, tucked him in, sat watching him sleep for a moment, wiped the paint off his face with the sleeve of my shirt. He was nine years old; he had skipped no grades; a lot of things that were easy for me were difficult for him; I felt distant and guilty and responsible all at once.
* * *
In a domestic departures terminal at the Toronto airport I let my forehead fall into my hands for a moment, thinking of the painted fish in Eli’s childhood bedroom, and try to imagine what Eli might look like now and how I might save him. I haven’t seen him in a number of years.
The day outside is brightening. By late morning I can see the city of Toronto again, blurred by light snow, and then after a time the clouds begin to lighten. Announcements crackle over the loudspeakers: planes will be departing once the runways are clear of snow. There is a muted cheer among the stranded travelers. I speak with a ticket agent and book a seat on a 4 p.m. flight to Montreal. I buy coffee and muffins for me and Emmanuelle and we eat breakfast together, then we sit by the glass wall more or less in silence until it’s time to go. She’s flying on to Halifax at six o’clock.
“Good luck,” I say. It seems hopelessly inadequate.
“Thank you,” she says. The last time I see her she’s sitting by the departure gate, staring through glass at the rising planes. I’ve never in my life seen anyone so alone.
Part Five
By the time I land in Montreal it’s snowing lightly and getting dark again, 5:30 p.m. In the taxi from the airport to the hospital I close my eyes. My damaged brother is so near but all my thoughts are of Claire. I pay the taxi driver and wade through slush into the solid grey square of the hospital, where my enquiries lead me to a silent waiting room with no windows. No one else is here. I sit down on a hard naugahyde chair and it occurs to me that it’s been nearly a week since I last slept in a bed. I close my eyes for a moment. The lights are too bright.
This is how she’ll come to me: I’ll open the door, and it will be night—it’s always night be the time you reach the town where we live, because it takes forever to get there from almost anywhere — and if it’s early enough she’ll be reading at the foot of the bed, or conducting maddening theological debates with her Bible-college-star brother on the satellite phone; or she’ll be pleading with her mother to stop praying for her, and on the other end of the line her mother will be pleading too; I can see her now, an older woman, blonde hair going a little grey, face pinched, pacing in her immaculate white kitchen, wondering how she lost her daughter, touching her gold cross necklace as she speaks. Come home. Come home. But Claire has moved beyond her family and nothing hangs around her neck. She is guiltless. She is unwavering and calm and her heart is open as the morning. I will unlock the door and she will come to me, my light. I’ll tell her the story of this moment: I arrived exhausted in a foreign city in winter and wanted only to be back in our old life in Kenya again, I sat waiting in a silent room in a hospital and all my thoughts were of you.
“Are you Zed Jacobs?” The nurse is small and nervous-looking and she speaks with a strange accent. I imagine that she’s from some small place, perhaps one of the forgotten little northern towns where the French language has wandered off in strange directions and turned inward on itself over time.
“Oui,” I say.
“Come with me, please.” She keeps talking in her strange French and I only catch every second or third word, but I understand her. My brother is one floor up. He isn’t speaking, but he’s awake. He’s not eating very much, but enough that they don’t want to force-feed him. He is broken — I think that’s the word she uses — and the word makes me think of fallen birds again. She’ll take me to him. I follow her along the endless hallway; there are patients here and there, wandering the halls or visible through the open doors of their rooms, but she’s the only nurse. She walks quickly, speaking over her shoulder. In the elevator she stands in pursed-lip silence. We are ascending.
“I’m going back to Africa,” I tell her, still en français. The revelation is too vast to contain. “I’m getting married.”
She looks at me, surprised.
“I wasn’t sure if I would.”
“Oui?” she says after a moment, and I realize that my Parisian French is as strange to her as her rural Quebecois French is to me. We’re almost speaking different languages. The doors are opening; she is gesturing me out.
“Oui!” I repeat. “Oui! Oui!” I’m a little deranged from spending a week in cars and airports, and there’s an exuberance about that word that makes it one of my very favorites in any language. It’s the sound children make when they’re flying high on a swing, when they’re clinging giddy to a merry-go-round, when their fathers throw them into the air and catch them again. Wheee! I repeat it again; we have stopped in front of a door and through its small high window I can see my brother, lying still in a bed with his face turned to the window. His hair is wild. He looks like a ghost.
“That’s him,” I tell her. She reaches for the door handle. “Wait. Did I mention that I’m going back to Africa?”
“Oui,” she says, genuinely puzzled. I find myself grinning, and suddenly it all seems very silly. I am unspeakably tired but I feel so light. She looks at me, smiles, and begins to laugh.
“Here,” she says, and we’re both laughing now, she can hardly get the words out — “here, Mr. Jacobs, come talk to your brother—” and I step forward into the room.
