Chapter One
Chagrin Falls, Ohio October 1995
A cool breeze carried the smell of fall's first fires into our half-packed living room, setting motes tumbling in a late-afternoon shaft of sunlight. Elbows on my knees and chin on my fists, I sat on a cardboard box and stared at my mother's unopened letter, which I'd propped against my stone warthog's back right leg. A South African stamp had been stuck upside down on one corner of the envelope.
I knew my mother's letter would bring news of enemies: her letters always did.
Beneath me, the box began to crumple, inch by slow inch. Like my life, I thought. Perhaps I'd slip gradually off the edge and dissolve into a puddle of unhappiness on the hardwood floor. In time, I'd evaporate upward, leaving only my clothes behind. When my ex-fiancé Simon arrived on Monday to pick up the last of his things, he'd find my empty Levis, red sweater, and scuffed tennis shoes huddled within a Stonehenge of packing crates and wardrobe boxes.
I'd have disappeared into another dimension.
In Africa, where I'd been born, people believed such things could happen. When I was a child, our family's Zulu maid, Prudence, had told many stories of magic and metamorphosis: of shape-shifting snakes, and dwarfish zombies called tokoloshes, and mysterious middle-of-the-night vanishings. She had faith in a world within our world-one teeming with ancestral spirits who debated the wisdom of intervening in family squabbles, played tricks on humans to alleviate the boredom of eternity, and appeared in dreams once in a while to offer advice to their earthbound progeny.
I listened, now, but heard only my neighbor scraping leaves from his gutter and a cardinal whistling in a tree. Were ancestors patriotic? Had they ridden the trade winds home when, five years before, I'd sworn the Oath of Allegiance and become an American citizen? Or left in a huff when I said barbecue instead of braai and watched baseball, not cricket?
A magenta leaf parachuted into the room, skidded across the floor, and came to rest next to the envelope.
I bent forward to pick up the letter, remembering what Prudence had told me: without descendants, ancestors could no longer inhabit the spirit world. Forty, unmarried, and childless in Chagrin Falls, I was endangering their continued existence. I had no brothers or sisters to make up for my inattention to procreation as I careened through short-term relationships: Gareth the violinist in New York, Ned the editor in Houston, Danny the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur in St. Louis, and Tran the computer programmer in Seattle. Not to mention the fiancés who'd book-ended the eighties-Terry the accountant and Eduardo the chef. And now Simon the cardiac surgeon, my third fiancé, who'd lasted nearly a year, and had been gone a month.
The Three Fiancés. It sounded like a bad movie. Or a singing trio.
Layers of transparent tape-topped with a red geranium of wax-sealed the envelope. I stood and headed to the study, where a clock, supine on the floor, told the ceiling it was three thirty. A beret-wearing skeleton named Mortimer slouched next to the gold first-place trophy I'd won for my podiatrist-promoting Do Bunions Make You Cry? ad campaign. On the desk, Simon's plaster-of-paris viperfish grinned at my clay hyena.
Our combined household had looked more like a fish-and-fauna store than a traditional home. Which had pleased us both. We were globally compatible.
I tilted the French shutters and gazed outside. From the same vantage point, five weeks before, on a late-September Saturday, I'd watched Simon greet his ex-wife Cilia as she dropped off Tess, their four-year-old daughter. Simon was a large, rumpled, good-looking man with hazel eyes, dark hair, and eyebrows like caterpillars. Cilla was tall and pale and once again slender, though she'd had a baby less than a month earlier. She wafted rather than walked. I was in a thin phase, but irrevocably short, freckled, and sandy-haired.
He'd touched Cilla's blue-black hair briefly-fondly-and she smiled up at him. Tess stood between them, dressed in a denim pinafore as triangular as a paper doll's. Father, mother, daughter. If people were furniture, I thought, they'd be sold as a set.
Cilla drove away in her Mercedes. Simon and Tess approached the house. I opened the front door and walked onto the porch to greet them.
Tess stopped. "Don't like you," she said.
"Come now, Tess," Simon said. "Manners." He'd kissed my cheek. "You look great in those jeans."
Tess tugged at Simon's sweater. "Dad? Now that Mommy doesn't have a boyfriend anymore, can't you come home?"
Cilla had left her divorce-causing father-of-her-new-baby jazz musician? I stepped back, knocking over a planter. "Want to see my warthog, Tess?"
"Don't like pigs," she said, disappearing into the house.
"Warthogs have four tusks," I told the closed door. "In the wild, they shuffle around on their knees foraging for food."
Simon enfolded me in his arms. "Tess'll come around, Kate," he said. "It's only been what? Ten months or so?" His body tensed. After a moment he repeated, "Ten months," but this time in the sad, valedictory tone people use when they mean, Well, it's been great, but all good things must come to an end. Or so it seemed to me.
I pressed my cheek against Simon's rough sweater. He smelled of ironed shirts. I worried that he and Cilla might reconcile now that she was unattached. But a week later, I'd been the one to break up with him.
I slammed the shutters closed and rooted in the desk drawers. Finding a pair of scissors, I cut open my mother's letter. Bagheera, my black cat, wandered into the study, hopped sideways at the sight of the skeleton, recovered, meowed, and bumped his head against my leg. His tail antenna-straight, he led me into the kitchen.
I glanced at the trash can: letters were lost in the mail every day. Why not this one?
After tossing the envelope on the counter, I dispensed chicken kibbles into Bagheera's bowl. He crunched his dinner, his name tag clinking against the china rim. Why didn't companies sell mouse-flavored cat food? I pictured an ad: Try Mice. They're Nice! A bug crawled along the sink, I washed him down the drain, wondering why it seemed more humane to drown than squash an insect, why I thought of a bug as a "he," not a "she," and whether, with a magnifying glass, you could tell the sex of an insect.
Finally I picked up the letter and carried it to the family room, where I knelt to light the gas fire. When the flames bloomed blue and orange, I sat on the couch and began reading.
Durban, South Africa Dear Kate,
Last week, I was taken from my flat and incarcerated in hospital. They say I have cancer (which is absurd-no one in our family has ever had cancer). This is your Oom Pier's doing, of course. He is afraid I will expose him as a murderer. It's sad that you have an uncle who is a murderer, but there it is. We can't choose our relatives.
Since you left I have told you to stay in America, thinking you were safer there, but now you will need to come and rescue me, I'm afraid. There is a nurse here, Miriam, who has agreed to mail this letter. She will draw a map on the other side of this page. DO NOT ALERT THE HOSPITAL AHEAD OF TIME THAT YOU ARE COMING! OR OOM PIET!
I hope you haven't cut your lovely curls, poppet. Your head is the wrong shape for short hair.
I visualized my mother scribbling the letter as she sat in her favorite armchair, her glasses glinting in the lamplight, her thick legs-tucked to the side-encased in stockings, beneath which unshaven hair would've curled into small Catherine-wheel whorls. I pictured a cigarette seesawing on the rim of a sailor-hat ashtray. Smoke-tusks curving from her nose. The smell of overcooked vegetables-cabbage and boiled onions-drifting from the kitchen.
You will need to come and rescue me? In previous letters-I'd received less than half a dozen in eighteen years-she'd insisted I not return to South Africa. I'd been glad to comply. Especially as she appeared to be coping well on her own. Had kept the same job for years. In 1990, on the same day Nelson Mandela was released from Pollsmoor Prison, she'd retired and had seemed content.
My uncle, who must be in his late seventies by now, was always the villain of her stories, though we hadn't seen him for decades.
I crumpled the letter and threw it in the flames. Ashy fragments floated up the chimney.
Bagheera jumped on my lap. I stroked his soft fur, and he stretched along my thighs, resting his warm chin on my knee. Outside, color leached from the sky. My young neighbor, Troy, raced across his lawn, trailing a recalcitrant red kite along grass still fragrant from the previous night's rain. Moments later I heard his mother summon him inside. The cadence of her voice hurled me through time and space and a tumult of emotions so that all at once I missed my long-ago mom, the one who'd rocked me to sleep when I was ten and terrified that an umamlambo-a shape-shifting snake with the power to render you insane with one glance of its round flat eyes-had transformed itself into my bedside lamp.
I couldn't call her. She hadn't owned a phone since 1967, when she claimed our conversations were being taped and kept in the basement of the Parliament Buildings in Pretoria.
And the letter had said she was in the hospital. Which hospital?
The fire snapped. I gaped at the flames. I'd burned the map along with the letter.
It was a sign from my ancestors. It was karma. Fate. Kismet. I would do nothing.
Bagheera purred on my lap like a living blanket. After a minute or two, I reached for my address book on the side table. I'd call the caretaker of her apartment building, Mevrou Bakker. We'd never spoken, but I had her phone number. It was after eleven on Saturday night in Durban, but that might work in my favor. She was almost certain to be home. I dialed. After a few rings-double purrs, instead of the single tone I was used to in the States-someone picked up.
"Ja? Mevrou Bakker." The woman's voice was high-pitched.
"This is Kate, Violet Jensen's daughter. The woman in three-sixty-one?" I wound the telephone wire python-like around my finger then released it, leaving red welts in my flesh.
After a silence, she replied. "Mevrou Jensen's daughter? Now how do I know for sure? Why would you call now, hey?"
"I'm worried about her." I gave her my mother's maiden name. My address and age. Even told her about my favorite toy as a child-a purple hippopotamus.
She breathed into the phone. "Violet warned me to be careful about calls like this." In the background, a radio chattered in Afrikaans. "If you're her daughter, why haven't you visited her, hey? Then I'd know who you are for sure, jy weet?"
"I live in America."
"There are planes."
A total stranger was making me feel guilty. "Please check on my mother." I flicked the lamp switch off and on.
"She's not here. She hasn't been here for days." She hung up.
Again and again I called, listening to the rings, picturing the sound rippling, Doppler-like, in the humid Durban air. October was early summer in South Africa: I remembered the itchy feel of the heat on my skin; the way rain fizzed and steamed on our window ledge and sweat dripped off the tip of my mother's nose when she ironed.
I spoke to directory assistance and wrote down the numbers of local hospitals. I talked to late-night receptionists and clerks and lost myself in a maze of voice mails. On the pad in front of me, I drew wild faces with staring eyes and checkmark eyebrows and lips the shape of an upside-down V.
No one by the name of Violet Jensen had been admitted to any of the hospitals.
When I called the police, they said they'd do their best, but they were short-staffed-Zulu and Xhosa factions were clashing outside Ixopo. Street crime was on the upswing; a French tourist had been murdered.
I poured Bagheera off my lap, stood, and stared out the window at the darkening sky. Later in the week, I was due to pitch an ad campaign for an antacid product, ReFute. If Bellish & Associates won the business, I'd likely be promoted from senior copywriter to creative director.
And on Tuesday, the last day of October, I was moving to an apartment in Shaker Heights. I hadn't wanted to stay in Chagrin Falls after Simon and I broke up. Though I loved the town-its hundred-year-old homes, Memorial Day parade, and riverside park-it wasn't a good fit for a woman who regretted not having married: the place was explosive with nuclear families.
In the dim, firelit family room, I reached into my pocket for Simon's handkerchief and held it to my nose, breathing in its fresh-laundry smell. I'd loved the way he carried a handkerchief. It reminded me of my dad, who'd used his to wipe chocolate from my mouth or tears from my eyes. Once, when we were at a cricket match in Johannesburg, my father had knotted each corner and put the square of cloth on his head to protect his bald patch. I'd draped it over his face when he died. His nose had made a small hill in the fabric.
Was that when my mother's troubles started? When my father had his heart attack? Or had she been ill before then?
Years ago I'd stopped thinking about the whens and whys and hows of my childhood, believing my past irrelevant to the person I'd become. Why revisit it now?
Outside, the sky had turned ebony. The Milky Way glimmered with the ephemeral light of today's and yesterday's stars, and, on the horizon, a pale three-quarter moon kept its shadowy secrets. An owl hooted in the darkness.
I opened the front door to the crisp-apple smell of a fall night and sat on the steps, listening.
Johannesburg, South Africa July 1966
When my father died, on my eleventh birthday, July 10, 1966, my mother said the government was responsible, and that was the first time I heard about The Plot to Split Us Apart.
Dad had been helping me blow out my candles.
The cake was chocolate sponge topped with scalloped icing and blue sprinkles. It sat on a doily on a china plate. I'd helped Prudence mix the batter and put the pan in the oven.
We were sitting on three sides of the dark oak table in the dining room. I faced the bay window. The winter sun cast straggly shadows across the lawn and rockery, one of my favorite places. Among the stones I liked to corral snails, grow daisies, and stage long-running plays in which my Barbie dolls fought off dinosaurs beneath the ferns or picnicked with large, friendly bears among lilac and white alyssum. Ken kept house.
Copyright © 2003 by Lynette Brasfield
