Tizita Read online

  We sat silently together. I closed my eyes awhile. The dim little room was a far cry from the airy bedroom whose wide windows had afforded my grandfather and me a perfect view of every bird landing on our tree. That sycamore was long gone, chopped down by my unnatural excuse for a father in a fit of revenge. But the tree had survived in its own way, along with Grandfather and the bird on the lawn and Baby X—all of them lodged securely in the hole at the center of my heart. I’d learned over the years that sometimes memories filled the void as no scientific discovery could. I confided some of this to Medr, not knowing if he understood English well enough to fathom my words.

  He understood something. He nodded, and I saw that he had a halo of gray hairs at the crown of his still plentiful head of tight black coils. I held my hand out to him, and he stroked the back of it, his ancient, calloused hand hairless and bony. His movements were hesitant, as if he hadn’t touched any skin but his own in quite a while. But in that moment I knew he was one of my angels, his kindness reflecting Grandfather’s as surely as a jeweled mirror in Indra’s Web.

  As if from a great distance I watched Medr’s hands trace my knuckles and the birdlike bones leading to my wrist. His dusky hue was so different from my own nearly translucent skin. Yet after watching a particularly pronounced vein on his hand pulse insistently, I put my right hand to my neck and found my own blood coursing in the same rhythm. I knew we were all said to descend from Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent matrilineal ancestor for every living human. Geneticists had gone so far as to claim that human beings spread out from what we now call Addis Ababa a hundred thousand years ago, which was why it seemed fitting that the fossilized skeleton of a very early hominid, Lucy—called Dinkinish, or You Are Beautiful in Amharic—was on display at the Ethiopian National Museum in Addis Ababa. So why not imagine Medr as my third grandfather?

  But now Dr. Sitota’s formal voice broke into my reverie. “Medr, Medr, I know you can’t speak, but will you stick out your tongue and move it from left to right?” I stared curiously. Medr looked as though he felt insulted at such a foolish request, but, shooting me a conspiratorial look—I hadn’t even known he’d registered my presence—he stuck out his tongue and, not only moved it slowly from side to side, but stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers.

  For a brief moment, the doctor looked affronted, but then he began to chuckle. As relief flooded through my veins, I snorted, “Hah!”

  Abeba, though, was not convinced, ripples of worry constricting her forehead. “He is okay?”

  The doctor rubbed his chin. “Well, I doubt it’s a stroke, anyway. And the humor is a good sign, wouldn’t you say?”

  Which didn’t stop the doctor from arranging to have Medr immediately admitted to Huntington Memorial Hospital for tests.

  Racing back home once I’d seen Abeba installed in a little cot by her father-in-law’s hospital bed, I reached Assefa from the Fiskes’ landline.

  He answered the phone with his mouth full. “Asheffa hew.”

  “What?”

  “Way-min.” A pause, then a laugh. “Fleur, my love. Sorry. I had a mouthful of chips to get down. Do you believe I’m sitting in a bloody Irish Pub in the middle of Dubai Airport? Positively surreal.” Then, when there was no quick response from me, “How are you, dukula? I tried to reach you, but it went straight to voicemail.” He lowered his voice. “Did you get my message? About how that spectacular body of yours would be the hit of Burka-land? And what I’d do to every inch of it if you were here with me?”

  I felt a little flutter in my tweeter, but this was no time for phone sex. “I didn’t get your message. I’m an idiot. My damned phone battery was dead. I heard you’d arrived from your mother.”

  “Enat?” A slight tinge of anxiety in his voice.

  There was no other way to say it. “Listen, he’s fine, but your grandfather had a little episode this evening.”

  “Episode? What—”

  “Wait. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Really, I think he’s fine. Your mom thought he was coming down with the flu or something, but the doctor—actually, Doctor Sitota; your mother said he’s a friend of the family? He said he didn’t exhibit any of the symptoms. He actually came to the house. I was there. He examined your grandfather pretty thoroughly. Medr actually made silly faces at me. That’s got to be a good sign.”

  Assefa machine gunned questions at me. “What’s Sitota’s thinking? Any signs of stroke or heart attack? Chest congestion? Fever?”

  “Assefa, I don’t know. That’s why they’ve got him at the hospital. Dr. Sitota said he didn’t think he’d had a stroke, at least.”

  For a moment I worried I’d lost the connection, but then I realized I could hear faint crowd sounds coming from the phone. I knew that, as a medical intern, Assefa must be running through the possibilities. Finally, he heaved an audible sigh. “Christ. It seems like nothing’s gone right since my father disappeared. You’ve got to keep me posted. I don’t want to be bothering my mother. Look, I’ll call you when I land in Addis Ababa. I have a brief layover there before my flight to Gondar.” Before hanging up, he said in an unusually astringent tone, “Charge your cellphone, will you?”

  The dial tone joined the fridge hum in Gwennie’s otherwise silent kitchen. I stared at the receiver until I became aware of Jillily brushing against my ankles. I dropped the phone into its cradle and lifted the cat to my chest. She proceeded to clean my face with long rasping licks. When I opened my mouth to complain, “Well that was a side of Assefa I didn’t know about,” my cat’s tongue made contact with my own. “Ew, Jillily. That’s disgusting. Don’t do that!”

  Her eyes grew wide and I contritely chicken peck kissed her sleek head. “Your mama’s so mean,” I whispered. She wrapped her front paws around my neck as I spirited her off to my room, where I fell asleep with her warm back spooned solidly against my belly.

  Despite having slept like an angel, I woke feeling devilishly voidish the next morning. Heading out for the lab with a dark, obsessive loop playing in my head, I nearly ran over Chin-Hwa as I backed out of the driveway. I slowed to make sure the Kangs were aware that their dog had broken loose again. Sure enough, Mrs. Kang came barreling out their front door as I shifted into drive, her black hair in curlers—who wore curlers anymore?—and her short legs in comical leaping ballerina mode as she cleared her lawn just as her Jindo crouched to do his business on one of Fidel’s particularly vivid young cyclamens.

  As soon as I came to the stop sign at the corner of Rose Villa and Sierra Bonita, I instructed my Bluetooth to call Sammie.

  “Sam, you’re not going to believe this.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Oh, just everything.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Do I sound like it?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just left home.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought I’d swing over to school. Drown my sorrows in the Eridanus Void.” I slammed my head against the steering wheel. She must have heard me.

  “Come on over. Sounds like a Grade One.”

  Sammie and I had a system of grading our personal emergencies. We’d devised it after not even four calls in a row had gotten her to answer her phone when Nana was killed. Not that Sammie could have known. She’d been racing to finish her master’s show at Otis and had convinced herself that no distracting Bohemian Rhapsody ringtone was worth making a whole year’s worth of work and a multitude of sleepless nights go to waste. I’d actually had to drive over to her house, bang on the door, and fall into a fetal curl on the front porch to get her attention.

  Of course, once she wrested from me the fact of Nana’s shocking death, she’d come through like a champ, pulling me to her chest tightly enough for me to feel the quick drumming of her heart. As always, she’d been a veritable fountain of words. “Oh, my luvvie, my sweet, my Fleur Beurre. She loved you so much. What a shock. What a loss. But thank God she went quickly. I know, I kn
ow, you didn’t get to say goodbye, but she didn’t suffer. That’s worth something. You’ll make it through this. I know you will. We both know how to do it. But first you have to get through this awful shock. And to think that the only one of the three to survive was Sister F. She must feel wretched. And guilty, I’ll bet. Survivor’s guilt, you know. We won’t even think of the kind of karma that bag of shit earned for himself. I’m sorry, but I’m actually quite glad that he died, too.”

  She was referring to the drunk driver who’d careened through a red light and veered across to Fayga’s lane as she was driving Nana and Sister Flatulencia to Toys ‘R’ Us to pick out presents for Cesar’s twelfth birthday. The fact that the latest record label wunderkind had been driving a Range Rover while the three older women were huddled in a cramped two-door Civic hadn’t improved my friends’ odds. Sammie tried reminding me that Siri Sajan had told us just the past week that ‘death is union with the divine,’ but her words were no competition for images of Nana’s bountiful bosom crushed by the Rover’s blunt nose, nor of Fayga’s big frame sliding under the dash. Ironically, it was Sister Flatulencia’s gas that saved her, her Beano having been less effective than usual that morning. Not wanting to constrict her bloated belly with a seat belt, she’d flown through the sunroof and landed well away from the meld of hot metal that became the other three’s coffin.

  Sammie’s consoling words might have helped—and ultimately would help once the immediacy of the crisis passed—but when I’m falling at breathtaking velocity down the bottomless pit of everlasting emptiness, only the solid feel of someone else’s body compressing my own brings me back to ground level again. Which was something I’d learned as an infant from Nana’s Mack truckish grip.

  I can’t say how many times afterward I reflected on the ambiguous properties of physical pressure, which seemed to be a kind of second cousin to nuclear power, with capacities for good and evil wrapped in one potent package. I ended up conveying those thoughts to my physics team, and for a time we even played with the possibility of physical force as one component of the cellular exchange we sought in dematerialization.

  But on the evening of Nana’s death, tucked tightly with Sammie under her winter comforter, taking little sips of hot chocolate brewed by Aadita and purposely not wiping off our twin melted marshmallow moustaches, such thoughts were far from my mind. Sammie, clever girl, managed to keep me just this side of despair—it was nearly impossible to imagine the world without a force like Nana in it.

  Afterward, Sammie proposed a system to ensure that neither of us would ever let the other down again. We ended up designating emergencies like that day’s as Grade One. On my side, Grade One was to be reserved for deaths, public humiliation, and the temptation to flap, twirl, and head bang. For her, it boiled down to death, abandonment, and, as she liked to put it, “making a right balls-up of a perfectly good painting by not having the sense to leave well enough alone.”

  We each had our own versions of Grade Two. For me, it mostly had to do with states of voidishness that would have sent me into Nana’s closet in the old days, my back pressed against the nails in the cedar paneling. Sammie’s own symptom of a Grade Two event would be talking so fast that not even her mother Aadita could follow her—typically occasioned by an argument with Jacob, who she had the habit of claiming was really a sweet guy despite his need to be right all the time and his verbally well-aimed temper.

  Recalling that day with the kind of hollowness that always tormented me when I remembered that Nana was no more, I made a quick U-turn and was soon parked in front of Sammie’s Craftsman-style house. I’d never stopped feeling grateful for the summer day when she and her mother had moved in right across the street from where I lived with the Fiskes.

  Flicking a quick glance at the daddy-longleg sprinklers drenching Fidel’s front yard, I slunk out of my car and took Sammie’s front steps two at a time. A dirty-blond rug spread across the banister moved of its own accord, lifting a tail from its rear section as if to spray me. Midget was still alive and, unlike Jillily, just as fat as in the old days. I put my nose to his, then gave him a vigorous chin scratch. His purr was loud enough to wake the dead.

  Sammie opened the door and grinned. Unable to resist, she came closer and joined in, rubbing the fur leading to her cat’s tail just long enough for him to lift up his backside welcomingly, revealing the slightly soiled starburst of his butt. We exclaimed simultaneously, “Gross!” before she took my arm and led me into the house.

  Aadita peeked a head out from her office into the hall. “Hello, love. Haven’t seen you for a bit.” Her hair had gone an elegant, shiny silver. With her figure still compact and trim and her big brown eyes taking up nearly half her face, no wonder she’d landed a new boyfriend fifteen years her junior.

  I’d worried about Sammie when I first heard that Aadita was dating her young yoga teacher. She and her mum had the kind of mother-daughter relationship I would have severed a few fingers for. But no—if anything, it was better for Sammie that her mother had found someone who couldn’t even pretend to be a replacement for her father, who’d regularly danced his daughter around their Primrose Hill flat, her feet on his, until he’d lost his life to tetanus on a humanitarian aid trip to Indonesia.

  I kissed Aadita’s cheeks, then caught up with Sammie in her room. Its Oriental-carpeted floor was still the dense jungle of paintings and books it had always been, though her original Liberty comforter had given way to a minimalist blue-gray duvet that was lent a slightly rosy hue by cherry blossom paper lanterns on the bedside tables. Since visiting Japan with Jacob the previous summer, Sammie had entered an Asian phase. A few calligraphed scrolls were the sole decorations on her walls.

  The two of us flopped onto the bed. “Right,” she said, kicking off her embroidered Chinese slippers, one of which landed beside a framed picture of Gwennie holding a “C The Big Picture” picket sign in front of the White House, a bunch of Father’s Cacklers making angry faces at her in the background. Sammie leaned over to light a half-burnt stick of incense that had already spilled a puddle of soft ash onto its black stone holder. “What exactly did he say?”

  I felt my eyes well up. “Well, it was more his tone than what he said. Honestly, I’ve never heard Assefa sound so ... peremptory.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Imperious. Arrogant.”

  Sammie waved an impatient hand. “I know what the word means. I was trying to get a sense of what he was being bossy about.”

  I swept a hand over my forehead, then felt my bangs fall right back. “Right—of course. Well, it was when I told him about Medr.”

  Sammie frowned, and I realized I hadn’t even told her what had happened to Assefa’s grandfather. As I described Dr. Sitota’s examination of him, I saw her shoulders lift an inch or two, a definite tell that she was anxious.

  “Honestly, Sam, I really think he’s going to be okay. Listen, I’ve got to pee.”

  As I sat on the toilet, I reflected, not for the first time, how Sammie and I had such different ways of coping with worry. Hers was more forthright. She made no apologies for it. She admitted as much, claiming it came from having had a Jewish father.

  I, on the other hand, favored distraction and tended to go up into my head. I’m not bragging about it. It’s just that I’ll do almost anything to avoid falling back into flapping and whirling. “Stimming,” as Mother once put it, “is so undignified.”

  When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that Midge had joined us. He was perched at the top of Sammie’s dresser, making throaty, “I-want-to-eat-you” sounds at an Anna’s Hummingbird outside the window. Midge looked so excited, I imagined his heart was beating way faster than its typical hundred and fifty beats per minute, but it still wouldn’t come close to the twelve hundred the tiny hummingbird could claim. I began explaining this to Sammie, who cut through my compulsive verbiage with an impatient wave.

  “No, wait,” she interjected. “You haven’t finished about Medr. Is he or isn
’t he going to be okay?” With her hands on her hips, she reminded me a little of Father, and I took a few steps back, catching my quarter-inch heel on a pictureless frame on the floor. I steadied myself by leaning a hand on the dresser, which startled Midge, who catapulted across the room in one long arc, landing hard enough on Sammie’s bedside table for Sam’s dental night guard to bounce up. Midge caught it as fiercely as if it were the hummingbird itself. Just before escaping with it down the hall, he shot us an exultant look, the mouthpiece covering his teeth like a set of fake lips.

  Sammie cried, “Did you see that?”

  She and I fell to the floor in hysterics.

  Aadita poked her head into the room. We tried explaining, but the story lost something in translation. She left us to our slowly de-escalating hilarity, shaking her head.

  When we finally fell silent, not unexpectedly we both felt a bit depressed. Sammie asked me with considerably less aggression to reassure her that Medr was okay. To satisfy us both, I called Huntington Hospital from my cell. I was put through to Medr’s room before I could explain to the operator that I needed to talk with a nurse, since Medr was mute. But a man’s voice came onto the line. “Yes?” For a brief moment I thought that Medr had found his voice again. That is, until I heard, “Doctor Sitota here.”

  Those were the words, anyway. The tone said something different: “Don’t you know I’m a busy man? Hurry up!”

  So I did. “Doctor Sitota, this is Fleur Robins. We met last night? I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping to find out how Medr is doing.”

  “Ah, yes. Miss Robins.” He paused, and I imagined him rolling his eyes at the ceiling. “All our tests have been negative, which is good. I’m pretty confident that this is a case of simple dehydration. It turns out that his digestion has been a little active lately. So we are administering fluids and he seems to be responding quite well. With any luck, he’ll be discharged tomorrow.”