Tizita Page 7

  Chapter Four

  Fleur

  I HAD TO LAUGH. Modern technology had made it possible to live multiple incarnations in one fifteen-minute ride to work. As soon as I got off the phone with Assefa, I saw Mother’s number on Caller ID. She was phoning from her limo ride back to San Marino after arriving at Burbank Airport via a red eye from D.C., where she’d been lobbying for the inclusion of alcoholism treatment centers in the health care amendment bills currently up before Congress. Though her hair was already greying here and there and her glamorous persona somewhat dimmed by the thickening of her waist, Mother was still a bundle of energy. Her demanding day job didn’t keep her from devoting astonishing chunks of time to the sobriety community. She was full of an excitement that I initially took as indicative that she’d won over a Blue Dog vote or two. But no, it was about me.

  “I may have missed your actual birthday, Fleur, but I’ll be damned if I let your celebration blend in with Christmas this year. The great news is that everyone can come. Dhani—gem that she is—has put together a fabulous menu for such short notice. We’re lucky Ignacio’s a good sport; he’ll probably have to make do with a Honey Baked Ham tomorrow night for Christmas Eve.”

  “But Mother, you’ve got to be exhausted.”

  I heard her take a deep drag on her cigarette. “Not a bit. Besides, I can take a nice nap as soon as I get home. Abeba’s got everything in order.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. She swears her father-in-law is fine now, and he’s quite comfortable at Huntington—they actually found another Ethiopian patient to assign to his room. Besides, it’ll do her good to take her mind off worrying about Achamyalesh.” Without skipping a beat, she pivoted, “Now let’s see, I don’t think I’ve left anyone out. Dhani’s coming, of course, and Ignacio and Angelina. By the way, have I told you how nicely Angelina and Cesar are getting on these days? I swear, that Ritalin is a godsend. I hate to say it, but that boy was going to drive me out of my mind. When a sweet girl like Angelina doesn’t like someone, you know she’s got some really good reasons.” She paused just long enough to take another drag on her Sherman, no doubt telling herself I couldn’t hear the faint rasp of her inhaling. But now I could just see her ticking off the names on her fingers. “Sammie, Jacob, Aadita and that boy of hers ... who knew Aadita was such a cougar?”

  It was more than a little jarring to hear the gracious Aadita referred to in that way. Besides, Mother calling Aadita a cougar definitely belonged in the Pot-Calling-the-Kettle-Black Department. “Mother! He’s not a boy. He’s forty years old. And his name’s Arturo.”

  “Okay, then, that cute forty-year-old boyfriend of hers, Arturo.” It occurred to me that Mother must’ve cleared her head from her overnight flight with a massive dose of caffeine. She rushed on, “Not to mention Sister Flatulencia, Katrina, Tom, Gunther, Amir, Stanley, and Gwen. Let’s see, that looks like seventeen, counting you and me.”

  I stifled a groan. I really didn’t do well with that sort of attention. It tended to remind me of being pierced by the King of Sweden’s perfect blue eyes while I prattled on about Grandfather’s balls.

  “Mother, really? Seventeen people? You’re going to have to haul the leaves out of the storage closet. They’re too heavy. Don’t let Abeba do it by herself. I’ll come early and help.”

  “Nonsense! Ignacio’s already said he’d do it. He promised to shave a few doors, while he’s at it. Nobody warned me about that one. Every time there’s a little earthquake in this town, everything in the house shifts. Oh—and a chap named Bob. Stanley said you’d want him, too. Is he on your team now?”

  Bob? Damn. “Mm hmm, yes, sure ....”

  Mother fell silent, and I sensed she was waiting for more of a response. She and I hadn’t forged anything close to a normal mother-child bond until my Nobel crisis, when I beat out previous odd ducks like Phillip Lenard, who attacked Einstein as “the Jewish fraud,” and Harold Pinter, whose videotaped speech was a fulminating rant against American crimes against humanity, for world’s most outrageous Nobel acceptance speech. Who else would stand before an audience that included the King of Sweden and ascribe her scientific breakthrough to a failed attempt to save a dying baby bird on the lawn, an equally abysmal effort to effect a modern day resurrection by pouring a vaseful of water onto a dead man’s balls, and having to get an abortion at thirteen merely because some ignorant hunk of a teenage boy kept whispering, “Linda paloma, linda paloma,” in her ear? If there was anything to Father’s public accusations that whatever came out of my mind was a product of mental disturbance or autism, my Nobel speech veered awfully close to proving his point. Which was why I’d especially appreciated Mother standing by my side when the media had its field day with me.

  I knew it hadn’t been easy for her. Our pattern had been set early on: she, way too young and fragile, far more comfortable holding her wine glass than her unwanted baby; me, prone to whirling and flapping, finding comfort only when being squeezed within an inch of my life. A pretty unlikely pair. Add to that my more recent choice to continue living with the Fiskes after she moved her whole crew to SoCal to be near me, and it was a miracle Mother hadn’t given up on me for good.

  “Mother, you don’t have to do this.”

  I could feel the smile lifting her voice. “Nonsense. It’s my pleasure, darling. You’ve always been the sweetest rose in my garden.”

  We both choked up over that one. Mother had first cultivated her David Austins—peony-like in pattern, ambrosial in scent—on Father’s vast grounds. The expanse of what I used to call their invisible beds was so beautiful, they could have given the Seven Wonders of the World a run for their money. As soon as Mother moved to San Marino, she’d immediately installed as many Austin bushes as she could fit into her considerably more confined backyard. Her comparing me to those cabbage-petaled treasures might be a bit—dare I say it?—flowery, but I knew the sentiment was sincere. It had taken years of elbowing my way out of the darkest black hole to actually understand that.

  Mother blew her nose loudly before adding, “I just wish that fiancé of yours could be here. Any promising leads? I hope you hear something good soon.”

  As it turned out, what I hoped to hear and what I actually heard turned out to be two different things. Assefa’s call came early that evening, as I sat with my improbable extended family at Father’s old banquet table, chowing down a series of some of Dhani’s most scrumptious Indian dishes, presented with panache on Mother’s “Africa” china, festooned with cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, and monkeys so idealized they would undoubtedly make Amir’s rescued lab chimp Lord Hanuman throw a poop ball or two.

  What I heard was that the aesthetics of upper class SoCal didn’t hold a candle to the charms of poor-as-Job’s-turkey Ethiopia. Or at least that was what I extrapolated from the enthusiastic paean pouring into my ear despite a lousy cellphone connection.

  “Wait, Assefa, I can barely hear you; let me try another room,” I said, pushing back my chair and angling out of it, avoiding the curious eyes of half the table.

  Settling myself upstairs onto the quilted covers in Mother’s spare bedroom and purposely positioning my neck against the sharp-ish corner of a copy of The Big Book Mother had flung onto the bed, I asked him, “Where are you, anyway? Addis Ababa?”

  “It’s amazing, Fleur. No, I’ve left Addis Ababa. Which is a great city, by the way—a lot more elegant than either of us would have imagined. And dizzying. I’d forgotten about the altitude. But I’m over it now. No, I’m in my hometown, Fleur! Tikil Dingay. I never thought I’d see it again. Do you believe it? My home is gone, and I haven’t been able to track down Bekele and Iskinder, but so much feels familiar. The smells. The sounds. The crickets are insane here, and I know you probably won’t believe, but our ibises are much louder than your crows. I’m like a buried man, coming back to life again ....”

  I dug my fingernails into my arm. Our ibises, your crows? Like a buried man? I’d realized early on that we ea
ch have multiple incarnations within one lifetime—such different ways of experiencing ourselves that we’re nearly completely different people at each stage of our lives. But buried? Really? Who’d been pouring his seed into me, licking my breasts, telling me how amazing I was—a dead man?

  But I have to confess that scientists can be pretty cold blooded. Despite my hurt and fear, the physicist in me was having a field day. I wondered whether I could use Assefa’s image of a buried self to expedite the application of my Principle of Dematerialization. If our pasts were like multiple universes, each previous incarnation a road in an alternate terrain, how might we move that process forward intentionally, cellularly? And might we also move it backwards and alter history? A part of me wanted to drop the phone and run downstairs to pose the question to Stanley and Amir and Katrina and Gunther and Tom. Even to Bob, who’d walked into Mother’s house wearing a broad grin and trailing a cloud of the world’s most cloying aftershave behind him.

  But that particular state of dissociation lasted less than a couple of heartbeats. Altering the past was, at best, a dubious proposition. If Mother hadn’t left Father, I might never have met Stanley H. Fiske. If Nana hadn’t been in the middle of an intersection just as an entitled Brentwood brat burst through a red light, she might have lived another thirty years, with Abeba going to work for some other family. If Assefa hadn’t come to the U.S., he might have married the girl who I just knew had brought him back to his village. Oh, he didn’t mention her, and I didn’t ask, but I knew. I could smell her otherness, her other-than-me-ness, in what Assefa wasn’t saying.

  A nasty little voice uncoiled from the bottom of my belly. “What about your father,” I asked, all innocence. “Have you found your father?”

  I’d achieved my goal. Assefa’s voice caught guiltily and his tone dropped to a whisper. “Well, no, not yet, but—”

  “Actually, I think I might be able to help. I’ll be meeting with an expert on the Ark tomorrow. I’m going with—”

  Assefa broke in with a non sequitur-ish, “Can you believe it, the orphanage Zalelew wrote about in his postcard is actually in the town where I was born.” And then I heard another voice, feminine in timbre, piping up in the background, “Yike’rt, Assefa,” which Assefa interrupted with a hurried, “Listen, Fleur, my cell is breaking up. Reception is crap here. I’ll email you as soon as I can. Tell my mother—” It really did break up then. I was left with nothing but static. I flung my phone onto the bed and felt myself begin to slide down the side of a slick, funnel-shaped pit.

  It wasn’t much later that Mother entered the room, catching my hands up in hers to stop the flapping. Pulling them, and me, to her breast, she said, “Assefa?” I nodded. She tugged me even tighter, as if Nana had been giving her lessons from the other side. “Tell me,” she murmured into my hair. Her breath smelled of garlic, cumin, and cardamom, which did no end of good in helping me surrender to her embrace. Dhani’s spicy jimikand and chatpate Baingan would no doubt turn my poo into fiery red bullets in the next twenty-four hours, but for now, transmitted to my nostrils via Mother’s whispered, “What is it, love?” the aroma was rather settling.

  I gently loosened myself from Mother’s grip and edged backwards to sit cross-legged on the bed, rocking just a bit as I crossed my hands below my breasts. “He’s supposed to be looking for his father, but he’s out in the middle of nowhere with some girl.”

  Mother sat down beside me, hip to hip, adjusting to my rocking motion. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, like Sister Flatulencia in prayer. “What do you mean, in the middle of nowhere? What girl?”

  “Well, not really nowhere. He’s in his hometown. Tikil Dingay. Where I always imagined visiting with him someday. But he’s with her.”

  “Who’s her?”

  “I only know her name’s Makeda. She’s the one Achamyalesh and Zalelew bumped into at the airport.”

  Mother’s face relaxed. “Well, then, it makes sense he’d look her up, sweetie. She might know where his father is.”

  I stared at her. We rarely sat so close. Her chiseled, almost austere features had spread and softened with age. The pores on her nose were larger than I ever remembered. The last traces of maroon lipstick feathered a bit around her smoker’s lips. Here was a woman who’d been to hell and back several times over—losing her own mother as a young child, falling captive to alcohol when a teenage pregnancy pushed her into a loveless marriage, watching her remaining parent rendered mute and powerless by a stroke, having to endure her abusive husband being revered by every whack job in the nation. The fact that she’d been able to haul herself out of those layers of hell wasn’t solely thanks to the intervention of her companion Sister Flatulencia and the ongoing support of the twelve-step community. No, she’d been fortified from birth by a keen mind, a kind heart, and a thirst for learning that ultimately sent her back to school in her early thirties. Mother becoming a librarian at L.A.’s stunning Art Deco Central Library might strike anyone who’d known her during her out-of-control adolescence as more than a little ironic, but Stanley wasn’t the first to assure me that no one should be held too much to account for the idiocies of youth.

  I was well aware that Mother knew a thing or two about the opposite sex. She hadn’t wasted much time once she shook herself free from Father’s pincer grip. AA was the primary supplier of a stream of (generally younger) men who were all-too-willing to bed the winsome ex-wife of the infamous Senator Robins, though she tended to collect suitors wherever she went, including the Swedish wedding she and I crashed on the night of my Nobel debacle.

  But in the end, she’d seemed to decide that celibacy suited her best. Having survived devastating loss, addiction, and an odd duck of a daughter who would never fit into a white-picket-fence mold, she wore about her an aura of humorous serenity steeped in a firsthand knowledge that, as the Buddhists say, life is suffering.

  So I grasped at the straw she profferred. “You’re right,” I sighed. “Adam always warned me not to get too carried away by the Green-Eyed Monster.”

  Mother shot me a quick look, as if checking to see if I was faking it. Which was a joke in itself. With a few notable exceptions involving my failed status as a resurrector, I was about as good at fakery as Jillily casually waltzing into the house with hummingbird feathers spilling from her mouth. Mother gestured toward the door. “Shall we?” Which I translated as, “We’re being rude. We need to go back downstairs.”

  As we stood up, Mother smoothing the wrinkles in her rose-patterned linen dress, it occurred to me that falling in love is like learning a new language. I had mastered the argot of physics and had worked even harder to grasp the crude idioms of our time, but cracking the code of Assefa was proving to be the most difficult challenge of all.

  By the time the two of us reached the bottom stair, Abeba and Sister Flatulencia had just finished clearing the table, and everyone seemed to be talking at once as they awaited Dhani’s dessert. I rushed toward the kitchen to give Abeba the latest Assefa bulletin. Entering the room, I saw Dhani and Sister Flatulencia make a quick, conspiratorial exit into the pantry. I couldn’t help but notice the cloud crossing Abeba’s forehead when I told her that Assefa hadn’t yet found his father. Her frown deepened when I added, “He was calling from Tikil Dingay. He said he couldn’t find your house. It was gone.”

  “But why is he there?” she said, gesturing plaintively. “Does he think Achamyalesh and Zalelew stopped there on their way to Aksum?”

  “I don’t know, Abeba. His cell cut out in the middle of our conversation.” Then I slyly slid in, “Didn’t Zalelew’s postcard mention bumping into some girl from your village?”

  Abeba’s lips clamped tighter than a ziplock bag. Seeing I wasn’t going to leave the room without some sort of response, she offered an uncharitable, “I can’t imagine what she would have to offer.”

  While I found her tone extremely satisfying, I had to admit that her comment lacked logic. I knew why I didn’t trust Makeda, but I couldn�
�t fathom why Abeba would be holding a grudge against someone who had, after all, been only a child when she’d last seen her. Abeba abruptly turned her back on me to resolutely stuff leftovers into plastic containers, and before I knew it, Dhani and Sister Flatulencia had joined us, Sister F. carefully closing the door to the pantry.

  I gave Dhani a quick hug, enjoying the sensation of her rounded belly against me. “You are so sweet to do this for me,” I declared, to which she responded with a self-deprecating little wave.

  Abeba removed a stack of dessert plates from the cupboard and hurriedly ferried them out to the dining room, as if she’d been looking for an opportunity to escape. Sister Flatulencia, wearing what looked to be a new lavender pantsuit, her now-white kinky curls struggling to escape her signature bandana, leaned her tall, skinny frame against the fridge and watched me and Dhani with a pleased grin. It was good to see her smile. She’d been understandably subdued ever since the tragedy. When I’d mentioned it to Adam in our most recent phone call, he’d pronounced, “Survivor guilt. How would you feel if you were the only one to make it through such a terrible accident with only a broken wrist to show you’d been there at all? Give her time, Fleur. She’s a strong woman. She’ll come back.” Maybe he was right. I knew that moving in with Dhani and Ignacio after the death of her two closest friends had to be helpful; babysitting for the adorable Angelina while Dhani taught at her cooking school would be healing for anyone.

  Dhani threw me a moist-eyed look, speaking in that lilting way of hers, still tinged with the Hindi-British accent of her youth. “Ah, my dear girl,” she said, though of course her girl came out sounding like gull. “I simply can’t believe it was ten years ago that I first cooked you an Indian dish.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “and my butt’s never gotten over it.” Sister Flatulencia frowned, which was pretty hypocritical of her, considering what hell her digestion had wrought on the rest of us before she discovered Beano.