Chapter 8
The Woman I Never Told Her About
For seven weeks, we were happy, and I am going to tell you about them quickly, because happiness is very hard to describe and very easy to distrust.
We were happy in small ways. On Wednesday nights she came to my flat in Ntinda after work with a bag of tomatoes and onions, and we cooked, badly, in a kitchen the size of a wardrobe, arguing about whether you put the onion in first. On Saturdays her mother cut my hair in the salon behind the shopping centre, with ten women looking on from under the dryers and offering commentary. "He has a good head," pronounced a woman in curlers. "Solid. Not too round." Harriet snipped at my neck with a look of grave professional concentration and said, to no one in particular, "He is thin. Who is feeding him?" Maya, in the next chair with her feet on a stool, said, "Mama, he's a grown man," and Harriet said, "That is when they get thin."
We went to the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe on a grey Sunday and walked under the huge old trees and did not speak for an hour. We argued about a film and made up before the credits. She read me a paragraph she was proud of and I told her one word was wrong, and she went quiet, and then changed it, and then said, in a small voice, "You were right," and it seemed to me the most intimate thing I had ever been given.
I drew her a staircase. I did it for no reason, on a Thursday, on a sheet of tracing paper, a small spiral in a room with a window, and I gave it to her at dinner without a word. She looked at it for a long time. She put it in the drawer of her bedside table and did not mention it again, and the next Monday I saw that she had stuck a copy of it above her desk at the Sentinel, next to the map of Wakiso, where I suppose it is still.
I was more at ease than I had been in years. That is the truth. And I was, at the same time, a man carrying a very heavy tray across a crowded room, holding it out at the end of my arm and hoping nobody would jog my elbow.
It was a Saturday in the first week of March when somebody did.
She was looking for scissors.
That was all. She had come round early, at nine, with a carrier bag of groceries, and found me in the shower, and had started, as she always did, to arrange my kitchen. Maya could not enter a room without improving it. She lined up the spice jars. She wiped a shelf. She said, through the wall, "Where do you keep your scissors? The bag of rice is welded shut."
"Second drawer," I shouted. "Left of the sink."
"It's not there."
"Then the desk. Middle drawer!"
I heard her cross the flat. I turned off the water. I stood dripping in the small blue bathroom and, in a delayed and dreadful flash, remembered what was in the middle drawer of the desk.
I do not know how long it took me. I dressed in about four seconds, with my shirt on inside out. I came out into the bedroom with a towel over my shoulder and my heart going like a drum, and I found her standing at the desk with the drawer open.
She was holding two things. In one hand, a pair of scissors. In the other, a sheet of paper, folded four times, its edges soft with handling.
She had unfolded one corner. Across the fold, in blunt black capitals, was the beginning of a word. NAO—
"Maya."
"It was under the scissors." She did not look up. Her voice was very steady. "I wasn't looking. I want you to know I wasn't looking."
"I know."
"It just fell open." She unfolded the rest of the sheet, slowly, and smoothed it against the desk. It was the page I had torn from a notebook on a balcony in September. She read it. She looked at it for a long time. "It just says a name."
"It's nothing."
"It's a name in capitals, folded four times, at the back of a drawer under a pair of scissors." She looked up. Her face was quite calm. It was the face she wore in the newsroom, the level, attentive one, and my whole spine went cold. "That's not nothing. That's a way of hiding something and keeping it."
"It's someone I knew. A long time ago. It's not..." I made a small helpless gesture. "It's a project. An old project. We called it that."
"A project."
"A house. I designed a house."
"For whom?"
"It was a hypothetical."
"Called Naomi."
"It was a working title."
The lie came out so smoothly that I heard it in the air after it had gone, and was appalled. Beneath the page, she had found a second object. She took it out of the drawer very carefully, with two fingers. It was a small drawing on yellowing tracing paper, an ink sketch of a low bungalow with a wide veranda and a single tall window on the eastern wall. In the corner, in my own younger, looser hand, three words and a letter: For N. Someday.
She laid it beside the page and looked at the two of them, side by side.
"That's a nice house," she said.
I said nothing.
"You draw very well." Her voice was almost gentle. "It's a shame the window's on the east. It'd be terribly hot in the mornings."
"That was the idea."
"I'm sure it was." She did not raise her voice. She would have been easier to bear if she had. "Ethan. I asked you, in November, whether there was anyone. I asked you again at Christmas. I asked whether there was someone in your past who mattered, and you said, not really. You said, just a girl at university. And I believed you."
"There was. It was a long time ago."
"How long?"
I hesitated. It was exactly one half-second too long.
"That's not a long time, then," said Maya.
She put the scissors on the desk. She folded the tracing paper along its old creases and laid it carefully back in the drawer, and then the page, and closed the drawer, softly, with a click. Then she stood with her hands flat on the wood, head bowed, like a woman listening for something through a floor.
"I'm going to make breakfast," she said. "And we're going to pretend this hasn't happened. And then I'm going to think about it for a while. And then I'm going to ask you again, later. And I would like, when I do, for you to have decided what you're going to say."
She went out to the kitchen.
I stood in the bedroom holding a towel and listened to her open the bag of rice, with her teeth.
I had told her the truth about one thing that was not the truth about anything, and I want to show you what I was hiding.
I want to show you the year after my father died.
It was not the year I told you about. Not the grief. I have shown you the grief, the tree, the bicycle, the hand in the dark. I have told you what Naomi said. But I have not told you what I did with it.
After my father died, I began to be afraid. I did not know that was what it was. It came on so gradually, like weather, that I took it for a change in the light. It began with small things. I would wake at three in the morning with a flat cold conviction that something had happened to her. That she'd been in an accident on the road to Kampala. That she'd slipped on the wet steps of the library, or been taken ill in a lecture hall with no one to help. I would lie rigid, listening to my own pulse, and then, unable to stop, I would pick up the phone and send a message. You ok? 3:04 a.m. Are you awake? 3:11 a.m. Just checking.
"Ethan," she said, the first time she said it, at breakfast. "It's three in the morning. I'm asleep. I'm fine."
"I know. I just—"
"I know you just." She put her hand over mine. "It's okay. It's the grief."
She was so patient. That is what I find hardest to remember. In those first months, she took the fear the way she took everything, with a steady uncomplaining practical tenderness. She sent me a message at 8:00 every morning, Awake and alive, with a small green frog. I began to wait for it. And then, when the morning it did not come because her phone had died, I called her fourteen times.
I never meant to be a jailer. I would like you to believe that. I loved her. I was terrified. I did not know how to be one without the other.
It grew. It is hard to describe how it grew. I began to ask where she was. Not always, not aggressively, only in a light, affectionate, casual way, the way you would ask a person about the weather. Where are you now? Who are you with? When will you be back? I began to notice which of her friends had a way of making her stay late. I said nothing. I sighed. I let my voice go small and flat, and I did the wall. She would come home at ten from a study group to find me sitting in the dark with a cold plate of food, saying nothing, and she would stand in the door, exhausted, twenty-three years old, with a bag of books, and say in a low, angry, disbelieving voice, "Ethan. It's a study group."
"I didn't say anything."
"You don't have to. You do it with your whole body."
Her friend Achan, a tall, blunt, funny girl from Lira, said something to me once, in the canteen at Lumumba. She said it quite kindly, with her tray in her hands. She said, "You know she can't breathe, don't you?"
"What?"
"Naomi. She's a person who needs air. She'd never say. She'll let you have the whole sky if you asked for it." She looked at me. "I'm not being cruel. I'm just telling you, as a friend. You're holding her very tight."
"I'm not holding anyone."
"Sure," said Achan, and went to find a table.
I went home and I wrote Naomi a poem, and I felt very much wronged.
It was in the middle of that year that she applied for the first time to leave. I did not know she was applying. I found out about it by accident, as I found out about most of what she did, by reading it. She had left her laptop open on the bed. I did not mean to. I was looking for a charger. An email sat open, from a research organisation in Nairobi, offering her a six-month internship in biostatistics, beginning in June.
I read it twice. I sat down on the bed. I was not angry; I want to be clear about that. I was frightened in the exact, cold, bodily way I had been frightened by the phone in the ward, the nurse in the corridor. I saw the shape of it. Six months. Nairobi. She would leave, and something would happen to her. She would be in a taxi. She would be in a flat with a lock that did not work.
She came in at six and found me on her bed.
"You were going to tell me."
"I was." She put down her books. She looked at the laptop. Her face changed. "You read it."
"It was open."
"That's not the same as being allowed."
"Six months, Naomi."
"It's an internship. It's a very good one. It's the sort of thing people wait their whole lives for."
"You didn't tell me."
"I was waiting until I knew." Her voice shook. "I wanted to be sure before I put it in front of you. Because I knew you'd do this."
"Do what?"
"This." She gestured at me, on the bed, with the wall coming down over my face. "I knew you'd make it about you."
That was when I said it. I want to give you the sentence, exactly, because I have gone over it many hundreds of times. I said, quite quietly, in a hurt and reasonable voice: "I thought we were building a life together. I didn't realise you were already planning to leave it."
She did not answer. She stood in the middle of the room in the failing light, small and straight, and I watched something go out of her face. Not anger. That would have been better. It was a kind of switching-off, as if a light had been turned down in a distant room.
She did not take the internship.
She told me a week later, in the same flat, sitting on the same bed, with her hands folded in her lap. "I've turned it down," she said. "I thought you'd like to know."
"Naomi."
"It's fine. I wasn't sure about Nairobi anyway."
I said I was sorry. I meant it. I held her, and she let me, and I put my chin on top of her head and thought, with tremendous relief: she's still here. It did not once occur to me to ask what it had cost. It did not occur to me that a person who turns down one door because a man has stood in it may, one day, be very good at finding another door, and at not telling him about it.
I had taught her that. I did not know I was teaching. But I had been an excellent teacher.
We went to the supermarket at three.
It was, I suppose, an attempt to normalise things. She had made breakfast, and eaten it, and said very little, and I had sat across from her drinking tea I could not taste, and at some point she had said, in an entirely neutral voice, "Shall we get some food? You've got nothing in."
"Yes. Sure. Let's."
"I'll drive."
It was the big Quality Supermarket on the Ntinda road, the one with the wide automatic doors and the bakery smell that hit you at the entrance like a warm hand. It was Saturday afternoon and packed: families with trolleys, boys in football shirts, a woman with a baby strapped to her back holding up two tins of tomatoes and comparing them with grave attention. We walked through the aisles without speaking. Maya put things in the trolley: rice, onions, sugar, a pack of tea. She did not consult me. I followed, pushing, feeling like a man escorted to a courtroom.
We were in the aisle with the cooking oil when I heard my name.
"Ethan?"
I turned.
She was standing at the end of the aisle with a basket on her arm. A woman in a plain blue dress, with a round calm face, and beside her a younger woman with the same eyes, holding a bag of flour. She was thinner than I remembered. There were faint shadows under her eyes. But the face was the same, open and level and unafraid, and my whole body understood who she was before my mind did.
"Grace," I said.
"I thought it was you." She came a few steps closer. She smiled, and it was a real smile, wide and warm, and it hurt more than a slap would have. "It's been a long time."
"Yes. It has."
"You look well."
"So do you. How's the... how's the ward?"
"Busy." She laughed a little. "It's always busy." She turned her head, courteous and interested, and looked at the woman beside me. "Hello."
"Hello," said Maya. She had gone very still. She had one hand on the trolley. "I'm Maya."
"I'm Grace. It's lovely to meet you." She held out her hand. Maya took it. They shook, with the careful gentleness of two women who understand exactly what is happening and have agreed, silently, to be kind to each other about it. "I was just..." She stopped. She looked at me.
I had a choice. I saw it, quite clearly, laid out in front of me on the floor of a supermarket in Ntinda, like a fork in a road at night. I could say: Grace is someone I was seeing, last year, briefly. I behaved badly. I could say it in front of them both. It would cost me a very great deal. It might, in a single sentence, have saved me.
"Grace is an old friend," I said.
The silence was very brief. It was not dramatic. It was only the quiet that follows a small dry click, like a key turning in a lock.
Grace looked at me. She did not look angry. I would have known what to do with anger. She looked at me with the same attention she had once given a patient in Bed 6, a steady, tender, clear-eyed attention, and something in her face went still and closed, like a hand folding.
"An old friend," she repeated. "Yes."
"Grace—"
"No, it's fine." She smiled at Maya, warmly, with her whole face. "That's what he does. He's very good at it. He puts a person in a box and makes sure it's a nice one, with a label." She spoke without malice. She spoke as one speaks to a colleague, about a difficult case. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to make it awkward. I just, you seem like a kind person, and I think you should know."
"Know what?" said Maya quietly.
"That he's a good man." Grace shifted the basket on her arm. "He is. He's kind. He'll listen to you for hours. He'll drive across the city with an egg. He just doesn't stay for lunch." She said it very softly, with a small, sad, rueful lift of the corner of her mouth. "I invited him to my sister's birthday once. I made rice. He had a site."
The girl beside her looked at the floor. A trolley rattled past. A child was shrieking somewhere near the bakery.
"Anyway," said Grace. She touched Maya's arm, lightly, and I saw Maya flinch and not pull away. "Take care of yourself. It was nice to meet you." She looked at me. Just once. There was no reproach in it, only a sort of ancient, patient sorrow, as if she were looking at a wound she had dressed and knew would not close. "Take care, Ethan."
She went. She walked away down the aisle with her sister at her elbow, in her flat shoes, and did not look back. I watched the blue dress until it turned the corner by the flour.
I did not dare look at Maya.
"Right," she said, at last. Her voice was flat and level. "We need rice."
We did not speak until we were in the car.
It was a small blue Toyota with a broken air-conditioner and a smell of old paper. She drove very carefully, both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, indicating at every turn. I sat with the shopping bags at my feet and my hands between my knees. The sun had come out again and was pouring in through the windscreen, indecently bright.
"Who was she?" said Maya.
"Someone I knew. Last year. Briefly."
"How briefly?"
"Two months."
"Two months isn't brief."
"It felt brief."
"To you." She braked at a red light. She stared at it. "She said you didn't stay for lunch. What lunch?"
"It was a family thing. Her sister's birthday. I had a lot on."
"You said nothing." She turned her head. Her eyes were very dark and very bright. "When she asked if you were friends, you said old friend. You said it so easily. Ethan, you said it like a man ticking a box. Who is she? Who was she to you?"
"It was nothing. She was nobody."
I heard it as it left my mouth.
It was the word. I could feel it, drop out of me, as something drops from a hand. I saw Maya's face change. It did not crumple. It closed, from the edges inward, like a door being drawn very quietly shut. The light turned green. Nobody moved. Behind us, a car hooted, and hooted again.
"Nobody," she said.
"I didn't mean—"
"You did. It's exactly what you meant." Her voice was very quiet. "She wasn't nobody to her, Ethan. Did you see her face? She looked at you as if you were a person she had carried. She stood in a supermarket and was kind to me, with you standing there, because she couldn't bear to be unkind. That is not what somebody does about nobody."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't say sorry to me. Say it to her."
"I can't. I don't have her number."
"You don't have her number," said Maya, and laughed, a short, brittle sound. "Of course you don't. You don't keep them." She put the car into gear and it jerked forward, into the road, and a matatu swerved round us with a blare. "I asked you. I asked you in November, and at Christmas, and in your bedroom this morning. Three times. Do you know what I said? I said, I need you to tell me. I said I'm not asking you to be a monk. I said I just want the truth."
"I told you the truth."
"You told me part of it," said Maya. "That's the worst thing. It was such a careful part."
She drove me home in silence. She did not come up. She stopped in front of my building and sat with the engine running and her hands on the wheel, and I got out with the bags, and stood on the pavement, and could not think of one true or useful thing to say.
"I need a day," she said, through the window. She still did not look at me. "Please don't call. I'll call you."
"Okay."
"Don't say okay."
"I don't know what else to say."
"I know," said Maya, very tiredly. "That's what's wrong."
She drove away. I stood on the pavement with a bag of rice in each hand, and watched the little blue car turn the corner. A boy went past on a bicycle, whistling. Somewhere a radio was playing a Sunday song, though it was Saturday.
She called on Sunday, at seven in the evening.
I had not slept. I had cleaned my flat. I had scrubbed the kitchen floor on my knees, with a brush and a bucket, until it hurt, as though by scouring hard enough I could take away a stain that had nothing to do with linoleum. When the phone rang I nearly dropped it.
"Can I come over?" said Maya.
"Of course."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
She arrived in a black raincoat, though it had not rained, with her hair pulled tight and her face washed clean. She sat on my sofa, on the very edge, with her hands in her lap. I made tea. She did not drink it. She looked around the room, at the drawings on the wall, the shelf of pencils, the candle stub she had never noticed, and I saw her eyes pass over it and move on.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"Okay."
"I want to tell you what I've decided. And then I want you to say something true. And if you can't, then just say nothing." She drew a breath. "I've decided I'm not angry about Naomi."
I stared at her.
"I'm not. I mean, I'm upset that you lied. That's a separate issue. But I looked at the drawing. The house. And I thought: he loved her. It's on every line. And I found it, I don't know, I found I could bear it." She looked up. "I'm not threatened by a woman you loved. I'd be worried if you'd never loved anyone. It's how you didn't tell me. It's the folded paper. It's the project. It's that you were ashamed to say her name in front of me."
"I wasn't ashamed."
"Then what?"
"I was afraid it would make it real."
"Make what real?"
"That it happened." I heard my own voice come out cracked. "That she's gone. That it's, that I—" I stopped. I could not finish it.
She waited. I saw her wait. And I felt, for one wild, shining moment, that I was about to say it all: the flat, the fear, the year after my father, the wall. That the whole thing would come tumbling out, whole, complete. I opened my mouth.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table.
It was lying face up between us, next to the tea. I saw the screen light. I saw it before she did. I saw the name, and the small round photograph, a woman in a gold necklace, and beneath it the first line of a message, printed in grey. And I lunged for it, and I was one second too late.
Maya had picked it up.
She held it in both hands and read. It was only a few words. I can still see them, because I have seen them so many times since, on the inside of my eyelids, at night. They were printed in a small clean typeface on a white background.
Brenda: Still thinking about New Year's 😏 Dinner Friday? I know a place.
The room was very silent.
She read it twice. I saw her eyes go to the top, and back. She turned the phone slowly, in her hands, as if she wanted to see the other side of it. Then, with great care, she set it down on the table, screen down, exactly in the middle, between the two mugs.
"New Year's," she said.
"Maya."
"That's the night of the watch service. Isn't it? I sent you a message at half past four in the morning. I said, I thought of you." She said it quite flatly. She was looking at the phone. "You wrote back at six. You said, sorry, I was asleep."
"It wasn't—"
"Was it before the veranda? Or after?"
"After."
"After the veranda." She nodded, slowly, as though confirming a figure. "Before the landing. Before I asked. So when I stood on that landing in the rain and said has there been anyone, and you said no, you knew."
"Yes."
"You knew."
"Yes."
She stood. She did it slowly, like a woman getting up from a very low chair. She picked up her bag. She did not look at me. She walked to the door and stopped with her hand on the latch, and I heard her draw a long shaking breath.
"I wouldn't have minded," she said. "That's what I can't get past. I told you, I'm not a monk. We weren't anything, then. I'd have been hurt. I'd have been angry. But I wouldn't have left. If you'd told me." Her voice cracked, once, and steadied. "I'd have said, thank you for telling me, and I'd have meant it. But you looked me in the eyes. And you took my trust, Ethan, and you put it in your pocket."
"I was afraid."
"Everyone is afraid. I'm afraid right now." She turned her head. Her face was wet, and quite composed. "I am so afraid I can hardly stand. But I'm standing here telling you. That's the difference."
She opened the door. The landing was dark. Below us, someone's television laughed.
"I asked you three times," said Maya. "That's the thing I'll remember. Not the girl. Not the paper. Just that I asked you three times, and each time you handed me something that looked like the truth and wasn't."
"Please."
"I need to go home."
"Maya, please, let me—"
"I need," she said, with careful, terrible gentleness, "to not be here."
The door closed. It did not slam. That was the worst part. It closed with the soft, definite click of a well-fitted hinge, and I stood in my living room with two full mugs of tea and a phone lying face-down on the table, and heard her footsteps go down the stairs, one at a time, unhurried, the way you walk when you have decided not to run.
I sat down on the floor. I put my back against the sofa. I stayed there while the tea went cold and the light went out of the window and the phone lay face-down in the dark, buzzing softly every few minutes, like something small and stupid that did not understand what it had done.
At about eleven, I got up. I went to the bedroom and knelt down. I put my arm under the bed, to the left, all the way to the shoulder, and felt my fingers close on cold metal.
I pulled out the tin.