‘You don’t need me for that. It’s not my area, personality typing.’
‘I can’t explain it all right now.’ He lowered his voice and glanced to her bedroom, ‘But you have to stay. I’m sorry. I’ve been …’ He dipped his head into his hands and raked his fingernails through his hair loudly. ‘I’ve been awful. I’m stretched a little thin right now. Stay just one more day. A half day. Leave tomorrow afternoon. Please.’
And stupidly, selfishly, I agreed.
23
3/21 Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping off layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can’t write about it fully yet. Don’t understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying—and hearing—the first wholly honest words of my life.
24
I awoke to sobbing. Nell. In pain. I got up off my mat and pushed through the netting. I found her sitting on the floor at the front of the house, a girl shaking and howling in her arms. It was the girl from the night before, the one arguing with Xambun. Nell smiled at me in my underwear, but the girl kept up her crying. I retreated to my room. The girl saved enough breath for a few words and Nell cooed something back to her. Tatem mo shilai, it sounded like. He will come back. After a long while they stood and Nell wiped the girl’s face and led her out and down the ladder. I had got on my trousers and shirt by the time she returned.
‘There’s been a good deal of drama this morning.’ She said something to Bani, whom I hadn’t seen behind the kitchen screen.
‘Tell me.’ I came through the netting and sat at the table with her. She was wearing the pale green shirt again, now streaked with the girl’s tears.
Bani brought out coffee. I thanked him and he smiled and said something to Nell.
‘He says you speak like his Kiona cousins.’ Then she slid a piece of paper toward me.
Bankson—
I know you wanted to get back, but what’s another few days in paradise, right? It’s now or never. Don’t be miffed I didn’t invite you along. Someone needs to stay with Nell and you’re clearly the Southern man for the job.
‘He’s taken your canoe,’ she said. ‘That was Umi, Xambun’s girl. He’s broken it off with her, told her he was going to go away soon. Move to Australia. And now he’s gone with Fen. This whole time—all those times Fen kept leaving the house—he was scheming with Xambun. Not even interviewing him, just plotting to get that goddamn flute.’
I thought of the way he kept disappearing, the way his moods shifted, the way his attention slipped in and out. The way Xambun had moved toward me the night before, expectantly, then shrunk back when he saw I wasn’t Fen.
‘I’m such a dope not to have seen this coming,’ she said. ‘He’s been lying to me for weeks.’
What had he told me? That he knew the route, that it would change the next moon. That he would go in upriver of the village. No one would hear him. No one would know. I’d underestimated him entirely. I’d thought his inertia was permanent, that he luxuriated in his sense of missed opportunity and bad luck.
‘He’s promised Xambun money, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Money to move to Australia.’
Without an engine it would take more than a day to catch up to them. Maybe I could find a pinnace to take me to the Mumbanyo. I stood. ‘I’ll get some men. We’ll find a way to stop them.’
‘At this point you’ll only give them away, make it worse.’
I remained in place, indecisive, weak.
‘Stay here. Please.’
They were hours ahead of me. This was the only time I would have with her alone. I sat back down.
‘Are you worried for his safety?’ I said.
‘He took his gun. I’m more worried for theirs.’
‘Won’t they follow him back up here?’
‘If they see him, they might. But there are other tribes I think they’d suspect first. The Mumbanyo have a lot of enemies.’ She crushed the note in her hand. ‘Damn him.’
Five or six heads of children appeared at the bottom of the doorway, halfway up the steps, ready to climb up the rest at the slightest invitation.
She looked at them longingly. They were what made sense to her.
‘Let’s get back to work,’ I said.
She waved the children in.