I explained the situation as concisely as I could.
“I’m sorry Jack was so rude to you,” she said, when I was done. “It appears you are both bound by the events of a tragic afternoon. Jack hasn’t been the same since he lost Li—” She stopped as Bahati returned, wearing the muumuu. It barely skimmed past his knees.
Goma pinched Scholastica—a quick, sharp nip on the back of her hand to stop her from giggling. Bahati in a muumuu was a very quiet man, nothing like the Bahati who rattled on and on.
“Excuse me.” I needed to get out of there before Goma pinched me too. “I think I’ll go change.”
When I came back, they were all in the kitchen—Bahati and Scholastica huddled around the table, while Goma ladled hot soup into their bowls.
“You can hang those up in the laundry,” she said, pointing to the wet bundle rolled up in my arms.
The rain was still falling hard as I made my way down the hallway to the laundry room. I found some clothes pegs and was hanging up my things when lightning illuminated the back of the house. I thought I saw Jack momentarily through the window, standing outside in the middle of a full-fledged tropical storm. I was about to chalk it up to my imagination when another flash lit him up again. He was just standing there, under a tree that looked like it was hundreds of years old, staring at the ground, while the rain whipped hell and fury all around him.
“I think Jack is still outside,” I said when I stepped into the kitchen.
Goma nodded and continued having her soup. “He does that. Sits with her whenever there’s a storm.” She pushed a bowl toward me. “Eat.”
“Sits with who?” I asked, taking the chair across from her.
“Lily. His daughter. She’s buried out there. They all are. This place sure lived up to its name.”
“Kaburi Estate?” I recalled the sign at the entrance.
“Yes. It was supposed to be Karibu Estate.Karibumeans welcome, but I was still learning Swahili back then and I wroteKaburion the work order. It means a grave. Sam—my husband—thought it was hilarious. He refused to correct it. He always said he’d love me to his grave.” Goma stared into her bowl. “And so he did. He loved me to the end.”
I sensed the beginning of an epic love story, the kind I was always hungry for, but she didn’t say anything more. She just smiled wistfully and swirled her spoon around the bowl in little circles.
“Should we . . . should someone go get Jack?” I asked as lightning pierced the sky again. I was starting to feel terrible about what I’d said to him.
“He’ll come in when he’s done. And he’ll keep doing it, until one day, he doesn’t need to anymore. It’s what you’re doing too, aren’t you? Miles from home. Mourning your sister in your own way. You’ve got to let it run its course. Give in until it’s spent and quiet, until you’ve learned to breathe through the loss.”
I had a spoonful of my soup and thought about what she’d said. Mo’s death was like a door that had been sealed shut forever. I could never walk through it, never listen to her go on about all the inconsequential things that I missed so terribly now. There is an invisible threshold of possibilities when someone is alive. It contracts when they’re gone, swallowing up all the worlds that hover around them—names of people they’d never meet, faces of kids they’d never have, flavors of ice cream they’d never taste. Losing Mo hurt like hell, but I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to lose a child.
“I thought I told you to leave.”
I jumped at the sound of Jack’s voice. He was drenched to the core, standing by the back door in a puddle of water. The hoodie was gone and his T-shirt was molded to the kind of muscles that came with hard, physical labor. We were high up at the foot of the mountain, where the air held a touch of frost in the evenings, but he showed no sign of being cold. Perhaps that was the point—standing in the rain past the point of numbness.
“I invited them in,” said Goma.
Jack followed her eyes and noticed Bahati for the first time.
“Habari, Jack,” said Bahati.
Jack nodded in acknowledgment. He had no reaction to seeing a muumuu-clad man at his grandmother’s table. Then his eyes fell on Scholastica, and everything changed. If he had been harsh with me before, he was positively hostile toward her. His hands clenched into tight fists by his sides, hackles rising until the air bristled with unspoken tension.
“That’s Lily’s,” he growled.
“So it is.” Goma didn’t seem perturbed by his reaction. “Scholastica needed a change of clothes, so I gave her Lily’s dress.”
Jack’s jaw clenched, like he had just stopped himself from biting someone’s head off. Scholastica huddled closer to Goma, shriveling under his biting glare.
“I think we should go now,” I said to Bahati. I had no idea if they’d let Scholastica board with me at the volunteer’s hostel until I figured something out. All I knew was that I didn’t like the way Jack Warden made me feel. I was used to constants with people—a nice, smooth line, with maybe a few blips here and there. But with Jack, it was like a polygraph test gone wild, the recording needle jumping all over the place. I went hopeful to insulted, from being sympathetic about his loss to infuriated by his attitude.
“No one’s going anywhere in this weather. In case you haven’t been listening to the forecast, the storm isn’t going to clear any time soon,” said Goma. “There are no streetlights for miles and the roads are treacherous in the rain. Besides, you have Scholastica to think about.”
“I’m sure the hostel can accommodate her for one night,” I replied. “I can call ahead and—”
“That’s not what I—”
