She’d apologized to her son. For being Mary Maynard, a waitress and a stupid bitch, and unable to send him to a good school when he was first getting into trouble, a bright kid, too bright and therefore bored, the teachers said. Unable to hire a good lawyer to keep him out of juvie. Shoplifting, then B&E, stealing cars. Unable to send him to college in penny loafers and an argyle sweater to study engineering or physics, because he’d been good at science. Unable to pay for his drug rehab when he was shooting up speed, smack, toothpaste. Unable to make love — all she had to offer—enough.
Sorry, she was sorry from the bottom of her heart, which was down there, so far, far down, right where hell must be. But James couldn’t hear her saying ‘sorry,’ could he. Sorry was a fart in the wind.
‘What do you want?’ she asked Mr Koppler.
‘To find her.’
Gloria knew very well that she should ask why. She knew very well, very, very well, the rage after James. She’d wanted to find the cops who shot him. She’d wanted to pluck out their teeth. She’d wanted to grind their skulls into dust. Mr Koppler did not want to sit down with Pilgrim and have a little, what was it called? Tate-a-tate.
She had to think fast. On one hand, there was sad Ernst Koppler, the father of a dead child, a compatriot in the ragged land of grief. On the other hand was Pilgrim. Gloria had first seen her in the market. Gloria, like a lovesick dyke, stared at the bead of sweat in the hollow of Pilgrim’s throat. She was buying fruit, paying too much. She didn’t even notice Gloria. She didn’t even notice as Gloria stared at the roots of her dark hair, the strands lifting off her long, lovely neck. Her hair shimmered. Pilgrim was clean, a mountain stream, pure like a white nightgown drying on the line. Gloria stood there in the proximity of such loveliness and smelled the whiff of herself: the residue of thirty years of bacon grease. It never washed off, even with the cheapest soap.
So, on the other hand, Pilgrim. Gloria knew she could not separate the image of Pilgrim in the market from what Mr Koppler had just told her. She couldn’t backtrack, could not un-know. Pilgrim is no longer beautiful, untouchable, fragrant.
‘I know where she is.’
He nodded. He put down his coffee cup. ‘The taxi driver, he tells me about your orphans.’
‘They will be here any day now.’
‘I help you,’ he said.
They both waited. They were holding the same rope, moving through the dark, hand over hand.
‘You understand I will not return to Switzerland.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have no one for my money. I am not rich. But my house, my business. I will arrange. It is enough for you. For what you need here.’
Gloria bit her lip. ‘That’s not necessary, Mr Koppler.’ But, in truth, it was. In truth, she didn’t have funds to last six months.
He held her gaze, he needed her to know him, to bear witness.
‘Yes, yes, it is necessary,’ he said.
It is, she silently agreed.
Money changes everything.
*
Gloria looks at the water, soft chiffon, the diffusion of light, a kind of magic substance. If she was Mary, plunging through it, flexing tensing arcing, if she was Mary at sixteen she’d swim away from Milton. But without Milton, she would be without James.
Far out, at the mouth of the cove, a dhow sails past: a vignette of tranquility. But if it came closer in, Gloria would see the ripped sail and the ragged fisherman with his salt-burned hands and dearth of fish. She waits, just to make sure he’s not going to tack into the bay and find her. She couldn’t possibly explain what she was doing with a body covered in a tarp.
She ties an old anchor to Koppler’s legs. She could tie her body to his, she could fall with him into the still, green-blue sea. Companions. She could lie with him in the eelgrass and look up at the tiled surface of the water.
But instead she shuts her eyes. She says, out loud, ‘James.’ His name carries over the water.
She pushes Koppler out of the boat. No easy task as the little boat tips and tosses and Koppler is a heavy man. But underneath Gloria still has her swimmer’s strength. There’s a splash and then silence.
She watches the body sink.
Harry says she mustn’t compare pain, mustn’t want it to all add up. But that’s a human need. The way a bill tallies, the items equal the cash. French fries are $1.99. And maybe, Gloria thinks, there is a reckoning, somewhere very far down the line, where it adds up and evens out. Profit and loss, perfectly balanced.
Harry and Pilgrim will be in Pangani now, Harry’s little shack there. Where she herself had been happy, lain with him for a brief sojourn. That’s when she’d told him about James, and that’s when he’d begun his retreat. He couldn’t bear her loss because of course — as she’s come to realize — it reminded him of his crime.
She doesn’t know — can’t decide — if she wanted Pilgrim dead. She only knows it’s immaterial to her that Pilgrim is still alive. Perhaps there’s a life for her after all, who can tell. Redemption can never be ruled out.
The morning Mary went to the dentist she’d been thinking again about killing herself. It was absurd: going to fix her teeth when what she really wanted to do was stick her head in the oven. She was just so very tired. The real reason she’d picked up National Geographic was the cover article about suicide. The story was about the global history of suicide, the rituals and reasons, maps, charts — so much more than the plodding consequence of depression. Mary already knew her desire to die didn’t come from depression, but from losing the only person she’d ever loved. The grinding loss, the meaningless years after his death had not been mental illness, only a loss she could not gain traction against.
The nurse called her name. Doctor Babbits is ready to see you, Mary. She turned the page and saw those dark-skinned children’s faces staring out—Africa’s AIDS Orphans. They stood half-naked in the mud, hungry, forsaken, their little hearts emptying of useless sadness and filling with violence that would keep them alive. In another issue, she’d be seeing the same faces with guns, dead eyes hidden by mirrored shades. Africa’s Child Killers.
The most ironic thing that can happen, will happen.
Mary had touched their faces with her fingertips. Oh, her heart had said. Oh.
Mary? The nurse tapped her shoulder. Mary? Doctor Babbits is ready to see you. She got up, clutching the magazine. She knew it had happened, the answer to a question she hadn’t known to ask.
How do you carry on?
It was like finding a crack in the earth and glimpsing the hot and certain core.
Because love endures with grief and hate. And every day, just as she feels her grief and hate, she feels her love and its great, shining purity.
She turns the boat south and west, back through the cove and the shallow channel to the blue, open harbor of Tanga’s bay. She glances up in the tussling green of the land. She can almost see her little house. She can imagine herself there when the bus arrives and she will finally hold them. Oh, yes, money is everything. Her careful bribes, her persistence has paid off: the last permit has been granted. And Mr Koppler’s money will be enough for quite some time.
Today, in only a few hours, in her arms, in her house, in her life, the children she has waited for, the children who have waited for her, shall be gathered safe therein.