“Oh,” says Brown, “yes, quite. I meant the nanny, what’s her name.”
“Molly.”
“Molly, right. Odd name for an African bird, isn’t it? I assume that’s what she is, African. I meant you worked it out with the child-care.”
“It’s strange,” Zan says, the train starting to move, “because we actually saw her, the afternoon before she came to the room, in a. . peculiar way. . at the pub where. . wait,” he says, stepping onto the train, “what?”
“How’s that?” says Brown, walking alongside, trying to keep pace.
“I worked it out? Didn’t you work it out?”
“Uh,” the other man says, the train speeding up and leaving him behind, “you know I intended to, but. . ”
“But I thought you arranged it,” Zan calls from the train.
“Have a good rest of your stay,” Brown calls back, waving. “Regards to Viv, if you hear from her.”
~ ~ ~
Did he say if? Over the building roar of the train, Zan strains to hear the word’s echo: Or maybe he said when. Was it when, or if? A few minutes later in their seats, Molly says, “No, it was Mrs. Nordhoc who arranged it. Sorry. I thought you understood.” On the seat beside her sits a small portable radio; a blip of music comes from its speaker. When the nanny holds the radio up to Sheba’s head, the signal comes through more clearly. In fascination Parker stares not at the effect his sister has on the transistor but the obsolete device itself. “That radio looks as old as your camera,” he murmurs before sinking back in his seat to the slight sway of the train.
~ ~ ~
Zan says to the nanny, “Viv arranged it?” Sheba is about to fall asleep, her eyes drooping. “Don’t let her fall asleep,” says Parker to Molly.
“Parker,” Zan says to the boy’s tone, but then to the woman, “I’m afraid he’s right. She’ll nap half an hour and be up the rest of the night. They’ve still got some jetlag anyway.” Molly rustles Sheba a few blinks back into consciousness, turning up the radio in the seat beside her; she moves the knob from station to station until she finds the song. Sheba’s head perks up. “Oh my god, seriously?” Parker groans from half-sleep; Sheba looks at Molly and smiles. We can be heroes just for one day. “I like this song!” says Sheba.
“I know,” Molly smiles back.
You know? thinks Zan. “You heard from Viv?”
“Well,” the nanny seems to sort through her sentences over the song, “not directly. Through a friend. A friend of a friend in Addis.” She sings softly along with Sheba and stares out the window of the train.
“But when?” says Zan.
“A few days ago, I think it was?” She says, “No, of course it must have been longer than that. A week or more?”
“A friend of a friend? Can I contact this person?”
“It’s difficult,” Molly nods, “very poor mobile service, you know, and email. . ” and turns back to the window.
“I ask because I haven’t heard anything from her in days.”
“I am certain that she is all right,” Molly answers,
“as long as she remains in Addis Ababa.”
~ ~ ~
It may be that Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence, but he would find Molly’s appearance more reassuring if it somehow were more explicable. He would feel more reassured if Zan had mentioned in the email to Viv the need for a nanny before the afternoon they saw Molly outside the pub. In that case Zan can imagine scenarios, slightly far-flung though all of them are, by which a young London woman — alerted to the situation of a white foreigner in town with two kids, one a young black girl — would happen to pass by the pub and take notice. But in any case, wouldn’t Viv have written something? Maybe, as Molly indicated, Viv said something to someone in Ethiopia, who then said, Oh I know a woman in London, and then Viv forgot in the midst of everything going on. As Zan too often reminds her, sometimes she thinks of telling him something and then later remembers doing it though she hasn’t.
Zan would find Molly’s mysteriousness, and all the mysteries that her mysteriousness engenders, more purely irritating if it weren’t for the sense he has — which has grown as surely as the transmissions from Molly’s and Sheba’s bodies together — that the woman is haunted. Or she is more than haunted, she’s branded by a secret, and all that lies between her and her secret is everything about her that’s so indefinite. There’s no way for him to know if Molly has come to Sheba to try and live down this secret or to try and draw closer to a resolution; but this is the one thing about her that Zan knows is no accident, even among all his other conjectures, the most prominent of which is whether, for all concerned, hers is a secret to either be unlocked, or locked away for good.
~ ~ ~
At the hotel, he carries his daughter up to the room and lays her down in the larger bed. For a while Parker plunders cyberspace on his father’s laptop. Sheba sleeps what her brother calls the zombie sleep, eyes not fully shut, lids only half lowered; the distant music that the girl transmits rises off her sleeping body like steam off a summer sidewalk. Brushing Sheba’s hair from her eyes, Zan is reminded that he promised Viv to find a salon for her in London, and that reminds him to check his email where, after the long day, he feels certain there will be a message. When there isn’t, it’s all the more of a shock.
Zan turns from the laptop and looks at his daughter where she sleeps, noting how the girl was different today with Molly, less manic, tethered to something or someone she’s never been before. Two hours later, unaware that he’s fallen asleep, Zan wakes to the sound of weeping.
~ ~ ~
Sheba isn’t in the bed next to him. The sound of crying comes from the bathroom where the door is closed.
In the dark Zan rises from the bed, looks over at Parker, goes to the bathroom where the door is locked. “Sheba,” he calls through the door.
“Go away,” comes a little voice.
“Sheba.”
“Leave me alone.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Leave me alone.”
“What is it?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Sheba, open the door.”
~ ~ ~
For half a moment he wonders if he should leave her but he says, “Sheba. Did you have a bad dream?” She just cries. “Sheba?”
“No.”
“Did you have a bad dream?”
“No.”
“You have to let me in.”
He hears her unlock the door.
~ ~ ~
She’s sitting on the bathroom floor. Because he’s still only half conscious and his brain is full of vodka, Viv, Molly, J. Willkie Brown and Ronnie Jack Flowers, he belatedly registers that this is something new, the four-year-old sitting on the bathroom floor crying, and that this is not crying for attention, this is crying in private, the way grown-ups do when they want no one to know. She looks up at him. “You don’t love me as much as Parker,” she says simply.