chapter seventeen chapter seventeenOn a road ten miles northwest of Gatumba, Sarah hauled herself out the window of a moving car and planted her butt on the rim of a door that had lost its window decades ago. Opening a bottle, she leaned across the windshield and sprayed the driver’s side with water, so the driver could clear the glass with her one working wiper.
“Better? Mieux?” Sarah asked, dipping her head to speak to Ninette, an acquaintance from UNHCR who happened to be at the airport in Bujumbura yesterday to pick up supplies. “I have a little more water—”
“Oui, ça va, that’s fine.” Ninette took one hand off the wheel long enough to adjust the knot of her orange-and-green head-scarf, which had gone askew when the car lurched into an enormous mud hole, coating the whole front end with a third layer of muck. “I will have to go more slowly,” she said. “One more hit and—pftt!—no more suspension.”
“The camp is just around the bend.”
Though every bounce jarred her bottom, Sarah lingered on the edge of the door. She’d left Boston two days ago in a snowstorm, after spending Christmas and most of January with her family in Vermont. Now she breathed deep of the humid air, sharp with the scent of ozone and rich with the smell of earthy decay.
As they passed the last hillock, the refugee camp loomed into view. It sprawled up the gentle slope of a denuded hillside in all its strange beauty. At the sight of it, she dug her fingers into the metal rim of the car’s roof. Years ago, this camp had been a tent-strewn temporary way-station for refugees from the wars in Congo and Rwanda—an oasis in crisis, to be abandoned as soon as everyone had been repatriated. Now, as she gazed upon the exuberant patchwork of makeshift houses created from bent saplings, thatched hay, and tarps, she realized how fully it had become a village, complete with—she counted the roofs—a dispensary, a clinic, a maternity unit, and three schools.
The ragged ribbon of her heart clenched. After all the weeks in New York, helping Jo settle the situation with Gracie, and then, after staying in her family’s rambling farmhouse, Sarah had toyed with the idea of leaving Doctors Without Borders for good. Strangely, it had nothing to do with Colin. She’d shut the door on him in L.A. Her weariness and uncertainty ran deeper than that; and it had been growing long before she received Rachel’s letter. She’d collected too many terrible memories. She’d finally filled herself up to overflowing.
She’d come a whisker away from quitting the business forever. Until she heard the news that Sam had returned to Burundi.
At the sound of shouts, Sarah saw a crowd of children racing toward the car—a gaggle of excited boys. Sarah recognized the biggest, Misage, who’d grown at least a head taller in the months she’d been gone. Niboyu, Misage’s younger brother, tottered barefoot, trying to keep up, sporting his big brother’s muddy Red Sox baseball cap. The kids spread out across the road like stampeding antelope, shouting her name.
“Mwaramutse.” Sarah greeted the boys in Kirundi, reaching into her woven bag for the hard candy she’d brought as gifts. When they got close enough, she tossed the first amber candy to Misage. “Eh, Misage, bite?”
“Hello, Miss Sarah,” he replied, in English, as he deftly caught the candy. “Welcome back to Burundi how are you today I am fine thank you.”
Show-off. Clearly, he’d been made leader of the crowd, though she knew he was barely twelve and had a weakness of heart due to a bout of scarlet fever when he was a toddler.
“You’ve been studying hard,” she said, as the kids swarmed around her side of the slow-moving car, reaching eagerly for the candy she doled out as fairly as possible. “Where are you all going today?”
“We go to market.”
“Ah.” The market was four miles away, and not much more than a crossroads to Bujumbura, the capital. “Did you find anything good on the heap?”
He shrugged, indicating the sack against his back. “Kool-Aid very sweet. Pretty shoes. Very high.” He struggled as he searched for words for the things he had scavenged from the refugee garbage, and then he sank his free hand into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out three small tubes. “This, too.”
Sarah stared at the tubes and frowned as she tried to remember the words for “lip balm” in Kirundi. Doubted the language had such words. In this humid, muddy climate, there was very little need for lip balm or stiletto heels, or for many of the odd donations that occasionally made their way to the refugee camp. Yet these little entrepreneurs could earn some coin hustling such flotsam in the marketplace—usually to prostitutes. Their efforts kept whole families afloat.
“Pour les lèvres,” she explained in French, the lingua franca of the camp, as she rubbed her mouth in imitation. “Pour les jolies filles.”
For the pretty girls.
A couple of the boys hooted. Misage quickly shoved the lip balm back into his pocket. Tugging on the fraying sleeve of Niboyu’s oversized sweatshirt, he barked orders to the rest of the boys, who made motions of not paying attention even as they headed back down the road, waving, vigorously sucking the butterscotch candy.
“Nzoz’ejo, Miss Sarah,” Misage shouted over his shoulder. “I will come tomorrow.”
To the clinic. To learn more English from her, as he surreptitiously watched Dr. Mwami pierce a boil or stitch up a swipe of a machete. As if Sarah had been away for a few days, not four months.
Time passes very differently in Burundi.
The small group proved to be only a fraction of the welcoming committee. As they approached the steep road that led to the camp’s main building, a flood of children poured around them, splattering mud with every excited step. Despite leaning on the horn and shouting at the kids, with her head outside the window, Ninette was forced to bring the car to a complete stop at the base of the hill.
“Ça va,” Sarah said, sliding inside the car to gather her bags. “No one ever makes it up the hill. You don’t want to attempt that slope anyway,” she said, gesturing to the steep, muddy incline. “It won’t be solid until the rainy season ends.”
“You trust this swarm with the boxes?”
Sarah eyed the crowd. “Some.”
“Bon.”
Ninette shoved the car into park, kicked the door open, and waded through the throng of kids toward the trunk. With a jerk, she lifted the dented hood and handed Sarah’s duffel bag, following Sarah’s direction, to a tall Tutsi girl with a regal bearing.
“À ma chambre, Aline,” Sarah said, “if I still have that room by the dispensary. Then come to me after—for a gift.”
Sarah had made sure to stock up on gifts. Her duffel bag bulged with beads to braid into cornrows, flip-flops decorated with colored glass, Bic pens, and cigarettes made of real American tobacco.
Ninette handed box after box into the arms of the chosen, barking at them in fluent Kirundi to take the boxes directly to the doctor. “Tell Dr. Mwami,” Ninette said to Sarah, piling a second, smaller box into a young girl’s arms, “that these are all the salt tablets we can spare for now but there’s another shipment coming in soon.”
“I have a few boxes arriving by plane also.” Before leaving the States, Sarah had stocked up on alcohol prep wipes, bandages, IV tubing, and other simple necessities. “Maybe I can send Sam…” She choked on the name. It fell off her lips without thought, and then caught as the sound reached her ears. “… or someone from the camp,” she added, recovering, “to pick everything up at once.”
Ninette embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks, and then shooed the children away from the Peugeot as she slipped back in. Sarah plunged her hand into her bag and lured the swarm away from the old car with the sound of crackling wrappers. They rushed her so fast that she nearly fell.
Sarah found her footing and headed up the incline while the children yanked on her skirt, patted her arms, ululated, and cried out in that high pitch only young children can reach. Miss Sarah Miss Sarah Miss Sarah Miss Sarah, they cried, hands raised, as she tucked a single candy into each palm, the number of palms never slacking, the number of faces never easing, and she recognized most of them: tall, slim Tutsi girls, the wide cheekbones of a child of the Twa tribe—Have you finally lost those front teeth, Shabani? Is that you, Nadège, with all that hair? Egide, have you had your measles shot yet? The mud sucked at her sandals with every step, threatening to steal them from her feet.
Then, drawn by the noise, the women emerged, ducking beneath the doorjambs to straighten like long streaks of color against the stick-and-mud construction of their refugee homes, or rising from their cooking pots, smoking over wood fires between buildings.
Sarah waved at Solange, noting the swell of her belly. Sarah called a greeting to Raissa, surreptitiously counting her toddlers, and wondered about the littlest one—the one who’d been sick with measles when Sarah left—the one she did not see.
She wondered, too, about the young girl she didn’t see, the one with two crooked braids standing up on either side of her head, tipped with wooden beads. She’d been sent away, no doubt. To a place with no bad memories.
Sarah glanced over her shoulder to a woman trudging up the hill, balancing a heaping thatch of firewood on top of her head.
“Bonjour, Safi,” Sarah said. “How are your children?”
“Yvan has a sore, and Mamy drank bad water, but the others fare well. Did your travels pass well?”
“Thank you, yes.”
“And your mother and father, are they in beautiful health?”
“Yes, Safi, thanks for asking. How are your lovely mother and respected father?”
Sarah continued to hand out pieces of hard candy as she and Safi traded the expected morning salutations. Finally, after she’d asked about Safi’s parents and children and aunts and goats, Safi said, flatly, “Bon,” and got to the true business of her blessings.
“Now that you are here,” Safi said, flashing a sly grin, “are you hiding an American husband among those children?”
Sarah reached deep in her bag, scraping the bottom for the last few candies, letting her hair screen her face. No doubt Dr. Mwami had explained her sudden absence in a way the Banyamulenge women would understand—that Sarah had gone home to see her family, a family that would undoubtedly marry her off before she became too old, because she was already, in Tutsi terms, the oddest of creatures: a woman without a husband, away from home.
“What need do I have for a husband,” Sarah said, “when I already have so many children?”
“How can that be, you come back alone?” Safi paused, to hitch the weight of sticks on her head. “The men in your tribe—they must be…” She made a motion with her hand, indicating her low opinion.
“Maybe none could pay the bride wealth,” she said. “My father asks for too many cows.”
Safi cocked her head. “It is good to have a father who values you.”
“It’s a blessing upon me.”
“But a father is no husband.” Safi leaned toward her. “You know my son, Sarah. Young and strong. Almost of age.” She winked. “Tuyage twongere.”
Let’s talk.
Safi’s laugh told Sarah the woman had managed to make Sarah blush even harder, a feat of endless fascination among the refugees. She’d better brace herself; no doubt there’d be more of such teasing coming.
The children swarmed even after the last candy was gone, roiling around her, asking questions, their small hands stroking her arms. She approached the main building of the camp and noted the moss growing on the edge of the roof, and the chunk of mud that had slid off the wall in the humidity. It would soon need repair.
And she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help scanning the open area, looking for a very specific jeep, wondering if he was here now, having delivered some supplies, perhaps boxes of donations like the ones the boys had filched from to bring to the market, but there were no cars here, nothing but a couple of loose goats. It was better this way, she told herself. She needed to brace herself, get a good grip on her senses, before she laid eyes on Sam.
She gave the last candy to the youngest in the crowd, and then said her good-byes as she slipped into the coolness of the main building. It served as the registration area for refugees, as well as a hospital and living quarters for herself, Dr. Mwami, and a collection of other employees of various NGOs. If it weren’t for the flies, the mud walls, and the humming of the generator, the room could be mistaken for a back office somewhere in Iowa. An iron-haired woman in khaki scowled over a monitor, her features bathed in a blue glow, as she pounded a single key over and over.
“Be with you in a minute,” she said, sliding under the table to unplug the CPU. “Dang operating system, freezes the whole drive,” she muttered, “couldn’t bring us a Mac, had to give us some virus-ridden office reject with a processor speed in the kilobytes—”
“Hello, Maggie.”
The woman poked her head up over the rim of the desk and blinked behind her square-rimmed glasses. “I’ll be damned if it isn’t Sarah Pollard.” She hauled herself up. “You just cost me two bottles of banana wine.”
Sarah cocked her head.
“I made a bet with that hunk o’ man with that bed-nets organization. Told him, after you left, that we wouldn’t see your skinny ass again. Can’t say I’m sorry I lost.” She spread her strong, wiry arms. “Come give Maggie a hug.”
Sarah braced herself for Maggie’s powerful squeeze, and was sputtering when Maggie finally let her go long enough to give her a good look-over. “You’re supposed to come back from the States fattened up and tanned, darling. What the hell you been doing, hibernating?”
“On airplanes,” Sarah said, ruefully. “It’s a very long story.”
“Well, there ain’t a hell of a lot doing around here, so you can fill me in on the gritty details over the next ration of mush, what d’ya say?”
“Sounds good.” Sarah thrust her chin at the computer. “More trouble?”
“Than it’s worth.” Maggie rounded the desk and gave the monitor a good swipe on the side. “The monitor’s got a burn-in. I think it’s porn. Ever try reading Banyamulenge profiles through the shadow of an angry penis?” Maggie gestured over her shoulder to the suite of machines humming behind a tarp. “The real problem is that I can take all the pictures I want of these lost souls, but without access to the refugee database, I can’t match orphans. Ah, you don’t want to hear this. It’s nothing Maggie can’t fix.” Maggie eyed Sarah’s bulging bag. “Wouldn’t happen to have a nice hummin’ black-market processor in that bag, would you?”
Sarah pulled out some magazines. “No, but I did bring you three months’ worth of People magazine.”
“Child,” she said, with a deep-throated laugh, “you just earned yourself an upgrade on your firewall.”
Sarah spread the magazines on the desk, and then cocked her head toward the hospital wing. “Is he in?”
“Is Brad Pitt crazy?” Maggie pulled the top magazine toward her. “Beyoncé is what? When did that happen?” She gave her head a shake. “I’ve got some reading to do. Why don’t you go on back to the clinic? Dr. Mwami could use the help. The last girl Doctors Without Borders sent, he demoted to firewood duty.”
Sarah shrugged her much lighter bag over her shoulder and made her way through the open doorway to the clinic. She followed the strengthening scent of disinfectant and bleach, which did a heroic job of masking the less pleasant scents of a room that housed fevered patients. The room itself, nothing more than a large open space, had its own separate entrance. Six of the eight beds were currently occupied, and she was relieved not to find any children lying on the floor pallets they kept stacked in the supply room. Yet a full bench of patients waited for Dr. Mwami’s attention, and one woman paced just outside the clinic, clutching her swollen abdomen against the labor pains.
She heard Dr. Mwami behind the single curtain.
“… I tell them, never drink still water. Still water is bad water, full of bugs and sickness. Fast water is better, if you must drink. Yet over and over again I see this. You will remember what I am telling you, won’t you, Dieudonné, the next time you go by that pond when you’re gathering sticks?”
Sarah came around the edge of the curtain to see the boy, thin and weak, manage a nod.
“Two of these a day.” Dr. Mwami grabbed a bottle from the shelf by the bed, checked the label, and handed it to the mother, Inès—a young and lovely woman who had named her child “God-given,” in spite of the less than loving way he had been conceived. “Two a day,” Dr. Mwami repeated, “one at sunrise and another at sunset. Comprenez?”
Inès nodded.
“You have no other children, yes? Then take the bed at the end of the row, so I can observe him. Maybe, in a day or two, he’ll be strong enough to go home.” Dr. Mwami raised his head and saw her. “Ah, Sarah. You are back.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Dr. Mwami pressed the plunger of the antibacterial gel on the bedside table, filling his palm with the quick-drying liquid. “That’s the eleventh case of bloody diarrhea I’ve seen today—but it’s not from the tanks. In every case, they drank out of that cow pond about a kilometer west of the camp.”
Sarah started. “Cholera?”
“No, but that’s why six of them are still here, for monitoring.” Dr. Mwami vigorously rubbed his hands together until all the antibacterial lotion dried. “The other two beds are taken by women who’ve just delivered. There’s a third on the way”—the laboring woman cried out, punctuating his words—“and if my instincts are right, little Claude out there has broken a rib from his foolish idea to climb the water tank.”
Sarah couldn’t help the smile that pulled at the corners of her lips as Dr. Mwami continued to catalogue the cases as if he were standing in a white-tiled room in a city hospital and she’d just come in for a new shift. She kept mum as she nodded, feeling slow in the head. Absently, she thumbed the strap of her bag off her shoulder, took the familiar stained lab coat off a peg on the wall, and hung her bag in its place.
“For now,” he said, “you’d best fetch Lynca out of her mother’s arms—the screaming one. She’ll need about a dozen stitches and a tetanus shot for that gash on her foot.”
Sarah shoved her arms into the sleeves of her lab coat. She walked around the curtain and glanced at the bench-full of patients, trying to pick the right sobbing girl from the crowd. Sarah led the girl behind the curtain. At first, she couldn’t find a pail or a clean cloth, though the soap was where it always was, and she felt Dr. Mwami’s slight impatience as she fumbled for supplies. She cleaned the girl’s foot as the doctor flourished a frighteningly long needle. Then Sarah held the girl’s hand while she told halting stories about America: about dogs who slept in feather beds, and machines that sucked away dirt, and houses that did not need fires to be kept warm. Dr. Mwami finished the stitches and called the next patient while Sarah did her best to keep up.
The next time Sarah lifted her head, it seemed, the bench was empty of patients, and the dried banana fronds on the roof rustled in the night breeze. Dr. Mwami shoved a bawling newborn into Sarah’s waiting arms and then turned back to take care of the exhausted mother.
Sarah brought the newborn to an empty pallet and gently cleaned the birthing fluids off the tiny girl. As she tucked the child into the box that would serve as a cradle, Dr. Mwami dropped a hand on her shoulder.
“Sarah—we’ve missed you.” He gave her a curt nod before turning away. “Glad to have you back.”
Sarah stared down at the infant, swaddled tight, as evening insects buzzed outside, as the light dimmed to the rose-purple of a Burundi evening, as the scent of cooking fires and roasted goat filtered through the open door. She felt, somewhere deep inside her, a certain fundamental shift of gravity, like a cart dragged through the mud finding sudden purchase on a straight and solid road. She stood quiet for a moment and let herself experience the growing lightness of being.
Yes. It was very good to be home.
A full week passed before Sarah finally heard the familiar pitch of a revving motor as a vehicle labored its way up the hill to the main building. She was pacing in the clinic, patting the tense back of a screaming infant who’d just received his first immunization, when she recognized the distinctive grinding of metal as the driver forced the jeep into a lower gear.
Sam had returned.
Her stomach dropped right to her feet. She patted the baby’s back a little faster as prickles of heat and shame erupted all over her. Sarah knew she’d have to face him, sooner or later. He was, after all, the one fragile thread that had been strong enough to pull her all the way back to Burundi. She knew this wasn’t going to be easy. They’d parted on such bad terms in Bangalore. He had been so angry with her.
With reason, Sarah reminded herself. Sam had been right. She’d made the wrong moral choice in India. She’d thrown herself at Colin, knowing he was promised to another woman, when she should have just said good-bye.
The devil had a million excuses, but Sarah took none of them. She couldn’t blame her behavior on Rachel, or Kate’s urging, or Jo’s encouragement: Sarah had made the decision all on her own. In the months past, she’d made her peace with God and her own conscience. She just wasn’t sure she could bear Sam’s terrible censure. Especially when she’d been such a virulent holier-than-thou about so many of Sam’s own difficult decisions.
“Dr. Mwami!” Josette, a young woman who happened to be herding some goats just outside the clinic, poked her head around the door. “Dr. Mwami! Master Tremayne is here! Come, you must see!”
“He is asking for you,” Josette said excitedly. She spoke toward the doctor, but her eyes danced on Sarah. “He wants to see you, Dr. Mwami!”
Sarah glanced at the doctor. He was inoculating an older boy against measles, a boy of about nine who sat with his eyes squeezed shut. The doctor finished the shot, pressed a cotton ball on the welling dot of blood, and tossed the needle in a sharps container.
“And doesn’t Sam look fine,” Josette said, her smile so wide her cheeks bulged like plums. “A fine man he is, tall and strong! And no wife of his own!”
Sarah turned away to lay the babe in the box they used as a crib so the young woman wouldn’t revel in seeing Sarah’s face redden even more. She hoped the teasing about her lack of a husband would taper off soon, but she supposed Sam’s arrival would only make it worse. Half the women of the camp considered her and Sam married in all but tradition. Didn’t they argue like husband and wife?
They did. All the time. It had taken her months to accept the realization that she was angry around Sam because he stirred within her a flood of dangerous feelings. Feelings she’d only dared to examine when an entire ocean physically separated her from him.
Dr. Mwami told the waiting patients that he’d be right back and headed out of the clinic. The patients, curious, quickly followed. Sarah fussed with the baby, arranging the cotton bedding, until she heard a voice in her head—part Rachel’s, part her own.
Coward.
Yanking off her lab coat, she tossed it across an empty cot and strode through the registration area to the main door of the compound.
The usual confusion of goats, children, cattle, and the curious had gathered in an arc around Sam’s jeep. Sam had managed to drive the vehicle all the way up the soggy hill, but the front wheels had sunk in the mud to the rim, and the vehicle was so splattered only a few spots of white paint and windshield glass shone through the muck. In stark contrast, Sam stood apart, straight-backed, wearing a blindingly white button-down shirt and a pair of belted, starched khakis.
She curled her hand around the bent sapling that formed the doorjamb. He looked fit and strong. The dark skin of his chest gleamed through the fibers of his shirt. He’d rolled the cuffs up, exposing the ropy strength of his forearms. He stood still, visibly uneasy, waiting for something.
She slipped outside to stand at Dr. Mwami’s side. Sam’s gaze shifted. It fell upon her. She braced herself for anger, censure, dismay—or, worst of all, lack of interest—but his look was a sudden flare, shifting and unreadable.
She shifted her feet to balance herself. She really must remember to eat her rations.
“Sam,” Dr. Mwami said sharply, “what’s all this about? I have a dozen patients waiting.”
Sam answered by turning away and nodding to a tall young man, who promptly slipped away. Then, leaning forward, Sam motioned to a boy by the other end of the jeep, who shot off in a different direction. The boy returned a moment later, trailing four young goats, just as the first man muscled through the crowd, gripping a leash and one horn of a brown Ankole cow.
The crowd murmured admiring noises, drawing around the beast, and the women grinned with new excitement.
“Dr. Mwami,” Sam said, “I’ve been thinking of how best to do this for some time now. I’ve decided it’s you who I must approach, to make an offer.”
“Speak plainly, Sam, is this another one of your grand jokes?”
“No, no joke.” A muscle flexed in Sam’s dark cheek, catching a gleam of sunlight. “You are considered the foster father for many of the fatherless daughters in the camp.”
“Well, what of it?”
“I’ve come to make an offer,” he said, gesturing to the goats and the cow, “of bride wealth.”
“Bride wealth.” Humor flickered across the doctor’s usually strong, expressionless face. “Burundi tradition. You wish to marry.”
Sarah swayed, sucking in a slow, long breath. The sagging belly of rain clouds rumbled across the sky, like Burundi drums in the distance. The first faint patter of raindrops rustled the dried roof fronds. A breeze brought the sweet tang of fermenting bananas from some hidden mash-pot.
She dived into Sam’s dark-chocolate stare. Fathoms deep, those eyes; she kept tumbling deeper.
Sam spoke, loud and clear. “I make an offer… for Sarah Pollard.”
Around the clearing, the women squealed and clapped their hands, and the children laughed, and suddenly everyone was moving, dancing, clapping, and stomping in circles. All but she and Dr. Mwami and Sam, three stiff figures amid the madness. Sam watched her steadily, his hands curling in his trouser pockets, ruining the sharp creases, while her heart started a steady, heavy pounding.
“A cow?” Dr. Mwami said suddenly. “Four stinking goats? What use do I have for these beasts, Samuel Tremayne?”
The crowd’s exclamations ended abruptly. The women stilled and watched Dr. Mwami with wide, unbelieving eyes.
“Of all the things you could bring me,” the doctor continued, “syringes or alcohol, iodine or bandages, salt tablets, antibiotics—you come to me with animals? Animals?!”
Sam spread a hand toward the jeep. “There is more.”
“There’d better be.” Muttering, Dr. Mwami left Sarah’s side to pull open the filthy door, revealing a pile of boxes. He patted his lab coat for his reading glasses, but Sarah didn’t know if he found them, because, while he looked, Sam crossed the yard, closing the space between them.
“Sarah-belle.”
She broke eye contact, then took interest in her muddy flip-flops, and filled her lungs with air, because it was too much, really—too much all at once—a great volcano of feeling. She didn’t deserve this. She’d done nothing but fight him since the first day he’d driven up the hill, over a year ago, and announced himself with a grin and a wink. She’d struggled against him the whole time, fought his tactics, even as he brought her equipment they had never been able to get before, despite all their efforts with grants and the requisitioning and the bureaucracy. She’d tried to drive him away with her holier-than-thou disapproval and her arguments about moral reckoning, but he kept coming back. She’d ignored him and yelled at him, even as she shamelessly chased another man—yet he persisted, solid and unyielding and sure. Sam scared her—she’d never really understood why, not until now.
His fingers were suddenly under her chin. She yielded to the soft pressure. Dared to look at that face, only inches from hers, as she had dared once before, under an acacia tree on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Intense and searching. The spattering of pits on his cheeks was like so many stars in the night sky, a counterpart to her own freckles. Sam, her dark reflection.
“I thought,” she said, her voice breathy, “that you were leaving Doctors Without Borders. I thought you wouldn’t come back.”
“So did I.” His nostrils flared as his gaze drifted over her head for a moment to the mountainous jungle around them. “But this place, these people…” His jaw worked. “It’s my calling.”
“You’re not angry with me?”
“For having a loyal heart?” He shook his head, sharply. “I can’t fault you for that. It’s one of the reasons I love you.”
She watched his throat move as he said those words. Fearlessly. She raised her hand and placed it flat on his chest, just over his heart. Beneath the warm cotton, she felt the strong, steady beat.
“Kate tells me,” he said, in a strangled voice, “that you are done with him.”
It took her a moment to remember who.
“Yes. I am.”
Sarah flexed her fingers, feeling the curve of his pectoral muscle, hard and tense beneath her touch. She wanted to caress him without the roughness of cloth between them. Wanted to feel him—Sam, who was real, flesh-and-blood, heart and soul, standing in all his warm, yearning glory before her.
Sarah knew that Sam could have gone anywhere. He could have transferred within the organization to another area altogether. He could have left the business and returned to England to work in an office, or anything. He could have washed his hands of her, of Burundi, and spent his days watching cricket on the telly and eating bangers and mash. He’d been talking about it for weeks after they’d rescued the girl with the crooked braids, and she had listened with some of the same yearning in her heart.
But he chose to come back. To all of it—the good and the bad and the beyond—because he was stronger than she was. He was a man of good heart and unwavering loyalty. And it made her think that maybe there was someone in the world perfect in his own imperfect humanity, and she’d been a fool all this time, looking in the wrong direction, for the wrong man, even as the right man walked calmly right beside her.
She closed her eyes and pressed her nose into the hollow of his chest. His shirt smelled like soap warmed in the sun. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Let the past lie,” he said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” He thrust both hands, fingers splayed, through the tangled mess of her hair, gathering the great weight of it up at the back of her head and letting her shift position against him, his chest her fulcrum. “You’ve been gone so long. I was afraid you wouldn’t come back. I’ve missed you, Sarah-belle.”
“Sam.”
“Shhh.” He buried his face in her hair. “There is time enough.”
“But I want you to know this.” She turned her face, so she could feel the bare skin of her cheek against the bare V of his chest.
“Sam, I came back to Burundi—for you.”
Sam shifted the jeep into fourth gear as Sarah raised her chin to the breeze. They’d made it off the rough mountain paths onto the firmer roads approaching Lake Tanganyika. She slid her fingers over his, where he gripped the gear shift, so he could drive and she could touch him at the same time. She tilted her head and managed a tentative smile, and he gifted her with a laugh that made her toes curl.
They’d escaped their own celebration. After Dr. Mwami had announced the bride wealth acceptable—to the jubilation of the crowd—Sam had informed everyone that several boxes of sorghum beer cluttered the back of his jeep, and they should be promptly unloaded. The women ululated, the boys ran for their drums, and everyone began to dance. No sooner had the last box been removed than Sam gripped her hand and urged her into the passenger’s seat. Maggie shot out of the clinic, tossed a duffel bag through the window, gave Sarah a salty, weepy kiss, and said, “Git, now, both of you!”
Now bouncing around in the jeep, Sarah sensed where they were going. Anticipation was doing strange and thrilling things to her. Her grip on his hand tightened. Sam nudged his fingers between hers, until she relaxed.
They pulled up to a scattering of well-made huts centered on a low, long, whitewashed building, well tended with pots of flowers in exuberant bloom. A friend of Sam’s owned the establishment, which was luxurious for Burundi, but considered by international travelers a “rough and rustic” retreat for environmental tourists interested in viewing the lake hippos or doing a little sport fishing in the narrow native canoes. Behind the main building, she glimpsed the deep-blue waters of the lake, shimmering silver now, reflecting the threatening clouds.
“I’ll register,” Sam said, grabbing his bag and hers from the backseat. “I’ll meet you by the lake.”
Sarah ran her fingers through her windblown hair as she sauntered around the edge of the building. A few fat drops of rain pattered, leaving spots on the back patio and sinking into the thatched umbrellas that shaded the few small tables. Beyond, a grassy slope spread to the edge of the lake. On a little hillock, just by the water, an acacia tree spread its low, wide branches. She walked directly to it and leaned up against its rough bark. It protected her from the sporadic rain.
She heard his footsteps in the grass, long before he came up behind her and pulled her into his embrace. She sank into him. How they fit—the back of her head in the crook between his jaw and shoulder, her back flat against his strong torso, his forearms tight beneath her breasts, his breath warming the hollow below her ear.
“I’d convinced myself,” she whispered, remembering the last time they’d embraced under this tree, “that it was just another kiss for you. That it was nothing to you, a bit of flirtation.”
“I frightened you.”
“I didn’t expect it,” she admitted, “and then I couldn’t explain… how strongly I felt.”
He turned her toward him and claimed her mouth. He took what he’d taken before—her lips, her balance, her senses—but he didn’t stop this time. He deepened the kiss and drew out the last of her lingering fear, the last of her doubts, coaxing from her the passion she’d been too afraid to give until right now.
“The people in the camp,” he said, pausing to press his lips against her temple, where a vein pulsed wildly. “They consider us married now.”
“I know,” she said, huskily. “So do I.”
His grip tightened.
“And though my father will appreciate the Burundi tradition,” she added, sensing what Sam was trying to say, “being a pastor, he’ll want a more formal Western ceremony eventually.”
“So will mine.”
She pulled away to look up at his face in silent query.
“Didn’t I ever tell you? He met my mother on a mission.” His smile was soft, teasing. “He’s a clergyman in the Anglican Church.”
Her smile warmed into a gentle laugh as the rain pattered around them, big messy drops falling from the leaves. She wondered at how much they still had to learn about each other, and how lovely it would be to do just that in the weeks and months and years ahead.
A drop of rain fell upon his cheek. She touched it, and with her finger she traced the tiny scars along his cheekbone, then followed the curve of his ear and the strong length of his jaw, watching as he grew silent and still and very intent upon her face.
I will be afraid no more.
She whispered, “Do we have a room?”
“A whole hut, Sarah-belle.”
He claimed her lips again. Bending, he lifted her off the ground, leaving the shelter of the acacia tree as he walked in the direction of one of the stilted huts. He twirled her as he carried her, making the whole world blur beyond his head, blur beyond the fall of the rain, which was steady now. It soaked his head and her hair and his shirt as only a tropical rain could.
He pushed the door open with his back. She fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, pushing the wet cotton off one broad shoulder, letting her palm linger on the perfect mahogany swell of muscle, as he finished the job. He skimmed his hand across her waist, then slid his fingers under the hem of her T-shirt. He traced a trail up her spine, dragging the shirt up with his wrist, exposing her stomach to his, so that she couldn’t resist pressing them together from navel to breast.
Their clothes fell in sodden heaps on the floor. With eyes wide open, she took wonder in their nakedness, marveling in the long sinews of his frame, the strength and coiled power of his lean body, the stark contrasts of their skin. He held himself back for her—she sensed it in the subtle trembling of his muscles as he drew her onto the bed and in the swiftness of his breath as he scraped his palm across the bone of her hip. With his lips and tongue and teeth he brought her to the tight edge of all sensation and held her there until, her whole body atremble, she wordlessly urged him close—even closer.
Sam. Loving, wonderful Sam.
And she felt lightness in her heart, like a soul washed clean by rain.