The following morning, D and I left for Mozambique. We regretted having to leave so soon. “We’ll miss the postmortem,” D lamented. We wouldn’t be around her family table when the highlights and lowlights were relived and retold, but as was the case with most of our plans, they were made on the fly and were affected by countless other changes that led to a domino effect, resulting in an early departure we couldn’t change.
We flew first to London; then overnight to Johannesburg, South Africa; then on to Vilanculos in southern Mozambique. We spent a day recovering and then we went into the bush. The wildlife in Gorongosa National Park had been all but obliterated by the sixteen-year civil war that ravaged most of the country. Over the past few years, large efforts had been made to revitalize the park and reintroduce game, but things had a long way to go. Still the place was raw and wild and remote. What Gorongosa lacked in overdevelopment it also lacked in effective service, which is how we ended up with a flat tire and no spare by the side of a dirt road at dawn with jungle drums pounding in our ears.
Eventually another van arrived and took us the rest of the way to the airport in Beira, which, like nearly all African airports, was hopelessly outdated and inspired little confidence. Our flight had left long ago, and there wouldn’t be another until the following day. I consulted my guidebook and discovered that Beira was “the easiest and best place to catch malaria in all of Mozambique, perhaps the best place in all of Africa.” I didn’t share this news with D.
Beira had been a stronghold of the resistance during the civil war and it had yet to show any real signs of recovery; it remained a war-torn hive of African chaos. The next morning we returned to the airport.
It took sixteen hours, three flights, and two more bone-jangling rides to travel four hundred miles and reach the small island off the northern coast in the Quirimbas archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The sun had set long before we arrived.
The next morning revealed a tropical paradise—blinding-white, buttery-soft sand; turquoise water rippling up to the shore; a huge blue sky; and palms gently blowing in a soft breeze that took the heat out of the air. For breakfast we had thin crepes and fresh mango. We watched yellow dhows sail across the horizon. We swam in the Indian Ocean. The next day we did it again. We made love in the afternoons and took long naps. We showered outdoors under the purple sky of fading sunsets and had dinner by candlelight on the beach. Stars shot across the sky. We went to bed early and rose late.
We considered staying a few extra days, to make up for the ones we had missed, but then D turned to me. “I miss the kids.”
“Me too.”
A few weeks after we returned home, D shook me awake in the middle of the night.
“Andrew, I think I’ve got malaria.”
“Huh?”
“I think I’ve got malaria,” she repeated. “I have a shooting pain in my side, which is very typical of malaria, and the gestation period is exactly right.”
“It’s probably the Chinese food you had for dinner.”
“And I’m clammy.”
I felt her forehead. It was fine. “If you’re still alive in the morning, we’ll call the doctor.”
She groaned and rolled away from me.
A few minutes later I heard the patter of our daughter’s feet. She climbed up into bed and snuggled down between us. Then my son appeared. “Move over, Dad.”
Soon I could hear everyone breathing evenly as I lay awake in the dark, with everything I wanted beside me in bed. I rolled over, and a mosquito buzzed in my ear.