It was a brand of imposition of which young people like Liana thought nothing: showing up on an older couple’s doorstep, the home of friends of friends of friends, playing on a tentative enough connection that she’d have had difficulty constructing the sequence of referrals. If there was anything to that six-degrees-of-separation folderol, she must have been equally related to the entire population of the continent.
Typically, she’d given short notice, first announcing her intention to visit in a voice mail only a few days before bumming a ride with another party she hardly knew. (Well, the group had spent a long, hard-drinking night in Nairobi at a sprawling house with mangy dead animals on the walls that the guy with the ponytail was caretaking. In this footloose crowd of journalists and foreign-aid workers between famines, trust-fund layabouts, and tourists who didn’t think of themselves as tourists, if only because they never did anything, the evening qualified them all as fast friends.) Ponytail Guy was driving to Malindi, on the Kenyan coast, for an expat bash that sounded a little druggie for Liana’s Midwestern tastes. But the last available seat in his Land Rover would take her a stone’s throw from this purportedly more-the-merrier couple and their gorgeously situated crash pad. It was nice of the guy to divert to Kilifi to drop her off, but then Liana was attractive, and knew it.
Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious house guest would require of her hosts. Though Liana imagined herself undemanding, even the easy to please required fresh sheets, which would have to be laundered after her departure, then dried and folded. She would require a towel for swimming, a second for her shower. She would expect dinner, replete with discreet refreshments of her wineglass, strong filtered coffee every morning, and—what cost older people more than a sponger in her early twenties realized—steady conversational energy channelled in her direction for the duration of her stay.
For her part, Liana always repaid such hospitality with brightness and enthusiasm. On arrival at the Henleys’ airy, weathered wooden house nestled in the coastal woods, she made a point of admiring soapstone knickknacks, cooing over framed black-and-whites of Masai initiation ceremonies, and telling comical tales about the European riffraff she’d met in Nairobi. Her effervescence came naturally. She would never have characterized it as an effort, until—and unless—she grew older herself.
While she’d have been reluctant to form the vain conceit outright, it was perhaps tempting to regard the sheer insertion of her physical presence as a gift, one akin to showing up at the door with roses. Supposedly a world-famous photographer, Regent Henley carried herself as if she used to be a looker, but she’d let her long dry hair go gray. Her crusty husband, Beano (the handle may have worked when he was a boy, but now that he was over sixty it sounded absurd), could probably use a little eye candy twitching onto their screened-in porch for sundowners: some narrow hips wrapped tightly in a fresh kikoi, long wet hair slicked back from a tanned, exertion-flushed face after a shower. Had Liana needed further rationalization of her amiable freeloading, she might also have reasoned that in Kenya every white household was overrun with underemployed servants. Not Regent and Beano but their African help would knot the mosquito netting over the guest bed. So Liana’s impromptu visit would provide the domestics with something to do, helping to justify the fact that bwana paid their children’s school fees.
But Liana thought none of these things. She thought only that this was another opportunity for adventure on the cheap, and at that time economy trumped all other considerations. Not because she was rude, or prone to take advantage by nature. She was merely young. A perfectly pleasant girl on her first big excursion abroad, she would doubtless grow into a better-socialized woman who would make exorbitant hotel reservations rather than dream of dumping herself on total strangers.
Yet midway through this casual mooching off the teeny-tiny-bit-pretentious photographer and her retired safari-guide husband (who likewise seemed rather self-impressed, considering that Liana had already run into a dozen masters of the savanna just like him), Liana entered one eerily elongated window during which her eventual capacity to make sterner judgments of her youthful impositions from the perspective of a more worldly adulthood became imperilled. A window after which there might be no woman. There might only, ever, have been a girl—remembered, guiltily, uneasily, resentfully, by her aging, unwilling hosts more often than they would have preferred.
Day Four. She was staying only six nights—an eyeblink for a twenty-three-year-old, a “bloody long time” for the Brit who had groused to his wife under-breath about putting up “another dewy-eyed Yank who confuses a flight to Africa with a trip to the zoo.” Innocent of Beano’s less-than-charmed characterizations, Liana had already established a routine. Mornings were consumed with texting friends back in Milwaukee about her exotic situation, with regular refills of passion-fruit juice. After lunch, she’d pile into the jeep with Regent to head to town for supplies, after tolerating the photographer’s ritual admonishment that Kilifi was heavily Muslim and it would be prudent to “cover up.” (Afternoons were hot. Even her muscle T clung uncomfortably, and Liana considered it a concession not to strip down to her running bra. She wasn’t about to drag on long pants to pander to a bunch of uptight foreigners she’d never see again; career expats like Regent were forever showing off how they’re hip to local customs and you’re not.) She never proffered a few hundred shillings to contribute to the grocery bill, not because she was cheap—though she was; at her age, that went without saying—but because the gesture never occurred to her. Back “home,” she would mobilize for a long, vigorous swim in Kilifi Creek, where she would work up an appetite for dinner.
As she sidled around the house in her bikini—gulping more passion-fruit juice at the counter, grabbing a fresh towel—her exhibitionism was unconscious; call it instinctive, suggesting an inborn feel for barter. She lingered with Beano, inquiring about the biggest animal he’d ever shot, then commiserating about ivory poaching (always a crowd-pleaser) as she bound back her long blond hair, now bleached almost white. Raised arms made her stomach look flatter. Turning with a “cheerio!” that she’d picked up in Nairobi, Liana sashayed out the back porch and down the splintered wooden steps before cursing herself, because she should have worn flip-flops. Returning for shoes would ruin her exit, so she picked her way carefully down the overgrown dirt track to the beach in bare feet.
In Wisconsin, a “creek” was a shallow, burbling dribble with tadpoles that purled over rocks. Where Liana was from, you wouldn’t go for a serious swim in a “creek.” You’d splash up to your ankles while cupping your arches over mossy stones, arms extended for balance, though you almost always fell in. But everything in Africa was bigger. Emptying into the Indian Ocean, Kilifi Creek was a river—an impressively wide river at that—which opened into a giant lake sort of thing when she swam to the left and under the bridge. This time, in the interest of variety, she would strike out to the right.
The water was cold. Yipping at every advance, Liana struggled out to the depth of her upper thighs, gingerly avoiding sharp rocks. Regent and Beano may have referred to the shoreline as a “beach,” but there wasn’t a grain of sand in sight, and with all the green gunk along the bank the obstacles were hard to spot. Chiding herself not to be a wimp, she plunged forward. This was a familiar ritual of her childhood trips to Lake Winnebago: the shriek of inhalation, the hyperventilation, the panicked splashing to get the blood running, the soft surprise of how quickly the water feels warm.
Liana considered herself a strong swimmer, of a kind. That is, she’d never been comfortable with the gasping and thrashing of the crawl, which felt frenetic. But she was a virtuoso of the sidestroke, with a powerful scissor kick whose thrust carried her faster than many swimmers with inefficient crawls (much to their annoyance, as she’d verified in her college pool). The sidestroke was contemplative. Its rhythm was ideally calibrated for a breath on every other kick, and resting only one cheek in the water allowed her to look around. It was less rigorous than the butterfly but not as geriatric as the breaststroke, and after long enough you still got tired—marvellously so.
Pulling out far enough from the riverbank so that she shouldn’t have to worry about hitting rocks with that scissor kick, Liana rounded to the right and rapidly hit her stride. The late-afternoon light had just begun to mellow. The shores were forested, with richly shaded inlets and copses. She didn’t know the names of the trees, but now that she was alone, with no one trying to make her feel ignorant about a continent of which white people tended to be curiously possessive, she didn’t care if those were acacias or junipers. They were green: good enough. Though Kilifi was renowned as a resort area for high-end tourists, and secreted any number of capacious houses like her hosts’, the canopy hid them well. It looked like wilderness: good enough. Gloriously, Liana didn’t have to watch out for the powerboats and Jet Skis that terrorized Lake Winnebago, and she was the only swimmer in sight. Africans, she’d been told (lord, how much she’d been told; every backpacker three days out of Jomo Kenyatta airport was an expert), didn’t swim. Not only was the affluent safari set too lazy to get in the water; by this late in the afternoon they were already drunk.
This was the best part of the day. No more enthusiastic chatter about Regent’s latest work. For heaven’s sake, you’d think she might have finally discovered color photography at this late date. Blazing with yellow flora, red earth, and, at least outside Nairobi, unsullied azure sky, Africa was wasted on the woman. All she photographed was dust and poor people. It was a relief, too, not to have to seem fascinated as Beano lamented the unsustainable growth of the human population and the demise of Kenyan game, all the while having to pretend that she hadn’t heard variations on this same dirge dozens of times in a mere three weeks. Though she did hope that, before she hopped a ride back to Nairobi with Ponytail Guy, the couple would opt for a repeat of that antelope steak from the first night. The meat had been lean; rare in both senses of the word, it gave good text the next morning. There wasn’t much point in going all the way to Africa and then sitting around eating another hamburger.
Liana paused her reverie to check her position, and sure enough she’d drifted farther from the shore than was probably wise. She knew from the lake swims of childhood vacations that distance over water was hard to judge. If anything, the shore was farther away than it looked. So she pulled heavily to the right, and was struck by how long it took to make the trees appear appreciably larger. Just when she’d determined that land was within safe reach, she gave one more stiff kick, and her right foot struck rock.
The pain was sharp. Liana hated interrupting a swim, and she didn’t have much time before the equatorial sun set, as if someone had flicked a light switch. Nevertheless, she dropped her feet and discovered that this section of the creek was barely a foot and a half deep. No wonder she’d hit a rock. Sloshing to a sun-warmed outcrop, she examined the top of her foot, which began to gush blood as soon as she lifted it out of the water. There was a flap. Something of a mess.
Even if she headed straight back to the Henleys’, all she could see was thicket—no path, much less a road. The only way to return and put some kind of dressing on this stupid thing was to swim. As she stumbled through the shallows, her foot smarted. Yet, bathed in the cool water, it quickly grew numb. Once she had slogged in deep enough to resume her sidestroke, Liana reasoned, Big deal, I cut my foot. The water would keep the laceration clean; the chill would stanch the bleeding. It didn’t really hurt much now, and the only decision was whether to cut the swim short. The silence pierced by tropical birdcalls was a relief, and Liana didn’t feel like showing up back at the house with too much time to kill with enraptured blah-blah before dinner. She’d promised herself that she’d swim at least a mile, and she couldn’t have done more than a quarter.
So Liana continued to the right, making damned sure to swim out far enough so that she was in no danger of hitting another rock. Still, the cut had left her rattled. Her idyll had been violated. No longer gentle and welcoming, the shoreline shadows undulated with a hint of menace. The creek had bitten her. Having grown fitful, the sidestroke had transformed from luxury to chore. Possibly she’d tightened up from a queer encroaching fearfulness, or perhaps she was suffering from a trace of shock—unless, that is, the water had genuinely got colder. Once in a while she felt a flitter against her foot, like a fish, but it wasn’t a fish. It was the flap. Kind of creepy.
Liana resigned herself: this expedition was no longer fun. The light had taken a turn from golden to vermillion—a modulation she’d have found transfixing if only she were on dry land—and she still had to swim all the way back. Churning a short length farther to satisfy pride, she turned around.
And got nowhere. Stroking at full power, Liana could swear she was going backward. As long as she’d been swimming roughly in the same direction, the current hadn’t been noticeable. This was a creek, right? But an African creek. As for her having failed to detect the violent surge running at a forty-five-degree angle to the shoreline, an aphorism must have applied—something about never being aware of forces that are on your side until you defy them.
Liana made another assessment of her position. Her best guess was that the shore had drifted farther away again. Very much farther. The current had been pulling her out while she’d been dithering about the fish-flutter flap of her foot. Which was now the least of her problems. Because the shore was not only distant. It stopped.
Beyond the end of the land was nothing but water. Indian Ocean water. If she did not get out of the grip of the current, it would sweep her past that last little nub of the continent and out to sea. Suddenly the dearth of boats, Jet Skis, fellow-swimmers, and visible residents or tourists, drunken or not, seemed far less glorious.
The sensation that descended was calm, determined, and quiet, though it was underwritten by a suppressed hysteria that it was not in her interest to indulge. Had she concentration to spare, she might have worked out that this whole emotional package was one of her first true tastes of adulthood: what happens when you realize that a great deal, or even everything, is at stake and that no one is going to help you. It was a feeling that some children probably did experience but shouldn’t. At least solitude discouraged theatrics. She had no audience to panic for. No one to exclaim to, no one to whom she might bemoan her quandary. It was all do, no say.
Swimming directly against the current had proved fruitless. Instead, Liana angled sharply toward the shore, so that she was cutting across the current. Though she was still pointed backward, in the direction of Regent and Beano’s place, this riptide would keep dragging her body to the left. Had she known her exact speed, and the exact rate at which the current was carrying her in the direction of the Indian Ocean, she would have been able to answer the question of whether she was about to die by solving a simple geometry problem: a point travels at a set speed at a set angle toward a line of a set length while moving at a set speed to the left. Either it will intersect the line or it will miss the line and keep travelling into wide open space. Liquid space, in this case.
Of course, she wasn’t in possession of these variables. So she swam as hard and as steadily as she knew how. There was little likelihood that suddenly adopting the crawl, at which she’d never been any good, would improve her chances, so the sidestroke it would remain. She trained her eyes on a distinctive rock formation as a navigational guide. Thinking about her foot wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about how exhausted she was wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about never having been all that proficient at geometry was hardly an assist, either, so she proceeded in a state of dumb animal optimism.
The last of the sun glinted through the trees and winked out. Technically, the residual threads of pink and gray in the early-evening sky were very pretty.
“Where is that blooming girl?” Beano said, and threw one of the leopard-print cushions onto the sofa. “She should have been back two hours ago. It’s dark. It’s Africa, she’s a baby, she knows absolutely nothing, and it’s dark.”
“Maybe she met someone, went for a drink,” Regent said.
“Our fetching little interloper’s meeting someone is exactly what I’m afraid of. And how’s she to go to town with some local rapist in only a bikini?”
“You would remember the bikini,” Regent said, dryly.
“Damned if I understand why all these people rock up and suddenly they’re our problem.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but if she floats off into the night air never to be seen again she is our problem. Maybe someone picked her up in a boat. Carried her round the southern bend to one of the resorts.”
“She’ll not have her phone on a swim, so she’s no means of giving us a shout if she’s in trouble. She’ll not have her wallet, either—if she even has one. Never so much as volunteers a bottle of wine, while hoovering up my best Cabernet like there’s no tomorrow.”
“If anything has happened, you’ll regret having said that sort of thing.”
“Might as well gripe while I still can, then. You know, I don’t even know the girl’s surname? Much less who to ring if she’s vanished. I can see it: having to comb through her kit, search out her passport. Bringing in the sodding police, who’ll expect chai just for answering the phone. No good ever comes from involving those thieving idiots in your life, and then there’ll be a manhunt. Thrashing the bush, prodding the shallows. And you know how the locals thrive on a mystery, especially when it involves a young lady—”
“They’re bored. We’re all bored. Which is why you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s not that late yet. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”
“I’m not bored, I’m hungry. Aziza probably started dinner at four—since she is bored—and you can bet it’s muck by now.”
Regent fetched a bowl of fried-chickpea snacks, but despite Beano’s claims of an appetite he left them untouched. “Christ, I can see the whole thing,” he said, pacing. “It’ll turn into one of those cases. With the parents flying out and grilling all the servants and having meetings with the police. Expecting to stay here, of course, tearing hair and getting emotional while we urge them to please do eat some lunch. Going on tirades about how the local law enforcement is ineffectual and corrupt, and bringing in the F.B.I. Telling childhood anecdotes about their darling and expecting us to get tearful with them over the disappearance of some, I concede, quite agreeable twenty-something, but still a girl we’d barely met.”
“You like her,” Regent said. “You’re just ranting because you’re anxious.”
“She has a certain intrepid quality, which may be deadly, but which until it’s frightened out of her I rather admire,” he begrudged, then resumed the rant. “Oh, and there’ll be media. CNN and that. You know the Americans—they love innocent-abroad stories. But you’d think they’d learn their lesson. It beats me why their families keep letting kids holiday in Africa as if the whole world is a happy-clappy theme park. With all those carjackings on the coast road—”
“Ordinarily I’d agree with you, but there’s nothing especially African about going for a swim in a creek. She’s done it every other afternoon, so I’ve assumed she’s a passable swimmer. Do you think—would it help if we got a torch and went down to the dock? We could flash it about, shout her name out. She might just be lost.”
“My throat hurts just thinking about it.” Still, Beano was heading to the entryway for his jacket when the back-porch screen door creaked.
“Hi,” Liana said, shyly. With luck, streaks of mud and a strong tan disguised what her weak, light-headed sensation suggested was a shocking pallor. She steadied herself by holding onto the sofa and got mud on the upholstery. “Sorry, I—swam a little farther than I’d planned. I hope you didn’t worry.”
“We did worry,” Regent said sternly. Her face flickered between anger and relief, an expression that reminded Liana of her mother. “It’s after dark.”
“I guess with the stars, the moon . . .” Liana covered. “It was so . . . peaceful.”
The moon, in fact, had been obscured by cloud for the bulk of her wet grope back. Most of which had been conducted on her hands and knees in shallow water along the shore—land she was not about to let out of her clutches for one minute. The muck had been treacherous with more biting rocks. For long periods, the vista had been so inky that she’d found the Henleys’ rickety rowboat dock only because she had bumped into it.
“What happened to your foot?” Regent cried.
“Oh, that. Oh, nuts. I’m getting blood on your floor.”
“Looks like a proper war wound, that,” Beano said boisterously.
“We’re going to get that cleaned right up.” Examining the wound, Regent exclaimed, “My dear girl, you’re shaking!”
“Yes, I may have gotten—a little chill.” Perhaps it was never too late to master the famously British knack for understatement.
“Let’s get you into a nice hot shower first, and then we’ll bandage your foot. That cut looks deep, Liana. You really shouldn’t be so casual about it.”
Liana weaved to the other side of the house, leaving red footprints down the hall. In previous showers here, she’d had trouble with scalding, but this time she couldn’t get the water hot enough. She huddled under the dribble until finally the water grew tepid, and then, with a shudder, wrapped herself in one of their big white bath sheets, trying to keep from getting blood on the towel.
Emerging in jeans and an unseasonably warm sweater she’d found in the guest room’s dresser, Liana was grateful for the cut on her foot, which gave Regent something to fuss over and distracted her hostess from the fact that she was still trembling. Regent trickled the oozing inch-long gash with antiseptic and bound it with gauze and adhesive tape, whose excessive swaddling didn’t make up for its being several years old; the tape was discolored, and barely stuck. Meanwhile, Liana threw the couple a bone: she told them how she had injured her foot, embellishing just enough to make it a serviceable story.
The foot story was a decoy. It obviated telling the other one. At twenty-three, Liana hadn’t accumulated many stories; until now, she had hungered for more. Vastly superior to carvings of hippos, stories were the souvenirs that this bold stint in Africa had been designed to provide. Whenever she’d scored a proper experience in the past, like the time she’d dated a man who confided that he’d always felt like a woman, or even when she’d had her e-mail hacked, she’d traded on the tale at every opportunity. Perhaps if she’d returned to her parents after this latest ordeal, she’d have burst into tears and delivered the blow-by-blow. But she was abruptly aware that these people were virtual strangers. She’d only make them even more nervous about whether she was irresponsible or lead them to believe that she was an attention-seeker with a tendency to exaggerate. It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut. Because instinct dictated that this one was private. Now she knew: there was such a thing as private.
Having aged far more than a few hours this evening, Liana was disheartened to discover that maturity could involve getting smaller. She had been reduced. She was a weaker, more fragile girl than the one who’d piled into Regent’s jeep that afternoon, and in some manner that she couldn’t put her finger on she also felt less real—less here—since in a highly plausible alternative reality she was not here.
The couple made a to-do over the importance of getting hot food inside her, but before the dinner had warmed Liana curled around the leopard-print pillow on the sofa and dropped into a comatose slumber. Intuiting something—Beano himself had survived any number of close calls, the worst of which he had kept from Regent, lest she lay down the law that he had to stop hunting in Botswana even sooner than she did—he discouraged his wife from rousing the girl even to go to bed, draping her gently in a mohair blanket and carefully tucking the fringe around her pretty wet head.
Predictably, Liana grew into a civilized woman with a regard for the impositions of laundry. She pursued a practical career in marketing in New York, and, after three years, ended an impetuous marriage to an Afghan. Meantime, starting with Kilifi Creek, she assembled an offbeat collection. It was a class of moments that most adults stockpile: the times they almost died. Rarely was there a good reason, or any warning. No majestic life lessons presented themselves in compensation for having been given a fright. Most of these incidents were in no way heroic, like the rescue of a child from a fire. They were more a matter of stepping distractedly off a curb, only to feel the draught of the M4 bus flattening your hair.
Not living close to a public pool, Liana took up running in her late twenties. One evening, along her usual route, a minivan shot out of a parking garage without checking for pedestrians and missed her by a whisker. Had she not stopped to double-knot her left running shoe before leaving her apartment, she would be dead. Later: She was taking a scuba-diving course on Cape Cod when a surge about a hundred feet deep dislodged her mask and knocked her regulator from her mouth. The Atlantic was unnervingly murky, and her panic was absolute. Sure, they taught you to make regular decompression stops, and to exhale evenly as you ascended, but it was early in her training. If her instructor hadn’t managed to grab her before she bolted for the surface while holding her breath, her lungs would have exploded and she would be dead. Still later: Had she not unaccountably thought better of shooting forward on her Citi Bike on Seventh Avenue when the light turned green, the garbage truck would still have taken a sharp left onto Sixteenth Street without signalling, and she would be dead. There was nothing else to learn, though that was something to learn, something inchoate and large.
The scar on her right foot, wormy and white (the flap should have been stitched), became a totem of this not-really-a-lesson. Oh, she’d considered the episode, and felt free to conclude that she had overestimated her swimming ability, or underestimated the insidious, bigger-than-you powers of water. She could also sensibly have decided that swimming alone anywhere was tempting fate. She might have concocted a loftier version, wherein she had been rescued by an almighty presence who had grand plans for her—grander than marketing. But that wasn’t it. Any of those interpretations would have been plastered on top, like the poorly adhering bandage on that gash. The message was bigger and dumber and blunter than that, and she was a bright woman, with no desire to disguise it.
After Liana was promoted to director of marketing at BraceYourself—a rapidly expanding firm that made the neoprene joint supports popular with aging boomers still pounding the pavement—she moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where she could now afford a stylish one-bedroom on the twenty-sixth floor, facing Broadway. The awful Afghan behind her, she’d started dating again. The age of thirty-seven marked a good time in her life: she was well paid and roundly liked in the office; she relished New York; though she’d regained an interest in men, she didn’t feel desperate. Many a summer evening without plans she would pour a glass of wine, take the elevator to the top floor, and slip up a last flight of stairs; roof access was one of the reasons she’d chosen the apartment. Lounging against the railing sipping Chenin Blanc, Liana would bask in the lights and echoing taxi horns of the city, sometimes sneaking a cigarette. This time of year, the regal overlook made her feel rich beyond measure. The air was fat and soft in her hair—which was shorter now, with a becoming cut. So when she finally met a man whom she actually liked, she invited him to her building’s traditional Fourth of July potluck picnic on the roof to show it off.
“Are you sure you’re safe, sitting there?” David said, solicitously. They had sifted away from the tables of wheat-berry salad and smoked-tofu patties to talk.
His concern was touching; perhaps he liked her, too. But she was perfectly stable—lodged against the perpendicular railing on a northern corner, feet braced on a bolted-down bench, weight firmly forward—and her consort had nothing to fear. Liana may have grown warier of water, but heights had never induced the vertigo from which others suffered. Besides, David was awfully tall, and the small boost in altitude was equalizing.
“You’re just worried that I’ll have a better view of the fireworks. Refill?” She leaned down for the Merlot on the bench for a generous pour into their plastic glasses. A standard fallback for a first date, they had been exchanging travel stories, and impetuously—there was something about this guy that she trusted—she told him about Kilifi Creek. Having never shared the tale, she was startled by how little time it took to tell. But that was the nature of these stories: they were about what could have happened, or should have happened, but didn’t. They were very nearly not stories at all.
“That must have been pretty scary,” he said dutifully. He sounded let down, as if she’d told a joke without a punch line.
“I wasn’t scared,” she reflected. “I couldn’t afford to be. Only later, and then there was no longer anything to be afraid of. That’s part of what was interesting: having been cheated of feeling afraid. Usually, when you have a near-miss, it’s an instant. A little flash, like, Wow. That was weird. This one went on forever, or seemed to. I was going to die, floating off on the Indian Ocean until I lost consciousness, or I wasn’t. It was a long time to be in this . . . in-between state.” She laughed. “I don’t know, don’t make me embarrassed. I’ve no idea what I’m trying to say.”
Attempting to seem captivated by the waning sunset, Liana no more than shifted her hips, by way of expressing her discomfort that her story had landed flat. Nothing foolhardy. For the oddest moment, she thought that David had pushed her, and was therefore not a nice man at all but a lunatic. Because what happened next was both enormously subtle and plain enormous—the way the difference between knocking over a glass and not knocking over a glass could be a matter of upsetting its angle by a single greater or lesser degree. Greater, this time. Throw any body of mass that one extra increment off its axis, and rather than barely brush against it you might as well have hurled it at a wall.
With the same quiet clarity with which she had registered, in Kilifi, I am being swept out to sea, she grasped simply, Oh. I lost my balance. For she was now executing the perfect back flip that she’d never been able to pull off on a high dive. The air rushed in her ears like water. This time the feeling was different—that is, the starkness was there, the calmness was there also, but these clean, serene sensations were spiked with a sharp surprise, which quickly morphed to perplexity, and then to sorrow. She fit in a wisp of disappointment before the fall was through. Her eyes tearing, the lights of high-rises blurred. Above, the evening sky rippled into the infinite ocean that had waited to greet her for fourteen years: largely good years, really—gravy, a long and lucky reprieve. Then, of course, what had mattered was her body striking the line, and now what mattered was not striking it—and what were the chances of that? By the time she reached the sidewalk, Liana had taken back her surprise. At some point there was no almost. That had always been the message. There were bystanders, and they would get the message, too. ♦
