Acacia: Acacia

Chapter 13: The hysterical cackle of a woman deranged

- 65 My summer in Zimbabwe was not all mulberries, pawpaws and guavas. All sweetness turned to sorrow when mbuya went into cardiac arrest about three weeks after our heart to heart. I remember it like it was yesterday.We were in Harare,at the house of MaiTatenda,one of mbuya’s countless cousins, drinking our afternoon tea under the shade of a mango tree,overlooking a garden ablaze with hibiscus,a fantastically wild beauty. In Mai Tatenda’s dilapidated Mazda, with me performing CPR in the back seat as best as I could, we managed to get mbuya to a hospital easily enough. But there was nothing the doctors could do for her in the meagrely equipped medical facility. It took Mum three days to get to us from Connecticut, and by that time mbuya was gone. To say that I was distraught is to add a ton of honey to an ever-bitter gall. Debilitated by the overwhelming unreality of it all, I was beside myself as I sat slumped on the floor of the hospital lounge, everything around me so foreign,so foreboding,waiting for Mum to come and make things right. She came, but all was still horrifically wrong. Mbuya was gone. Forever. Now, as I look back on that trip, I think that mbuya knew that she was on her way Home.That is why she had wanted to come home, to Zimbabwe, to Africa. She didn’t want to be buried in a foreign land. She wanted to be laid to rest under a southern sun, beside my grandfather. She wanted her body to be next to her heart. And so we buried her in the red earth of the land she loved. Throbs - 66 of agony, weeping and wailing. An ululation of sorrow under an ochre sky, mad with the colours of dusk. Mbuya. Mbuya. Mbuya.Woman who taught us everything that mattered. Woman who taught us how to be woman. I wanted to call Taylor and collapse into his strength, but in the end I couldn’t do it. After everything that had happened between us over the past year, what really could I have said to him? Vexed and vulnerable, it was just better for me not to go there at all. Marcus and Sahara had been calling to get updates on my travels every few weeks since I left, and so I told them about the funeral. I figuredTaylor would hear about it from Marcus soon enough. I stayed in Zimbabwe an extra two weeks with Mum as she made her rounds visiting and consoling relatives she had not seen in years and whom I had never met.We returned to New Haven submerged in a cyclone of sorrow. Mum had to plunge back into work right away, and I barely had time to breathe before I had to pack my bags and head back to NewYork. Second year of med school would wait for no woman. My first night back in Manhattan, I dreamed of Africa. I dreamed of mbuya. I yearned for home. Taylor had returned to New York from the Mayo Clinic a few days before me.We had not parted well. Or at all. It felt like a lifetime ago. I knew I had to face him at some point, preferably not at our first class in front of an audience, so I decided to bite the bullet, go to his apartment, and talk to him. Say something. Say anything. Be an adult. Moron of a woman!What were you thinking going over there? Of course when I knocked on his door, who should answer but Jenna, all bubbles and smiles. I couldn’t take it. I stepped in briefly, said hello, lied that I was glad to be back, then fled the scene of my incapacitation. A few hours later,after Jenna left,Taylor came over to my apartment.It turned out that he had heard about mbuya from Marcus.When I opened the door,Taylor took a step towards me, cupping my left elbow with his right hand, inviting me into his embrace. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed caustically, recoiling from my would-be - 67 refuge . About a month and a half before I had left for Zimbabwe,Taylor had knocked on my door at four in the morning. Distraught, he had told me that his dad had just had a stroke...