Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page A

treated for swine flu, tested for pneumonia, and had subjected my lung meridian to acupuncture needles, but still my illness would not abate. A friend brought me flowers, soup, and bottles of eucalyptus oil. Then she sat on the end of the bed and watched me cough. “This won’t do,” she said at last, and had me phone a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases. He made a house call, listened to me for a few minutes, and diagnosed me with whooping cough. He prescribed steroids for me, and prophylactic antibiotics for the rest of the family. Even after I felt well, he cautioned that I should probably stay out of circulation for a while. Whooping cough, he warned, is very contagious.
    I thought of a ship in harbor flying the international maritime signal flag Lima, also known as the Yellow Jack. It meant, “This ship is quarantined.” I liked the word,
quarantine,
and all the protective cover it implied. I liked too the idea of signal flags. In a crisis of the sort that unlanguages a person, when there is no longer any possibility of intimate and complex communication, there is still the simple, dread symbol of two yellow squares juxtaposed with two black squares: “You should stop your vessel instantly.”
    After a few days, the fever subsided. I stopped coughing. Spinning from the steroids, I woke before dawn and started tidying the yard of its winter debris. “Sweat equity,” Charlie called it, a phrase I hated for the way it took the joy out of labor, but one that had nonetheless stuck in my mind, reemerging every time I swept the driveway, weeded the flowerbeds, raked the lawn. After that, I went up to my office. Beginning that afternoon, and in the weeks that followed, I did the seventh draft of a frustratingly out-of-reach screenplay. I wrote eighty pages of a new book. I reviewed a couple of novels for newspapers, I accepted a magazine assignment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for the following summer. I worked and worked as if so doing could tether our house to the earth; Charlie to me; our family to itself.
    “It’ll be okay,” I said. “Won’t it?” But Charlie’s anxiety swelled and began to fill the room. Although he went into the office every day, and stayed there all nine or ten hours and sometimes late into the night, his real estate business was dead; there was nothing left now but the phantom labor of shuffling papers from one side of his desk to the other. The edges of other people’s panic leaked into our lives. Charlie talked about clients who had lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. Then he said we would have to put our own house on the market and move into something smaller, downsize. “We’re going to have to tighten our belts,” he said. “Batten down the hatches. Save every penny we can.” At night our sighs and exhaustion left our mouths and settled over our bodies; a cloud of unmet expectations, a threatening storm of broken promises, a low pressure system of the unsaid.
    I thought of how it isn’t impossible, but it’s overwhelmingly daunting and perhaps even pointless to construct a viable future from an imperfect past. I thought of Charlie and me confined again to a little cottage; his brooding silence, my reactive chatter. It was too late. Fifteen years ago, I would have moved into a teepee or a hut or a tent with him. But we’d killed the very possibility of small air between us. We were a broken working relationship. Dread played a long, low note in my chest. We couldn’t move into something smaller. If we were going to stay together, we needed a wing each, adjoining cottages with a drawbridge, two houses divided by state lines. We needed the kind of extraordinary space ordinary people could never afford.
    Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationship—finances, children, housekeeping. We concentrated on logistics, cautiously withholding, careful of what we said to one another in case it was used against us later. We were competitive with one