Stray Love by Kyo Maclear

worried. The shirker in me wants to pretend I haven’t overheard her, but I raise the subject on our way home, unleashing a series of difficult questions.
    “Will my grandmother get better?”
    “I hope so.”
    “Will she
die?
“
    “The hospital is taking good care of her. But, yes, it’s possible she could.”
    I have resolved to be truthful, to answer her questions the way she needs them to be answered. She keeps playing with the locket around her neck. She heaves a deep, loud sigh. Then she has a thought.
    “Can we make her something? Maybe a package? Some drawings.”
    The words
Iris, your grandmother Natsumi is in a coma
form on my tongue, then dissolve. How does one actually avoid being a dreadful parent? I know from experience that too much honesty can tear a child down. It’s a delicate balance: neither denying nor overwhelming the young, truth without cruelty.
    “Yes,” I say, finally. “That’s a very good idea. We’ll make her a package.”
    We’ll make
her
a package to cure
our
sadness, I think.

C HAPTER 3

Stray Worries
    I HAVE SEEN THE CLIPPINGS from those first years that Oliver went overseas. I know what Oliver saw, where he travelled. But in those days I was divided between wanting to know and not wanting to know. I was struggling with my anxieties. My anxieties won.
    In January, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Oliver flew from Nairobi to Leopoldville to cover the funeral, where he followed a wailing procession of mourners through the streets.
    I pretended he was in Lancashire.
    In February, Oliver trekked deep into the forests of Kenya to speak with Mau Mau rebels about the conditions in the British prison camps.
    I pretended he was in Suffolk.
    In early March, in Accra, Oliver met with Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who reflected on his mortality a few weeks after an assassination attempt.
    I pretended he was in Essex.
    In late March, he travelled to the Tanzanian capital of Dar esSalaam where he wrote of the desecration of a Union Jack flag by a mob of students. In Tanzania, he also visited houses abandoned by departing British families. He took photographs of rooms strewn with the items they had chosen to leave behind: stuffed antelope heads, stained zebra rugs, half-empty bottles of Boodles and Dewar’s. He described expat stores whose shelves had become “a cemetery for dusty boxes of gravy mix and powdered Yorkshire pudding,” expat schools in whose empty classrooms he found the same Beatrix Potter books he had once read to me.
    I pretended he was in Surrey.
    In Guinea–Bissau (mid-April), he met with a gentle, charismatic leader named Amilcar Cabral who had just formed a party to overthrow the Portuguese.
    I pretended he was in Northumberland.
    In June, Oliver returned to Leopoldville and followed the tuba player in a brass band that marched down Boulevard Albert on the Congo’s first anniversary of independence. He then flew to Elisabethville, in the secessionist province of Katanga, where protesters were in the streets with banners blazoned NO UN FORCES . Later that day, he walked through wild bush with a Belgian doctor who claimed to be a witness to Patrice Lumumba’s still unresolved murder.
    I pretended he was in Cornwall.
    “How are the bicycle lessons coming along?” Oliver asked the next time he called home.
    “I’m still wobbly,” I said.
    At the Elisabethville Airport, Oliver’s bag was thoroughly searched. Among the confiscated items was a drawing I had done that evidently looked like a map of Katanga’s mining region, but was, in fact, a recent sketch of Mrs. Bowne’s hand.The intricate lines they had mistaken for roads and rivers were merely tendons and veins.
    As Oliver made his way around Africa, his stomach cramped, his bowels loosened, his pale skin burned and peeled a dozen times. He developed a heat rash, his eczema worsened. Yet even as his body fell apart, he had never sounded better. (Pippa said the work focused his