Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker

ponytail. Her toenails were painted a light purple. The older woman swooned with grief, her high-pitched trill bouncing off the walls.
    Two bodies over lay a man’s corpse, similarly pierced, but with his head split open between the eyes, as if the top half had been cleaved in two with an ax. The brain was gone. One of his eyes had popped out and lay against his cheek.
    Over the course of several days, the scenario of what had happened that day would slowly emerge. Shortly before 10 A.M. , a small truck carrying several men pulled to the front of the embassy, where three-foot-high barriers prevented them from pulling onto the sidewalk. The guards waved them to the back entrance. Once there, they were refused access to a drive that led to the embassy’s underground garage. The driver sped over a small curb but was blocked from going farther by a drop-down gate. Several men emerged from the truck. A couple of U.S. Marines came over. Guns were drawn, the men firing several rounds before throwing a concussion grenade—the first, small blast Pressley heard inside the embassy. Then some of them ran. Others detonated a huge bomb set on the back of the truck, some five hundred pounds of explosives.
    The blast killed more than 240 people, 12 of them Americans. The bomb in Dar es Salaam, which went off five minutes after the Nairobi bomb, killed 10 Tanzanians. More than 4,800 people were injured in both blasts, the deadliest attack against an American institution abroad since a suicide bomber killed 241 soldiers at the U.S. Marine base in Beirut in 1983. The first arrest was of Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, a Palestinian national who was detained in Pakistan while trying to cross into Afghanistan on a forged Yemeni passport. He admitted to taking part in the bombing, but that was about all anyone knew at the time. It would be two years later, after the World Trade Center had been leveled, before the connection to Afghanistan would fully resonate.
    That first day, very little was clear. I made it back to the hotel with seventy-five minutes to file a fifteen-hundred-word story, munching chocolate and drinking Cokes to stay awake. Then I used the satellite telephone to call Vita before editors started calling me back with queries and clarifications.
    “Where have you
been
?” she shouted.
    “Half of Africa and a quarter of Europe,” I mumbled. “The Nairobi embassy blew up. Didn’t you hear?”
    “Sort of,” she snapped. “I’m a little preoccupied. Chipo nearly died.” I sat up. Vita sounded as tired as I felt.
    “What?”
    She gave a quick synopsis of the past week, the emergency room and the hospital and the marathon of caring for her at home. She ended with Dr. Paz’s recommendation that Chipo live with us.
    “What? You mean to stay?”
    “To stay.”
    “Jesus, baby. I had no idea. Why didn’t you call me?”
    “Where? How? Who can ever find you? It took two days and three operators to get the hotel in Kinshasa, and you had gone. You’re always in some remote spot or another, or in transit, and no one can ever track you down until you call in. I finally got your message and figured you’d show up in Nairobi sooner or later.”
    That stung. Sitting in my hotel room, I had the sensation of how the child had felt in my arms, how weightless she had seemed, how hard she had struggled just to breathe. That feeling when she took my finger in her hand returned, and I looked out the window. How could I have left? What had I been thinking? Chipo would have died had it not been for Vita, I realized, which was another way of saying she would not have lived had it been left to me. It was difficult to speak.
    “Is she stable?”
    “Well, yes, I think so. But she doesn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. Mavis is helping. The social workers are coming tomorrow to do a home study. But Dr. Paz said no more Chinyaradzo for Chipo.”
    The speed of it all was overwhelming—I had left home seven days earlier, when we were committed to