Free A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve

wide-awake images of what Adhiambo had just gone through. She could picture the breaking of the glass, perhaps the beating down of a flimsy door. A drunken African—or had it been an Asian? a white?—had pleaded at first and then had stopped his pleading. As if he’d been refused a drink at the bar and now intended to swipe all the bottles from the shelf, he’d thrown Adhiambo to the floor. Would Adhiambo have screamed? Margaret thought not. Was she already ashamed? Would a scream be heard in the evening cacophony? Or worse, ignored?
    When Margaret woke in the morning, Adhiambo was sitting at the edge of the bed, her blouse-ball tucked under one arm. The bed had been perfectly made, and Margaret couldn’t tell if she had slept in it or not. For all Margaret knew, the woman had slept on the floor.
    “Good morning,” Margaret said, and Adhiambo nodded her head.
    “Are you okay?” Margaret asked.
    The woman didn’t respond, but neither did she try to hide her face. The egg over her eye had swollen and blackened. Her lip was cut but was no longer bleeding. Margaret wondered how many other bruises lay beneath the clothes. She tried not to think about the ultimate bruise.
    “Would you like some tea?” Margaret asked, and Adhiambo nodded.
    “Good. I’ll just use the bathroom a minute and put on my robe.”
    It occurred to Margaret that Adhiambo might be wondering about the unsightly red disks on her own arms and legs.
    Margaret slipped by Adhiambo to the bathroom and closed the door. Her own clean underpants were still neatly folded on the dresser. A flash of shame shot through Margaret for having even offered them to Adhiambo. To have presumed that level of intimacy would have offended the woman. Margaret recalled that African men wouldn’t touch women’s underwear. Maybe the same prohibition held for African women. And then Margaret noted that the hand towel, always on a ring by the sink, was missing. The bleeding must have been so bad that Adhiambo had needed a towel to stanch it. Margaret didn’t use sanitary napkins. Perhaps Patrick could get some at the duka as soon as it opened. Margaret searched the wastebasket and found three tiny shards of glass.
    Adhiambo would drink tea, but nothing else Margaret offered her seemed to have any appeal. Margaret tried bread and jam, then cereal, then eggs, then fruit. Adhiambo must still be in shock, Margaret thought. She wondered where James was, why he had not been sent to the cottage first thing in the morning. Margaret sat across from Adhiambo and tried to talk to her.
    Adhiambo took a great deal of sugar with her tea, and Margaret thought,
Good.
Something to allay the after-quakes of shock, something to keep her going. Margaret poured her another cup, into which Adhiambo added more sugar. Margaret glanced at the clock. Five to nine. Where the hell was James? He’d been up, as per his routine, since four thirty. Margaret heard Patrick, who had kept out of Adhiambo’s sight, shut the front door behind him. He was going for the pads now.
    “Adhiambo, I would really like to help you,” Margaret said.
    “I am just all right,” Adhiambo answered in a voice barely above a whisper.
    Was this, Margaret wondered, a translation of another phrase in Adhiambo’s tribal language? Margaret didn’t even know her tribe; she had never bothered to ask. Adhiambo had tucked her hair into the clean scarf Margaret had given her minutes ago. Her skin was dark brown, with hints of gray in the shadows. It wasn’t that she looked old; it was merely the shade of her skin, just as James’s was blue. Margaret wondered if the woman knew her own age or the month she was born. Many of the Africans Patrick had met at the hospital didn’t know their birth dates. They took the concept of “age-mate” seriously: a man or a woman who’d been born in the same year as oneself. But the actual date? “Is there a reason to know that?” they would ask, somewhat puzzled.
    “I am so sorry this