Free Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker

shell when Chipo was awake and make eye contact. “Breathe, baby, breathe,” she coaxed. Time dragged by into the small hours. It was 2 and then 3 A.M. The hallways were dark and deserted. It was quiet. In spite of herself, Vita gradually nodded off. She came to, sitting bolt upright in a chair, just after daylight. Chipo was asleep, her chest moving slightly up and down with each breath. Vita closed her eyes and said a prayer of thanks. Dr. Paz was delighted when he came by on his morning rounds. By that afternoon, he even allowed Chipo out of the oxygen tent for a few minutes so that Vita could walk her back and forth in the hall. Her body was warm, a sensation that delighted Vita, but her breathing was shallow and fast. Her eyes seemed a listless shade of brown. Her head lolled back on her shoulders. She went back under the shell, into the hiss of the oxygen.
    The next day, the shell stayed on for twenty-two hours. The day after, twelve hours. By this point, Vita had all but moved into the ward, returning home only to shower and sleep for a couple of hours.
    “I have a question for you,” Dr. Paz said to her late one afternoon. “Chipo is well enough to go home. But she is so small, her lungs and heart so weak. If I sign the papers for her to return to Chinyaradzo, I am signing her death warrant. She will not live if she is returned there. I want to know if you and your husband would take this child in. I do not mean for a while. I mean to stay for always. If you say yes, I will inform the home and the Department of Social Welfare that this will be my recommendation.”
    “You mean she would be ours?”
    “If you wish.”
    Vita, who had given up on ever having children, felt a swoop of hope pass through her, a sensation like the flapping of the wings of a small and unseen bird.
    “Of course we will,” she said.
    The next morning, Vita found herself taking Chipo home in a taxi. She had tried to call my hotel in Kinshasa but could not get through. This was particularly unnerving, because Chipo would never have been released at that stage in a Western country, and now Vita had the child alone—in better conditions than the orphanage, and perhaps even better than the hospital, but still alone. She nervously eyed the combinations of liquid medicines Chipo needed to combat the pneumonia and break up the fluid in her lungs. It was difficult. Like most every infant, Chipo would take a teaspoon of medicine and spray it back out, but her life depended on that medicine getting into her bloodstream. Vita would let one blast of medicine splatter onto her shirt, then get another and coax it down, time after time. She tapped her on the back four or five sessions a day to try to dislodge the phlegm. She grew unnerved and exhausted, for Chipo rarely slept more than an hour at a time.
    After several days, the disorientation of sleep deprivation became apparent. There didn’t seem to be a way out. The intensive-care session had no doubt saved Chipo’s life, but there was no hospital in Zimbabwe Vita trusted enough to call for help in an emergency. She had learned that distrust firsthand.
    The previous year, a minibus had plowed the wrong way down a one-way street, smashing into her car head-on. It cracked her collarbone, which the paramedics snapped in two when they lifted her out of the car by picking her up under the shoulders. A crowd gathered as she lay on the grass next to the wreckage. She felt a tugging on her boots, at first thinking it was the paramedics. But it persisted, and she opened her eyes to see that a bystander had knelt down and was stealing the boots off her feet, tugging hard to get them off. Once he got them, he stood up and walked away. No one stopped him. Then the paramedic stuck an ungloved finger into the open gash on her leg. “Uuhh, that’s deep,” he said. Later, after doctors set the fracture, they allowed an artery to fuse onto the snapped collarbone. It wound up requiring a trip to Johannesburg