Free Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller

early to bump me off, don’t you think?”
    But my own death wasn’t my biggest fear. Charlie’s death was my biggest fear. He seemed to be such an irreplaceable impossibility, so exactly the unlikely and correct combination of person for me—someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous. For these reasons, it hadn’t seemed rash and foolhardy to have married him at twenty-three. On the contrary, it seemed as if
not
marrying Charlie would have been a rash and foolhardy decision. My marrying him would mean I’d be all right forever. He’d be all right too. And our children would have double doses of all-rightness.
    Plus, I was so in love I now understood the condition as a sickness. My physical self changed in Charlie’s presence: my heart flipped; blood surged; nerves strayed out of their protective sheaths and misfired. The sudden shock of coming into such sharp focus—the sheer, unlikely, extraordinary luck of being loved by this man—was wonderful, but it was also slightly confusing. The few other men I had been with had found my intensity off-putting, unseemly, alarming, but Charlie calmly, fearlessly turned toward it, as if warmed by the heat I threw off.
    Secretly, I couldn’t help suspecting our courtship and marriage had all been a laughable misunderstanding. Surely Charlie would find out what my family had been saying all along, that I was none of the things he believed me to be—passionate and witty and articulate. Instead he would discover for himself that I was difficult and noisy and unpredictable. “Oh no,” Mum said. “I
did
warn him you were impossible. He can’t say I didn’t warn him.” She shook her head in the manner of a breeder who has pointed out the flaws of a filly, and managed to sell it anyway. “But that’s the lucky thing about Americans. They’re very susceptible to an accent.” She dusted her hands victoriously. “Isn’t it lucky we taught you how to enunciate properly?”

CONTINENTAL DRIFT
    B y the beginning of April 2010 in Wyoming, the earth’s orbit had tipped enough to allow the sun’s warmth to penetrate layers of tree bark and snow. Redwing blackbirds had returned to the willow bottoms along the river where I walked Dilly most days; our horses over in their field in Idaho had begun shedding their winter coats in salt-matted chunks; the snow was receding in a series of white high-tide marks from the south-facing wall of our house. Grape hyacinth and crocuses speared pioneering shoots out of the freshly thawed ground. Spring in the Rocky Mountains was a time of everything up and out and forward. Last month’s winter, with its blizzards and below-zero wind chills and torporing chickadees, was something that seemed to have happened to other people in another world.
    In late spring, I was scheduled to do a reading in Dallas where it was already ninety degrees. I flew south from Wyoming and talked about my Zimbabwean/Zambian childhood to Texans in a vigorously air-conditioned building filled with artifacts from Africa. It looked as if the closet of a continent had tipped into the place: Yoruba headdresses and Tuareg silver; Zulu beads and Ghanaian robes; Masai necklaces and Kuba cloth. The audience was well traveled, adventurously secure, university educated. They seemed to have formed strong opinions about Africa in the course of their studies and journeys. I had no such strength of opinion.
    What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything, but I’d lived in the States for sixteen years now. Plus, I didn’t look or sound the way most people imagine a Zimbabwean or a Zambian should look or sound. I had a Wyoming-winter complexion and my accent had morphed transatlantic. Also, there had been too many things of the sort I couldn’t have imagined or insured myself