drive. Two men with distinctively shaped AK-47s stood next to the vehicle. As he watched, they raked the cab and the bed of the pickup with bullets. Through the smoke puffing from each weapon, an arc of spent casings glittered in the sun. A hot round ignited the gasoline spilling from the punctured fuel tank. Flames engulfed the truck, forcing the men to scramble back.
Mercer staggered, falling slack at what he’d witnessed. Nanny yanked on his arm to get his attention and slapped him full across the face. “We mourn later.”
Having spent several summers with the Bonnevilles, Mercer knew their plantation even better than the farm’s Hutu overseer. Yet as they crashed from row to row of banana trees, he had no idea where he was. His mind had left him. He wanted nothing more than to collapse. Juma led them on, maintaining their bearings by watching the pillar of black smoke that rose from the Bonnevilles’ plane.
“Where next, Philippe?” she asked when they broke out of the first cultivated field. “We need to lose ourselves in the jungle. Which way is closest?” Across a fallow area thick with wild grass, more ranks of trees ran to the horizon. The prattle of machine-gun fire had faded in the distance.
The boy said nothing, the sting of the slap having nothing to do with the tears that greased his cheeks.
Juma lowered herself to her knees so that she was looking up into his face. “In my village, when a boy reaches a certain age, he goes through an initiation to become a man. It is a time of great joy for everyone as he leaves his childhood behind. You have just left your childhood but there is no joy for either of us.” Her voice was steadying, solemn. “When the village boys take that first step into manhood, they also take a new name. It is the warrior name they will forever use in the tribe. After today, it is time that you take your warrior name too, even if your people don’t choose them like we do.
“To honor your father’s strength and your mother’s courage, you can no longer be Philippe.” She thought for a second. “You will be called Mercer from now on, do you hear me? This is the name you will use when you reach your tribe again. Your warrior name.” Her eyes bored into his, soft brown meeting frightened gray. “Tell me, Mercer, which way do we go to reach the jungle quickest?”
Without word or hesitation, he pointed to their right.
He had no idea how many days it took to reach Juma’s village on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu. They lived off the land using her intimate knowledge of the jungle and took circuitous detours around the pockets of fighting. He stayed with her for almost six months before a Red Cross worker came to the village. It would be another three weeks until Mercer’s identity was verified and his grandfather in the United States alerted to come to the Rwandan capital of Kigali to collect the grandchild he’d never met. A mistake by a harried clerk at the U.S. Mission in Rwanda anglicized his first name to Philip, though he barely cared. He had become Mercer.
Mercer looked down at the sleeping Panamanian boy on his lap, his face glowing in the embers of the dying fire. Even if he hadn’t felt it, maybe the boy had sensed the commonality of their experience. Both were orphans, forced to live in the jungle and denied the time to grieve. He stroked Miguel’s hair.
“What happened to Juma?”
“What did you say?” he asked, startled.
“Your nanny?” Lauren prompted. “What happened to her?”
Mercer swallowed. He thought the memory had unfolded silently in his head, as he allowed it to do a few times each year, the details so vivid he could still smell the rhododendron blossoms from the hedge. Not even Harry knew the details of how he lost his parents and he’d just accidentally told the story to a complete stranger. Looking at how Lauren watched him, the vulnerability he feared failed to appear. He’d always thought his story would elicit pity, an emotion he detested, but in her voice he heard respect. The jackhammer blow to his heart he’d felt when she’d asked about Juma eased into a sort of warmth.
“I tried to get her out a few times, but she never wanted to leave her village again.” Lost in the past, his voice caught. “I went back when genocide swept Rwanda in 1994. I was too late.”
Lauren’s hand came out of the gloom beyond the fire’s reach and rested on his. “I’m sorry.”
He finally stripped the wrapper off the neck of the Remy Martin bottle and uncorked it. He gave Lauren a sip and took a small one for himself. “Knowing her for even a day was worth the pain of losing her.”
Unexpectedly, the melancholy that usually descended after thinking of that day did not come. He felt the first stir-rings of anger instead. Mercer felt an emotion stronger than simple revenge for wanting to discover what had happened to Gary and the others. He wanted to give Miguel’s loss some measure of meaning. Something that he had never been able to do for his own parents’ murder, something that haunted him still.
“So what do we do with him?” Lauren asked into the lengthening silence.
“I assume he has family in El Real or someplace close. We’ll send one of Ruben’s men back to the town with him tomorrow and continue our original plan.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Mercer had no answer.
They were woken the next morning by the jungle. Birds that had already reclaimed the once-poisoned valley were joined by a few other animals, including a monkey that screeched at the rising sun as if defending its territory. The thick canopy of vegetation emerged from the darkness, colors resolving themselves with remarkable speed. Blacks morphed to grays and then to greens. Shapes appeared, first like phantom shadows, then detailing into individual trees and resolving up to separate branches and leaves. With each passing moment, the jungle became louder and louder as nocturnal animals scampered for cover and the early-morning hunters sought them out.
Mercer must have fallen asleep long before Lauren, for when he woke he found she had erected mosquito netting around them and filled a shallow trench around their camp with water to keep away crawling insects. He woke flat on his back. Miguel was pressed as tightly to him as a just-weaned puppy and Lauren Vanik lay on his other side, her hand cupped around his biceps. Her face was turned to him. With her extraordinary eyes closed, her face didn’t lose any of the character he found so appealing. As he watched, they fluttered open, their curious coloring giving the impression that she greeted each day with anticipation rather than resignation. Her dark hair was a fan against the soft sand where it spilled off the folded shirt she used for a pillow. All three had shared a single blanket through the night. On the far side of the dead fire, Ruben and his men coughed and scratched themselves awake. A pair of cigarettes were lit amid more coughing and spitting.
She smiled. “I love how men come awake like they’re hibernating bears.”
“Not me. I just roll out of bed ready to face the day.”
“Oh, you did your bear impersonation last night. My God, you can snore.”
He shot her a look of mock indignation. “I do not. And if I did, you should know that a loud snore is considered a sign of manly prowess.”
“Then you should be proud of yourself. I’d say your snoring makes you quite the stud.” She spoke with more sentiment than she’d intended.
To cover her embarrassment at so openly flirting under these inappropriate circumstances, Lauren rolled out from under the blanket before Mercer could see her blush. She went beyond the jungle edge to find a little privacy while the Panamanians lustily urinated in the river.
Mercer untangled himself from Miguel and left the boy sleeping as he went to find some breakfast from the remains of Gary’s camp. The look Lauren had just given him and the glassiness of her eyes after hearing his story remained fresh in his mind. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her knowing his most intimate secret. Strangely comfortable was as close as he could come to an accurate description.
He returned to their camp with tins of stew, a pot for boiling water, mugs, and a half-empty jar of instant coffee. Lauren had folded away the mosquito netting and the fire was burning cheerily. Miguel was just wiping sleep from his eyes and sand from his hair. He held Mercer’s limp bandana as if it were still shaped like a rabbit. Before allowing Mercer to concentrate on the food, he asked for the puppet to be reformed on his outstretched hand. He’d already named the rabbit Jorge, after a cartoon he’d seen.
As Mercer cooked, Lauren took the reluctant boy to the edge of the river, stripped him naked and ordered him to bathe. Protesting in wailing Spanish, Miguel finally relented when Mercer shot him a stern look from the fire. Lauren and the boy chatted easily as he washed in the warm water.
When they approached the fire, Mercer had coffee and stew ready and Lauren had a worried frown on her face. “We’ve got ourselves a problem. Miguel doesn’t have any family in these parts. His parents were living in Panama City when your friend Gary hired them. He says he only has one uncle who moved to Miami years ago.”
