Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

if I were the most pathetic excuse for a female she’d ever laid eyes on. I suspect she’d detected my secret from the start but thought I was too dumb even to know I’m pregnant. At this point in my disgrace, however, I realized that she’d been trying all morning to model the Biya way of motherhood for me, and I had been too dumb to see that these lessons in infant caretaking were offered in charity.

      Shep, alas, took one look at my pasty face and insisted we head back to Ross.

      It took everything I had to convince him I didn’t need to be carried.

      I felt better as soon as the stink of boiling pig fat was behind us, but then the trek absorbed me, and only when we reached the beach, as Shep was checking his watch, did I regain the presence of mind to ask how the launch would know to come for us.

      He scuffed his boot heel in the sand and told me not to be angry. He’d arranged for Lieutenant Reynold to make a run past the cove each day at four o’clock—just in case.

      To top it off, he took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. Despite all the layers of grime and sweat and citronella. Had he really asked me not to be angry with him?

      Of course, I couldn’t get away scot-free. Claire, darling, he said. Damn stupid, all things considered, but now the cat’s out . . .

      No future field trips for me. Claire, darling. He’d caught me cold being selfish and foolhardy, and many another husband would be far less forgiving. But I don’t regret this first foray, brief and fraught as it was. Night in the jungle was a misery of heat and wet and biting, stinging, whining, crawling creatures against which our puny net offered little defense, but we saw the Biya dance. We listened to them chant. Shep up and stomping with the other young men. Leyo’s head thrown back in delight as the full moon breached that penny of sky far at the top of the canopy.

      I can still feel the quiet pressure on each of my fingertips in turn as Kuli took my hand in his and tried to teach me the correct sounds of the old Biya language—sounds that Leyo gets all wrong. Before I ruined everything, Shep had gone out twice with Leyo and Imulu’s husband, Sempe, and they collected more than a dozen orchid specimens while I stayed with Kuli and the women.

       I learned from old widow Mam Golat how to boil a boar and how the wily Imulu worked while simultaneously nursing little Artam—

       Breast feeding. God help me. Am I ready for this?

      If only I’d managed to hold on. If I were Ruth Benedict or Margaret Mead, I’d have been living with Leyo’s people for weeks by now. Pregnancy would never hold them back, much less childbirth.

      No, they’d give birth right in the field, presided over by the old grandmother and chief. Then they’d mine every minute for cultural significance and write a bloody book about it.

      The monsoon was in full swing by the time she went into labor. All through the hospital, pails had been set out to catch the leaks, around which teams of lizards raced, little phantoms against the furred green stains of mildew. Fists of rain slammed against the tin roof as Claire counted through her contractions, and the young Indian nurses hummed as they wiped her brow. The daring giggled at Shep’s lanky presence brooding through the hours.

      He steadied himself by folding a two-month-old Times into birds of paradise, an island diversion he’d picked up from Som. The nurses offered him tea and sweets, as unaccustomed to the presence of fathers during labor as they were to viewing their chief surgeon as a human being.

      Claire told him to go tend to his other patients, but his only other patients at the moment were waiting for elective procedures on the mainland.

      “You’re stuck with me.”

      “Then do something useful.”

      “You’re irritable.”

      “You try pushing a watermelon out between your thighs.”

      “I might have to go back to America to find one.”

      “Go, then!”

      He went. She screamed. Dr. Ratna Bose—the “ladies’ doctor”—swept in and monitored Claire’s progress with a magisterial wave.

      But now she felt abandoned. What if the baby came before he returned? What if something went wrong? It would all be her fault. She knew she wasn’t thinking straight, but she couldn’t help it. She shouldn’t have driven him away.

      She began to shiver as the nurses mopped her brow. “Where did he go?”

      “It is just as well. Gentlemen don’t belong in maternity wards.” Dr. Bose parked her fists on ample hips. “Especially gentlemen doctors.”

      And then she was seized by another spiral of pain and could think of nothing else.

      Four contractions later Shep returned, breathless, bearing something in a bell jar. He set the wooden base on the table beside her bed. Under the glass a yellow orchid bloomed with the face of a monkey.

      He removed the bell and squeezed the monkey’s jaws between his fingers like she and Robin used to do with snapdragons when she was a child. Shep put no words in its mouth. Instead he gently bent the stem so the monkey appeared to dance as he hummed the “Waltz of the Flowers.”

      The nurses gaped from the doorway until Dr. Bose shooed them away. Claire, weeping, was midway through it before she noticed the next contraction.

      “Who are you?” she demanded when the agony shuddered off again.

      He blazed his dazzling gap-toothed grin. “Damned if I’ve the foggiest.”

      One hour later, young Tyler Durant emerged on the crest of a final convulsive push. He let out a polite but voluble cry, measured eight pounds, twenty inches, and had all requisite fingers and toes, plus big pink ears and a velvety shag of chestnut hair, eyes that blinked at the strange world around him as if calculating its weight.

      Claire was speechless when their son was placed in her arms. Shep leaned over them both.

      “Hallo, young Ty,” he greeted their son. “Welcome home, little man.”

      Naila bonded with the baby right from the start. Bookish and shy, she seemed to have few friends of her own. She preferred to orbit around her parents, and caring for Ty gave her an excuse to stay close. Every day she’d race home from school to help Jina tend and play with him. She’d sit on her haunches memorizing the lullabies that Claire sang, and with the slightest encouragement, she’d chant him ditties in Urdu. She was tender and careful, as attentive as her mother—both of them as gentle as any trained ayah Claire could imagine.

      Shep wasn’t so sure. “There’s a line between servants and family in Asia,” he said one night in bed. “It can get blurry, but it’s best not to forget it’s there.”

      However well-intentioned, the warning landed like an affront. Claire tried but failed to keep her voice light. “You sound like your father.”

      For several seconds, she heard only the breath of the surf outside. Then, “That’s a low blow.”

      The sting of hurt surprised Claire. “Sorry. It’s something I’d imagine your father saying. Remember, I’ve never met the man.”

      “And I intend to keep it that way.” He rolled toward her, found the tip of her nose and kissed it in truce, but she took note. However much Shep loathed his father, the arrogant colonialist, he might have more in common with him than he cared to admit or even realized.

      As far as Claire was concerned, Naila was simply a wonder. One day the child demonstrated how, when she was little, she used to press her face to the kitchen screen so the wires would carve the world