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Really? They still look pissed off to me.

We dash out to the car. One of the waiting women approaches the window and says, “Call me. Call me.”

As we’re driving away, I call back, “I don’t have your number.”

She hollers after me, “Why?”

I AM WEARING THIN. On the ride back to Bukavu, I blast music on my iPod, trying to shut it all out.

Through dinner on the terrace at Orchid, my iPod is still blasting. It takes everything I have not to think. The phone rings: unknown number. I ignore it.

Minutes pass. I eat my daily staple, plate de legumes, and zone-out by staring at Lake Kivu. The phone rings again. I pick up. It is D, calling from the Nairobi airport. He’s waiting for his flight to Zanzibar. “How was your day?”

“Sobering.”

“Mine too,” he says. “I spent the afternoon visiting genocide memorials in Rwanda.”

We are both quiet.

“Do you feel like taking a break from Congo? Why don’t you join me?”

I am not that girl. I mean, leave a war zone? Abandon Congo for a romantic weekend of R&R with a stranger? Come on. But I’m just fried enough to indulge the thought for a second, imagining another life where I am that woman—sitting in a luxury eco-spa overlooking the Indian Ocean. But that’s not why I’m in Africa.

“It sounds like heaven. But I can’t.”

And that is that.

I finish my meal, then head back to my room for a doomed effort at sleep.

In the morning, I text D: “Is it too late to change my mind?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Parentheses

FLOATING LANTERNS ON water, probably night fishermen making their way back to shore, are all I can see looking out the window from this small plane packed with Europeans on pleasure holiday. As we descend over Zanzibar, the bobbing lights lead me to imagine the island as a massive spa, full of tea candles and orchids.

It makes me tense.

I am already certain this was a huge mistake. I was sure of it earlier today, as soon as I stepped into the Nairobi airport, full of backpackers and safari-goers. I paced the main corridor, focused on breathing, trying to shake off my dis-ease. When I tried to escape over a cup of tea in the airport café, I sat next to a couple of leathery English women debating the affairs of the royal family. “Oh, never mind him,” one said. “He’s gay anyway.”

A woman in a safari T-shirt invited herself to join me in my booth and initiated a chat about her volunteer work on a game reserve. She’d had a “shocking” visit to the local school, where the children wore dirty clothes and their school meal included only white rice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a whole-grain believer. Two months ago, I would have felt her white-rice pain. But I am ripe to crack. Half of me wanted to hurl expletives at her and everyone else in the terminal: “Are you f——ing kidding me? White rice? That’s the most upsetting thing you’ve run across in Africa?!”

The other half of me wanted to find the nearest bathroom stall and cry. Instead, I was measured, even nonchalant, when she asked, “So what brings you here?”

“I’ve been in the Congo.”

“On holiday?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

Clearly this is a risky little social experiment I’m undertaking. Slipping out of Congo for an exotic first date on a remote African spice island turns out to be kind of like going on a dream-job interview right after your best friend’s funeral. Best avoided.

It’s true, I could not have known how Congo would seep under my skin any more than you feel wet when you’re underwater. But when you come up for air, well, that’s something else entirely. I know the dating cliché: Just be yourself. But what if myself is freaking out?

To feel or not to feel, that is the question. If I start to cry, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop. I picture myself curled up in a five-star bathroom sobbing uncontrollably for two days, like D’s hysterical sideshow. I hate to emote in public, and for all intents and purposes, D is the public. (After my dad died, even my mom and my sister were the public.) I’ve got to get it under control. Shut it down. Fortunately, over the last few years I’ve grown