An Open Heart Read online

  “Hello,” Jace responded, taking the man’s hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe I know—”

  “Dr. Simeon Okayo,” he said. He looked at the dishes on the table. “You enjoy our food.”

  “I grew up eating this,” he said, leaning back into his chair. “It’s been a long time.”

  “We have business. May I sit?”

  What business? Was he a new doctor at Kijabe Hospital? Jace nodded. “Sure.” He pointed to an empty plastic chair.

  The man retrieved a small bottle from his pocket. He held it up, gently shook the white powdery contents, and offered it to Jace. “Take it. Dissolve it in a cup of water. Soak a cloth in the water, and place it against your eye. It will draw out the color.”

  Jace touched his left eye. The good food had distracted him from his pain. He took the small container and held it up to the light. “What is it?”

  “An herb. Your Western instructors would not have taught you about this.”

  Jace eyed the man with suspicion. “You came here to see me? How did you know where I’d be?”

  “It is not hard to track a new mzungu. All the villagers know who you are. The children will come asking for help with their school fees soon enough.”

  Jace smiled. Some things never changed.

  “You will be meeting with the minister of health tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “The minister is the one who paved the way for you. Your state government contacted the minister about your interest in assisting us.”

  Jace swallowed uncomfortably at the mention of his own government. He didn’t want the Kenyans to be biased against him from the start.

  The old man smiled. “You cannot hide in Kenya, Dr. Rawlings. You’ve been in our news. I’ve known for months you were coming.”

  Jace chuckled at the man’s exaggeration. “I’ve barely known it for that long myself. You couldn’t have—”

  “I understand your twin sister asked you to come.”

  Jace felt blood drain from his face. He hadn’t told anyone in Kijabe about his sister contacting him. He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

  “Relax,” the old man said, chuckling as if he were talking about something mundane. The weather. Sports. “Your sister told me to expect you.”

  “No!”

  The African gentleman looked around to the other customers as if to say, Don’t mind the crazy American.

  “Look, I’m not sure what you want with me, but you’ve got some crazy ideas. What you’re suggesting is impossible.”

  “You are reluctant to admit she contacted you.” Okayo shook his head. “I wouldn’t expect any less from an American doctor. Miracles can be explained by science, reality is only what you can see and touch, and the dead don’t speak from beyond the grave.”

  Jace shook his head and whispered, “It’s impossible.” He looked up at the man. “My returning has nothing to do with her.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said with a flip of his bony hand. “You also have a rational reason, don’t you? The heart program.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.” He spoke like he didn’t believe a word of what Jace had said.

  Jace stared silently at the empty plate in front of him, feeling a twinge of indigestion and wishing he hadn’t eaten so much.

  The old man continued. “If your sister is trying to reopen communication with the family, I’d think you’d be wise to listen.”

  Jace stayed quiet.

  Simeon Okayo spoke again, this time dropping the sarcasm. “Twins share so much more than the same human house for nine months, Jace. You go about your life and your work, but Janice is never far from your thoughts.” He reached for Jace’s shoulder. “She touches every part of your life, Dr. Rawlings. Even now.”

  Jace stood. “I think you don’t know me.” He took a step away from the table, his eyes on the doorway. “About tomorrow. I’ve only just arrived, and I want to get settled, see the operating theater here, make a materials list—”

  The old man held up his hand. “The minister of health won’t be kept waiting. I’ll have a car pick you up at ten.”

  “And just who are you, Mr.—”

  “Dr. Okayo.” The old man smiled. “I do consultant work. Sometimes for the parliament. Sometimes for others.”

  “Why would he want to meet with me?”

  “You are a valued specialist. A rarity in our country. The minister only wants to be assured that your loyalties are in the right place.”

  “I’m here to help the poor.”

  Dr. Okayo nodded. “Then you won’t have any trouble from us.”

  Jace swept aside the beaded strings at the front entrance.

  Simeon Okayo called after him. “Oh, Dr. Rawlings. Use the remedy. I want you to look your best for the minister.” He cleared his throat. “And do try to stay out of jail.”

  Jace stared at the man. He knew about last night? What was this? Another test? A warning of some sort? We are watching you?

  Instead of taking the bait, Jace exited into the equatorial sun.

  Slowly, he walked up the rutted dirt road, not understanding what had just happened, and now acutely aware of the eyes of everyone he passed. Judging him. Sizing up the heart surgeon. He didn’t want to be the center of attention. He’d had enough of that back in Virginia, where he’d been hailed as the one who’d saved the governor’s life but later condemned by the same media.

  For stealing the governor’s wife.

  4

  Jace collapsed into a deep sleep at eight. Merciful solace without troubled dreams.

  But at three thirty in the morning, he stared at the ceiling, wide awake, with an internal clock struggling to reset. Predictably, his mind regurgitated snippets of conversations, unable to digest the nuances of cross-cultural communication. One thing he understood. He was being watched. Judged. And he’d traveled around the world only to find that his colorful past had tagged along for the ride.

  After a few minutes, he realized the futility of remaining horizontal. He sat up, noticing the small towel he’d moistened with a solution of the herb Dr. Okayo had given him. He lifted the hand towel from the bed, curious that the once-white material now contained a circle of purple. He’d tried the remedy the night before, mixing the potion and placing the moist towel over his face as he drifted off to sleep. He hadn’t believed in the herb but wanted to try it out of respect for the local culture. When in Rome. Oddly enough, though, the pain in his face had disappeared during the night.

  He walked to his little bathroom to wash his face. He looked in the mirror and traced the edge of his cheek with his index finger. Strange. I look normal. The bruising had vanished.

  He straightened, at a loss for an explanation. He rubbed his finger against the bridge of his nose, gently at first and then with additional pressure. No pain. He shook his head and added the event to a growing list of things from this trip that he couldn’t explain.

  I’ll have to ask him for another sample of that herb. Maybe I can get a lab to analyze it back home.

  He made Kenyan coffee, dripping the first cup straight into a mug emblazoned with the logo for a popular little blue pill. To Jace, this coffee, grown on the hillsides of Kenya’s tallest mountain, was the best in the world.

  He drank it black and strong and let the liquid dance across happily awakening tastebuds.

  At the small kitchen table in the stillness of the night, Jace questioned his motives. Was he, as the chaplain accused, on the run from his past?

  Or was he running toward his past?

  He sipped his coffee, feeling a sudden loss. Not many weeks ago, Heather would have shared this morning ritual.

  Without her, his loneliness seemed palpable. He’d made mistakes. She’d lost faith in him. Four weeks ago, after too much media speculation about his relat
ionship with the Virginia governor’s wife, Heather had asked him to move out.

  Jace had begged her to come with him instead. Start a new chapter away from the pressures in Virginia. But she couldn’t see beyond the damaging gossip of the supermarket tabloids.

  It was a media circus that he found himself helpless to refute, since he remembered almost nothing of the events they reported. To Heather, his amnesia seemed too convenient. Unlike the events preceding his accident, he clearly remembered waking up in the hospital. He lifted his hand to his scalp, reliving the memory.

  The first sensation that day had been pain, a gripping headache that began at a point deep inside his skull on the right and spilled out over his scalp like ants escaping an anthill. He could feel every one of their six legs as they marched forward, spreading their misery to his spine. He opened his eyes and tried to lift his hands to his head, but someone restrained him.

  Heather. He’d recognized her petite hand in his immediately.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “Jace. You’re awake.” Her voice trembled. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  He tried to shake his head but the pain prevented him. “Where am I?”

  “The hospital. You were in a car accident and had surgery to drain blood that was pressing on your brain.”

  She pulled his hand to her lips. He studied her face. She was relieved. Crying. But behind her tears, he felt something else … doubt?

  “Jace. Tell me what happened.”

  “I—I don’t remember.”

  “You can tell me.”

  He searched her eyes and strained to remember. “We were at the movies.”

  “That’s right,” she said softly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Jace, I wasn’t in the car with you.”

  He squinted at her. Pain. Fuzzy thoughts. Again, in her eyes, he saw something else. Behind a mask of relief, he saw a flash of pain. “But, we—” He hesitated, trying to remember. “Who?”

  Her gaze hardened. “Anita Franks,” she said, spitting out the name that had come between them. She gently laid his hand back on his chest. She kept her voice low and leaned forward over him so that he could not avoid her eyes. “So tell me, Jace. Just what were you and the governor’s wife doing out so late together?”

  “I. Don’t. Remember.”

  Her eyes bored in on his for a moment until she broke her stare, looking off, turning away, wiping her eyes with her hand.

  He’d recovered rapidly from the accident, but the memory of that fateful night seemed to be permanently erased.

  “How convenient,” Heather had said.

  In the end, the newspapers splashed their speculation, and Jace’s once rock-solid marriage began to crack.

  “Come with me to Kenya,” he begged her.

  But Jace recognized that look of pain in Heather’s eyes. She wouldn’t come. Claimed she couldn’t go with a man who wouldn’t come clean.

  Jace couldn’t stay. But it wasn’t so much what he needed to leave behind as what he needed to find in Kenya again. Beginning alone was his only option. He needed a fresh start. A new canvas. And enough paint to make a difference in the world.

  The problem with Kenya was that every memory brought his sister back into view. As twins, they had been inseparable. So alike but so very different. And never were their differences cast into such sharp contrast as the spring before their high school graduation.

  Janice was frustratingly optimistic, wildly positive about life. She could see good in everything. If Jace and his teammates lost a rugby match, she said, “It will help the guys focus. They won’t be overconfident for the upcoming tournament.” If they had a flat tire that delayed their travel, she was sure they’d been spared a worse catastrophe. “We could have been in an accident.” Her optimism was inseparable from her faith. She accepted everything, good or bad, as a gift from a loving heavenly Father. For Jace, a young man of common sense and science, her attitude was a simplistic cop-out.

  But what happened to Timmy O’Reilly tested even Janice’s positive bent.

  For everyone around Kijabe station, Timmy’s arrival had been a special gift. Abandoned at the hospital after birth, this little Kenyan boy was adopted into the home of Matt and Tina O’Reilly, the missionary neighbors of the Rawlings family. Unable to have children of their own, Matt and Tina joyfully opened their lives and wrapped Timmy in love and acceptance. He was boy to the core, and soon there were backyard campouts, scraped knees from an encounter with an angry skateboard, a broken window from a line drive, and a collection of African porcupine quills that Timmy scavenged from the forests around Kijabe. One afternoon, a few months before Jace and Janice’s high school graduation, eight-year-old Timmy convinced Janice to pitch fallen grapefruit to him so he could practice his baseball swing.

  With every successful thwack, Timmy laughed harder. After hitting twenty or so slow, fat pitches, Timmy was covered in a fine, sticky mist of citrus, and the smell of sour fruit hung thick in the afternoon humidity. Janice changed her tactic, winding up in an exaggerated fashion to give him the old Rawlings heat. “Try this,” she said, launching a fastball over a makeshift home plate of banana leaves.

  Timmy swung and missed. Once, twice, and then a third time the yellow fruit whizzed past and rolled under a hedge of bougainvillea. “Give me another chance.”

  Janice held up her hands. “Hey, sport, I’m all out.”

  Timmy scampered to the flowering hedge and knelt on hands and knees. His head disappeared under the hedge.

  A moment later, Timmy screamed. High and piercing, the kind of scream that could only mean pain or terror.

  Janice ran to him. “Timmy, what’s wrong?”

  “Sn-snake,” was all he said.

  She grabbed his feet and pulled. He had three double-pronged bite marks—face, neck, and right arm.

  Janice winced. Black mambas were known to strike multiple times when cornered. She called for help. For anyone. For God.

  Timmy’s mother responded.

  Timmy covered his eyes with his hands. “Everything is blurry.” He squinted at Janice. “Two Janices,” he said.

  Janice stood and watched Tina running toward the hospital with Timmy cradled in her arms.

  He was dead within minutes.

  Dr. Rawlings found and killed the snake an hour later. Without antivenom, the black mamba bite was often fatal. In Timmy’s case, he had such a high dose of venom that it caused cardiovascular arrest within fifteen minutes.

  Why did Timmy O’Reilly die?

  For lack of antivenom.

  Why was there no antivenom?

  Because Dr. Lloyd Rawlings had decided not to stock it. The antivenom was too expensive and went out of date too quickly to justify stocking the expensive vials. They could treat a hundred cases of malaria for the price of one dose of antivenom. In a small mission hospital, difficult choices were made every day. They were always trying to stretch a dollar further than ever intended.

  And Timmy paid the price.

  Two days later, as the population of Kijabe shed enough tears to launch a boat, Timmy O’Reilly was laid to rest.

  Jace found his sister in her bedroom, her arms locked around her knees, sitting in the center of her bed, numbly quoting a verse from the book of Romans. “All things work together for good.” Over and over, as if the blind recitation of words would take the pain away.

  Jace took on the role of encourager but felt inadequate for the task. Janice had always been the one to see the silver lining. But words, however sincere—even the Bible—couldn’t penetrate Janice’s sorrow. Her pain was emotional. The words were aimed at her intellect and fell short, rain on ground too crusty to absorb.

  Jace took the part of Job’s wife. “Curse God and die,” he said. “I hate Him for what He’s done.”

  Hi
s words shocked his sister from her agony. “Don’t hate Him, Jace. He loves us. Loves us,” she said. “I’ll never understand this.” She paused, wiping her eyes. “But I know God is still good.”

  She stood and pulled Jace into a bear hug. “Take it back, Jace. You don’t hate Him. You can’t.”

  But he did. He couldn’t see beyond her tears. He couldn’t bear the O’Reillys’ sorrow.

  He hated the mission hospital for being underfunded and his father for not being able to purchase the medicine that could have saved Timmy.

  He closed his heart to his sister’s words. If God was good, He sure had a funny way of showing it.

  Jace and Janice plodded on. There were only a few months left before graduation. Then Jace would leave Africa. Leave the pain. Go to college in America and find a new life. He wanted nothing more in the few days that remained to him in Africa than to focus on his friends and make a few last good memories.

  He had no idea how much pain was in store before he would make his escape.

  At ten a.m., surprisingly prompt for the Kenyan culture, a well-dressed man driving a Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the lane outside Jace’s little house. Jace looked through the bars over his kitchen sink to read the emblem on the driver’s-side door: Ministry of Health.

  Jace opened the door as the man approached. He was young, dressed in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and black tie. He held out his hand. “I’m Samuel, John Okombo’s driver.”

  Jace shook the man’s hand firmly, alternating with a grip of his fingers and sliding into a grip of his thumb, a traditional Kenyan handshake. “I’m Jace Rawlings.”

  Samuel nodded. “I am to take you to see the minister.” He handed Jace a business card.

  Jace wore a blue blazer, a dress shirt, a red patterned tie, and khakis. From the looks of the driver, he might have underdressed.

  “Please sit in the back. It is safer.”