Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

The twins regarded her in silence. A fleeting look of fear crossed Yvette’s face. But she recovered quickly, her features filling with an indifferent, challenging look.

Maud felt an ache in her throat. Not knowing what to say, she left them to their reading.

A naturally morose man, Samuel’s thoughts turned morbid after the pill incident. He’d read in a book that human allergies were cyclical, shed and acquired every seven years. These changes had no precise demarcation; you only found out when exposed to new or neutralized dangers. Samuel felt grateful to have outgrown his allergy to codeine, which he’d discovered in his youth the day it had almost killed him.

It had happened during his flight from his old home to his new. Jacob slept beside him. To his left sat a dark-haired Englishwoman, fussy, nervous, who laughed every time he looked at her. Samuel at first thought he frightened her, but it soon became apparent she suffered from a general self-consciousness. Samuel concluded that her desire to appear ladylike was undermined by her vices. She ate snacks from her pocket, flushing with embarrassment. When her meal came, she ate with great relish, sopping up the sauce with a squalid bun.

When Samuel glanced at the tabloid she was reading, she laughed nervously. “I don’t usually read such nonsense,” she said, “but flights will do that to you, won’t they? That’s what I brought.” She pointed to a pristine copy of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , stuffed into the seat pouch in front of her.

Samuel stared at her. Who did she think she was fooling? But he wouldn’t have noticed had she not felt compelled to point out her weaknesses to strangers.

He should have known better than to accept this woman’s advice. But Samuel’s excitement had kept him awake for thirty hours straight, and Jacob looked so peaceful beside him.

“Well, it’s not right for you to be left behind, is it?” she said, pointing to Jacob. She searched through her purse, retrieving an unmarked vial, and shook two pills onto her small, anemic hand. “It’s codeine,” she said. “You’ll sleep like a lamb.”

Sleep like a lamb he did, and almost didn’t wake. He was only roused five hours later in an Algerian hospital. They’d had to ground the plane and take him there, so severe was his swelling, his toxic shock. When it became clear he would live, Jacob berated him for days: “Before this, I had never seen so old a brain on so young a body. Now it is the other way around.”

Now, after having had no reaction to a second dose of codeine, Samuel wondered if the woman on the plane had given him codeine at all.

Samuel sat in his shop. No one came to offer condolences, and though glad no one knew of his accident, he couldn’t help feeling somewhat disliked. Maud had gotten consolation for her accident. His mind was taken off his childish bitterness only by the arrival of Ray Frank, who’d run over on his lunch break from his parts shop.

Propping the door open with his foot, soot on his cheeks, Ray called, “Don’t suppose you know much about tractor parts?”

Samuel shrugged. “Not really.”

“You sure? You’d make good money. I’m doing the rest, but there’s a part for the engine I just can’t get from my distributors. Can you check with yours? I’ll cut you fifteen per cent.”

“Oh, you do not have to do that,” laughed Samuel. “Just find out about Jacob’s will for me, and we can call things even.”

Ray winked. “I appreciate it,” he said, his eyes trailing a thin, haughty-looking woman pushing a stroller past the shop. Only when she’d passed did he focus again. “All right, Sam, take down this serial number.” He recited it off the back of his hand.

“Wait, wait, let me get my book.”

“Hurry, Samuel, I’ve got to motor.”

Samuel fussed with the wires and papers strewn all over the counter, pressured by Ray’s impatience. He found what he was looking for under his stool. “All right, give it to me again.” But as soon as Ray began to speak, Samuel realized he had the wrong ledger. This one was filled with childish writing.

“Got that?” called Ray, already out the door.

Samuel flipped to a blank page. “Let me double-check. Just say it one more time.”

Ray made an exasperated noise, but recited it a final time, emphasizing each number as though speaking to an imbecile. He rushed out the door.

Samuel waited until he couldn’t see Ray from the window any more to open the ledger. The twins often helped themselves to the empty green ledgers in his study, a hoard of thirty or so he’d permanently borrowed from the government office. Sure enough, on the front cover Chloe had inscribed her name. Wed. July. 5. Y. stared at Asthma during dinner tonight — secret friendship? Thur. July. 13. Y. leaned over my soup when I went to bathroom — silica gel? Varnish? Did not finish soup. Y. alone in alcove with grape juice, seemed scared when I came in for cup. Did not drink juice. Mon. July. 17 9:45 a.m. I go to bathroom. 9:48 a.m. Y. gets up to go to bathroom. 10:02 a.m. I yawn and roll on my right side. 10:03 a.m. Y. yawns and rolls on her right side. 11:55 a.m. I roll over to read — got my exact book in her hands, has just rolled over to read. Tue. July. 18. Y. stuttering. Saw a gleam in her eye at top of the stairs — moved out of way before she could push me. Wed. July. 19. Y. still blames me — detergent in my juice — didn’t drink it .

The list filled half the pages of the notebook. Samuel closed it, sitting for a minute on his chair. He didn’t know what to think; he refused to see anything in it, taking it for a game he would make sure the twins gave up. But he had a feeling. Not a mild feeling, like a hunch or even intuition. Dread.

To clear his mind, Samuel worked on his prototypes. All had been going just as planned, save the base costs, which were more demanding than he’d predicted and had begun to strain him a little. His friendship with Ray helped interest a few local investors, and having fronted him money, they merely waited to see what he came up with before giving him more. In all other matters he was his own man. He had proved himself, and felt vindicated. He was so close to justifying his life with a great work that it scared him to move too fast. And with Maud finally a little convinced of the plan’s ingenuity, if not its practicality, he accepted the eventuality of fame and threw himself headlong into it.

But he couldn’t keep his thoughts on the work, and closing early, he drove home.

The Tyne house was filled with grainy light that made the furniture look stark and severe. It was so quiet that Samuel could hear the water heaters ticking, the sound of wind in the grass out back. On the kitchen table Maud had placed a bouquet of fake roses in a horn-shaped brass vase, and Samuel felt for the first time all summer his uncle’s presence in the house. Here was a part of himself Jacob hadn’t managed to take with him to the grave. Seeing the vase, which Jacob had spent decades polishing, Samuel was reminded of the jealousy he’d felt towards it as a young man. How he had spat on it when ignored by his uncle, filled it with filth, and even, one time, attempted to throw it in a fire. But the vase survived, and he lived alongside it, despising it like a gifted sibling he was hopeless to outdo.

Samuel picked it up, running a finger along its nicks and scars. Someone else was home. A loud thud shook the house to its foundations, followed by silence, then a second thump. Still clutching the vase, Samuel left the kitchen and started upstairs. At the threshold of the twins’ room, he paused for a minute before turning the doorknob.