“My parents understood completely why I changed my name,” Katie said. “But it was still a source of…”
“A source of what?” Carmen pressed.
“A source of something. It was always one more source of”—and she paused as she searched for the right word—“tension between my parents and me. And, as you know, we had plenty already.”
Reggie leaned toward them, his elbows on his knees. Carmen could feel his intensity. “Carmen, let me tell you something I once told Katie. Only you know you. Only you know what’s inside you. There are no such things as mind readers, and we all have secrets. Oh, people think they know you, and they believe what they want. Look at the stuff Movie Star Confidential publishes. Look at the trash people read in the gossip columns. The faster your star shoots across the sky, the more people will want to see it collide with the atmosphere and burn to a billion cinders before it disappears into oblivion. There are people who love that sort of blaze. Watching someone flame out before their very eyes? It’s timeless theater. And I don’t want that ever to happen to you, Carmen. I don’t want that ever to happen to either of you.”
Carmen sipped her coffee. She supposed if anyone had secrets it was Reggie, and if anyone knew what it was like to have people both adore you and want to see you incinerated, it was Katie.
“Jean suggested that we bring a writer and a photographer on the safari—or at least a photographer—from one of the tabloids or magazines,” Katie said. “Thank you for taking my side and vetoing the idea, Reggie.”
He shrugged. “Jean is very, very smart, and it was a well-intentioned suggestion. But I just felt it crossed a line. We want our Hollywood stars to lead glamorous lives, but a little ostentatiousness goes a long way. It can be off-putting. The photos from the wedding will suffice.”
“And I do want us to have our privacy. The trip is for my closest friends and family. That’s all,” Katie said. She patted Carmen’s knee and squeezed it through her slacks. Then she turned back to Reggie and added, “Besides, you’ll be there. No one’s going to burn to a billion cinders or disappear into oblivion as long as you’re around.”
* * *
.?.?.
Carmen recalled that meeting in Reggie’s office and thought once again of the movie The Vikings and the funeral pyre that consumed the Kirk Douglas character, and considered leaving Reggie’s body right where it sat against the trunk of the baobab tree. She would surround it with kindling and brush, too, because that might be a more decent way to dispose of the corpse than allowing it to be devoured slowly by vultures or more quickly by jackals. But she wasn’t sure that she could create a fire hot enough for cremation or （if she could） watch her friend burn, and so she dragged the body to the acacia. She held his good hand and his good wrist on his good arm, the one that had not been mauled by the hyena, and pulled him across the dust and the grass, around the anthills—and they really were hills here in Africa, she observed, they were like the stumps of great trees—and over animal scat. She kept the rifle slung over her shoulder. It took forty minutes, and she was not merely exhausted by the effort, she was in pain: her hands were blushing red, and the sunburn was starting to blister on her right forearm. She felt the eyes of myriad animals upon her, including the impalas that paused from their feeding, more curious about her than suspicious of her. When, at one point, she dropped Reggie to catch her breath and allow her back a respite, she had a staring contest with the antelope she supposed was the alpha male. The head of the herd. Or harem. That was what Muema had taught her you called a cluster of impalas. A harem. She lost the contest.
When she reached the acacia, she studied her sunburn, and she recalled the one that Felix had told her about soon after they met—the one he had gotten on his back after his sister, Olivia, had died in the car accident. The first time she had given Felix a back rub in bed, she had noticed the small scars that remained.
The sun was dead overhead now. She sat down beneath the acacia to rest and thought how easily she could fall asleep here. But she didn’t dare. One foot in front of the other. She reached into Reggie’s pants pocket for his wallet and took out all the paper money and traveler’s checks that he had.
And then she trudged back to the baobab, trying to remain alert because now the impalas were gone and that might mean something. A predator was stalking them. She had gone no more than fifty yards when she saw the vultures lift off and glide over her head toward the acacia. Of course. They would feed on the dead publicist—a man who’d survived Okinawa, one of the most dangerous places on the planet, and Hollywood, one of the most toxic—while she was incinerating the tree that had saved her life last night.