Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) by Audrey Schulman Page B

banner that said “Welcome Panoply Pharmaceuticals.” In smaller letters beneath, the banner added, “Rwanda: A Great Place for a Factory.”
    She held tight to the railing, blinking. The trip here had taken twenty-two hours, three different flights. All those fleshy breathing strangers packed in so close. The nubbly seats, the loud announcements, the mechanical air. She wasn’t supposed to move, not pace, not flap her hands. For twenty-two hours, strapped into her chair, the roar of the engines had whined in her head like a noxious gas.
    Now, exiting this plane, her feet were a little leaden from the tranquilizers. She stumbled slightly near the bottom of the stairs and four different arms in business suits were held out, wanting to assist. She stopped cold, out of reach, and waited there, eyes averted. After a pause, these hands were withdrawn. The flight attendants stood in the doorway behind her, whispering. A certain dry pressure in the back of her throat. She worked not to vomit.
    She didn’t address any one of the business suits around her, but instead talked in the direction of her left hand clinging to the railing. “I need a room to myself,” she said, “for twenty minutes.” She ignored the French phrase book in her bag over her shoulder; it was too far away. Instead, she just repeated her words more loudly. “I need a room to myself for twenty minutes.”
    One of the uniforms, maybe a translator, said something to the others about
nécessit
-a-something-or-other and
chambre
. Perhaps they assumed she had to make some phone calls, probably to heads of state, for they snapped into action, the whole crowd of them leading her into the airport, down a corridor and around a corner to an office that looked like it had been considered fancy in the 1950s.
    They clustered in the hallway, one of them addressing her, probably the first sentence of a welcome speech, smiling, rolling his hands out in a wide gesture as though this hallway represented all that Rwanda could offer.
    Before the translator could put these words into English, she closed the door in their faces.
    Space without people. Something close to silence. Switching off the lights to stop the busy electric hum, she crawled under the desk, tight ball, tight ball, fists over her ears, rocking and moaning soft vowel sounds like a sick cow.
    Later, she opened the door. She could at least function now. Five of the officials were still waiting, whispering among themselves. They turned, anxious and smiling. She announced she was ready and they led her back down the corridor. Not one of them asked a question. It was possible they’d heard her moaning.
    The parade of them walked straight through immigration, followed by several porters wheeling her bags, the lab equipment and food. They cut through the crowds to the front of the line where a nervous immigration agent stamped her passport without saying a word.
    She looked down to avoid the eyes of anyone who might be staring. All she saw were the hands and legs of the people she passed. Noted the median skin tone here was much darker than she was used to, close to the color of pumpernickel.
    Her own color was an amber shade exactly halfway between her mom’s ivory pinkness of a shaved mouse and her dad’s reddish brown of cedar mulch. Still, in Maine, the combination of these colors had always seemed to confuse others. The first day of kindergarten, for example, her parents had walked in with her. The teacher had understood her dad was her dad. Had greeted him, exclaiming what a beautiful little girl he had.
    And then hesitating, turned to her mom and asked, “Can I help you?”
    On many subjects, neurotypicals were capable of deriving enormous information from minimal data points. Her mother, in a two-minute conversation with a neighbor, could deduce so much about the person’s relationship, career and family life—information that Max would never