A Mother's Love

At 11:26 A.M. on a Tuesday morning in April, Kyra Tierney's telephone rang. When she picked it up, her life tilted sideways and spilled into another realm entirely.

But at 11:23 she'd stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the converted warehouse that contained the empire she'd built and wondered why she didn't feel more satisfied. From where she stood, she could see a hallway of studios--large and small--with old redbrick walls and green plants thriving in the sunlight cascading down from skylights placed at intervals throughout the building to allow natural light to heat and illuminate the space below. There was a cafe, the Ganesha Room, sprawling in one corner, with large windows overlooking the downtown Denver street beyond.

This was Yogariffic, the megastudio grown from a tiny storefront seed Kyra and her college roommate, Africa, had planted the day after their college graduation. Africa, who was not, as people often imagined, a willowy black woman with hair cut close to her head and cheekbones to die for, but a willowy white one with flowing hair down to her tiny bottom and lips like Angelina Jolie's. Her real name was Amanda, which was much too soft a name for a woman like that, a crusader and--well, it had to be said--sometimes a flake. Someone in college nicknamed her Africa when she was raising funds for some crisis or another in that war-and famine-torn place. It stuck.

Below, in the warehouse, the day was cranking up to full speed. Businesswomen on their lunch hours hurried in to take one of the seven varieties of yoga they offered--hatha and vinyasa, kundalini and Iyengar, among others--or belly dancing or hula or Nia. College students came in to curl up and study in the all-organic, all-vegetarian cafe. Yogariffic employed an acupuncturist, two massage therapists, an Ayurvedic practitioner and an herbalist who consulted in a tiny bricked room.

Kyra was the vision and brains behind it. Africa was the face and personality--at least when she was around. At the moment, Africa was extremely pregnant and living in Wales with her husband until the baby was born, when she promised to be back.

Kyra somehow doubted it. For the first time, Africa was deeply in love. She'd met her Welshman, Thomas Rhys, on a business trip to London, and the pair had fallen wildly, instantly in love. After carrying on a long-distance love affair for a few months, they'd eloped, then commuted between Denver, London--where Africa supervised a new Yogariffic being established--and the tiny village in southern Wales where Thomas was born.

Africa's defection left Kyra wondering what in the world she was doing with her own life. How was it possible that she was thirty-eight years old with no husband or children, no family at all? And the business into which she'd poured all her energies sometimes seemed out of control, a thing separate from her.

Looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows, she felt absolutely nothing. It was highly profitable and green and honorable enough, she supposed, but where was yoga in all of this, that balancing, quieting practice? In her seventy-hour weeks and the ordering of yoga mats in thirteen colors (some with paisleys, some with stripes) and the extremely expensive teas they sold in extremely expensive tins and the glossy magazines that touted new products to make you more lithe and flexible and have better sex and look great--where was the yoga? Africa loved all the extras and insisted that they would turn a profit with them. It turned out they were doing much better than just making a profit--they were getting quite wealthy--but sometimes Kyra wondered where the original vision was. Buried in the cafe beneath the yerba mate in earth-friendly mugs?

When she picked up the telephone that rang at 11:26, a male voice with a thick, rolling accent said, "May I speak to Kyra Tierney?"

"This is she."

"My name is Dylan Jones." The voice moved right through her like the perfect opening cords of a song she wanted to learn to sing. "I'm afraid I'm calling with some bad news, Kyra. It's about Africa."

"What?" Kyra sat down, air leaking out of her as if she were a punctured balloon. "Is she all right?"

"I'm afraid she's not," the man said. Obviously the accent was Welsh. It was somewhere between Irish and Scottish. Sort of.

"What is it?"

The man said simply, "She and Thomas were in a car accident. I'm so sorry to tell you they were both killed."

Kyra heard him, but the words might well have been spoken in some other language. Swahili, say. Or Japanese. "Pardon me?" she asked. "Killed? Both of them?" Her lungs were empty and she tried to bring air back into them.

"When?"

"Thursday last. We didn't know to phone you till the will was read after the funerals."

The will Kyra had insisted Africa write and keep with her. "I see." Though she didn't. "How did it happen, the accident?"