Chapter One: Joshua CHAPTER ONE JOSHUA
I hurry along the wooden path, nascent morning sunrays whispering across the gray sky, when it suddenly goes black overhead. I halt and gaze up at a tangle of vulture wings.

More vultures swoop down to join the party that’s apparently being called. I duck, throw my arms up to protect my head. Once the flock passes by, I straighten, feeling foolish. Then the shrubs nearby shiver with movement, and fresh fear constricts my chest. I bob my flashlight around the dim bush.

Finally, reasonably certain that nothing menacing lurks close, I continue along the riverbank. The air is warm, perfumed by firewood, and tart blooming baobab flowers, and the whiff of eggs and sausage sizzling over the Skottel. Or maybe I’m imagining the last part, conjuring pure childhood mornings that were few and far between.

I check my phone again. No text. But Bailey will be at the firepit, waiting for me. She has to be.

Even though we were supposed to meet by the lodge. And Bailey—my reliable, quiet sister, who always does what she says she will—wasn’t there. Not in her room, either, one of the property’s five luxury suites she’s sharing with our brother, Sam.

A fish eagle shrills, and a hippo follows with a series of grunts, sounding eerily close. More vultures whip by, and I run reassurances through my head about the unlikeliness of being injured on safari. An electric fence encircles the lodging grounds at Leopard Sands. And in the decades my family has been vacationing here, I am aware that monkeys, baboons, and sometimes even an antelope scrape by the enclosure, but rarely any predatory animals, like one of the Big Five. Besides, once the vultures swoop toward the trees, it means that the danger has passed.

Death has already come.

I wonder what died. An impala? A bushbuck? A wildebeest? And who executed the kill? A lion from the dominant Naru pride we saw on our drive yesterday? The circle of life, sure, but I always look away when an animal is about to pounce on its meal. Teeth gnashing, the vicious chase. The gore. Disney doesn’t show you a lion emerging from a buffalo’s cavity, fur matted in blood.

I prefer peaceful drives—watching hyena pups in their den, or a cheetah on the run, or lions lazing beneath a silver-flowered buffalo thorn—whereas my brother gets off on the kill. Sam is six years my junior, and my opposite in most every way. And yesterday he practically salivated when we got rare front-row seats to a hunt. Two lions chased an old leopard, then ripped him apart limb by limb. My brother didn’t look away when the lions’ incisors clamped down on leopard flesh.

I, on the other hand, looked away.

Sam was high on it; the rest of them too. I felt ashamed that I didn’t share in the thrill. Sam taunted me—Would I ever man up? God gave me eyeballs for a reason, and I was a fucking sissy. Not the type of person who should be CFO of a huge, successful company—or next in line to command it. He said that pointedly to Mom. Fact is, Sam’s hated me ever since he was seventeen, and I told Mom he was doing lines of coke off our dining room table. Still, the barb rubs up against my insecurities. I worried Mom may start to believe it. Or worse, that she was already thinking it herself.

I didn’t defend myself, though. I just stared at my hands and thought, I am a sissy. But not for the reasons Sam said.

Kill or be killed, Mom said as she watched the lion feasting, trying to diffuse our tension, levying the edict in her calm, exacting tone that commands both the boardroom and our family. Let the dead stay dead.

And then sitting there in our open-air Jeep, we all added the obligatory statement, a ripple wave of irony that trilled out in unison. The circle of life, we intoned, almost like automatons, the axiom both apropos to the conversation, and also, the inspiration behind the name of our family company—Circ—that’s worth at least a billion.

Mom’s billion. Lest any of us forgets it.

I switch off my flashlight as light suffuses the horizon, dawn yielding to morning. Then I quicken my pace, passing the spot just on the inside of the electric fence, where I once watched a crocodile dismember a hippo on the shores of the river beyond. Aba kept my head steady on the sight, didn’t permit me to look away. I can still feel his hand on my skull, the heat from his meaty fingers, the pressure on my neck.

Anxiety that began as an itch has now reached a peak in my chest. Everything is wrong. Starting with them getting engaged. Mom and Asher.

Or as Sam calls our soon-to-be stepfather: Mom’s new and improved right-hand Josh. It’s a one-two punch of a dig, as I despise being called Josh—it’s such a fratty nickname. Sam is cruel, no doubt, but also right. I was once Mom’s go-to, her favorite, her everything.

It’s pathetic, isn’t it? That I like—love—being those things to my mother. That every time she bestows her approval upon something I’ve said or done, I experience a dopamine surge. Which is why it’s so out of character that I confronted her last night, that I didn’t mince words. She accused me of threatening her—and still I didn’t back down.

Not the golden-boy son any longer.

I round the bend amid a rustle in the trees. I stop. A few birds scatter in startled flight. The air is so heavy and humid now a pinprick could burst it. An owl hoots, and again I hear the hippos honking and grunting from the river. Hippos are the loudest animals on earth, which I quite respect, even envy. I wasn’t loud enough with Aba, am usually not with Mom, and am not even with my wife. Though I am trying, on this trip, in fact, to cut this toxic trait of mine and express myself.

The sun, now almost violently red, bloats above the thicket of baobabs. Piercing vulture squawks zing down my bones. The birds are scavenging in the distance, I now see, beyond the memorial headstone for Aba, in scrubby brush that is tangled and overgrown, making it harder to identify the kill. I pass the firepit, with charcoal embers from the prior night’s festivities.

I tried to go to bed early. After Mom and Sam fought, and then made up again, and then my brother massaged her shoulders, sucking up to Mom in a way that she invariably succumbs to. I’d had quite enough. Davina, many drinks deep, opted to stay out without me. I kissed Bailey’s cheek good night, grazed my hand across Davina’s back, then mumbled pleasantries to the rest of them. I returned to my suite to relieve Gwen, who was babysitting, after which I stared at Ruby in her crib for eons—my sleeping daughter’s perfect frame, the reassuring rise and fall of her chest, the almost unfathomable way babies are able to sleep with nothing worrying them at all.

But when Davina finally slunk back to the room in a sorry state, I stormed out to talk to Mom. Heat creeps up my neck as last night lashes back. Mom’s surprise, face flushed, as she lazed on the couch, still in her rehearsal dinner dress. How her surprise at seeing me morphed to indignation. Then anger. As I finally said the things that’ve built to a crescendo….

Now my eyes skitter beyond the bonfire pit, toward the river. Elephants burrow their trunks in the murky depths, the stench of their dung pungent in my nostrils. And on the riverbanks, antelope graze amid spindly marula trunks, ears flicking.

Where is Bailey?

My footsteps slow as I pass the gravestone, tall, gray, and imposing, just like Aba in life, carved with a Jewish star insignia. Aryeh Babel, it reads.

Aryeh means “lion” in Hebrew. Fierce, to the ends. But Lion Sands was already a thriving safari lodge, so Aba called ours Leopard Sands. Because of all predatory animals, you don’t want to be attacked by a leopard. A leopard will go straight for your jugular, suffocate and then eat you. You can be attacked by a lion and survive. But pretty much no one survives a leopard attack.

Thus, everyone who worked for Aba called him the Leopard. I think he secretly delighted in that moniker.

My eyes travel down the headstone. Beloved Husband and Father it reads at the bottom.

The sentiment always provokes a nervous twinge from my depths.

All of a sudden I freeze, breathless, as a few observations converge. First, that whatever is dead died within the bounds of the electric fence. When we built the bonfire encampment, with the memorial to Aba, the lodge extended the electric fence to enclose our family’s beloved hangout. The place we always head after dinner to drink and chat and fight, when we reunite here in our South African home away from home.

The second thing that hits me is that there is something strange, something eerily human and hideously familiar, about the dead shape on which the vultures are feeding. Slowly, very slowly, my eyes absorb the details, then my brain. I stop suddenly.

A buzz mounts in my ears as I step closer to what is unmistakably a human hand. Though the vultures have ravished other parts of the body, the hand is intact, spotlighting prominent veins and long, thin fingers with age spots not completely eradicated by frequent laser treatments, to the previous chagrin of the hand’s owner. I kneel down, my heart thrashing in my chest, taking in the glossy fingernails painted white, shaped in that trendy, witchy point that Davina has also adopted.

But the hand doesn’t belong to my wife. Nor to my sister, whose nails are always bare and short. It belongs to… oh god… I can barely think it, even to myself.

Another person besides my wife who enjoys—enjoyed—keeping up with the latest trends.

Mom.

Nausea builds in my throat. As I teeter, my orientation unsteady, my foot crunches down on something hard, distinguished from the packed dirt. I bend down to pick it up, but even before it’s in my hand, I know what it is. Mom’s necklace. A large gold locket she wears on her neck, that since my earliest memory she has never taken off.

I glance around before I slip the necklace inside my chinos’ pocket. Then I begin to scream.