Lindiwe, reading my mind, smiles reassuringly. “We’ll take good care of him. Don’t worry.” She reaches out for him and I feel a rush of vertigo.
“Let me just feed him first,” I say, stalling for a few more minutes.
“Mandy is unfortunately in a bit of a hurry. You go with her to make the statement and I’ll feed him. He’ll be fine.”
And then she pries him free of my grasp. Without the reassuring warmth and weight of him anchoring me, I feel as insubstantial as a cloud, as though all I’m made up of is the cotton-candy fluff of yearning and despair. Don’t tell me you can’t hear a heart breaking. It sounds exactly like a baby that’s been yours for two days being carried away, its quavering cries growing fainter as the world rushes in to close the gap between you.
* * *
• • •
Walking like a zombie on my way out, I can’t help but think of how I’ve spent my whole life searching for signs only to find them in the most unusual of places. The most powerful ones came when I wasn’t even looking for them.
One such sign came in the form of a song on the radio the night the universe suggested it might be time to leave my first husband, Doug. As I tore out of the yard in Doug’s Ford Cortina with my dress ripped and my mouth bleeding, “You Always Hurt the One You Love” by the Mills Brothers filtered out from the speakers.
It was the same song I’d sung in the bar the night we met, and the same one we danced to a week later as he whispered in my ear that I was the most beautiful woman in the world. Of course, that was before he started hitting me. The thing about fists is that they have a way of robbing you of things—your beauty, your dignity, your sense of self-worth. The song reminded me that I wasn’t that beautiful anymore.
You have him to thank for that, Ruthie, the universe whispered. He took that from you. You know what to do.
And I did.
Some signs have saved my life while others reminded me that I had a life worth saving. Reading them hasn’t always been easy; a precious few are unambiguous; the rest are as ephemeral as smoke and as clear as mud. None has been quite as definitive as a baby left on my doorstep.
And yet I’ve just given him back; rejecting a literal gift from the gods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Zodwa
13 May 1994
Big Hope Informal Settlement, Magaliesburg, South Africa
Leleti has had so many seizures in the past twenty-four hours that Zodwa has lost count of them. Zodwa hasn’t slept at all and only managed to eat half a tin of cold baked beans during a brief respite between her mother’s attacks. What keeps her going is needing to make Leleti better so she can find out where her baby is.
Zodwa shouldn’t leave Leleti alone but she needs to empty the bucket that has served as their toilet. She also has to fetch clean water to wash the soiled bedding. The stench has become so overpowering that she worries it’s contributing to Leleti’s distress. She wonders briefly where Leleti’s dog has disappeared to, as its presence would probably calm her. So much for loyalty.
Zodwa detours past Mama Beauty’s shack and knocks on her door to ask her to stay with Leleti but no one is there. Zodwa is just wondering who else she might ask for help when Mama Beauty rounds the corner carrying shopping bags.
“My child,” she exclaims, rushing to Zodwa. “I heard the news and am so sorry for your loss.” Mama Beauty puts her bags down and envelops Zodwa in a hug.
Zodwa’s thinking is so foggy from fatigue that she can barely make sense of what Mama Beauty is saying. “My loss?”
Mama Beauty clucks in sympathy. “I can see you are not handling it well but that is completely understandable. To lose a baby during birth after carrying it for nine months is a heartbreaking thing.” Mama Beauty releases Zodwa, and her eyes are filled with such compassion that it almost brings an exhausted Zodwa to her knees.
She shakes her head to clear her mind so that she can focus on the task at hand. “I was just taking this to empty it.” Zodwa nods at the bucket, which she’s covered with newspaper. “Mama is very sick. I need to get back.”
“Oh, I am sorry for keeping you! You go dispose of that, my child, and I will go see your mother.”
They part ways, Mama Beauty’s words playing in a loop through Zodwa’s mind.
To lose a baby. To lose a baby. To lose a baby.
What did she mean by that?
The laneways between the shacks are narrow and Zodwa keeps getting jostled by the people streaming into and out of the squatter camp. It takes her longer than it normally would to reach the privy. She empties the bucket and then goes to wash it out, filling the water bucket in the process. Black smoke billows from somewhere nearby and Zodwa looks up at it, fearful of what it means.
A woman walking toward her sees Zodwa’s concern. “Don’t worry, sisi. It’s a controlled fire. They’re burning down Gertie’s shack. It’s the only way to rid it of the killing disease now that she’s died.”
Zodwa thanks her for the information and tries to keep moving, but the woman stands in her way.
“There are others who have the killing disease,” she continues. “More and more every day. If we let them stay here, it will spread to all of us. What we need are more fires. That will teach them.”
“Yes,” Zodwa agrees so the woman will let her go.
When she gets back, she’s made up her mind to ask Mama Beauty what she meant about losing a baby, but finds her on her haunches in their shack with her back to Zodwa. Leleti is rolled over, one arm flung out to the side.
Zodwa drops the bucket. The water splashes out, pooling into the dirt. “Mama?”
There is no reply from Leleti but Mama Beauty stands and turns to Zodwa. “My child,” she says with trembling lips as she takes Zodwa’s hand. “My child, I am so sorry.” Her eyes are filled with tears.
Zodwa forces herself to pull her hand free as she takes one step forward and then another until she sees what her mother’s friend is seeing. Leleti lies with her eyes wide open and foam crusted at her lips.
Zodwa drops to her knees, the moment so surreal that it feels as though she’s hovering just below the shack’s roof looking down on herself. What she sees is a selfish girl whose unnatural appetites have brought great suffering upon them, a daughter who made her mother’s last months on this earth bitter with disappointment.
She wants more than anything to retrace her steps out of the shack and then to keep retracing them so they take her back to her grandmother’s hut in KwaZulu, back to an idyllic childhood before brothers went missing and mothers contracted tuberculosis, and girls were correctively raped to cure them of their love of other girls.
She wants to go back to a time when her future was promising, a time before babies were born and then disappeared into the night, before being eighteen years old made her feel ancient with all the weariness she is weighted with.
Oh, Mama. Mama, no.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Delilah
14 May 1994
Johannesburg General Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa
I had just stepped into the ICU waiting room when I saw him. Father Thomas was sitting in the corner reading his Bible, but he looked up as though he sensed my presence. I was frozen in the doorway when he caught sight of me.
I knew he was in his late seventies but he’d aged well in the way that handsome men sometimes do. Though he was completely gray, he still had a full head of hair that was cropped close to his skull. Wire-rim glasses framed his dark eyes, intensifying rather than diminishing the power of his gaze, which still had the capacity to unnerve me so thoroughly. Even after all that time, what I felt most strongly in his presence was shame.
“Delilah,” he said, standing up. “It was you, after all. I thought I’d imagined it.” So he’d recognized me when we caught sight of each other the last time I’d been he
re.
I couldn’t help but marvel then at how a lifetime wasn’t long enough to break the hold some people had on you. After all, I was only fifteen when I’d first laid eyes on Father Thomas and fallen so desperately in love with him.
It had been a Sunday and my mother wasn’t joining me for church because she had to stay behind and help with the harvest. Da had insisted I stay to help too, but Ma had told me to go and that she’d deal with the fallout. On impulse, just before I reached my usual place of worship, I ducked into the nearby Catholic church for mass instead. Having learned that the Dutch Reformed Church only accepted men in the service of the Lord, I’d become disillusioned with the limitations of it, and having recently read about nuns, I wanted to find out more about Catholicism. Forgoing my own faith’s devotions to sneak into those of another’s was the most rebellious act I’d ever committed up to that point.
Father Thomas was standing in the pulpit that morning as I slipped into the back of the church a few minutes after mass had already begun. I was struck first by the breathtaking stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes behind him, and then by him as the rainbow colors painted him with diffused light, lending him an aura of otherworldliness.
He spoke with a grave conviction, like a man truly possessed of the Holy Spirit, and radiated such majesty that it was impossible not to be entranced by him. Judging by the rapt faces of his congregants, most of whom were women, I knew I wasn’t the first person to fall under his spell. Without a doubt, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and I fell as much in love with him that day as I did with the mesmerizing rituals of his faith.
And now, after all those years and everything that had happened in the interim—even after Father Thomas had served as my judge, jury, and executioner by taking my son from me, and then excommunicating me from the church—some specter of that feeling remained.
“Father,” I said in acknowledgment. It was all I could manage under the circumstances.
“How did you know to come?”
The question threw me. “What do you mean? I got your letter.”
“Letter?” He looked genuinely confused. “I didn’t write you a letter.”
I thought of the dozen missives that had arrived sporadically over the years and the handwriting that had become familiar because of them. I’d always just assumed he’d been the one sending them. If not he, then who?
Father Thomas tilted his head as he regarded me, as though I was a puzzle he’d long before given up on solving. He still wore that air of wounded disappointment that I’d found so difficult to bear in the last weeks of my pregnancy, as though I’d let him down in some unbearable way that he’d never recover from.
He took my elbow and led me toward the viewing window, nodding beyond the glass. I looked from his face to Daniel’s bed. My view was unhindered by curtains this time, and I could make out Daniel’s upper body hidden under a sheet and raised up a few degrees by the incline of the bed. He had bandages wrapped around his head and his face was swollen. I wouldn’t have recognized him as the man from the last photo that I’d been sent. But then, without all those photos over the years, I never would have recognized him at all.
A nun was sitting beside Daniel’s bed. She had her elbows propped up against his mattress with her forehead resting against her interlaced fingers. Her wimple hid most of her face, but I could see she was mouthing what looked like a feverish prayer as tears coursed down her cheeks.
“See that woman? That’s Daniel’s mother. She’s been his mother ever since you left.”
Even if he hadn’t filled me in on their relationship, I would have guessed it. If ever there was a picture of maternal anguish, then she was it.
Father Thomas continued, “Your being here will just upset her. I know you think there’s something here for you, but there isn’t. There’s nothing you can do for Daniel but you can do the right thing for her. The past is in the past. I beg you to put it behind you where it belongs and move on.”
I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. The past wasn’t a place you could just walk away from; it was something you carried with you your entire life, and year upon year as your arms got weaker, the burden just got heavier and harder to bear. But I wanted so much for him to be right because that meant I got to set it down—all that guilt and regret and shame—and leave it there.
This is yours now, I wanted to say. You take it.
“Go home, Delilah,” he said.
And so I did, because beneath it all, even after everything I’d done, I was still a good girl who wanted to do the right thing and who listened when told what to do.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ruth
14 May 1994
Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa
I’m pouring another drink, my fifth or sixth of the day. It’s been two days since I was forced to give the baby back and I find that booze takes the edge off the worst of my fury at Dee and some of the fury at myself. It doesn’t help that I keep reaching for the phone wanting to call Vince because he’s the person I always speak to when I’m most wounded. Remembering each time that I can’t speak to him just makes me pour the drinks stronger.
“Jirre, man. Check out the kwaai BMW M3!”
The voice coming from the front yard startles me. I peek out the window to discover two men in camo gear getting out of a bakkie and walking toward Vince’s convertible. By the looks of lust on their faces, the car is giving them major hard-ons. Blond, broad-chested, and taller than six foot, they both look like mirror images of Maynard Coetzee, the town’s golden boy who I’d briefly had a fling with when I was seventeen. They have to be his sons.
“Killer mag wheels and spoiler. I wonder if it has a proper racing steering wheel,” the one with the cap replies in Afrikaans as he leans in for a closer look.
“It does,” I say, opening the front door and stepping outside, “but the car’s just been cleaned, so try not to drool on it.”
He spins around, snatching his hands back from the door, and smiles when he sees me. “Hello, tannie.” Being called “auntie” by someone who’s in their thirties rankles me but I know they don’t mean anything by it. “Is this your husband’s car?” he asks without any hint of sarcasm or irony.
“No, it’s mine,” I brazenly lie. You’re not going to win any poker tournaments if you’re not good at bluffing.
“Regtig?” I nod and he carries on. “A small lady like you driving a big car like this? So, what’s the fastest you’ve done in it?”
“Oh . . . ” I think back to the dusty Karoo expanse on the way here. “About two hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.”
He whistles appreciatively just as the one without a cap spits out, “Kak, man! There’s no way.”
I just shrug and smile mysteriously. “I’m Ruth, by the way. And you’re which of the Coetzee brood, exactly?”
“I’m Klein Maynard and this is my brother, Henning,” the one with the cap says. “Klein” is the way Afrikaners preface names they share with older members of their family; it means “small” and is their way of saying “junior.”
“Lovely to meet you. I knew your father many moons ago.” There’s a smirk of recognition from both of them, so I know they’ve heard the stories or, at least, some bastardized version of them. “Would you like to come in for a drink? I don’t have beer but I’m sure I could rustle up a brandy and Coke.”
They thank me and follow me up the steps, sitting on chairs on the veranda after indicating that their boots are dirty and they don’t want to trek mud inside. After I mix their drinks, pouring a double for myself, Jez follows me outside as I deliver them. She stops short of going near the men, her ears and tail lowered, and then she surprises me by baring her teeth and growling at them.
They laugh nervously and I apologize, scooting her back inside before closing the door behind me. Jez hasn’t been herself sinc
e we handed the baby the over. It’s like she’s bereft without him. I know how she feels.
We sit and chat about the weather for a bit, and then talk turns to Hartbeespoort Dam, and how it’s become a drawing card for rich people from Johannesburg looking to get away from the city for the weekend. Golf courses and resorts are springing up all over the place and it’s bringing a lot of pleasure-seekers with money to our neck of the woods.
“Which is why we’re prepared to up our offer,” Klein Maynard says.
“Your offer?”
“For the farm. Since you turned us down.” I’m taken aback. The estate agent told me it was some consortium who’d made the offer but didn’t tell me who was behind it.
“We want to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” Henning says before Klein Maynard offers a million rand more.
The total figure makes my eyes water.
Damn Dee for making us turn it down. Damn her for making me give back the baby. Damn her to hell for all of it.
And it’s in damning her that I somehow conjure her, like one of those demons in horror movies who appear when you mention their name, because there she suddenly is, pulling up in Da’s old Chevy Impala. We watch as she parks behind their bakkie and gets out. Her eyes look swollen, as though she’s been crying again, and I suddenly realize where she’s been all morning: at the hospital visiting her son. I’m just wondering how to ask her if anything has changed without letting on too much in front of our guests, when she walks up the stairs and glares at them.
“This is my sister, Delilah Ferguson,” I say by way of introduction and to cut through the awkwardness. “These boys are Klein Maynard and Henning Coetzee.”
They stand and Klein Maynard removes his cap before reaching out to shake Dee’s hand. She leaves him hanging.
“Entertaining AWB members now, are you?” she asks me acidly.
If You Want to Make God Laugh Page 11