Two Years of Wonder

by Ted Neill

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She glances at the other children around her and shakes her head no. I have crayons and paper in my hands that I was planning to use for an activity with some of the older children. Judy takes a piece of paper and a box of crayons. She writes,

  I don hav my mum I don wat tub a lon

  She draws a house, two figures, a red figure, her mother, and a blue one, herself.

  Our house Judy is two years Mum issma ilen

  The Mum laek to play with children and she laek to stay with them

  I ask her, who plays with her now.

  One Le children

  What is the difference between mothers and children?

  One Le mum kan kip me in her arms

  I love her so much

  I am so sad

  She puts down the crayon as if she has suddenly realized something. She turns to me.

  “I will die soon.”

  “Judy, don’t say that.”

  “I will. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you think of your mother too much, she will come and get you.”

  The children I am closest to are six girls in Cottage Yellow: Miriam, Josephine, Ivy, Tabitha, Jamina, and Winnie. I call them collectively, the Gremlins. I read to them every night. The orphanage has a wide selection of donated books and the most popular by far, the one that produces the most squeals, hoots, and peals of laughter is a comic book series about a portly, balding middle-aged high school teacher who has Superman-like powers but a costume that consists of nothing but a pair of underwear—briefs to be specific. His name is Captain Underpants. And years later the Gremlins tell me their favorite book was always Captain Underpants.

  I also teach the Gremlins how to play mafia, a card game where the card you are handed gives you a role. Numbered cards are townspeople; a jack is an informant; a queen is a medic; and a king is the killer. With the help of a facilitator (me), the killer in the bunch has to kill the other players while they try to figure out who it is before they are all dead. It’s a game of lying, cheating, and deception, and at times earnest protestations of innocence. Needless to say, the Gremlins love it and ask to play it every night. The irony of course is that they know each other so well and are such unsophisticated liars, that the killer is often correctly identified and caught in the first two rounds—short by the standards of the game but it does not diminish the kids’ enjoyment.

  Hannah is leaving. The trip to Uganda, the night commuters, the LRA, the over-the-top American boys trying to make a film, not to mention the endless tragedy of the children at Malaika, it’s all too much. She’s seen enough. She wants out of this “God-forsaken place.” She has university to attend. A life to live. The sense that I will be all alone in a country without anyone to understand me begins to overwhelm me, yet I tell her I don’t think I can keep what we have going over long distance. Selfishly I touch her and hope that at least she will make love to me once more before she leaves, but she is uninterested.

  I decide not to go to the airport with her. I don’t think it would matter much to her anyhow. She gets into a car with Mama Seraphina. It is late April. The long rains have come. It is pouring like it only does in the tropics. Nairobi is a mile above sea level, so the rain is also cold. I kiss my hand and blow it towards Hannah.

  But I’m not sure she can even see me through the fogged window. The car pulls away and disappears down the road. Later when I lose my temper with the children over something exceedingly minor and I send them crying back to their cottages, I turn to find Miriam glaring at me, her arms akimbo. She takes a few steps towards me and shakes her finger.

  “When you speak to young children, you must keep the angry words inside your mouth, Ted.”

  It was Sofie that had crossed the highway to the clinic to find someone to help her mother, Christabell, the social worker, told me. When they realized Sofie had crossed the road herself, dodging between the traffic, they were horrified. When she led them to her house where they found that she had been taking care of Judith, they were astounded. Sofie was not yet six.

  “She is a genius,” Christabell said.

  I ask what happened after the nurses came to Judith and Sofie’s house. She tells me that with some networking, they found some distant relatives of Judith that were willing to take her in and give her hospice care. Sofie was admitted to the orphanage on a temporary basis. The tentative deal was that the family would take care of Judith until she died and then they would take in Sofie.

  I ask Christabell if she had heard from the family. She tells me no. Does she know how Judith is?

  “Probably dead.”

  “Then why have they not come to get Sofie?”

  “They probably do not want her. They took care of Judith as she died, they probably don’t want to do it again for a child. And after all, Sofie is comfortable at the orphanage.”

  I write a story for the home’s newsletter about Sofie and Judith. After which I write a short-form story and send it to the Washington Post. I tell them I don’t even want any money for it. Three months later they run it.

  I guess I’m a writer now.

  Chapter 13

  Cottage Green

  There was a nurse in Cottage Green, psych ward, who dispensed medications, named Hunter. He was in his twenties and in the same public health program that I graduated from in 2005. We had taken the same classes and experienced the same professors. We talked about some of their quirks and idiosyncrasies. He had done work in Haiti as I had done in Kenya. On a few occasions he came out from behind the window to sit with me. He was a kind person, but I knew he was also trying to figure out what went wrong with me. Our profiles were similar: sensitive and empathetic guys in glasses with penchants for helping people and a love of travel. He wanted to support me, but I also sensed a thread of fear in him, as if he might come to the same fate as me.

  In group therapy sessions I learned more about the people in the ward with me. There was Grant, a singer in a metal band by night, post office worker by day, who since he was a little child had impulses and fantasies, of slashing open people’s necks. It was his obsession and he hated himself for it, so he tortured himself with negative self-talk and suicidal ideation, even though I saw him using a cup to catch a spider so he could toss it safely out the window. His therapist tried hard to convince him he was a good person.

  “You may think about killing people, but have you ever hurt anyone?”

  “Never. I’ve nearly fallen in a pool trying to rescue a drowning butterfly.”

  “Then stop torturing yourself, you are a good person.”

  My roommate was a six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound manic depressive. He was courteous to me and my first night there, my only complaint about him was that he snored. But by the second night he had a manic episode, attacked a staffer, and ended up screaming, strapped to a board for the next twelve hours. The seclusion room was across the hall from my own and even with the door closed I could hear him. So again, I couldn’t sleep.

  I made my way to the common area with my blanket and my pillow and tried sleeping in one of the cushioned chairs. Not long after I settled in, a man was admitted who would not relinquish his cell phone. Three staffers had to wrestle him to the ground. Afterward I was too agitated to sleep.

  It was about this time that Pat, an old drunk who with his beard and short stature resembled Gimli the Dwarf, came into the common area leaning on his cane, his hair still wet from the shower, and sat down next to me.

  “Boy if it isn’t dark out. What time is it?”

  “Two thirty.”

  He laughed, a nice hearty, unselfconscious laugh, a welcome noise to me. It turned out that when the staff came in to check if he was still alive—as they did with all of us every hour—he thought it was his wake-up call. I asked him why he didn’t go back to bed.

  “Won’t be able to sleep now,” he said.

  I told him about my ordeal the past few hours
and he took sympathy on me. “How about you get some rest and I’ll sit up and keep watch. There are some old National Geographics in here that I might read.”

  When I woke in the morning, he was still there next to me, a pile of Nat Geos on the table next to him.

  Another patient, trying to quit a drug habit, after overhearing me talk about my time in Kenya, confides to me that he contracted HIV when he was a teenager after a brutal rape by a gang of men. The resulting trauma was one of his triggers for his drug use.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. You don’t seem crazy. You don’t seem like you would judge someone for being HIV positive.”

  Chapter 14

  Forgetting

  Father David’s mother, Susan, was a giant fat lady. She had taken a few other children that were not her own into her house. Ivy shared a bed with a girl named Rebecca and Maurice shared a crib with a boy named Edison. An older girl named Ruth lived with them too. She had once been a street girl and could be very mean. Ivy was afraid of her.

  But Susan lived in Kariobangi as well, so for a while things were the same as always. Maurice went to school. Ivy went when she was not sick and when she was sick, Ruth and Rebecca would take him to school—times like these Ivy was happy Ruth was once a street girl because then no one would try to disturb Maurice.

  Susan finally took Ivy to the doctor. This was a different doctor than the one Ivy was used to. This one was in a large hospital that was very far away. One of the nurses there took Ivy’s blood. Then she came back with a piece of paper that she showed to Susan and they went into an office and talked for a long time without Ivy. When they came out the nurse was very nice to Ivy and told her that she would see her again.

  Ivy did see her again when they came back with Maurice. He cried when they took his blood. Ivy had not cried when they took hers, but she wanted to when she saw her brother so upset. Once they were done she held him on her lap, which she always liked. Having her brother so close to her made her feel whole, calm, and peaceful as if she was doing what she was meant to do as a big sister. They told Ivy they would need to take her blood again.

  That night Father David came over to speak to his mother. When she was supposed to be sleeping, Ivy tried to listen to their conversation. She heard the word ukimwi many times. She knew it was a very bad sickness. She also knew they were talking about her and her brother. David kept saying, “Their father’s wish was to keep them together. They should be treated the same.”

  Ivy was not sure what this meant.

  Miriam knew this noise. She had heard it before, this whimpering, coughing, crying. But it was lower now than ever. They all kept their voices low since that night of the burning, as if to try to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible to their neighbors.

  At first when she heard the sound she was scared. She thought it was Purity crying and that the baby had come back from the dead to bite her. But that was not the case. Evelyn was not on her sleeping mat. The lantern was burning in her parent’s room. Miriam entered.

  Her mother was weeping with a low moaning sound, interrupted by her coughs and sputters. Evelyn had her arms around her shoulders. Her father was still. Miriam knew this stillness from when Purity had died. She also knew it was a great change from the quick shallow breaths her father had been struggling to make the past few days.

  She went in and stood beside her mother, who held her hand.

  Her brothers came home for the burial. Joseph left after that to return to school. Evelyn insisted he go, saying it was what their mother would want, if she had been strong enough to say so. Peter stayed. One morning Peter took Miriam for a walk and when they returned, Evelyn said her mother had died. Miriam asked to see her but she had already been taken away.

  Miriam wondered if perhaps her mother was alive. She even wondered if she was dead and she might come back to life in three days. But in three days they had the burial, and when Miriam saw the coffin loaded into the back of the pickup truck, she knew her mother was not coming back. And it was her mother inside, Miriam had checked the little window on the top. It was her mother’s face on the body below. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was stretched open over her teeth that seemed to protrude from her face. She looked like she was crying.

  Evelyn shut the cover over the window and pulled Miriam over to her side. A woman came up and said to Miriam, “Don’t feel sad. Just pretend you never had a mother. Many children don’t. It is better to forget.”

  Even though Babu was dressed in his best suit, the headmaster would not allow Oliver back into Busura Academy. He said that there were not enough spaces. He also said that he felt that Oliver would find the classes too slow now that he had been to St. James for two and a half years. Oliver did not understand either of these reasons since four children could share a desk. Oliver even said that he would not find the classes too slow because he had been out of school for a while now and he was sure he had fallen behind.

  But nothing swayed the headmaster. Oliver wondered if it was his coughing that was the real problem.

  He went with Babu to a few other schools in the area near Babu’s house, but none of them would take Oliver. He and his grandfather began taking longer trips to children’s homes. Oliver knew that these homes were for orphans, which were children that had no parents. Babu said they were visiting the homes because some homes had schools and one might accept Oliver. But still none did. Oliver would try very hard not to cough when they were meeting with the managers or headmasters of these homes, but inevitably he could not help it.

  Traveling with his grandfather was not terribly different than traveling with his mother when she had grown ill—his grandfather walked very slowly and had to stop to take long rests. Oliver did not mind this because often he was tired and had difficulty breathing himself after walking a long distance.

  Finally one day Babu took Oliver all the way into Nairobi. When they first arrived, Oliver was afraid that his grandfather would not be able to find his way, but Babu reminded him that he once worked downtown in Nyanyo House.

  Babu led them, slowly, to a bus stop where they joined the queue. While they waited, Oliver saw a young boy leading an old blind man with a stick and a cup. The man came along the queue and people dropped shillings into his cup. Babu gave him a few as well. His grandfather had leaned heavily on Oliver a few times that day already and Oliver wondered if a day would come when he would have to lead Babu like a blind man.

  When the big blue bus pulled up Oliver recognized it as a Kenya Shuttle, just like the one he and his mother had taken the time they went horseback riding. He and Babu boarded. Oliver sat beside the window and soon realized that they were going along the same road they had taken when they went to ride horses. Oliver asked Babu if that was where they were going but Babu said no.

  When they alighted Oliver recognized the same petrol station and the same market. He looked in the direction of the stables but could not see them through the traffic and the trees.

  Babu asked a few people for directions then they walked for a while until they reached another matatu stage. They boarded a tired-looking matatu with plastic bags covering where the windows should have been, then waited a long time for all the seats to fill up.

  They did not ride the matatu long before Babu tapped the tout and the tout slapped the roof, telling the driver to stop. Oliver and Babu had to climb over many people since they had been some of the first to board.

  When they got out Oliver realized they were at another children’s home. This one had a long driveway with trees and grass along it. It was very quiet—he could not hear any children. They walked all the way down the drive until they reached a few buildings. Inside the first one was a receptionist that asked them to wait. They did. There were many people around. There were nurses. There were some wahindi and a mzungu lady that walked by and smiled at Oliver.

  Eventually the receptionist said to Babu that the chief manager was ready to see him. B
abu asked Oliver to wait then followed the receptionist.

  While Oliver waited he finally heard the voices of other children. One little girl came in crying because she had cut her knee. The nurse, who seemed very nice and had a sing-song voice, put a plaster on it for her.

  The receptionist was very nice as well. She gave Oliver some biscuits and tea and told him she liked his red cap. He mentioned that his mother had given it to him. The receptionist did not ask him where his mother was. Before Oliver had finished the biscuits, Babu returned with the chief manager, a man named Bonaventure. Babu said that Bonaventure and the very kind people at this home had agreed to let Oliver go to their school, but he would have to sleep over here. Oliver did not want to stay here. He did not want to leave Babu but he knew Babu wanted him to go to school, so he said he would stay.

  Then Babu did something Oliver had never seen him do before, not even when his mother had died—Babu wept. Not a lot, but just enough that he had to wipe his eyes. He took both of Bonaventure’s hands in his as if they were close friends. He thanked Bonaventure and said that God would bless him. Then Babu bent down beside Oliver and said,

  “I will come to visit you. Show them what a good boy you are.”

  Oliver said he would.

  Chapter 15

  Adoption

  William is a six-year-old boy with a pointed face and ears that are too big for him. I call him rat boy. He asks me what it means. When I explain it to him he kicks me in the shins. But he runs off flexing his arms and screaming, “I am Rat Boy!”

  A few months later he goes to bed with a headache and never wakes up.

  At an outing to a museum with the kids I take a picture of Anika. She is wearing a multicolored knit cap layered like the bands of a rainbow and is smiling while she looks off to the side with her almond-shaped eyes. The picture is nothing short of perfect. But the camera has limited memory and I have to delete the photo to make room for others.