by Jessica Yu
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Thirsty Baby
New Vision
Trevor
A Tale of Two Georges
George the Second
The Children of Strangers
Mommy Gladys
Three Acres of Shade
The Enchanted Chapati
Zam
The Lost Smile
The Boy with Seven Names, Part One
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Two
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Three
Silver Sandals on the Yellow Line
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Four
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Five
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Six
The Boy with Seven Names, Part Seven
A Day at the Beach
House with No Roof
Passed Along
The Meat Market
Frozen Wings
Win Win
Yellow and Green
Lost Again
Seven Pieces of Cassava
Hope for the Helpless
Naguru
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Yu
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-61706-3
Cover design by Martha Kennedy
Cover photograph © Jeremy Snell
eISBN 978-0-544-61843-5
v1.1017
For Ava and Esme
The Thirsty Baby
The bottle of water sat on Officer Harriet’s desk, its contents clear, its slightly crumpled label depicting the ice-capped Rwenzori Mountains. In spite of the heat, the policewoman and the reporter looked upon it not with thirst but with suspicion.
It was Monday at Kawempe CPU—Child and Family Protection Unit—and the two women had a sick baby, a missing mother, and a clue.
A nine-month-old boy, naked and feverish, had been brought to a clinic by his mother. She reported his name as Brasio Seguyo. The nurses diagnosed malaria and put the baby on an IV drip. The mother paid a small deposit on the treatment fee, saying she would come back with the rest of the money. Two days later, she had not returned. Only the bottle of water had been delivered, with a note saying it was for the baby. The plastic cap had clearly been twisted open; the seal on its neck was absent.
The baby in question lay draped over Officer Harriet’s shoulder, his body as limp as a warm chapati. Lacking boys’ clothes, the clinic had sent him to the police in a blue-and-pink-flowered dress, its bottom now damp-dark from a diaper worn overnight. Harriet flipped through a report folder, expertly avoiding the wet spot as she supported the baby with her other arm.
Harriet Nantaba was one of Gladys’s favorite officers. It was easy for CPU officers to become overwhelmed by the daily flood of domestic disputes and abuse cases, but Harriet could always be counted on to gather the Who, What, Where, and When that Gladys needed for her newspaper column about lost children. In addition to being efficient, Harriet was always neatly groomed, her olive-green uniform perfectly fitted—a modern vision of a young policewoman. Children in particular seemed to like her, perhaps because Harriet was also pretty, her classic features offset only by a disarming gap-toothed smile.
“Did the nurses give the baby the water?” Gladys asked.
“I don’t know. That’s how they brought it. They said they feared—”
“—it may contain something.”
“Yes,” said Harriet. “It could be contaminated. Maybe the mother wanted to have the baby killed or something like that. So this is an exhibit now for police.”
“Yes, we are holding it as an exhibit.”
“Hmm.”
Their eyes locked on the bottled water. They sweated and stared, the heat swelling with the silence. The CPU was always hot.
While Kawempe Police Station was a proper building, with two stories and a parking area for motorbikes in the front, its Child and Family Protection Unit was an eight-by-twenty-foot shipping container donated by a Finnish NGO. Plunked down on a dirt lot next to an ever-smoldering trash pile, the metal box housed two desks, two sets of bookshelves, four wooden benches, half a dozen plastic chairs, and frequently the maximum seating capacity of bodies. Two small windows provided air but no cross breeze, as they were cut into the same side of the wall. Under the steady glare of the Kampala sun, the steel walls that provided the material fortitude for stacking on a cargo ship became an oven.
Gladys noticed that while she and Harriet sweated, the baby did not. His forehead had the dull surface of a stone. “He’s very dehydrated,” she remarked.
“We tried to give him some juice, but he vomited.”
Gladys shook her head. “He looks really, really, bad off.”
“He needs the drip treatment. He only got a little bit.” Harriet explained that when Brasio’s mother had not shown up with the money, the baby had been taken off the IV. “The clinic realized no one is coming to claim for the child, so they stopped treatment.”
“He didn’t get a full dose.”
“No, of course, he couldn’t. Because there was no one to pay.”
Gladys sighed. “Now, Harriet, I know we need profits for our businesses. But in such cases, can’t someone sympathize with a baby like this and complete the dose?”
Harriet demurred. “I’m not very sure . . .”
“O-kay,” Gladys said, steering away from the dead end of the rhetorical. She flipped to a clean page. “And what was the name of this clinic?”
“Family Hope Clinic.” The irony escaped the room like an unswatted mosquito.
Outside, the sun shone directly on the wilted line of supplicants sitting in front of the shipping container, and grumbling voices rose up to its tiny windows. Gladys frowned down at her notebook, weighing the possible outcomes of including Brasio’s story in her column. Would the mother come forward? If she did, could the police analyze the contents of the mysterious bottle of water? What if she was not sane? They could not release the child to a mother who intended to poison him. But perhaps another family member would recognize Brasio and come forward to claim him.
As she readied her camera, Gladys wished they had boy’s clothes to put Brasio in, so as to avoid any doubts planted by the flowered dress.
“Hold him up so I can see his face,” she directed Harriet.
Harriet lifted Brasio away from her shoulder and turned him toward Gladys. The boy’s eyes fluttered open, and the sight of the water bottle on the desk momentarily energized him. He moaned and thrust out an unsteady arm.
“Ah, ah,” Harriet soothed.
Gladys snapped photos as the baby pined for the water; she needed a clear look at his face. It felt bad not to reward him with a drink, but there was nothing else to offer. Given their low wages, police did not have money for amenities like bottled water.
“I wish you could remove that bottle from there,” Gladys said.
Harriet gingerly relocated the exhibit to a stack of boxes by the wall.
“Good,” said Gladys. “I’m worried that someone may feel thirsty and pick it up.”
“It is me. It is me who is thirsty.” Harriet laughed, show
ing the friendly gap in her teeth.
Gladys sighed. Everybody was thirsty.
AFTER A FEW phone calls, Gladys enlisted a social worker to help her deliver Brasio to St. Catherine’s Clinic. There the infant drifted in and out of consciousness, failing to stir even when the nurse pricked his fingers for a blood sample. Gladys had endured malaria many times, and she knew the crushing, invisible weight the disease placed on the will as well as the body. This body, limp as a doll’s, looked spent, and there was little sign of will. Who could say whether the child was still clinging to this life or it was only the hands of others detaining him a few moments longer?
If the doctor knew, his mild expression gave nothing away. Gladys lingered by the examining table as he gently prodded Brasio’s swollen belly. “I’m worried about that stomach,” she murmured.
The doctor did not think the swelling was due to malaria. “It’s probably malnutrition.”
“Ah.” Gladys nodded, unsure if that was good news.
The doctor moved to the head of the table, and Gladys now saw that Brasio’s eyes were half open, revealing only empty white crescents. The sight froze her in place. How could she leave, with the baby looking so much worse than when she had first seen him?
“Thank you for these good works,” she managed, by way of farewell. “For my abandoned babies.”
The doctor’s nod answered her unspoken question. Only time would tell.
AT THE END of the day, Gladys headed into the Old Taxi Park, where the white tops of a thousand matatus, or minibus taxis, formed a mosaic of congestion. It seemed that Kampala, already the largest city in the country, could not possibly accommodate more growth. But every day hundreds of people left their villages or their districts or even their countries for the City of Seven Hills, hoping to pursue, if not the Ugandan Dream, some chance at a better livelihood.
Kampala was a place of modern buildings, bustling markets, government offices, top schools, swank hotels, stately monuments, and thumping nightclubs. It was also a place of traffic, slums, and unemployment. Still, the city beckoned, like one of these matatu conductors trying to lure one more passenger into his overpacked minibus.
Gladys boarded a matatu for Entebbe, the city where she had lived through shifts of fortune since her childhood. It was close to eleven by the time she reached her small rented room, and after midnight when she went to bed. Sleep, though, would not come. It was not arguing neighbors or barking dogs keeping her awake, but the thought of the baby, Brasio.
How could a mother abandon her child in such a condition? In six years of writing her column, Gladys had seen these situations before. The push and shove of city life produced many casualties. But on this empty night, the thought of this baby stirred the ashes in her gut, sending up red embers. The mother, the nurses at Family Hope Clinic—they had all looked at this sick child and walked away. Everyone in this life carried problems on their back, but surely the load of one infant would not crush all these so-called adults?
And then the fire died out, and Gladys was left with cold dread. Malaria would take the boy, she was certain of it.
When she needed help with a case—a lost toddler without a place to stay for the night, an orphan lacking school fees, a sick child in need of an operation—she had a small circle of friends she could call on, although one could well imagine the flicker of exasperation on their faces when her number popped up on their phones. Tonight she would not bother them; she would never waste their time with something as unsolvable as feelings. Nothing could lift this sense of futility, heavy with the taint of guilt.
Why guilt? said a voice in her head. There was nothing you could do for that child, Gladys. Don’t stress.
At least she might have saved him from dying alone. She opened her eyes to the dark, her sleepless night now a vigil. If the child did slip away in these quiet hours, there would be someone to think of him, to ensure that his departure did not go unnoticed.
THE VERY NEXT DAY, at St. Catherine’s Clinic, Gladys could not believe her eyes.
The social worker, a cheerful girl in her twenties, held a baby in her arms: a smiling, wide-eyed baby, head bobbing about with curiosity. Surely this could not be the same Brasio? He still wore that flowered dress. Someone had twisted his hair into tiny feminine knots around his head, making him look every inch a happy baby girl.
“Eeeehhhh!” Gladys exclaimed with ear-piercing delight, startling Brasio so much that his body wobbled like a stalk of maize in a rainstorm. He began to wail.
“That’s good!” said Gladys. “Before, he could not even cry. I am happy to hear you cry, baby!” The social worker laughed.
It was enough excitement for one day. But then Gladys’s phone chimed with another surprise. Officer Harriet was calling from Kawempe CPU.
“The mother of the baby is here.”
“The mother!” Gladys exclaimed.
“Yes. We are very busy, but I know you want to talk to her—”
“Yes, please! Keep her there.” A dozen questions popped into Gladys’s head, but she knew her phone was about to give out, from either lack of power or lack of airtime. “I am coming right away.”
Every child Gladys met was a story, a story in its middle. Sometimes one could trace the beginning of the story, sometimes not. But it was hard to find resolution, even a temporary one. The story of a child required a parent. It was parents who set events in motion, and it was parents who determined whether the story would return full circle or go spinning out into the world.
HARRIET LET GLADYS use her desk in the office container for the interview while she went out to attend to other duties. Brasio’s mother was Christine, a plain woman in an orange dress. She leaned slightly away from Gladys, eyes tired but wary, like a cornered animal looking down from the branch of a tree that was not as high up as she wished it to be.
“My names are Gladys Kalibbala. I work with New Vision newspapers.”
Christine nodded politely, in the manner of someone possessing familiarity with the paper but not the means to buy it.
“Every week in the Saturday paper I have a column for children, ‘Lost and Abandoned.’ I get many of these cases from police. So when I get a call saying, ‘Please, come to the station, there is this child here,’ I come.”
The woman considered her interrogator. Gladys was a big woman, middle-aged and smartly outfitted in a long, flowered dress of black, orange, and white. In one hand she held a small notebook and pen, in the other a folded handkerchief which she periodically pressed to her shiny brow. With its wide cheekbones and square jawline, her face was strong, yet rounded at the edges by its fullness. The result was a look both solid and soft, like those oversized armchairs with the padded arms displayed outside furniture stores on Ggaba Road.
“I don’t want you to be afraid,” Gladys said easily. “I want us to talk and then we can understand each other.”
In a half whisper, Christine began to answer her questions: where she lived (Bwaise), how many children she had (three under four years of age), and what employment she had (sporadic work digging in gardens and washing clothes). While her mind seemed clear, she appeared incapable of eye contact, her glance darting toward Gladys, only to retreat whenever the reporter glanced up.
“Okay. Tell me,” Gladys said, “when did you bring the child to Family Hope Clinic?”
“Saturday night. They put him on IV drip, but in the morning they refused to continue the treatment because they wanted me to pay the bill.” This matched Officer Harriet’s report. “The bill was forty-nine thousand shillings, but I only had ten thousand shillings from my grandmother-in-law.”
“So you had ten thousand shillings. Why did you not give it to the clinic?”
Christine shook her head. “I tried to give it to them, but they said, ‘No, we want all of our money, the whole forty-nine thousand shillings.’ I begged them, ‘Please, I will pay in bits as you treat the child.’ They refused.”
It was not an enormous sum of money, 49,00
0 shillings, but it was enough to buy a carton of powdered milk. Or some shoes, if they were not leather.
“I had to go look for money,” Christine continued. “I tried to breastfeed him before I left.”
“Did you feed him?”
“He was too sick and he would not wake up. I knew he would be thirsty, so I brought a bottle of water for him.”
At last, that bottle of water. “You thought that the nurses would give your child water, when you had not paid them their money?”
Christine gave a weak shrug.
“Why didn’t you call for the baby’s father?”
“They told me that he refused to come when they called for him.”
“Are you and the father married?”
“We stay together,” Christine said, “but we don’t get along very well. Sometimes he walks. Sometimes if I can’t handle it anymore I walk.”
Gladys wrote in her notebook: Father able but neglecting?
Outside, it began to rain. Inside the container, a sound like gravel being scattered.
“You left that baby on Sunday morning and you did not come back until Monday night,” Gladys pressed. “Don’t you think that is a very long time to leave a sick child?”
“I did not sleep, I did not eat, I was only thinking about my son.”
“But you could not find the money?”
A shake of the head. “On Monday night I used a thousand shillings to take a boda boda back to the clinic. I hoped the nurses might let me breastfeed him a little bit.”
“Yes, that’s a mother’s feeling.” Gladys chuckled sympathetically. She looked down at her notes; something did not add up. “Now, Christine. You say you went back to breastfeed your son. But you say you had not eaten. How could you produce any milk?”
Christine looked down at her hands. “I don’t know if I had milk. But it was the only way I could try to help my child.”
“Ehhh.”
“But when I arrived at the clinic, my child was gone. They said he had cried so much that they left him with the police. So I came here.” She swallowed hard, evoking the urgent thirst that accompanied nursing. “I have no milk now. You see the shape I am in.” Shame radiated from her like heat.