Garden of the Lost and Abandoned

by Jessica Yu

  To her surprise, the boy dropped his chin to his chest. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “I have been telling you a lot of lies.”

  Gladys gasped. These were words she had heard before. But she had never expected them from this mouth.

  “I lied about why I ran away.”

  “What do you mean? It was not because your stepmother was mistreating you?”

  “I was not even staying with a stepmom.” Douglas was unable to meet her eyes. “I was staying at my grandmother’s house.”

  What of the stories he had fed her of the stepmother’s terrible beatings? He had spoken her name, he had displayed the scars. How Gladys had wanted to squeeze that woman’s neck! For so long this stepmother had lurked in Gladys’s imagination, and now it appeared that that was the only place she existed.

  “Why did you not tell us the truth before?”

  Douglas turned toward the window. “I didn’t want to go back home.”

  “Why?”

  “My grandmother got more children to care for, and she said there would not be enough money for my school fees. I wanted to study. That’s why I ran away.”

  Gladys’s mind reeled in this new direction. Douglas had a grandmother? And he took such risks over a lack of school fees?

  “Douglas, it has been over two years. For two years you have been lying to me?”

  “I was going to tell you the truth after my Primary Leaving Examinations.”

  “Why wait?” Gladys asked, with a touch of pique. “What difference does two months make when you have lied for two years?”

  “I feared I would be dismissed from school.”

  The severity of this logic gave her pause. The boy anticipated banishment. He must have reasoned that if he could maintain his deception through his exams, at least he could finish his primary education before being thrown back on the street.

  Did he really think Gladys capable of such cruelty toward one of her children? What had he seen in her behavior to imagine that she would behave in such a petty way?

  She considered this quiet, serious boy. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt with an image of a horse pulling a cart through a garden of flowers and the words AMISH COUNTRY printed above. In his hands he gripped a small blue Bible with DOUGLAS written in pen on the edge. There were spots on the shirt and the book where his tears had dripped from his lowered chin. It was pointless to scold him; nothing could make the child feel worse than he did now.

  “Douglas, I don’t want you to get scared. There’s no need for you to be scared, okay?”

  The chin trembled, shaking another drop onto the T-shirt.

  “I’m not planning to go and dump you there,” she reassured him. “No. Because after all the years I’ve spent on you, you are now a P Seven candidate. I can’t just dump you. My concern is to get to know your people. And for them to get to know that you’re still alive. I want them to know that you were not kidnapped and sacrificed. Or sold. Okay?”

  AS THEY APPROACHED Nakasongola, driving down the very same road that Douglas escaped on two years before, the cloud cover darkened, producing a rain as sudden and steady as water from a tap. Mike flicked at the lever for the windshield wipers; the blades jerked across the glass like the arms of an impatient traffic cop. “I tell you,” he called over his shoulder, “running away like that? This boy was two days from trouble.”

  “He was very lucky,” Gladys agreed. If Douglas had spent even one more night on the streets, they would not have met at the police station. He might now be moving with those street kids who picked pockets, scavenged from dustbins, and sniffed gas fumes out of plastic bottles.

  “What really is it under the sun that would drive a child from home to go sleep on the pavement of the town?”

  “Without even a blanket!”

  “No kid runs away from a good home. There is always a reason. A reason why they lie and lie and lie.”

  Gladys was all too familiar with these reasons: violence, poverty, alcoholism, sexual abuse, drugs, illness, or any combination of the above. “You’ll find that there are a lot of bad behaviors at home,” she said, “whereby a child would not want police to take them back. The reasoning is, If I don’t want to be taken back home, I have to make sure that I present my story so that it can’t be traced, you know? Some of them will tell you, ‘I forgot the place,’ ‘I don’t know the name of the road,’ or ‘I don’t know where my family is.’”

  “For me, that is very intelligent,” Mike commented. “They make a dead-end story, and they stick to it.”

  “You are right.” Gladys chuckled.

  “Just lie yourself into the future.”

  At her side, the subject of their speculation sat huddled and motionless, lips moving above his open Bible, scouring the text for some magical phrase that would make him disappear.

  She spoke to the boy. “Don’t you think your family may have been looking for you?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t you miss them?”

  “At first I missed them, but now I’m used to it.”

  “Who did you miss?”

  Douglas’s eyes instantly filled. Outside, heavy clouds clustered on the horizon.

  “Are you afraid of taking us there now?”

  He did not answer.

  “Let’s get this over with. Eh?” Gladys addressed him with a soothing matter-of-factness. “Whether your people are annoyed or what. Yes, of course they must be annoyed, but it’s always good to get to that point where they can see you.”

  Still the boy did not speak. What made him freeze like a rabbit caught in an open field? What raptors circled overhead?

  “Douglas,” she said, “you should take me to where you feel comfortable.”

  “I will take you to where I ran away from.”

  “You know the place?”

  “I was staying with my grandmother. Deborah Namusisi.” Uttering the name, the boy was stricken anew. He breathed through his mouth and shut his eyes, as though preparing to submerge his head underwater.

  Gladys let him be. A child with a secret could be like a snail retreating into its shell. No manner of shaking or prodding would dislodge it. But leave it alone and it would emerge when it felt safe.

  DESPITE HIS ANXIETY, Douglas began to perk up as they turned down the road toward his home. From what Gladys could see through the gray wet, it was a typical rural village. As she quizzed him about the schools and churches and the horned cattle they passed, Douglas answered confidently, his excitement growing as the landmarks became more and more familiar. When the rain obscured the view out of the side windows, he peered through the windshield, thrusting his body between the front seats like the figurehead on a ship.

  “That place there. That one is my grandmother’s.”

  As Mike turned into the driveway, the sun burst through the clouds as abruptly as the yolk from a cracked egg.

  “Ah! You can’t believe. All of a sudden it is hot!” Gladys squinted skyward as she stepped out of the vehicle. In Uganda, it often felt like someone up there was playing with the switches.

  In the bright light before them stood a house of medium size, with a kitchen on the right and a latrine in the back, all of red brick. Fruit trees bordered an orderly yard. Chickens stalked the periphery, on the hunt for grubs disturbed by the rain.

  “It looks like a nice place,” she remarked. “Whether it is sunny or rainy or what, it is a nice place. Look at it.”

  “There is even glass in the windows,” Mike commented.

  The door was locked. Douglas went around to the back of the house. He returned eating a green mango.

  “Is your grandmother there?”

  “No.”

  A couple of young boys came running up. They were neighbors, not relatives, but they greeted Douglas with excited smiles. Soon they were chattering away in Ruuli, the local language.

  “Why would you run away from a good home like this one?” Glad
ys asked rhetorically.

  “I expected a very poor place,” Mike said.

  It did not add up. She had braced for squalor and disrepair. Perhaps a leaky mud hut. A place like that of George the First—or George the Second—where there was so much poverty that a boy might think it was futile to stay. But this was a sturdy, finished house. There was nothing to indicate a distressed situation.

  “Eh, today is what? Sunday. The family is probably at church.” The neighbor kids nodded, confirming Gladys’s hunch. “Let us go and look for them.”

  As they drove, Gladys struggled to fit the odd pieces into the puzzle. “Help me to understand,” she entreated Douglas. “What got you so annoyed with this home that you ran away?”

  “The long distances to school,” he muttered.

  “Eh?”

  The boy claimed that he did not like to walk two hours to school and two hours back. Gladys frowned. It was a long way, but in rural places like this, such distances were common.

  “What is so special about you that you can’t endure that?”

  Douglas gave no answer.

  “It’s not making sense,” she said, sighing. The story kept changing. Hadn’t he stated that he had run away because his grandmother could not pay his school fees? Would a boy who balked at walking two hours to school walk six days to Kampala in search of school fees?

  Approaching the church, Mike drove through an area of intersecting paths dotted here and there with clusters of people exchanging Sunday greetings. Two middle-aged women stood at the side of the road, one holding a bicycle.

  Douglas whipped around. “That one is my grandmother.”

  Mike hit the brakes, sending a tremor of excitement through the van. The women on the road turned as the door slid open. The one with the bike wore a silky sleeveless black-and-orange blouse over a fitted skirt; she had a blue leather tote tucked under one arm, braided hair swept back in a voluminous bun. There was a dignity to her bearing, a natural poise.

  When she saw Douglas emerge, everything dropped: her jaw, her bike, her composure. She rushed to the boy, then hesitated, as though he might be an apparition. Gingerly her fingers touched his cheek. Douglas began to cry.

  Gladys studied the grandmother, this Deborah Namusisi. The tightened lip, the rising brow—signs of what? Anger? Worry? Relief? Yes, relief. But also hurt.

  “What made you leave this place?” Deborah asked.

  Douglas sniffled loudly, too overcome to speak. She caressed his brow with her palm, but the boy ducked away. In a smooth motion she pulled him to her, cradling his head in her arms. It was a brief moment, but its significance registered. No woman could offer such tender comfort to a child she did not care for.

  Abruptly Deborah grabbed for Douglas’s left hand and pulled it to her. Missing a fingernail, his pinkie ended bluntly, like the top of a carrot.

  Gladys laughed. “Are you sure now? That it is really him?”

  The grandmother did not answer. She saw no one but the boy. “I’ve dreamed so much about you. I’ve dreamed and I’ve dreamed till I was tired of dreaming. What did I do? I didn’t scold you or anything, but you just left.” Douglas only wept harder, his hand wilting in her grip. “What happened? What did I do to you? Why did you go?”

  The question echoed in Gladys’s head. Why had this child run away from this gentle-looking woman? What was he trying to escape?

  A sizable crowd had collected, the way it always did. Once a few neighbors stepped closer to hear the conversation, a dozen quick-footed kids appeared, drawn to any gathering with the potential for drama. Stragglers filtered in, their steady encroachment belying their indifferent expressions. A couple of toddlers waddled up last, led by their bellies.

  “Don’t cry,” the grandmother pleaded, unsettled by Douglas’s distress. “Why are you crying? Are you happy? Are you annoyed?”

  “Maybe he has forgotten the language,” a neighbor speculated.

  “It’s just that he’s crying, he can’t speak,” said another.

  Gladys sensed a public forum gathering around them. “I suggest that we go to your home and talk there,” she said to Deborah in a low voice. “I will explain everything.”

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the house, Gladys proposed that they convene on the veranda. A pinched nerve in her back was acting up, and she was eager to sit.

  The rain began to fall again, hastening the assembly process. A dozen bodies squeezed onto the rectangle of cement, the visitors on chairs and the family on the floor, circled by local kids who ran over to find shelter under the lip of the roof. The veranda felt like an overloaded lifeboat.

  Gladys asked Deborah if she had heard of New Vision newspaper.

  “I have heard of it. I’ve heard it is big.”

  “Yes, we are big!” Gladys replied. Sensing the turmoil of emotions on the veranda, she spoke with casual cheer, as though they were sitting down for Sunday tea. “We give you the news from all over the country. We even give you the news from here.”

  She explained her newspaper column, the repeated listing of Douglas’s story, his placement at Early Learning School, and everything leading up to today’s arrival at the village. Perhaps it was the challenge of listening through the rain, but across the crowded veranda there was no fidgeting, sniffling, coughing, or absent-minded scratching, even from the children. Deborah concentrated on Gladys with the alert stillness of a fisherman holding a finger to a taut line.

  “Up until this very morning, I believed Douglas had run away from this stepmother who beat him. For two years I have been wishing to find this horrible stepmother so I could blast her!” Gladys gritted her teeth and shook her fists in the air, her pantomime of vengeance drawing a flicker of a smile from Deborah. She let her hands drop. “But the child lied to me.”

  Douglas, who was seated on the floor near his grandmother, could not look up. He appeared to be staring at his tiny Bible, although his eyes were so puffy it was unlikely he could see much of anything.

  “If there is a genuine reason as to why this boy ran away, I have not seen it.” Gladys paused. On cue, a tremendous thunderclap blasted over the house, its lingering rumble a drum roll announcing cascading rain. Big fat drops boiled up the red soil, infusing the veranda with the rich, clean smell of wet earth. Chickens scurried for cover, as ungainly as ladies crossing a busy street in high heels. A yellow dog, its fur already damp, shambled with resignation through the yard.

  “So now, Deborah Namusisi, what is your side of the story? When the boy disappeared, did you strip yourself naked and scream? Did you fall down and roll on the ground? What happened?”

  The woman cleared her throat. She seemed a soft-spoken sort, and it required some effort on her part to speak louder than the rain. “This boy was given to me at the age of five years,” she began. Although she called herself his grandmother, technically she was Douglas’s great-aunt. Douglas’s father, a fisherman, was her nephew. When Douglas was dumped by his mother, no one showed up to take him. He was passed around to several relatives before landing on Deborah’s doorstep.

  “Has he ever lived with his father?”

  “The boy doesn’t know his father. He has only seen him once.”

  Deborah took Douglas into her home. She placed him in the village school, but over the years it became apparent that the standards were too low for the boy’s high potential. In particular, he displayed an affinity for electronics.

  “He used to tinker with broken phones and torches and stuff like that,” she explained. “At school and at home. He would open them up, fiddle with them, and they would work. People would even bring their radios to him and he would fix them.”

  Gladys had heard similar reports of Douglas’s skills at Early Learning. “Where did he learn how to repair such things?”

  “The boy learned it by himself. I don’t know how he did it.” Deborah shrugged, but there was pride in her voice. Douglas could build things too, she asserted. From the spare parts of his repair jobs he had cobbled together
his own working receiver. Set within an old jerry can, it was his rudimentary version of a portable radio. “I thought that eventually he could go to a college and train properly to repair those machines. So for P Five I wanted to take him to a private school.”

  Gladys glanced from Deborah to Douglas. This was a direct contradiction of his claim that his grandmother intended to stop his education.

  “I loved the boy,” Deborah said emphatically, following the reporter’s gaze. “Whatever I ate, he could eat. He was such a humble boy, a fine boy.”

  “So all along his behavior has been good?”

  “The boy was so well-behaved!” Deborah’s voice rose defensively. “If you told him to do something, he would do it. The whole village loved him!”

  Several heads nodded. Douglas pressed his lips together and stared at the floor.

  “I had to find a way to earn money for his private-school fees. So I would make chapatis and samosas to sell at the market. Douglas would deliver them to a shop in the morning, then bring back the money in the evening. But after some time, no money came back. He reported that the chapatis didn’t sell. I didn’t sense any trouble, because the boy was always so good and obedient.

  “Then I started to lose money. I had fifty thousand shillings stored in the house that disappeared. I didn’t think the child would steal money from me, but something was going on. Maybe the wind blew it away. Maybe it was taken. I spoke to him directly: ‘Douglas, if you took the money, maybe you have eaten some of it. But if there is any balance left over, please bring the rest back to me.’ He denied the theft totally.

  “The day he disappeared, it was a Saturday. I asked him to deliver the buckets of chapatis and samosas to the shop, and I went to cultivate. At the end of the day I waited for him to come to the garden, but he didn’t show up. I went home, but Douglas was not there either. He was nowhere to be found. I searched the entire village for him.”