Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  “Was there anybody else?” the tall man in the white uniform says, in a casual drawl Asanka’s only heard before through radio or television.

  The passengers from Asanka’s boat look over at Mustache and Ponytail, but the two men just look around, as if confused.

  “Yes,” Chaminda says, talking around the clear plastic bottle that’s wedged between his lips. “We lost a man. In the night. Several days ago.”

  The Australian closes his eyes: not for much longer than a blink, but Asanka catches it. “Do you know his name? Who he was?”

  Chaminda glances over at Ponytail and Mustache. They stare blankly back at him. “No,” he says.

  The Australian looks around the boat—at Asanka, at Chaminda, at Mustache and Ponytail, at the other men and boys scattered across the deck. He turns on his heel and walks into the large room in the center of the boat, talks quietly to a few of the other Australians. He unclips a small machine from his belt, raises it to his mouth, presses a button and speaks into it. He pauses. Puts it to his ear. Listens. A voice crackles back to him.

  Chaminda gets up and follows the man, then waits until he has clipped the transmitter back to his belt. “You are the Australians. We are going to Australia, in Australian water,” Chaminda says. Asanka’s surprised at how firmly his gentle friend has pressed the uniformed man.

  The Australian looks at Chaminda, at Asanka, now standing a few meters behind his friend. He takes in a deep breath, turns his eyes away and scans the water. “Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

  The deck is moving beneath Asanka, rippling like the sea. The tall Australian man is a stilt fisherman, crouched two meters above the water. He is staring down at Chaminda, at Asanka, at the whole boatload of them. They are tiny fishes, flitting about his stilts, unaware what crouches above them, and he is quietly suspended, waiting.

  * * *

  Loretta sits behind the wheel of her stationary car. Asanka had walked away so strangely, so forlornly. And she’d left him in there. Wasn’t even in a position to help anymore. She doesn’t know what will become of him if he has to stay there much longer, or even if he’s sent back. She should get out of the car, turn back around, talk to the kid some more.

  Tears stream down her face as she watches the cameras flashing and microphones jostling at the other end of the parking lot, where the razor-wire fence adjoins the visiting area. The Mazda windows are closed, but she can still get the gist of the press conference spin. Hopelessness burrows into her chest again, its fingernails digging into her lungs, slowly squeezing the air out.

  Fuck Sam, fuck having a baby, fuck her new job, and fuck this stupid fucking car. Loretta doesn’t even know who her husband is anymore. She’s even more uncertain of why she’s sitting here, crying about her husband, in this of all places.

  Loretta takes a deep breath and turns the key in the ignition. As she pulls out of the Villawood parking lot, she glimpses a commotion unfolding in the rearview mirror. Cameramen scramble across the gravel, abandoning the startled speaker. They are shouting, sprinting, pointing at a figure moving slowly and steadily toward the fence, across the asphalt of the visitors yard.

  Aviation

  MIRABEL PLUMPS up the couch cushions, quickly turns over the one with the tiny stain on it, and adjusts it back into place. She straightens up and runs the cotton lounge curtains through her tired fingertips. Mirabel can recall, so clearly still, measuring the windows. It was almost four years ago now. She can remember Michael and her, in the haberdashery store down near Union Square; Michael’s eyes glazing over as her eager hands traveled over ream after ream of potential curtain material. Mike had tried his best to look interested, polite as he always was.

  “Michael!”

  “Sorry!” He’d jumped, startled. “The material all looks the same to me, Bel.”

  “No. This one’s thicker—look here, feel the two of them.”

  “Who cares how thick they are?”

  “It’s for the curtains, Mike! The thickness matters!”

  Michael’s face had flowered into sunshine at her obsessiveness. That crooked smile of his had broken. His sea-green eyes had flashed in that amused way they did. Then there was that grin that warmed everything it touched.

  “Nesting! That’s what it is,” he’d teased, reaching around Mirabel’s sides till both his hands reached her stomach, chin resting on her shoulder, blond stubble prickling her cheek. It had been just a small bump, but already holding far more hope than any of the other times. They were past thirteen weeks and Mirabel had felt, with the certainty of stone, that this pregnancy would be the one that finally worked out. The women in her family never had any trouble bearing children. The eldest of five, Mirabel can still remember running her hands over her mom’s swollen belly when her youngest siblings were inside—the way her mother’s almost-translucent pearl-white skin stretched drum-tight over each fast-growing life.

  Mirabel steps away from the curtains now, the memory of her husband aching in the muscles just below her abdomen. Two weeks after she and Michael had bought the curtain material, she’d found herself curled up in their bed, bleeding, her entire body contracting with grief. Memory is everywhere in this house. Trauma. And yet, Mirabel still can’t bring herself to sell up and leave. Michael is here, even though he’s gone. Mirabel can feel his presence. In a strange and slightly eerie way, this will always be his home.

  She walks toward the glass coffee table and starts tidying up the small pile of magazines and books spread across it. They haven’t given her much notice, Child Protection. An hour ago, the woman—Jillian, her name is—phoned. But Mirabel guesses that’s part and parcel of the job—the late notice—and the house is never really that untidy anyway. Not now, with just her and the dog rattling around in it.

  Mirabel reaches down and picks a few stray strands of grass up off the cedar-colored rug. She hasn’t even time to vacuum. She doesn’t suppose it much matters, but she wants to make a good first impression. It feels momentous, this: a child, finally in the house.

  She stares out the sliding glass doors of the living room. Big Ted has his eyes closed. His goofy black Labrador-cross chin is resting on his oversized paws as he suns himself on the warm wooden planks of the back patio, tail flicking. Mirabel watches him for a bit. Sometimes the dog still wanders around the house, bumbling in and out of each room like he’s looking for someone. It’s been three years since Michael died, but Big Ted still remembers. Of course he does. Remembers Michael, playing fetch with him in the park across the road; Michael, with the wind rustling through his sandy-colored hair as dog and man tumble over each other, wrestling.

  Mirabel moves slowly into the kitchen; lifts the kettle from the countertop; shuffles slowly to the sink. She lifts the cold water tap. Sunlight from the kitchen window bathes her face. Warm. Certain. It was golden outside like this the afternoon everything changed. Golden, on what would become Michael’s last breathing day. A brilliant yellow light had bathed the whole of Oakland.

  “Shit.” Mirabel shakes her head, cussing to herself. She wasn’t going to think about this today, but she can’t seem to stop her mind wandering there. To him. She’d been standing at the kitchen sink. Just like this. At the kitchen sink, with her long auburn hair twisted up in a silver butterfly clip. She remembers everything: every minute, inconsequential detail. Several disobedient heat-limp strands of hair had clung to the back of her neck, the wet featherweight of them falling just below her ear. Mirabel sets the full kettle down on the stove; decides against another coffee; walks back into the living room and draws her long legs up underneath her on the couch.

  It’s almost eleven. They’ll soon be here.

  Through the half-open window she can smell the potted lavender on the back balcony. Sweet. Impossibly fragrant. It was nearly fall, the day Michael was killed, but it had still smelled like summer—like today. The air was thick with newly cut grass and neighbors barbecuing, and the freshly laid asphalt from two streets down the block. And the lavender
. The lavender.

  The house had been almost completely packed up in large brown boxes: ready for their move, ready for her to join her husband in New York. Mirabel had marveled at the emptiness of the place. The crisp, clean, soaped-down walls and ample floor space visible with most of their furniture already shipped had suddenly made her fall in love with the house all over again. It had brought back the potential she and Michael had seen when they first moved in: before they realized filling the place up with little ones might not be as easy as they’d planned. Before he took the new job, and before she’d decided to give up her teaching position, move across the country with him, and try the baby thing just one more time.

  That day—Michael’s last—just as Mirabel had been musing on the emptiness of the place, there’d been that knock at the door. Rappata, rappata, rappata. A frantic urgency.

  * * *

  Antonio pulls at his shirt collar; runs his fingers nervously through his dark curls. He double-checks the silver house number bolted to the front door; knocks loudly. It’s the third door he’s knocked on for little Sunni this morning. Antonio looks briefly up to the white cumulus cloud hovering in the endlessly blue sky. Please. Let this home be the one. Antonio’s eyes fall on the red and white stripes of the flag rising from a pole attached to the roof; the cluster of white stars staring out of the midnight-blue rectangle.

  “Here’s your new home for the next while; fingers crossed, little man, eh?” Antonio rests a hand gently on the top of Sunni’s baseball cap. There’s something uneasy about this place. Antonio’s come to be able to read the signs in just two years on the job. Something feels slightly off.

  Antonio looks down at the child standing next to him on the doorstep. Sunni’s arms are hanging straight and still by his sides, as though he’s trying to squeeze himself smaller. The straps of his purple backpack are digging into his chubby shoulders. Sunni looks up, searching Antonio’s face. Antonio flashes the kid the most hopeful smile he can. He wants to reach down and give the little man a hug, to say: It’s not you, kid, it’s them. But there are footsteps now, moving toward them from inside the house. Antonio takes a deep breath.

  This is the kind of moment he talked about last month, when his daddy and mama came visiting, when his mama had started on at him about getting a proper job. Antonio’s parents had climbed the narrow set of stairs to his third-floor apartment, and he’d heard his mama complaining before he’d even opened the door. She’d shaken her head, click-clicked that sharp tongue of hers as she wandered disapprovingly around his two-room home.

  “Lord have mercy on my sweet, sweet soul. You a half-black, half–Puerto Rican man, graduated top of your class from UCLA, and this is how you’re gonna spend that education? Ayah! Running after those troubled kids and living in the most lowdown place you can find, ’cause you gettin’ paid no more than pennies for it?”

  Antonio’s daddy—six and a half silent feet of brown construction-site muscle—had quietly closed the apartment door and wrapped himself around Antonio’s tall, slim frame. Antonio’s daddy had shrugged his shoulders and grinned at him softly like: That mama of yours is gonna calm down eventually. Don’t worry, I got you, son.

  Standing on the doorstep next to Sunni, Antonio wishes with all his might for that kind of bear-hug love to open the front door. Antonio reaches down, grabs Sunni’s warm, trembling hand. His mama’s voice circles around the inside of his skull, the way it always does at pressure-cooker times like these. Ayah! Antonio! This job of yours! Who can really love a child that’s not their own? These children, they are lost already. It is hopeless, Antonio. Hopeless!

  * * *

  Sunni fixes his eyes on the wooden front door, straining to bore holes into it with his eyes. If he were Superman, he’d be able to see who was on the other side already. If he were Superman, his X-ray vision would tell him what he needs to know.

  The last two ladies at the last two houses, they both had earrings on. Fancy earrings. Gold. In Sunni’s experience, tiny, fancy gold earrings on white ladies in big houses is never a comfortable thing. Sunni doesn’t know if he can take another hushed doorstep conversation, another turning-away. Nobody wants him. Sunni grinds the toe of his running shoe into the paved doorstep. Well, he doesn’t want any of them either. He wants his maa. Just to go home to his maa. What was she thinking, anyway—not arriving to pick him up after school like that. The police officers who finally came to collect him said his maa was in custody. Sunni doesn’t know where that is. Custody. Open the door. Sunni bites at his bottom lip, stares up at the neat silver house numbers screwed to the front door, his hand growing sweaty in Antonio’s. Please open the door. Open the door and be nice.

  Something happened in the Walmart with his maa before she had to go to that custody place. Sunni heard the cops at the police station whispering. His maa had been yelling at people in the store, they said. It was as if the cops had decided he couldn’t hear them, even though he was standing right there in the room. Sunni didn’t like the way they’d talked about her—clustered around the station’s front counter in their black-and-gold uniforms. They’d talked about his maa like she was really crazy. Said she’d been throwing things and yelling about the airplanes. She’d been yelling about terrorism, about America. Sunni had heard her do that before, when folks stared at them on the street.

  “It’s not our fault. Stop staring. What the hell are you all looking at? I’m American. We’re American. We’re not even Muslim. We’re Sikh. Stop staring!” The veins in her neck would stick out.

  This time, the cops said, his maa had smashed things; said really bad words. Sunni tries to imagine his maa doing that: using bad words and smashing things, her long black plait swaying to and fro as she tumbles cans of baked beans and glass bottles of ketchup into the store aisles. The cops said she’s done it. Property damage, they’d whispered. So it must be true. She must have.

  “Your mom, she’s done some bad things. We’re going to have to find a place for you to stay for a while. I’ll make a few calls. A lovely lady from the department will come down to help you. Do you want a soda or something? Some crackers?” The cop had sounded like he felt sorry for him. Sunni hadn’t liked that—had wanted to kick him in the shins and run off. In the end, it hadn’t been a lady that came down from the department. It had been Antonio.

  “Just like Antonio Banderas, but infinitely more handsome. You can call me Ant if you like, little man,” the tall brown man had joked to Sunni, shaking his hand vigorously and pressing a chewy mint into his palm. Sunni had smiled and nodded, even though he didn’t know what infinitely meant, or who Antonio Banderas was.

  * * *

  Mirabel readjusts the silver heart necklace on top of her cotton shirt as she walks slowly down the hallway toward her front door. The hardwood floors beneath her feet have turned to royal-blue carpet. Plane seats are laid out in straight rows on either side of her. Mirabel is walking, slowly, toward the cockpit. She puts a hand on the wall to keep herself steady. The hallway is spinning. She’s right inside the nose of the beast now, can see over the pilot’s shoulder. There are men yelling things in a language she can’t understand. The plane is suspended in time, hovering wasplike. The knocking at the front door sounds far away.

  Mirabel is close enough to the first tower of the World Trade Center to see through the glass, across one entire floor. She can see thin, French-manicured secretarial fingers flying across a laptop keyboard; a half-finished cup of black tea; a laser printer spitting out reams and reams of paper. It’s not real. It’s not real. Mirabel gasps for air. A lean, scruffy-haired man is scribbling notes on a whiteboard, his back to her, in one of the glass-walled meeting rooms. He turns midsentence, her Michael, and stares back at her through the tower window, through the plane window, disbelief scribbled across his face.

  Mirabel fights against the panic attack—blinks the vision back. Not today. Today is a new chapter. The beginning of something. Through the frosted glass, Mirabel can see a tall silhouette ne
xt to a shorter one. Her stomach flips. She knows it’s impossible, but she feels like this child will be hers and Michael’s, somehow. A child of circumstance. Perhaps even with his same tousled, sandy-colored hair, or eyes the exact same cloudy green as San Francisco Bay.

  * * *

  The door swings open.

  “Mrs. Mirabel Adams?” Antonio clears his throat, uses the firm, friendly-yet-businesslike tone he’s learned to cultivate.

  “Yes.”

  Antonio smiles away his surprise. The young white woman is dressed in cream slacks and a white cotton blouse. Her long hair is twisted back into a loose plait. She blinks her clear, light-gray eyes as if surprised to find anyone on the doorstep. Usually, the emergency caregivers are older: grandmotherly empty-nester types. Mrs. Adams’s cheeks are flushed pink, as though she’s been running or just come from the shower. Antonio’s heart closes a little. If not a carer like his dad, he’d been hoping she’d be someone like his mama: all loud opinion and sharp tongue, but fierce love. Fierce love. Antonio can hear his mama’s voice in his ear. Ayah. Antonio! This woman! She is wearing cream-color pants. So neat and proper and impractical for life. This fancy white lady. Tell me, how will she love this messy little fat brown boy? How will she love him? Antonio! Use the brains God gave you, child. Ayah!

  “Hi, I’m Antonio.” He stifles his doubt. “We spoke earlier on the phone. And this”—he puts a gentle hand on Sunni’s back, nudging him forward—“is Sunni.”

  The woman looks down suddenly, taking in the top of Sunni’s baseball-capped, bowed-down-toward-the-doormat head.

  “Oh, yes. Of course. I’m been waiting for you. Hello, Sunni! I’m so glad you’ve arrived.”