What Tears Us Apart

by Deborah Cloyed

  “Are you sure?” She looked through the paint cans and took out green. “I think I saw a green one once. Maybe he was sick?” She pretended to vomit out of a pretend elephant trunk, making Ntimi laugh again.

  She opened each can, and laid out brushes across each one.

  “Wait,” Ita said, already imagining the chaos and the mess that was seconds from ensuing. “Are you sure—”

  “Birds!” Leda picked up a brush and dipped it into the black paint. On the wall closest to her, she painted three lowercase Ms in quick succession.

  The children collectively sucked in a breath and turned their wide eyes on Ita, waiting for him to erupt. He saw their big eyes like a row of vervet monkeys and laughed. This made their eyes grow even bigger.

  “Paint!” Ita said. “Monkeys! Lions! Rainbows! The sun!” He looked at Leda and then he reached over to pluck up the brush from the orange can of paint. He walked beside her and painted an enormous orange circle between Leda’s birds. She clapped.

  The boys sprang into motion at once, grabbing up the brushes and dashing off for their own piece of wall. Ita filled in his sun while Leda watched.

  “Are you going to do the green elephant next?” she whispered close to his ear.

  He felt the tingle go down his neck. “Anything you wish,” he said.

  He heard her take a deep breath, sucking the warm air away from his neck. She stayed there, crouched behind him, watching him fill in the sun, one slow, even stroke at a time.

  When the sun was finished, neither one of them moved. It was a pause Ita wanted to live in forever. When Ntimi shouted for Leda to come see his painting, Ita was sad to see the moment end. “Now I shall fix your birds,” he said.

  “Hey!”

  He took the paintbrush from her fingers, the black paint already drying in the sun.

  “What kind of birds should they be, then, huh?”

  “Sparrows,” he said.

  “Leda!” Ntimi shouted. “Look!”

  But Leda didn’t leave just yet. She nodded at Ita, seriousness smoothing out the scar along her chin. “In the States, sparrow tattoos signify freedom, but also coming home. Did you know sparrows mate for life? And in Egypt, sparrows signify dead souls living as stars.”

  Ita watched the hairs on his arm stand up. How did she know these things that spoke to his soul?

  “Hope,” Ita said. “For us, sparrows mean hope and dignity. And love—the love we all deserve, no matter who we are or where we are from.”

  Chapter 13

  December 31, 2007, Kibera—Ita

  WHEN ITA RETURNS to the orphanage, the boys rush forward like miniature infantry, only to fall back at the gunfire realization that Mary isn’t with him.

  Michael says what everyone is thinking. “It’s just us now?”

  “Yes,” Ita says.

  “Mary will stay with her family?”

  “Yes,” Ita says again, desperate to lie down. He has no idea how they will survive without Mary, even though it was he who insisted she stay with Grace, with her real family at a time like this.

  Ntimi has the next question. “And Leda will stay with her family, too? She isn’t coming back?”

  Ita feels sorry for them, but they deserve the truth. “No, she isn’t coming back. It’s just us now.”

  Nobody knows quite what to do after Ita says that. He steps farther into the courtyard, closer to them, and then past them. “Michael, come, let’s cook lunch.”

  * * *

  With food in his stomach, Ita’s head clears enough for him to see the days stretched out before him. No school to send them off to. No business to attend to. And no Mary to help. They will be here, like this, staring at each other, each with an ear peeled to the outside, waiting for the fire to come for them.

  First, and fast, Ita knows, they will run out of food and water.

  When he closes his eyes, he can picture the week before—Christmas. Leda with her hair that shook when she laughed, the children gathered around her, tugging on her as if she were an angel about to take flight any second.

  When he opens his eyes, the boys are staring at him, their eyes bulging in their sockets. Fear.

  Without a word, Ita spreads open his arms. Jomo takes a step back, but the rest of the boys hurry in, arranging themselves around and on top of Ita’s legs. Walter, miraculously without a sound, curls up in Ita’s lap. Michael sits down shoulder to shoulder with him.

  Even though it presses on all his bruises, Ita keeps his arms wrapped tight around the youngsters, their jutting bones reminding him of little birds.

  “Jomo,” Ita says as the boy turns and walks away.

  “Let him go,” Michael says.

  Ita looks at Michael, then again at Jomo walking off on his own to the bedroom.

  “Let it go,” Michael says and Ita can’t help but think he means all of it. Leda, Mary, the life and future they’d been building the last seven years.

  Let it all go.

  * * *

  That night, Ita stretches out on the mat beneath the boys’ bunk beds, staying until they fall asleep.

  Listening to their breathing, he looks up at the structures he and Leda built together. The flowing wood grain reminds him of her long tapered fingers. Of how she pursed her lips when she hammered the nails, how she laughed when he teased her. He lets his eyes count the nails. Even while it makes his chest ache, it soothes him to remember the hours they spent in this room, to remember Leda here.

  That is how he drifts off finally—playing back his reel of memories, from the day she arrived with her suitcase and her smile, her watchful eyes surveying Ita from head to toe, the first time she came to breakfast in her blue pajamas, the first day they went out to explore Kibera, movie night, and the afternoon a few days later, the first time they—

  * * *

  Ita’s eyes fly open in the dark. How long has he been asleep?

  He’s sitting like someone jabbed an iron rod down his back. A noise. Coming from the courtyard. From the front gate. Ita rises from the floor, scanning the boys’ faces, praying they won’t wake.

  He tiptoes out of the room. What was it? A knocking, he thinks. But there’s a hissing in the night, too, that sounds like his name being called.

  He reaches the door, the rifle slung over his shoulder. When he holds his breath to listen, he hears the breathing on the other side. A man. Chege?

  Ita’s stomach flash floods with acid.

  But then his name comes again in the night, leeching through the padlocked gate, and it isn’t Chege. “Ita, it’s Samuel. Let me in.”

  Samuel. The man who brought him Leda. “Samuel. What happened?”

  “Please.” The younger man’s voice seeps through the metal like a bleating goat. “Help me.”

  Ita tenses his protesting muscles into a ready stance. But he doesn’t open the door. He doesn’t know if he has any more comfort to give, strength to help other men battle the darkness. He has the boys to protect—

  “It’s my girl,” Samuel’s voice sobs, shuddering though the door. “Please. You have to help her.”

  Ita doesn’t hear a girlfriend, only Samuel’s labored breathing. But the desperation of his plea rings in Ita’s ears. He’s been crying hard.

  “What can I do?”

  “You are a doctor, people say.”

  Ita’s heart races. If the violence staggers on, how many more will come for help?

  When he opens the gate, he looks out into empty air. Then he looks down. Samuel’s crouched on the ground, slumped over something dark and lumpy.

  The man looks up, the whites of his eyes shining from a grotesquely swollen face, and Ita sees what he’s cradling in his arms.

  Slung over his knees is a woman, unconscious.

  They’re both bathed in blood.

  Ita can’t see her face in the shadows, only her form. In the darkness, her broken body becomes Leda’s, pinned beneath Chege. It becomes Kioni, unconscious in his arms as he listens for her breath, begging Go
d not to take her, not to stain Ita’s hands red with her blood.

  He failed them both. Maybe this woman he can save.

  Ita bends down.

  Samuel’s eyes glisten with gratitude. Together, they lift the woman through the doorway. Ita locks the door behind them. Surveying the dark courtyard, Samuel clutches his girl tighter, rocks her gently. Ita can’t tell if she’s alive. There is a frozen sea between the two men, fate being decided, like dice rolling in slow motion.

  “This way,” Ita says. He points toward the hidden room.

  Inside, Samuel lays the girl on the table while Ita closes the door. He crosses the room and lights the lamp. In the bouncing glow, he readies his equipment, dons plastic gloves. The scent of blood blooms in Ita’s nostrils.

  Now he turns to inspect the woman, his heart cracking, one fissure at a time. Her clothes are torn, her hair matted with blood. She’s been struck in the face, and all along her body, methodically, it seems. Blood oozes from wounds on her scalp, her neck, and her clavicle...but it’s not enough to explain the quantity of blood that has them both glistening and sticky. “Are you hurt?” Ita asks Samuel.

  Samuel doesn’t look up, his eyes are locked on the woman. “Don’t worry about me. Save her. I’ll give you anything. Hurry. Please.”

  Ita opens the woman’s tattered blouse, undoing the buttons one at a time instead of tearing them.

  His fingers freeze when he finds the source of all the blood.

  A loop of intestine protrudes from the bottom of a jagged gash—she’s been stabbed in the stomach. There’s so much tissue damage, Ita suspects a machete. When he lifts her skirt to check her legs, he decides, yes, machetes did this. A gang attack, most likely.

  Then Ita sees the girl’s underwear, soaked through with red. He looks up, catches Samuel’s eyes across the table as they well with tears, his face cracking like an egg, jagged pieces falling in on themselves. Thick tears drip onto the woman’s broken body, the woman Samuel loves, the woman he would give anything to save.

  What Ita needs is time to stand still, so that he can think. The violence outside, Samuel’s weeping, the blood pumping through the woman’s body, the memories of Leda stampeding through his mind—everything needs to stop, give him two seconds to think, to plan how to save her.

  If he was in the clinic, the plan would be clear. He would do a laparotomy to assess the damage. He needs to open the gastrocolic ligament, decide the type of procedure she needs. The wound is close enough to have nicked the liver. Her lungs could be compromised. The colon or bladder could be injured, spilling their contents, causing peritonitis. Large blood vessels could cause a bleed-out.

  Gently, Ita tips back the woman’s head and leans in to check her airway. When he shuts his eyes to listen for her breath, he can smell her skin beneath the blood, so close to his. Almost, he reaches out to stroke her cheek. Instead, he sets his fingers to the tip of her nose—it’s cool to the touch. Her breath is there, but shallow. When he touches her jugular, her distant pulse is a rabbit skidding through the brush, quick and terrified. Time is turning its back on this woman. Fury swells Ita’s chest. She doesn’t deserve to die like this. She can’t.

  “How long has she been unconscious?” Ita asks.

  “Not too long,” Samuel says, as though what he says can change what happens next.

  “She’s in shock.”

  He moves to her hand, checks her capillary refill time by pinching a chipped red fingernail clogged with dirt.

  He sees the panic fill Samuel’s eyes as the seconds tick off in the room—rising at the same rate as the dread in Ita’s stomach. No. No!

  Ita turns back to his supplies. Buried deep is an IV of saline solution. It is more precious than Samuel can possibly know. Ita squeezes shut his eyes, feeling dizzy. He spins back around and starts the woman on an IV, twisting the clamp to allow a steady flow, not a drip, of crystalloids for shock.

  He puts out his hand. “Give me your student card.”

  Samuel starts. “What? Why?”

  “I need it. Or any card, of any kind. ID. Student. Doesn’t matter.”

  Samuel fishes in the woman’s pockets. He hands her student ID card to Ita. “Her name is Mercy,” he says, seemingly more to himself than to Ita.

  Ita looks at the card while he douses it in hydrogen peroxide. The woman in the picture, Mercy, is beautiful, with regal cheekbones and big smiling brown eyes. Her eyes are like Kioni’s—brave and kind. At least, what Kioni’s eyes used to look like.

  Ita blinks. He has to keep a grip on reality. He presses the card over the gash, forcing the intestines to slip back inside the wound. He packs fresh gauze over the card and then a towel. “Press. Hard.” As Samuel does as he’s told, Ita tapes around her body, top and bottom of the towel. “Keep pressing.”

  But as Ita winds the tape, he sees the skin under Samuel’s hands changing.

  With trembling fingers, he reaches out and touches the lower half of Mercy’s abdomen, his heart skipping a beat. Her skin is rigid and distended, darkening in the glow of the lantern. She’s bleeding internally.

  Ita’s teeth clench so hard they feel as if they will shatter. He throws his head back to the metal roof, glares at the god that made this forsaken world.

  She needs surgery. She needs help Ita cannot give her, not here, not with the supplies he has.

  With tears racing to his eyes, Ita struggles to breathe. Ita will fail a third woman tonight. A woman named Mercy. Oh Lord, where is your mercy now?

  Gently, while Samuel continues to press desperately on the gauze, Ita slips a towel under Mercy’s feet to raise them. Respectfully, he lowers her skirt. He covers her legs with a blanket.

  Samuel notices his movements slowing down. He watches, his eyes jumping about, weighing Ita’s every act.

  “Samuel,” Ita says softly.

  The man’s eyes stop flittering and double in size, his anguish filling the room like smoke. “Come on, Ita. Please.”

  Ita’s own wounds throb as he shakes his head, like punishment. Judgment for his failure.

  “Please,” Samuel says again, louder. “I brought her here because I heard you can help—”

  Ita grits his teeth. “She needs a hospital.”

  “You’re the hospital. Look!” He gestures around the room, at the posters, at the supplies. “What does she need?” Samuel holds out his arm, making a fist. He looks down at the veins bulging to the surface, in the crook of his arm. “Take my blood. Take my organs. Anything you need from me. Please. I don’t have any money. I brought her here. I brought her here.” More tears pool at the corners of his eyes. “It can’t be my fault. Please. You have to save her.”

  “I can’t save her,” Ita says, and the words stab his heart. “She needs surgery.”

  Ita looks down on Mercy’s still body. The human heart pumps several liters of blood a minute. A human female has no more than four liters of blood. He has to tell Samuel the truth. He can’t send him into the night, with no money, lugging her heavy body to a faraway hospital, where it will only be too late. It already is too late. “Samuel,” he says and waits for the poor man to look at him, so he will see Ita’s eyes and hear the truth. “She’s going to die. Very soon.”

  “No!” Samuel stands up so fast he tips over a metal pan with Ita’s tools, sends them flying. The noise of metal on metal shatters the night.

  Ita looks sharply at the closed door. He imagines with dread Michael’s head suddenly peeping through the door.

  “I can make you.” Samuel’s eyes look to the ground behind Ita. Without having to turn, Ita knows what is there.

  The rifle. He carried it into the room with them, set it against the wall.

  Ita shakes his head. A tear finally frees itself from his eyelashes. “I’m sorry, Samuel. I wish I could save her, truly. I wish so many things could be different than they are.” He takes one ragged step and picks up the rifle, slings it silently over his shoulder. “I will leave you to say goodbye.”

 
Samuel’s iron face melts at the words. He spins away from Ita as if he no longer exists. He sees only Mercy, on the table. The dice have stopped rolling. No more shouting or pleading will stay fate’s cast.

  Ita watches, sadness tearing his limbs apart, as Samuel sinks onto the stool beside his beloved’s body. He kisses her bloody face till his lips sheen. He smoothes back her hair, plucking tiny rocks from the strands above her forehead. He cups her face with both hands. “Mercy.” The name comes slow and soft as honey, like the sweetness of her spirit filling the room.

  Samuel whimpers, begging her forgiveness, as Ita edges out of the room, the whispers of my love, my life hissing like a branding iron, marking Samuel the eternal possessor of the worst moment of his life.

  Ita pulls open the thin door and reenters the long, cruel night.

  The sheet to the boys’ room is drawn. Miraculously they haven’t woken. He carries a plastic stool a small distance away from the hidden room to sit and wait. To wait for what else this night may bring.

  New Year’s Eve.

  It’s the first time the thought registers in his mind and sticks.

  He flashes on how he and Leda talked about it, dreaming what the New Year would bring them.

  She told him about celebrations in America, men and women drinking bubbly liquor and kissing each other at midnight. The memory is a sharp pang in Ita’s side. Leda isn’t celebrating tonight. She is suffering.

  Ita looks into the courtyard where Leda sang with the boys, where they played, where she painted elephants and giggled with them. He sees her face turning around to smile at him, the laugh that sprang from her like fresh clean water.

  At least she’s alive. She didn’t meet Mercy’s final fate. She is somewhere safe.

  December 31, 2007, Topanga, CA—Leda

  The hot water scalds her and Leda endures it resignedly, watching her skin turn the color of shame, the color of regret and blood and pain. She lifts her face to the showerhead and opens her mouth, thinking it could burn her or drown her or both and that would be okay. The water fills her mouth and pours over her chin; it rains and rains, drawing her blood to the surface like a sunburn.