Michael doesn’t budge until Ita looks straight into his eyes. Then, with a clench of his jaw, the boy resumes his role. He herds the children back to their bedroom.
Ita slinks past Kioni into his room. He strips off his shirt, pours water over his hands, wipes them on a rag. Then he sits hunched on his bed, not knowing what to do next.
The med student in him knows he’s in shock by his numb hands, his rapid heartbeat, his shallow breath. His blood pressure is sinking alongside his heart. But he is helpless to do anything about it. For the first time, Ita glimpses the minds of the ghost men who wander the alleys of Kibera, shells of fathers and husbands whose whispered grievances are like trash in the wind. Their wives and children, their youth and hope—all having slipped through their fingers.
Ita thinks he understands. He sees how loss can flood a mind, leave room for nothing else to matter.
When Kioni opens his door, he can’t be bothered to look at her. His eyes are ripe with tears that cannot fall, tears he doesn’t care to wipe away.
“Ita—” she says, but stops. Maybe she sees how words have lost their meaning, their purpose flittered away like everything else. But she’s moving anyway, sweeping into the room like a storm cloud, misting down onto the mattress next to him. He is glad she doesn’t touch him.
After a long drift of silence, out of the corner of his eye, he sees her open her arms. At first, he does nothing and Kioni leaves them be, a stone angel in a cemetery.
But then Ita feels something inside stirring, pushing him, nudging at what’s left of his soul, until he lets himself fall into her lap.
Images of Chege saturate the air around them. Not just of tonight, of shots ringing out, of blood pooling in the dirt. No, not just that. Images of nights piled up through the years, from long, long ago—they dance around them in the room, cresting and falling on their twin strangled breaths, their crippled heartbeats.
Ita feels the roughness of Kioni’s dress, feels the warmth and softness beneath, and he gets caught, careening from one memory into the next.
When Ita touches his cheek, the wetness of his tears slips between his fingers like blood. He feels sick inside, the acid rising up in his throat. He lifts himself away, away from her warm skin and the terrible visions it brings.
Her hand finds its way to his cheek, a mirror gesture of how he cradled Chege’s face. She looks at him, mourning, as he did over Chege’s body.
They cry together for their friend. No matter what he was, he was theirs. Their only family. And they cry for themselves, for the parts of them that died in the dirt with Chege.
* * *
Light is seeping into the room when Ita looks over and finds Jomo standing in the doorway, watching them. Their eyes meet and hold.
“Come in,” Ita says, his voice thick. “It’s okay. Come here.”
Jomo doesn’t budge.
When Kioni raises her head, the three of them get stuck in a slice of time, like a fuzzy photograph. Ita imagines himself trapped inside a camera, and he wonders if he is destined to lose his mind in the coming hours and days.
Then Ita sees it—Jomo’s big toe inching forward in the dirt. He approaches like a frightened cub, eyes averted. His little fist is closed tight over something.
Ita and Kioni watch, entranced. Jomo reaches the edge of the mattress, drops the thing onto the blanket, then jumps back and runs out of the room. Ita gets up to go after him, until a sparkle pulls his eye to the bed.
The necklace.
His mother’s necklace. The necklace he clasped around Leda’s ivory throat on Christmas. Ita snatches it up, closes it in his hand and hangs his head, eyes squeezed shut.
He sees Leda, tossing back her dark hair to expose the pale skin of her neck that seemed so naked to Ita, indecent almost, both in sensuality and vulnerability. He sees the light glinting off the necklace, the promise that would bring her back to him.
Ita opens his hand, stares at the gold chain with the bird forever imprisoned upon it.
How did Jomo get it? Did she leave it behind before she left? Ita can almost feel his heart ripping through his chest. The light catches the end of the chain dangling from his palm—it’s broken. Snapped. Ita fingers the edge, his mind reeling, so much so that he barely notices that Kioni has seen what he holds. Her hand flies to her throat.
“I gave it to Leda,” he says.
Kioni’s face falls, her pupils swelling to spill their ink. “You gave it to her? To a stranger?” She scrambles off the bed. “After everything. After all those years. You gave it to a mzungu?”
Ita doesn’t have a chance to respond before Kioni flees the room, vanishing into the night. He doesn’t have the chance to tell her, Leda wasn’t just anyone. She was a chance at light, beauty, at peace. She was a chance for redemption. Redemption for what I did to you.
Chapter 23
January 9, 2008, Topanga, CA—Leda
LEDA ARRIVES LATE to the doctor’s office.
But the look on the receptionist’s face, either from too much Botox or in response to Leda’s haggard appearance, says she’s forgiven. Or maybe, Leda realizes, the kindness is due to why she’s here. Donor testing.
“Have a seat, honey,” the receptionist says. “Dr. Gordon will be with you just as soon as he can.”
Leda feels as if she’s moving through a haze, as if she should put her hands out to clear the fog. The cumulative noise—the beeping, the incessant ringing of the phones, the loud typing, the rampant whispering—it all feels choreographed, overdone. Chipper. American.
She sits down to wait. Her mind’s swimming like a dunked feline. She hasn’t been able to drag herself from her bed for over a week. Her phone hasn’t rung once, despite her constantly, desperately, willing it to. She finally decided the only way to rise from the rumpled sheets was to promise herself not to think. Promise to avoid the wide swath of things tearing apart her mind—Estella’s cancer, today’s tests to see if it will fall to Leda to save her, the dreams that plague her, of fire and blood...
I’m thinking about it.
She snaps the rubber band on her wrist. She slipped it on this morning and anytime thoughts creep in, she snaps it, a psychological trick. A weapon. She has already snapped it seven times in the car ride over, twice since she’s entered the office. So far she doesn’t think the receptionist has noticed.
On the table in front of her are the usual assortment of women’s and men’s magazines, and a newspaper. Leda knows she should snap the rubber band, but she picks up the newspaper.
It’s not on the front page. She has to flip two pages to the World section, but there it is, from a bird’s-eye view.
The newspaper says that in the months preceding the December 27 presidential election, clashes in the western part of Kenya killed hundreds of people, although this was not as bad as previous election years. The article blames politicians for stoking ethnic tensions, saying anyone could have foreseen that a narrow victory for either candidate would mean mayhem and riots.
Leda looks up, the paper extended, open. Idiot. That’s what she was, an idiot. Acting like a love-struck teenager frolicking on a beach while a tidal wave rose offshore. The tsunami was there the whole time, steadily positioning itself to drown Kibera and everything contained within. She pictures the shops, the blur of faces, children running through the alleys. The orphans. Ntimi, beaming, ever the gentleman. Michael, the martyr. Walter with his chubby exuberance. And Jomo, his watchful eyes, just starting to come around to the idea that maybe the world wasn’t so horrible.
When all along, Jomo was right.
Leda’s eyes return to the newspaper.
At first, the article says, Raila Odinga was reported in the lead. People celebrated in splatters. But when the official election results were withheld, people got antsy.
Leda sucks in a shaky breath—she knows what’s coming next. What will the newspaper say? About December 30, the night Kibaki was hastily sworn in. The paper says Kibera went mad. Thwarted Luo men took to the streets,
hell-bent on hunting Kibaki’s long-privileged Kikuyu. After, during the night and day Leda spent on a plane, government security forces flooded the slum, and live TV was cut. Police rounded up protesters and took the opportunity to kill dissidents and Mungiki gang leaders, too.
New Year’s Day, while Leda sat at Estella’s kitchen table, public accusations were made of mass killings by Kenyan government forces. The same day, a mob set fire to a church full of women and children. The next day, President Kibaki accused Odinga’s Luo protesters of “ethnic cleansing” as the death toll rose. Odinga followed with a Nairobi rally that police squashed with tear gas and water canyons. By the fourth, as Leda tossed in bed, the United Nations announced their estimate that the violence had uprooted 200,000 people.
And who would’ve thought this would happen, the newspaper muses, when December 27—voting day—was such a relatively peaceful event? Millions turned out, hopeful and in good spirits, Luo and Kikuyu neighbors side by side.
Leda’s eyes drift from the page. Voting day.
The day the little monsters came out to play.
“Leda Walbourne,” the nurse calls out.
Leda looks up.
“We’re ready for you,” the nurse says with a smile. “We need blood and urine samples, then Dr. Gordon will see you.”
Chapter 24
December 27, 2007, Kibera—Leda
AFTER LEDA’S ILL-FATED announcement on Christmas Day, the bliss between her and Ita sputtered like a car running out of gas. He was as polite and kind as ever, but somehow that made the distance more pronounced. If falling in love meant turning a stranger into something as familiar as oatmeal, then falling out of love... Was it this? Watching Ita turn back into a stranger one hour at a time? Leda sensed him rewriting her, sketching a new image of her in his mind.
He asked her a few questions about the money, what Leda wanted do with it. But each time, his questions and her overeager answers wedged them further apart.
She didn’t understand what had happened, not really. Did he feel betrayed? Emasculated? Suddenly indebted? Or was it just that she had suddenly become a stranger, a rich foreigner, a mzungu, in his eyes?
He needed help for the orphanage. She wanted to help. Why did this have to become a mountain between them?
That morning, Ita and Mary had left for the voting station before Leda even emerged from her room.
The night before, she’d asked to go with him to the polls, but Ita had said no. “Optimism,” he’d said, “does not negate caution.” Plus, he needed her to watch the boys.
When Leda joined them, the boys were already eating breakfast. They were riled up as if it were Christmas morning—infused with frothy excitement. They must have caught it from Ita and Mary before they’d left.
Leda tried to feel excited, too. This could be the day nefarious leaders toppled, replaced by saviors. The day when life in Kibera got better.
But Leda couldn’t. She couldn’t rise above the unease caused by the rift between her and Ita.
As she played with the younger children, who understood neither English nor her butchered Swahili, Leda felt her anxiety increase. On safari, she and Ita had been a romantic fairy tale, reveling in their impossible love. But in Kibera, the vivid dreams they’d whispered in the dark became chalk drawings in the beating sun. Had she been honest, telling Ita she could live in Kibera? Although he might see her life in California as wasteful, idle or shallow, at least he could go to med school there. Follow his dream, because he had a goal. But what would she do there? Maybe staying in Kibera wasn’t ridiculous. Here, at least, she felt as though she had a purpose, as though she could help. Or at least she had felt that way. Did Ita even want her to return anymore as his benefactor, if it meant this unease between them—tiptoeing around their love like a shattered vase hastily glued?
Leda gathered all the boys in the courtyard and vowed to stop thinking about it. She would just have to talk things out with Ita that night. It would be fine.
For a few hours, they played Duck Duck Goose and Red Rover, Red Rover. Leda taught them how to patty-cake and they showed her how to use the wooden Bao board she’d been curious about. It was like a cross between checkers and backgammon, with dried seeds as playing pieces.
Afterward, Leda heated the lunch Mary had left for them—chapati and salted cassava with peas.
After the meal, and after all the dishes were done, Leda announced it was story time. She stuck to the simplest one—Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. The boys traced their fingers over the shiny pages, laughing at the little boy picking apples. They felt sorry for the wrinkled old man the boy becomes, with only a tree for a friend.
After they read it through three times, Leda could tell they were losing interest. Jomo was the first to get up and leave, ducking away without so much as a glance. Could he sense the shift that had happened, too? Would they all treat her like an outsider now?
Leda was continuing with the story—pointing out the apples and the trees, imagining her voice sounded boring and screechy—when there was a loud knock at the gate.
Her hands froze, clenching the book like a baseball bat, as the boys jumped up and dashed toward the sound.
“Wait!” she called out.
But overlapping her voice was another—Chege’s, coming from the gate. “Ita! Sasa?”
Michael grinned and unlocked the door before Leda could stop him. Her stomach twisted like a balloon animal, but with nothing funny about it. Every single thing about Chege made her uneasy.
She jumped up and scurried to the door, hoping to block his entrance. Chege stopped, surprised, and peered past her as he asked, “Where Ita at?”
“Voting with Mary,” she said, and instantly regretted adding the Mary part, as Chege’s snarl curled into a sickening smile.
“Just you? Alone?”
“Ita will be back soon,” she said, her hand resting on the door pointedly. “I’ll tell him to call you.” She tugged on the metal.
Chege chuckled as he reached in and put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Nah, I just play here till he come back.”
Michael moved aside, allowing Chege to slip in. Leda looked at Michael in anger. Traitor.
She stood awkwardly in place as Chege strutted past her to the mat, pied piper to seven pairs of pitter-pattering feet. He wore jeans and a shiny red Fila athletic shirt. His dreads snaked down his back, loosely gathered by a red piece of cloth.
For a split second, like the first time she’d laid eyes on him, Leda was struck by an unwelcome thought: Chege could be handsome. Not at all like Ita, who was smooth and solid and chiseled. No, Chege was both jagged and lithe, his allure like that of a lizard or a snake.
As if he could feel her studying him, he turned and winked. It caught Leda so off guard, she turned away, pretending she’d heard a noise outside and needed to shut the gate, fast. Her cheeks burned with shame.
Ntimi noticed her hovering near the door. “Leda, play! Come here, play!”
Chege smiled, showing his teeth with the brown streaks. Ita told her it was from chewing miraa, a twig with an effect like cocaine. “Yes, Leda,” he purred. “Come play.”
Leda’s general nausea about him returned, and that was comforting somehow. She went and sat down next to Ntimi on the mat.
“What you boys reading today?” Chege picked up the book and ran his hand seductively over the shiny cover. He didn’t open it, Leda noticed. She wondered if he could read.
“The Giving Tree,” Ntimi said. “By Mr. Shel Siverstein.” He pronounced it perfectly. Leda smiled at him proudly.
Chege chuckled. “Yeah? What the trees giving us today? I thought you don’t need a giving tree anymore, now you got Leda. Ita’s angel. That what he think. You boys, too?”
Leda’s smile faltered.
He laughed. “Aw, come on. Let’s be friends, Leda.” He pulled up his shirt enough that she could see his stomach. She expected to see a weapon, a machete, but instead he took a flask from his waistband.
“Share a drink with me. For voting day. You American girls like to drink.”
“No, thank you,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders and took a swig. With wet lips, he studied her. “You know changaa?”
She knew he meant the liquor. Slum moonshine, brewed illegally at great penalty. “No,” she said.
Chege’s face softened. “It not your fault, you pretty thing. You from the other side of the world.”
Leda felt heavy, like an anchor sinking to the bottom of the sea. She wished she could go hide in her little room. She felt exposed before Chege. Naked. But daring to look in his eyes, she was surprised at what she saw. Not the judgment she imagined, not at all. He looked at her with something like sympathy, understanding.
“Anyway,” he said. “That not your real problem, is it?” He took another swig from the flask. He closed his eyes as it went down and brushed sweat from his forehead. He looked tired, suddenly. Beaten down. When he opened his eyes, he stared straight ahead, not at Leda. “You no angel. Nobody is. Not after what the world done with us. Nobody an angel.” Now Chege looked over, extended the flask. “Except Ita.”
Leda didn’t say a word. The image of Ita’s face loomed between them, his eternally kind, patient face, loving her so innocently, so unconditionally, the same as he loved the orphans, same as he loved Chege. Not believing that anybody could be undeserving of his love—
When Leda’s eyes met Chege’s, she saw herself reflected in them. She reached out and took the flask.
The fluid that gushed down her throat was liquid fire—possibly gasoline—and she imagined it scarring her insides as it went. Not warming them, but harming them—rivers of burned tissue. She liked the feeling, liked the dull wave of fog that followed.
Chege watched her face as he took back the flask. But he didn’t say another word.
Instead, he seemed to relax. He turned away from her and started jabbering to the boys in Swahili. Leda sat weaving in place for a few moments, a balloon tied down in a breeze.
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