Chege smiled when Walter waddled over and sat in her lap. Leda kissed the top of the toddler’s furry head and gave him a squeeze. She felt so much better after the drink.
All of sudden, Chege drummed out a beat on his knees and right away the boys copied it. Ntimi thumped his knees next, faster, and ended with a loud puff of his cheeks. Everyone imitated, laughing. One by one, each boy took their turn, adding their own flourish, like a King Kong chest-beating or an arm flap accompanied by the squawk of a chicken. Ntimi’s second turn, he jumped up and did a little dance. This time, Leda popped up with Walter in her arms and approximated Ntimi’s wiggly jiggle. Everybody laughed appreciatively, Chege the loudest.
* * *
After playtime, the group stretched out on the mat to rest.
“Now I want to hear the book,” Chege said, sprawled out opposite Leda.
She hesitated shyly, but Chege pressed the book into her hands.
Ntimi scooted in. “I start,” he said, and opened the book on Leda’s knee.
Each of the boys found a way to participate in the story, pointing out an apple to Chege or the old man’s glasses or the carving on the tree. Leda applauded their efforts and their English. She was thrilled to feel the ease between her and the boys had returned—it made her feel drunk on contentedness. Or changaa?
Chege looked at Michael, sitting, watching as usual. “Is it teatime?” he asked. “Huh? Teatime, brother,” he said when Michael didn’t answer. “Take them.”
Michael looked at Leda and the intensity of it unnerved her, made her feel suddenly guilty somehow.
“Go on,” Chege urged and then rattled off a string of Swahili. The boys got up at once, Ntimi taking Walter, and headed for the kitchen.
“Hey—” Leda said, the word cottony in her mouth.
“I want to talk to you, Leda.”
The cozy feeling began to dissipate. “I should go help them.”
Chege laughed. “You think they need your help?”
Leda felt the sting, but dulled.
“Do you think Ita needs you now?” His voice turned soft again, low. “You want to help, I know.”
“Why is that so bad?” she asked, thinking of Ita, of the way he looked at her now—warily.
“What are you gonna do, Leda? Live here? Mother those little black boys?” He snorted, his dreads trembling. Then he got serious, looked her dead in the eye. “Or you plan to take him away? Save him from Kibera. From me.”
“We don’t know yet,” she said, trying to match his tone. But her voice wavered.
“Oh, Leda,” Chege growled. “Those things ain’t going to happen. This—” he gestured around the orphanage, but kept his eyes glued on hers “—is not your home. And you are right that Ita don’t belong here. But—”
He didn’t have to finish. As he reached inside his pants for the flask, she heard the rest in her head. But he doesn’t belong with you, either.
Chege leaned in closer, so Leda could smell him—smoky and earthy. “I did something,” he whispered, “that Ita will never forgive me for. Never. No matter what I do.”
She searched his eyes, expecting to see a monster, but all she saw was pain. Regret. Shame.
“And one day,” he said, “you will, too.”
Chege moved in slowly, put his forehead to hers, so that his dreads swung forward and made a tent of privacy. His hand gripped the back of her neck.
When his lips met hers, sensually, softly, deeply, Leda expected herself to recoil instantly.
But she didn’t. She let him kiss her.
He was right, she thought. Chege was right.
Chapter 25
January 9, 2008, Topanga, CA—Leda
WHEN DR. GORDON opens the exam room door, it cuts through the memory so sharply, Leda puts a hand to her heart and finds herself gasping. Caught. The vision of Chege leaning in, the feel of his lips, the sour liquor taste of his mouth—it burns through her just as sure as the changaa from his flask.
“Leda, hello.” The gray-haired doctor looks up from his chart as he enters the room. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yes,” she says, her breath still jagged and darting, uncatchable as rabbits. “No.”
Doctor Gordon’s face is creased like pillow markings. “No, of course not,” he says gently. “These situations are very difficult.” He’s clutching the chart to his narrow chest.
It’s bad news.
“Leda, we’ll get the blood test results in a few hours, but I’m afraid...you aren’t eligible for donation at this time.”
Leda looks away to let the news penetrate. So, then it’s settled. She can’t save Estella. She will let her mother down, again, in the worst way. Because the doctor’s words have a deeper meaning. They mean Estella will die.
“In your condition, I mean.” Dr. Gordon is clearing his throat, trying to get her attention. “You are ineligible in your current condition.”
Leda looks at him blankly. Her condition?
“Leda, you do know that you’re pregnant...don’t you?”
* * *
Two hours later, Leda knocks at her mother’s door. She didn’t call ahead, she can’t just go barging in.
She rubs her hands together—they’re clammy, with a coat of sand. After leaving the doctor’s office, she drove along the coast until she screeched to a halt, parked and sat on the beach, shivering under the gray sky. But nothing could slow the avalanche of her thoughts, and no sense could be made of the colliding mess.
So Leda drove here. To tell her mother the bad news.
She knocks again.
No answer, even though Leda knows she’s home. She turns around and sits on the doorstep, sure she’s going to throw up, but what falls from her mouth instead is a sob, with a line of sobs backing up behind it. The racking intensity scares her. Estella always forbade crying and the conditioning stuck.
Now here she is on her mother’s doorstep, bawling like a two-year-old. She almost doesn’t hear the click of the door.
Almost. Frantically, she gulps down sobs like they’re billiard balls, while swiping her eyes. She wipes her nose on her sleeve.
“Leda?”
She fans her face, begging the red to drain from her cheeks. With a deep breath, she turns. The vision of her mother is a zap of electrical shock. Estella’s wrinkles are piled up like the hide of a shar-pei. Her skin without makeup has the wan lumpiness of lard. She looks old. No, Leda thinks, she looks like she is dying.
“Come inside,” Estella says and leaves a gaping black hole in the doorway.
Leda stands and follows into the dark, shuttered house.
“Sit down,” her mother says as they enter the kitchen.
That’s what I need, Leda thinks. I need someone to tell me what the hell to do.
“Where’s your team?” Leda asks.
Estella looks at her, clearly annoyed at the sight of her daughter’s red, puffy face. “What?”
“Your team. The death squad.” She’d meant it as a joke, but seeing Estella wince, Leda wants to smack herself for saying it.
“I sent them away.”
Leda sits at the table. Estella continues to the opposite end, the seat farthest away.
“I saw the doctor today,” Leda says.
Estella opens her mouth, as if she will speak, then closes it. Neither one of them knows where to begin. Leda picks at her fingers, the nails chewed to the quick, and studies the wood grain of the table.
“Stop picking,” Estella says, glaring at Leda’s hands.
She stops. “The blood-test results are still to come, but there’s a...complication. A condition.” When Leda’s eyes close, the memories replay, stacking upon one another. First, Chege’s marred face leaning into hers, his dreadlocks blotting out the light. But then she sees Ita’s face. The day he opened the door, the sun painting his eyes with gold.
Before Leda can stop it, tears well in her eyes. They slip through her eyelashes, make a mad dash for her chin.
“Don’t cry,” Estella says.
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Leda’s eyes fly open, the weepiness swinging to sudden anger. “Why?” She looks at her mother. She truly wants to know. “Why can’t I cry? You’re dying. And I’m—” more tears spill over her cheeks “—pregnant.”
Estella blinks. She blinks again and Leda lowers her chin, anger extinguished by guilt. The look in Estella’s eyes—it is the realization that her daughter will fail her, one last time. She gets up from the table, wobbles, then sets course for the refrigerator, her slippers sanding across the floor. She begins a process as familiar to Leda as the sound of the sea. The clink of the ice. The sloshing pour of the vodka.
But, Leda thinks foggily, there’s still a chance. “I don’t have to keep it.” Her throat closes off when she says it. She puts a hand to her neck, against the sensation of a phantom vise. “Awful things happened in Kenya...”
As she trails off, the silence looms around her. Her mother’s silence. Her mother’s lack of interest, her complete lack of concern. Leda feels the chill in her bones, heightened by the gaping emptiness of the cold house. Soon, when Estella isn’t here anymore, she realizes for the first time how truly alone she will be. She imagines giving birth alone, trying to be a good mother, all alone. I can’t. I can’t do it. Now, no way the tears will stop. She wipes at them one by one, but they spring up like leaks in a crumbling dam.
“Goddammit!” Estella whips around and smashes her glass to the ground. The shatter is like the earth cracking, splitting through Leda as though she herself is a mirror shattering into a million pieces.
Estella looks at what she’s done, heaving, her hands trembling in the air. Leda’s heart pounds in her chest, but her trunk is petrified wood.
“I’m dying,” Estella says. “I’m as good as dead.” She touches her hairline, shakily smoothes back a curl. “The oncologist called. It’s everywhere. It’s over.” Leaving the glass where it fell, Estella trudges back to the table. She takes her faraway seat and stares at the wood. In a voice so quiet, Leda wonders if she’s imagining it, she says, “It’s her fault. She’s the cancer in me.”
“Who?” Leda asks.
But Estella only wrings her hands. They’re still shaking. She mutters something else, unintelligible, to herself, as if she’s forgotten Leda’s in the room.
“Whose fault?” Leda tries again.
Estella sighs, irritated. “Your grandmother’s.” The word sounds like a curse.
“Oh,” Leda says. Her grandmother died when she was four, and that comprised the entirety of what Estella ever revealed about her. Leda may have seen her a couple of times but she had no memory of it. “I don’t remember her.”
“Lucky you,” Estella says, and turns her head. She studies the shattered glass with an intensity Leda finds disconcerting. But Estella doesn’t elaborate. She’s far away somewhere, as if her daughter doesn’t exist.
Leda slips her hands into her lap. She pinches the skin on her wrist and twists hard. She has a sudden powerful urge she hasn’t had in many, many years—to make a cut, just a nick, but big enough to bleed...
Estella’s fiddling with something in the pocket of her robe.
Even though she knows better, Leda asks, “What is it? What do you have—”
“None of your business,” Estella snaps. Another hook from Leda’s childhood sound track.
But obviously she’s gripping something in her pocket. Leda suddenly imagines a gun. She takes a closer look at her mother’s appearance. Estella’s face is moist, like she’s sweating. Her skin hangs slack, but flushed. “Mother—” Leda says, starting to feel nervous.
Estella sees her worried face. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she hisses and yanks the thing from her pocket. She smacks it on the table and Leda flinches.
It’s a stack of photos. Leda stares in surprise. Then shivers wind up her arms. The photo on top is in black-and-white. A pretty young woman holding an infant. “Us?” she asks.
Estella snorts. She rolls her eyes. “No, me. And my mother. The bitch.”
Leda recoils.
But Estella hardly seems to notice. She stares at the photo, her lips pursed into a thin steel line. She stares for a long, long time.
Finally Leda whispers, “What did she do to you?”
Estella shakes her head. She wrings her hands some more, notices the habit, hides them her lap.
By the time Leda has stopped expecting an answer, Estella says, “What didn’t you do to me?” She’s addressing the photo, in disgust. “You needed a mother, not a child.” Estella’s eyes veer back to the smashed cocktail. “Gave me my first drink at ten. To keep her company.”
Leda stands, goes for the mop.
“Leave it,” Estella says. “Just leave it alone,” she adds and Leda suspects she’s not talking about the mess. She flips to another photograph, one Leda’s seen before—a sepia glamour photo of Estella, her hair shining like waves of silk. “No wonder I ruined my life.”
It stabs Leda in the stomach—her mother’s crystal clear regret. She slumps back into the chair, only because she’s worried she’s going to faint.
A mean glint enters Estella’s eye as she turns her head toward Leda. “Guess now it’s your turn.”
Leda’s stunned. She puts a hand over her stomach. No. I would never be like that. Like you.
Estella’s eyes are trained on Leda like an attack dog. “You know I don’t even know if your father was...your father,” she sneers. “He was rich. Rich and old.” She looks around the house purposefully. “Can you imagine what I had to do to give you all of this?”
Flip. A photo of an old man holding an infant Leda. Her mother smirks at the image. Leda stares at the photograph, too. The man’s smile is genuine and wide-open. A smile like Ita’s.
“Should have known there was a reason he went along with everything so easy—”
The man in the photo smiles at Leda, his wasted arms wrapped tight around the swaddled baby.
“He was sick. He didn’t want to die alone.”
Leda can’t pry her eyes from the photo. Estella notices.
“Yes, he wanted you.” Estella squashes her thumb on the edge of the fading photo. “But he died, left me alone with you.”
Leda touches her scar out of habit, caressing it while she stares at the photograph. Now she feels her mother’s eyes on her scar. “I tried, you know. But, God, it was awful—”
Leda tries not to listen. She wills her soul to remember the man in the photo somehow. Oh, how she wishes she had known him.
Estella pushes her chair back from the table with a loud screech across the floor. She takes two stormy steps, fumbling with her robe again. From her pocket, she takes out something small, closed in her fist. When she opens her palm, Leda gasps.
It’s a necklace. A platinum chain with a diamond fixed in the middle.
Estella coils it atop the photo, like a snake. “He gave it to me the day you were born. I never wore it.” Estella drops the necklace and doubles over to cough, an awful sound like a death rattle. Leda puts out her hand, but Estella waves her off. When she recovers, she gives the necklace one last look, then forcibly straightens herself and turns away.
Leda watches her mother go, puts her hand to her throat, envisions Ita clasping the sparrow necklace around her neck, his perfect smile that made her stomach heave. “Little monsters,” she says.
“What?” Estella says from the hall.
For the first time in her adult life, Leda feels sorry for her mother.
“Nothing.”
Chapter 26
January 10, 2008, Kibera—Ita
WHEN MARY SHOWS up at the orphanage a week later, Ita stares across the threshold as if she’s an apparition. Since Chege’s death, every day has been a waking nightmare full of ghosts.
“Good morning,” Mary says.
She’s real, Ita realizes, noting the deep lines on her face and her hair, normally neatly plaited, puffing out from beneath a soiled handkerchief.
Ita lets her inside. “How is Paul? How’s
Grace?”
“Alive,” Mary says. When he locks the door and walks past her, she says, with heavy feeling, “Thank you. I can never repay you—” She spots Kioni over Ita’s shoulder.
“A friend,” Ita says. “An old friend. Kioni.”
Mary and Ita stare at each other, unspoken words piling up between them. He decides not to tell her about Chege, and she decides not to reveal the shadowy thoughts crossing her face.
But now the boys have caught sight of her. They bolt from the mat where Kioni had been giving them a lesson, and swarm around Mary like bees to fruit juice. Mary opens her matronly arms and hugs them fiercely with her eyes squeezed shut. The desperate joy on the children’s faces makes Ita realize how they’ve been suffering, from fear and worry, but also from his silence.
It is Kioni that has cared for them this long week.
Ita sees her crouched like a blown-out lightbulb. Without the children occupying her thoughts, she is the same as him, nothing but a shell in the wake of Chege’s death.
Since that night, they’ve barely spoken. Kioni took over Mary’s role—cleaning and cooking, caring for the orphans. The schools are closed indefinitely, so she set up a classroom in the courtyard. She sings to the children, smiles at them, nuzzles them, but around Ita—she tiptoes. It’s as if there is an imaginary boundary between them. They skirt all mention of Chege, of the dwindling supplies, of the never-ceasing violence, of the past hurt that slices them every time they pass too close to each other.
Ita’s heart sinks. Kioni came here for help, not to witness Chege’s murder, not to mother seven orphans while Ita broods over a foreign woman who never belonged here.
She turns as if she can hear his thoughts. Her big brown eyes fill with concern. Ita smiles, Kioni looks unconvinced, and he smiles bigger, this time it’s nearly genuine. She raises an eyebrow and grins, tiredly. She waves him over. Mary’s still catching up with the boys, asking them about their studies and what they’ve had to eat and whether they’ve washed behind their ears. Ita sidles over to Kioni.
“We should go out,” she says. “With her here. To look for supplies.”
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