Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  “Ehil wehash alqual,” Etagegn had said with an air of mystery to her voice when I told her about my dream. “You are the water you spilled,” she explained, patting my unruly hair down into a ponytail. “You’re leaving the orphanage soon.”

  “What about the scary man?”

  “He represents your destiny. The future can be frightening, but you have a bright life ahead of you. Embrace it, Nebiyat.”

  I was not convinced. I’d sensed something destructive in that man’s presence. Or was that figure even human? I couldn’t tell for sure anymore. Whatever it was, I’d felt as if it could swallow the sun and turn it into fire and ash.

  Etagegn sensed my skepticism. “You’re going to a much better place, Nebiyat. You’ll see. I heard ferenjoch have so much money they even buy toys and beds for their pets. Gwood eko new! Can you believe that?” Just before turning to tend to her herb garden, she added, “I’m telling you, in America, even animals live better than some of us here.”

  Until the day I left the orphanage, I ached to tell Nurse Meron that I’d overheard her conversation with Etagegn but I didn’t because she could not have prevented my adoption. And besides, everybody knew a lot of money and effort went into finding a forever family for us children, especially the older ones like me who had been waiting for years. If Mrs. Saunders had gotten wind that I didn’t want to be adopted anymore, both Nurse Meron and I would have ended up in serious trouble. So to fight the fear that was growing in my chest, I started basking in Etagegn’s interpretation of my dream, feeding her imagining of my future with increasingly luxurious images I collected from foreign sitcoms, movies, and magazines.

  In contrast to the Sears store where Claire had taken me three weeks earlier to get winter clothes and boots, the store we walked into was narrow and dark. Pictures of contorted, bloody faces covered the walls. The fake spiders and skeletons hanging from the ceiling reminded me of the chandeliers I had once seen at a church in Addis Ababa. I crossed myself before following Claire and Josh deeper into the store.

  “I want to be a scarecrow,” Josh said, picking up a package with a picture of a boy wearing a flimsy hat and tattered overalls that seemed to have been fashioned out of a potato sack and straws.

  Even though he was two years younger than me, Josh and I were the same height. Noting his immaturity usually spawned in me a deep, perverse satisfaction that made his height advantage easier to bear. But now, his choice in costume made me think he might also not be right in the head.

  “You sure?” Claire asked, examining the package.

  Josh nodded.

  “Once we pay for it, you can’t change your mind, okay, Josh?” she said and put the package in her plastic basket.

  I wondered why Claire and Paul, my adoptive father, indulged their son so much.

  “Mommy, can we go to McDonald’s now?” Josh asked.

  We walked past shiny clothes, brightly coloured wigs and hats, and plastic swords and guns packed on racks and shelves taller than Claire.

  “Later,” Claire said.

  “How about you, Nebiyat? Do you want a princess costume?” she asked, placing a plastic package in front of me and pointing at a picture of a girl with blond, curly hair and a shimmering gold-and-pink puffy dress.

  Before I had time to respond, she picked up another plastic-wrapped costume and asked with a big smile, “How about a butterfly?”

  From the photo on the package, another girl with light brown hair as straight as Claire’s, a yellow dress, and matching wings and antennae with pink spots on them smiled at me.

  When Emaye, my mother, was still alive, she never asked for my opinion. When she could afford to buy me new outfits, she would always pick dark colours because light-coloured clothes stained easily and required a lot of soap to wash. She mostly wore browns or indigo herself, except for the one habesha kemis she kept for special occasions and one traditional white shawl with a black edge reserved for funerals and visits to the bereaved. So when Claire first asked me if I wanted the light blue sweater, white shirt, and pink skirt ensemble she’d picked up from one of the racks at Sears, I thought it was a trick question.

  “It’s so much more fun to shop for a girl,” she’d said excitedly, as if she were buying the clothes for herself.

  I’d found her enthusiasm puzzling for an adult, but it also made me feel sorry for her. I promised myself I would do my best to fill the role of a good daughter for her.

  “Mommy, please?” Josh said, pulling on her sleeve.

  “Soon,” she said.

  “But I’m hungry,” Josh said, pouting.

  “In a minute,” she said. “Let’s help your sister pick a costume first.”

  “This one?” I asked, pointing at the butterfly girl.

  There was approval and excitement in Claire’s eyes. I sighed in relief.

  “No. I want to go now. And she’s not my sister.” Josh stomped away from her.

  “Josh, don’t say that,” she said and went after her son. “Josh, honey, please … ” I heard her call as she turned down an aisle.

  I imagined Josh being unreasonable or acting up in front of Emaye. Emaye sometimes even hit me for looking at her the wrong way, let alone talking back. I didn’t always understand what differentiated the wrong way from the right way so, for a time, I couldn’t prevent myself from repeating my mistake. But eventually I figured all mothers were unpredictable and learned it was best to stare at my own feet and acquiesce even if I didn’t agree.

  As we left the store, I crossed myself again at a poster of a sneering old woman in black clothes and a big, pointy hat.

  One of my earliest memories is of kneeling with my parents in front of a wooden cross in our one-room house for our nightly prayers. This was back in Addis Ababa when I was about five years old. Sometimes my father didn’t come home after work.

  “He must have lost his way home again,” Emaye would say when I asked.

  I used to think it was because of his crossed eye, which often made it seem that he was looking at two things at once. I felt sorry for him, but Emaye would curse at him in the mornings as she yanked my arms through my school uniform shirt sleeves and polished my face clean with Vaseline and spit. When I came back from school, I’d find her still cursing, this time under her breath, a flow of incomprehensible words accompanying her every step and gesture as she went about her daily chores. Sometimes she’d stop pounding on the rich neighbours’ clothes she washed for money in a large tub propped up on a pile of big truck tires and lament with foamy palms open to the sky: “What did I do to deserve this, Amlaké? What did I do?”

  After she became too ill to kneel down — long after my father had left us for good and long after she’d stopped going out at night, her mouth painted red like a fresh wound — Emaye would lie still on the sagging bed she and I shared and guide my prayers. She looked as though she were sinking farther and farther into the mattress every day, the sheets and gabi covering her body growing, it seemed, thicker and thicker. Sometimes spit flew out of her mouth when she coughed. To avoid looking at her gaunt face and withered limbs, I’d watch the spit’s trajectory as it drew an arc in the air and imagine it transformed into a fly. Or, with my head on the mattress, I’d play with slivers of straw from our broom and the bread or injera crumbs I’d find under the bed. Then one day Emaye’s friend barred me from entering our house and, sniffling under her netela, said: “Your mother is no longer of this world.” I thought the bed must have finished swallowing Emaye whole. I assumed that my father would come back for me but he never did.

  Two days before Halloween, I watched as Claire carved two eyes and a mouth in each of the two pumpkins we’d bought at the grocery store. She then collected the flesh and seeds she’d carved out and tossed everything in the bin for compost, which I understood to be another word for garbage. I had seen my new parents throw out leftover food, and put perfectly
good bottles and jars in a blue bin for a person called recycling. Emaye or the women at the orphanage would have reused those jars for years. It baffled me, the carelessness with which my new parents rid themselves of things. It made me wonder if I could also be discarded as easily.

  “Why you put this there?” I ventured, pointing at the candles Claire placed in the hollow space inside the pumpkins, trying to roll my r the way my new family did. Unlike the English I’d practised with Nurse Meron at the orphanage and at school in Addis Ababa, my new family’s English sounded like a voice on a fast-forwarding tape recorder. Sometimes I asked questions just to make sure I could still speak. What if, one day, I lost my voice completely from lack of practice? Other times, I worried my new parents might think me too curious, so I dumped my questions in a pile of all the things that were incomprehensible to me.

  “It’s tradition,” Claire said as she placed the pumpkins on each side of the doorsteps. “And it’s fun. You see?” She pointed at the candlelight.

  It didn’t look like fun to me. The light transformed the pumpkins into two decapitated fat men, grinning threateningly. It also reminded me of what Emaye had told me about devil worshippers who left food under trees for pagan gods or those who would lace leftovers with witchcraft and throw them on the doorsteps of the people they wanted to hurt. I wondered if ferenjoch performed witchcraft too.

  While I was at the orphanage, one of my friends had said that my new family would turn me into a Muslim. She’d crossed herself three times as she said this, her distress fully displayed in her big, protruding eyes.

  “No, ferenjoch are Catholics, you idiot,” Yohannes, another kid, had said to her. Yohannes was holding onto the street light pole outside the orphanage and swinging his body in semi-circles. “Catholic, that’s what you’ll become,” he’d said, turning to me with a smirk that implied, This is what you signed up for. Get used to it.

  I didn’t know anything about Catholics but I figured they were probably as bad as Muslims. I wished I could tell Yohannes I would refuse to go live with such people, but we all knew none of us children had any say in these matters. I looked to Amsalu for support. She was two years older than us and always reading, so I’d hoped she’d refute Yohannes’s declaration, but she kept her myopic eyes on her sweater, picking lint off her sleeves as if she were ridding her clothes of lice.

  “Nobody is going to make me do anything. I’ll stay a true Christian, an Orthodox Christian, until I die,” I said to Yohannes, as Emaye had taught me to respond to blasphemers, and quickly walked away before any of my friends had a chance to provide more proof of my impending doom.

  “They’ll feed you pig meat!” I heard Yohannes shout behind me.

  “What does pig meat look like?” I asked Etagegn in the evening.

  Etagegn had a puzzled look for a moment before she conceded: “I don’t know. But the bible says ‘It’s not what goes in your mouth that defiles you but what comes out of it,’ so just eat whatever they give you, eshi?”

  Later on, I realized I should have pointed out to my friends that we all shared the same fate. Who else did they hope would adopt them but ferenjoch? They’re the only ones with too much money and no children of their own, but by the time I thought of it, I was already on the plane, on my way to Canada.

  For weeks after I’d moved into my new life, I looked with fearful anticipation for signs of Catholic rituals in everything my new family did. I tried to read in their words hints of my upcoming conversion, but there was never any mention of it. In fact, I started to think maybe this family didn’t believe in any god at all and wondered which was worse: being Catholic or living like animals, as Emaye would have said, without any faith.

  The day before Halloween, I was helping Paul and Josh carry paper bags full of dry leaves and twigs to the edge of the sidewalk for the compost truck to pick up, when I heard Josh shout: “I found a worm.” It was getting dark so I couldn’t see what he was holding between his fingers, but there was an excitement in his voice as though he’d found gold. I dropped the bag I was carrying and ran to see this thing called worm.

  “It’s a big one,” Josh said, turning toward me and dangling the worm in front of me, almost touching my nose with it.

  I let out a small scream and walked away in disgust.

  Josh followed me with excitement in his voice. “You’re such a baby. Who’s scared of worms?” He laughed and chased me around the yard.

  “No, Josh. It’s dirty, stop it,” I said. “Stop it!” I shrieked and turned to slap his hand away but ended up hitting him hard on the face.

  He stumbled backwards and fell, the worm flying out of his hand and landing behind him.

  “Nebiyat!” Paul shouted, dropping his rake and taking big steps toward us.

  “She hit me,” Josh cried. “Nebiyat hit me.”

  I pointed at the ground. Paul followed my trembling finger then looked back up at me and asked, “What happened?”

  “What did I tell you, Nebiyat? We don’t hit,” Claire said, standing beside Paul and Josh, the three of them forming a semicircle in front of me. “This,” she continued, grabbing my hand and gently slapping it, “not okay.”

  I bobbed my head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I stuttered, my heart about to jump out of my throat, beating as if it didn’t want to belong to my body anymore.

  Paul and Claire exchanged a look I’d come to hate and dread. As I walked into the house and to my room, I felt as though a thousand horror-filled eyes were following me. This was the way I’d been feeling at school since, two weeks earlier, I’d twisted one of my classmate’s fingers for laughing and pointing at me while saying things I didn’t quite understand about Africa and food. Eyes and whispers had been trailing me through lunch queues at the cafeteria and even when I hid in bathroom stalls at recess.

  I took my shoes off in the entranceway and walked past a wall of pictures of Paul, Claire, Josh, and other people who resembled one another. I stopped for a moment to look at a picture taken a month and half earlier. In this photograph, I’m sitting on the grass beside Josh in the backyard and Paul, Claire, and their parents are crouched around us. The day it was taken, Paul and Claire had invited their friends and families to meet me.

  “Nice to meetchya, Nebiyat. Did I get it right? Ne-bi-yat? What a pretty girl,” the guests had said, looking at Claire and Paul as if I were a great treasure find.

  “How interesting,” they said when Claire translated what my name meant. “Prophetess, huh? It’s not something you hear often around here. Well done.”

  Some of them had concern in their eyes that contradicted their smiles and words, a look that reminded me of the way Emaye’s friends treated me when they learned I was being sent to an orphanage. I nodded, smiled, and thanked my new parents’ guests, trying to pin odd-sounding names to unfamiliar features. Examining the picture again, my dark face like a bruise in the midst of sunny smiles and my hair a big pile of coiled yarn sitting in the middle of my head after Claire had broken her fine-toothed comb trying to detangle my tight curls, I felt like an aberration. A rough and awkward snag on a tapestry of seamless and easy belonging.

  Claire came to sit beside me on my bed and put her hand on mine. I flinched but didn’t remove my hand. I was still shaken by the sight of the worm, which brought to mind those that slid out of me when I squatted in the latrine when I was little. The intricate veins on the back of Claire’s hand were green and clearly visible. I imagined a tree was growing inside her. It reminded me of one of Mrs. Saunders’s stories about carnivorous trees that preyed on small children who refused to go to sleep.

  My eyes filled up with tears.

  “Maybe we should find someone who speaks Amharic,” Claire said, patting my hand and turning to Paul who was standing by the door.

  I looked at Claire’s eyes, which were brownish-green like water-starved grass. “Your new mother has the eyes of a cat.
Maybe she turns into one at night,” Yohannes had teased me while I was still at the orphanage. I wondered if having cat eyes was a sign of a murderous soul.

  “We’ve discussed this already. Full immersion is best in the long term. Speaking Amharic will only slow down her progress in English. And her integration,” Paul said. “It’s normal for kids to fight. We’ll figure it out. Right, Nebiyat?” he continued, now on his knees in front of my bed. There was something in his gaze that contrasted with his reassuring voice. I couldn’t tell if it was exasperation or worry.

  The light gleamed on the wisps of blond facial hair that grew on his chin and along his jawline. The corners of his eyes creased in an arc when he smiled but his droopy blue eyes made him look sad, as if he carried the weight of the sky in them. When I first met him at the orphanage, I thought I could find comfort and kinship in the sorrow of his eyes. Now I wondered if Paul was, as Emaye used to describe deceitful people, a false prophet in disguise.

  “Do as you’re told until you’re old enough to take care of yourself, but don’t trust anyone, eshi?” Nurse Meron had said. Remembering Nurse Meron’s words made me feel heavy with defeat. I had known from the beginning that, as an outsider, a lot would be riding on my behaviour, that I needed to stay vigilant, but it seemed I was bound to fail at every turn.