by Amy Bass
Austin thought about last night, the team dinner at the Trinity Jubilee Center in downtown Lewiston. He loved those dinners. His mom and grandmother made vats of pasta and meatballs, some of his teammates brought sambusa, and they’d eat and laugh and, sometimes, dance. “Gish the Fish!” some chanted, trying to get the assistant coach on the floor.
The highlight was when Abdi H. took a water bottle and pretended it was a microphone so he could “interview” Austin’s grandmother. Austin, like many in Lewiston, called his grandmother Mémé. It was a French-Canadian thing.
“Season ticket holder for three years in a row, are you prepared for tomorrow’s game?” Abdi H. asked Mémé, who wore a red sweater, a delicate gold cross around her neck. Not terribly tall himself, Abdi H. towered over her small frame.
“Yes, I am,” she answered. She got stern. “You guys better win, or you’re in trouble!”
The team hooted and hollered, loving every second as Abdi H. put the water bottle down to join the fun. They’d thought they were so ready.
Abdi H. sat just behind Austin on the bus, the spirit of last night’s fun replaced by the misery of losing. He, too, listened to McGraw preach, all the while replaying the game in his head. If only I hadn’t missed…Stop it, he thought. This isn’t about you. You’re a captain. You’re only a junior, and you’re a captain. Think about the team.
The ride felt strange to him. Usually the bus was filled with the sounds of victory, dancing, and fist bumps, the white kids clapping just so they could take part, chiming in whenever they could. Abdi H. smiled for a moment, thinking about it. But now McGraw was the only one making noise.
He thought about what McGraw was saying; how they could come back next year and finish it. Despite their dominant record, they’d never been a great finishing team, shots hitting the crossbar or flying over the goal more often than not.
Abdi H. had started playing for McGraw during the summer season when he was still in middle school, before he was supposed to, everyone looking the other way so he could build experience. He made varsity his freshman year and scored sixteen goals, making him the top offensive player on the team and throwing him into a leadership role at an early age.
As McGraw paced, his face reddening, his blue eyes barely blinking, Abdi H. decided he believed Coach. He was a junior now, forty-six goals under his belt—twenty-four just this season. He thought about his time line playing for McGraw. They had just lost the state final. Last year, when he was a sophomore, they went out in the regional final. Freshman year? The same.
It made sense, Abdi H. decided. Every year he played for McGraw, the team got a step closer to winning a state championship. Of course they’d be back next year. It just made sense. And according to his time line, he reasoned, they could win. He relaxed a bit in his seat and put his headphones on, looking down at the phone in his hand. He looked at the texts coming in, some from teammates sitting just a few feet away. He was okay.
From the front, Gish was having a hard time listening to his colleague. Like Austin, it felt like his heart had broken. It was going to be a long time before he could shake the image of Mike Wong collapsing to his knees in the middle of the field at the end, his yellow cleats sticking out behind his white shorts, head down, inconsolable, while Karim stood over him, his hand on Mike’s head in a futile attempt to provide comfort. That was typical Karim, thought Gish. Even high-scoring Abdi H. deferred to Karim. The most versatile player on the field, a true all-rounder, elegant, he had an all-knowing way about him, as if he was the team’s very own Somali elder. He possessed the same qualities people said made some of the older men in Lewiston’s Somali community elders. Experienced. Wise. Trustworthy. Knowledgeable. Respected. It was as if he was saying to Mike, “It’s all right, son.”
But it wasn’t all right. They deserved a championship, Gish thought. They deserved it just as much as the man who was now trying to help them cope.
Gish’s eyes shifted to Austin and then to Abdi H. Huh, he thought. Look at that. They knew. They got it. They accepted the mission McGraw laid out. Gish smiled for the first time in hours, knowing what was coming next. When these guys get off the bus, he thought, they’re going to go play soccer.
That night, Gish couldn’t sleep, unable to forget the sight of twenty-five hearts breaking before his eyes. He thought about his daughter, Lilly, nine years old, sitting in the stands. She loved the team. Austin and Abdi H. often helped at her soccer practices. She knew her father considered them family. It wasn’t about the money; he would have coached for free. It was about the players, the fans, the school, and McGraw.
When Gish got home after the game, Lilly greeted him at the door, tears streaming down her face. He embraced her and his fifteen-year-old son, Hunter. He tried to keep his own emotions in check as he held his kids, his wife, Cindy, looking on.
“Why’d they lose, Daddy?” Lilly finally asked, her eyes red and swollen.
He gave her the speech that a coach gives to his players after such a day. Sometimes, he said, it doesn’t always go your way. You might be the better team, but you’ve got to play the game. You can’t ever assume you’re going to win. It’s hard.
“We’re just going to keep trying,” he promised, looking into her deep blue eyes so much like his own. “We’re going to keep trying.”
But it was hard to think ahead. He wasn’t like McGraw, who could shake off a loss with a “the sun is going to come up tomorrow” attitude. McGraw usually cracked a joke about a player, made his team laugh, and moved on. Yet this was different. How could they shed a loss of this magnitude? He kept thinking about how they could have prepared differently to finish better in the game. Balls needed to go into the net. The number of shots didn’t matter if they didn’t go in.
Gish didn’t want to dwell on the past anymore. He tried to think about the comeback McGraw had promised on the bus. It was actually less than a year away, he reasoned. Summer soccer. Tryouts. Preseason. The end-of-summer jamboree. He picked up his phone and started to text McGraw some of his ideas, plotting their road back to the state final. Just as the players headed to the park to play a pickup game when they got home, he, too, had to get back to work.
A few miles away, Shobow Saban was having trouble finding light in the loss. He hadn’t planned on spending the night at his mother’s apartment in downtown Lewiston. He drove up from Worcester just to see the game. The senior biology major at Assumption College had played for McGraw for four years. He still spent summers working with Somali youth at a local community center, teaching them about citizenship and the juvenile justice system. He’d been excited to drive the nearly two hundred miles to see his old team finally win its first soccer championship. He’d made plans with a former teammate, Abdi Abdi, to meet at the game, but intended to drive back to school right after to finish a lab report.
When Shobow arrived at the game, he was full of enthusiasm, excited to see players like Abdi H. in action. For years McGraw had told them a championship would eventually happen. But watching the game was excruciating. With each minute that went by, Shobow deflated a bit more as Lewiston tried to dig itself out of a hole.
As Abdi H. lined up to take his penalty kick, Shobow finally felt hopeful. Lewiston didn’t miss penalty kicks, he thought. Somalis, especially, didn’t miss penalty kicks. This was it. Abdi H. would score, the game would turn around, and they would be state champions.
“WHAAAT?” Shobow screamed when Abdi H. missed. “What are you DOING?”
He sat there in disbelief. That was it; that was the state championship. The clock didn’t matter anymore. It was not their year. Allah did not want it so, he thought after the game. How could he have been so wrong? He said good-bye to Abdi Abdi and got into his car, sitting for a moment, thinking about his lab report. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t drive back to Worcester. He headed toward Lewiston.
The next morning, as Shobow contemplated his drive back to college, Abdi H. woke up not quite knowing what to do. He thought abou
t McGraw’s words from the day before. He still believed him—they would be back next year—but he hadn’t fully processed the loss and didn’t know where to start.
He decided to go for a walk. The apartment was a comfortable place: the lace-covered table; the dark wood hutch with his family’s few treasures gleaming through its glass doors; the decorative rugs; the leather-like couches they crowded onto. Abdi H. was one of eleven kids ranging in age over a twenty-four-year span. “Our own starting eleven,” he often said with a smile when talking about his siblings. But this morning the apartment suffocated him. He needed to get outside.
The door to the apartment building often sticks, so residents keep a large stick nearby to wedge it open. The building is one of the larger ones downtown, four floors tall. Most apartment houses in Lewiston are triple-deckers, adorned with tired, chipped remnants of Italianate-style architecture and a few “For Rent” signs in the windows. Standing on the creaking front steps, Abdi H. could see the Colisée to his right, its parking lot a familiar playground, and the spires of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in front of him.
Downtown Lewiston has been among the poorest neighborhoods in Maine for a long time. Variety stores and halal markets dot many corners, Somali women popping in and out, jilbabs flowing behind them, children in tow. Poor white families who have lived in the tired apartments for generations now reside next to the city’s newcomers.
Abdi H. had no real destination in mind; he just wanted to walk. He constantly shooed his younger siblings outside, shutting off the television and telling them to go play. He liked being outside. He wasn’t much for television, unless a soccer game was on.
As he started walking, he pretty much had the city to himself. Lewiston wore a Sunday morning quiet, church bells occasionally interrupting his thoughts. He was glad for the solitude. It was rare someone didn’t stop to talk to him, to ask about soccer and school. The little kids he helped coach for various youth leagues in his spare time, from Gish’s daughter’s team to the Somali youth teams, were forever running over to say hello. His father, who prioritized school above sports, always seemed puzzled when people asked about soccer. He wasn’t a typical so-called soccer dad—few of the Somalis were—who wore his son’s goal tally on his sleeve, but he was proud of the role Abdi H. had come to play in the community. Modest to a fault, Abdi H. has a hard time talking about his reputation. But it was something he took very seriously.
He slowed for a moment when he saw some of his teammates ahead: Karim, Moe, Zak, Q, Nuri. He called out to the group, running to catch up with them. They were getting Chinese food, they said. He decided to join them, and the group headed to the buffet place just around the corner. They were somber. Nuri, especially, had had a rough night, waiting until he got home to release his grief over losing. He didn’t want to cry in front of his friends, but it was the worst day he’d ever had. He’d heard his mother cried the whole way home from the game.
Although Noralddin “Nuri” Othman hadn’t been in Lewiston very long, he lived within blocks of Moe, the Abdulle brothers, and Q, just off Kennedy Park, and they’d become close friends. He arrived in Lewiston on March 18, 2014, from Turkey, a long trip that included a stopover in Germany. Born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Somali parents, he’d been traveling ever since he could remember, his family always searching for a home. They’d fled Somalia through the north, where the narrow waters between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden lead to Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But both Yemen’s escalating civil war and Saudi Arabia’s escalating intolerance of refugees pushed many over the border. After a brief return to Somalia, Nuri’s family headed to Turkey, where they spent four years before coming to Maine.
Nuri kept playing with the crown of hair that rose large and bushy over his head. He was proud of his Afro. His teammates loved teasing him about it. What a season, he thought, wondering what to order when they got to the restaurant. He’d swung between the JV and varsity squads until midseason, when Coach wanted to shake things up a bit.
“We have to give you a chance,” McGraw had said to him, his arm across his shoulders. He stared at Nuri for a moment, his steely blue eyes conveying just how serious he was.
Coach believes in me, Nuri thought. He trusts me. He wants me to do well. It had taken him a while to believe all that. But once he did, it changed everything. By the first game of the playoffs, Nuri joined the starting lineup and never looked back.
“When he gave me a chance,” Nuri remembers, “I was so nervous, but I did so good.”
But Nuri’s best wasn’t enough, and now he was trying to make it better by ordering a lot of Chinese food. Moe, especially, just kept ordering more and more. But they couldn’t eat. Such a waste of money that they really didn’t have. As they pushed chicken lo mein around their plates, they tried to talk about the game. Karim couldn’t stand it.
“Shut up,” he said to them in frustration. “Cut it, cut it, I don’t want to hear it.”
They did. They always listened to Karim. But five minutes later, like everyone else, he started talking about it.
“Why did the clock go by so fast?” someone asked, causing laughter.
They felt that the clock had worked double-time to ensure that Cheverus was on top at the end. They started to trade stories, but Moe, always on edge, couldn’t take it any longer. He got up from his seat and lay down on the floor. He did this sometimes; just shut down when he couldn’t deal with his feelings. It was better than lashing out. His friends were sad, disappointed, but he was angry. This was supposed to have been their year. They were going to be the ones to do it for McGraw after no one else could.
Giving up on food, the group decided to head over to the woods near the high school. I can’t think about soccer anymore, Nuri thought as they walked, taking selfies along the way. Everything felt dark. Coach had said it would happen next year, but he couldn’t find his way back just yet.
For Abdi H., Chinese food and his teammates helped the loss fade a bit more. By the time he headed home, the sun waning over the river, he again felt reassured about what McGraw had said the day before. The next season started now, and it was going to have a different ending. His family did not come to Maine for a soccer championship, but now it was part of the journey.
Chapter 3
Welcome to Vacationland
As one heads north into Maine from New Hampshire, the Piscataqua River Bridge materializes, a dull green arch separating Portsmouth from Kittery. At the halfway point on the bridge, high over the tree line, a small green sign matter-of-factly announces: “STATE LINE—MAINE—VACATIONLAND.” Once across, the change of scene feels immediate. The trees lining the interstate grow taller, keeping watch on all who enter. The seventy-mile-per-hour speed limit favors the never-ending road ahead, gentle, rolling dips breaking up the increasingly stark landscape.
“Welcome to Maine,” a blue sign announces. “The way life should be.”
The highway is littered with warnings about moose and large fines for boaters who don’t properly clean their vessels before setting sail in Maine’s pristine waters. Cars with the signature VACATIONLAND license plate, a lobster or pine branch indicating a local’s identity, dot the road. In the off-season, traffic is light, an eerie sense of solitude permeating the highway. But between Memorial and Labor Days, the turnpike becomes unbearable, cars sitting for long stretches between exits as tourists try to get to a beach or a lake, a mountain or a forest.
A Howard Johnson’s once greeted weary visitors at exit 25, Kennebunk. Now a giant sculpture of a moose welcomes those who need coffee, a bathroom, or a bite of fast food. There are also, according to a sign, “live lobsters to go.”
Venturing farther north, another sign reassures drivers their long journey will not be for naught. “Maine,” it says. “Worth a Visit, Worth a Lifetime.”
This slogan is one that African refugees have taken to heart.
Within months of the first Somali families settling in Lewiston in 2001, a busful rolled up t
he turnpike. The deeper they drove into Maine, markers extolling the virtues of “Vacationland”—Beaches! Lakes! Skiing!—were fewer and farther between. As the turnpike took an inland curve west, it shrank to two lanes on each side, more popular tourist destinations in the rearview mirror.
For Somali refugees, the turnpike represented the final stage of a long trip to a new life. For some, like Abdi H. and his teammates, the journey from Africa at such a young age is a cloudy combination of memories in many languages. Their parents guard their refugee stories. The memories are painful, filled with the violence of displacement. Starving themselves so their families could eat. Carrying their children when they themselves could barely walk. Losing everything, from their homeland to their family to their way of life. To share these tales is to relive them, to experience the trauma again, to engage with the nightmares. They don’t need or want their children to know the specifics of what they went through; only that they respect their parents’ quest to survive and the need to move on.
“We moved past it,” one mother says of their long journey from Somalia to Maine. “We went by.”
For Abdikadir Negeye, each part of that journey remains all too vivid. Negeye fled Somalia with his parents when he was five years old. Thousands took the journey; days of walking toward the Kenyan border, losing older and weaker family and friends along the way. Hiding from animals and rogue armed militia. Little food, and even less water.