We shooed Wolf away from the steamy plates of Chinese food. He shook his blond mane and trotted away in a huff, in the way dogs can sometimes be more expressive than people. My mother ordered the food without asking us what we wanted. I didn’t have the energy for combat. I could feel myself slipping into a more and more malleable place. It reminded me of the Plasticine my mother brought me back from France when I was about five years old. Fancy French Play-Doh where I tried to shape myself, to shape my family. To create their faces and mine so I could see us from the outside. But all I could manage was rolling us all into tiny faceless blobs of clay. We were faceless and I knew it, even then.
After the meal, we almost held our breath. I was afraid to move. I could read in my mother’s body language that the moment had come. She had begun wrapping her arms around her own shoulders again. She held her breath in between syllables, as if she were holding back a piece of herself.
“We received some news, in the mail. About your birth family.” She was looking down into her plate where a pile of congealed Chinese food was already beginning to dry. My father sat still, docile like a child. His eyes had a watery quality that gave him an air of nostalgia. Was he crying? I had never seen my father cry before. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t. My body was trapped under the weight of the medication. I had taken it so it would pin me down, so I could be restrained from feeling anything. Suddenly, I wanted to be free again. But I’d given myself away to it and now I couldn’t walk away so easily. My mind was now trapped underwater like a lifeless form at the end of rope, tightly secured by boulders.
“This is not easy to say,” my mother said, pulling a letter out of her purse. She was looking at me now. She had unfolded her arms slightly, placing her elbows on the table, holding the letter between her palms, as if she were trying to keep the paper warm. This simple infraction of my mother’s elbows on the table, this cultural transgression of manners only emphasized the gravity of the situation. If Marie Françoise de Peussy was placing her elbows on the table, all bets were off.
“Apparently, you have a sister. A twin sister. And she wants to know about you.” My mother handed me the letter. I couldn’t look at it right away. I needed to let the words sink inside my brain. I let them settle in the fertile murky earth of my muddled mind. Twin. I tried to replicate an image of myself, only to find that I could not remember what I looked like. I tried moving my hand. If I held out my hand, if I could move in the direction of seeing myself, any part of myself, then maybe I could begin to see this other person. I finally looked at the letter. It was postmarked from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The name of the sender was written in a choppy, childlike handwriting: Maya Owl Feather.
“She recently found out about your existence. She’d been searching for years and now she found you. It’s up to you. If you want contact, then I can give you her address.”
I looked at my father again. His eyes were dry. Maybe I had imagined the presence of tears. Memory cannot be trusted. What I hold to be true cannot be trusted.
“You’re not speaking.” My mother’s voice was pulling at me again. She wanted something now. She wanted me to give her something. I tried to stir myself to think.
Think, think about what you have to give this woman who saved your life.
Like a puppy, like a stray dog, Marie de Peussy saved my life. The medication was making me cynical. She was right.
“When did she write?” I looked down at the postmark date again, five weeks earlier: August 6, 1998.
My father perked up. He was looking directly at me now. It was as if my asking a factual question had suddenly brought him back to a piece of himself.
“The letter arrived a month ago. You were fragile. We didn’t want to upset you.”
One month and this strange piece of myself, this other half of me was waiting for an answer. I wanted to measure the world. Not just this room. Two cups, one glass, for my milk. My mother always gave me milk when she thought I was about to break. The breaking point had passed now. And she was still standing at the corner, waiting with her handkerchief in hand, waving at me from the corner as I rode away on the school bus. If I could measure the world, I could find my way home. I understood my father all of a sudden. Twenty-eight years of silence, and suddenly this man and I were closer to each other than we’d ever been. Closer than destiny, closer than fate and love and everything else that splits the heart open, and laying us down to rest, exposed. This solitary man with a mind for clarity came to me; he came to my rescue.
“You don’t have to respond. There is nothing that forces you to respond. Your mother and I just wanted you to know. To give you the option.”
I found comfort in the idea of waiting. Waiting is what I knew. I had waited for a family my whole life. Not this family. Not this life. I had waited for my real life to start. Soon it would happen. My life would start soon.
Chapter 3 – Francine
Syracuse, New York, 1998
Francine rested her open palm on the frozen window. She liked the feel of the cold against her flesh. It reminded her that she was still alive; that her brain was sending signals through her body. Cold = pain = life. She pressed her index finger into the frost and watched the thin layer of ice melt under the pressure of her body heat. The melted spot formed a circle, a tiny opening onto the outside world. She could see the gray dawn hanging like a veil above the world. This place is dead, she thought. Winter kills everything. Her fingers formed additional circles, tiny windows until she could finally see them: her children standing in the crisp air, waiting for the school bus.
Francine watched the blue parka, electric blue piercing through the blandness around Boy, her boy, her son. He looked small standing there next to the others. He was the smallest. The youngest. He was the one hanging by a thread. He was only four. Boy stood very still next to the others.
Francine closed her eyes and imagined running naked through the snow. She pictured this over and over again, like one imagines jumping off a bridge. She knew the cold would kill her, eventually. She liked to think of the slow death. The deliberate detachment the frigid temperatures would create on her body.
Distant voices of approaching children pierced the silence. Their voices were muffled by the walls of the house surrounding Francine, and by the thick snow encircling all of them. Francine first saw the girl. She was walking ahead of them. They were all marching towards her children, who were waiting at the bus stop. The girl must have been nine or maybe she was a small ten-year-old. A pack of boys was chasing her, laughing, taunting her. One boy wearing a small wool hat quickly made a snowball with the newly fallen, untouched snow on the sidewalk. He bent quickly and then thrust his small frame forward. His pale face opened like a flower. “Get this!”
Francine could barely hear them. Their voices falling in the distance, as if speaking from the bottom of a well. The boys were laughing wolfhounds. The small girl was trying not to run. Her face held fear, but she was forcing a smile. Francine felt her stomach tighten. A sharp pain shot through her abdomen. She could not take her eyes from the pack of children. The boys were nearing now. Her long blond locks cascaded down her back. Her face was pristine, the tiny symmetrical figurine features. Porcelain skin. She reminded Francine of the European dolls of her childhood. One day she will be beautiful, Francine thought. Their paths will diverge. When the boys will have become wasted men, bald and unshapely. When their bodies will have fallen under the pull of gravity, their guts pulling downward, their skulls exposed, she will attract older men with sinewy bodies. The alpha wolves with large bank accounts. The muscled men with golden skin and silver hair. One day these boys will remember her. The girl they used to taunt. The small mermaid with golden locks they only touched with tainted snow.
The children reached the bus stop. Boy ignored them playing with a tiny pile of snow he had formed with his foot. Sylvie, Francine’s second-eldest stared at the blond girl with great interest. My daughter has never seen a child so blond. Angélique, Devota a
nd Sophie were busy talking with each other, busying themselves with the small of life. The wolfhound pack of boys did not even glance at Francine’s children. Instead, they had encircled their victim and were now taunting her with a refrain of words they were repeating over and over again in a sing-song tone.
The bus came and Francine pulled away from the window, as if she had seen a ghost. She did not want to watch her children disappear into a bus. She couldn’t bear seeing them leave, even if she told herself they would be back later that day.
After the children vanished, Francine usually allowed herself an hour or two on the couch where she lay wrapped in a blanket, wishing the perpetual cold of this land away. She preferred taking these pseudo naps in the living room far from the bed she shared with her new husband, Jean de Dieu, even though he had left for work long before the children awoke. Francine did not have the luxury of sleeping all day until the children came home from school. But an hour or two away from the world was the gift she gave her brain from having to think about the others and the muck of her life.
By midday, Francine would rise from the couch, and hurl herself into the cadence of the daily chores; six loads of laundry, a trip to the grocery store, cooking a pot of rice, with lenga lenga greens and chicken, cleaning the bathroom, and sweeping the floor. With six children in the house, the work was never done.
That afternoon, the children came home and filled the house with the ruckus of their childhood. She watched their resilient limbs running and playing carelessly, as if no blood had ever been shed on their land. She listened to the giggles of her oldest daughter, Devota, as she tried to run from Boy chasing her through the house. When Jean de Dieu came home, he was tired. His job at the box factory, where he worked on the assembly line, kept him exhausted and quiet—sedated like a caged animal. One peck on the cheek as he walked through the door, and Francine and her husband had finalized the last bit of physical contact they would have for the rest of the day.
When night fell, the children were fed and coaxed into bed. Jean de Dieu liked to retreat at the same time as the children, leaving Francine to sit at the kitchen table in the blue glow of the hot water heater. This was the time when Francine would find the quiet inside her and wrap it around herself like a shawl. She would sit until sleep found and trapped her with the heaviness of her limbs and the closing of her eyes. That is when she would drag herself to bed and tumble into sleep from which she accessed no dreams. In the middle of darkness and the quiet of the muffled silence of the snowy streets, Francine was was roused again into thought and consciousness by the cries of her son, Boy. Francine sat in bed for a long time in the blue glow of the room and listened to her son’s cries. She sat very still and waited for the child to stop crying. She could feel Jean de Dieu’s warmth next to her. The rise and fall of his heavy, labored breathing after a long day of work. Francine knew he would not be woken by the tiny whimpers of her son. In between cries, Francine heard the house creaking and moaning. The boiler rumbled like a monster hidden in the basement; it was coughing hot air into the house, desperately trying to fight the cold outside.
“Mama, it hurts!” he cried. Francine felt she was hurling herself out of bed. She thought of the violence it required to extricate her body from the warm sheets to walk through the cold dark house in order to check on a child whose death she had prayed for a long time.
“Where?” Francine asked curtly. “Where does it hurt?” she asked standing by the child’s bed.
Boy pointed to his head, and then to his belly. His small finger rigid, a frail twig, a tiny stick leading to the truth.
“Wait here,” Francine whispered and then she was gone into the dark house in search of warm milk. This house was larger than any home she had ever lived in and yet it was shabbier. Francine was accustomed to the comfort of her modern home in Kigali, and the ease that comes with the work of servants to keep the house clean. That home was gone now, as was everything else that had been taken away.
When she returned, Francine handed Boy a cup with frothy hot milk. Boy shook his head. No. “No, Mama. My stomach hurts.”
She thought of death and how it resembled an old toothless woman trailing around the house.
“Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, we will go see the doctor.” Francine placed the cup of milk on the nightstand next to Boy’s bed. Angélique and Sylvie were sound asleep in their beds nearby. She walked over to each girl and pulled the blanket up to their chins and then walked out of the room.
Francine stood by the window of her bedroom and watched the night sky filled with stars. Africa. She thought. Rwanda. There is nothing left for me there. Francine thought about the ghosts wandering the streets of Kigali at night. They must wander not knowing they are dead, Francine wanted to cry. She wanted to cry for the dead; she wanted to cry for Boy and for everything he needed, for everything she could not give him, but she had no tears left to cry.
Chapter 4 – Elbe
Syracuse, New York, 1998
The next morning after my parents had gone, I forced myself to dial the number for my volunteer gig. Everything had become an effort. The smallest task, a mountain climb, a trek through a hot and humid forest on a scorching day. It was ringing on the other end. Three rings and then a machine.
“Hello, you’ve reached Catholic Charities. We’re not here at the moment, so please leave a message.” The beep sounded. Holding my breath as if under water, I forced myself to speak.
“Hi, my name is Elbe McEwan.” I heard myself, a third party, floating somewhere above the room, by the ceiling. What kind of name was Elbe McEwan? Some hippy name maybe, a white chick with liberal parents. I was still speaking. “I am a medical interpreter volunteering with refugees. I am calling to see if you need me this week…um because I am available. If you need to reach me, my number is 315-723-1415.” I was on automatic pilot. Whenever, I made professional calls, it was as if I wasn’t even the one talking. I hung up. After my parents had left, I had made a pact to do something productive with my time, to stay connected to the world somehow.
I looked around. The bedroom was a mess. I hadn’t made the bed in a week. Simply laid in it all day and all night, with intermittent visits to the kitchen and the bathroom. Each time I returned to the sheets, I tried to brush the accumulating animal hair off the pillow and the top of the bed. I pulled on the blankets trying to bring order without exerting energy. Everything required so much effort. Drinking, eating, defecating, and urinating. The body required constant care. I had never noticed this before. Staying alive was a full time job.
I had gone to see my doctor. I’d had a cough for a few days, which didn’t seem serious, but what if it was? What if I required serious care? My doctor had listened to me. He’d reached for his stethoscope and placed it gently in the middle of my back, the soft and vulnerable place where the lungs were hiding. Are they this low? I wondered. I realized that I didn’t even know the placement of my own organs in my body. How can I get better if I don’t even know where my spleen is?
I had felt strangely comforted by his touch. This anonymous hand on my body. How he had pressed the stethoscope against my back. With this simple gesture, I had felt attachment, or even love. I wondered about love for a moment. What it really was. Could it be measured in a certain kind of touch? This stranger did not love me. I knew this rationally, and yet for a moment, I had felt held. Contained. Maybe containment was a form of love.
“You don’t have bronchitis, not even a cold, really,” he said, moving back as if he wanted to see me more clearly, more fully.
“Let me ask you a few questions. Do you mind?” he asked scratching his bald head.
I acquiesced with a nod.
“OK, so do you do things slowly?”
What did he mean? I had no idea. “No,” I answered blankly.
“OK.” He jotted my answer quickly on a sheet of paper clipped to a board. “Does your future seem hopeless?”
I considered the question closely. “Hopeless, as in un
certain?” I asked.
“Hopeless, yes, without any hope.”
I could tell he did not want to have a philosophical discussion with me about the nature of hope. Stick to the facts, Elbe. I told myself. Stick to the facts.
“Yes, it does.”
“OK.”
He gave me the same reaction as when I had answered no. There seemed to be no correlation between his reaction and the type of answer I provided.
“Do you have trouble making decisions?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel like a failure?”
“Yes.” The list went on and on and each time, I found myself answering yes.
“It sounds like you might be suffering from depression,” he said, stepping away from me with an air or scrutiny, as if he were trying to discern whether the depression could be visible from the outside.
Before I left the office, the doctor said, “did you know that lungs are associated with sadness?” He smirked and shrugged. I noticed the worry lines on his forehead. The baldness made him look more vulnerable. Who cared for this man? I wondered. Who held him at night?
Sadness. A trail of the past came back in a strange mist. A wafting smell. This was the second time I had pneumonia. Although the last part about pneumonia was my own leap of faith. The good bald doctor had never pronounced those words. Not exactly. I liked how it sounded, however. It gave weight to my listlessness. It gave credibility to my inability to get out of my bedroom, except to perform the rudimentary bodily functions.
When I got home, I opened a can of vegetable lentil soup. Wolf followed me into the kitchen, his blond shaggy body strangely attached to the shadow I cast around the house. There was a magnetic pull between me and the dog. He could see right through me. I knew this and sometimes feared him for all that he could see in me. My transparency. His eyes reflected mine. He was sad. I hadn’t taken him for a walk in a week. I would only put him on the extendable leash every four or five hours and let him out and waited as he defecated and urinated right outside the house. I always hated this halted moment. Having to stand there, my life in suspension. The two of us were reduced to the same functions. We were the same.
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