At the volunteer organization, they warned us about asking too many questions about the clients’ former lives. I could still remember the director of the refugee relocation program telling me: “Many have lost loved ones in atrocious ways. We must not pry.”
The house was large, but old and run down. The worn, wooden floor was warped and stained in some places. The walls needed a new coat of paint. The windowpanes were thick and the woodwork around them was warped and swollen with moisture from past seasons. I imagined the sub-zero winter ahead and the cold drafts they would feel in this house. When dinner was ready, we got into a small dining room and squeezed at a table made for three or four people. There were eleven of us. Maman Elaine was placed at the head of the table with Jean de Dieu at the other end. Francine sat on the side, she said that she’d need to get up often and didn’t mind it. I sat next to her. The three younger girls were sent to eat into the living room. Sylvie, the oldest came out of the kitchen with Francine. She said hello to me timidly and helped her mother serve dinner. I felt like I should be helping them, but I didn’t know what might be perceived as offensive or courteous. Was it better that I sat there not offering my help or that I offered it? I sat still waiting for the commotion to settle.
The food quieted and grounded us all into a common goal. We passed around the dishes; everyone was served. Jean de Dieu, then Maman Elaine, then me and the children. Francine served herself last. She offered me another piece of meat. I accepted. Her sleeve was pulled up halfway on her forearm. I noticed a huge scar, a carved out piece of flesh was missing. I almost gasped when I saw it. I said nothing. She noticed my eyes on her, on her arm, but she looked away, furtively, almost fearfully, like a small animal almost caught in a trap.
“The food is delicious,” I said my heart racing. What kind of wound was that? I had never seen anything like it. The crater made it seem like her flesh had somehow closed on itself trying to make up for the void left behind as best it could. Another few millimeters and the bone would have been exposed. The skin was dark and knotted in some places, where the flesh had tried to close in on itself. I wanted to touch her scar. She pulled her sleeve back down.
“Does anyone want any more potatoes?” asked Francine pretending I had never laid eyes on her arm.
For dessert, we shared the cheesecake I brought. A sliver for everyone. One tiny piece for each person. I passed on mine to offer my piece to them, saying that I was not hungry. We stayed seated at the table for at least two hours. Everything took place at the table. We drank coffee after the meal. The plates were cleared.
“You’ve never had a single snowfall in Rwanda?” I asked trying to find order in the mundane.
“No, never. Sometimes it gets cool at night, especially up in the hills, but we never get any snow.”
We talked about everything that could be contained. The closest we came to speaking of the darkness was the moment Jean de Dieu told me he was an engineer back in Africa.
“I worked for a large government contract firm in Kigali until everything went bad.” Silence returned.
“They said it might snow all day tomorrow. All day and all night.” Francine grasped the opportunity to tell us about the more temperate climates of Rwanda.
“That’s why we’re called The Land of a Thousand Hills. There are so many summits, you can always look at the world from above,” Maman Elaine chimmed in, as if she were already speaking from beyond the grave.
The evening ended. I kissed everyone on the cheek four times, including Maman Elaine. I told them that next time they would come to my house, even though I didn’t know how I could possibly fit ten people in my home.
I wanted to hold on to this moment of familial levity for as long as possible. When I slammed my car door and drove away, I waited until I was at least two blocks away to pull over. I held my face in my hands and began to wail. I cried like a baby, loud and strange cries that poured out of me. Wiping away the tears, I continued driving and wailing; the blur of the moon’s face was ahead, full and round, a blue orb in my hazy vision.
Part IV
Chapter 17 – Home
The phone rang in Elbe’s apartment, waking her from the dead. The problem with taking medication to stabilize your mood is that it keeps you anchored to the ground, she thought.
“Road trip!” Joey blared on the other end. “Get your shit packed, we’re going to South Dakota to find your peeps and mine.”
“And yours? I thought this was supposed to be about me.” Elbe nervously played with her hair.
“When is something not about me, darling?”
They both laughed.
“I want to go see my mother and since I have that little dribble of Lakota blood in my veins, I thought we’d make it a pilgrimage to our homelands. What say you?”
“I say, I’m in.”
**
The following week, Elbe and Joey drove to Francine’s house on their way out of town.
“Keep the car running,” Elbe told Joey as she ran to the front door. She was embarrassed by how eager she was to leave town and everything else behind, even Francine. Elbe rang the doorbell and waited. She could feel the pounding in her chest from the few steps she had run from the car to the door. Elbe looked back at Joey waiting in the car, as if she wanted to ground her way out of the squalor of this town.
Francine opened the door.
“Bonjour, Francine,” Elbe said trying to convey warmth.
Francine seemed relieved to see her and invited her to come in.
“Je ne peux pas entrer,” Elbe told Francine she could not come in, explaining that she was on her way out of town. She had pointed to Joey’s car still running, as evidence of her freedom.
“Comment va Innocent?” Elbe asked about Francine’s boy, and as if the child sensed he was being discussed, he peeked his head behind Francine. He was wearing footy pajamas and smiled at Elbe as soon as he realized it was her.
“Rentre tout de suite, il fait froid!” Francine snapped, the way any mother would snap at her child to spare him from catching his death. The little boy vanished.
“Everything is OK now,” she said to Elbe, thank you for everything.” Tout va bien. Merci pour tout.
Elbe took Francine’s hands into hers. They were warm, full of life, she thought. The two women looked at each other. They knew in that moment that their paths which had converged in sadness was now coming to an end. Would they ever see each other again? The uncerstainty of this answer did not evoke sadness but possibility for both of them.
“À bientôt Francine,” Elbe said, as one blurts a formulaic phrase that has lost all meaning.
“Au revoir,” replied Francine, before kissing Elbe on both cheeks.
Francine shut the door of her home with a smile.
**
Elbe and Joey drove for two nights and two days, arriving in Decatur County, Southern Iowa. This region was not only the poorest county in the state of Iowa, but also one of the poorest in the nation.
“Welcome to my hometown of Le Roy!” Joey yelled in some kind of Midwestern drawl that sounded forced and borrowed. His loud voice seemed out of place in the end-of-night darkness engulfing their car. “This is the smallest city in America. No joke! Guess how many people lived here when I did?”
Elbe noticed the sinuous line of the road ahead of her. A black trail of light in darkness. “By the looks of it, zero.”
Joey made a loud, obnoxious buzzer sound indicating Elbe’s answer was incorrect. “Wrong! 13 fucking people. You heard me right, lucky 13, and I was one of them.”
Joey stopped the car and admired the vastness of a flat horizon at the edge of corn fields.
“Joey, what the hell are we doing here?” Elbe was annoyed. Somehow this whole road trip which was supposed to have been about finding a piece of herself had now turned into the Joey show.
“But wait, do you know how many nonwhites lived in Le Roy when I was growing up? 6 percent. That’s right, 6 percent of 13. I know you’re a
historian, but do you know how much 6 percent of 13 equals? Tataaaah! Less than one,” he said pointing at himself.
Elbe ignored Joey’s clankering voice and thought about what had taken them on this trip. She knew that something had led them here. Something other than herself, other than Joey’s sense of space and time. Something outside of themselves.
“Seriously, Joey. What’s the plan? Because I want to be in South Dakota by tomorrow so I can actually meet my twin sister.”
“Okay, okay. You want serious? Here’s serious. My mom lives here, somewhere down that path. And I haven’t seen her since she left me when I was five and I went into foster care. I want her to see me, as Joey, as me.”
Elbe thought about Joey as a girl. She thought about the cosmic error that had assigned him the wrong body at birth. Michele must have always known that she was Joey, that she was a he.
“Dude, can we just sit here quietly for a moment and not speak?”
“Dude?! Okay, white girl.”
Elbe felt that same strange fluttering she had felt the night she had gone to Francine’s house for dinner, a fluttering in her solar plexus where she liked to keep her index finger. This was something she liked to do. She drew the silence to her like a cape and got out of the car before Joey even moved. The sun was rising on the eastern horizon. The air outside was cool, crisp. It was fall and for the first time; she felt the changing of seasons. Elbe saw a small path open up ahead, dissarayed and sinuous, the way paths can appear to be in the country where there is no money.
Joey joined her and they watched the flat of the endless Midwestern horizon light from the inside.
“Follow me,” Joey said taking her hand.
In the strangeness of darkness, they moved together. She clasping her heart like an ailing widow and Joey moving slowly, ever so slowly, as if he had suddenly lost his battle with gravity. Immense, the fading darkness around them drew them into a place that united them instantly, like two sudden orbs connected in the places of connection. This was the circle of change, Elbe thought. She wanted to stop Joey in his tracks and tell him that uncovering the past unravels the world. She wanted to grab him even, and speak of her gratitude for his presence on this journey with her, but she said nothing. There was no turning back now. Even Elbe knew the momentum they had unraveled could not be stopped, or even slowed. They continued to walk in silence until they came to a bend in the road. The curve was slight, the bending of an elbow.
“Here,” Joey said, pointing to the first trailer in a string. Night had given way to morning. The light was pale and gray, barely holding them.
A dog began to bark madly while pulling at its chain. The animal lunged forward pulling towards them like a ball dangling at the edge of an elastic band. When they came to the periphery where the dog could almost touch them, Elbe stopped and looked at Joey for direction.
“That dog won’t bite you,” Joey said smugly.
“Um…how the hell do you know that?”
“Don’t know, just a feeling I guess. But look at how it’s observing us now. It’s not even trying to get to us anymore.” Joey was right. Now that they were close, closer than they had ever stood to the dog, the animal became calm and laid down.
The dog’s body was shaggy and grey in places where dirt and mud were caked on an otherwise tan and beige fur.
“Fuck it, I’m going for it!” Joey moved past the invisible line that separated him from the dog and entered into the animal’s span of space that lead him to the trailer door. The dog sniffed Joey slowly, carefully, and then leapt on him while wagging its tail.
“See, I told you,” Joey said before pounding on the door. Once. Then a pause. And then again. Elbe closed her eyes and moved towards the animal as if she were approaching the edge of a cliff. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that the dog had barely acknowledged her. It was fascinated by Joey instead. No one was answering the door. But when Joey looked up, he saw that someone was looking at them through the parted curtain of the trailer.
“Someone’s here.” There’s someone in there,” Joey said pointing to the window. “Hello?” Joey began pounding on the door, this time with more insistence.
A voice, faint and feminine trailed from behind the thickness of the peeling door.
“Who is it?”
Joey paused and waited. He knew that if he said who he was, they might never meet the woman who lived inside. “You’ve won a prize. I’m here to get you to claim your prize.”
Elbe looked at Joey in shock and then burst out laughing. She knew that the laughter had more to do with the tension of this moment and the fear coursing through her rather than hilarity. They both stood on the edge of their. Something shifted inside the trailer, rustling, and then the door cracked open.
“What do you want?” A frail woman peered from behind the partially opened door.
Elbe tried to find Joey’s face in hers. She tried to find a trace of genetics that connected them to each other but she couldn’t see even the faintest of resemblance. The woman had deeply set, tired and sad, washed-out pale blue eyes, as if time had tried to push them into her face, like strange marbles that needed to be dislodged.
Joey stood very still staring at the woman who had brought him life. He said nothing for what seemed like a long time. It was difficult to say whether she recognized her own child. If she did she said nothing. Elbe almost spoke, afraid the woman would slam the door in their faces but she too stood there waiting. The moment hung like this until the woman asked again.
“What the hell do you want?”
“You’ve won a prize. Sweepstakes.” Joey hesitated. Elbe knew that he was searching for the next words.
“A lifetime supply of coffee.”
The woman’s face brightened briefly and then crumpled in an expression of mistrust. “How do you know I drink coffee?”
“Who doesn’t drink coffee ma’am?” Joey smiled. The woman smiled with him and she pulled the door open.
“What do I have to do?” She had a scar on her face. A line in the shape of a half crescent moon across her forehead.
Elbe noticed the scar; Joey saw it too. He eyed the line on the woman’s face pushing him off balance, into some kind of shaky constellation of memories that began to whirl in his head.
“You don’t have to do much of anything,” he finally answered. Joey looked to Elbe for direction. She shot him a look of confusion.
“Well, you do have to answer a few questions, a questionnaire really. Once that’s done, we’ll deliver the coffee.” Joey added.
“Yeah?” she asked again unsure of the situation.
“Yes, we can deliver it later today, if you’d like.”
“Wanna come in? I’d offer you some coffee but I got none.” She snorted a strange kind of laugh. “Hey does this coffee come with a coffeemaker? Cause I don’t got one.”
Joey hesitated for a moment and then said, “Yes, of course. It comes with a nice and new coffeemaker.”
Elbe was now shrugging looking at Joey, as if to say, are you nuts?
“My name’s Jennie, with ‘I E’ at the end. Well you know that, if you’re from the sweepstakes and all. You know my name, I guess.”
“Yes, Ms. Stevens, we know your name. My name is Joey and this here is my assistant Elbe.”
Elbe shot a look of visible annoyance in Joey’s direction.
Jennie pulled up her stained yellow housedress as she climbed the two small steps back into the trailer. Her legs were swollen in places exposing varicose veins.
“Sure. We’ll come in, Joey said and he stepped into the trailer with Elbe in tow.
“I never won a prize before,” she said, sitting down on an old mustard-colored armchair. “You can sit right there, if you want,” she said pointing to two chairs covered in animal hair and unopened mail. “Just move that shit out of the way. You can put it on the floor.”
Elbe and Joey moved the piles of old mail and sat down next to each other.
“So what que
stions do you got for me?”
It was hard to determine her age. Her face was worn in the way alcohol and poverty gnaws at the body. Elbe knew Jennie could not have been older than 45 given the fact that she had had Joey when she was only 14. The three of them sat like this in the fetid smell of the dark trailer. Elbe scanned the room for clues, something that would give her an understanding of how this person was the woman who had given life to her friend Joey. Elbe searched through the darkness of the room; the two shades that covered the two small windows were drawn. Outside, Elbe remembered the sun was shining. She looked at the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, the opened cat food can on the counter, the piles of unopened mail on the floor, and the crowded room. The formica table between them, the peeling linoleum on the floor, the plastic flowers covered in dust.
Jennie held her hands holding each other, folded on her lap. Her nails were short and chewed, with pieces of skin red and raw in places.
“Well, let’s see.” Joey said clearing his throat. “First of all, what is your favorite TV show?” Jennie hesitated.
“Is this some kind of quiz or somethin’?”
“There are no wrong answers Jennie. So you don’t got to worry here.”
Elbe noticed how Joey had adapted his way of speaking for Jennie. She was shocked. She had never heard him speak down before. Jennie thought for a moment, she unfolded her hands and scratched her head.
“That ain’t easy, but if I got to pick one, then I have to say Everybody Loves Raymond.
Joey began writing the answer in a notebook, giving this process an air of legitimacy Elbe found disturbing. She knew it was the same notebook where he’d been jotting things down like the address of the nearest fast food joint where they had eaten the day before. Elbe did not know however that it was also the place where he’d begun writing thoughts and feelings down in a makeshift journal.
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