Fly Away Home

by Vanessa Del Fabbro

  Mandla threw a pile of his clothes into his suitcase. “It’s not fair. I’m the one who should be here. This place is wasted on Sipho. He’s not talented.”

  “Mandla! How can you say such a thing about your brother?” Monica noticed that her finger was bleeding.

  “There aren’t any big movies being filmed in South Africa.”

  “Yes, there are. The South African film industry is growing. And foreign production houses are always going there to make movies, especially in Cape Town. They hire local people.”

  “As extras. I don’t want to be a face in the crowd. The director said I had talent.”

  “Mandla, we cannot all move here. It’s a ludicrous idea. When you’re a grown-up, you can come back and try again.”

  “That’ll take forever,” yelled Mandla. “And they will have forgotten about me by then.” He stormed off to the bathroom.

  “Don’t you lock yourself in there again!” shouted Monica.

  But it was too late. She heard the lock turn. Sighing, she tidied the pile of clothes he had thrown into the suitcase, and began to pack the rest of his things.

  An hour later, he came out of the bathroom, but he would not speak to her unless it was to answer a question in monosyllables. Monica was starting to regret ever having helped Sipho submit his application to be a foreign exchange student.

  Parenting was the toughest job in the world. Just when Monica thought she had the hang of it, new challenges were thrown at her, and she found herself floundering like an absolute beginner.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sipho, at least, was smiling when he met them at the Houston airport the next morning with Nancy and Connor. It wasn’t long though before Monica realized that part of his happiness could be attributed to a wildly successful party the boys had thrown at Connor’s house the night before. Monica hoped that Nancy and Bill had provided proper supervision, but she would not embarrass Sipho by asking about it in front of Connor.

  Nancy insisted that Monica and Mandla stay at her house, and since their extended sojourn in Los Angeles had run up quite a credit-card bill, Monica accepted gratefully. Staying close by would also give her the opportunity to see how Sipho lived his day-to-day life.

  “You’ve come in time to hear Sipho talk to the student body tomorrow,” Connor told her in the SUV on the drive home from the airport. “What’s your topic, Sipho? I hope it’s not lame.”

  Sipho grinned, but refused to tell him. “Wait until tomorrow,” he said.

  “You better make it funny or everyone will fall asleep,” said Connor.

  “They won’t fall asleep,” replied Sipho. He caught Monica’s eye and smiled.

  There were three exchange students at Sipho’s school, and each of them had been asked to give a fifteen minute presentation about their home country.

  The first student, a girl from Colombia, started her presentation the following morning by asking the audience to forgive her faulty English. She then got everyone laughing by listing the errors she had made while learning the language. She had brought slides to show the Colombian countryside and cities. As she started to talk about the turbulent politics of the country, Monica noticed a lot of fidgeting and whispering in the audience. Connor was correct; the students wanted the speaker to make them laugh. She began to feel so nervous for Sipho that she had to wipe her sweaty palms on her skirt. Never in his fifteen years had she known him to make a crowd laugh.

  It was his turn next. As he went to stand behind the podium, she could feel her heart racing in her chest. His voice cracked when he greeted the audience, and she covered her face with her hands. He cleared his throat.

  “I feel very privileged to have been given this opportunity to study abroad.”

  She heard a few giggles and thought of the film director’s advice to Mandla to lose his accent.

  “I want to thank you all for welcoming me to your school.” His demeanor was more formal than that of the school principal who had introduced him.

  Monica knew that he would have to change gears now or face losing his audience.

  “Today I want to talk to you about the children in my home country, South Africa—those less privileged than you and me.”

  Beside Monica, Mandla shifted in his seat. Sipho turned on the laptop he had set up on the podium, and a photograph of a little African girl appeared on the screen. He explained to the students how more than a million children in South Africa had lost one or both parents to AIDS and the number of orphans was growing faster than anyone cared to admit. He changed the slide to show a little girl holding a cup of water to her mother’s chapped lips. Ailing parents, he said, were being cared for by their young children. Some households were now headed by children as young as ten years old.

  “I am one of the lucky ones,” said Sipho, looking at the row of chairs where the parents, including Monica, sat. “I was adopted by a good woman.”

  Monica felt her stomach flip. In all their years together, Sipho had never mentioned that he was grateful to her for taking him in, and she had never expected it of him. The agreement she had made with the boys’ mother to adopt them had come naturally—they had not even thought to put it in writing before Ella died.

  Flipping through slides that showed children involved in a variety of household tasks, including collecting firewood, Sipho described to the students the daily struggle of these AIDS orphans, whose schooling had to take a backseat to the grinding task of eking out a living. Monica noticed a few girls near her wiping their eyes. There was not a sound in the packed auditorium.

  Monica had never seen Sipho so in command of himself and his listeners before. His words were eloquent, measured and heartfelt, his gestures large enough for the whole auditorium to see, but still natural. He was his mother, Ella, all over again, but with a subtle difference: she had filled the room with her larger-than-life personality. Sipho filled it with the quiet intensity of his words. The result, though, was the same: people took note. Monica saw many students writing in notebooks when Sipho listed the ways in which they could help.

  When he finished, there was silence, and then a boy in the front row stood up and began to clap. Soon the entire student body was giving Sipho a standing ovation.

  After the presentation by the third student, who struggled to gain the audience’s attention with his account of daily life in Japan, the students swarmed around Sipho to ask questions. Even Connor, Monica noticed, had a question. She wanted to tell Sipho how proud she was of him, but didn’t want to intrude. After ten minutes, Sipho left the group to come to her. If the other students hadn’t been watching she would have taken him into her arms and probably shed a tear or two, but she behaved as any parent of a high school student should: with restraint.

  “You were fantastic,” she told him.

  “Thanks. Did you like the slides? A nongovernmental organization in South Africa e-mailed them to me.”

  “The slides were great, but you were…you were your mother up there on that stage.”

  Sipho gave a pinched smile. “I felt her watching me. Is that crazy?”

  Monica shook her head. “Not at all.”

  “I meant what I said about being lucky.”

  Monica felt a sob catch in her throat. “No, sweetie, I’m the lucky one.”

  He stepped forward and put his arms around her shoulders. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, Sipho.”

  He pulled away shyly and pinched Mandla’s cheek. “I’d better go back to the students so I can get them to donate money to AIDS charities while they’re all fired up. You know what it’s like with teenagers.”

  He had returned to being the Sipho she knew, older and wiser than his years. She was going to miss him over the next four months.

  Mandla barely spoke to her on the flight home to Cape Town. He slept little and watched all the films available. With time, he would get over his disappointment and realize that it was impossible for him to live in the United States at this point
in his life. Until then, Monica would have to endure his censorious silence.

  As the airplane approached the airport in Cape Town, Mandla looked out the window and caught his breath.

  “Look, Mom,” he said, for an instant forgetting to be sullen.

  Monica leaned over to view the city many called the most beautiful in the world. The sky was the same color that Hercules always painted it in his landscapes—the one Francina called artificial. Frothy white waves fringed Cape Point, the rocky peninsula some mistakenly called the most southern tip of the African continent. Table Mountain was not covered by its usual beautiful white tablecloth, and Monica imagined tourists at the top marveling at the clear view of the bay below and the houses crafted into the rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean.

  “It’s good to be home,” she said, and instantly she regretted her words because, predictably, they reminded Mandla of where he would rather be.

  He retreated into his shell again, and although the flight crew had turned off the in-flight entertainment system, he stared at the gray screen as though it might come to life at any moment.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Zak had sent Mirinda and Paolo to pick up Monica and Mandla from the airport because he had to go to the main police station in Cape Town to make a statement—his fifth so far.

  “So how’s my little movie star?” asked his grandmother, hugging Mandla.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine? You go on holiday, land a role in a movie and you’re just fine?”

  Mandla shrugged. “I probably will never be in another one as long as I live.” He spotted his suitcase on the baggage carousel and tried to lift it off, but it was too heavy for him and he had to jog alongside it until his grandfather lent him a hand.

  Monica took advantage of his distraction to explain to her mother why Mandla was not happy to be back in South Africa.

  “Ah, that explains his sour face,” said Mirinda. “Come here, little man.” She grabbed hold of his hand. “You don’t want to stay in America and start saying ‘toe-may-toe and ketchup.’”

  Mandla shook his hand free. He did not find the matter amusing.

  “Too many young kids here are putting on American accents to be cool. Haven’t you heard them, Paolo?” Mirinda did not wait for her husband’s reply. “I don’t know what this ‘cool’ is, anyway. When I was a child we didn’t have time to worry what our hair looked like or if we had the right clothes. We were happy if we had shoes on our feet.”

  Mandla rolled his eyes. “But you wanted more. That’s why you left your little town to go to Johannesburg to become a model. Can we go now? I’m tired.”

  “Ooh, Monica, you’ve brought back a grumpy little man,” said Mirinda.

  Monica smiled but did not say a word for fear of upsetting Mandla further. All she wanted was a long soak in a hot tub and then her own bed.

  In the car on the way home, Mirinda told Monica that she had taken a plate of food to Zak every night, but had often found it untouched the next day.

  “We’ve hardly seen him,” said Paolo. “I wish I could do something to help.”

  Mirinda told Monica that Francina, Hercules and Zukisa had been visiting Zukisa’s aunt every weekend and her condition was unchanged. Lucy had settled into a life of domesticity she had not known for years, but the family was short of money and she would soon have to look for work. The older boy, Xoli, had started to be more civil to his mother, and Francina hoped that eventually he would start spending more time at home. Lucy’s daughter, Fundiswa, never left her side, not even when she took a shower.

  Zak’s car was in the driveway when they arrived home, and Mirinda thought it better if she and Paolo didn’t accept Monica’s offer to come in for a cup of tea.

  “You’ve got lots to talk about,” she said, giving her daughter a serious look.

  Zak came to the door and Monica was shocked at his appearance. He hadn’t shaved for days, there were dark rings around his eyes and he had lost weight. She kissed him hello.

  “Have they found her?” she asked.

  He gave a weary smile. “Yes. They just told me when I was in Cape Town.”

  “That’s fantastic. What happens next?”

  He told her that the Sydney police had taken Jacqueline into custody for questioning, but she would be released in twenty-four hours unless he laid a formal charge of kidnapping against her.

  “So what are you going to do?” Monica sank onto the sofa.

  “I’m leaving for the airport now. I was just packing.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry I have to rush off like this.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I just hope you’ll be able to get some sleep on the flight.”

  “When I get back we’ll have a long talk, okay?”

  She knew what he meant, but she did not know if she was ready for it.

  Zak had planned to drive himself to the airport, but Monica would not allow it in the state he was in.

  “I’ll ask Oscar if he can do it,” she said, and went off to phone their family friend.

  Oscar said he was free for the afternoon and that it would be a pleasure to help out. “Yolanda belongs in Lady Helen, not Sydney, Australia,” he said.

  Monica knew that Zak would not have told Oscar—or anyone else—what had happened, but it was impossible to keep a secret in Lady Helen, where the grapevine was so short.

  After Zak left, Monica lay down on her bed to rest her eyes for a minute before unpacking. The next thing she knew the doorbell was ringing and it was dark outside. Francina had come to welcome Monica and Mandla back, with a pot of lamb stew and a small covered dish of steaming hot rice.

  Mandla emerged from his bedroom, rubbing his eyes. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

  “Aha, I thought my good South African food would catch your attention,” said Francina. “It’s better than American hot dogs and hamburgers, isn’t it?” She kissed Mandla hello.

  “We also ate Indian and Thai and Mexican food there,” he said.

  “Oh, well, lah-dee-dah, aren’t we sophisticated?” said Francina, serving the stew and rice onto plates. “Take one bite of this and tell me you’d rather have a taco.”

  Mandla did not comment but cleaned his plate and asked for more, which Francina gave him with a broad smile on her face.

  “Tomorrow I’m bringing you good old African pap and gravy,” she said. “It’s more delicious than any fancy foreign food.”

  After Francina had left, Mandla took a bath, but he was refreshed after his long nap and couldn’t think of going to bed at the normal time even though he had school the next day. It would take at least a week for him to get back into his normal routine. He went into the living room and Monica heard the television flick on. She was washing the dinner dishes when she heard Mandla give a scream.

  “What is it?” she shouted, rushing into the living room.

  “Look.” He pointed at the screen.

  An American movie was on and there was no mistaking the identity of the boy getting into the car with his father. It was Steven.

  Mandla turned up the volume. Steven spoke with a Southern drawl.

  “He’s good with accents,” said Monica.

  “That’s not put on. That’s how he used to speak. He’s from Alabama.”

  “But he didn’t sound like that when we met him.”

  Mandla gave Monica a look of impatience. “He had a voice coach to help him get rid of it.”

  “Oh,” said Monica. So it wasn’t only Mandla who had an accent that needed to be eliminated. She thought of her mother, who, after moving to Johannesburg, had worked hard to remove from her speech all traces of her small-town upbringing in the Karoo desert.

  “Are you going to watch the movie?” asked Monica.

  Mandla’s frown reinforced her realization—too late—that this was a stupid question.

  “You need your sleep. School starts tomorrow.”

 
; “I’m not tired yet.”

  Although it was bedtime in South Africa, Mandla’s body was on United States time, where it was early afternoon. Perhaps the movie would relax him and he’d be able to fall asleep. She told him that she was going to take a bath and would check on him afterward.

  “Don’t you want to watch Steven?” he asked.

  “He’s not as good as you,” she replied, and again she realized she had said the wrong thing.

  “Yes, but he’s the one with a career in movies, I’m not.”

  “Mandla, I told you I’d take you to any audition you wanted to go to.”

  “Yes, in Cape Town.”

  She was too tired to go over this again with him.

  “I’ll see you in a bit,” she said. He looked so small and frail sitting there in the blue light of the television that she wanted to put her hand on his soft cheek, but he would shrug her off and she was not in a state to take rejection.

  After her bath she found him fast asleep on the sofa, with Steven’s movie still playing on the television. She switched it off and scooped him into her arms to carry him to bed. He stirred when she put his head on the pillow, but then turned over and went back to sleep. She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. Her little boy was disappointed with his lot in life at the moment and there was nothing she could do about it. Hopefully school would take his mind off it.

  She looked at her watch. Zak had been flying for three hours now and would only arrive when she was waking tomorrow morning. What could Jacqueline have told Yolanda to make her leave her father in South Africa?

  Monica lay down on the bed and heard an owl call outside. A warm summer breeze drifted in through the open window. She had planned to go through all the mail Zak had not touched, but before long she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  The next morning Mandla shook her awake.

  “You turned the alarm clock off again and went back to sleep,” he moaned. “I can’t be late on the first day of the year.”

  Monica dragged herself out of bed. “Why are you wearing the sneakers I bought you in Houston?”