by Kari Jones
“Canada,” says Mom.
The soldier speaks again, and Thomas says, “He wants to know how long you’ve been living here.”
“Five months,” says Mom.
The soldier gestures to Mom’s purse, hanging near the door. He uses his gun, so it swings toward our faces, and both of us gasp. The solider laughs and points at the purse again. Mom takes it off the hook and gives it to him. He slings it on his shoulder and then, without saying anything, he turns and walks away. We watch until he leaves the driveway and turns down the road.
Mom sags against the door. I let go of her hand and lean on the other side. Thomas sinks to the floor at our feet. None of us moves or says anything. My heart is beating so fast I feel my blood rushing past my ears. The three of us stay there, silent. When I go to bed, Dad comes into my room. He sits on the edge of my bed and says, “You were brave today.”
“I wish you’d been here,” I say.
“So do I.” His voice sounds tired, worn out.
“Why do you think he left?” I ask. I’ve been thinking about it all day. He could easily have barged into the house and taken anything he wanted. Mom and Thomas and I wouldn’t have stopped him. Not with that gun.
“Was it because we’re foreigners?” I ask.
Dad shakes his head. “I don’t know, but I’d say yes, probably,” he says.
There’s nothing more to say after that, so he leaves and I lie in bed thinking about how Ebo said his dad would never leave Ghana and about how easily we could.
EIGHTEEN
“Joanne, go to bed,” says Dad a couple of mornings later.
“I think I’ll sit with Gordo a bit,” Mom says, but Dad says, “Joanne. Please. Look at yourself.”
She doesn’t move, but when Gordo says, “Astrid’s going to read to me,” she lets Dad lead her out of the room.
“Read to you?” I ask. Gordo’s a lot better, but he’s still weak and not allowed to leave his bedroom.
Gordo frowns. “I had to say something. She doesn’t want me to be left alone. She’s afraid I’ll get sick again. She’s afraid I’m going to die.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. For a little kid, Gordo can be really perceptive sometimes.
“Plus, she smells,” he adds.
That sounds funny, but neither of us laughs, because it’s true. She hasn’t had a bath or changed her clothes since Gordo got sick. We’re both silent for a minute.
Dad comes back in and says, “Mom’s taking a nap. Abena’s agreed to keep an eye on Piper, and I’m going to work. I won’t be long, but I want you to let Mom sleep. If Abena needs anything—help with Piper or anything else—I’m counting on you to help her out. Gordo, that means you too.”
“You’re going to work?” I say.
“I’ll be fine.”
It’s not him I’m worried about. This will be the first time he’s left the house since the soldier came. I must look anxious, because he says, “Thomas says the soldiers are under control now, so we don’t have to worry.”
“Soldiers?” says Gordo.
Dad sighs, but he sits on the end of Gordo’s bed and tells him what’s happened. I expect Gordo to be all mad about missing the soldiers, but instead his face turns pale, and his mouth sets in a grimace.
Dad kisses his forehead and says, “It’s over now, Gordo. Don’t worry.” To me he says, “I won’t be long,” and he leaves the room.
Gordo throws back the sheet and swings his legs to the side of the bed.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Going to see Kwame and Yafeo,” he says.
“You’re not allowed,” I say. Like not being allowed to do something has ever stopped him before. “Gordo, I’m serious.”
“So am I.” He pulls on shorts and a T-shirt and shoves his feet into his sandals.
“You’re still sick, Gordo.”
He turns his face to me. “I want to see them,” he says.
“The soldiers?”
“No. Kwame and Yafeo.”
“Get back into bed.”
“No.”
“Gordo, I’m telling Mom unless you take off your shoes and get back into bed right now.”
Even that threat might not have stopped him, but he must suddenly feel tired, because he reaches his hand out to the bed, then sinks onto it.
“You go, Astrid,” he says.
“As if,” I say.
“Please.”
“How come you want to see them so much?” I ask.
“Please. I just do.”
“That’s not a good answer, Gordo,” I say, and I’m about to leave the room when he says, “I want to make sure they’re okay.”
His face looks feverish again. “Please,” he whines. Usually that whiny voice drives me nuts, but today it scares me.
“Please, Astrid, please?” His face goes all blotchy. He’s crying for real now, and it makes him gulp.
“Gordo, shut up—you’ll wake up Mom.”
That doesn’t stop him. If anything, it makes him worse. He’s snotty and gulping and generally getting really upset over a couple of street kids. If he has this much energy, he can go find them himself.
“Fine. Go yourself,” I say.
Gordo takes in a deep breath and wipes his nose on his arm. I follow as he makes his way down the stairs and across the hallway to the front door. I know I shouldn’t let him go. When he reaches the front door, he leans against it for a second, and I say, “Go sit outside, Gordo. I’ll go.”
He doesn’t put up a fight.
Gordo tells me how to find Kwame and Yafeo. I turn left at the end of the driveway and walk two blocks down the street, across an empty lot to another street, then along that street to a hut on the corner.
I stand in the road and call, “Ko ko ko.”
A woman steps out of the hut. She eyes me up and down but doesn’t say anything.
“I’m Gordo’s sister,” I say. I don’t know if she speaks English, although most people around here do.
Two boys poke their heads around the side of the hut, and I recognize them as two of the boys that come to our house.
“Is Gordo better?” one of them asks.
“He’s had malaria.”
The three of them nod. Everyone knows about malaria.
“But he’s better now?” The boy’s face is pinched with concern, and when I nod, his whole face changes with his smile. The woman goes into the hut and comes back out again with a plastic glass of water, which she hands to me. I take a sip even though Mom would have a thousand fits if she knew, because it seems rude not to have at least some of it.
“Gordo asked me to get you,” I say to the boys, and they don’t wait for any more invitation before they hop across the ditch and run onto the road. I hand the glass back to the woman and say thank you in Twi, then follow them.
When we reach the house, we go around to the back to see if Gordo’s there. He is, and so are Abena and Piper and Thomas. They are all sitting under the tree, drinking lemonade.
“Kwame and Yafeo are here,” I say to Gordo. He grins, and the boys run up to him. They jabber away in Twi—so fast, it’s hard to distinguish words—but Gordo listens, and he must understand them because he laughs at the same time Abena and Thomas do.
“What are they saying?” I ask Thomas.
“They’re telling about when a soldier came and took stuff from their mama’s stall.”
“Why is it funny?” I ask.
“They make it sound funny. What else are they going to do?”
Kwame or Yafeo sits down next to Abena and holds his arms out for Piper. I’m about to give him my ice-queen stare and say “No, we don’t let street people and strangers touch her,” but I shut my mouth, because she crawls into his lap like she’s done it a dozen times before.
Gordo’s face is still pale, but he laughs at the boys’ jokes and talks easily with them. His feverish look has gone, and I suddenly understand that he was really worried about them. To him, they are mor
e than just boys who live in the neighborhood and sneak up the drive to hang out at our house. They are his friends.
Piper plays happily with the boys, and my face burns with embarrassment. I’ve never even learned which boy is Kwame and which is Yafeo, so when Gordo talks, I listen, so that in future I will know.
NINETEEN
School opens again. It’s been two weeks since the coup, and now it’s so close to the end of term that I wonder why they bothered bringing us all back. When Dad tells us we’re going to school in the morning, I wait for Mom to freak out and say no way, but she doesn’t. The only thing she says is, “I’d better make sure you have clean uniforms,” and she gets up from the table to go check. She’s looking better. The bags under her eyes have gone, she doesn’t smell bad, and she’s washed and combed her hair. She even put on a pretty sundress this morning.
Gordo shrugs, and I decide it’s best not to say anything.
It’s great to see everyone, and even Bassam doesn’t bother me when he comes into the classroom. It’s strange. He walks in with his head hanging and sits behind me. I pull my hair around my shoulder so he can’t reach it, but he doesn’t even try. Thema and I frown at each other.
“What’s wrong with him?” I whisper to her.
She shrugs, and then we both sit straight as Sister Mary walks into the room. She has the snake in her pocket. She must have come to school when it was closed to pick it up.
“Who wants to feed the snake?” she asks as she lowers it into the terrarium. All the boys’ hands go up, but Bassam doesn’t seem as enthusiastic as usual. Normally, he bounces out of his seat to get her attention. Today, he raises his hand slowly. Sister Mary chooses Peter, so Bassam lowers his hand and slumps back in his desk. He doesn’t grumble as he usually does when someone else gets picked. I wonder what’s going on.
The morning goes slowly. Sister Mary sets us a bunch of math questions to work on silently, but she has to send three people onto the breezeway for talking out of turn (not me, thank goodness), and no matter how many times she tells us to be quiet, the room always has a buzz in it. Finally break comes, and we all surge out of doors.
“What’s up with Bassam?” Thema asks Harpreet as we run to the tamarind tree.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Bassam’s house was raided,” says Harpreet. As she speaks, her eyes glitter in a way that makes me shudder a bit.
“You mean by soldiers?” asks Thema.
Harpreet leans in close and whispers, “They’ve taken his dad to jail because he’s a hoarder.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Bassam’s dad in jail? The image of the soldier pointing a gun at Thomas fills my eyes, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
“A hoarder?” Thema asks.
“That’s why there’s nothing in the stores,” Harpreet says.
“Nothing in the stores because Bassam’s dad hoards it all?” Thema asks.
“No, stupid, because lots of people do it. That’s called corruption, and that’s what Rawlings is getting rid of.”
Harpreet sounds so sure, but Thema doesn’t look convinced.
“Poor Bassam,” says Thema.
“So I guess his party’s canceled,” says Harpreet.
I don’t like her much, I decide.
When I get home after school, I find Thomas in the back garden, listening to the radio and raking.
“Don’t you get tired of listening to that?” I ask.
“Astrid, the future of our country is in that radio,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever Rawlings says to the country, that’s our future.”
I think about that for a minute before saying, “My dad says Rawlings doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Hmmm…well,” says Thomas, as if he’s thinking about what he’s going to say. “It’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure.” He doesn’t look at me when he says that, as if he’s hiding something.
“I thought you were happy Rawlings is in power now,” I say.
“I was. I am. I think I am,” he says.
I’m confused. At first Thomas couldn’t stop talking about how excited he was. But then the soldier came. Maybe that’s what’s wrong. Even though Gordo’s better and Thomas says the soldiers aren’t breaking into people’s houses anymore, I know all of us are still jumpy.
“But there are also some hard things about it,” I say, to show I understand.
Thomas lifts his rake and tips it on end so he can pull off a leaf that’s stuck in the tines. He says, “You’re a smart girl, Asteroid.”
I’m happy he calls me Asteroid, because that shows he’s in a better mood, but he ruins it with a frown that creases his whole face.
“Is there something else?” I ask.
“Some soldiers went to the market. They harassed Esi.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it.
“What!”
“She doesn’t want to go back because she’s afraid they’ll come again.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they?” I ask.
“They’ve beaten up some women in the market. They call them hoarders.” His face is so sad, I don’t know what to say. This can’t be right. It was hard enough to think about Bassam’s dad being a hoarder, and his family is rich. I know for sure that Thomas and Esi aren’t rich. How can anyone think Esi’s a hoarder?
“Does that mean you can’t sell your animals anymore?” I ask.
He nods. “Not for now anyway.”
“So you can’t buy your house?”
“Not right now.” His voice quavers, and he leans into his raking. “I shouldn’t have told you that, Astrid,” he says.
I blush. I hate feeling helpless.
“Will you do me a favor? Can you ask Abena to bring me my tea?” Thomas asks.
“Sure,” I say. At least it’s something I can do.
TWENTY
It’s raining on our last day at school. At home in Canada, I’m used to rain that soaks in slowly. Here, we’re drenched in seconds, and the cars and buses make waves in the street as they pass. The dusty school grounds have already turned to mud, so we have no choice but to run into the breezeway for cover.
Some boys kick a soccer ball around on the tiles, and a bunch of kids dangle their legs over the rails. Thema stands near the classroom door with Harpreet. Her face looks plastic, like she’s listening to Harpreet but not interested. When she catches my eye, she says something to Harpreet and walks over to me. She puts her hand on her hip, flips some non-existent long hair over her shoulder and says, “You’ll never guess what I’ve heard.”
Her imitation of Harpreet is so good, I splutter with laughter.
“What did she hear?” I ask.
Thema laughs. “Who knows? I left before she could tell me.”
Sister Mary marches down the breezeway, scattering kids as she comes. When she gets to the classroom door, she says, “Well, go on, in you go,” and we all crowd inside.
Summer holidays start tomorrow, and it’s hard to pay attention. Sister Mary doesn’t even try to make us work. Instead, we clean the classroom. We have to collect all our papers into bundles to take home and gather pens and pencils into a box for next year’s kids.
By the time the bell rings at the end of the day, our classroom looks completely different. There’s nothing on the walls except for the rolled-up maps, and our desks have been scrubbed and all the stickers peeled off. We each have a neat pile of papers to take home. Even the snake cage is empty, and the snake is safe in Sister Mary’s pocket.
“Goodbye, Sister Mary,” we chant before she lets us out of the room.
“Have a good summer, everyone,” she says.
Thema and I saunter to the parking lot. “I think I’m going to miss her,” Thema says.
“Sister Mary?”
“Yeah.”
I only think about it for a second before I say, “Me too.”
After lunch, Gordo a
nd I sit outside under the tree. I read, and Gordo watches a spider spin a web. I noticed it first and almost swatted it away, but Gordo puffed out his chest like a rooster and said, “It’s a brown button spider,” as if that meant I’d be a criminal to touch it, so I plunked down into the chair and picked up my book instead. As long as the spider stays over there on the branch, Gordo can watch it as long as he wants.
Watership Down is boring. I hate to say it, but it is. With a sigh, I put it aside and watch Gordo studying the spider instead. For a boy who’s usually running, he can be really still when there’s some kind of creature around.
Thomas comes around the side of the house. He has a frown on his face, and he stares at Gordo like he’s trying to decide whether to say something.
“Thomas?” I say.
“What are you doing?” he asks Gordo.
Gordo points to the spider.
Thomas takes a deep breath and says, “Gordo, I need some help. Come help me.”
“Awww,” says Gordo. “Can’t you ask Astrid instead?”
“I need your help,” says Thomas, and his voice is sharp, like I’ve never heard it before. He jabs the shovel into the ground by his foot. “I’ve found some snake eggs that need to be moved. Come on, it will only take a minute.”
“I’ll watch the spider,” I say, though watching spiders is about as exciting as watching paint dry, and I shove Gordo out of the way and stand under the branch to get a clear view. Gordo runs over to Thomas and says, “What kind of snake? Can I keep one?” as they disappear around the corner.
Something is wrong with Thomas. In the past few days he hasn’t sung or listened to the radio or whittled. He says hello as usual, but there’s something different about the way he talks on the rare occasions he says anything. I keep asking if he’s okay, and he keeps saying he is, but I don’t believe him. He seems preoccupied, and I guess he’s been thinking about his animals and the house that he can’t buy.
I stand under the spider while it does nothing until Gordo comes back. I don’t know why the spider has to be watched, but I’ve given up trying to understand Gordo and his creatures.