The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  There was one thing she understood above all else: there was no way to hide what was done.

  And glinting behind that knowledge was a question—would a thirsty mob spare a child?—whose answer she did not want to have to learn.

  She turned to Grace. “Take Isaac and Wilborn. Leave everything else. Come.” Grace disappeared inside and Rose went to her brother and touched his shoulder again. He was stroking Agnes’s cheek with a bloodied hand.

  “James, we must go.”

  He looked up at her with blinking eyes, making no sound. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  Thunder erupted all around them. The first raindrops began to fall.

  “We need to leave, James. Now.”

  She heard Grace inside the hut, coaxing Isaac to leave the paper bird and take her hand. Rose’s calm—the hardness of the bush—began to crack.

  “Think of Isaac,” she pleaded. “Think of what they would do to him.”

  “Isaac,” James repeated dumbly. Agnes’s head lolled in his lap, her mouth slightly open. The rain grew steadily stronger, making patterns of pockmarks in the dust, thickly crimson.

  Voices carried from the direction of the road. So soon? She tried to wrench James up by his elbow, but his body was slack and heavy. She heard Isaac resisting Grace in the hut.

  “Brother, please,” she begged.

  “No,” James said at last, his voice raw. He met her eyes. “I will stay.”

  “But Isaac,” Rose said. The voices were getting nearer. She could recognize the shrill tone of the preacher; several other men had joined.

  James turned again to Agnes’s face. “Yes. Isaac.” Without looking again at Rose, he said, “Take the children to Beatrice. It is not safe for you here.”

  She gripped his arm tighter. “What good can you do? She’s gone.”

  His eyes flickered up, past her, and Rose turned: Isaac had come out of the hut and wrestled free of Grace’s grasp, and was standing, belly out, looking at them, uncomprehending. Thunder cracked open the sky.

  “I have done enough wrong in my life,” James said quietly. His eyes never strayed from Isaac. “Let me do this one good.”

  * * *

  A moment later Rose had Isaac in her arm—he was heavy but calm, at least, wrapped around her neck—and Grace at her side, Wilborn tied to the girl’s back, as they followed the path away from the hut toward the river. From there they could walk upstream to another path that would take them to Beatrice’s home. They moved cautiously, careful not to draw attention; from behind, Rose could still hear men’s voices escalating quickly into anger, though the noise was quickly drowned out by the storm. The men had stopped at the hut, as James knew they would; too preoccupied with the scene, they wouldn’t think to pursue any possible fugitives. The preacher would try to soothe them, she expected, but the shouting would attract others, and in this way the mob would grow, seething, until it was beyond control. But she couldn’t think of that. The children were safe. Even Isaac. No one would ever have to know.

  They paused when they reached the river, Rose breathing heavily. Her arm shook from the weight of the boy; she was out of practice carrying a child, and even in the bush she’d had both arms. Now she felt always off-balance, no way to steady herself. The rain was becoming more intense, pebbling the muddy, slow-moving creek water, where bits of flotsam drifted. Aside from a Marabou stork stalking augustly among the reeds, the place was empty.

  She set Isaac down and pulled the phone out of her purse to dial the police. They could stop this thing; they could intervene. She knew that she must report it anonymously lest they come after her, too.

  The police didn’t answer. The line rang and rang.

  “You should not come to Beatrice’s place, auntie,” Grace said.

  Rose turned, wiped the rainwater where it was gathering at her temples. “I have to make sure you’re safe.”

  Grace turned to her, and it seemed in that moment that the girl was older than her years. “They do not love you there.”

  For a second Rose was dizzy. When she looked up, Grace already had Isaac in her small hand. The girl’s eyes were bright and fierce. The rain had no care for them; it pounded harder and harder, as if searching for a way through her very skin.

  “Apwoyo, auntie,” Grace said—and without waiting for a reply, took Isaac and trotted onward, three little souls into the storm.

  Rose watched their departing figures until they turned a corner and disappeared behind the brush, the leaves battered by the storm and wind. The river was growing in strength. She felt that her feet had grown long and deep into the soil. Her body was a broken thing.

  When her phone began to ring, at first she didn’t understand the source of the noise. The melody was so artificial and bright, it made no sense at the riverbank by the garbage with the stork, and therefore it couldn’t belong to reality.

  She answered in a daze. “Hello?”

  Franklin’s voice carried heartily through the torrent of rain. “Rose, apwoyo, eh? You are fine in Kitgum? I have received your message, Ocen will be happy to hear this news.”

  She had to sort his words for sense. Ah: the lie, Ocen’s “payment.”

  “I must return your call later,” she said.

  “But he is here!”

  The drumming in her ears drowned out all else. “He is there? Ocen?”

  “Yeah, that is what I said.”

  “Since when?”

  “Three weeks … maybe four.”

  Her vision became blurry, crowded. “I called before. You said he never came.”

  “Ach,” he dismissed. “I never said.”

  It didn’t matter.

  “Can I talk to him?”

  He coughed. “I mean to say, he is not here at this moment. He went for a short trip. But he is returning soon.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. Perhaps.”

  Her pulse slowed. The man told tales. He didn’t know anything about Ocen. He only cared about the money.

  But was there some truth here? She had to think. “And the mono girl?”

  “Eh, Lily. I know her. That one, her backpack is bigger than herself.”

  “They are together?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “She is with him now? She’s returning with him?”

  Hesitation. “Why are you asking me? Does she have something to do with the money?”

  The stork hunched down against the wind, and the muddy water swirled and pushed loose a pile of plastic bags and debris.

  Deliberately, carefully, she lowered her voice and said, “Lakwali.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was palpable. She did not repeat the word. Finally he spoke. “What do you know about that place?” In the forced casualness of his tone, she heard everything. She hit the end button without responding.

  The world tilted. Her hands trembled with cold and confusion as she scrolled through her contacts to find Christoph’s number. She dialed, waited.

  “Rose?” he answered. “Did we have something scheduled for today?”

  “I need you to pick me up,” she said. “We must leave Kitgum. Immediately.”

  “What are you talking about? Is everything all right?”

  “I know where they went,” she said. “Lily and Ocen. I know.”

  ***

  OCEN

  December 2, 2008

  Kitgum, Uganda

  Running. Screams. Silence. Stars.

  For a few seconds after he jolts abruptly to consciousness, Ocen lies blinking into the blackness, willing his pulse to slow, his breath to return. A dream, he reminds himself, as he’s done so many nights before. It was just a dream.

  Running. Screams. Silence. Stars.

  Awake, though, the memory is sharper, more potent than the nightmare, and he struggles to push it away. The shouts, the confusion, the pop!pop!pop!pop! of guns going off in the dark, the red flares. Nearly ten years have passed since that night, but he can still smell the beginn
ings of smoke from a hut on fire, still feel the pressure of his mother’s hands pushing him out the door in a panic, her voice choked with worry over Opiyo, who’d snuck out to meet Rose and not returned. He can still hear his mother’s urgent whisper: Find him and flee, find him and flee.

  But the rebels were already upon them, among them, and in his terror Ocen could not search—he could only run. He heard the screaming behind him until he wasn’t sure whether it remained in life, or if it was only in his head. The earth was cool and damp beneath him, the touch of brush rough on his skin.

  Night passed for a million years.

  When he returned to the camp in the yellow-bluish dawn, he saw them there: his parents, unmoving. The dark earth. The hazy sky. Trails of smoke, bridging the space between.

  There were other bodies, too. Too many. But not Opiyo.

  Ocen checks the time on his cell phone. Just before four; he should have been awake already. He rushes to dress, to prepare his few belongings, placing an extra shirt, a pair of socks, and his toothbrush into a black plastic bag, then slipping his identification documents along with his small savings and cell phone into the zippered pocket of the jacket he’s wearing. Everything else in the hut remains: the bowl and spoon, the mattress and sheets, the leaky jerry can, his logbook, last year’s calendar on the wall. He won’t need any of it where he’s going. Around his wrist is the bracelet he always wears, the one Rose gave him: three different metals, silvery iron and reddish copper and golden brass, wired and braided and linked for all time. It comforts him to feel the cool metal against his skin, to be touched by a thing that has been touched by her.

  Before he closes the door behind him, he glances around the tight, spare space one last time. If Rose comes to look for him here, what will she see? What conclusions will she draw?

  It pains him to imagine her after he leaves. How long will it take her to know that he’s gone? There were so many times in the past weeks when he was a breath away from telling her everything: the revelation, the impossibility, the meticulous preparations. But he was so angry. It shames him, this anger; yet it’s the force that thrusts him forward, that he hopes will carry him through the coming weeks. The fight he picked with Rose the other night had been fabricated—he needed to cloud the circumstances of his absence, and driving a wedge between them was the safest approach—but the emotion was true. He hadn’t been certain until then that he would follow through with Lily’s plan, but after Rose hurled that word at him—coward, she’d said, an insult that pierced him to the very core—his resolve became firm, and he knew he would go.

  Now the early morning stars shine high overhead, quietly dazzling in their distant shrouds. A crescent moon glints seductively on the shiny metal of his boda where it leans on its kickstand at the edge of the brush. When he grabs the handlebars and pulls it upright, the movement startles a stray dog, which trots off, pausing to scratch an ear before disappearing behind the neighbor’s hut.

  It feels different to touch the motorcycle now that it belongs to him. When Lily gave him the money last week, he was embarrassed—he never wanted to beg—but she’d convinced him so thoroughly of the necessity. This way they won’t be dependent on public transportation; they can travel unnoticed, unremembered: just another mono on a boda. You can pay me back afterward, if you like, she said. After we return.

  She believes this, he knows: that their return is not a matter of if.

  She’s already said she won’t come back to Kitgum with him—she’ll travel straight to Kampala to catch her flight out of Entebbe. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful a white Christmas in Colorado can be, she said. The snow makes everything clean and new.

  When he returns to Kitgum—if he returns—all will be new here. But clean? What in this place can ever be clean again? Nothing that he knows. Nothing that he’s seen.

  He takes the side roads through town, avoiding the bus station where the overnight bus from Kampala would be arriving sometime soon. No one can see us leave together, Lily said again and again, and so he is careful to skirt the streets with the bars, too, where other bodas will be waiting for the stumbling drunks after last call. He understands Lily’s caution, though as he passes the street that leads to Rose’s house, he has to make a concerted effort not to turn.

  He crosses the bridge and heads down the road toward St. Joseph’s. Finally, far in the distance, his headlights catch on the white façade of the Mission—and there she is, standing on the steps with an enormous backpack. His chest constricts and releases, constricts and releases.

  As he slows to a stop in front of her, she smiles.

  “Apwoyo,” Lily says, almost shyly.

  “Apwoyo.” The low gurgle of the idling engine rises to envelop them, and for a second he wants to laugh: what are they doing? What nonsense has brought them to this point? Let us remain, he wants to say; let us forget.

  But she’s already climbing onto the seat behind him, her slight body burdened by the weight of her pack. She straddles the bike like a man, and he can’t help but think of Rose, seated gracefully with both legs on one side—the way she’d lean her cheek against his back, wrap her arm around his belly, and he could feel her warmth through his shirt. But now it’s Lily’s heat, and the sense is altogether different.

  “Are you ready?” she whispers.

  His toes still touch the earth, but barely, as he steadies the bike while revving the engine, and then they are moving, and his shoes are on the footrests, and the ground is falling away beneath them. He turns his head and says into the wind, “Let us begin.”

  PART II

  THE RESURRECTED

  CHAPTER 13

  SABINE

  December 29

  The SUV splattered mud as it barreled forward, rumbling through puddles and over bumps at a bone-jarring speed, the windshield wipers working relentlessly while Sabine, behind the wheel, squinted to see through the storm. Christoph sat in the passenger seat; Rose was in the back. Nobody spoke. The dirt road unfurled straight ahead, flanked by mango trees and low brush, everything blurred in the rain. Sabine knew she was driving too fast—how many times had she told David to slow down when the road was wet?—but every time she lifted her foot slightly from the gas pedal she was overcome by restlessness, by the sense that every second was precious, and her foot pressed back down and the speedometer crept higher.

  She’d insisted both on taking her rental car and on driving, despite Christoph’s protestations particularly toward the latter; she reminded him that she had significantly more at-the-wheel experience in Uganda than he did, and Lily was her family, not his. The statement—spoken perhaps with more force than she’d intended—had the desired effect, and he’d climbed into the passenger seat without further complaint. In the rearview mirror Sabine could see Rose in the backseat, still wrapped in the towel she’d been wearing when Sabine met them at the Bomah half an hour before. Rose and Christoph had been sitting on the musty couches in the lobby when she arrived, panicked, after getting Christoph’s phone call outside the library. The exchange was brief—only the essentials: Rose had reason to believe Ocen and Lily left Kitgum together, that they’d traveled to Arua, and that Ocen’s uncle would know more. Arua? Sabine thought wildly. What’s in Arua? But she didn’t even ask the question; she would find out when she got there. Her luggage was already packed and in the car. Rose said she had everything she needed, too. It took Christoph five minutes to put together an overnight bag, and then they were on their way.

  The farther they drove from the center of Kitgum, the fewer pedestrians were on the road. Despite the approximate peace, people remained instinctually afraid of wandering from the relative security of town. Occasionally Sabine saw a bicycle lying at the side of the road, marking where a brave—or desperate—farmer had returned to his fields, and any time they approached a camp or village there would be more people coming and going, even in the rain, but in the long stretches in between, the roads were empty, the fields lay fallow, and the landscape that
rolled by was vast and green and wet.

  They’d just passed the junction at Acholibur—Sabine took the right fork, southwest toward Gulu—when Christoph cleared his throat and said, “We should call the police.”

  Sabine was quiet; Rose, too. When no one replied, he pulled out his phone from his pocket. Sabine reached across and put a hand on his elbow.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “They can help us.”

  Sabine glanced in the mirror at Rose, whose face was turned toward the window. She seemed to be somewhere else. It was strange; being near Rose heightened Sabine’s awareness of her own body, the symmetry of her two arms, two wrists, two hands—how suddenly superfluous the doubling seemed. Sabine thought of their encounter yesterday outside the prison, Rose’s evasive demeanor. Had she known then that Lily and Ocen were together? What else was she hiding now? Could Sabine trust her?

  “I’m calling,” Christoph said.

  “Don’t,” Sabine said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  Sabine downshifted as they approached a particularly bad stretch of road. The car shuddered and shook as she coaxed it through puddles deep enough to swallow the tires. When they were past the worst of it, she said, “There are things you don’t know about Lily. Things I didn’t learn until I got to Kitgum.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looked at Rose again. This time the woman’s eyes met hers. In her gaze Sabine saw an interest that bordered on wariness. Maybe if Sabine opened up first—if she laid all her cards out on the table—Rose would do the same.

  “You remember how Linda said that Lily was acting strangely?” Sabine said. “That she’d been distant? I think I know what it was.”

  Christoph tensed, and she felt a sinking sense of loss. She pushed on. “Through her work at the rehabilitation center, Lily learned that the LRA was involved in the illegal ivory trade. I believe she spent her last month in Kitgum doing research. It’s possible she uncovered sensitive information tracing back to local officials.” She repeated Jochem’s story about the journalist in Kampala. “I have no way of knowing what’s true or who to trust. The police have shut me out of their investigation. It could be incompetence or apathy, but I’m not willing to take the risk.”