CHILDREN BECOME THEMSELVES
There was a kind of unease stalking Jane, and it grew daily as her pregnancy bloomed. She couldn’t decide whether to blame the mask, the murders she’d borne witness to or the history of her own blood. Thoughts of Lance and his disease haunted her. It was genetic, and the idea that it might infect the cells she was giving her baby terrified her. Without warning the feeling would leap on her back and dig its claws in, a jungle animal weighted with muscle and teeth and driven by an instinct not to let go. Jane didn’t know how to fight the thing off and, instead, began to hide all day in her darkened bedroom, curtains drawn against the Liberian light, the air-conditioner rattling on its highest setting to drown out the sounds of the surf and the world going on—without Jane—outside.
For weeks, Mohammad slipped inside the bedroom only to place bowls of soup and bottles of boiled, filtered and chilled water on the bedside table. Jane would eat the things Mohammad cooked. She trusted him and his fastidious adherence to the rules of cleanliness. But she ate little else. Nothing fresh, nothing raw. The potential to make her baby sick by eating diseased produce or ingesting even a drop of untreated Liberian water hung over Jane constantly. Even her desire to shower was outweighed eventually by the terror that the unpotable tap water would somehow pass her lips. In the late afternoons, Paul returned from work, and when he was home, Jane climbed out of her bed and sat at the dining table with him to nibble dinner. She tried to be calm and happy around Paul, but the fear kept leaking out. All day long Jane counted squares on her calendar, calculating the day of conception and the day she was due. She wondered what her baby looked like week to week, she obsessed over the growth of her baby and was frightened to lose track. She compulsively checked off the days as they slid past. At thirty-two weeks the embassy would send her to the States to wait until Grace was born. Jane only had to hold on until then. At home, things would be clean and safe, and she would be able to breathe the air and drink the water again.
“I’m worried,” Paul said one night. “You aren’t doing well.” His face was scared, and the concern Jane saw there was a chisel to her fear and broke it all open.
“I’m scared,” Jane cried. “I can’t stop being scared, and I keep thinking this is how my brother started.” She couldn’t stop crying, and the bursts of emotion kept her in tears until Paul finally convinced her to get back in bed. He curled next to her, stroking her hair until her sleep came.
Jane refused to leave the house at all and missed two appointments with the embassy doctor. Finally Paul arranged a ticket for her to fly home. He knew the albatross of a wife suffering the kind of mental distress Jane was experiencing would impact his career. The State Department would limit his choice of future posts, and he’d be a far less attractive employee to ambassadors if they found out. Unwilling to risk that, he told his boss that Jane wanted her mother to help with the preparations for the baby. His tour in Liberia was almost finished, anyway. He would join her just before the baby’s due date. His next post was assigned—Washington, DC. They’d settle for a while.
* * *
“Back from Africa!” Those were her father’s first words when she exited customs and saw him. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him. Older and somewhat fragile. Jane hugged him, and he said, “And pregnant! Sure it’s not a voodoo baby?” He laughed.
Jane could still smell the salty Liberian air in her own hair, and when she opened her suitcase later, it released the scent of her Monrovia house—the slight tang of mildew she’d become used to and hadn’t realized was so pervasive.
That night, Jane woke up sweating, breathing heavily. She lay completely still, eyes tightly shut, and listened hard. In her dream, someone was there in the room with her. Someone was watching from a corner as she slept. Someone’s breath mingled with hers in the darkness of the bedroom. Slowly she gathered the courage to open one eye, then the other. The curtains were gauzy against the windows and since she’d kept them open for the air, they billowed out a bit with the night breeze. The streetlight, a few houses down, sent a cool white glow into the room. Even still, it took Jane a few minutes to remember where she was—in the guest bedroom of her parents’ house in Fairfax. There was the heavy wooden dresser between the two windows and the chintz-covered armchair piled with things she’d begun to unpack. There was the cat, curved and silent as a comma in the bed beside her. They weren’t touching, but Jane sensed the weight of the little body, the slight heat the cat gave off.
Jane tried to shake the dream from her head, but it left her breathless, with little shocks of terror that burst in her veins like fever. She wished her father hadn’t joked about her “voodoo baby.” Jane’s genes were tainted; she knew that. Her father knew that, too. It wasn’t something to joke about. The baby slid inside her and the movements were a comfort. This baby would be fine, Jane whispered to herself. Her brother was her brother, not her, and his demons wouldn’t infect her or her baby. Jane told herself this over and over in a mantra of her own design. Finally, she turned onto her left side and the cat stretched her legs and purred, then shifted into a furry ball. Jane pressed her right hand to the stretched dome of her belly. This is how she held her unborn daughter and this is how she banished the nightmare and finally fell asleep once more.
She woke to an overcast sky and the promise of rain. For June it was cool in Virginia. She could hear someone in the kitchen downstairs, and a sudden memory of her childhood struck her. When Jane’s mom was still healthy, she’d make a pot of tea and a pile of cinnamon toast for Jane every morning. Jane would sit at the blue kitchen table and eat. Jane’s friends thought it was weird to drink tea. None of the other kids did. But Jane’s mother made it sweet and milky, and Jane had a favorite cup, which she used every day. Jane couldn’t remember what happened to that mug—dark blue with white flowering vines trailing around it.
Later that first morning, Jane joined her dad and stepmother in the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee. “If I can borrow the car, I think I’ll go today,” Jane said. She’d showered and dressed but still felt bleary and light-headed from the jet lag and disturbed sleep. She hoped the coffee would help. “To see Lance.”
Jane’s father didn’t answer. His face changed slightly—his mouth slid into a line, and his jaw clenched just enough that Jane noticed. Jane wanted to force the conversation, poke her father with words. This was the chasm between them now. Her father and stepmother kept a strict schedule of visits to Lance—they had to draw lines, they’d explained once, in order to protect themselves from pain. Jane knew that was true theoretically, but in her heart she had never understood how her father could turn his back on his only son. Although Jane had come to appreciate—even love—her stepmother, she also silently blamed her for the boundaries erected between Lance and their father. Her real mother would have done anything for Lance.
It was disconcerting to drive along streets that were wide and clean and empty. They were so different from the crowded and colorful streets in Monrovia. There she’d have to navigate puddles of oily water and stray dogs wrestling for scraps, and she’d have to share space with children selling single cigarettes and ladies hawking vegetables or dusty packages of biscuits and noodles. At every stoplight someone would rush to slap a wet soapy rag on her windshield in the hope of earning a few cents. There was a loneliness to these empty American streets. Jane was shocked to feel a tiny wave of nostalgia unfurl inside her. She never ever thought she’d find things to miss about Monrovia.
The place her brother lived now tried hard to look homey from the outside. There were bright flowers in pots on a wide front porch and cheerful green shutters on all the windows. But you had to sign in at a front desk where a man had a dozen screens that all showed different views. In them you could see hallways, people shuffling in grainy black-and-white. The people looked like specters. Jane signed the book the man indicated, and then she was buzzed through a metal door into one
of the hallways. She thought the man at the desk was probably watching her now. She was a specter, too, like all the others.
After two years away, Jane was shocked by her brother’s appearance. Thin and pale and hunched over in a metal folding chair, he stared up at a TV screen affixed high in a corner of the common room. Jane could hardly tell the women from the men, as slouched and hunched as they were, dressed nearly identically in dreary, loose cotton clothes that puddled around them. But she knew her brother, and at her first sight of his back, she recognized him out of all the others. Something about the lines of his body, the way he sat, the shape of his head. It all made him, the little brother she grew up both resenting and adoring in the years before her mother’s death. He’d been a distraction in those early days when she wanted nothing more than to have her mother to herself. Later, he’d been a symbol of the reality that her mother was really dying—one she dodged by avoiding her mother’s desire to talk about Jane’s responsibility to Lance. But things changed again when Jane’s father remarried. Then, Jane saw him as her ally, the one person left who connected her directly to her mother. As he’d gotten older, he’d made her laugh and dared her to climb trees and helped her, slowly, move past the heaviness of her grief. He was smart and funny and athletic. He was handsome, too. When, in the middle of his sophomore year in college, he’d had his first schizophrenic episode, the whole family was shocked. They racked their memories for signs they’d missed, quirks of moods, silent periods, brief moments of deep confusion. They never agreed on whether or not the signs had been there, and after a few years, it didn’t matter anymore.
“He’s okay, you can go to him,” an orderly in bright green scrubs told Jane. She tried to ignore the other patients watching her as she crossed the room and knelt down on the linoleum next to her brother’s chair.
“Hi, Lance, it’s me. I’m back.”
She didn’t expect a reply, and she didn’t get one. He was often quiet. The drugs kept his hallucinations at bay, but they also sent him spinning in a different direction—into a completely internal world. After his first breakdown, Lance moved home and began a strict regimen of medications and therapy. Her father watched him closely, hired the best psychologists and sought innovative treatments as he researched endlessly.
Her dad and stepmother poured money and time into Lance at just the time when they wanted a new kind of freedom. Lance’s sickness took over every aspect of their lives for years. They couldn’t leave him alone, couldn’t travel and couldn’t trust him to take care of himself. Lance didn’t always respond to the medication, and when he forgot to take it or it stopped working, he could grow violent in an instant. By then, Jane was away at college. One day, not long after she’d come home to tell her dad she was leaving for Africa, she’d witnessed Lance switch from calmly eating lunch to grasping his father’s head in a tight lock, only letting go when Jane and her stepmother leaped upon him, scratching and screaming and pulling him back. The next day, her father had Lance committed again.
“We can’t put you in the face of that danger,” he’d said. “You shouldn’t have to be afraid in your own house.” But Jane hadn’t been afraid of Lance. Not ever. Instead, she felt only anger. She remembered the fight she’d had with them after Lance was gone. The things she’d accused them of—of using her as their reason to finally get rid of her brother.
Jane sat with Lance in the common room, with other patients watching them for several silent hours. Once, when she felt the baby moving, she grasped Lance’s hand and pressed it to her belly. “That’s your niece or nephew,” she said, and she’d watched his face. His expression didn’t change at all.
“He didn’t talk,” Jane said later that night at dinner. “Not even a word.” She mentioned it only as something to say; she knew they didn’t want to hear about Lance. They had locked him away in a mental compartment they only opened during their twice weekly, one-hour visits. But Jane wanted to talk. She still obsessed over her own mind and moods. The anxiety that had weighted her down for the last few months fed off the deep-seated fear that her own brain was as diseased as her brother’s. Or, worse, that this baby of hers would inherit Lance’s sickness. She was terrified of that and even more terrified that if that did happen, she would end up doing what her own father had—sending the child away and barely looking back.
* * *
Paul returned to her just in time. He’d packed the Monrovia house up and had all their freight directed to the States. He was exhausted when his plane landed, and Jane let him go right to bed. She opened his suitcases, though, and pulled out a couple of books he’d packed, a shirt or two and his toothbrush. She sniffed everything closely, both wanting and dreading a whiff of the place he’d come from.
Barely two days later, Grace was pulled from Jane under bright lights and a rush to the operating table. It wasn’t what Jane expected, and she lay shivering with surprise and terror as the doctors cut her open. Paul’s face was mostly hidden behind a neat blue mask, but Jane noticed the way his eyes looked—as if, for the very first time, he had no understanding of what was happening. There was nothing he could say, no way to control the outcome of the birth. Through the fear and the chill in Jane’s body, she saw his eyes and they made her feel a bubble of sympathy under everything else. Paul was not in charge here. This was not his element, and even though Jane never wanted Grace born this way—she’d imagined a natural birth, free of drugs and scalpels and fear—she was oddly relieved to see Paul in this moment of vulnerability. This wasn’t his to manage, none of it was. He wasn’t in control, and for the first time in their relationship, Jane felt fear like heat from his skin. She’d never seen him raw like this. It made her feel vindicated, somehow. Now you know, she thought. Now you know.
When Grace was in her arms—wet and red as meat—she felt elated. Paul leaned down and kissed her temple, awe in his eyes replacing the fear. He hadn’t looked at Jane with that expression for so long. She was new again for him—strong and capable. Already baby Grace changed everything.
For the first six weeks of Grace’s life, the new family lived with Jane’s parents. Paul spent days at the State Department, settling into his new position. Occasionally, Jane left Grace with her parents so she could visit Lance. He never spoke to her. He was a shell; the dark breathing creature of his brain, his real self, was hidden so deeply it couldn’t come out.
One evening, a few days before they were set to move into the little house they’d rented in Arlington, Jane and her father packed Grace into the stroller and walked slowly through a nearby park. Together they watched the little children dig holes in the sand and shout from between the bars of an elaborate jungle gym. Mothers sat on benches, watching closely, occasionally offering up juice boxes and packets of pretzels or Goldfish crackers to the kids who buzzed back and forth to them, bees to flowers.
“I miss those days,” Jane’s father said. “When you and Lance were little and it was so very simple. It all changes fast. You just can’t predict.”
Jane didn’t answer. She was stunned her father had said Lance’s name. She hadn’t heard it from his mouth in so long. The stroller wheels clicked against the seams in the sidewalk, and Jane’s father breathed deeply. “It’s not perfect, nothing ever is. Kids aren’t yours to keep, in the end, Jane. You can’t control every outcome. I tried to make a place for Lance, but I couldn’t. It was too hard. We had to accept him the way he is. The Lance you knew? The Lance we loved? He’s gone forever. It was our gift to him to finally acknowledge that. Children become themselves. You can’t force an outcome just because you want to.”
A few months later, Paul and Jane took Grace to get her passport photo. They didn’t know when, but they would be posted overseas again, and even the baby needed official papers. Because Grace couldn’t sit or stand for the photo, Jane had to hold her up. The photographer directed her to stand behind a thick, blue drape and push her hands out—still draped—to lift the baby up
for the camera. Behind her dark curtain, Jane held tightly to Grace’s wiggling body. Several weeks later, Paul brought the passport home with him from work. When Jane looked at it, she saw the beautiful round face of her beloved daughter. It was a good picture, and Jane filed it away with her own passport and Paul’s and didn’t think of it again.
Months later, when they were packing up for their next post, Paul pulled the three passports out and laid them on his dresser where they wouldn’t be forgotten. This time, when Jane opened Grace’s, her eyes were drawn to the space beyond Grace’s soft, round head to the undefined, almost ghostly shape behind the blue curtain. For a second Jane thought maybe it hadn’t been her back there, not her at all who lifted the baby’s body dutifully up to the camera’s eye. It couldn’t be her who’d agreed to take this new and delicate thing so far away. And she felt the sensation of slipping on ice, uncontrolled and dangerous; there was no way to stop from falling. For an instant, she didn’t even recognize herself.
SOLAI VALLEY
There it was again—a puff of dust.
Ruthie’s heart beat fast. She licked her bottom lip, and wondered if she should put her boots back on. If it were John coming back, she’d want to meet him at the turnoff. The sun was sliding low, a pure white smudge in the pale blue sky. Twilight was coming. She should put the kettle on. John would want his tea.
Her eye had caught something out beyond the screen door, out beyond the paving-stone walkway that led from the house to the two concrete posts marking the entrance to the property. The front field was out that way, hardly a field now that the drought had erased the grasses and shrubbery bit by bit, leaving only the bones and hides of the cows she used to help tend.
The Brightest Sun Page 12