Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  She cried that night. She cried for the suffering her family endured. She cried for her auntie, who was sick and whom she had disgraced. She cried for the child she had abandoned, wondering if he even knew that across continents there existed another mother – his real mother. She cried out of humiliation for the pathetic condition that Jamila had found her in. She cried for war-torn

  Somalia. She cried for herself.

  Her family had undergone the unthinkable, and still they had maintained their dignity, on that she would have bet her life. There was no dignity in selling mothers of innocent children poison. There was no pride in being beaten by her husband; her father had treated her mother like a goddess. She looked down at the tattoos on her arms and cried for the life that was slipping away. She cried into the night. She cried the next day. She cried for a week. She cried until the tears no longer came, and the water seemed to well up inside her, trapped. She cried until the wet sobbing became the dr y moaning of a wounded animal in the desert, until her thoughts lost their clarity and she no longer knew why she cried at all.

  In the days after Jamila’s visit she longed to write to Auntie, to speak to her, but she couldn’t until she got herself straight. If Jamila kept her promise of silence, the family might continue to consider her merely selfish and rude and ungrateful. She would return eventually, and when she got there, she would be whole and beautiful and loving, and they would love her back. She would make it up to all of them. Now she was getting ahead of herself, because there was much to do before her plans could take shape: an empty sack cannot stand, her mother always said. But her time at Shelby was almost up, and she had wasted most of it.

  *

  She was afraid to leave Shelby, to face the outside again. Then, just when the trees beyond the fence were the palest green and the air smelled like rain and a new beginning, she had another visitor. Nick was tanned and healthy looking when he planted a kiss on her cheek. She turned away.

  “I’ve missed you, babe.” “Well, I don’t miss you.”

  “That’s not what your postcards said.” “You get them?”

  He nodded. “Bastard,” she said.

  “I’ve been away – Florida. I needed to sort things out.”

  She didn’t know how to behave. She was angry and excited at the same time.

  “I don’t blame you for being pissed off, but shouldn’t I be the one to carr y the grudge? After all, you shot me.” His smile said he knew her better than she did herself, that despite anything she said or did, he knew what the outcome of his visit would be.

  “And I would do it again,” she told him.

  “I didn’t testify against you,” he reminded her. “Doesn’t that carry any weight?”

  Her heart soared, but she kept her face expressionless. He asked her to sit down with him on the sofa.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking this past year and a half, Fatma. And I’ve done a lot of work. No more drugs. No more booze. I’m trying. I swear. And I’m going to help you stay clean too – after all, it was me who really got you into this mess.” He looked down. “I fucked up big-time.”

  Fatma was silent. She wished there was a glass wall between them and they were talking through a telephone, so great was her urge to touch him. He was her worst addiction.

  “Why somebody else?” she asked. “Why Elsa?”

  “Men are weak, Fatma. And when you’re not with me, I’m even weaker. I made a big mistake. But I’ve changed. Living without you has taught me a lesson.”

  “What lesson?” “I need you.”

  “Me and you like oil and water,” she said, knowing full well they were more like a magnet and a piece of iron.

  “I moved into a new condo on the waterfront in Rockfield. I’ve even got the practice back on its feet. It’ll take some time to get it to where it was. It may never be exactly there, but it’s going well. I put in some calls to a guy I went to law school with who works for the State Department. He thinks he can find a way for us to get your son here for good. Hussein Kornmeyer, right?”

  “Al-Nassar. My mother’s family name.”

  Remember me? Your flesh and blood? a sleeping voice within her said. The one you let go of. The one who still clings to your insides like moss does to stone. The one who, like the sun and the moon, will never go away. The source of all your sadness.

  Nick took her hand in his. It was large and smooth and warm. She let him. “I’d like you to come home with me,” he said. “I want to take care of you. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a nut out there. It’s not safe, and I’m worried about you.”

  She knew all about what was going on in Rockfield: a serial killer on the loose whose targets were black female addicts. Women were breaking parole to be sent back to jail, just to get off the streets. One woman’s frozen naked body had been found in an alley off Gaylord Street, pantyhose stuffed down her throat. Another was discovered in her home, her nude body sodomized with a vase. Yet another had been found under some bushes behind the post office, propped up in a grotesque sexual position. All had been raped and strangled. Ever y new inmate had come in with stories. “I need go to Mombasa. My auntie’s sick.” “I know.”

  “You come back, Nick?”

  “Every visiting day. We can do it, Princess. We can start over. Trust me.”

  Nick did return – every Sunday for the next three months. She began to take her shower on Saturdays. She bought perfume and deodorant and mouthwash from the Shelby store. She took care to fix her hair the way he liked it. But when he showed up, she was nasty to him. He absorbed her abuse as if it were something he deserved and expected. After five or six visits, she began to soften and hungered for his hand on hers, his hello and goodbye kisses, first on her cheek, then on her lips.

  *

  The morning she was released she left with Nick, against the advice of Miss Sarah, who slipped her card into Fatma’s pants pocket on her way out. Fatma got into his car just as she had on the day of the feast years before. He said they could be like Isaac and India, who had finally gone straight and bought a house and a dry cleaning business in Worcester. The last he’d heard, India was pregnant. They would travel, Nick said – back to Africa and Saudi Arabia. Back to Mombasa.

  His condo was a remodeled paper factory set between Silva’s Fish Market and Lambert’s Restaurant Supply. From the balcony of the condo, you didn’t see them or the decaying city; all you saw was the river and the beautiful bridge that arched from Rockfield to Carlington, where Daniel had first brought her. And so Nick took her to the balcony, where she made the mistake of looking straight ahead and never behind. “A toast to a new beginning.” Nick held out a glass of champagne. “Just a toast, that’s all,” he insisted.

  *

  She’d been out only a few weeks when Nick suggested they take a vacation in Key West, where he said he’d been living for a good part of the time she was in jail. He wanted to show her the place that had helped him get it all together.

  “What about my probation officer?”

  “I’ll call him for you. He won’t mind if you skip one or two visits.”

  “I don’t know, Nick.”

  “Come on, Princess, I’ve already arranged time off.” He was annoyed, and those little red veins popped out at his temples.

  “Okay, Nick.”

  “You’re happy about this, aren’t you, Princess?” “Yes, Nick. I’m happy.”

  They went shopping for beach clothes. He bought her bikinis and robes and hats and strapless long dresses for the evenings of dining and dancing on the pier. He bought her a pair of sunglasses with 14-karat gold designs on the frames. He didn’t know what to do to make it all up to her. It was he who undressed her now and tried everything to bring her pleasure, and she remembered how much she had missed being loved.

  They flew down to Miami and rented a red convertible, because Nick thought it would be fun to drive to the Keys instead of taking another flight. He sang all the way: “Runnin’ down the road tryin’
to loosen my load / I got seven women on my mind ...” And Fatma laughed as they crossed bridge after bridge connecting the islands. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, but the wind was strong and whipped it around her head. Strands of hair escaped and stung her cheeks. They drove so far, to the end of Key West, she thought they would go right into the water.

  “This is where we’ll watch the most magnificent sunset and eat fresh mahi mahi and Key lime pie. Hear that?” he said of the Spanish music on the radio. “It’s from Cuba.”

  “How close we are?” she asked. “Ninety miles or so.”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Why would you want to, even if we could?” he asked, laughing.

  “I think it be nice there. Like heaven. Like Mombasa.”

  A Higher Power

  Fatma should have known when they pulled into the Sunny Glow Motel that something was wrong: Nick never stayed in places like that. He liked valet parking and bellboys and room ser vice. Her father had taught her never to drop the stick until the snake is dead, but she was hot and sticky and tired from the long day of travel. She went to take a shower; Nick brought in their luggage.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, with the thin scratchy towel barely covering her breasts and fanny, Nick’s eyes had the expression of a rabid dog. He had never forgotten the shooting; he hadn’t testified only because he had wanted her to get alone to seek his own form of justice. This time he didn’t wait for her to take the first punch. His hands dug into her shoulders; the skin on her hip and leg burned as he dragged her along the carpet. His grip tightened; her head crashed into the wall. Fists met her eyes, then her mouth; her teeth cut her tongue and the insides of her lips. Next she was flying through the air like a rag doll. She lay curled up where she landed. He kicked her in the back and tried to pull the diamond ring off her finger, but he couldn’t. “Fucking bitch!” she heard him say. “I’m gonna kill you. By the way, I had a vasectomy twenty years ago, and I have no friends in Washington.” It was dark when she came to. She didn’t know how long she’d been lying there or whether Nick was on his way back to offer her a fix or finish her off. She crawled over to her suitcase and dressed. When she phoned the front desk and asked for a taxi, the clerk told her she owed him for two days. “Fuck it,” he said when he saw her

  hobbling out of the room.

  She had only enough money for taxis, so she called Jeannine Fournier and asked her to have a ticket waiting at the Key West airport. The attendants there were kind, trying to understand the words she uttered through clenched jaws. They called for a cart to drive her to the gate, and in Hartford they arranged for a taxi from Bradley Airport to Commonwealth Medical Center.

  Her eyes were swollen shut as they wheeled her into X-ray, but she heard loud and clear a familiar voice, and she dropped her head so the woman speaking couldn’t see her.

  “Fatma?” Pia whispered, kneeling in front of her broken friend. “Is that you?”

  *

  The injection they gave her for the ruptured disk barely relieved the pain radiating from her lower back to her buttocks and down her leg like a steady bolt of lightning. So they admitted her and fed her more drugs that wrapped her in that blanket of numbness and sent her traveling so far in her dreams that she found herself in Mombasa, walking up Biashara Street. Only it didn’t look like Biashara Street, at all but Main Street in Rockfield. “Who are you? Where are you going?” Pia asked. She was

  wearing a black buibui.

  “You speak very good English,” Fatma said. “I studied hard. Now tell me, where are you going?” “Nyumbani,” she said in Swahili. Home.

  “Speak English. Everyone speaks English here now. No one understands Swahili anymore.”

  Fatma couldn’t remember which way it was to Auntie’s house, and so she walked and walked in the town she had known like the palm of her hand. The more she walked, the more lost she got. Then she saw the blue Indian Ocean behind the tall towers where the lawyers worked, and she knew that Auntie’s house was near. She began to run, but she never reached the ocean. Another woman in a buibui appeared again out of an alley. It was her old maid Lisha, and Fatma was ecstatic with relief.

  “Lisha, take me to Auntie.”

  “Where are your clothes?” she asked coldly. Fatma looked down and saw she was naked.

  “You are not Fatma,” Lisha said. “You are American. American women are naked.”

  “I am not naked. I had a towel. I must have dropped it.” “Maybe Iblis took it from you. Do you remember Iblis?” “Yes.”

  “You did not listen to me. You walked under the baobab when you should not have. You are not Fatma. You are not an American. You are Iblis now. Shame on you. Go now. Go away. Shame on you. Go. It’s time for the parade.”

  A large statue of the Madonna was being paraded by a bunch of little children. She was dressed in the same clothes as the Madonna in Rockfield, only she was not the Madonna, she was Auntie – a giant Auntie. And she was headed toward Fatma.

  “She does not know you anymore,” Lisha said. “Go.” “Wait!” Fatma cried. “Please. I am Fatma. Take me home.” She tried to speak English, but the words came out in Swahili. The children kept marching; the statue came closer, until it was about to run her down.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “Gina langu ni Fatma,” she sobbed. I am Fatma.

  “Fatma,” the nurse said. “That’s right, honey. That’s what your chart says. Just a bad dream. Here, this’ll make you sleep better. No more bad dreams.” The nurse injected her arm. “Just nice ones.”

  *

  In the morning she asked for her clothes. An orderly brought her the brown paper bag containing her belongings, saying her doctor would have to discharge her before she could go. And if the doctor wouldn’t? She would leave on her own; she was good at running away.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Pia said when she found her dressing.

  The swelling had subsided somewhat, and she could see Pia better now. She wore a white jacket and her hair was cut short.

  “You look beautiful. Like grown-up lady.” “I am grown up.”

  “What you’re doing here?”

  “I’m a resident here. I was in Boston for a few years, but I’ve come back. My mother isn’t well.”

  “Like mine.”

  “Is your auntie sick?”

  “You my doctor?” Fatma managed. It was too hard to explain anything else.

  “No. But the doctor who admitted you yesterday will be in to see you soon. Who did this to you, Fatma? And where’s Nick?” She put her head down.

  “Oh my God, Fatma. It was him.” “I need to go.”

  “You can’t even walk.”

  But she couldn’t stay there with the drugs and the patient moaning in the bed next to her, the constant pricking of needles and drawing of blood, the strange hands all over her body. She needed to go. Pia was a doctor; she must have known all along about Fatma: Fatma’s interior must always have been as open to Pia as those of the cadavers she worked on in medical school.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked. “Call Miss Sarah.”

  “Sarah who?”

  Fatma had no idea what her last name was or what had happened to the card she had given her. “At Shelby. At jail,” she whispered, hoping to soften the admission of where she’d been. “Just say Miss Sarah. They know.”

  She took the ring off her finger and offered it to Pia. “Keep this for me.” It was too nasty out on the street, and she didn’t want to lose a finger for it.

  “If I were you I’d sell it, or better yet, I’d throw it away.” During her stay in the hospital, they treated her eyes with drops

  that were more effective than anything she’d used before. They also hooked her up to machines that diverted the messages her damaged vertebra sent to her brain. She was given massage and physical therapy, but only drugs alleviated the dull aches and burning spasms.

  “I always want to be on my own,” she told Miss Sar
ah when she arrived. “I make so many mistakes.”

  “We all make mistakes, sugar. Some just show more than others. Some have greater consequences.” “What I do now?”

  “You violated your probation. Missed two visits. If you’re brought up in front of a judge, he’ll send you back to Shelby.”

  “But Nick called the probation officer. He said it’s okay.”

  Miss Sarah looked at her as though to say, You still believe in him?

  Fatma should have known that Nick would never kill her; he would never jeopardize his freedom with a murder charge. She should have known there was no breaking probation without consequences; Nick had planned to have her locked up again.

  “Under the circumstances, I might be able to convince your probation officer and the judge of an alternative,” Miss Sarah said.

  *

  Miss Wilma wasn’t as sweet as Miss Sarah or as cold as Jeannine Fournier. Behind a slight stature and eyes like two pieces of coal set into smooth mahogany-colored skin lurked a mind as quick as a fox’s. There was nothing phony about her, from her alligator shoes and tailored suits to her matching silk scarves, gold jewelry, and frank tongue. She didn’t waste time telling Fatma and other new arrivals to Haven House that she was the product of alcoholic parents and a heroin-addict husband who had overdosed at thirty-five, because she made one thing very clear: you either kept up with Miss Wilma and life at Haven House, or they moved on without you.

  Even though Fatma had come from the hospital, they deloused her at Haven House as if she’d come from prison or the street. They gave her a urine test and made her shower several times. Then, after Miss Sarah left, Miss Wilma took her down to the cellar, where there were racks and racks of clothing according to size. “They’re donated,” she said. “The underwear is new, a gift from Sundry Undies here in Willowsville. Pick out something to sleep in, something to wear every day, and something you’ll feel special in. When you graduate, you’ll get a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to the Salvation Army Store.”