But not without having the last word, of course.
“I have friends in the State Department,” he said. “I can get you all fucking fired tomorrow for this. Don’t think I won’t be talking to your supervisors.”
Mia rolled her eyes and looked as though she wanted to flip him the bird, but knew better. There was a moment of solidarity among all of us then, a moment where we all felt a little morally superior to those rich American assholes. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel like one of those rich American assholes.
Derek and I followed Mia back into her office. She took the half-empty beer from her brother’s hand.
“It’s getting worse and worse.” She took a sip that finished it off. “First it was the volun-tourism, which I could handle, people paying lots of money to come here and help us build things. Even though they never built the right things. They’d build a school, but we have no teachers. They built a well where there wasn’t any water. It was self-serving, but those people genuinely wanted to do good things, even if it wasn’t for the right reasons. But these people. These are the worst. They want to come for five or ten minutes, an hour tops, and just take as many pictures of poverty as they can fit on their memory cards. They want to take selfies with the refugees so they can show their friends and colleagues back home. I want to scream at them: these refugees don’t exist to be on your Instagram. But then some of them give us money, and money is the one thing we do need. The government really is cracking down. An American woman stayed after dark one night and she was harassed by some of the men.”
“Is the camp dangerous?” I asked.
Mia sighed. “Yes and no. Anytime you have people in a hopeless situation there’s an element of danger. There’s mostly petty crime, the crimes of desperation. One of the teenagers could have plucked that fat bastard’s wallet right out of his pants. And you know who that would have fallen on? The kid. She could have gotten a few years in jail because that man didn’t have an ounce of street sense.” Her face darkened. “It happened a year ago,” she said quietly. “The girl, she was barely twelve, she drowned herself in the river instead of going to jail because she didn’t want to be a burden on her mother. The wallet she stole was empty except for a driver’s license and one credit card.”
We were all silent then.
Derek sat down next to his sister and slung an arm around her shoulders.
“You can always come back to Oz,” he offered. “If this is getting to be too much for you.”
“And move in with you? Be the old spinster sister living in your attic?”
“We’d keep you in the basement,” he joked. “And you’d only have to go in there when we had company.”
I enjoyed watching the sibling camaraderie between them. My older sister and I had never been close. We were six years apart. Even though we never talked about it, my sister never understood why I was so desperate to leave Wisconsin, why I wanted to travel the world. Kelly taught the fifth grade. I’d seen her and her husband only a handful of times since I left for college. In my third-grade notebook I’d written, I want a big life. I didn’t know exactly what that looked like at eight. Of course the irony is that I still don’t know exactly what it looks like at forty, but the longing never went away.
Just then Buppha returned. She walked so softly, like an alley cat stalking a restaurant’s back door, that I was always surprised to find her standing right next to me.
“Ready to go, Kate?”
I nodded and stood. My joints creaked. I extended my hand to Mia. “I’d really like to come back and help out. I don’t want you to think I’m like those people you just shooed away.”
“Of course,” she answered. “You’re welcome anytime. You’re nothing like them. You stood up to that son of a bitch. If only we did have cameras. We can’t even get enough power for the refrigerators. Half our vaccines went bad because we couldn’t keep them cold.”
The mention of the vaccines reminded me of the woman I’d met on the street.
“Do you know a woman named Htet?”
Mia squinted and tapped her fingers on the desk. “She has two little girls, right?” A look of recognition crossed her features. “She’s been here for maybe six months. Quiet. Keeps to herself, not that I blame her. She’s been through a lot.”
“What’s her story?” I asked.
Mia massaged her temples, as if the memory inspired a headache. “Her husband was attacked by the military police almost a year ago. He was badly beaten, three ribs broken, his skull cracked. I think they were farmers. Someone probably used him as a scapegoat. Htet nursed him back to health. Her husband got her and the girls across the border, but he knew they needed money if they ever actually wanted to leave. He was smart. You should see the old-timers in the camps. They escape hell on earth, but then they’re stuck in purgatory with no money and nowhere to go. Htet’s husband left them here and went to his brother in Bagan. That’s on the other side of Burma. His brother had money. I think he drives taxis. Htet knew the trip would take a long time, but he had promised to be in touch. She hasn’t heard from him. She has a name and an address for the brother, but that’s it. No e-mail, no phone number. She sends letters to the brother and hears nothing back. She’s devastated. She doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive. I worry she’s going to waste away.”
I’d spent the past ten years worrying about preschool admissions interviews, about selecting the right gift for the bat mitzvah of the daughter of an important editor, about losing those extra twenty pounds so I wouldn’t be ashamed of my body at pool parties in the Hamptons, about whether the girls’ food contained GMOs and whether it even mattered, about whether or not my husband still found me attractive and interesting. These were the nuisances of the one percent, maybe even the one half of the one percent.
Mia began to speak again and then closed her mouth. I watched her bite her bottom lip, as if trying to decide if she wanted to tell me something else. She exhaled as she told me the rest.
“Htet was pregnant when she came here. I don’t think she even knew when her husband left them, but we figured it out pretty quickly. She was terrified of having the baby with her husband away, but hopeful about the child. She told me she had a dream it was a boy and that made her happy because her husband always wanted a son.”
I knew what Mia was about to say before she finished the story and I wanted to stop her. I didn’t want to hear the words out loud.
“She miscarried last month. There was nothing anyone could have done, even if we’d had a proper hospital. It was still early and it probably would have happened no matter what, but she hasn’t been the same since.”
Hearing Htet’s story broke something inside me. I knew too well that you were never the same after losing a baby. I swallowed hard to keep my composure.
“That’s terrible,” I managed to say to Mia. “Is there anyone here she can talk to about it? A doctor? A therapist?”
“You’re looking at her.” Mia set her lips in a wry line. “I think she’s ashamed. If we could find her husband it would make all the difference for her and those little girls.”
I closed my eyes for a second. Mia reached out to grab my arm.
“Kate, are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I stuttered. “It’s hard to hear the stories. I don’t know how you listen to so many of them.”
Mia rubbed at her eyes. “Their stories. Jesus Christ their fucking stories. I’m a vault of all of them,” she said, her voice ragged. “But listening to them, writing them all down, is a necessary evil. It might help get us some cash to keep this place open. There’s this documentary filmmaker from Los Angeles who wants to do something on refugees. I googled him. He seems like a big deal, won an Emmy a couple years ago. I had this long call with his manager. They want to know all the stories to see if this is the right camp to shoot in. If they do it we’ll get some kind of grant, a million bucks. That money would be life-changing. But trying to write everything down
is so much in addition to the day-to-day of running this place.”
There are moments in your life when you know what you are about to do is exactly what you should be doing. I’d felt it the day I stepped onto Columbia’s campus, even after taking out nearly one hundred grand in student loans to pay for an MFA program that would never get me a real job. I walked with pride, my chest puffed up through the Morningside campus gates on 116th Street ready to conquer the fucking world. A small plaque on the black wrought-iron bars read, MAY ALL WHO ENTER FIND PEACE AND WELCOME. It described perfectly how I felt in that moment, completely at peace with a decision that should have been crazy. I had the same feeling the day I turned around in the Paris bookshop and bumped into Karl. He was just a tall stranger blocking my way, but the same sense of calm and conviction washed through my body. My bones and skin and blood knew he was my person before my brain or my heart did. Hearing Htet’s story I knew I wanted to do something more here than unpack boxes and turn on computers. This was something that would make a real difference.
“I can help. I can listen to their stories. I can write them down. It’s what I do. I’m a writer.” I hadn’t said “I’m a writer” out loud in so long. Now, it felt true. “I know it’s important. Listening and recording them. Let me write them down. I want to help.”
The darkness from moments earlier passed from Mia’s face and was replaced with astonished joy.
“Are you sure? It’s a lot of work.”
“I want to do it.” I hoped I sounded as sincere as I felt.
“It needs to be finished by January fifteenth. It will be hours and hours every day.”
I didn’t have much longer before I was heading home, but I was a fast worker when I put my mind to something. “I want to do it,” I repeated.
Those five words would change everything.
Dear Karl,
I tried to call you back after we got off the phone but you didn’t answer. I understand why you didn’t answer. I understand you need some time to process everything I told you. I can’t imagine how I would feel if you called me three days before Christmas and said you weren’t coming home.
I don’t want to repeat myself here. But I can’t tell you enough how much I need to be here right now. Volunteering in that refugee camp has changed me. I’ve been so desperate to find some meaning in my life outside of being a mother and a wife. This place has given that to me. Already, in my short time working there I feel like I’ve really helped change these women’s lives. I’m actually making a difference. I can’t imagine leaving this yet and returning to my life in New York, a life of such extreme privilege, when I know people here are still suffering.
There’s one woman here. I didn’t mention her when we talked. I wanted to. I wanted to tell you so much more, but then everything escalated and it was impossible. This woman’s name is Htet. She has girls a little younger than ours. I’ve been helping her with her English, but more than anything I think she needs a friend. A month ago she miscarried a pregnancy. Her husband is missing. She has no one. Talking to her, trying to help her, has brought up so many of my own memories, my own pain, our pain. I recognize that particular kind of haunted look in her eyes, the grief of losing a child.
We never talk about it, Karl. Losing our second child. Our boy. We never talk about him like that. We never call him a child or a baby or a boy. We occasionally made mention of “what happened,” but it was always something that happened to me, not to us.
I was brazen enough to feel “safe” at twenty-one weeks, that I was past the danger zone. I carried the baby long enough to hear a heartbeat, learn the gender, and see an inkling of the person he could turn into when we saw him on the ultrasound. Remember when we thought we saw him wave to us in our last appointment.
You were so delighted. “I think he’s a leftie like me,” you said.
You were so far away when it happened. In Frankfurt, at the book fair. I remember that because I started to feel strange pains at noon and I tried to call you and it was six in Germany and you were out to cocktails with Donna Tartt and Carolyn Reidy.
When you called me back I could hardly hear you and you couldn’t hear me so I hung up. Then Izzy woke from her nap and I had no choice but to go to her even as I started to bleed. I managed to get myself and Isabel into a cab to the doctor. I talked to the baby inside me the entire twenty blocks. “You’re fine, little man. I’ll keep you safe. It’s OK, baby,” I whispered over and over with increasing urgency. Izzy thought I was talking to her and she smiled and laughed. “I’m OK, Mama,” she said.
Izzy wouldn’t let me put her down. I couldn’t lie on the table and hold her at the same time. A kind nurse finally took her away.
Then came the awful moment. The doctor waved the wand over my stomach and told me she couldn’t find a heartbeat. I remember staring at the wall of my OB’s office, her bulletin board covered in photographs of fresh new babies, some of them wrinkled and purple and straight from the womb, others photo-ready with their plump bellies and their gummy smiles. I knew Izzy’s picture was somewhere among the bunch, but I needed to turn away from the bright eyes of all these living babies.
I never knew I could grieve someone so much I never met. The level of pain I felt astonished me.
One of our regular babysitters was able to pick up Izzy then and I was finally alone. There was no service in the windowless room, and I didn’t know what I would tell you even if I could get you on the phone. I couldn’t text. What would I text?
When we got the tissue tested and found out the fetus had a rare genetic disorder, the doctor tried to comfort me and tell me that the miscarriage was a good thing. That my body knew what it was doing. I hated her when she called the miscarriage a “good thing.” It was like someone describing a “worthy earthquake” or a “benevolent five-alarm fire.”
You were just as shattered as I was when you returned, and you did everything you could to try to make me feel better even as you grieved, but it felt impossible to completely share the experience with you. I can’t help but feel that I started to build a wall around my emotions then, that I started to shut you out.
I couldn’t escape the feeling that the miscarriage was my fault, that I was being punished, that I’d failed, that I’d done something wrong.
And through it all I kept mothering. I couldn’t stop mothering. I wasn’t allowed to stop mothering. Every time I picked Izzy up and smelled her head and pressed my lips into her soft downy hair I thought about that other tiny hand waving at me from the grainy black-and-white screen. I muted my pregnant friends on Facebook. I couldn’t stand to watch their bellies swell as they ticked off the weeks until their due dates. I hated myself for despising their joy.
Before the miscarriage I still gave myself a couple of hours every day to do something completely on my own while Izzy slept. Mostly I wrote. Afterward I used that time to sleep, or stare into space, or cry. Eventually that time was just folded into the rest of the day and erased entirely.
I needed help that you couldn’t give me. So we hired Marley. I knew you didn’t want a nanny raising your children, but we needed someone. I needed someone. I told you it was so I could rest, but that wasn’t what I did. I left the house and got on the subway. I just sat on the N or the R riding uptown or downtown. Sometimes I’d switch to the PATH and go all the way to New Jersey. I never got off the train, just watched the stops go by. Sometimes I’d go to the movies and cry. Kind strangers would hand me Kleenex. When I came home from those trips I’d feel ready to mother Izzy again.
I don’t know why I am telling you all of this, except that talking to Htet and helping with her girls has brought up all of these feelings I’d buried. And I want to be able to share these feelings with you; I want you to be able to hear me, really hear me. And vice versa.
She’s so brave, Karl. I want to be brave like her; to know that whatever comes my way, I can deal with it. And she is just one of hundreds of mothers here fighting for her girls. I’m honored to tell
their stories. It’s just taken longer than I expected to listen to them all, to write them down. I’ve started recording them too, in the hopes that it will make the project more appealing and help Mia and the camp get the money they need to keep going.
I met someone here who told me that “when a person looks like they need help you have to help them.” Those words have stuck with me.
I can make a difference here. I have a purpose again. This won’t be forever, but right now I need to stay.
Love,
Kate
Chapter Seven
* * *
I made my bed and now I had to lie in it. I made a choice to stay and now I had to face the consequences. The most excruciating of these was that my girls seemed more distant after I missed Christmas. Maybe they were upset that I’d missed the holiday or maybe they just realized that business trips didn’t last this long. I clung to the hope that it was my imagination; that my guilt was coloring my perception, because dwelling on the alternative—that my kids would grow up to hate me—was too hideous to bear.
I could still see their days running parallel to mine. When I opened my eyes I saw Tilly sneak to her sister’s bed and nip her on the shoulder to tell her it was morning. Izzy would be awake but lying on her belly, sketching on a pad, or reading a chapter book. She told me she reads chapter books now! She was the good one. She was Karl. Tilly was me, the old me before I became their mom. She wanted to move the second she opened her eyes. She was never satisfied with being in one place. As I wrote my first sentences of the day I could see Tilly roll her eyes as Marley reminded her that she had a Japanese lesson in the afternoon. I rolled my eyes with her. Who teaches a five-year-old Japanese? Why couldn’t I just let them be kids? When I pulled the string to turn off the light in my room at the zen center at night I heard them recite their quiet prayers.
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