Silently, tears roll down Mama’s high cheekbones, falling on the edge of the plate, and I just stay there, knees aching.
The living room is dark. Some of the women sleep on the couch. Some on the floor. I am curled up by Mama’s side with Mama Jina’s kikwembe pulled around my shoulders. I can’t see Mama’s face but I can hear her tears and feel the sobs racking her body. I stretch my thin arms around her and squeeze as hard as I can.
“Your mother has to go to Kinshasa to bury her sister,” Baba says to me.
The house is temporarily empty; the women have gone home to tend to their own households and children. Only Mama Nuru, who has coaxed Mama upstairs to take a bath, remains. The kitchen tile is cold under my bare feet and I let my hands sink into the dirty dishwater.
“For how long?” I ask.
“A week at most. She’s leaving tomorrow.”
I don’t say anything and Baba looks up from the computer, where he is buying Mama’s plane ticket.
“She’ll be back before you know it,” he says. “I just need you to keep being a big girl for a little while longer.”
Mama Nuru, Mama Jina, Mama Aisha, and all the other women come to see Mama off at the airport. They take turns hugging her and whispering reassurances into her ear. All of them cry. When it’s my turn, I hug Mama as hard as I can. I open my mouth but there are no words and all I can do is squeeze her tighter.
The women come back to the house with Baba and me. They will stay until Mama Dalia is buried in Kinshasa. We clean the house. We cook. Mama Nuru and Mama Jina braid my hair with colourful beads. We clean and cook some more.
On the third day Mama’s been gone, we do not cook. We do not clean. The women and I sit in silence in the living room. Nobody says anything. Every so often someone shifts or gets up to use the bathroom but otherwise nobody moves.
Mama Aisha begins to cry and suddenly they’re all weeping. The room is filled with their sobs, and their sorrow suffocates me as I sit there, silent and dry-eyed. Outside, the sky goes from a golden caramel to an inky darkness broken only by the glimmer of stars. As the women continue to wail, I stare at the twinkling stars and wish that my aunt would come back and make Mama happy again.
The shrill ring of the phone breaks the rhythm of their cries. Mama Nuru answers the phone, listens, and hangs up. “Ni kufanyika,” she announces to the room.
Like a record winding down, the women’s cries slowly stutter and stop.
For the rest of the time Mama is gone, the women take turns stopping by. They stay for a bit, drop off dishes of food, and talk to Baba. Before they leave, they always hug me and ask if I’m okay. I know that they don’t want to hear that I miss Mama, that I’m scared that she will never come back, so I don’t say any of this.
One day while Baba is out, Mama Aisha comes by. I stare at her through the glass window of the front door. I don’t want to let her in but I know I have to.
“Took you long enough,” she says, handing me a casserole.
I follow her into the kitchen and set the dish on the island. I lift the lid and peek in.
“Puff-puffs!” the words leave my mouth before I can stop myself.
“Do you know how to make those?” Mama Aisha asks.
I look up from the casserole full of deep-fried doughnut balls to see a slight smile on her face.
“Mama showed me how,” I reply.
“Let’s make some more then. Your baba will finish these as soon as he gets home.”
I stare at her in surprise.
“Well? Don’t just stand there, get the ingredients.”
As we mix the flour, sugar, eggs, and yeast, Mama Aisha begins to talk.
“My mama taught me how to make these. She would sell them in the village marketplace. Some days I would go with her.”
Mama Aisha abandons the wooden spoon and begins kneading the dough with her hands. “One day,” she continues, “Mama got sick. She was too weak to even beat the dough. I had to make the puff-puffs and sell them or else we wouldn’t have any money.”
“Where was your baba?” I ask.
“He left. He had another wife.” She looks down at her flour-covered hands and shakes her head.
“When Mama died, everybody in the village came. They stayed with me until her burial. They cooked for me, fed me, cried with me. And after, one of the women took me in as her own daughter.”
I look up at Mama Aisha. She’s stopped kneading the dough.
“Do you still miss her?” I ask.
She nods, a tear leaks out of the corner of her eye. “Mauti hutia kilio,” she whispers.
I cock my head. Mama Aisha sniffles and smiles at me. “It’s an old proverb. It means: ‘Death makes people cry. One day the seriousness of life will be brought home to everyone.’ One day the seriousness of life will come to you too. Now you want your mother to come home to you, and that is okay.”
I don’t realize that I’m crying until I see the drip of tears on the dough in front of me. Mama Aisha reaches over and wipes my face with flour-streaked fingers. “If we keep this up, our puff-puffs will be so salty that no one will eat them.”
We finish making the puff-puffs and then we do the dishes. Mama Aisha hums as she dries. Before she leaves, she hugs me and tells me to greet Baba for her. Later that night, I can’t sleep so I clean the house. It’s not dirty. I try to erase the remnants of sorrow from the walls but I can still hear the echoes of crying no matter how much I scrub, sweep, and mop.
The women come early the next day. They come laughing. They come singing. They come with brightly coloured kikwembes. They come with cassava leaves, plantains, okra, ndakala, piri piri, and yams. The kitchen fills with the sound of oil sizzling as we fry the plantains and fish. Okra boils on one of the back burners. Sliced yams are piled high on the counter waiting to be boiled. Mama Nuru sifts flour for the fufu. As they work, the women sing, their voices weaving in and out with one another.
I sit on the floor, beating the piri piri in the mortar with the wooden pestle. The spices sting my eyes, and unbidden tears leak out of the corners.
Mama Aisha dances past me and says, “Ambaye ni mtoto huyu ambaye analia wakati wengine kucheka?”
Whose is this child who cries while others laugh? She smiles at me and I smile back.
The table is set. My hair is brushed and braided. Green and yellow beads, Mama’s favourite colours, clink together at the ends of my braids. I wear her old yellow kikwembe with the matching top. The women talk quietly as we wait for Baba to come back home with Mama. I sit by the window and watch as cars go by. Our red Camry rolls into view and I can’t move. What will I do if she’s still crying? What will I do if she refuses to eat again? Will she talk now? Will she smile again? Will she—
“Mtoto,” Mama Aisha says, breaking into my thoughts. “Kwende.”
And so I go. I slip off the couch and out the door. The pavement is bumpy under my bare feet but I barely feel the rocks as I run toward Mama.
SHARON BALA
READING WEEK
A room. Seventeen by seventeen. Opposite sides like inverse images. Something like that. Outside: a knock. Soft. Uncertain. Inside: guitars, bass, drums. Late-nineties alterna-rock. Angry. Angst-ridden.
Girl at a desk. Hair, ponytailed. Or turbaned in damp towel. Doesn’t matter. Plaid flannels. T-shirt, possibly frayed. Abbotsford High. Bare feet. No. Slippers. Once plush, now worn. Pencil. Tap, tap, tap against textbook. Bits of twisted rubber, eraser crumbs everywhere. Goosenecked lamp.
Another knock. Louder. Nine steps to the door. Distracted. Product Rule (fg)’ = f’g +fg’. Pencil clamped in mouth. Teeth bared. Door swings inward.
Now, everything in slow motion.
At first Jo doesn’t recognize him. His flecked, green eyes, the turning down at the mouth, the scar under his left ear. Who is this guy standing expectantly in the doorway of her room? She takes her pencil out of her mouth, ready to ask. But then the stranger sinks his fingers into his hair and it is Jeremy.
<
br /> All these years he’s remained frozen in her imagination: sixteen, a child on the cliff’s edge of adulthood. Two years ago, she had vaulted past him.
Grocery store cake. Carrot, her least favourite. Seventeen candles. Pink wax dripping. Cream cheese frosting. Inside of eyelids: orange and black. Make a wish. Exhale. Hard. Now, here it is: her wish come true. Seventh time. Charm. Etc.
“Hi.” They speak in unison, two sides of the same voice—male and female.
All the things she wants to say occur to her at once: What are you doing here / Where have you been / Are you okay / Do you have any idea.
“How’s it going?” This. This was what she has chosen to say.
“Can I come in?”
How long has she been standing here, mouth like a guppy? “Uh yeah. Sorry. Of course. Sure.” She steps aside and then her brother is in her room.
More things Jo wants to say: Oh my God / Do Mom and Dad know / Stay.
“Cool room. Nice tree.”
“That belongs to Alice.” Jo steps around the stump and waves her hand around the far side of the room. “This is my half.” She presses a button. Radio silence.
“I like them too.” He points to her CD player with his chin.
The conversation is too normal. Jo wants to dial back three beats. “How did you find me?” Finally, a real question.
“I saw you. On Princess Street.”
“You live here?”
“No. I’m going to Montreal. A guy in a pickup dropped me off.”
“And then you saw me.”
“I wasn’t sure. Not right away.”
Jo tries to work it out. She had gone to the A&P for Kraft Dinner and Jeremy had followed her home. “But I’ve been here since seven.”
He doesn’t respond and she doesn’t really notice. Because she is staring at him, trying to see her brother. His hand hangs limp by his side and he looks like a stranger again. She can’t comprehend what he has said. It is too much to do all at once. “Wait. How did you get in here? You need a card…”
“I walked in after someone.”
“We’re not supposed to…nevermind. What’s in Montreal?”
Jeremy lifts his shoulders to his ears. “Dunno. What’s in Kingston?”
“I’m in Kingston.”
He smiles and the stranger looks like Jeremy again. A taller, leaner version of. And hungry. It occurs to Jo that she should hug him. She holds her arms out and when he sees what she is doing, he does it too. The mechanics are awkward and quick, and somehow they have their arms around each other and she is patting his back. She comes up to his shoulder now and he smells like sweat and stale coffee. The inside of a stranger’s pickup. Not bad, all things considered. But this is not how she remembers. And it is not how she imagined.
They have left the door open and Alice walks in as they come apart.
“Hi!” Alice has blond hair. Dreadlocks.
“This is Jeremy,” Jo says.
“Hey,” Jeremy says. He does not try to shake her hand.
“Hey,” Alice says back.
Jo has never had a guy in the room before. She sees how it must look. “Jeremy’s family. Is it okay if he stays the night?”
Alice bends one knee and fiddles with the thin strap of a heel behind her back. “A cousin?”
Jo does not look at Jeremy. “Something like that.”
They make up a bed on the floor with spare blankets and sleeping bags. Alice hauls the communal vacuum from down the hall to suck up the wood chips.
“I missed you, Joannie,” Jeremy says when they are alone.
“It’s Jo. I’m Jo now.”
Jo is an only child. Jo does not wear glasses. Jo has a fake ID that says she was born in 1977. Jo is not a girl you needed to feel sorry for.
—
Joan is ten. Jeremy is sixteen. There is a note. Two sentences. I’ve gone. Don’t try to find me. The Centre called her parents and her parents called the police. There was a search. The local news media came out. Every night on the TV, her parents crying. We love you, son. Come home. If anyone has any information…
Patience is a well with a shallow bottom. From up above, it looks deceptive. Go ahead—fall in. You won’t drown. People lost interest; they became unkind. Jeremy wasn’t kidnapped. He’d gone willingly. What kind of parents were they, anyway? To harbour a drug addict (this was a nice community). To shove him into rehab. To not get him in fast enough. What kind of parents.
—
Jo wakes up and it is Sunday. Her bed is by the window. A gust of wind rattles the pane. It sounds cold. Victoria Hall is a time warp circa 1968. The carpet is a pukey pink colour like Pepto-Bismol. You must use blue tack on the walls; the posters are always falling down. Sometimes on top of you so that you wake up staring into Liam Howlett’s tortured face emerging out of liquid metal.
She hears doors down the hall. Groggy good mornings. Slowly the present comes into focus. Jeremy is here. She sits up. A thrill. Christmas morning. In the middle of the room an open space. Bedding in a neat pile. A shard of notebook paper on top. She doesn’t want to look. Jo knows what it will say. I’ve gone. Don’t try to find me. She closes her eyes. Counts to five. Slowly, slowly. Leans toward the note. On the other side of the room, Alice is a lump under a flowered blanket. Jo stares at the wall, turns her eyes only at the last possible second. What the note says: Gone to church. Back soon.
—
Before Jeremy left, Joan’s parents had done things: walked for breast cancer, voted for (more book mobiles) and against (grade five sex-ed) things at PTA meetings, insisted on family dinners. After, they found excuses to skivvy off work. Sometimes on her way to the portables for calculus, she would see them loitering across the street, watching the stoners play with lighters on the edge of the soccer field. (Looking for what? Ghost of teenage son past?) Her brother had left but Joan was the one who disappeared.
—
“Are you like religious or something?”
They are walking to the library. Alice has gone away for Reading Week. Home to Sudbury. Or Tremblant for skiing. It’s not important. She has left her student card behind for Jeremy to use. Already, they’ve been to the dining hall in the building with the weird Gaelic name (What was it called? Ban Righ?), where Jo watched Jeremy put away more food than she thought it possible for a human to eat.
“I’m trying it out,” Jeremy says. “Sometimes I go to the synagogue too. Depends on what’s around.”
Jo tallies this up. Give up drugs. Take up God. Grant me the serenity.
Jeremy wears yesterday’s shirt—sleeves folded up to the crooks of his elbows (no track marks, she’d surreptitiously checked)—and the same pair of blue jeans. More worn-out than worn-in, the thread at the knees near transparent, threatening to split. As kids, they had called these potatoes—the round holes that appeared on the knees of pants or the heels of socks. Mom would say: “Little spuds on my small fries” and Joan and Jeremy would laugh, and inevitably one or the other would demand french fries. It occurs to Jo now, and for the first time, that Jeremy had gone along with the game long after he must have outgrown it.
“So where’s the shelter here?” Jo has never seen a homeless shelter. The hands held out from the sidewalk are uniformly young—highschoolers playing at poverty for beer and videogame money.
“The shelter?”
“Well, yeah. If you hadn’t seen me, where would you have—”
“Do you want me to leave?” He asks without anger, his voice flat and inscrutable.
“No. God. No. Just curious. Just…making conversation.”
At first, Jo had been worried that Jeremy looked too dishevelled, too ratty, that he’d be recognized as an impostor and kicked out of the dining hall. But they had walked in together and Jeremy had slid Alice’s student card through the electronic reader and smiled at the woman in the hairnet who watched to make sure bagels didn’t get smuggled out. Like this was his morning routine. And Jo saw that her brother had confidence, that
he knew how to blend in. Mom and Dad never stood a chance.
“This is kinda like my church,” Jo says when they arrive at the library. Stauffer is what a cathedral would look like if it was built in the nineties. From the outside it is fascist, spiky and forbidding. But, through the huge, heavy doors, it soars, full of light. Clean, straight lines. Lots of wood.
Inside, Jeremy drops his cover. He stares up at the vaulting ceiling, the floors of books and reading rooms stacked on top of one another. He is open-mouthed. Jo has to take his hand and force Alice’s card through the reader. It is the first time they have touched since the night before. His skin is rough. His wrist bone bobs like an Adam’s apple. It is a wrist that belongs to someone else. Granny Edna at the end. She wants to give him a hug. And maybe tuck him into bed, kiss his forehead, and read him a story. What life have you lived?
“This place is massive.” Jeremy’s head is back, crown straining behind neck. “How many square feet?”
“What do I look like, a guide book? I dunno. Big. Let’s go upstairs.”
She takes him to the undergraduate reading room. They decamp on the best seats in the house: two leather armchairs in front of the fireplace.
Jo gets cracking. The Krebs cycle. Okay.
Jeremy has brought his backpack (it is the same one he ran away with—a blue beat-up Jansport that looks as though it’s shared his life) and his copy of Tolstoy. He’d taken it out the night before.
Tolstoy wrote children’s stories?
Yeah. Wanna hear one?
She and Alice had fallen asleep to the sound of her brother’s voice, and Jo had dreamed she was six.
Your cousin’s cool. Here, take my stud card.
Now, Jeremy is a fidgety reader. After a while, he stands.
“Fireplace reading room,” Jo reminds him. “Second floor.”
He returns with books. Mill. Augustine. Hume. Origin of Species. Communist Manifesto. Great Renaissance Painters. Clamped down under his chin. After that, Jeremy sits still. For hours. Book after book. Covers snapping open, thunking shut. Onion skin turning.
The Journey Prize Stories 29 Page 7