by Katie Crouch
“The one person you loved before me?” she asked. “Or more than me?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t going to go there. When he’d let himself think of Esther that one night in Swakopmund before he’d gone to the morgue, he’d almost lost his mind.
But Amanda pressed on, her voice shrill. “And? What is it? Why can’t you talk about her? Even now?” Mark got up out of the chair and moved to the edge of the patio. “Why are you still keeping something from me?”
“You don’t want to hear this, Mandi. I was super young. Like you were when you met me.” He scratched his neck violently, instantly regretting the words that had escaped his mouth.
“So she was to you what you were to me.” Amanda said this slowly, as if turning over the reality in her mind. “The first person you fell for. The person who was supposed to change your life.”
“I don’t know, Mandi.” Mark began pacing back and forth. He felt like he was on a runaway train. “I mean, have things ended up being so wonderful between us? You can barely stand me. You hate the way I parent. I’m a total disappointment to you, and now you’re having an affair.”
“I’m not having—”
“All right, even if you really did just make out with someone else—which, by the way, I find highly implausible—then ask yourself: Why did I do it? Am I really happy? Or am I just living in this construct because I have a kid?”
“I…” Amanda seemed not to be able to get her mouth around the words. “I…”
But Mark was trucking on now, full speed ahead. His anger was fueled by decades of sorrow. And it felt good, because Amanda was such a believer in prudence. Well, he thought, this is a fucking imprudent moment.
“So do I think about what life could have been like with her? Yes, Mandi. Of course I do. It would have been a completely different path. I would have taken care of her … the way you take care of me, okay? I mean you’re so … fucking … capable, Mandi.”
“You think I’m capable?” Amanda repeated. “That’s what you think?”
“Yes! You can do everything! And what’s worse, you always have the answers. You’re always right. Maybe it would have been better for me if I could be the capable one. If I had to be the one who stepped up.”
“Un-fucking-believable,” Amanda managed, leaning forward to look at him, with her hands on her knees. “You want a less capable woman in your marriage, so you can be more of a man? I’ve never heard you say anything more pathetic.”
“See, Amanda? You’re always right.”
“No one asked you to be such a weakling, Mark. Our marriage would be a lot better if you’d take some of the load sometimes. If you weren’t so … lazy.”
“Well.” Lazy. That’s where they were. Mark shook his head and picked up his keys off the table. “I guess now you have Ronnie.”
“I don’t have Ronnie!” Amanda yelled, pounding the seat cushion. “He’s nobody! Why can’t you get that through your head?”
“I’ll go pick up Meg,” Mark said. “I need to get out of here.”
Amanda shot up, following him as he walked to the car. Mark had never seen his wife out of control before; it was thrilling and frightening at the same time.
“No!” she shrieked. “You can’t leave. Not when I have all of these questions, you asshole. Was she better than me? Was she prettier? Did you like having sex with her more? Was she just a little incapable, fuckable lamb?”
“I’m not talking about this,” Mark said, getting into the car. “You’re being indecent. It’s not who you are.” He turned the key in the ignition and pressed the gate button; in response, it shuddered awake and began to open.
“What was her goddamned name?” Mark heard his wife scream as he steered the car down the drive. He hesitated, then put his head out the window.
“Esther,” he said, then pulled away.
/ 26 /
Mila shifted from side to side in the backseat of the Mercedes, opening and closing her palms. She still couldn’t believe she’d let Persephone convince her to come to the school in the middle of this mayhem. Mark and Amanda, they could be anywhere. But she hadn’t been able to put Persephone off.
“I can’t explain,” she’d said patiently over the phone the seventh time the hysterical woman called.
“Try!” Persephone had wailed.
“I have a … personal problem at present with the Evans family, and I absolutely cannot see them.”
“Mila. Mark Evans doesn’t even know where this school is, probably. He never does pickup. Never. He certainly won’t be here setting up for a PTA function. And Amanda’s out buried in the beverage tent. I’ll meet you out front of the school. Look, I’ll come to your car if you want, as if you were a Mafia boss lady. I just really need you right at this moment!”
“And why do you need me?” Mila said, smiling slightly on her end of the line. Persephone had acted very badly. It wouldn’t hurt her to eat crow in a pie.
“Because I was an idiot to think I could do this. I don’t even know where to plug in the stereo.”
“You lead the cord to the stage in the gym.”
“Yes, only the cord shorted. Actual sparks came out!”
“You need the adapter, because the stereo is European and the voltage was set up in 1986 or what-what-what.”
“Exactly! How am I supposed to know that?”
Mila had sighed. “Fine. I’ll have the driver take me to the lot. Meet me in the car, under the tree by the middle school.”
So here she was, in a government car so conspicuous she might as well have hoisted up a banner that said MILA SHILONGO IS IN. Enter Persephone, sprinting over in her customary whites, her red ponytail bouncing behind her.
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” Persephone trilled, jumping into the car. The driver, Joel, glanced at Mila in the rearview mirror and looked quickly away. Mila could feel his tiny smile. Persephone was holding a legal pad and a sparkly pen with a feather on the end of it.
“Okay. Look at this floor plan. I have twelve countries on one side and only six on the other. But everyone on this side is refusing to move. All because of Russia. I said yes to the Russian Embassy, and now look! And they’re already drinking vodka and the event isn’t until tonight. And the smell of the cabbage, Mila. Shame! And oh my God, we let year two be Namibia, and the teachers have constructed a shebeen. A bar, Mila! At a school event! They’ve even put a picture of a lady in a bikini on the wall!”
“Tell them to take that down,” Mila said sternly.
“What if they say no?”
“They cannot say no,” Mila said. “You are their leader.”
“Okay, yes. That’s true. But I sort of think…” Persephone’s voice trailed off.
“Think what?”
“That they don’t like me telling them what to do because I’m white?” Her voice was uncharacteristically small.
“Tell them anyway, Persephone,” Mila said. “You can’t solve the history of Namibia. You need to get this done. What did you do about the live warthogs?”
“I sent them to the butcher. He said he didn’t have time—he was booked. Booked! I told him he could keep a whole hog for himself on me, though, so he finally said yes.”
“Good. Very good. And China?”
“They’re alone under the goalpost.”
“All right. You can stage the water balloon toss next to them. Then they won’t feel so ostracized. It’s a fundraiser for the Christian Club, and God won’t let them say no.”
“Brilliant.” Persephone snapped her notebook shut. “As I said, I am very thankful. Although, can I say one tiny thing?”
Mila looked at her, silent.
“It would have been nice if you had told me all of this before. I mean, that’s the way I would have done it, I might have left a written … guidebook of some kind. That would have been the most responsible thing, I think.”
Mila peered through the window for a moment, then turned back again. “Persephone, I am going to be frank with yo
u because you need to hear it. I am not trying to be cruel, but you must learn. You, my dear, are a FIGJAM.”
“What?”
“Good Lord. Do I have to teach you Americans slang as well? I’m saying you’re a Fuck-I’m-Good-Just-Ask-Me.”
Persephone’s cute little mouth formed a perfect doll-like O. “Excuse me?”
“Yes. FIGJAM. Write it down, dear. You think you know everything, because you’re rich and American and your skin is the right hue. Your event is a mess because you planned nothing. You’re sloppy and entitled and you’re the whole reason Namibians dislike Americans.”
“Mila!” Persphone cried. “Africans love Americans!”
From the front seat, Joel let out a barely discernible chuckle.
“You know what?” Persephone wheezed. “I said thank you for coming. But actually, no thank you! You’re the snob. And another thing, too: I know your husband’s a crook.”
“Get out,” Mila said, cold as ice.
“Gladly,” Persephone sniffed before kicking the door open with her tiny white sandal and exploding back out toward the sweaty, lethargic masses of International Day.
Good Lord, Mila thought. She hadn’t wanted to yell at Persephone. She wasn’t a fan of hurt feelings in general. But the Gecko, she needed it.
“Let’s go,” Mila said. Joel nodded and pulled out. Just then, there was the sound of crushing metal.
Mila had been in one fender bender since the accident. That incident, which happened while Josephat was driving, at the intersection of Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro Avenues, had sent her into a shock so violent Josephat had thrown some cash at the policemen and left immediately to drive her to Lady Pohamba Hospital. This jolt was worse than that—the crushing was louder, the cracking of shattering glass seemed next to her ear. She heard a shriek that she realized was her own, and curled up into a ball on the floor of the car.
“Miss Shilongo?” Joel said. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Sorry, sorry. That man ran into me. It’s just the back window. Miss Shilongo. No problem, no problem. Miss, are you all right?”
* * *
The combi had left late, because one of the mothers was waiting for her little boy to come with a delivery of fruit from his auntie’s. The driver tried to throw her off, but she enlisted the sympathy of the other passengers, who rose up against him and insisted that they wait. The woman needed her fruit! The little boy had finally come, triumphantly holding a bag of oranges, and after a brief round of cheers they had started off.
They were meeting a transfer in Karibib, and the driver was making up time by overtaking the slower cars. The combi shook and rattled; they were easily going 120 kilometers an hour. The American was scared and gripped Esther’s waist, but any Namibian who had ever been on the roads knew this was the way it went. You got into the car. You handed over your life. Then you hoped to get there.
Esther didn’t even see the other car coming at them over the hill. She was turned around, whispering in her new boyfriend’s ear.
The rest happened too quickly for her to remember. There was a shriek and the crash of metal. There was a flipping and a turning and the sky was on the floor and the endless plains of sand were stretching out in the wrong direction. Esther braced against the ceiling, hard, and stayed roughly in place, but others around her were flying and hitting the sides and top of the combi with sickening slapping sounds.
Then, just as quickly, everything was very, very quiet. She was not in the American’s lap anymore. She was so tired. She went to sleep.
When she woke, there was the sound of dripping. Someone was crying. Feet were everywhere.
There is a certain slowness that occurs after a Namibian traffic accident. Whether it be a fender-bender at an intersection or a fatal collision with a tractor trailer, the aftermath becomes a social event. There is a fundamental lack of urgency, as official help will not come for a long, long time. People stop their cars. They move the dead to one side, the bleeding to the other. They bring food and pray. Someone was braaiing just to give the injured people something to eat. Someone else had turned on the radio.
Esther was stretched on the side of the road, where someone had pulled her, simply to be clear of the traffic. When she opened her eyes an auntie was sitting next to her, holding her hand.
“Oh good,” the auntie said. “You are not dead.”
“Am I hurt?”
“You are not even bleeding. I think you might be bleeding inside somewhere. Can you breathe?”
Esther sat up slowly. There was a slicing pain in her side. She cried out.
“Yes. The inside is bleeding. Lie still until the ambulance comes. I have some rooibos with honey for you.”
“Where is my sister? Where is the other man?”
“What other man?” the woman asked in Oshiwambo. “There are many men here.”
Esther sat up again, taking deep breaths to get through the agony. She looked around slowly, taking care not to put herself into shock with what she saw.
There was the little boy with the fruit, so soaked in blood there could be no hope for him. Others were eating his oranges.
There was the father, whose body still lay where he was thrown through the windshield.
And there was Saara, her sister, surrounded by people working and shouting. From where Esther was sitting, she could see that her sister’s leg was sheared off below the knee.
“That is my sister,” Esther said. “You must help me get over there.”
“I do not think—”
“Do it now.”
The auntie called for reinforcements, and Esther was lifted and carried over to her bloody sister, whose eyes were wide and crazy as a rabid jackal’s. A smartly dressed man was holding her sister’s head and feeding her sips of Four Roses. She looked behind him, and thought that he must belong to the white Mercedes with gold hubcaps.
“Saara,” Esther said.
Her sister shook her head.
Esther sat back, looking around frantically for the American. This well-dressed man could help her, but a white man might pull even more rank in a situation like this. Yet he wasn’t anywhere. She scanned the dead bodies laid out in a line—he wasn’t there. He wasn’t sitting with the injured or standing with those trying to help.
She looked at the rich man, who seemed to have the most authority at the moment.
“There was a white man on the combi,” she said. “Have you seen him?”
“He is with the Boers,” he said. His eyes slid in the direction of Karibib. “They had a whole empty truck going right toward the hospital. But they would only take the American.”
Esther shivered with hate. “And he went with them? Was he hurt?”
“He seemed all right,” the man said. “He was bleeding but walking. They threw him in the back and left.”
The ambulance came a few minutes later. Esther waited for hours with Saara for the medical help to sort itself. Someone had torn a strip of cloth from her dress and used it as a tourniquet to tie off her sister’s leg. The rich man stayed close.
Esther was certain the American would come back. He went for help, she thought. He went for the doctor. He loved her. He said he did.
He held her up in the water.
But as the minutes and hours trickled away and her sister grew weaker, the truth became clear. The American had saved only himself. He was a white man who had used her and, of course, was never coming back.
Finally, Saara was taken to the hospital in Walvis. They stopped the bleeding, but the doctor said they could do nothing in terms of prosthetics and physical therapy. The rich man was more than that, it turned out. He was Kenneth, a developer from Cape Town. He wanted to fly Saara to a hospital there. He would pay for and oversee her recovery himself.
“You will owe him too much,” Esther whispered to her sister at the hospital. She herself had been briefly examined and, despite the pain in her side, was judged mostly unharmed. The man named Kenneth would not look at her. He would no
t give her a phone number.
Saara didn’t answer. She pulled the envelope of Mark’s money from her rucksack and handed it over. “I only spent three hundred or so. You can use it. Go to Windhoek. Or find me later, in Cape Town.”
They left as soon as they could, taking the white Mercedes southward. Saara waved from the window. Esther watched the car as it disappeared into the desert haze, then sat on the bench in front of the hospital.
It was the middle of the day, the very time when the sun would kill you. She would have to wait until four o’clock. No white car would be giving her a ride home. Esther would catch another combi, alone.
As she sat on the bench without her lover or her sister, she thought about how to survive this. How to learn what to avoid next time. She would learn to bear the long ride to Windhoek without her sister or a friend. She would learn how not to look surprised when she was told, when she called an auntie, that the Peace Corps man never returned to Oshakati. That he was fine, according to the embassy worker who came to gather his things. He just wasn’t coming back.
She would change her name from Esther to Mila, so no one from Ovamboland could hear of her again. She would learn to be mercenary, and to look for another sort of man. A Josephat sort, with whom she could make a deal that did not bank on love.
She would learn to box up everything that had happened to her—everything that could ever hurt herself or her family—and to put it far away. She would seal it, this box, with thick hate for an American she met in Oshakati. He was the only person who had ever given her true hope, which was the cruelest of life’s tricks.
She had only one regret about never again speaking to the American, and that was that he would never own up to his biggest lie. Not the one about loving her; she no longer cared about that. It was what he said about the water. It won’t hurt you, he had said.
Yet Mila was from Ovamboland, a territory riddled with crocodiles and snakes. On principle, Ovambos did not swim. They knew how to coax food out of sandy soil, they knew how to survive years of scorching sun. But the ocean? No. Anyone who said otherwise was telling you a story. It was madness, not to be afraid of the sea.