She nods but says nothing.
"What you did was pretty amazing. Where did that idea come from?"
"TV," she says. "You know how the TV was always on in our house."
"Yes," I say.
"Well, I always used to see these crying ladies, mamas and aunts, and it made me feel so sad and scared. They"d be standing in their doorways sobbing while a reporter tried to push his way in, or they"d be at some candlelight vigil where they"d fall to the ground. I don"t know," she says. "It just kind of came over me."
"You did a very good job," I say.
"Like Academy Awardwinning," Nate says.
"I can"t believe that happened," Ricardo says. "And we all just leapt to action, like superheroes, like guys in the movies." He smiles broadly. "Did you like when I asked for the de-frigerator?"
I keep replaying the event in my head; the more I think about it, the more traumatized I am. I look at the children-they seem fine, as though they don"t fully realize how wrong that could have gone. I think about what might have happened and know that in a blink I would have done anything to protect the children. For the first time I"m aware of how bonded to them I"ve become, how attached.
At the airport, my mood starts to sink. I am still upset about the attempted kidnapping and worried about going home. How do we maintain the sense of hope and possibility, the feeling of not holding back that infused our trip up until now? I"m suddenly filled with dread and wondering if it"s just me. We have done so well outside of our home-outside of ourselves, up against a world so much bigger than we are. We banded together, working as a team, and I worry what will happen when we get home, when all bets and expectations are off.
The flight from Durban to Johannesburg is fine, and as we prepare to board our plane home, the children, still riding high, rush to buy last-minute things: Simba chips, sparkling lemonade, as though they will never see South Africa again. Johannesburg is like a transfer station for all humanity; fortunately, once again Sofia arranged for a people minder to shuttle us from one plane to the other.
I think of the house, of George and Jane. I know I am overtired, but it"s like I am seeing it, feeling it all again, or maybe more like feeling it for the first time. Suddenly it is all alive for me, it is all right there, in gory detail, to be touched. It seems unreal-I can"t believe it happened, I can"t believe it was earlier this year and that we are now in a South African airport, waiting.
I think of what Londisizwe said about releasing what lives inside and realize that I did not drink my noontime tea. I will ask for hot water as soon as we"re on board the plane. I think of Londisizwe, of the foul smell that escaped-the children laughing as I writhed in pain. "Very good," Londisizwe said the morning after the first dose, when I told him how ill I felt. "It is good that you feel sick-that is just the beginning of what is inside of you.... But you felt it," he says, happily slapping my shoulder. "That means you are not dead."
I am feeling it again at the airport; bile rises in my throat, tasting like a combo of fermented leaves and animal s.h.i.t. I swallow it; it burns hot and sour going back down.
"Whose child is this?" A customs agent points to Ricardo.
"Ours," Nate says.
"I am their brother," Ricardo says.
I take out the letter from his aunt and give it to the agent, who calls another agent over. They ask me if I have a phone with international calling. I say yes and hand it to them so they can call the aunt, who says that Ricardo has not been kidnapped. Satisfied, the officer asks Ricardo if he had a good time in South Africa. "Did you ride on an elephant?"
"No."
"Bungee off a cliff?"
"No."
"What did you do?"
"I played soccer," he says.
"Good on you," the agent says, smiling, flashing loose tobacco bits in his teeth, as he hands back our pa.s.sports and gives each of the children a small piece of hard candy, just the size you could choke on, which I immediately confiscate.
Our arrival in New York is delayed by thunderstorms; we circle the airport for what seems like hours and then land in Boston for gas and fly back to Kennedy. I text the pet minder from the tarmac at Logan to say we"re delayed. He writes back, oddly chipper, "We are ready and waiting, looking forward to welcoming you." Something about his tone makes me nervous. "Everything okay?" I ask. "Just dandy," he texts back. Oh no....
Landing in New York, I feel a kind of flat-footed relief that we are back in the land of Mets and Yankees, of traffic and abrasive people.
The United States Customs agent asks me to open my suitcase.
"Where are your clothes?" he asks.
"I gave them away," I say.
"Are you opening a business?" he quizzes, looking through all the merchandise acquired.
"No, I took three kids on a trip, and this is the stuff they got; there was no room for clothing."
"Why didn"t you just buy another suitcase?"
"Didn"t want another suitcase."
"You want to hold my babies?" Ashley asks the agent.
"Did you know that in South Africa they sell the clothing that we put in the recycle bins in church parking lots?" Nate says. "You think you"re donating your old clothes to needy people in this country, but your clothing is being sold to impoverished people for profit."
"Guess it was like an educational trip," the customs man says, closing my bag and pushing it towards me for a zip-up.
"Fact-finding mission," Ashley says.
"I almost got circ.u.mcised," Ricardo offers. "I still want to but he said no." Ricardo gestures to me like I"m the bad guy.
"TMI," the man says, stamping our pa.s.sports and urging us on.
"What does TMI mean?" Ricardo asks.
"It means some things are private," Nate says.
We walk outside, the heat smacks us down. The transition from the oxygenless chill of the airplane to an eggs-on-the-sidewalk broiler is too abrupt, we are instantly sticky and cranky.
"You"re late," says a rumpled guy holding a placard with "Silver" scrawled on it in grease pen.
"Weather delay," I say. "And we had to stop for gas."
The padded ride of the big black car gives me the uncomfortable sensation of floating, of being divorced from reality. I find myself craving the b.u.mpy ride of the old Land Rover, with its homemade seat-belt contraption for the kids, harnessed like a backyard rocket ship.
We pull up at the house. The rosebushes by the front door are in bloom-a deep b.l.o.o.d.y red. A climbing White Dawn rose stretches up the front of the house, wrapping around the windows. Ashley picks a low pink rose and puts it to my nose. "Abraham Darby," she says. "They make perfume out of them."
I draw a deep breath; the heavy scent catches in my lungs-I breathe again, a little less deeply.
"Nice."
Ricardo insists on going to the front door and ringing the bell. Tessie barks excitedly.
Cheryl opens the door-she smiles.
It"s hard to describe, but what I"ve been dreading instantly falls away. I don"t think I"ve ever had that sensation before-a kind of darkness lifting, like sun coming out from behind a cloud-as literal and elusive as all that.
There are balloons, brightly colored streamers, and an enormous chocolate cake with "Congratulations on the Big BM" written in baby-blue script.
Cheryl, Sofia, Cecily, the pet minder and his sister, Madeline and Cy, Tessie and the cats, and a few people I"ve never seen before stand in a reception line.
"The house looks different," I say, pleasantly surprised.
"You bet it does," Cheryl says. "We gave you a makeover-painted the kitchen, living room, and dining room, rearranged the furniture, got a few new things like chairs that are easy for Cy and Madeline." I follow Cheryl through the house with my hand over my mouth, awed, saying, "I can"t believe it. I just can"t believe it," over and over again.
"The look on your face is priceless," Cecily says.
Yesterday, in Durban, I was dreading coming back to the house, falling into the same routines, but this is incredible, a wonderful welcome home. For the first time I"m part of a community. I stand there, eyes watering, and raise a giant gla.s.s of diet orange soda. "My heart is full."
There is pizza, soda, and cake so teeth-curdlingly sweet and richly American that I can"t stop eating it. I have one slice and another and another until I am high. I cut the high with coffee and am shaking and dizzy.
"We got hijacked," Ricardo tells everyone. "Run off the road by some crazy men."
"Ashley and Ricardo saved us by pretending the dolls were her children and that they were injured," Nate says.
"What made you think to do that?" Cheryl asks.
"At my school they taught us," Ashley says.
"Taught you what?" I ask.
"In gym cla.s.s there was a unit on self-protection. They taught us to go for the eyeb.a.l.l.s and the ball b.a.l.l.s and that if we were ever approached by someone who wanted us to get into a car or tried to hurt us in any way, we should act crazy. Or roll under a parked car. They said bad guys don"t want to get down on their knees and try and pull you out from under a parked car, and that crazy people made them nervous. When I was younger I would always be thinking about what I"d do."
"Brilliant," Madeline says.
Terrifying-my thought repeats.
I make the tea Londisizwe sent home with me; it tastes of the South African ground, the dirt, and the air. I swirl the muslin bag in my cup and would swear that I see blue, green, and purple colors like an ersatz rainbow floating.
Later, I overhear Cheryl talking to Nate.
"What happened to your mom could have happened to any of us," she says.
"I doubt it," he says, not believing her.
"Trust me," she says, "I"ve lived longer than you."
"Do you really think it could have happened to anyone?" I ask Cheryl after everyone else has gone and she and I are in the kitchen trying to figure out the new cabinet organization system.
"I do," she says.
"I"m not sure how to take that...."
"It"s not about you, it"s about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that"s so shocking?"
I nod. "I guess so."
"What"s shocking," Cheryl says, "is that it doesn"t happen more often. What"s shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what"s shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So-am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it"s sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are."
She stops and looks at me carefully. "You look different."
I burp the combo of pizza, cake, orange soda, and Londisizwe"s tea; I"m surprised blue-green smoke doesn"t puff out of my mouth.
"I missed you," Cheryl says. "You know, we don"t talk about a lot of things, it"s all s.e.x, s.e.x, but I"ve been watching-you"ve come a long way."
"How so?"
"You"re human now."
"And what was I before?"
"A two-by-four," she says.
I give Cheryl the gift I brought back for her-an old wooden phallus.
"A d.i.l.d.o?" she asks.
"It"s an important African symbol."
"Is it supposed to make me think of you?"
"Not necessarily," I say.
"Did the children see you buy it?"
"Nope."
I lie on the sofa with Tessie at my feet, her muzzle on my hip, one cat behind me, another on my neck. As I"m falling asleep, I"m thinking of the village waking up for breakfast....
For several days we are in a zone that is neither here nor there, existing outside of time and geography, decompressing-readjusting. The children sleep, eat, and watch TV.
For me it is a period of reorganization, realizing that things don"t have to be as they have always been. I don"t want to lose the openness, the sense of possibility that I felt on the trip. For Ashley, Nate, and Ricardo, things can never be as they were; the same is true in many ways for Madeline and Cy as well. For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you"ve got to let go of the past-in other words, I have to finish my book. And then what? Go back to school; study religion, Zulu culture, literature? Become a suburban real-estate agent? This isn"t so much about time on my hands as about life in my hands. And it"s life as currency. Where am I going to spend it? What"s the best value? I"m limited only by what I can dream and allow myself to risk, and by the very real fact of the children-I can"t take off trekking the globe in search of myself. It seems pointless to go on for the sake of going on, if there isn"t some larger idea, some sense of enhancing the lives of others.
At every opportunity, Ricardo or Nate retells the story of the hijacking; each time, the boys elaborate on what happened, what they were thinking, and what they would have done had the bad guys "tried something." Ricardo would have picked up rocks from the side of the road and thrown them at them-stoning them. Nate would have used his martial-arts training to "take them out." When asked, I offer that I would have attempted to negotiate-to talk them down-limited only by my ability to speak their language. Every time the boys retell the story, there is more to it. This is their unpacking of the event, the dawning of the realization that it was really f.u.c.king scary-that we could have been killed, and that, had we been kidnapped, had we been threatened with bodily harm, there would have been very little we could have done. Their retelling of the story makes it clear how powerless we really were. And the fact that when they retell it Ashley says nothing concerns me. Ashley in some ways was the most vulnerable of us-she was the girl, the child, the prize, and the heroine. The boys don"t say anything about that part of it, but I think about it-a lot. And I think Ashley does too-which is why she starting screaming on the roadside, and why her survival training kicked in.
Africa seems both so far away and eternally present, like a scrim that I"m operating behind. I keep drinking Londisizwe"s tea, which I think is helping.
I am cooking, cleaning, and packing three enormous duffels with a month"s supply of sheets, pillows, bug spray, stamps and stationery, shirts, shorts, and bathing suits, while having an ident.i.ty crisis-one I"m too old to have-against the backdrop of a heat wave and three children who are leaving for camp this weekend. Ashley and I talk about "relationships" away from home and reaffirm that there should be no trading of physical favors between adults and children-she shouldn"t fool around with anyone more than three years older or younger, and what she does should be limited to "the soft arts," a phrase I coined for the occasion. Ricardo and I review the plan I"ve come up with in collaboration with a colleague of Dr. Tuttle"s to wean him off his medications and add a variety of supplements. Nate and I go over his summer reading and extra-credit projects.
At dinner, Cy holds up a stalk of broccoli like it is a tree and asks, "What is this? Is it an evergreen tree? Is it a maple? If I can"t identify it, I can"t eat it."
"Broccoli," Ashley says. "Not a tree, a vegetable."
"Oh, right," Cy says.