Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  His eyes find Joe’s in the rearview mirror. “Land mines. Some were shot. I don’t like to dwell on the details.”

  “Lino almost died many times,” Amina chimes in.

  “Yes, many times. Once I was saved when a woman took pity and gave me a cup of water. Another time, something inside me said not to go with the others, but to go my own way. There was this one boy—I had walked with him from the start. I couldn’t persuade him to follow me. And so he went with the others and that day he was killed by a land mine.” Lino is quiet then, his strong profile illuminated by the dashboard lights, and his eyes are unblinking as he stares at the road.

  “But the hardest thing was being tired. All the time. So many people would say, ‘Oh, I can’t go any longer without resting for a little bit, wake me up when you’re going to leave.’ But of course, Joseph, they never woke up. Just when I too wanted to lie down in the shade I would hear about someone I knew being in a place fifty miles away. A cousin, or someone from my village, and this gave me the strength to go back where I had just come from, or to go on to another place. To Kenya, into Ethiopia, back to Sudan, then Kenya again.”

  It comes to Joe that he’s heard about this. The Lost Boys. He recalls seeing something on the news, the army of naked boys, their eyes huge and illuminated by thirst and hunger, their emaciated bodies mottled with dust.

  “I was eleven years old when I heard, finally, about my mother. I learned she was at Kukuma with two sisters from my father’s second wife. And so I went there immediately. Some soldiers gave me a lift on their truck. And then, years later, Amina arrived. “But that is her story, and perhaps one day she will tell it.”

  After a moment Lino says, “I’m sorry, Joseph. Maybe I have talked so much, I thought, you have told me your story, and I will tell you mine.”

  “The Lost Boys,” Joe says. “You’re one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.”

  “Yes, that is what they called us,” Lino says. “But you see, I am no longer lost.”

  “That happened some time ago,” Joe says.

  Lino nods. “Yes, long ago. In 1983, that’s when it all began, but I ran from my village five years later. I am told that many of the university students in the cities were rounded up and sprayed with paraffin and set on fire. I prefer to believe that my brothers were not among them.”

  Joe steers his imagination away from the thought of flesh searing, the pain. Human torches. “Why did it happen?”

  Lino’s sigh is loud and long. “People used to say, ‘They want us to be a different colour.’ But in the end, it is not very complicated. There was a war, and whatever bad thing you can possibly imagine happens during war, and I myself, as a small boy, have seen it all. Amina has experienced more than you can imagine, Joseph. And it is still going on to this day.”

  “Okay, okay,” Amina sings out. “You will stop now.” Joe takes it to mean that Lino should stop talking, but as he slows down and pulls over onto the shoulder, he realizes she meant he should stop the car.

  She has prepared food, she tells Joe, her features animated. “Tea,” she says and lifts a metal Thermos for him to see and taps it. “I also have a rice salad and bread.”

  “Amina, say, sandwiches,” Lino commands.

  “I learned to speak English at the refugee camp. There was no such word as sandwiches,” she tells Joe, struggling to pronounce it. She dives forward into a bag between her feet and comes up with a plastic container. “You see? Bread. Bread, with bananas and peanut butter. But first, you must wash.”

  “The doctor wishes us to be hygienic,” Lino says.

  Amina opens the car door and leans out, water splashes against the ground. Joe gets out and goes over to her, drops to his haunches and cups his hands. She’s about to pour water into them from a two-litre Coke bottle, when Lino comes up to his side, takes it from her and motions that Joe should follow him down into the ditch.

  In turn they wash their hands, the water gushing from their palms to splatter the grey earth the colour of charcoal. Joe breathes deeply of the cool wind sweeping across the foothills, smells what he takes to be iron and ice. This handwashing is for his benefit. They likely think he hasn’t been near water for days. He welcomes the shock of the cold wetness against his chapped face, rubs it in, his new beard scraping against his palms.

  They stand for a moment looking out across the land, grey-mauve in the light of the moon. Joe thinks to ask Lino if he’s seen the antelope, and whether they are similar to the antelope in Africa, when Lino says, “Amina will go back. When she is finished studying medicine she will return to our homeland. She will become a surgeon, as she wants to heal the effect of war on the women and girls.”

  Joe hears the sound of an oncoming vehicle and turns to see its headlights, the steady swift trajectory boring through the dark. The traffic coming this way is more frequent than it was earlier and he wonders if Lino has noticed. Lino seemed to think that his Canadian brother might not know enough to pull dry grass to start a fire, and he might also think he’d given up too quickly on hitching a ride. After hearing Lino’s story, he understands why he would return on the chance of picking him up.

  “Will you go back too?” he asks Lino, thinking of the woman he’s waiting to marry.

  Lino’s face is lit by the headlights now and the question goes unanswered as his eyes widen in disbelief.

  The sudden shriek of tires is a jolt of electricity zinging through Joe and he turns in time to see the collision, the car crashing into the rear of Lino’s car, climbing halfway up its trunk and falling back, the shimmer of beaded glass shooting outward in a silvery aura. It happens like that, all at once, the deadening whomp of the impact, Amina’s arms flying up as she’s flung backward and then pitched forward, her head and shoulders bursting through the windshield.

  Oh, God, no. He thinks he hears himself scream as he takes off at a run, but as Lino runs past him and up the side of the ditch he realizes it is Lino, screaming Amina’s name. Lino stops abruptly only steps away from the car, his feet drumming the ground in a staccato of anguish. Then he darts forward, stoops to try to see into Amina’s face, which is flat against the hood. With a leap he’s on the car and kneeling, his legs on either side of her head as he begins to bash at the web of glass encircling her shoulders.

  Joe goes to grab for his phone, realizing as he does, that it’s in his jacket pocket, and the jacket is on the back seat.

  “Get into the car,” Lino yells. “Go. You will help her to pass through.”

  Steam rises from the car that crashed into Lino’s car, its hood sheared off, the exploded airbags bulging through the broken windshield. Metal squeals when Joe wrenches open Amina’s door, pieces of glass fall to the ground, a spurt of beaded glass flies onto the floor now as Lino batters it loose. The back of Amina’s seat is gone. It has broken off and tilts into the rear of the car. Her body hangs from the dash, her knees bent and resting on the floor, the silver Thermos of tea to one side of her leg.

  It’s not possible that she is alive. Her arm is limp at her side, fingers curled, and he sees the pale skin, the creases in her upturned palm. When he wraps his arms about her hips he feels her heat as he lifts her, carefully, while Lino begins to ease her through the cleared windshield. When she is almost through Lino turns her body so that she is face up, gathers her by the shoulders and is about to slide her across the hood and carry her in his arms, when Joe calls for him to wait. He smells gasoline now and thinks of the intense heat of the exhaust pipe, the possibility of a fire. He’s seen the blood, the wide gash on Amina’s forehead, the flap of skin pushed up revealing bone; her squashed nose.

  As he gets out of the car he looks in the back of it for his jacket, when he doesn’t see it, he assumes it’s buried beneath the broken seat. Then he sees another car stopping, parking across the broad shallow gully of the median, its lights on, someone running across that stretch of land. Maybe they’ll have a cell.

  He feels Amina’s slenderness, her lightness, as they carr
y her down the slope of the ditch. When they lay her on the ground her head lolls to one side, the flap of skin gaping open and revealing the ivory wetness of her skull. Her eyes are closed. Likely she didn’t know what happened. No air bags. No seat belt. No headrest. Lino drops to his knees beside her, reaches to touch her hair and pulls his hand away as though frightened. Then he curls into himself, covers his face with his hands and begins to rock.

  Joe peels off his hoodie and spreads it across Amina’s body, thinking, she’s already gone. The blood has left her face and there’s an absolute stillness that is deeper than sleep. He looks up and imagines a flurry of tiny white moths in the shape of a body, a swirl of limbs, hurrying off into the night. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. Or just absent.

  “I’ve called 911. They’re sending an ambulance,” a man says and when Joe looks up he cannot see him for the glow of the cellphone in his hand.

  “It’s too late for the guy in the other car. It doesn’t look like he made it,” the man says.

  Asleep at the wheel, or drunk. It serves him right. The thrust of anger pushes through Joe’s numbness.

  The man is about to be joined by a woman now, teetering down the slope on high heels and Joe wants to shield Amina from their gaze. When she arrives she wraps her arms about herself.

  “It looks as though this one is dead too,” the man says to her.

  “Oh, my God,” the woman says and covers her mouth with her hand.

  That is what people say, oh, my God, in circumstances when other words fail to come. For an instant there was Joe, Lino and the infinite silence emanating from the wreckage. That minute fraction of time following the impact, before Joe began to run. Just as there had been an instant of time before he’d seen his mother’s canvas sneaker in the police officer’s hands. As there was between the ticks of the mantel clock in the dining room downstairs when he lay awake listening for that pause between the seconds when everything and nothing seemed possible.

  Oh, God, no, Joe breathed out in that moment following the crash. Instinctively he had reached beyond himself to utter a prayer. He pleads now for Amina’s death not to be. That her sudden paleness is shock. He wants this, not as proof that there are such things as miracles. He pleads for the sake of the boy, Lino, walking for five years in search of his family, that the mercy finally given to him, by God, by fate, will not be withdrawn.

  More people begin to appear, colourless, like phantoms drifting toward them. In the far distance the wail of a siren rises, circles like a hawk riding the air currents far above the foothills. Joe reaches out, Amina’s skin cool as he places his fingers on the artery in her neck. He presses lightly at the base of her jaw and feels nothing. He slides his fingers down, near to the spoon-shaped indentation of her throat, and that is where he feels the unmistakable flutter of her pulse. He shuts his eyes for a moment, holding tight inside his intense and rising joy.

  He touches Lino on the shoulder, then tugs at him and when Lino uncurls, he puts his arm about his bony shoulder and draws him close so that their ribs touch. Joe begins to weep for the swelling inside, for the boy he’d been when he grew aware of the light shining around him, warm and the colour of honey, and how it had infused his limbs. When he was eleven years old and felt love for the first time, which he feels surging in him now. He takes Lino’s hand, presses his long black fingers into Amina’s neck with his own. “Do you feel it?” he asks after a moment.

  “Aha,” Lino says quietly in what sounds like a great and long sigh of relief. “Aha, Joseph, I do feel it.”

  Then, as the first of the police cars arrive, Lino rises up on his knees, anxiously looking for them to come.

  The air is cold against the wetness on Joe’s face and draws his skin tight. He wipes at it with his arm and says to himself, thank you. Thank you that he is again able to feel love for another human being.

  “You are going to be okay now, my little sister,” Lino says, and as if to reassure him Amina opens her eyes and looks at him, and then at Joe.

  “There was a car accident, but you will soon be okay, Amina. Don’t you worry. The ambulance is here,” Lino croons.

  “My handbag,” she mutters.

  The words are barely spoken, but Joe understands.

  When he goes up to the car, the ambulance attendants are hurrying toward it, and he shouts to gain their attention and points to Amina and Lino, and they veer away from the highway and go on down into the ditch.

  Both sides of the highway are lined with vehicles now, and police cars are parked across the two lanes, the headlights illuminating the people gathered around the other car, the swirling blue and red lights laying bare in flashes the shattered glass scattered across the pavement, pieces of twisted metal. Joe looks for the man with the cellphone, wanting to tell him Amina is alive. He wants to fall to his knees, his teeth chattering now, the shock setting in.

  Ten

  LAURIE AWAKENS IN THE MORNING on the lounger, still wearing the fox jacket, the top half of her body sticky with heat while the bottom is cold and her muscles cramped when she struggles upright. She groans when she sees the cut-out bits of postcards and photographs, the scraps of newspaper and McDonald’s wrappers scattered about on the floor. The collage covers the dinette table. She remembers her impulse to glue the pieces down, telling herself that hot water would soften the glue enough to scrape the image off before Joe would return. And then she’d decided to leave the collage intact, as a reproach, wanting Joe to see it and know how she’d filled the time while waiting for him.

  She awoke during the night to the sight of the green light glowing from the bedroom and knew why she hadn’t been able to sleep there. It was as though a creature had taken refuge in the room and was giving off its last breath. But up front in the cab, the two empty seats were starkly lit by the parking lot lights and emphasized the feeling that she was the only person on the planet still breathing.

  Compared to the house, the Meridian is a cigar tube. The house with its wide oak trim, ten-foot ceilings, the stone basement, Verna’s clock chiming the hour—yes, even that clock, much as she had resented it sometimes—gave weight to the conviction that she was exempt from destruction by earthquakes, floods and killer weather. But, nonetheless, the sturdy house had not protected her from heartache. Like other women all over the world, she had listened for the turn of Joe’s key in the lock, his footsteps on the stairs. And sometimes when he’d climbed into bed beside her she’d smelled someone, a woman, on his skin. The thought was another one of those things she’d crammed into a jar and put up on the shelf beyond reach.

  Alfred’s cut-out face looks up at her from the floor between her feet. You’ve been good for Joe, he says.

  “Yes, Dad, but has Joe been good for me?”

  She’d used Alfred’s face, Joe’s, their torsos, hands, legs, along with the postcard images to create a collage profile of her own mother’s face. The hours had passed swiftly while she snipped Joe and Alfred free from picnic and dinner tables, from veranda chairs and campsites, all the while thinking that in the morning she would regret having destroyed the photographs.

  But she doesn’t. Rather, as she stands at the dinette looking down at the collage, she’s surprised at how much she actually likes what she’s made. The picture Verna took of Karen, her pregnant mother, lies on one side of the table, Laurie’s guide to creating her rather long and slender nose, her straight ash-coloured hair. In the collage, patches of photographs torn from the newspaper have become her hair. Her mother’s mouth is open wide, and narrow strips of news stories radiate out from it and across and over the edge of the table. She picks out random phrases from the streamers of words—-fairly urgent, predicted it would, which means—things her mother might have said. I thought, the world—of you, she finishes. There had been a silver seal on the tissue paper, and it’s become her mother’s eye.

  When she’d finished the collage, she’d laid the tissue paper over it and squeezed out the remainder of the glue, and sprea
d it thinly with her fingers. Overnight the glue had dried like a varnish, rendering the tissue translucent, what she’d hoped for, and her mother’s face seems to come forward through the tissue in the way it does through the fog of her imagination. Joe’s mouth smiles out from her eyelid, a daisy of splintered postcard images adorns her cheek, the body of a red-coated mounted police officer, topped with Alfred’s face, dangles from her ear.

  She fingers the narrow red ribbon that had bound the photographs, stiff with glue now, looped and flattened in a bow at her mother’s throat. When Alfred gave it to her he couldn’t say for certain if it had belonged to her mother or not, as all the Rosemont Place girls had worn them beneath their collars. It was part of the uniform they were made to sew when they first arrived, the smocks being different colours, but all of them had the white picture-frame collars and the red ribbon tied beneath it. Intended to draw the eye upward and away from their embarrassment, Laurie concluded. Soon after Verna died, Alfred, while out walking along the river, had come across the ribbon washed up in a flotsam of debris, and when Laurie introduced herself into their lives, he knew, he said, why he’d kept it all those years.

  She’s surprised by her creation, the words especially, and wishes now that she’d thought to cut the newspaper strips into something complete for her mother to say. Made her the kind of mother with patience enough to explain, to advise, to be playful, everything her grandmother was unable to do. Unless you were a dog.

  A vehicle passes by in the parking lot and she turns away from the table, figuring that later today she’ll soak a towel and lay it on the collage and clear it away. Right now her stomach is reminding her of the twenty dollars fate put in her pocket, and the promise she’d made to herself to indulge in a substantial breakfast. Her breath reeks like a barn, the stale pizza, she concludes. And although she washed her hands last night, the sour smell of the garbage can still clings to them.