by Shana Burg
Mom smiles. “Great artists ask great questions,” she says, and turns back to her painting.
No more apples.
Only planets.
And stars.
It takes a few days, but eventually I realize that it wasn’t me who died.
“Where am I?” I ask.
“Sun Private Hospital, Clare, in Blantyre.” Dad takes my hand. “I’m so sorry, but Innocent died that night. There’s nothing else we could have done. You passed out, so I brought you here.”
My heart cracks along the same lines where it was just starting to heal from my mother’s death. Tears pour down my face. I’m a river. A river of tears. There’s nothing holding my sorrow inside anymore. No skin. No bones. There are no borders to my pain. It’s everywhere. It’s in me. Around me. On the metal rails of the hospital bed. In the cardboard hospital toast. I inhale it five times a day through the oxygen concentrator until Dad and I finally talk—really talk—about what happened.
The tests show that I have pneumonia. “You were probably sick before you even went to the lake. That cough you had wasn’t allergies. It was something called walking pneumonia. Looks like you were carrying the virus around in your lungs.” Dad says that soaring down the road on the moped swallowing dust turned the virus into something more serious. “I feel awful,” he says. “I should’ve known.”
At night the nurse comes to give me pills. I swallow them and drink the tiny cup of water, but I’m still thirsty and the nurse has already gone. Dad’s next to me, dozing in the chair beside the bed. “Dad!” I say. “Dad!” He doesn’t move, so I reach out and touch his elbow. He still doesn’t stir, so I poke him a few times in the arm.
“Mmmm.”
“Water, Dad. I need water.”
“Right, right.” He jumps up. “Water.” He dashes into the hall.
Sun Private Hospital is night-and-day different from the government-run hospital where Dad works in Machinga. Here, patients get their own rooms, plenty of medicine, and food from the cafeteria. So why didn’t Dad bring Innocent to this private hospital along with me? Is it only because I’m a doctor’s daughter that I can get this kind of special treatment? Or is it because I’m a mzungu? If I had stayed in the Machinga District Hospital, would I be dead too?
Dad returns from the hallway with a whole bottle of water. I take a few sips. “Zikomo, Dad,” I say. I feel hot all over. I’ve been in the hospital four days already. Four days too long. I need to get out, so I ask him: “Why’d you leave Innocent at the hospital in Machinga?”
“What, honey?” Dad sits down.
I cough. “Why’d you leave Innocent there?”
He reaches over and holds my hand.
“Why didn’t you bring him to this hospital? With us?” Thinking about Innocent, I feel too heavy to move.
“Clare,” Dad says, “it’s complicated. And besides, even though we got him breathing again, he’d slipped into a coma. It was too dangerous to transport him then.”
Innocent’s voice plays in my ears—I one the cake … I eight the cake—and his laugh, like wind chimes, when he finally figures out what that means.
I’ve already missed Innocent’s funeral, which is bad enough. Now I’m desperate to get back to the village to check on Memory, but Dad says that’s out of the question. “You’ve got to take it easy, honey. A few more days on the oxygen. You know your lungs haven’t cleared all the way.”
“A few more days!” I feel like a dead leaf being stepped on again and again. Mr. Special Kingsley will have to tell the standard one students that our play is canceled. We’ve missed so many days of rehearsal. Besides, I would never recast Innocent’s role. I can’t even imagine what that would do to Memory. To me.
“Pneumonia’s serious stuff,” Dad says.
Every morning after I get hooked up to the oxygen machine, Dad and I spend hours playing checkers and Othello, the two games the hospital keeps on hand. In the afternoons, he drives to the Royal Malawi Hotel to rest for a few hours while I sketch in the pad he brought me. But each time I try to force myself to draw, my pen drifts off the page along with my mind.
Today Dad returns from the hotel with a big smile on his face. “I’ve got something here that’s going to cheer you up,” he says. He opens his briefcase and takes out a stack of paper. “A messenger delivered these to the hotel. They’re for you.”
He fixes the pillows behind my head so I can get a better look. My Bingo cards! They’ve been turned into get-well cards for me. Each and every one has a message on the back.
On the top of the pile is a card that says:
You are missed by your classmates and students. Take good care. Your headmaster, Mr. Special Kingsley
I can’t believe so many people at Mzanga have noticed I’m gone. I want to flip through them all to see if Saidi has written me a note, but my father is watching, so I turn over the cards in order from top to bottom. Every once in a while, I read one out loud.
Sickness wrote:
Please fele betta. Love from your friend, Sickness
On the other side of the paper, she drew a scarf around the head of the lion I sketched on the Bingo board.
Norman’s card says:
COOD YOU FIND A FLUTE IN BLANTYRE FOR ME WEN U FEEL BETTER?
Halfway through the stack, I see a card from Saidi. It says:
Best wishes to feel well in quickest time. Your friend Saidi
I read it over twice before I look at the next one. I’m almost at the bottom of the pile when my throat tightens. I haven’t seen a card from Memory yet. I turn over the very last one. It’s from a girl named Jelly. I don’t even know who she is. All it says is:
I like dog. Jelly, std. 4
I cry. I can’t help it. I’m afraid Memory hates me. If I were her, I’d hate me too. Hate me because of where I was born, how much money I have, and how I get treated to a whole other kind of medicine, a whole other chance at life. But when I tell Dad why I’m crying, he says, “Think of what she’s going through, Clare.”
And suddenly I burn with shame at how selfish I am to even think she could make a card for me, when she’s probably having enough trouble just waking up in the morning. I know that after Mom died, whenever I opened my eyes, I would get confused and think, This has got to be the nightmare. Now let me wake up to my real life.
After seven days in the hospital, when I finally do get back home, I run to the veranda and find Fred burrowed in the corner of the puffy green chair. As soon as Fred sees me, she flaps her wings. I plop down and she flies onto my lap. “I missed you so much,” I whisper, and nuzzle my cheek into her silky feathers. I never thought a chicken could hold her own in a conversation, but Fred starts squawking up a storm. When she finishes catching me up on her life, she prances across the floor and settles in the corner, where I know she’s laying an egg for me.
“I’ll be back to check on you,” I say. Then I go into my bedroom. The scarves draping my dresser look so happy and colorful, like a little rainbow right in my room. I lift the netting and climb onto the mattress. It’s still thin, but it’s my bed and it feels good, so I lie there and stare at the mosquito netting around me. Then I think and think and think about what happened and what I can say to Memory, since no hug, no kind words, nothing at all can vaccinate her from the pain of losing her brother. But maybe if I tell her about my mom, she won’t feel so alone. I wonder if her mother liked to laugh like mine, or if her father told bad jokes.
I’m in the middle of praying that Memory will speak to me again when I hear Mrs. Bwanali’s booming voice. “My girl come home!” I heave myself out of bed. We meet up in the living room and she swallows me in a huge hug. “My girl, my girl,” she says, and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. “You look healthy like a water buffalo!” She throws her head back and laughs and laughs and laughs. She takes my hand and pulls me into the kitchen, where a chocolate cake is sitting on the table. “Dr. Heath special recipe,” she says. “I make to fatten your belly after ill
ness. To turn you strong.”
If cake can make me strong, I’m all for it! “Zikomo kwambiri,” I croak. Then I throw my arms around Mrs. Bwanali and hug her as tightly as I can, which isn’t much, since my arms are about as muscley as two strands of thread.
Mrs. Bwanali sits down for cake and tea with Dad and me. “Very yummy!” she says after the first bite.
“Who taught you that word?” I ask, teasing.
“My girl, Clare, of course,” she says, and smiles. “Now tell me the scary story. What happen to you?”
So I tell her all about how I woke up in the hospital and heard the sad news about Innocent, how my heart broke, and how I couldn’t even concentrate enough to draw. I tell her how I used the oxygen concentrator five times every day, and how Dad stayed at my side almost the whole time. While I’m telling my scary story, Mrs. Bwanali helps herself to another piece of her cake. And when she helps herself to a third, it’s all Dad and I can do not to burst into giggles.
“So, what about you?” I ask. “What’s been happening here?”
Mrs. Bwanali puts her hands behind her head. Then she gives me a behavior report on Fred, who was not excellent or even satisfactory. “I try to care for this nkhuku Fred while you are away and ill,” she says. “But this chicken look at me like this.” Mrs. Bwanali cocks her head to the side and scowls. “I tell Fred, ‘Clare is in hospital. We must pray together.’ And we do. We shut eyes and pray. This chicken only give one egg in whole week.”
While Mrs. Bwanali complains about Fred, I finally get a chance to eat her cake. It really is delicious!
“This chicken scratch up the furniture and go to the ladies’ right on the veranda floor even after I put her in the box.” Mrs. Bwanali shakes her head like she still can’t believe how bad Fred was. “This chicken Fred was so mad and sad without her friend Clare. This chicken need her own pit latrine! It is good you come home, Clare, because me and this chicken—we cannot survive long in same house without you.”
After cake and tea, Mrs. Bwanali leaves for the market and Dad drives me to Mkumba village, where I give Memory’s grandmother a hug and tell her how terribly sorry I am. Then I walk in the plum-colored dusk down to the river, where Memory is washing the dinner dishes.
When Memory sees me, she picks up a dirty pot and hands it over. I squat beside her on the riverbank, take a rag from a bucket, and scrub, scrub, scrub, harder and harder, until I work up the guts.
“Do you hate me?” I finally ask.
“Hate you?” Memory stops scrubbing.
“Well … hate my dad?”
She looks at me hard. “It is not fair,” she says. “This world is not fair.” She bites her lip and knits her eyebrows together.
My heart drums in my ears. I want to tell her that it’s not my fault. That I didn’t mean for it to be this way. That I wanted to save Innocent, and my father did too. It’s just that he couldn’t. Dad couldn’t. Things weren’t set up that way.
But Memory is the number one student for a reason. She already understands. She already knows there’s a system in place, and we can’t change it overnight. We can only do our small part, and take one step at a time, even if that step involves tangling with the law. “I love that you steal electric bicycle to try to save my brother,” Memory says. She puts the pot on the muddy bank and wraps me in a hug.
Memory pulls away from me. “There is a secret,” she says.
“Secret?” I wipe my cheek.
She leans in close and whispers, “Electric bicycles got stealed from the hospital parking lot.”
I gasp.
She puts a finger over her lips and says, “Shhh!” She hugs me again. “Ndimakukonda,” she says. “I love you.”
“Ndimakukonda,” I say, because, of course, I love her too. And even though we’ve only known each other about a month, I could swear we’ve been friends our whole lives.
I can’t wait another second to get back to school. I haven’t had a fever for three days, so when Dad shakes me awake Monday morning, I get right out of bed. The buttery smell of pancakes fills the whole house, and as I pull my uniform over my head, I can already hear Mrs. Bwanali explode, “Clare, love. You look pretty as a wildcat!” The uniform is bigger than ever on me, so today I have to wrap the scarf twice around my waist in order to gather all the extra fabric.
I shuffle down the hall and through the living room and stand in the kitchen doorway, feeling a little groggy and a bit weak but otherwise not too bad.
Mrs. Bwanali takes one look at me. “My girl. My pretty, pretty girl,” she says. She runs across the tiny kitchen, throws her arms around me, and wraps me in a warm hug.
While Dad chows down his pancakes, Mrs. Bwanali checks me out one more time. She leans forward and examines my eyebrows, my ears, my nose. She clucks her teeth. “Open the mouth,” she orders. “Put the tongue outside.”
But when I do what she says, Mrs. Bwanali’s face sags. She shakes her head. “Dr. Silver,” she says, “yoo-hoo, Dr. Silver!” She waves her hand in front of Dad’s medical report.
Dad looks up. “What is it?”
“My pretty girl, Miss Clare, not much pretty this morning. This throat is red as the backside of baboon.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Bad spirits fight inside this body,” Mrs. Bwanali tells Dad before she turns to me and says, “In the bed, my girl.”
“What? I’m going to—”
She puts her hand on her hip. “Mrs. Bwanali know when a girl can go to the school, when she can go to a party, when she can go to the trading center,” she says. “Clare, you must go in the bed.”
“Dad!” I say.
“She hasn’t had a fever for three days,” Dad says, like he’s mildly interested in helping me out.
“Show your daddy. Stick this tongue out like a lizard, Clare.”
I do, and the two of them stare down my throat.
“Red bumps,” Mrs. Bwanali tells Dad. “Bad spirit.”
Dad nods. “There is still some slight inflammation,” he says. “That’s to be expected.”
“When you are at work, Dr. Silver, I am chief of this village, no?”
A bead of sweat dribbles down the side of my face.
“I think one more day of rest would be good,” Dad tells me. “It’s certainly not going to hurt you any.”
“If I don’t get back to school, my students will never learn the English alphabet before we leave this country,” I say.
“There is more than one way to cook a goat,” Mrs. Bwanali says.
I shiver.
“Or a chicken!” Dad says, and laughs.
“Not funny,” I tell him. Dad’s still not a big fan of Fred’s, especially since Mrs. Bwanali gave the report about how badly Fred behaved while I was in the hospital.
“I have to go to school today. I have to see my friends!” I say.
“A true friend shall wait for the other through the hungry season,” Mrs. Bwanali tells me. “Now go!” she says, gently pushing me through the doorway as Dad calls out, “Bye, kid.”
Back in my bedroom, I’m steaming mad. I stick the thermometer in my mouth only to find that Mrs. Bwanali’s right: my fever’s back up to ninety-nine and a half. Plus, whenever I swallow, it feels like someone’s scraping my throat with sandpaper. I take off my uniform and spend the morning drinking tea, sketching all the foods I miss, and flipping through the pages of Gallery Geek, a magazine of super-hip modern art that I brought all the way here. After an hour or two of hanging out in my bed and chewing on my necklace, I close my eyes and fall asleep.
Mom visits. She sits on the edge of my bed stroking my hair, admiring my uniform, which is hanging from the nail on the wall. “That pendant I made you. I’m glad you put a dent in it,” she says. “Why should it be perfect? Perfect is boring.”
I wonder if Mom knows we stole the mopeds. That wasn’t exactly a boring thing to do. I’m pretty certain she’s clueless about the fact that I’m now a teenage criminal. If she did kno
w, I doubt she’d look so peaceful, so calm.
When I wake up from my nap, I’m ravished. I trudge back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Bwanali’s dicing a tomato at the counter. “How you feel now, Clare?” she asks. No sooner have the words left her mouth than her eyes bulge. She slowly walks toward me, feels my cheek, and then yanks her hand away like she’s touched a hot stove.
“What?” I shout.
“Mark from the … from the …”
“Mark from the what?” I shriek.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Evil spirit!” she whispers.
I fly to the bathroom and check in the mirror. There, printed on my cheek, is an upside-down, melting strawberry ice cream cone. It sort of looks like a machete dripping blood. I run my finger over it. Then I laugh out loud. I laugh so hard that I can’t even stand up anymore. I run to my room, push aside the netting, and flop down onto my bed.
Mrs. Bwanali pokes her head in the door. “I know the witch who do this to you. He come in the door when I scrub clothes outside. I must shut door to keep out this witch! My poor, poor Clare.”
Before the woman collapses from guilt, I show her the picture I drew in my sketchbook. I try to explain that I must have fallen asleep right on top of the page with the ice cream cone, but Mrs. Bwanali’s still convinced I’ve been cursed. So I pull her into the bathroom, pour some water onto a washcloth, and scrub the ink off my cheek. “See,” I say. “It’s not the mark of a wicked witch. It’s from my red pen.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Bwanali says. She throws her hands over her mouth and then rubs her thumb across my clean cheek to make sure the mark of the sorcerer is really gone. When she sees that it is, she laughs her thunderous laugh and her whole body jiggles.
Memory told me that Saidi told her we’d better figure out a way to replace the mopeds that got stolen. She said Saidi is trying to come up with a plan, but so far, no luck. The more I think about the fact that we’re practically criminals, the itchier my muscles feel and the more I’ve got to stretch my legs. For two days, I’ve been in bed doing nothing but sketching, thinking, dreaming, and swallowing medicine for my sore throat, and suddenly, I can’t take it anymore.
