by Brady Hammes
The misunderstanding racked into focus, and Jonah felt a weight empty through his shoes. He was not being arrested after all.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to charge you for a second bag,” the woman continued. “It’s thirty-five dollars. I’m very sorry. Someone should have informed you about this in…” She looked down at her computer screen. “Libreville. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen.”
His assumption of prison time had been replaced by a fairly reasonable demand for thirty-five dollars, and he wanted to throw his arms around the woman and cheer. “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve got all my camera equipment in there, which is why it’s so heavy.”
The woman smiled disinterestedly. Jonah handed over his credit card, and she disappeared into another room. She returned a moment later pulling his rolling case. “Thank you for understanding,” she said, handing back his card.
“Not a problem.” Jonah grabbed his case and smiled at the woman. “Merry Christmas,” he said, then turned and walked away, feeling alternately proud and ashamed at having successfully smuggled eighty pounds of raw ivory into the United States of America.
He powered on his phone as he made his way toward the exit. In the four months since he left, he’d received only three voicemails. The first was from the librarian at Vanderbilt asking him about an overdue book whose whereabouts he could not recall. He guessed it was probably packed away with the rest of his junk in a public storage unit in Nashville. The second was from Marcus, asking him to check in once he was settled. The last one was from his mother, left sometime in the last few minutes, saying that she was almost at the airport.
His phone rang: unknown caller.
“Hello?” Jonah said, weaving his way through a rush of travelers.
“This is Andre. Slinky’s cousin.”
“I’m still at the airport. Can I call you later?” He’d been on American soil for less than an hour and Slinky was already keeping tabs on him.
“You have my address?” Andre asked.
“No,” Jonah said.
“You know the South Side?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna text you my address,” Andre said. “Make sure you’re here by four. I got the Bulls game tonight.”
“I can’t be there by four,” Jonah said. “I just landed. Can we arrange something for tomorrow please?”
“I don’t know about that, Johnny.”
Jonah’s phone beeped with an incoming call. “Can you hold on a second?” He clicked over. “Hello?”
“There you are,” his mom said. “I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Hi, Mom. I just landed.”
“I’m pulling up now. Air France, right?”
“I told you I’d take a cab.”
“Too late,” his mother said. “I’m already here.”
Jonah heard honking through the phone, followed by a few seconds of muffled dialogue. “Mom?”
“Cop,” she said. “I have to go. I’m pulling up now…in the Mazda.”
Jonah passed through the sliding glass doors and stepped into a kind of weather he’d almost forgotten about. The temperature was somewhere far below freezing and he had no coat, an oversight that now became painfully clear. He’d been wearing the same torn corduroys and T-shirt for the past three days, which for the most part had been sufficient. But he hadn’t considered this thing called winter. He hadn’t considered that he might need more than seven T-shirts and a rain slicker fashioned from a plastic trash bag. Bracing himself against the cold, he hustled out into a river of slow-moving traffic, fielding curious looks from other travelers.
His phone rang again. Same number. “Hello?”
“You hung up on me,” Andre said, annoyed.
“Sorry, but I can’t really talk right now. Can I call you later?”
“Are you through customs?”
“Yeah.”
“And you have the product?”
“Yeah.”
Jonah saw his mother’s car approaching and he waved her down. She pulled to a stop and hopped out. She wore fur-lined snow boots and a chunky red scarf over the black pea coat he’d bought her for Christmas last year. For years she’d dyed her hair brown, but now it was a natural shade of gray that he thought looked quite nice on her. “Where’s your coat, bozo?” she said.
“My cousin says I should keep you on a very short leash,” Andre said. “He’s worried you may try something funny.”
“I don’t have one,” Jonah whispered to his mom.
“You don’t have what?” Andre asked.
“Look, I really have to go,” Jonah said into the phone. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” He clicked the phone off and slipped it into his pocket.
His mother approached and threw her arms around him. “I missed you, kiddo.”
“I missed you too,” he said, feeling suddenly warmed by his mom’s embrace. Thirty hours of air travel were immediately forgotten in that moment.
She walked to the rear of the car and popped the trunk. “Who were you talking to?”
“Work,” Jonah said, tossing his backpack in the trunk.
“Don’t they know you’re on vacation?”
“Apparently not.”
“Lordy, sweetheart,” Cynthia said, trying to lift his rolling case. “Did you bring one of your elephants home with you?”
Not funny, Mom. He grabbed the case from her and hoisted it into the trunk.
“Do you want to drive?” she asked, handing him the keys. “I don’t do well on these icy roads.”
They escaped the airport and merged onto the freeway. Everything was cast in a flat light and the sky felt low, the clouds cupping the city in a gray dome. It was his first time behind the wheel of a car in months, and he drove carefully, the feeling slowly returning to him.
“Sam back yet?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder before changing lanes.
“She got in late last night.”
“And Gavin?”
“He’s driving from New Mexico. He should be here this evening.”
“What was he doing in New Mexico?”
“He was there for a play.”
A taxi cut in front of their car. Jonah hit the brakes, causing the car to slide momentarily before he regained control. “Jesus, asshole!”
“Jonah…,” his mother said.
“What? That guy’s driving like a moron.” Jonah took a deep breath and tried to compose himself. “What happened to the show?”
“What show?” His mom was now texting someone on her phone.
“Gavin’s.”
“Oh, it was canceled,” she said, punching at the phone. “I thought I told you.”
“Maybe you did.”
“I don’t think anyone’s too surprised,” she said. Her phone dinged with an incoming message. “Did you ever see it?”
“I don’t have a television in the forest.”
“Oh, right,” she said, typing again. “Anyway, he’s still pretty sore about it, so please don’t bring it up.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
Her phone dinged again, then once more after that. “Who are you texting?” Jonah asked.
“Your brother,” she said. “Trying to figure out what time he’ll be here.” She tossed her phone into her purse and turned her attention back to Jonah. “So what’s the latest with your elephants? You figure out what they’re jabbering about?”
“To be perfectly honest, Mom, I haven’t really gotten much work done lately.”
“Why’s that?”
“The situation on the ground hasn’t been conducive to research.” He hoped that would be enough to appease her.
She frowned. “That’s a shame. I thought everything was going so well out there.”
“It was until about a week ago.”
“Then maybe it’s a good thing you came home.”
“Maybe.” The car smelled strongly of flowers. Jonah looked in the rearview mirror and discovered a back seat filled with bouquets of poinsettias and holly. A couple wreaths sat on the floor between the seats. “What’s with all the flowers?”
“They’re from the shop. A bunch of the girls and I had lunch today, and we divided up everything that hadn’t sold. Quite a haul, huh?” She giggled to herself, though Jonah wasn’t sure what was so funny.
Before his parents moved downtown, his mother had worked part-time at a flower shop in Palatine. The store was owned by one of her girlfriends, who staffed it with other friends from the neighborhood, and in this way the store became a sort of meeting place, a social club for the empty nester subset. They each worked a few short shifts every week, but most of their time was spent enjoying wine-heavy lunches like the one his mother had apparently just attended.
“Boozy lunch?” Jonah said. “Is that why you wanted me to drive?”
“No,” she said a little defensively.
“You haven’t had anything to drink today?”
She shrugged. “I had a glass of wine. Big deal.”
It really wasn’t a big deal, but he liked to give her grief about it, probably because he was jealous of her social life, the fact that she was undeniably more popular than he’d ever been. Jonah’s image of his mother had always been of the woman who ran the vacuum while they watched cartoons, the woman who carted them around to sleepovers and sporting events and dance class, the woman who awaited him at the kitchen table every morning. This other woman, the one who spent her afternoons drinking with friends and traveling the world, this was a very different person. Her kids were gone and so was the big house in the suburbs, along with all the requisite housekeeping that had occupied so much of her time. She now had whole days and weeks to do whatever she pleased. One of the girls from the flower shop came from a wealthy Italian family that owned a villa at Lake Como, where his mother and her posse of girlfriends spent a couple weeks every summer. It seemed like every time he spoke to her she was either returning from an overseas adventure or preparing to depart for one. In the past year, his mom had taken a riverboat tour down the Danube, followed by a week spent touring the coast of Croatia. It was as if she’d found herself, at fifty-eight years old, on perpetual spring break.
They arrived downtown a half hour later. She directed him toward the apartment, which turned out to be a fairly new building stacked atop a Walgreens. It seemed as though almost everything in Chicago was stacked atop a Walgreens. He parked in the underground garage and followed his mother into the elevator. They got off at the sixth floor and walked down the hall and into their apartment, where Christmas music was playing for a seemingly empty home.
“You and Gavin are sharing the big bedroom,” Cynthia said. “I put Sam in the small one.”
“Where’s Dad?” Jonah asked.
“Probably out doing some last-minute shopping.”
Sam appeared from the bedroom looking as if she’d just awoken from a nap. She was skinnier than he’d remembered, though she’d always been thin. She wore black stretch pants and a hooded sweatshirt, and her hair was uncombed. He noticed her eyes were bloodshot, though his were as well, an unavoidable result of international travel.
“Look who I found,” his mother said. “Returned from the jungle.”
“You smell like it too,” Sam said, embracing her brother.
His mother sniffed audibly. “I didn’t want to mention it in the car, but it’s really quite bad, Jonah.”
“I know, Mom. They don’t have showers where I’ve been.”
“You could have showered at the airport,” Sam said, twisting a fallen strand of hair around her index finger.
“If you’d ever been to the Libreville airport, you would know that’s not an option.”
“What did you do in Paris?” Sam asked.
“Exactly what I said I would. I drank two glasses of wine and fell asleep on the floor.”
“Whatever happened to your plan to meet up?” their mother asked.
“She never got back to me,” Jonah said.
“Sorry,” Sam said. “It was kinda hectic at the end there.”
“I’m gonna go take a shower for you ladies, okay?” Jonah said, walking to the bedroom. He closed the door and sat on the twin bed he’d slept on as a kid. It was strange seeing elements of their old suburban home restaged in this unfamiliar space. In the corner of the room was the bureau he and Gavin had plastered with skateboarding stickers when they were kids, though someone, their father he guessed, had refinished it in a dark walnut stain. As he sat on the bed, he listened to the metronomic tick of the small table clock on the nightstand. The last few days had been so loud, but now it was so quiet and he found the silence unsettling.
There was a knock at the bedroom door. “Jonah,” his mom called.
“Yes?” he said.
“What’s in this giant suitcase? I thought you were only staying a week.”
“Don’t open that!” he said, swinging open the bedroom door.
“What is it?”
“Your Christmas present.” There were few things his mother held more sacred than the surprise of a Christmas gift, so he figured this would be an adequate deterrent.
“Okay, okay,” she said, turning and walking back to the living room.
Jonah shut the door again and went to the bathroom that connected the two bedrooms. He got the shower going, then undressed and tossed his dirty clothes in a pile by the door. There wasn’t much hope for those old things, so he added new wardrobe to the mental list of supplies needed for his time in America. He looked at his naked body in the mirror for the first time in four months and was pleased with what he saw. Beneath the dirt and grime was a surprisingly toned thirty-one-year-old male, defined chest and ropy arms, contoured thighs and bulging calves. A plant-based diet and some daily hiking had vanquished the gut he’d acquired back in Nashville, and for the first time in his life he felt like a man in control of his body.
When the water reached a comfortable temperature, he stepped in and basked in the glory of a warm shower. A buffet of shampoos and conditioners and body gels was lined on the shower rack, and he smelled each one carefully before making his selection. He’d almost forgotten how simple life could be, how he could turn a knob and stand for however long he wanted beneath a stream of clean hot water, and then step out of the shower and dry himself with an absurdly luxurious towel. My God, he thought, what a life he’d been missing, what a perfectly comfortable way to exist.
Afterward, he dressed and went to the living room, where Sam was sitting on the couch with her laptop.
“What’s really in the suitcase?” she asked, clapping the laptop shut and placing it on the end table.
“Poor choices,” he said, plopping down next to her. He picked up the remote and began flipping through the channels.
“So you haven’t actually done any Christmas shopping?”
“There was a Best Buy in the village. You’re all getting thumb drives.”
“I’m going shopping tomorrow if you want to come along.”
“You know how I feel about crowds.”
“I’ll bring a flask.”
Jonah smiled. “We’ll see.”
He stood and walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He nearly wept at the bounty it contained: four varieties of cheese, pasta salad, gourmet sausages, a crisper stuffed with assorted vegetables, three bottles of sauvignon blanc, and six different kinds of beer. He studied the beers carefully before grabbing a pilsner and rejoining his sister on the couch.
“How long are you back?” Sam asked.
“Supposed to be a couple weeks,” he said, cracking the beer. “But it’s still
up in the air. You?”
“I told Mom the twenty-ninth, though I actually just bought a one-way ticket home.”
“You aren’t going back?”
“To be determined.”
Jonah took a drink of his beer. “So what’s Moscow like?”
“I’m not actually in Moscow. I’m in a little nothing town about a hundred miles northeast of Moscow. It’s a lot like suburban Illinois to be perfectly honest. Maybe a little colder but equally boring.”
“I take it you don’t like it?”
She shrugged. “It’s fine, I guess. Not sure how much longer I’ll stay.”
“It’s nice to see you,” he said, putting his arm around her.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Nice to be seen by you.”
* * *
—
THEIR DAD RETURNED HOME later that evening with a collection of shopping bags. “Welcome home, pal,” he said, giving Jonah a quick hug, then went to the bedroom to hide his gifts. He returned a moment later. “How was the flight? Or flights, I guess.”
“Long,” Jonah said. Fraught was more accurate, but that would invite a line of questioning he wasn’t interested in addressing.
Later, they gathered around the kitchen table for chicken piccata and a couple bottles of Malbec. For the first time in almost a year, the entire family, minus one, was together, and Jonah found it slightly annoying that the two living overseas had managed to make it home, while the third, the unemployed actor, was nowhere to be found.
His mother finally joined them at the table and began circulating the dishes.
“So what are you doing out there?” Jonah’s dad asked him.
“What do you mean?” Jonah said.
“In Gabon. What do you do there all day?”
Jonah didn’t see the need to lie. He’d already lied to his mother about the ivory, so he figured he might as well be honest about the indolent nature of the last few weeks. “I’m supposed to be studying elephants, but lately I’ve just been drinking with my buddy in town.”
“That doesn’t sound very productive,” his mom said, trying, unsuccessfully, to modulate her displeasure.
