The Milk of Birds (14 page)

Todd sits down on his bed. “Mom's hiring you a tutor.”

“School's almost over.”

“Apparently you're not doing so hot in—”

“All right, all right.”

I hate this! In fourth-grade summer school we spent an entire July picking bugs off the playground to stick in our ant farm, but this year all the teachers took a serious pill. Mr. Hathaway's teaching the English part. He probably needs the
extra money to fly to some grammar convention where they sit around the pool discussing colons. “Tell me, Miss Cannelli”—he never calls me K. C.—“why is it that you write such long and . . . spirited papers at home but cannot come up with one coherent and correctly punctuated paragraph in class?”

I don't want to tell him about my computer, and I'm certainly not going to mention Mom's cut-and-paste jobs, so I just smile.

A few people have told me I have an impish smile. Sometimes I feel like a smiling idiot. Got a problem? Just smile. It works.

Except on tests. Why do they always make them so long? As if nobody has anything else to think about.

“Mom asked me for recommendations,” Todd says.

“Who?”

“Parker.”

“Gregory's little brother?”

“History's his thing. And he's a good writer. He just won a big prize.”

“A pencil.”

“Five hundred bucks,” Todd says. “From some association of Civil War buffs.”

How can you be a war buff? One of the things I'm not doing so hot in is world history because it's all wars, empires on parade, and everybody fighting, Tangs and Turks, and then the Byzantines, who couldn't seem to make up their minds which team they were on. I can see a fifteen-year-old being a car buff maybe. A baseball buff. But a war buff? Parker must be really sick.

I'm never going to forgive Mom.

I look around for a place to sit, but clothes cover pretty
much everything, as if Todd sneezed into a big basket of dirty laundry. I turn his desk chair around and lift his towel with tweezer fingers, draping it over his stack of books. Ignoring his glowering, I launch into the sick-day story I told Nawra.

For the longest minute, Todd doesn't comment; he just slides his hands up and down his skinny, hairy thighs. No mazes carved there. Finally he says, “Dad probably knows a lot of purchasing managers.”

Whenever Dad sat still enough for a lap, I'd always climb into it, and he smiled—not the big grin he uses for SuperOffice but something soft and real, and he'd notice something about me, like the ladybugs on my barrettes or the progress of a scab on my elbow. “Open wide,” he'd say, and admire a tooth coming in.

That's what I liked about Dad; all you had to do was grow, and he'd think you were pretty cool.

He used to mark our heights on the wall at home, and now he measures us against his body, which has stopped growing up but not out. As Todd says, he's getting heavy around the equator. Todd is as tall as he is, but I'm only up to his armpit, which is not a place where I like to spend very much time.

I miss his lap.

Maybe Sharon hops in when we're not there.

“What are we going to do?” I ask Todd.

“Nothing,” he says. “Whatever happened, Mom should never hear it from us. Never. Get it? If you bring this up, I'm going to tell her about all the math homework I've finished for you. And more.”

I'm used to Todd threatening me, but this feels different.

J
ULY
2008

Once I feared death, but now I know there are things worse.
The miserable person has a long life,
said my grandmother, God's mercy upon her.

As Zeinab and I walk toward the tap stands, the day's rains begin. It is easy to tell who is new among the
khawaja
, for they run for shelter at the first drops. Some carry umbrellas, but soon they are as wet as those without. If the umbrella has not collapsed under the beating, they will save it to make shade when the sun returns.

Adeeba runs up to me.

“Your class,” I say.

“It is the break,” she says, “when most go and do not return. Go to the
khawaja
's meeting place in section twenty-seven,” she says. “The
khawaja
have brought something to help with births.”

“Who told you this?”

She catches her breath before she answers. “Khalid.”

“Ahh,” I say.

“I was asking him about words for the dictionary,” she says.

“Ahh,” I say.

“It is hard to find
khawaja
these days,” she says.

“But not hard to find handsome young engineers from Khartoum.”

“Stop,” she says. “His English is very good.”

“His eye is very good,” I say. “He fancies you.”

“He fancies his spider,” she says.

It is true Khalid talks much of the water tank he is building.

“How tall is the platform today?” I ask.

“Nineteen meters,” she says, and we laugh, for Khalid is a man of numbers even more than words.

“His pipes came on the same truck,” Adeeba says. “You must get this birth kit. There are not many, so you must hurry.”

I think of Umm Ali's bundle of needles and brown glass. Tools matter, but more the one who holds them.

“You should go,” I say.

“I have to teach,” she says. “Report to me tonight.”

•   •   •

It is a long way to section 27 in the rain.

Dear Nawra,

Now to your questions. Our house is made of brick. Last winter we had mice; Purrfect just watched Mom set traps. In our garden Mom plants veggies every spring, but she hates bug spray, so what we grow is mostly weeds and plants that can survive with half-eaten leaves, like zucchini, which grow into baseball bats if you don't find them in time.

Marriage customs. They used to be pretty simple: Guy gives diamond ring, girl buys white dress, minister says, “You may kiss the bride,” big party, honeymoon, house, baby, happily ever after. My granny and grampers did it that way. Granny was a nurse, and Grampers started out a roofer; one day he sliced his foot on some metal flashing, and she gave him the tetanus shot. “Been a pain in my you-know-what ever since,” Grampers always said, which isn't exactly, “You are the sunshine of my life,” but the way Grampers said it, you knew that's what he meant. Now everything's all mixed up—sometimes baby first, or no guy, or two guys, or red dress, and most of the time the happy doesn't last long into the ever after. I want kids, but probably I won't get married; then they won't have to go through a divorce.

Sharon's not mean to us. She treats us like houseguests—what
do we want to eat, and do we have enough blankets? I'm not complaining! But we have to act like houseguests, tiptoeing around, making sure we straighten up the cruise ship brochures she has fanned out on the coffee table. Sharon never comes to our stuff, like eighth-grade promotion, though maybe that's because Mom's around. I think Sharon sees us as competition. Like this weekend Mom told Dad I needed ten hours of expensive tests, which I didn't want until I heard him basically say I wasn't worth it. I heard Sharon thinking,
What about me?

It's not just me Dad treats cheap: He doesn't want Todd to look at expensive schools. He says, “You can make good connections wherever you go. Just join a fraternity. I wish I had. But then I met your mother,” like Bad Connection Mom ruined his life. Sometimes I wish I could hop in a time machine and spy on my parents when they were dating—just the public parts, please! It couldn't have been as bad as Dad makes out because he proposed, right?

Once in a while Mom says something about their nonprofit days in D.C. when they were going to “save the world,” as if she's making fun of these kooky people she once knew but missing them too.

Probably inside Dad was like Todd, whining all the way.

Okay, Nawra, it's past midnight, and I've got to finish my homework, at least the part we have to turn in, since Mom's going to look it over in the morning. Sorry for going on and on, but one thing I found out from the Save the Girls assistant director is that we have only a year to write letters, which sounds like a long time until you realize that I blew you off for
four months. Maybe I can ask for an extension. That's another thing I'm good at.

One question from me: Have you ever heard of Linus Pauling? He's a scientist right up there with Albert Einstein. Emily knew him, but only because he published some off-the-wall stuff about vitamin C, like it can cure cancer. Emily's mom has gone totally herbal, so Emily keeps a big binder with clippings about supplements. It has three sections separated by dividers: Possible Merit, Harmless Poppycock, and Poison. That's Emily. She labels everything and hangs up her shirts by color, like at the thrift store.

Tell me more about those Janjaweed people. They sound scary.

Love, K. C.

A
UGUST
2008

I try to give the kit to my mother, but she shakes her head. Sitting on her mat, she turns her back to me.

He who has a mother has no worries,
my grandmother used to say. I no longer believe that. Perhaps that is why so many women are silent in this camp. Their wisdom belonged to the village; we drank it like pure water from the wells. But the devils poisoned the wells. In this camp, we need another wisdom, about bugs and birth in the dark.

In this strange place, perhaps my mother is eager for me to die, and the baby in me. Then she will have her memories to herself. Adeeba will bring her water and buy the vegetables for her
mulah
, but I am sure my mother will stop eating. She will lie down and close her eyes and wait for the day the horn is blown and the heavens split open and all stand before God.

Many people asked Abdullah about the day of judgment. He urged them to do good. Abdullah recited the sura about paradise: It has rivers of unpolluted water, and rivers of fresh milk, and rivers of wine, delicious for the drinkers, and rivers of strained honey.
They have all kinds of fruits therein, and forgiveness from their Lord.

I think my mother hears those rivers running. She will not
say this is suicide, which is
haram
. But I do. We must not deny death, but neither should we invite it.

“This kit is for your hands,” I tell Adeeba.

She is trembling.

“You are the girl who climbed up and down through Jebel Marra without a companion!” I remind her.

“Walking I know how to do. You put one foot in front of the other,” Adeeba says. “Delivering babies is another thing.”

“You use your hands, not your feet,” I say.

My friend does not smile.

“Your mother was a doctor,” I say.

“She did not deliver babies in our apartment,” Adeeba says. “Even if she had . . .”

Her words pull up short, like a spooked horse.

“What?”

“I cannot even remember her face,” Adeeba says.

I hug my friend. The loss of a mother marks a child. I saw it even in the village.

I would have liked to meet Umm Adeeba. Adeeba has told me many times how she followed her mother up the stairs to their apartment in a building taller than a tree. I picture my friend as she must have been as a child, talking, talking as they climbed.

“Since when did these stairs turn into a mountain?” Umm Adeeba said.

Adeeba cannot remember her mother's face, but she will never forget those words. The heart sees before the eyes.

But her mother smiled. This tiredness, this sickness in the stomach, this swelling in the belly—they could mean only a brother or a sister for her little talker, Adeeba. The test of blood
said no, but Umm Adeeba did not believe her own science. Her happiness deceived her.

I wish and you wish, but God does his will. In the end, the doctor became the patient. It was not life growing inside Adeeba's mother but death.

“You read your mother's books,” I say.