The Milk of Birds (21 page)

“I can only speak to that from a boy perspective,” he says, blushing. “And I'd rather not.”

“Some people call it female genital mutilation,” Emily says. “You know, cutting out the clitoris. Some places they stitch the labia together.”

I can't even imagine. Human anatomy's pretty funky even without messing with it.

We all look down in our laps as Emily resumes reading. I think about Mrs. Clay and her
People
magazine and God never making a mouth and leaving it—only aren't there a lot of hungry people in the world?

“Who has a cell phone?” I ask.

“What?” Emily says. “You can't call Sudan.”

“Cell phone,” I demand.

Parker doesn't have one, and Emily's battery is dead. She has to pay by the minute anyway. I scan the bodies on the lawn. Where is Chloe when you need her iPhone? Finally I recognize some Hispanic girls from summer school, so I run over and ask if I can borrow a cell phone because this girl I know might be dying of childbirth in Darfur. They just look at me like I'm some Japanese tourist asking directions, so I pantomime with key words—“
teléfono
,” “
emergencia
”—and finally Florinda—easy name to remember because she spritzes herself all the time with flowery body splash in remedial math—digs into her purse and pulls out a Razr.

“We speak English, you know,” she says.

“I do too,” I say, “but that doesn't mean anybody understands me.”

Florinda laughs and hands me the phone.

“Thank you, thank you. I'll bring it right back,” I promise.

“Hope your friend is okay,” Florinda says.

“She was raped,” I say. The girls cringe. “And lots of her family were killed.” Florinda murmurs something about
Dios
and crosses herself. “She's really brave. It's just she's living in this miserable IDP camp, and there's nobody but her best friend to help deliver the baby. Later I'll tell you—” I say, pointing to the phone, Emily,
Dios
in the sky.

“Go,” Florinda says. “Make as many calls as you need. Tell you what”—she looks at her watch—“just meet me at the flagpole after dismissal.”

As I run, I flip open the phone—one more reason Mom
should let Dad replace mine, so I can dial 911 in an emergency. I'll have to tell Nawra about 911. The magic number. She needs one.

“What are you doing?” Emily asks.

“Calling my 911,” I say.

“K. C., don't,” Parker says, so kind and patient, like I'm some lunatic about to jump off a skyscraper. “You can get in big trouble for false—”

“Mom,” I explain.

I hope she isn't counseling some client about the importance of deodorant. Her temp agency places all kinds of people: inexperienced students, rusty moms, even some high-powered career switchers, but the flakiest ones they send to Mom. Three rings. How am I going to leave her a message when I don't even know which number I'm calling from? But just before voice mail, she picks up.

“Susan Frantz. How can I help you?”

For just a second, I always think I've reached some stranger since around us Mom still goes by Cannelli. Once when the Mean Girls in my class were calling me Kooky instead of K. C., Mom told me that her classmates used to chant, “Susan Frantz, Susan Frantz, doesn't have enough money for underpants.” Then she'd answer, “Money can't buy
you
love,” which is the gospel according to the Beatles. Every generation has its Mean Girls.

I tell her to pick me up and drive straight to D.C.

“What?”

I assure her I haven't broken my leg, haven't been sent to the principal, haven't taken the cell phone off a dead classmate
while some gunman rampages through WJLL.

I tell her about Nawra's baby. “We have to go to Save the Girls.”

“Oh, K. C.,” she says. “Don't you have math . . . now?”

She really should be a teacher; she has bells in the back of her head. Everyone's picking up and going inside—Parker's gone. Mom promises to call Save the Girls and call me back at 1:20, after math, as long as I turn off the phone and pay attention in class.

I do better on the first part than on the second.

After math I step outside because we're not allowed to take calls in school. Mom says a Save the Girls intern told her the director of overseas communication is traveling, but she's due back next Monday. Monday! No way can I wait that long not knowing. Surely somebody knows something, or maybe we could track down this director lady at her hotel or something.

Mom tells me to calm down, go to my last class, and she'll call me again.

I update Emily and Parker in passing on my way to Spanish, which is a lost cause. I keep thinking about Nawra giving birth on that dusty plain in one of those scrappy little tepees.

We all meet by the flagpole as the buses are loading. Florinda, too, but I hold up my finger, one minute more please, as her phone rings.

Mom says she reached the deputy director of Save the Girls, who said the communications person is off trying to set up an operation in Afghanistan, which is another place hard on girls, but even if they could find her, she wouldn't know about Nawra. No one will know until the field contact—that would be Saida
Julie—returns to the camp. When a girl in the program dies, the field person slips a note into the envelope for the sponsor, who can pick up another girl if she wants because they never run out of girls in need—although they totally understand when a sponsor drops out after a death.

Like they have this whole procedure!

Mom says, “Brace yourself, K. C. Women and babies sometimes die in childbirth, even in the best hospitals.”

“Nawra won't. She hasn't. I just know it.”

“If Nawra were here, what might she say?”

In my head I flip through Nawra's letters.
I wish and you wish, but God does his will.
The buses are leaving, so I give Florinda her phone. Everybody touches me on the arm, their fingers little sponges soaking up my worry, so I feel a bit lighter.

Surely God wants Nawra to live. But what if he's having a bad day?

S
EPTEMBER
2008

I dread the pains, not for what I feel in my body but for what I think in my head. I lose my hold on Big Zeinab's voice and hear nothing but the wails of mourning in Umm Jamila.

•   •   •

After a time my mother came to Kareema's hut with her needle. She washed me with water and stitched. I wept, but she did not say anything. She passed the needle through the fire and offered it to Kareema, who shook her head.

“Stay with Kareema,” my mother said.

Through the walls we listened to the comings and goings. Through the walls I heard my father return with my aunt and learned of my cousins who had died. Kareema and I lay down, but we slept little. I did not think of Kareema's humiliation, the first wife, childless, and now dishonored. I thought only of my own, burning inside and out.

Early in the morning, we stepped out to relieve ourselves. When we returned, we found a bowl of
mulah
beside the door of Kareema's hut.

Through the walls we heard my aunt scream when my uncle died. On this day, the village was strangely quiet, pierced only by cries of grief.

I listened and I watched at the door of Kareema's hut. I saw
my mother give my sisters grain to hide in the bush. I ran after them and showed them many secret places.

“You do not look ruined,” Meriem said.

Saha placed her cool hand on my hair.

I did not follow them but returned to Kareema's hut. Through the walls I heard Muhammad advise my father to move us and my father refuse. “We are not nomads,” he said.

As they discussed the animals, I stepped out into the yard. I offered to go with Muhammad to assemble the herd.

My mother said it was too dangerous.

My father said it did not matter, for I was spoiled meat.

S
EPTEMBER
2008

On the bus home I sit next to Todd, who looks at me as if I were an ant crawling onto his picnic. I make him pull out his earbuds so I can tell him about Nawra.

“That girl doesn't get a break,” he says.

He tells me he's going to apply to Kent State because he can double-major in chemistry and photojournalism. It's all because of Mr. Physics and his stoves. Todd's glommed on to using advanced science to make something simple but useful for people with big needs, but he figured out that you need good pictures to convince donors to support what you're doing. Todd read about some projects in Latin America where chemists are showing people how to filter water through buckets full of sand and bacteria-eating algae.

“It's so elegant,” he keeps saying, which must be the scientific word for “cool,” although I get this picture in my head of Todd squatting by some mud puddle in top hat and tails. He talks to me all the way home on the bus and into the house, a new world record.

So many of the great, famous photos are about war, he says. But why? Fighting's big news, of course, and photographers can show off that they're really brave to go poking around a war zone. Plus, dead bodies don't move, so you can play with
exposure and never have to ask permission. But isn't it more interesting how people survive?

My brother, the philosopher.

Secretly I'm thrilled that he's talking to me like this.

Live, Nawra. Forgive my ill-mannered brother for the backhanded compliment that you're more interesting than a corpse.

I point out that even if Todd showed up in Darfur with his elegant water filter and took before-and-after pictures, he might see how IDPs survive on the outside, but not on the inside, since he wouldn't even understand sayings without speaking Zaghawa or at least Arabic.

“I'll leave that to the anthropologists,” he says.

When Mom comes home, I make her tell me about anthropologists. She says her knowledge is a little dated, but basically anthropology is the study of man, meaning
hu
man. Then we google Margaret Mead on the Internet, but Mom has to make pork chops, and I have to finish my homework, which I haven't even started, though Mom doesn't blame me because the letter has us both worried out of our brains.

Live, Nawra.

S
EPTEMBER
2008

“We are almost there,” Big Zeinab says. “We have reached the mounds.”

The Valley of the Kings. If I die here, no one need carry my body to its burial spot.

“Your people are waiting,” says Big Zeinab.

As she describes again the wedding feast, I think of all the people waiting for me on the other side of death. Perhaps Muhammad is herding them together, Abdullah and Meriem and Saha, Daoud, Hari, Katuma, all my other cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Who holds baby Ishmael? I long to see them. My father waits there too.

Pain comes, and I walk beside a river of milk. Ahead I see Muhammad, and all my people. When my father sees me, he turns away.

•   •   •

Big Zeinab will not let me rest. I smell dead animals, defecation, smoke. It does not smell like paradise.

“We are here!” cries Little Zeinab.

“Who is there?” a man calls roughly.

“Women with wood,” says Big Zeinab.

“Did you meet trouble?” a woman calls. “We have clothes.”

“No trouble,” says Big Zeinab. “But one among us is near to giving birth.”

“Nawra?” a woman calls.

I do not recognize her voice, yet she knows my name.

“Yes,” Big Zeinab says.

“They have been looking for her,” a woman says. “A little boy has told all to watch for her.”

“Pesky as a fly is that boy,” says another.

“My little brother,” Little Zeinab tells Big Zeinab.

We see the shapes of people lit from behind.

“He was just here,” a woman says.

Soon they are calling for Hassan. I did not notice when the rain stopped, but it must have, for we are standing by a small fire.

“Rest, sister,” says a woman.

“Not yet,” says Big Zeinab. “Let us get her with her people.”

A small form darts from the shadows. “Zeinuba!” Hassan cries. He hugs his sister hard. “Tata Adeeba is going to beat you,” he says to me.

“Tata Nawra needs only kind words now,” says Big Zeinab. “Your section is far?”

Hassan nods. “But Tata Adeeba is not,” he says. “I will bring her.”

The people of the fire offer water and
mulah
as we wait. I stand, for if I sit I may not rise again. Big Zeinab holds the plate and urges us to eat. This is the smell of paradise, cumin and red pepper rising like incense. My hunger surprises me, how my hand shakes in eagerness as I lump the okra, hot and rough and gummy, between my fingers.

Hassan reappears with Khalid and Adeeba.

“You!” Adeeba yells at me. “You are like one who seeks protection from scorching heat with fire. Did I not tell you to stay in the camp? Did I not tell you I would collect wood? No, no, Nawra bint Ibrahim does exactly as she pleases. Nawra bint Ibrahim listens to no one. The girl has spent so much time with goats, she thinks like one. How much wood did you bring back? Was it worth it?”

“This must be the professor,” whispers Big Zeinab. “She asks many questions.”

“What Adeeba means,” Khalid says, “is that we are pleased to see you.”

“What Adeeba means is, there is no excuse for one who has been warned,” Adeeba says.

“The desperate will take the difficult path,” says Big Zeinab.

If God brings your murderer, he will bring your defender, and she is mine.

“Nawra is not desperate; she is willful,” says Adeeba.

“And you are not?” says Khalid.

Pain relieves me from this lashing.