The Milk of Birds (22 page)

Dear Nawra,

Are you well? You are strong; you're the one who's a lion under your clothes. All this time you were pregnant—why didn't you tell me? Dumb question. I'm not mad, just worried. You know, so many single women here have babies you can't tell anymore whether it's on purpose or not. I'm sure your kid's going to be okay, better than okay, because you're the one who's going to be sculpting him. Or her. And sometimes kids sculpt themselves, too. Look at Emily: Her mom's this total flake who's moved a thousand times to “follow her star,” and yet Emily turned out to be a carrier camel.

Are you okay? Nobody can tell me, not even Save the Girls.

Hang in there.

S
EPTEMBER
2008

I hear before I see again. Khalid's voice, calm and far, repeats what the
khawaja
said to Adeeba, that it is not their business to send a car looking for a girl with child.

“Fuel is expensive,” a man says.

“What is the cost of a life?” demands another.

“They must think of the many and not the one,” says Khalid. “That is not easy for the
khawaja
either.”

“Firebrands burn the one who treads on them,” says the angry man.

“If they do not feel all our pain, they feel some of it, living here,” says the first.

“They can leave,” says the angry man.

“
Aywa
. They can feel our misery but not our frustration,” says the first man.

A hand is rubbing my back.

“Take your friend to her mother,” Big Zeinab murmurs to Adeeba. “Nawra must rest. Perhaps then the child will come.”

“This mother is useless,” Adeeba says. “Can you come with us? We need one such as you.”

“I must get back to my son,” says Big Zeinab. “I have caused him worry.”

“If a friend becomes honey, we must not eat him all up,”
I say, standing straight. “You must go to your son, Big Zeinab.”

She takes her leave, thanking the people who fed us, separating more than my share of wood from hers, calling Little Zeinab a big woman. Then she hugs me long, her clothes ripe with damp and sweat. Or is that my smell? She says, “Paradise lies beneath the feet of mothers.”

The night widens behind her into a big emptiness. We take our leave before the pain returns. I lean against Adeeba. As Khalid picks up Little Zeinab, he tells Hassan to carry the firewood.

“That is women's work,” Hassan says.

“Women's work is to beat little boys,” Adeeba says.

“Give me some of the sticks to carry,” Khalid says.

We move slowly. “Have you lost the water of birth?” Adeeba whispers.

From above, rain dumps on our heads like water from a bucket. My clothes have been soaked all day. How can I tell one wet from another?

Dear Nawra,

I've been saying prayers for you. So has our whole church—well, one of them. Dad got our old church after the divorce, so we go there when we spend the weekend with him. He always cuts out before communion to go smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. Now that he's married to Sharon, not Mom, he doesn't have to sneak his cigarettes, but even Sharon won't let him smoke in the house because it conflicts with her air freshener. Mom didn't mind switching churches, because she thought St. Luke's was too stuffy, which means the minister gives a sermon as long as his face.

Now we go to this church called Blessings that meets in the lunchroom at an elementary school, so you have to get used to squished peas instead of stained glass on the walls. Plus, the minister, Jack, wears blue jeans and sometimes sips from a cup of coffee during the service, but everyone's allowed to get one whenever they want from the big urns in the back. Instead of an organ, Jack plays bass, and these ladies with long white hair raise their hands over their heads and shake tambourines. Todd calls it the Church of Gay Men and Lonely Divorcées. Which isn't true; there are lots of families, and everyone is always giving each other the peace, and the first Sunday of the
month you have to put cans of food into the collection bucket for the food pantry. Trouble is, the service starts at 8:30 a.m. so it doesn't interfere with your plans for the rest of the day, but it interferes with plans Todd and I have for sleep, so half the time we miss the service, and then Mom goes into a funk about the state of our souls.

This morning as usual, Jack asked at the end for Concerns. Usually I just listen. People ask for prayers for just about everything, the usual sickness and dying, but also an escaped ferret who doesn't know how to live in the wild or an old car that just has to make it to the Northeast to drop someone off at college, and sometimes the congregation cracks up before praying. This morning I raised my hand.

My voice was shaking, but I said, “I know this girl in a camp in Darfur. She's fourteen and having a baby. I read that midwives might not have come because the rain has washed out the roads, so her best friend is going to deliver the baby.”

The quiet intensified, just a cough, and Mom squeezed my hand.

“K. C.”—I was amazed the minister knew me—“what's the name of this girl?”

“Nawra,” I said. “It means ‘blossom.' ”

Someone in the audience said, “Ahh.”

“Blossom,” Jack said. He does that a lot, repeats what someone just said, which is a trick I'm going to remember because it shows you're listening and buys you time to think of something else. It also makes idiots like me rush in to fill the silence that follows.

“She's always saying nice things about God, like he's merciful
and compassionate and never makes a mouth and leaves it hungry. But everything that's happened to her—well, happened to her recently—contradicts that. She hasn't told me much of the bad stuff. She talks about sisters and brothers, but they're not around. Her mother doesn't talk anymore.”

Jack was still looking at me, but I sat down. If I said anything more, I was going to lose it.

Mom put her arm around my shoulders.

Jack closed his eyes. “Let us pray for Nawra,” he said finally. He uses silence like a period at the end of a sentence, but somehow you can tell he's not finished. “Who has the mysterious gift of faith.” The lunchroom got very quiet. “Let us pray for another gift . . . the gift of recovery . . . of healing . . . of reconciliation. . . . Let us pray for the people of Darfur.”

I could feel the energy, everyone cranking out prayer, and maybe we were cranking so hard that we started to smoke, and the smoke drifted out down the halls of the school, past the kindergarteners' leaf rubbings and the fifth graders' poems about autumn, and out the doors and windows up to the sky, like a kite, where it caught a breeze, a trade wind, which carried it across the ocean to Africa and then across the desert to where you are.

I imagined you looking up, you and your beautiful baby. “Look at that amazing cloud,” you told him. I'm guessing it's a him. Maybe it was really hot in Darfur, and the prayer cloud gave you that one minute of shade you really needed.

After the service we were mobbed, so I had to tell and retell the whole story of being your pen pal, and Mom kept referring people to Save the Girls—“Just google it”—and I wouldn't be
surprised if they signed up twenty new sponsors this week.

One of the men talked to my mom so long I nudged Todd, who shook his head and mouthed,
Gay
, maybe because the man was somehow sleek, gray hair combed straight back from his forehead. Like an otter, only a hip otter, with small, black-rimmed rectangular glasses. But gay—I don't think so. Every so often he looked over at this noisy rabble of kids playing freeze tag under the
JOY
banner, and I wondered which were his. I wouldn't mind a younger brother or sister. Of course this is way premature. But on the way home, I asked Mom if they had exchanged numbers, and she blushed as she said yes. “All I had in my pocket was your gum wrapper,” she said.

“Don't lose it,” I told her.

I'll be back soon.

Dear Nawra,

Just live. Today I'm going to mail this bundle of letters so you have something to read while you're on maternity leave.

You're not the only teenager in the world having a baby. So many juniors and seniors have babies that the school system sends them to a special high school program with day care. The plus side is you could be a grandma in your forties and a great-grandma in your sixties and a great-great-grandma in your eighties, so you'll have a lot of people to teach your sayings to.

Here when we draw family trees, we always put ME at the base of the trunk and all the ancestors like birds in the branches, but really it should be the other way around, with the ancestors as the roots and then your own kids growing up and out through the generations. Then you can rest in the shade and listen to them up there chattering.

Love, K. C.

S
EPTEMBER
2008

We park in front of a snazzy building, all dark glass and fountains. Mom's been trying to convince Granny to move near us into assisted living, but I can't imagine this is the “cozy place” she's been talking up to Granny and Uncle Phil. Corporate headquarters, maybe?

We get off on the sixth floor and head for an office with a little trophy plate on the door.
DR. FRANKLIN REDDING, NEURO-PSYCHOLOGIST.

“The two-thousand-dollar guy?”

Mom nods.

“I'm not going.”

“Why?”

“I am not sick.”

“No one's saying you are.”

Why is Nawra's letter so late? I can't stand it. She can't be dead. She just can't.
I did not think I was afraid, but perhaps I am.

I'm terrified that I'm going to be certified dumb. Not Best Buddy material like my cousin Sienna but somehow NQP—not quite perfect—like the clothes you can buy cheap because someone goofed and cut the sleeves too short or misaligned the buttonholes.

“I don't want someone sticking needles in my brain.”

Mom laughs. “As far as I know, Dr. Redding doesn't do acupuncture.”

“Dad gave you the money?”

She shakes her head no.

“How are you paying for this?”

“Home equity line of credit.”

“You pawned our house?”

“Just Todd's bedroom,” she says.

“We are not sharing a room!”

“Calm down,” Mom says. “I'm not taking in boarders. I'll pay back a little every month.”

“How? We already buy generic everything.”

“I'll find some waste to trim.”

“Name me one thing we can do without,” I say.

“Coffee,” Mom says. “Movies. Now please, give this a chance.”

The front desk lady collects her money first thing—all two thousand dollars. The waiting room is huge but empty, probably because people would rather be drinking lattes and going to a matinee. From the building and sign, you'd expect a fancy waiting room, but there are only black beanbag chairs and small tables with all sorts of neon toys—balls and stars and urchiny things with spikes or tentacles. I poke around. Hard. Squishy. The lime green one is so soft and tacky I just have to throw it against the wall. I knew it would stick.