The Milk of Birds (5 page)

I am a wall, I said.

You are a crazy person, she said. Yes, you did say that. Write. But next thing, Adeeba led Fayiza beside me, and Umm Hakim beside her. Soon we were one big wall of women side by side around the children and the water. Even with the sand a whip on our backs, it felt good to be part of such a circle. When the men pray in the mosque, they stand tall in a line. We were just women sitting hunched in a circle in the dirt. Yet it felt to me like a prayer, and the prayer itself became an answer to a prayer.

After the worst we searched and searched, but we lost much of what the wind had stolen.

We will get more plastic, the
khawaja
said.

As we say, From every setback there is a way out.

In my section an old woman died because she could not breathe, and everywhere people were coughing and spitting. The children complained about the crunch between their teeth.

Walida tried to cheer them up. She said, Mmm, what a meal. At last I have something to chew on! Then the day for Saida
Julie passed, and then another, and another, and we thought she was not coming.

She needs a camel, not a car, some said. A car is no match for the
haboob
.

They might have been kidnapped, others said. Everyone knows she carries money.

Rumors can make you as sick as invisible bugs.

Please, madame, whatever your condition, just send me your mark on a paper.

Your sister, Nawra

M
AY
2008

I could write a book:
The Survival Guide to Being Grounded
.

1. Look really sorry.

2. Sharpen your pencils in public.

3. Clean the toilet. Mornings are best, especially if you get into the bathroom first and everyone notices as they're doing the cross-legged dance in the hall. If your mom somehow misses this, tell her you're getting low on that gunk you squirt under the rim. Get the green apple flavor because it makes a cool tie-dye effect when it runs down the bowl. Apply lots. Gunk takes some of the disgustingness out of scrubbing off the water stains and crusted poop with the little brushie. What's truly gross, though, is wiping the back of the seat where your repulsive brother has overshot the rim. Last time I was babysitting, Mrs. Clay had bought Wally these decomposing rings you toss in the toilet so he can try to make a bull's-eye while he pees. I suggested this for Todd, but Mom said it's too late.

4. Never gripe. That just lengthens your sentence.

5. Ask your mom if she needs a back rub. Remember that you have nothing better to do.

6. Say yes to everything, even chicken livers and onions.

7. Listen to your music so low that you can hear your mother on the stairs and stash the MP3 player before she reaches your room. Murmur as you try to figure out what the heck you wrote in your social studies notebook:
Improt check balences no brunch gets to powerfull keep Presdent in line

As if presidents ever have to wait in line.

“Mom!” Act surprised when she barges into your room. “Wouldn't it be cool to have Secret Service agents help you cut . . .”

My words drip off into nothing at her expression. Mom's holding a letter, and her hand's shaking so much that the paper rustles.

“Katherine Cannelli,” Mom says. Uh-oh, the full name. This is it: I'm repeating eighth grade.

She thrusts the letter at me.
It has come to our attention that you have not been corresponding . . .
It's a whole long letter, but I get the gist.

I haven't failed the SOLs! Yet.

I've just failed Mom. Again.

“What's the story?” she asks.

The story is . . . your daughter is a loser. Of course, I can't
say that aloud. Mom would tsk-tsk and give me her usual line: “ ‘
Loser
' is a self-defeating word.” Officially I'm
at risk
. But everybody knows what that means.

“You got me into this,” I say.

“What was in those envelopes?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You mailed empty envelopes to Sudan?”

“I didn't mail them.”

“You threw them out?”

“Recycled them.” I may be bad, but I'm green.

“I hope you haven't ‘recycled' the letters from that girl,” Mom says in a voice that has no hope in it at all.

I have the letters. I swear I have them. I dig them out of my sock drawer along with the wicker box of stationery. December through March. Letters! I show her.

After Mom reads them aloud, we have a long moment of silence. Life sucks for this Nawra person.

But what am I supposed to do about it? I can't even pass the practice test in world geography.

“Remember what I told you about Darfur?” Mom asks.

Time for the quiz. Behind her back Dad calls her the Schoolmarm, which is actually nicer than what he used to call her when they were getting divorced. Now that he's remarried, he's a lot nicer to everyone. Todd says it's new sex (sex is Todd's answer to everything, since he's not having any), but I think it's the way Sharon worships my dad, like it's a privilege just to make his bed, grind his coffee beans, pick up his shirts from the dry cleaner's, keep track of his papers, etc., etc. I don't know what it was like when Dad and Mom first got married,
but Mom hates housework and Dad was a lot of work around the house.

“Remind me again,” I say.

She tells me the first civil war in Sudan was about religion, Muslim north versus sort-of Christian south, more or less, but this one's in the west, in Darfur, where pretty much everyone is Muslim, so they're fighting about water and land—kind of like the old Wild West, with the farmers against the newcomer cowboys. The leaders in Khartoum back the cowboys, who are mostly Arab nomads, against the farmers, who are a little bit of everything. The farmers say the government has neglected them, so the government calls them dangerous rebels. Pretty good trick. The capital has hired some outlaws called Janjaweed to ride around on horses and camels to cause trouble.

“These Janjaweed militias are teaming up with government soldiers to drive farmers off the land by destroying their villages,” Mom says. “That's probably how Nawra ended up in a camp.”

“Camp?” The word makes me think of log cabins, s'mores, bathrooms with puddles and spiderwebs in the corners. I quit Girl Scouts after fifth grade, but I miss telling ghost stories and collecting pinecones.

“IDP camp,” Mom says. “For Internally Displaced People. Like being a refugee in your own country.”

Of course we have to troop downstairs to the computer and look up “Sudan IDP camp” on the Internet until we come up with a picture of a dreary, dusty plain packed with straw huts and tepee tents patched together from old clothes and plastic tarps.

“That's the kind of place Nawra lives,” Mom says.

“I just don't need any more homework.”

“What is so hard about writing a letter?”

“I hate writing.”

“You like talking,” she says. “You've got great ideas.”

Yeah, and when I have to write them down . . . it's like I'm holding a big, beautiful lamp and it slips out of my hand, hits the floor, and shatters into a million pieces. I pick up all the little sharp-edged shards and put them on the paper, but they get all mixed up and I get fed up and who could tell there was ever any light in this thing?

Plus, I can't spell. Todd says if they ever held a misspelling bee, I'd be national champ.

“I could be your scribe, Madame Cannelli,” Mom says. “Nawra has Adeeba, and you can have me.”

What did Nawra say?
Adeeba is very clever but very bossy.
So is Mom, but I can't see her writing that down. She already types my papers, at least the big ones I can't avoid telling her about. She makes so many changes I wonder sometimes if they're hers or mine. Even if Mom wrote down exactly what I said, it wouldn't be exactly what I wanted to say because a lot of things I couldn't talk about.

Like being a loser.

“I'll write the letters if you won't,” Mom says, “but we need to let this girl know we're paying attention.” She pulls out the scolding from Save the Girls. “As Martin Luther King said, ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.' ”

“You write the letters,” I say.

Dear Nawra,

I am SO sorry. I screwed up, which is nothing new, so don't take it personally. I have so much homework, and I'm always behind, and this letter thing was one more assignment I had to do. My mother—the real Madame Cannelli—kept bugging me, so I scribbled on the outside of an empty envelope, slapped on a stamp, and waved it at her as I ran to the bus. Then Save the Girls sent us a reminder, and Mom made me dig out your letters, and there you were holding hands with your sisters and scratching Cloudy's back and listening to your mom sing to the mango tree. My mom knows the first three lines of every song written before I was born, but whenever she sings, Todd—that's my brother—and I put our hands over our ears and wail. It's not as mean as it sounds. Once Mom made it all the way through “Yesterday” and burst into tears, so it's better that we wail than she does.

I wanted to send you a letter. Trouble is, I suck as a writer. I'm not allowed to say that, though. Mom is always telling me not to send negative messages to myself because they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm supposed to get up every morning and say to the mirror, “I'm smart, I'm confident, I'm good at . . .” Fill in the blank.

But I don't have anything to put in my blank. Mom works at a temp agency, and this is one of those exercises she does with people before she places them in jobs. Maybe it works for them. Of course, Todd doesn't have to lie to the mirror because all day long people tell him, “You're smart, you're organized, you're God's gift to high school.”

People tell me, “You're worse than a mosquito!” At least that's what Mr. Hathaway said yesterday when he told me to stop annoying people in my English class.

So I made Mom write you a letter, only she pretended she was me, only we're totally different, so the letter didn't sound like anything I'd ever say. I refused to sign. Then Mom and I got into a long fighty discussion about writing and what happens when I fail the SOLs, Standards of Learning, which are these huge tests we take every year but especially in eighth-grade spring to show which Stupid Or Lazy kids should be left behind. Mom kept saying “in the unlikely event,” but she's done all this research, so she's bracing for me to fail. At least you can still go to high school if you take summer school and your teachers recommend promotion.

“So stay on the good side of Mr. Hathaway,” Mom said, ha-ha, as if that man cared about anything except punctuation. You could write that you had a car accident on the way to your dad's funeral after your house burned down, and he'd draw a big red bull's-eye at the end of the sentence where the period should have gone. Minus 5.

Thanks to you, though, I might actually finish eighth grade! Mom heard about this software where you speak and the computer writes down what you say, and we ended up going to the
computer store right then and buying it, the deluxe version, and a studio microphone, which is so unlike Mom since she usually never buys anything without a coupon.

Mom and Todd are helping me train it to write down exactly what comes out of my mouth (except for the “uhs”). I have to speak slowly and loudly. I really loved my grampers, who died two years ago, so I imagine the microphone as him, with hair growing out of his ears. I talk to him. It is AWESOME to see the words appear. I can talk my papers for school!

Unfortunately, Mom heard me say this—well, scream this—to my friend Emily on the phone.

First Mom told me to calm down. Then she said, “Good writing is really rewriting.” She is Queen of the Kibosh.

Gotta go. More later.

Dear Nawra,