What Tears Us Apart
What Tears Us Apart
Deborah Cloyed
Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys' orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within
Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart
The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys’orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.
Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.
In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within.
What Tears us Apart
Deborah Cloyed
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To debianca, and redbird.
Contents
Newswire (#u5247e091-367e-5830-98a1-c2e8e48c91c6)
Prologue (#u39627649-affc-5267-8931-0c7d637151ce)
Chapter 1 (#ua5fb53d2-acad-54a2-bf8d-21916aa35f24)
Chapter 2 (#u9b919efa-15f2-5cca-bd48-8992d81bd616)
Chapter 3 (#u2fa35e8f-665b-5eb0-8a4c-0662bac099a1)
Chapter 4 (#uc92ecd3c-bd90-5014-8041-3942595dcd9c)
Chapter 5 (#u0b1c82e0-2fab-50b5-974f-e68052220d50)
Chapter 6 (#ua217717d-2d83-519a-a886-cd5f22256db4)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Teaser (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Deborah Cloyed (#litres_trial_promo)
Newswire America: December 31, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya — Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was hastily sworn in yesterday, beating out Raila Odinga in Kenya’s heated election. Allegations of fraud sparked violence countrywide.
In Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums and Raila Odinga’s stronghold, thousands flooded the streets, bearing rocks and machetes, chanting, “No Raila, no peace!”
Members of Raila’s Luo tribe lashed out at their Kikuyu neighbors—the tribe associated with Kibaki—setting shops and homes aflame. The Mungiki, Kenya’s notorious Kikuyu mafia, retaliated, riots escalating into a rape and murder spree. By midnight, smoke blanketed Kibera, flames licked the sky, and mutilated bodies littered the roads as screams rang out from every corner of the slum....
Prologue
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Leda
NO. PLEASE. PLEASE, world, God, fate, don’t let this happen.
Each man’s hands on Leda’s skin are like desert sand. Hot. Gritty. Rough as splinters of glass.
She ricochets around their circle, a lotto ball in the air mix machine, fate holding its breath. Behind the lunging silhouettes of the men, the slum explodes—fire licking and climbing, spitting at the world. There’s another sound, too, mixed with the whooshing sound of the inferno. Wood, metal, bodies—all crumbling, cracking, hissing and screaming in the flames. It is a symphony of loss.
The men, who are boys really, they yell incomprehensibly, but Leda knows their intentions.
They rip the buttons on her shirt.
They yank the hem of her skirt.
A cloud of reddish dust rises from their feet, as though trying to hide her. But the dust dashes away when Leda is flung to the ground.
For a moment nothing happens.
Then it’s like vampires at the sight of a wound. The men converge—kicking, poking, laughing. They tug at all her protruding parts. Leda’s a centipede in the dust, trying to fold in one hundred legs. Trying to protect the things that matter, things that cannot be undone.
Maybe they will just beat me and go away. This is not my fight. I came to help. Leda wants to shout in their faces. I came to help.
But then she hears it, jumbled with the clatter of their words. Ita. Another one says it. Ita.
So they know who she is.
She is a fish flopping, a tree fallen. A spider in the wind.
She is Ita’s love.
For an instant, Leda thinks it will save her. But as their voices rise, she knows it has doomed her instead.
When the boy drops down on top of her, the force of it is like a metal roof pinning her in a hurricane.
Instantly, all Leda smells is him—sweat and dirt, but rancid, like musk and cheese rusted over with blood. He uses his trunk to flatten her into the ground, his rib bones stabbing into her sternum, her bare skin grinding into the rocks and trash. His legs and hands scramble for Leda’s flailing limbs. The man-boys above laugh and holler.
All she can do is flail and scream.
Leda calls out for the man she loves, the only person who’s ever really loved her.
But it’s the devil who arrives instead.
Ita’s beloved monster, Chege.
Chege’s voice arrives first—a low growl, a familiar snarl. It is the battle cry of an unchained wolf, at home in the darkest of times.
Chege is above her. His dreads close over Leda and her attacker, a curtain of night.
“Help me,” Leda says. Did Ita send him?
As Leda tries to decipher Chege’s spitting words, he yanks the man off and her body takes a breath. The rancid smell, his clawing zipper, the pain in her lungs—it all disappears into the racket above and for one second Leda feels light as a sparrow in the sky. She allows herself to breathe. There is mercy in Chege’s heart after all. He will save her. At least for Ita’s sake.
But then Chege’s eyes flicker, a flap of emotion like blinds shuttering daylight. His hand shoots down and wraps around her throat, a coiling python, and Leda’s breath is lost. His other hand snaps the necklace from her neck. The gold necklace Ita gave her, the sacred chain that is everything to him.
This, Chege knows better than anyone.
He stares at the necklace in his fingers, his eyes bulging, and Leda knows the truth. Chege’s heart isn’t merciful, it’s a furnace of coal that burns only with rage. When both his hands pull Leda up by the throat, the glint of the gold chain taunts her, the shiny sparrow charm a spark in her peripheral vision as the necklace drops to the dirt.
Up, up through the dust, Chege brandishes her like a chunk of meat.
He’s claimed her. Head wolf gets the kill.
His eyes dart about. Leda sees it when he does—a door ajar. He smiles, baring his brown teeth.
Faster than she can scream, Chege kicks her feet to knock her off balance, then drags her across the alley, to the open door. The boys lap at their heels, eyes ravenous. Behind them, the fire rolls atop the mud shacks like a river of exploding stars.
Maybe they will burn for this. Maybe we all will.
Chege yanks her into the dark room, kicks the door shut, and all light goes out in the world.
Chapter 1
November 14, 2007, Topanga, CA—Leda
LEDA SAT IN the sun, feeling judged by the mountains.
Nearby trees wriggled their pom-poms of leaves, but Leda stared far off in the distance, where the scrubby canyon peaks took their turns in the sun and the rain, under the stars and the moon.
Everything in its place.
Except me.
A multicolored mutt entered the patio through a doggie door and hopped onto Leda’s lap. He curled into a furry ball to be petted.
“I quit, Amadeus,” Leda whispered.
The little dog looked up and sniffed.
“I know. Again.” Leda nuzzled the dog’s Mohawk. “Sorry, buddy, no more leftover filet mignon. I told François Vasseur to shove it.”
Amadeus whined.
“Oh please, you won’t starve.” They wouldn’t lose their cozy home in the canyon, either. Leda didn’t have to be a chef, she didn’t have to be anything. Not for money, anyway. But she’d really thought she’d finally found her calling.
Maybe I just don’t have one. A calling. A purpose.
Leda sighed. On a table to her left sat her laptop, waiting smugly for her to start the process again, an all-too-familiar sequence of searching.
Maybe some more iced tea first. Leda went inside, past her bookshelf of cookbooks (culinary school), past the corner display case of cameras (photography school). She bumped the stack of Discover magazines atop the stack of the New Yorkers (double undergraduate majors in science and literature).
When Leda returned with tea, she battled the urge to procrastinate further and pulled the computer into her lap. Mentally, she ran through the various paths she’d tried, weighing them. The thought of starting school again was both exciting and exhausting, but if necessary, so be it. She didn’t want a job, she wanted a career, something she cared about deeply. Something she could throw herself into.
Her fingers hovered, ready to fill the Google search box. She typed in career. Then she added meaningful.
When the search results loaded, she clicked on one after another. Social worker. Counselor. Teacher. An article about a nun in Canada.
The next one was a website listing volunteer opportunities.
Leda inhaled. Why not? She didn’t need the salary, but she felt awful when she wasn’t working. She should leave the paid positions open for people who needed them and help people for free.
Leda sat up straighter in her chair. She scrolled down the listings, each one a short link next to a picture. Teach English as a second language. Tutor troubled teens. Read to senior citizens...
On the third page, Leda saw a link titled Triumph Orphanage, with the tagline We Need Your Help. Next to it was a photograph of a man with a wide, strong, clear face, rich brown skin, and a smile written across like a welcome banner in a crowded airport. Leda leaned forward to stare into the picture. She clicked on the link and it opened a new page, with the picture enlarged within. The man’s smile held no trace of mental chatter or self-consciousness behind it. It was free and complete, open. Leda felt a surging desire to touch it, the smile, an entirely unfamiliar urge.
Below the handsome man’s picture was a snapshot of seven schoolchildren in an orphanage, smiling ear to ear. Leda looked closer at the photo, at the background. She scrolled down to the text. The man who ran the orphanage funded it by guiding safari tours—
Whoa. The orphanage was in Africa. In Kenya. In a slum called Kibera, outside Nairobi.
Leda exhaled and clicked the back button. No way. Let’s not get crazy, thought the woman who got anxiety in crowded grocery stores. Leda looked down at Amadeus, then inside to her cozy little house, each piece of furniture and decoration meticulously chosen and arranged.
No way could she do something like that.
Automatically, she fingered her burn scar, the patch of skin near her jaw, so smooth and soft, it was like a stone in the ocean’s break. She shut her eyes, felt her heart begin to race, heard the song humming the start of an awful memory.
When the phone rang, Leda nearly fell off her chair from startling.
She grabbed her phone from the table. Estella.
She hadn’t spoken to her mother in months.
“Leda?” came the raspy voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Mother. Something wrong?”
There was a pause. Leda sank into her chair.
“You’re the one who sounds like something’s wrong.” She sighed. “What is it?”
Leda frowned. Estella would get it out of her eventually. “I quit my job.”
“Surprise, surprise. What was wrong with this one?”
Leda’s teeth gritted together. Invisible armor clinked into place. “It was a sweatshop. My boss was abusive. But mainly it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.” Leda looked up. The mountain was still staring at her. She averted her eyes. “I wanted to find something meaningful to do with my life.”
As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Naked emotion was nothing but ammunition for Estella.
Sure enough, Estella “hmphed” loudly. “Not sure you’re the charitable type, dear.”
Leda thought of the photo of the man with the smile. “Actually, I was just looking at a posting to volunteer in Kenya.”
Estella’s cackling laugh poured into Leda’s ear like a bucket of wriggling maggots. “Leda, you are, what, thirty-two? Isn’t that a little old to play the college kid off to save Africa?”
Choice words died on Leda’s tongue. “Was there something else you called about, Mother?”
Estella’s cackle snuffed short. A pause. “No. I think that’s enough for today.”
Leda listened to the call disconnect, her eyebrows knitted together. When she set the phone back on the table, she saw that her hands were shaking.
The laptop’s face was in sleep mode. Leda swiped her finger across the mouse pad and the screen jumped back into view.
The picture was waiting.
She read the caption beneath the smile. His name was Ita, the man who ran the orphanage.
Ita, with a gaze fair and bright, surrounded by smiling children.
College kid, indeed.
Leda opened a new tab. Travelocity.
Chapter 2
December 9, 2007, Kibera—Leda
WHEN LEDA LOOKED out over Kibera for the first time, she thought of the sea behind her mother’s house, how it unfolded into infinity, unfathomable and chilling even on a sunny day. Leda stumbled at the top of the embankment, grabbed for the handle of her suitcase and stood tight until the rushing realization of smallness receded from her knees.
One million people, her guidebook claimed, crammed into a labyrinth of mud and metal shacks. It was a maze to make Daedalus proud. No Minotaur could escape from here. The slum was the Minotaur, gorging itself on fleeting youth and broken dreams.
Leda felt the dampness of her washed hair morph into sweat. She’d arrived the night before, had been ushered quickly into a cab and sped to her shiny white room at the Intercontinental in Nairobi. But now she stood on the edge of Nairobi’s secret, two terse sentences in the hotel’s welcome binder—the Kibera slum. Bounded by a golf course, towering suburban gates, a river, a railroad and a dam. Cordoned off. Now Leda saw what that meant—a place with no running water, no electricity, no sanitation system—the blank spot on the map of the city, officially unrecognized. A space smaller than her Topanga Canyon neighborhood, but thirty times the population density of New York City.
From where Leda stood, Kibera below was an undulating sea of rusted rooftops, ending at the horizon and the glaring morning sun.
Samuel, the guide Leda had hired to take her on a tour of Kibera and to the orphanage, stood likewise frozen, but unalarmed. More than likely he was used to the tourist gasp, had it penciled into his schedule.
Leda looked at him sideways, her eyes grabbing on to him like a buoy at high sea. Samuel was younger than her for sure, no more than twenty-five, but taller by a foot. His face was smooth, shiny in the heat. How did he feel? Awkward, as she did, embarrassed? Was he secretly seething?
Normally, Leda was good at discerning people’s thoughts and moods, a skill learned early in her mother’s house. It wasn’t a talent that brought her any closer to people, however.
She closed her eyes to the miles of dirt and metal, shut her ears to the clanging roar before them and the gridlocked traffic behind them, and tried to sense any irritation or ill will coming from Samuel. But his stretched posture and his even stare gave nothing away. If nothing else, he seemed dutiful. This was another Sunday, another customer.
Samuel sensed Leda’s searching, as people always did, and he turned. “Do you want to take a picture?”
Leda’s hand went into her pocket, wrapped around her camera. Right. A photographer should want to take a picture. But when she saw the men down the embankment staring, her hand let go of the camera. These were the kinds of moments that confirmed for Leda she wasn’t cut out to be a photojournalist.
“It’s okay. Let’s just go,” she said.
Samuel nodded and stepped behind Leda to pick up her sixty-pound suitcase. He hoisted it onto his back heavily, as though it was a piano, and started down the dirt hill.
The sight gave Leda a queasy jolt. “Wait. There’s no road?”
She’d looked at the pictures online, she’d seen the narrow alleys. But she’d also assumed there would be a way in, a way out. A road.
Samuel turned. He smiled.
Leda felt the sneer behind his smile. She looked down, her cheeks burning. She studied the orange dust under her boots. The color was due to the dearth of vegetation, she’d read. The iron turned the clay minerals orange.
Samuel was off and walking. Leda scrambled after him down the hill, feeling like a clown fish in a pond. She watched him start across a rickety footbridge arched over a brown swamp of trash, with sugarcane growing in thick clumps through the waste. Children waded in near the cane.
Leda followed, studying her shoes to avoid all the eyes on her.
The other side of the bridge landed Leda in a landscape that was more landfill than ground, and she nearly went down on the twisted path of plastic bags. She was grateful for her tennis shoes, but still furious at herself for the suitcase. Imagine if she’d brought her second one, instead of leaving it with the hotel. Underneath the ridiculous load, all she could see were Samuel’s sandals traversing the winding path over rock and drainage creeks. And all she could do was follow along, like a princess after a porter, trying not to trip. Her mother’s words blared in her head. Off to save Africa?
As doubt clogged her throat, Leda felt sure she would drown in the smell. Moldy cabbage, rotten fish, cooking smoke, but mostly it was the steaming scent of human waste that poured into Leda’s nose and mouth, saturating her as if she could never be free of that smell again. She opened her mouth to breathe, and gagged on the sweat that dribbled in.
Now the view of the slum had disappeared and they were inside it, weaving through narrow spaces and crisscrossed paths like an ant farm in hyperdrive.
Men with hollowed cheeks and yellowed eyes stared at Leda. Women—in the midst of tending children and selling and trading and gossiping and cooking and cleaning—their eyes flickered warily as she passed.
The children, however, were a different story. Schoolkids flew up around Leda like clouds of sparrows, waving their arms and chirping Howareyou? Howareyou?
Leda was grateful to them for their acceptance and she answered with the Swahili words she’d only ever spoken to her iPod. “Jambo,” she said, and they giggled.
“Present,” one boy shouted amiably.
Samuel stopped suddenly, and motioned for Leda to stand beside him. He shooed away the children, not meanly but firmly, and set down the suitcase, ready, Leda supposed, to continue with the tour he’d begun when they met that morning in the café in Nairobi.
“So, you are here to volunteer. What is it you do in America? Are you a teacher?”
Avoiding his question, Leda looked away. “Yes, I’m a volunteer. Here to help.”
Samuel nodded. “Do not give the children money. They do not understand it. In your country maybe you are a poor teacher, but here your money is a lot. This puts ideas in the children’s heads.”
Leda looked into Samuel’s face, at the sheets of sweat soaking his T-shirt. She moved closer and released the handle on the suitcase, demonstrating that she would pull it.
Samuel smiled again, the smile Leda hated and that she felt hated her. She nodded toward the children playing nearby. “What ideas?”
“The idea that begging is a job. Or that robbing you would not be so bad since you give it so easily.”
Samuel took a breath and walked a few steps. Now he resumed his script as he pointed here and there. “When the British left, they gave this land to the Nubians—Muslim Sudanese soldiers. But with no deeds. The Nubians became illegal landlords and the seeds of war were planted in this dirt. Muslim against Christian. Kikuyu against Luo. There have been many problems.”
“But then, technically, the government owns the land? They could help.”
They passed a beauty salon of women who stared at Leda struggling to wheel her suitcase through the trash. Samuel waited. Silently, he watched the trash pool around the suitcase wheels until Leda found herself dragging, not wheeling, the suitcase. His look more or less said I told you so.
“Yes, they could help,” Samuel said. “But it is more convenient for them to do nothing. As long as the slum is illegal, they do not have to provide what the city people have rights to.”
A man tripped over Leda then, for cosmic emphasis, sloshing water from a yellow jug. The dirt beneath her shoes turned to mud and the man looked at it and frowned. Leda’s skin burned under the man’s indignation. He huffed and walked on. How far had the man walked for that water? “Then how do they get the necessities?”
“Everything is for sale in Kibera. Water. Use of the latrine. A shower. People pay the person who steals electricity for them. They pay the watchmen, really paying them not to rob them. They pay thieves to steal back what other thieves stole in the night. Women who sell changaa, they pay the police a bribe. Women who sell themselves, they pay the bribes with their bodies. But still one must pay for charcoal and food and school. The hardest thing to justify is school.”
“How do people pay for everything?”
“They don’t.” Samuel pointed at the ground.
Leda lifted her right foot and a sticky plastic bag dangled from it in the dusty air. She considered anew the blanket of trash bags.
“When you can’t pay or it’s unsafe to go, then you do your business in a bag and—” Samuel’s hand carved an arc through the air that ended at her shoe. “Flying toilets.” He took the suitcase, now soiled from her dragging it through the refuse.
“We’re almost there.” He pointed ahead.
Leda was in shock. But before they moved on, she had to ask a question she thought she knew the answer to. “Do you live in Kibera, Samuel?”
It was the first time emotion crossed his face unfettered. “Yes,” he said, and heaved the suitcase onto his back as he turned away, a turtle putting his shell back on.
Leda followed him deeper into the slum, supplementing his practiced explanations about Kibera with the rushing things her eyes and ears told her. Kibera was an assault of objects, colors, smells and sounds, all suddenly appearing out of the dust inches from her face. As they ducked between mud/stick structures, colored laundry fluttered and dripped overhead. A volley of muffled chatter and music echoed from all directions.
Leda wondered what privacy meant in Kibera, if anything. How would any one of these people feel if they found themselves alone in a quiet house like the one she shared with Amadeus? Or in a mansion of marble, glass and sky, like her mother’s? So much space all to themselves.
People passed each other the way cats do, touching, brushing skin, sliding off one another in the sweaty heat. Personal space was an oxymoron and as soon as Leda put words to the thought it made her recoil, dodging this way and that to avoid contact in the swarming crowds. She saw she would have to form new habits in Kibera, new ways of moving through space.
Women streamed by in bright dresses, in business attire, in jeans and flip-flops. Men streamed past in athletic jerseys and ragged South Park T-shirts and button-downs. All on a mission, edging doggedly in one direction or the other.
Chickens and stray dogs darted through the two-way parade with a bravado Leda wanted to admire. But the smoke searing her eyes and the jagged rays of sunlight darting through the metal turned the path ahead, behind the bobbing suitcase, into an obstacle course of certain peril.
Eventually, the suitcase stopped.
It dropped to the ground and revealed Samuel heaving to catch his breath so he could announce the obvious.
“We’re here,” he said, and pointed at a small, hand-painted sign tacked to a towering wall of corrugated metal. Triumph Orphanage.
Most of the maze of houses and shops were single-roomed, and could be seen right into if the bedsheet doors weren’t drawn. But they’d passed several tall metal partitions, walled-off spaces, which the orphanage seemed to have, as well. Leda tried to get a sense of how big the structure was and poked her head around the corner.
The metal wall spoke to her. Rather, it laughed.
The hair on Leda’s arms stood up. The laugh was a sound like midnight thunder rolling across the sea. Leda shut her eyes. From the moment she’d entered Kibera with Samuel, winding through the dust, through the throngs of smiling children and scowling mothers, through the smells and jolting clamor, whenever it seemed too much to bear, Leda had blinked her eyes long enough to see the smile from the website. A smile full of calm and certainty.
Leda would bet her soul that the laugh on the other side of that wall and the smile were one and the same.
When Samuel banged on the door with his fist, the laugh snuffed out. Leda’s eyes shot open.
A section of the metal wall slid open.
And there it was—the smile that belonged to the laugh.
“Leda,” the smile said, wide and shining.
“Ita,” she said, feeling the grin tug at her lips, a sensation as rare as it was delicious. For once, she wasn’t politely mimicking—the smile sprang from inside, as though freed from a cage.
Samuel looked back and forth with a curious expression. “Have you met before?”
Ita smiled wider, shaking his head. “We have now.”
Leda laughed, enchanted by the simple confidence he radiated like a lightbulb. Feeling breathless, she looked down at her dusty feet and had another vision of standing by the sea—watching in wonder as the sand, the shells, her whole body was drawn in by the tide, magically pulled by the moon. Leda looked up and took another gulp of seeing Ita’s lit-up face. Then she turned to Samuel and held out her hand. “Thank you, Samuel. I wish you well.”
Samuel snapped free of the moment and nodded. “Good luck, Leda. Good luck in Kibera.”
Ita held out his hand, too. “Samuel. Asante sana.”
Samuel shook Ita’s hand, craning to peek inside the orphanage with the same urgent curiosity Leda felt. Ita stood firm with his smile, blocking the view. Samuel nodded once more. “Karibu. Kwaheri.”
Leda watched her guide disappear around a corner and then turned back, which left her and Ita alone across the divide of the entrance. She found herself close enough to be struck by the smoothness of his skin. It was flawless, reminding Leda of a hand-dipped cone. Imagining that it would feel like velvet to the touch, Leda lurched forward for her suitcase handle, letting her hair swish over her face.
“Please, let me help you,” Ita said. He took the suitcase from her and swung it through the doorway in one fell swoop, opening a new world to Leda. The orphanage.
Leda got a two-second glimpse at a horseshoe of shadowy rooms around a dirt courtyard, before the view filled with children, bumping like bees as they swarmed past Ita to greet her. Six boys, Leda counted—toddler to preteen—as they tugged her inside, chattering competitively in Swahili. One boy, the oldest, watched her intently, walking backward like a guard dog. Leda tried to smile at him.
Inside, she stepped into a battle of smells. To the left, cardamom and clove fought pepper and cumin for control of a stew. Leda sniffed the spicy smoke the same way she inhaled Amadeus’s fur after a grooming, but stopped short when she was bitten by Kibera’s sharp endnote of sewage.
The boys patted her clothes and skin as they tugged her toward a woven mat in the courtyard. Leda focused on not tripping over them. She felt woozy after her voyage through Kibera, as if she’d stepped off a merry-go-round. But now, inside the orphanage, if such a thing was possible, it was actually louder, more closed-in, more overwhelming. The kids swirled around her legs like water in a tide pool and Ita followed, the herder.
“We’ve been waiting for you!” he shouted over the tops of their heads. “They are very excited. We have prepared many things for your arrival.”
Leda swam in the most human contact she’d had in years. Maybe ever. Estella had renounced her past and whatever family it may have contained, so Leda hadn’t grown up in proximity to anybody other than her mother. She’d sat alone in school, then spent evenings watching children on television, trying to comprehend them in their freeness. Leda always felt as though she’d been born eighty years old.
Now here she was being mobbed by children, her breathing shallowing. Estella’s judgments rang in her mind—she was not made for this. Was she crazy to have come here?
And then, just as Leda nearly went down in the mosh pit, Ita saved her. His eyes met hers, a knowing look in them that made Leda feel as if she’d found a wall to lean against. His eyes, dark brown with golden supernovas, stayed locked on Leda as he called out in Swahili to the children. A series of commands, sold with a smile but sure as a sunrise. The children reacted like little soldiers. They took their places on the mat, sitting cross-legged with their hands in their laps.
Leda exhaled and Ita laughed.
“We’re happy today. To meet you, Leda.”
“Oh, me, too,” she rushed out, hoping she hadn’t just come across as rude. “Just tired, I think, from—”
“A tsunami of children? Yes. Cannot hear yourself think, is that it?”
Leda nodded, amazed. Yes, that was exactly it. Ita stepped closer. “Lunch is almost ready. Should I show you your new home?”
She looked around the orphanage, at the concrete walls crumbling to the dirt floors, at the open doorways and one wooden door. Shyly, she followed him as he walked briskly to the left of the courtyard. First, he pointed at a closed door, crooked on its hinges. “My office,” he said, and walked on. Then he turned, with a wink Leda might have imagined, and said, “And my bedroom.” The next room was open and Ita stepped inside, waving her after.
Leda didn’t understand what she was seeing. A closet? Shoes lined the edges of the room, in a square around another huge woven mat. She lifted her foot to step forward, but Ita put his hand on her arm. It was warm and soft.
“This is where the children sleep. You may sleep here or—” Ita stepped out of the room “—with Mary.”
Mary had been the other name on the website, but hadn’t been linked to a picture. Leda’s stomach burned with curiosity. “Is Mary here now?”
“Who did you think was creating that delicious smell?” Ita ducked his head under a wooden beam and Leda followed him into the kitchen. A wood fireplace formed the rear of the room, and the rest of it, apart from smoke, was filled with pots and pans and plastic bowls towering off the ground.
Bent over a cauldron that hung above a fire was a sizable woman’s backside, wrapped taut in a patterned sarong, brighter than a bouquet of flowers. At Ita’s voice, the woman straightened and Leda saw she was old, though to guess her actual age would be tricky.
Leda felt relief gush through her, and she laughed at herself when she realized why. When she’d read the listing online, she had thought perhaps the man and woman mentioned were married or a couple. Now, she knew she’d been hoping that wasn’t the case.
Did women shake hands? Leda wasn’t sure, so she said, “Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” the words piling up in her mouth like cotton balls.
Mary smiled kindly, her face wrinkling like a cozy bathrobe. “Karibu,” she said.
Welcome. Leda did feel welcome. She’d never had anyone make such a fuss over her presence, or anything she did, really. Except maybe Amadeus.
Next, Ita showed her where the toilet was—toilet being a very loose term. There were two stalls with two hanging sheets. When Ita pulled back the first sheet, Leda’s eyes traveled down to the square of concrete. In the middle was a piece of wood with a handle on it, and Leda could only guess that underneath was a hole. The second stall was exactly the same.
“Shower,” Ita said of the second stall.
When Leda remembered to breathe again, she met Ita’s eyes and saw that they gleamed with pride.
So Leda looked again and tried to see it through different eyes. She remembered how Samuel had said everyone paid to use a latrine and to bathe. This was a luxury. An achievement. He should be proud.
“Awesome!” Leda said, and knew immediately she’d overdone it.
But Ita laughed at her effort, not wounded in the least, and led her by the elbow to the other side of the orphanage.
The ease with which Ita touched her—it was unnerving. Even more distracting was how her skin felt under his fingers—tingly, pliant. Usually, she grew stiff under a stranger’s touch. In her fairly limited sexual experience, Leda had always felt clumsy at best, but more often raw and exposed. But as she walked with Ita, she had a lightning-flash vision of Ita’s warm hands on her skin. She bet it would be different with him—gentler, yet sexier, urgent.
Leda’s head shot up, her eyes darting to Ita as if he’d heard her thoughts. She felt the blood stampede her cheeks. She coughed to try and combat a full-on blush.
Ita paused before the back wall of the orphanage. He looked at her strangely, and she wondered if she was hurtling pheromones at him so hard he felt it. Get a grip, Leda.
“There is a room behind here. It is our medical room, our secret hospital.”
He must have known how strange that sounded. But at the same time, she noted the same pride as before that lifted his chin. “Are you a doctor?” she asked.
Ita smiled. But when his eyes moved to the door, his confidence faltered. “No. I study.” Now he looked embarrassed. “Not like you have studied. Impressive, your education.” Leda had sent him her résumé, as if applying for a job. Now she felt stupid about it. “I want to know all about it,” he said as he walked past the room.
On the other side of the orphanage, the back half was a three-walled room with a metal roof and another identical mat spread out. “This is for study, and for eating when the rains come.”
The next room had a sheet drawn tight across it. “Mary!” Ita called across the courtyard, followed by a question in Swahili that Leda couldn’t understand.
Mary’s answer boomeranged back and Ita gently tucked the sheet to one side. “Mary’s sleeping space,” Ita said, but respectfully, he didn’t enter.
Leda hesitated.
“It is okay. You may look,” Ita said.
Leda ducked her head inside. This room was much smaller. A mat still covered most of the dirt floor, but this time sported a narrow strip of foam and a folded sheet on one half.
When Leda poked her head back out, Ita watched her expectantly.
“It’s...” Leda wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear, and her head was starting to spin with the dawning realization that these were her accommodations for the month. “Great.”
“So you will stay with Mary,” Ita said, satisfied.
Leda looked out to where the children sat, playing quietly, waiting for their lunch. She put a hand out, feeling for the wall, something solid.
Ita’s voice was different when he spoke next, with an edge of self-consciousness that was new. “I’m sure where you live is very different.” He remained with the sheet in his hand and straightened. “The bed might help you become accustomed.”
Leda realized he meant the piece of foam in the little room, but she could no more imagine stretching out next to Mary and having any hopes of sleeping there for an entire month than she could imagine coping with any of it—the toilet, kitchen, the sheets for doors. She would be surrounded at all times. Forget hearing herself think, she wouldn’t even be able to feel herself breathe. As if in response, her breathing came quicker.
But then she remembered the morning—traipsing around after Samuel through the maze—all the jagged metal, the haggard faces, the roar and the stench, heaps of garbage, the images leaping out like rabid dogs.
Leda forced herself to breathe from her belly as she looked at her feet. She saw now where she and Ita had walked carefully around the perimeter of the courtyard. The dirt in the interior was swept clean. The children’s sandals were lined up like ducks around the mat. The concrete in the bathrooms was new, the sheets clean. She remembered the touch of Ita’s hand, felt the lingering calm he exuded. She was safe. Leda felt sure of it. Inside the orphanage, she was safe.
But Ita noted her silence and saw how she looked at her feet. “I have an idea.”
He walked back to the room he’d said was a hospital. He slid open the metal that looked like a wall and waved Leda over. She was amazed to see a metal table, and walls covered in posters of anatomy and the periodic table.
“It is our secret, this room,” Ita said, looking at the stacks of medical supplies on a table in the corner, and Leda thought she understood. In a place like Kibera, where health services were rare and precious, a room like this would have to be kept secret lest the whole slum descend on it. “You would like your own room. What do you think?”
Did he mean the metal table? Leda could only think of blood and episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, until she pictured the foam on Mary’s floor and found herself saying, “Yes, if it’s okay, this is perfect.”
Ita nodded and smiled. “Good. I will bring the foam and blanket. Are you ready now to meet the children?” Ita looked past her at the kids when he said it, and the love that radiated toward them landed on Leda, too, like wrapping her hands around a cup of morning tea. She felt glad for the boys, then noted the lump in her throat.
As she gazed after them, Mary appeared out of the kitchen, struggling under the weight of the steaming pot.
“Michael, msaada,” Ita called, and the word was followed by more Swahili that Leda figured meant the boy should help Mary with lunch.
Michael, not only the tallest boy by a foot but owner of the only serious expression of the bunch, stood and grabbed the pot’s handles. He called out and two other boys obediently headed for the kitchen.
As she watched them go, Leda realized Ita wasn’t watching the boys, he was looking at her. She felt his curiosity digging into her again, and realized for the first time that she must seem as strange to him as all this was to her.
“Let’s eat,” Ita said.
The remaining children wiggled with excitement as Leda came closer.
“Karibu!” one of the middle-sized boys called out. He put his hand out like a little salesman. “Ntimi,” the boy said, indicating himself. He had a smile almost to match Ita’s—full of strong white teeth and a joy one can only be born with.
Leda sat next to him. “Leda,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Timmy.”
It was Ntimi who named the other boys, from Thomas to Christopher, ending with Michael. Then Ntimi scooped up a toddler and plopped him into Leda’s arms. “Walter,” he said, and everyone laughed as Walter tried to wiggle free.
Michael was the only one not laughing. Leda had a hunch he was a person she would have to win over slowly. “Thank you for having me here, Michael, for letting me into your home.”
Michael nodded with a solemn maturity that made Leda want to smile, but she held it back.
Ita, watching closely, doled out a look of approval that warmed her belly.
“Jomo,” Ntimi said as he pointed toward a sheeted room by the door, a room that hadn’t been on the tour. Leda took it for a guard post of sorts, or a storage space. She squinted. Did Ntimi mean a guard?
“He new,” Ntimi said in a quieter voice, just as Leda made out two skinny legs showing from under the hanging sheet.
Another boy. Boy number seven.
“Will he join us for lunch?” Leda asked, though the answer was obvious.
Mary handed Leda a yellow plastic bowl filled with murky water. Leda studied it, unsure what to do. Was it soup? “Wash,” Ntimi said, and Leda wanted to hug him.
She wet her hands in the lukewarm water, then passed the bowl around for the children to do the same.
Next, Mary brought her a bowl heaped with rice from the pot. She handed Leda a spoon.
Leda said thank you and waited for everyone else to be served. But Mary didn’t go for more bowls. They all seemed to be waiting and Leda wondered if guests ate first.
The first mouthful occupied Leda mind and body, with a collision of flavors she’d never tasted before. Sweet, salty, spicy all at the same time.
Suddenly Leda saw all the eyes on her. She jabbed her spoon back into the rice and felt her cheeks start to burn.
Activity commenced. Mary left and brought back bowls for herself and Ita. Then she set down the big bowl of rice on the mat, the boys huddling around it. Their little hands went to work, rolling little balls of rice and transferring them to their mouths fast as they could carry. Leda looked and saw Ita and Mary dig in with their fingers, too, employing the same technique.
Leda watched, thinking first of hygiene, then suffering a guilty replay of all the food she’d left on her plate or thrown away in her lifetime.
Leda looked at her spoon, glinting in the sun, and set it down on the ground. Watching Ntimi’s nimble fingers, she imitated him, rolling the food into bite-size pieces with her hands. Ntimi smiled at her.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leda saw the sheet flutter. She looked and saw that it was pulled just a crack to the side.
On impulse, Leda stood up and started over. Ntimi stopped and looked up in worry. Michael shook his head ever so slightly. But she went anyway.
Stopping in front of the sheet, she held out her bowl. “You like to eat alone, that’s okay,” Leda said gently.
No hand reached out for the bowl, but Leda could hear the boy breathing, with a slight wheeze of asthma that made her heart leap. Dangerous out here with no medicine. Lucky he has Ita, she thought, just as she heard Ita stride up behind her.
“How much English do they understand?” Leda asked, glossing over the fact that she still held out the bowl of steaming food.
“All Kenyan children learn English in school,” Ita said. He glanced at the sheet when he added, “But many of our children have missed much school.”
Leda’s heart sank. “So they don’t understand me.” Of course not. “Good way to practice my Swahili, I guess.”
Ita spoke into the crack in the sheet. When only silence followed, he spoke again in the same even, coaxing voice.
Nothing happened.
“They will understand some, if you speak slowly and use easy words.” Ita saw the look on Leda’s face. “Don’t worry, they already love you. They are so excited you have come all this way for them. It is hard for them to believe.”
Suddenly the sheet opened and a small, lanky boy stepped into the sun. He wore a WWF T-shirt, shorts and a scowl like a guerilla rebel.
Ita knelt down and spoke to him, as if he was explaining why the sky is blue or the dirt orange. Leda already loved this manner of his, a solid gentleness much like what she loved about the trees at home—cheerful but sage.
Jomo stood but he didn’t meet Ita’s gaze. Instead his eyes found something just off to the side and locked on. His face took on a blankness Leda recognized with a shiver. She looked down and saw what Jomo was doing with his hands. He picked and picked at the edges of his thumbs, beside the nail beds. Leda looked down at her own hands, similarly mutilated. It was an embarrassing habit, but one she’d never been able to conquer. Estella thought it was disgusting. Doesn’t it hurt? her school guidance counselor had asked. But the pain was the point. It grounded her. In public, whenever Leda felt anxious, when she wanted to flee or scream, the picking gave her something to do, something to keep her from losing control, something to control. The only other thing she’d ever found that calmed her, gave her a buffer against the world was—
“Hey, Jomo,” she said, reaching into her pocket and startling both Ita and the frowning boy. “Want to see something?”
Leda took the camera from her pocket. It was her favorite—small enough to take out and tuck away quickly, with the manual control to shoot without a flash. It put a lens between her and the loud crazy world, let her compose it, control it, record it from one step away. Cameras gave Leda a way to interact with the world without...interacting.
Jomo’s attention snapped toward the camera lying flat in Leda’s hand. His yearning was more apparent than he would have liked, she was sure. She set down the food and knelt across from Ita, close to Jomo, and turned the camera on. She didn’t press it into his hands; she just started to demonstrate how it worked. Zoom like this, she mimed, frame with the screen, and take the picture. She pointed the viewfinder toward Ita and snapped.
Jomo grunted, a small slip of amusement.
Ita watched the two of them studying the image of him and he laughed. She bristled and felt Jomo do the same. But it wasn’t Ita’s fault, she realized. He wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t daunted by life. He danced happily with the world. He wouldn’t understand the comfort of a camera on the sidelines.
But Leda also knew Ita wanted Jomo to be happy, he was ecstatic at the merest glimpse of joy in the glowering boy. She hoped Jomo would know this soon, too. She tucked the camera away, picked up the bowl and settled it into Jomo’s hands before he saw it coming. Then she stood up and walked pointedly back to the mat.
When Leda sat down, the children settled back into a ring around her. On Ntimi’s cue, they began clapping their hands and rapping on their knees, and while Leda watched, a little taken aback, they began to sing.
It was a song they’d planned, obviously, because everyone from youngest to oldest joined in at once.
Leda let the harmony wash over her and blinked her eyes. When she didn’t have her camera out, she would blink to record the memories she wanted to hang on to, to replay later for comfort. She’d had no idea what to make of her first day in Kibera, but just then she wanted to savor the warm feeling wrapped around her like afternoon sunshine on her porch in Topanga. It wasn’t the feeling of serenity she felt there with Amadeus, however. This was something new.
A loud banging on the metal door stole Leda’s train of thought and took the warm feeling with it.
The children stopped singing but sat obediently, not looking overly perturbed, though Jomo ducked back behind his curtain. Leda tried to calm herself—visitors to the orphanage must be common.
Ita walked over to the door and she heard the voice that filtered through, sounding more like a low growl than a man.
Reluctantly, Leda thought, Ita slid open the door. But he blocked the gap, so Leda couldn’t see who was outside.
She turned back to the boys, but the mood had shifted one hundred and eighty degrees. Leda glanced up to see if clouds had moved in. No, the sun was still beating down like a radiator.
The door scraped ajar and a tall, wiry man darted through to jab Ita and cackle. When the man’s yellow eyes scurried over Leda’s skin, she shuddered and averted her gaze. When he turned to converse with Ita, Leda looked again.
At first glance, Leda might have called him handsome, with his angular face and cat eyes, but beside Ita, she decided, definitely not. The man was a praying mantis, creeping along on folded pincers. Dreads snaked down his back, trembling as he shuffled closer. Dangling, bouncing from his belt, was a battered machete. When he sneered in her direction, Leda recoiled at two rows of stained teeth. Then she saw that his face was covered in scars, several of them burns like hers.
Her hand went to her scar while her mind filled with fifty thoughts at once. The man was clearly a gangster, yet seemed to be Ita’s friend. There was a word at Leda’s lips, a scary word. Mungiki—what the guidebook named Kenya’s vicious mafia and more or less warned to look out for dreadlocks. Mungiki ran the slums—extortion, female genital circumsion, beheadings.
“So, this is the volunteer?” The man stopped at the edge of the mat, close enough that he cast a shadow over Leda. “You the woman Ita can’t stop talking about, two weeks now?”
Ita’s face blanched. Wary? Or apologetic?
“Chege!” Ntimi jumped up. The other children greeted him with enthusiasm, too.
Chege turned to Ita and laughed his hyena cackle again. “She speak?” He looked down on Leda meanly, his eyes on her as he continued in a growl before she could answer. “Funny, nah? Here Ita been talking ’bout this educated white woman, smart, rich, talking up a summer storm.” Chege smirked, he flickered his eyes over to Ita then back to Leda. “Lot to live up to, this man a big dreamer. He dream big beautiful things. Like an angel come from America, come save everybody.”
“I’m not—” Leda said, but Ita interrupted.
“Kuacha, Chege,” he growled. He held out his hand to Leda and tugged her up to stand beside him. “This is Leda. She is my guest.”
“Leda,” Chege purred. “Welcome to Kibera, Leda.” He put out his hand and she took it reluctantly.
Ntimi interrupted. “You bring gifts, Chege?”
Ita shook his head and steered the boy back to the mat.
When Leda tried to retract her hand, Chege held tight and pulled her closer to him. She squeaked, desperate to escape his calloused grip, but he peered into her eyes and whispered, “Don’t tell him you no angel yet. American rich lady come save Africa, and have a little fun.” He nodded his head in Ita’s direction.
Leda’s eyes flickered over to Ita. Were those his words?
“But what if—” Chege’s voice rose, pulling Ita from the children into their huddle “—what if us Kikuyu brathas don’t need your help, Leda? Don’t need a volunteer—”
“Chege,” Ita said. “Stop.”
Chege laughed, his smoky breath hitting Leda in the face. “Okay, okay. I play nice.” He dropped Leda’s hand and slung down his knapsack. “Presents!” he called out.
The second he let her out of his grasp, Leda stumbled back and wiped her hand on her pants. She wrapped her arms around herself then, trying to still the wave of nausea and panic. Chege strode past her, chuckling, and crouched down among the boys.
Leda coerced herself into taking one clean, full breath.
Chege dug in his bag and brandished a coconut, winning “oohs” and “aahs” from the children. He untied the machete from his belt, its edge jagged, its blade sticky with congealed brown stains. Leda watched him swipe it across his jeans, telling herself firmly the stain wasn’t blood.
He split the coconut with a single, expert stroke. He sucked down the milk that came spilling out, letting it course over his chin before he dribbled it into the kids’ open mouths, like watering a ring of flowers. The children gulped the sweet juice and giggled. With the machete, Chege carved smaller pieces and handed them out.
Leda watched the whole process in a daze, until Chege ran his tongue over the white coconut flesh, one eye leering sideways at her. She looked away, her cheeks burning.
Ita couldn’t seem to tell anything was wrong. He looked over at her and smiled, the same pure, easy smile.
As all the children sat content with their treat, Chege stood next to Ita. With a flare obviously for Leda’s benefit, he pulled a bulging wad of money from his pocket. “Been a good month, brother.”
Ita looked at the cash and the smile was gone, replaced by steel. “No,” he barked, followed with daggers of Swahili, fervent hand gestures, and a look searing enough to ignite a forest fire.
For a fleeting moment Chege was surprised, he teetered backward on his spindly limbs. He recovered at the same moment Leda saw Jomo edge into the courtyard.
Chege saw him, too, and waved him over. Jomo hesitated, then jutted out his chin and walked over.
Chege peeled off a leaf of Kenyan shillings. “Ita say he don’t want any,” Chege said. “He don’t like where it come from. Ita always think money cares where it come from. Always. Even when we was you age. Course, then he had no choice.”
Chege took Jomo’s wrist. He thrust the money into the boy’s palm. Jomo’s eyes bulged as if he was scared to blink, as if the money might disappear. Now Chege looked up at Leda. “Maybe he think things be different now?”
Leda felt the nausea tip and pour back through her stomach. What had they said about her? What did they think of her here in this place?
“Chege, enough,” Ita said, but Chege put out his hand and knelt down next to Jomo.
“But this boy knows. Every hungry boy knows money have to come from somewhere.” Chege’s coiled stance made Leda think of a feral cat—watching, plotting, waiting. “And somebody always have to give something to get it.”
Leda could tell Jomo didn’t understand the words, but everything Chege did was a cartoon requiring no caption. Ita’s jaw was clenched so tight she wondered how words could possibly escape, but she could see them, piled up behind his teeth, being chosen carefully.
When he opened his mouth, however, Ita’s words were swallowed by banging at the door. Deep voices followed, so loud Leda jumped.
Chege laughed. “For me,” he said with a wink.
Ita’s frown was like a deep etched carving. “Go,” he said and strode quickly with Chege to the door. Leda stayed where she was, holding her breath.
When the gate opened, thugs huddled outside, their words like little firecrackers. Leda couldn’t understand any of it, but the men looked back and forth behind them as if they were being chased by the devil himself. One man took the machete from his belt and demonstrated a whack. With another glance behind him, he tried to dart inside the orphanage.
Which is when Ita started shouting. He screamed at the men, then at Chege, all the while trying to close the metal door on top of them.
But everybody, and time itself, stood still when Chege hollered into the air. With terse, measured words he spoke to the men, who lowered their heads and nodded. He pointed beyond the door and they left.
Chege turned to Ita. A look passed between them and Ita raised his chin. Chege slipped out though the doorway. But as Ita slid the door shut, Chege’s eyes found Leda and sent a chill all the way down into her shoes.
Leda backed away, air locked up in her lungs.
When she sat down on the mat, she found she was shaking.
All the children had scattered off, to their room or to the kitchen. Leda pressed a finger to her scar.
What in the hell had she gotten herself into?
Chapter 3
December 30, 2007, Nairobi airport—Leda
THE SEAT BELT shakes in her fingers, as Leda buckles in and wishes she could likewise restrain her mind. Above the rushing of the air vents, the rumble of the engines, the chirpy chatter of the stewardesses, Leda hears her own horrible sound track on repeat. The sound of fist on flesh, the crack of machetes, the thud of Ita hitting the dirt. Screaming. Leda hears the awful, high-pitched screams, then realizes they were hers.
She sees Ita silhouetted in the doorway of the shack when he discovered them. Sees him hit Chege so hard the blood is like a hose, instant and coursing. Leda could smell it. She can smell it now.
She buries her face in her hands, presses against the small glass window, like she can make the sounds disappear, like she can snuff out the images.
She can’t.
She feels Chege’s wet mouth over her ear, stubble slicing her skin, his arms pinning her, sure as shackles, hissing into her ear in a voice that will never leave her again.
Ita found them, but too late. He found Chege sprawled atop her, grinding into her, her body pinned as though beneath a scorpion’s tail.
She looks down at her skirt, balling it up in her fists, fighting not to cry, wishing among so many other things that she’d changed clothes at the airport. Thirty hours she will have to look at her skirt and remember. Thirty hours she will be imprisoned in memory.
No, forever. Forever is how long she will have to live and relive this night.
Ita hit Chege and the world exploded. In the grand finale of the fireworks show, Chege’s men descended on Ita like bloodthirsty warriors. How many men were there? Leda couldn’t count. She’d covered her face and cried, begging them to stop. If the police hadn’t arrived—
But the police had arrived and they’d dragged her away. Once they’d learned she was already scheduled to fly out tonight, they asked no more questions. They dragged her away from Ita and left him there. As though her life was more precious than his. You don’t know anything! she’d wanted to scream at them as she looked down at his bloodied body in the dirt. Save him, not me! I cannot live with this.
The child in the seat next to Leda is asking the stewardess for ice cream. The stewardess jokes with the boy, looks hard at Leda, as though she’s about to ask her something.
Leda turns farther toward the window in a preemptive response.
How? How is she alive and on a plane? How is the world still spinning? How can the child next to her be deciding between strawberry and chocolate?
Leda thinks of the orphans. What will happen to them? What’s happening to them right now?
She burrows into her seat and tries to breathe.
“I liked the zebras best, mummy,” the little boy is now saying. “And the hippos. But they looked mean. I think the zebras are nice. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, I think I liked the zebras the best, too.”
The mother sees Leda’s sullied clothes, sees her mussed hair, the scratches on her neck and arms.
Leda sees the woman’s blow-dried hair, her careful makeup, her attempts to hide her scared eyes, the lines of worry. The mother knows what’s happening beneath them. She can only guess the horrors responsible for the scratches on Leda’s skin and the look on her face, but she knows.
The look she gives Leda is a plea.
Their eyes lock, two women in a world of men gone mad. Leda looks at the boy, who’s around Ntimi’s age. Then she thinks of the youths who attacked her, their teenaged faces hard as wood.
Leda turns away. She obliges the mother with her child’s innocence and her mind returns to the stench of blood cloaking her. She washed her hands in the airport bathroom, but now as her hair falls forward, Leda sees it matted with the stuff. Her stomach clenches when she remembers how, as she cradled Ita’s battered head in her lap, her hair caught in the blood on his face. His eyes could barely stay open, as the fire reflected in them raged all around them. The sorrow in Ita’s eyes quickened the terror in the gazes of the policemen staring down at them.
I’m sorry, Ita. I’m so, so, so sorry.
Chapter 4
December 9, 2007, Kibera—Ita
THAT NIGHT ITA lay in his bed, wrestling with his eyelids as though trying to clamp shut two hippos’ mouths. With a grin, he gave in to replaying the day instead. The sudden blooming smile when she said his name, the breathless tinkling sound of her laughter and the way her hair danced to it, dark brown curls swirling. It wasn’t like Ita hadn’t met white people before, mostly at the clinic. But none like her. Leda was like an American movie star, but from old films he’d seen in black-and-white. Maybe it was the way her skin glowed in the dark, or the curves of her body like flowing cloth. Even when she first arrived, covered in a fine dust, her cheeks looked creamy underneath, like milk. Her green eyes peeked out from her slender face, watching like a bird on a branch, poised and wary at the same time.
She was nothing like Ita had imagined—an aggressive older American woman. Crass, maybe, loud, even wanton, from what he’d seen at the theater in Kibera that showed current movies. Women with plastic breasts and lipstick, who wore little clothing and made dirty jokes.
Leda didn’t seem this way in the least. She reminded him of an old-time movie star because she didn’t seem real, of this time, or even human. She floated behind him on her first tour of the orphanage, taking everything in like a first visit to Earth. Could she tell that they’d cleaned? Swept? Washed all the dishes? Ita had sensed her discomfort at sharing a room with Mary. He was glad he’d thought of the hidden room.
Goose bumps crept up his skin in the dark. She was nearby, in that room—asleep on the metal table, wrapped in the blanket he’d given her. He imagined her wispy eyelashes, a smile on her face, her slender fingers curled around the cloth.
He sighed. Everything was perfect.
Suddenly his heartbeat sped up like a motorcycle. Nothing was ever perfect, or ever stayed so for more than a fleeting second.
Ita knew why he pictured Leda curled up, smiling in her dreams. He’d known another girl to sleep that way.
He tried to stop the stampeding memory—he put his hands over his eyes, he turned to his side, dug his head into the foam. But he couldn’t stop it. The vision of Leda’s beatific face was gone, mutated into the image that haunted Ita every day. A different smooth, beautiful face, but darker and twisted beyond recognition by fear, battered and swelling with blood, as she slumped down beside him in exhaustion. Behind her, Chege.
The memory crept away as it had slithered in, leaving only the guilt twisting Ita’s stomach like wringing wet clothes.
Chege.
Ita replayed Chege’s appearance today, how he pushed his way in to see Leda. How he took her hand, seductively, teasing her, leering at her. Then he’d pulled out that money. What are you showing off, Chege? Nothing to be proud of—how his boys made that money.
It was Mungiki creed to despise Westerners, Americans, even as they coveted their clothes and music. Did Chege really not see the hypocrisy? Could he not see what he’d become?
The air in Ita’s room seemed to grow hotter as he thought of what Chege had said to Jomo—money in Kibera can only be gotten by giving something up. Filmstrips of memories spiraled in Ita’s mind, of how much Chege had given him—so much, everything, saved his life even, countless times. And now Chege wanted to help the orphans the same way, give them money, protect them. It made Ita’s blood boil. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he should be grateful. But Ita knew what it cost to accept Chege’s help. He knew what it meant to repay in regret and nightmares.
In the dark, Ita shook his head, trying to wriggle free of his thoughts. He wished he could be like Leda—clean, new and fresh to the ways of Kibera.
Suddenly, he remembered how she bent down for her suitcase, sending her curls to cover her face. Was it the scar she wanted to hide? A mark like white paint dribbling down her jaw.
Maybe she had memories she wished she could forget, too. Ita felt a tenderness ache through his chest. In his eyes, that only made her more perfect.
* * *
In the morning, Ita wasn’t surprised to find the children awake early for school, waiting on the mat for breakfast, eyes darting to the secret room.
“She is in there, stop worrying,” he said in Swahili. “Do you think she will fly away?”
As he said it, he realized it was his worry, too.
While they stalled a bit, Ita asking them about their studies, Jomo appeared and sat on the mat as if it was the most normal thing in the world. But in the few months since Jomo’s arrival, he had yet to willingly come sit with them. Ita’s gaping mouth reassembled into a smile.
Mary came outside with the food, and as they debated whether to wait or wake their visitor the door scraped open and there she was, looking exactly like a crumpled angel in the best of ways. He had seen pictures of the men’s pajamas American women wore, and she wore a set herself. But it didn’t strike him as wanton like the pictures. On Leda, it actually looked quite demure.
But Ita must have been indiscreet with his looking because she seemed suddenly self-conscious and stepped backward.
“Good morning,” Ita said, worried she would duck back into her room.
The children echoed him, practicing their English greetings. “Goo-mowning, goo-mowning, Ledaaah.”
“Breakfast is ready,” Ita said. “Please, join us.”
She smiled, but he could see her hesitation, and the flurry of thought scurry across her face. He had noticed this the day before—she was always thinking, dreaming, watching. But he liked this quality, it reminded him of the children, the rapt curiosity with which they regarded the world.
Leda walked across the dirt in her blue pajamas and sandals. She sat down in the empty spot next to Jomo. “Good morning,” she said. Jomo didn’t look up, but Ita could see the glint in his eye.
The children were at a loss as to what to do with this mysterious species in their midst. It was Ntimi who looked up shyly. He took a moment and then he opened his mouth. “I trust you slept well, Miss Leda,” he said.
Ita nearly split open with pride, hearing the phrase they’d practiced.
Leda beamed at Ntimi, too, looking equally impressed. “What a gentleman you are. I slept like the princess in the fairy tale. Well—” Leda leaned in closer “—not the one about the pea.”
Ntimi smiled blankly at the foreign words, and Leda noticed. She mimed opening a book. “I will read it to you. I brought lots of books.”
That the children understood, and they clapped and chattered in response.
Ita was touched. In her email, she did not say she would bring books. But books were what the children craved, and lacked, the most. A luxury Ita always longed to provide.
Mary set the tray of food on the mat. Leda watched the boys first this time. She washed her hands, then took her loaf of bread and a cup of tea. When she took her first sip, her eyes widened in reaction.
“It’s spicy!” she said and licked her lips like a kitten. “And sweet,” she said to herself, then poked Ntimi until he giggled.
“Spicy. Sweet,” Ntimi echoed and everyone dug in much like Leda, absorbed in the happiness of a shared meal.
Ita watched his little family take in this strange new addition, like they did with each new orphan. A warmth spread through his stomach, like the fullness of a big meal. It must have been the tea, he reasoned.
* * *
Once the boys were off to school, Ita and Leda helped Mary with the dishes and straightening. Leda seemed a bit deflated with most of the children gone. Maybe she didn’t feel useful enough. She bounced Walter on her hip, which he loved, though he shouldn’t get used to it, Ita thought.
Ita pictured the paperwork waiting in his office, but he surprised himself by turning to Leda and saying, “Would you like to go exploring with me?”
She hesitated, these little pauses already becoming familiar, and Ita wondered if it was the image of the slum or the thought of time alone with him that caused that little furrow in her brow.
“I have things to buy,” he added, suspecting she would prefer it presented professionally. He was right.
“Oh, okay, sure, let’s go. I’ll just change my shoes. One second.”
She crossed to the secret room. While the boys had gotten dressed, she’d changed into brown pants and a blue T-shirt. Ita wondered if blue was her favorite color. This was something he did with the orphans as they arrived—try to identify their preferences. Jomo always took the blue cup if it was available and had selected blue sandals for school.
* * *
Ita didn’t have a plan for their tour, and this was very strange for him. He preferred to have a plan for everything, a trait that Chege had teased him about since they were small. For the Kibera laughed at nothing more than plans. But it was what had made the orphanage possible. Ita’s business plan had found them sponsors and the space they now inhabited. And planning was what made him a successful safari guide, standing out among the many, Ita believed. He knew how to craft the perfect trip, down to the type of salad and sandwiches he served for lunch and dinner. Everything was meticulously scheduled, so that it looked effortless for his customers.
What about today’s schedule, then? His plan had been to let Mary show Leda the housework she would do around the orphanage while the children were at school and Ita worked in his office. Fetching water, washing, cooking—he’d told Mary that American women didn’t know how to do these things without machines. They’d joked about the idea of a dishwasher. How funny. Imagine having enough electricity to power a machine to wash the dishes.
But here he was, walking the volunteer out the front gate, watching the mix of emotions dance on her face. How was he to know that the volunteer would be beautiful and shiny and completely captivating? The kind of woman who makes paperwork—something he enjoyed, the figures lined up neatly—suddenly boring.
So Ita led the way around the corner, past the beauty shop and the barbershop next to it. The sun struck them between the maze of rooftops, flickering over their skin through the haze of dust. Ita noticed a spring in his step that he loved to see in the children. Not that he remembered ever being a child like that himself. Chege had always said Ita walked as though he had a rhino on his back.
First stop, he needed to charge his cell phone. Leda had asked him questions about his phone yesterday. She seemed surprised that he had one. But how would he run a business without it? From Leda’s descriptions, it sounded as though most businessmen in America had computers. She asked if they had one, making Ita laugh. If anyone knew he had a laptop in the orphanage, he’d have to hire a security guard to live with them. No, Ita explained. He had to pay to use the internet in Nairobi, when he went to check his post office box for the orphanage. When he told her that, he thought of the shillings that had added up in the minutes he’d spent staring at her emails and résumé.
“What’s up, brother?” the charging-station man asked. Ita handed him his phone and saw the man look Leda over, alternately like a skewer of meat and a purple elephant.
Leda noticed. She smiled at the man, at the same time averting her eyes and backing away.
Ita handed over the money and rushed back to his charge.
“So,” he said, hoping to soothe her. “What do you plan to teach the children while you are here? Improve their English?”
Leda’s face lit up instantly, like the first rays of sun that woke Ita up every morning. “I was thinking about it last night.”
He couldn’t help but picture her curled up on the table in her blue pajamas, modest enough to hide her body, but thin enough to fuel his fantasy of undergarments.
“I would definitely love to teach them, and read to them, and I’ve brought several cameras, but—” Leda’s voice grew shyer suddenly. “I wanted to see what you thought about the boys’ room. What would you think of building them bunk beds?” She made a gesture with her hand like a shelf.
Ita was caught off guard. There were many things the boys needed before wooden beds, but the thought was touching, and the boys would feel like city princes. And did she mean they would build them together? Ita liked the idea of them working side by side.
“Is that silly?” she asked. “I’m sure there are other things they need first—”
He laughed. “They will love bunk beds. You know how to build them?” He hoped he did not sound discouraging. He was just trying to picture her wielding a hammer.
Now it was Leda’s turn to laugh. “I have a house in the mountains. I’ve discovered that I like building things. Flower boxes and a doghouse.”
“You have a dog?”
“Amadeus,” Leda said, and now Ita knew a way to win a smile from her.
“Mozart. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the boys like. For me, Requiem—breaks my heart.”
She gasped. But when she smiled, Ita knew she must love the music as much as he did.
“Okay, bunk beds,” he said. “We will need wood and nails.”
She looked down but her voice was even when she spoke. “I would like to donate all the supplies, please.”
A feeling welled up in him that was hard to place—gratitude, excitement, giddiness at the rare taste of money—
“Do the boys like to paint?” she asked.
Surprised again. “Like on paper?”
She smiled. “The walls! We could all paint the orphanage walls together. Would they like to decorate their home? Maybe elephants and birds, rhinos, all the animals from your safari trips.”
The boys had never been on safari. But he was sure they would love painting animals on the walls. Ita liked to draw, too, though how long had it been since he had done it? “They would like that.” A lump rose in his throat and he turned away. He was moved, imagining Leda lying in bed, dreaming up these plans. “Should we get the supplies today? Wood and nails. And paint. We will have to get someone to help us carry them back.”
* * *
The day stretched on that happy way, now that they had a united mission. They found the paintbrushes first, but had to go elsewhere for the paint. They laughed as they discussed their plans, designating zebras their place by the kitchen and monkeys in the bathroom.
On their way to get the wood, Ita couldn’t help himself from tossing questions at her like chicken feed. He wanted to know everything at once. But she didn’t answer. Before his eyes, she caught herself, breathed in and said coyly, “You first,” with a little smile. But Ita would bet it was a practiced defense, that smile no man would deny.
“I grew up here,” he said, watching passersby stare as they walked. “I tried to leave, I wanted to become a doctor. I was on my way, starting school, helping out at a clinic here, but then the orphanage came to be and—” Ita put out his hand to help Leda over a creek of dribbling brown water. The touch of her skin sent shivers through his arm.
Leda caught his eye and looked quickly away. Did she feel it, too, the electricity? “And?” she asked, her voice high in pitch and a little shaky.
“And what?” he said, his hand still closed over hers.
Leda slipped out of his touch and bounded a step ahead, leaving him feeling embarrassed. He was acting like a schoolboy in love. The realization brought him back to Earth and he remembered what he’d been talking about. Broken hopes. How time steals them away. “And days became years,” he said. Could she know what that meant? Dreams dashed, time squandered on poverty, years that raced by as he dealt with one pressing problem at a time? It hurt Ita to speak of his dream, getting further and further away now, of being a doctor.
“I know what you mean,” she said softly.
Ita believed that she did, somehow. He felt the questions returning, piling up—
“But how does an orphanage just come to be?” she asked, and he laughed in spite of himself.
“With a Michael.” He looked to see if she’d learned the children’s names yet. “The tallest boy, the oldest.”
“The protector,” she said simply.
Ita missed a step to look at her. “Yes. That’s Michael.” He pointed out a shadowed walk-through, but stopped before entering so they could catch their breath. “A friend brought him to me. She was sick, and she was out of time. Back then, my dream was dying, too, slipping through my fingers—” Leda was watching him with her wide green eyes. She had this way of making him feel as though they were alone in a quiet room, not in the midst of Kibera traffic. “It seemed like a sign from above. How could I say no?”
Ita looked to the sky, remembering so clearly the four-year-old boy with the serious eyes, hiding behind his mother’s spindly legs. “I thought I would take him to an orphanage, but no one would take him.”
“Why not?”
Ita sighed, feeling the old anger bubble in his blood. “His mother died of AIDS and people thought her child must have it, too. They didn’t want a sick child. One who would die or infect others.”
Leda chewed on her bottom lip. “So you took him in.”
“Yes,” Ita said and smiled, remembering. “I took him everywhere, delighting in everything he did. People saw that I loved him, clothed him, fed him, and—” Ita meant to laugh, but it came out like a sigh, remembering the rainy season after Michael arrived, after Ita had to quit school “—then people started leaving children at my door like flowers.”
A man knocked Ita’s shoulder, snapping him back to the present. It wasn’t safe to stand still like this in the back paths of the slum. Better to keep moving. “You never know, right?” He started toward the shadowy corridor.
“Know what’s coming next?” She stepped into a ray of sunshine.
Ita slipped into the alley. “Never know when you’ll meet the person that will change the path of your life.”
The corridor was only wide enough for one person at a time. A man squeezed past Ita, then jumped when he saw Leda entering the passage.
“Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” she said and wriggled past him, so formal and adorable it made Ita want to kiss her.
He turned around, and as though fate meant to grant his wish, she was watching her feet and ran right into him. It threw him off balance, and they ended up pressed against the mud wall. Ita had just a moment to feel her slender frame, the down on her arms brush against his skin.
She looked up at him, her breath retreating across her pink lips.
“You’re right,” she whispered.
Ita looked at her, a feeling of wonder washing through him.
“You never know,” they both said in unison, then laughed shyly and slipped apart.
Chapter 5
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Ita
GOD’S BEEN RAINING kerosene.
Ita watches the flames clawing the night sky. When he tries to force air into his iron lungs, ash coats his tongue, clogs his throat. He doubles over, hands on his knees, and feels his body heave with vomit. But when he opens his mouth, it’s blood that drools onto his foot. He coughs, and blood splatters the dirt. Ita wonders if his wounds will prove fatal after all.
He must make it back to the orphanage. He must find a hold on the present. All is lost for him, but the boys deserve a chance.
He nearly faints from the pain of standing, but grits his teeth and thrusts one foot in front of the other. He’ll keep to the alleys—he can hear the rioters out on the main paths. He creeps unsteadily between the homes, his back scraping along the mud shacks. From inside them, he hears the chorus of whispers—plotting, pleading, praying.
One more corner and he’ll be there. The fire is behind him; it hasn’t reached their neighborhood. He realizes, with a pang of shame, that he dreads seeing the children. He dreads their questions, their tears, their bulging eyes. Ita doesn’t have any comfort to give. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth, he might tell them the truth.
The life we have been building, the one I wanted to give you, planned so carefully—it’s over.
When Ita knocks quietly on the door, there is an instant rustle.
A tiny whisper asks who’s out there. Michael.
As soon as Ita answers, the door slides open.
Michael’s eyes go wide as cashew nuts, and Ita realizes he must look as monstrous as he feels.
“Jomo?” Ita asks.
Michael nods.
Ita sighs. He is safe. Jomo is inside and safe. Ita drags his swollen body inside.
Michael watches with his ancient eyes. “All the children are in bed. Mary, too. I told them they must stay there until you returned.” Pride peeks through Michael’s scared voice. Ita sees that the boy is clutching Ita’s rifle. He floods with tenderness for this boy whom he has promised so much.
“You did very well, Michael. I knew I could count on you. You must sleep now. I will need your help in the morning.”
“But—” Michael darts another look at Ita’s wounds.
Ita puts out his hand, takes the rifle. “I’ll be okay. I can fix it.” He nods toward the secret room. But he has no idea if he can fulfill that promise, if he can fix anything this night has destroyed. “Go on,” he says in a voice he knows Michael will obey.
Michael sighs, the same old man’s sigh he had when he was five years old. “Lala salama, mpwenda baba.” He says it so softly as he turns to leave that it takes Ita a moment to realize what he’s heard.
Goodnight, dear father.
Ita watches him enter the bedroom, then begins the painful trudge toward the room with the medical supplies. Leda’s room.
There are footsteps again in the courtyard at his back, scurrying, urgent.
“Ita—” Mary’s whisper hisses into the night.
Ita turns. Mary’s face is crinkled paper, soggy in the creases.
Her family, he realizes with a pang. The orphans are not her family, not like they are for Ita. Mary’s kin is out there, in the chaos, in the fire. Her daughter, Grace, lives by the railroad tracks with her husband, with Mary’s grandchildren. But Mary is here. She stayed. “Thank you, Mary. Thank you for staying with the boys. What can I do? Do you need me to go check on your family?”
A tear winds crookedly through the wrinkles of Mary’s face. Ita realizes he has never seen Mary cry, not even close. She’s looking at his battered body. “You cannot. Look at you. What did they do to you? Where is Leda?”
“She is gone.” But Ita has no words for what happened to him, because it is linked to what happened to Leda, to what Chege did. He wonders when he will be able to say it aloud, if ever. Dizziness rolls over Ita like fog. He pitches forward, his stomach heaving into his throat.
Mary scuttles toward him, grips his shoulder.
Ita recoils from the pain. He must stand. He must reassure her, if he wants to be alone. “It’s okay. In the morning—”
“No, I must go now. My daughter—”
He shakes his head firmly. “No. You cannot go out tonight. It is not safe for women.”
More tears seep into Mary’s scrunched face.
But Ita must be firm on this. He cannot go back out there now and hope to protect an old woman. “Does Paul have a phone?” Ita asks of Mary’s son-in-law, taking out his cell phone.
Mary shakes her head.
Ita nods. “I’ll go with you tomorrow. We will walk in the sun, in the light that has to follow this darkness. Grace will be all right. She’s strong and brave. Like her mother.”
Mary understands. Ita has decided. She stops her lip from trembling. Then she reaches up and puts her hand gingerly to the side of Ita’s face. He closes his eyes and the scratchy parchment of her hand on his cheek brings the flicker of a memory, decades old. A mother’s touch. If he doesn’t open his eyes, he will disappear into the sensation, spiral into the void, searching for solace in memories lost and drained away.
His eyes fling open when Mary’s hand slips away. Without another word, she turns and shuffles off to her room to spend a sleepless night.
The moment of comfort evaporates, and Ita knows he might collapse any minute. He hastens across the courtyard to the hidden room.
Inside, he lights an oil lamp. He sees the pile on the floor, but wrests his mind away from thoughts of Leda, of the memories in this room. Instead, he looks at himself in the small mirror.
At the first glimpse of his face, Ita sees a statue glued back together all wrong. His eyes, nose, jaw—everything’s in the wrong place and wrong proportions. The swelling—that explains why his vision is so distorted, why his head pounds like a pump about to blow.
The only other time he has ever seen his face like this, a mangled toy to be thrown away...
The only other time was the day he met Chege. The day one life ended and another began.
Ita soaks a rag in a bowl of water. He presses it to his forehead, covering his eyes, covering the vision, and tries not to remember.
But everything—the blood coating his teeth, the pain in his limbs as though they’re clenched in a lion’s jaw, the hopelessness flooding his veins—it’s all so much the same that Ita can’t help but remember...
September 22, 1989, Kibera—Ita
Ita hears them, the boys, he hears them coming, but he doesn’t care.
After two weeks on the streets, he is already tired. He’s tired of running, tired of begging, tired of trying to hold on to a life that’s bent on wriggling out of his fingers like a worm. So, let it. Let it all go. Mother. Home. School. Hope. He hears the boys tearing down the alley, their footsteps the sound of his plans being trampled.
When the boys turn the corner, Ita sees they are older than he’d expected. Teenagers.
There is a moment where they stop and Ita looks up and they look at him and there is still a thread of time in the fabric of fate when they might just move on.
But then one of them spots Ita’s backpack. And when he nudges the boy next to him, that boy looks at Ita’s shoes. And then the third boy, the tallest, with a tattoo freshly done, he rallies them all with a certain look. Seconds later, as though choreographed, they all jump Ita.
The tall boy is the fists. He likes it, Ita can tell. He likes beating him, likes beating anyone, probably, maybe because he’s holding in the same bellyful of seesaw emotions as Ita. This way, when his knuckles crack on Ita’s cheekbones and his knees make Ita’s ribs pop, some of the feelings can get out and away, and leave space for him to breathe again.
That’s what Ita hears the loudest—the boy’s breathing, heavy in his ear. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hear the other boys unzip his backpack. He can hear them celebrating the spoils, tossing out the books as they find the food and clothes, the medicine. Ita can hear, just barely he can hear them tell the tall boy to stop, that it looks like he’s dead, stop, he isn’t moving, he’s—
The next thing Ita hears—it must be a dream. There is a new voice. It is a madman shouting. A madman shouting in a kid voice like a whistle.
“Get away from him!” the voice is screaming. “Get away or I kill you. I kill you all.”
Ita bargains with his eyelids. They weigh more than two rhinoceroses, but they must open. Open and I will let you close for good. Before I go, before I die, I want to see the madman.
Ita’s eyes open to glimpse a dreamy sliver of absurdity. The teens, they’re frozen, frozen in place by the owner of the whistling voice.
He’s the skinniest kid Ita’s ever seen. His hair looks like he cut it with a broken bottle. His eyes shine like he swallowed a flare. He’s standing atop an overturned jerrican, and he’s still barely taller than the shortest of Ita’s attackers.
Doesn’t look like he has got a lot going for him, Ita thinks.
But he does have a machete.
The attackers don’t seem to notice; they’ve begun to thaw. They giggle, Ita doesn’t see which one starts, but now they’re all hyenas, cackling in the dust. The tallest boy, he zips up Ita’s backpack and slings it over his shoulders. He laughs as he walks toward where Ita lies. Ita’s eyes are about to close, having upheld their end of the bargain.
But he fights himself to watch the tall boy come slip the shoes off his feet, and to see the incredible thing that happens next.
The miniature madman makes a sound. It cannot be called a scream—it hardly fits the description of any human sound Ita’s ever heard. He waves his machete in the air. When he brings it down, it whacks into his own forearm until blood squirts out in the shape of a rainbow, splattering Ita’s attackers. With the bubbling blood, the madman smears his cheeks, like war paint.
The last thing Ita sees is the blood-smeared kid spring from the jerrican and charge, roaring like a hound let loose from hell.
The last thing Ita hears is the backpack drop in the dirt beside his head. But then his senses are extinguished, replaced by the sound and color of nothingness.
* * *
When Ita comes to, it’s nighttime, the most dangerous time in Kibera. He struggles to cobble together his thoughts, rocks tumbling into a river.
“Good. You not dead.”
Ita looks, and the machete-wielding psychopath is sitting just beside him in the dark.
“Chege,” the psycho says.
It will hurt to speak, Ita imagines. “Ita.” He was right.
“Go back to sleep, Ita. See you tomorrow.”
* * *
In the morning, Ita wishes he was dead. Still might happen, he consoles himself. Everything hurts. Everything.
“Morning,” the psycho says brightly.
Ita wonders if maybe he is a spirit, a spirit guide into the other side. Should he talk to him? Can he ask questions? Like...where is my mother? Is she here? She’s dead, too. She just died two weeks ago—
“Hey, you okay? You eyes rolling back into your bones again. How much longer you expect me to sit here?”
Ita’s ears normalize for a moment. They’re near the tracks, he can hear the trains. So they’re in the landfill. Now Ita can smell it and his stomach turns.
“I’m just kidding. You can sleep. Just don’t die.”
* * *
Sun’s going down again when Ita next wakes up. His mind is clearer. He understands he can die now, if he wants to. Or not. Because he saw what the psycho named Chege was sitting on—the backpack.
“Inside.” Ita isn’t sure if the words came out or not. “Medicine.”
“I saw. Which one?”
“Pill. Orange.”
Ita’s mouth feels orange, stuffed with Kibera dust.
“Got it. Here. What’s it for?”
“Infection.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother. Sick. A long time. I learned—”
“You Kikuyu, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too.”
Ita doesn’t answer.
“It your mother’s fault, then, that Kikuyus not take you in. She go with men? Get money? She got that sickness—”
“Shut up.” Ita rolls up to his elbow, ignores the lightning strikes of pain, blood frothing in his mouth. “You shut up, you—”
“Shhh. Hey. I no judge. Your mother love you so much, she do it for you. That makes it okay.”
Ita sees his mother’s face, a skull painted brown, her trembling bone fingers giving him her necklace, the gold sparrow sparkling in the setting sunlight, her voice, scratched raw, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive me—
“No, it doesn’t,” Ita says and blacks out, back into the in-between.
* * *
Two more days, and Ita doesn’t take any more of the pills. Best to save them. When he finally sits up, Chege nods in approval, and they sit on the field of trash where no ground is visible.
“You live here?”
Chege hears the judgment. “Now you do, too.”
“Why?” Ita asks. He is genuinely curious—why choose to live in a trash heap?
“Because here you won’t run into those guys again. Because here you can sleep, even if you stink like a cockroach.”
The backpack is zipped, sitting between them. Ita opens it up. It’s all there. The books, even the food. He looks at Chege in surprise.
Chege twists away. When he swivels back, he holds out a crooked carrot and a mushy tomato. “Eat these.”
Ita knows he must have been saving them. “How’d you get them?”
Chege shrugs. “I stole them from an old woman.” He pats the machete resting across his knees.
Ita looks at the food in his hands. If he eats it, he will break the promise he made his mother, and himself. The promise that he would try to be good, die if he must, but not die shamed, like her.
“What did you do to the guys that attacked me?”
“They not coming back, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I want to know.”
Chege’s face is blank, placid, cracked dried blood still visible on its skin. “Just eat.”
Ita looks at the tomato. The pang in his stomach tells him he’s starving, his body desperate. He pops the tomato in his mouth. The skin splits and the mush bursts in his throat like rotten flesh. He almost chokes, but gulps it down.
“Why are you helping me?” he asks Chege, and chomps the carrot, so dry and old it’s furry on his tongue.
“I’m not!” Chege huffs. “I’m leaving. I just didn’t think you should die yet.”
Ita looks at Chege’s face, staring straight ahead.
“You smart,” Chege says quietly then. “You read books. There just some things you didn’t know yet.” He picks up a bottle cap and chucks it. “Now you know.”
But Chege doesn’t get up. He doesn’t leave. He sits, huddled over, feet dug in. Anchor to the ship thrashing in a storm.
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Ita
Ita wrings the rag out over the bowl of water and studies his face in the cloudy mirror.
He knew the terrible things Chege was capable of, but to betray him like he did tonight, to do that to Leda...
How could you, Chege?
Hatred pumps to the rhythm of Ita’s blood. His reflection, staring back—the monster in the mirror—a mis-sewn Frankenstein’s creature, everything about him grotesque and misshapen, distorted by the electrifying visions that won’t stop coming. He sees Chege on top of Leda. Sees her white legs in the red dirt, rows of scratches like lions tried to devour her. He sees the look in Chege’s eyes. Guilt. Pure and clear. Guilt and regret bubbling out as Ita lunged at him with his fists. Good. Ita remembers the blood spouting from Chege’s nose. If you don’t die from guilt as you should, I should kill you. You are poison. You take everything that is beautiful—
Now it’s a different memory vying for Ita’s mind. A memory more than a decade in the past, but somehow sharper with time. That look, sick and shamed, twisting across Chege’s face—Ita’s seen it before. That was Chege’s face the day he loomed above Ita as he wrapped his arms tight around a different, trembling, sobbing girl, the smell of fear mixed with the scent of her blood and sweat. I’m sorry, Ita whispered into her hair. I’m so sorry.
Ita covers his face with his hands, trying to blot out the images, but it makes them grow stronger and louder.
He opens his eyes, stares at the monster in the mirror. You see? You knew. You knew Chege would betray you again. What he did to Leda is your fault. You let him get close. Close enough to covet her, to hate her.
Ita remembers how Leda scrambled away in the dirt, her face stained in tears. He remembers her screams. She screamed while the men beat him. Screamed at the world, at fate, sobbing and screaming until she collapsed and pulled Ita’s head into her lap, rocking him until the police dragged her away.
Now she’s gone. And she’s never coming back.
Ita hears a noise outside. His engorged body turns to iron. The sound swells like the roar of a charging animal. It’s a pack of men—tearing through the alley. They stop at the house behind the orphanage. Without the thin metal wall, Ita could touch them. The men rip a door from its hinges. Women scream—
Ita grabs the rifle. He must get to the front door.
Then he hears a noise behind him. Inside. In the courtyard, at the door.
He grips the rifle with both hands and spins around.
As the shouting outside turns violent, fists thudding against skin and bone, the door to the hidden room scrapes open.
Ita aims the rifle, holds his finger on the trigger.
But what appears in the crack of moonlight is Ita’s nightmare memory come to life. Ita’s childhood self, misshapen, a child-sized Frankenstein’s creature come back to haunt him.
The little monster blinks, eyes wide and watery.
Ita lowers the rifle, gasping.
“Jomo.”
The boy’s face is swollen, bruised and taut, as if it will split open. Blood is crusted in his eyelashes, still wet under his nose.
“My God, Jomo, come here.”
Jomo looks like he will take a step, but the roar outside changes again. The women screech, outrage at its highest pitch, until a new sound follows the fists—the whack of machete on bone. The screams become the wail of hopelessness.
As Ita looks upon Jomo’s broken face, he hears the women’s tears rain down on crimes they will never forgive.
“I’m sorry,” Ita whispers.
They stand perfectly still, Ita and Jomo, facing each other, listening to the attackers running off, receding into the merciless night.
Chapter 6
December 11, 2007, Kibera—Leda
HER THIRD DAY in Kibera, Leda woke with a smile curved like a fortune cookie. The blanket Ita had given to her was clutched in her fingers; she wriggled her toes into it. She could already hear them, the children, outside in the orphanage clanking pots and chattering. On the other side of the wall of her little room, she could hear people shuffling past in the alley, a rise and fall of greetings and “good mornings” Leda was surprised to find comforting rather than scary in their proximity.
The buoyancy she felt in her heart didn’t hold for her body, however. Even with the foam beneath her, Leda’s body felt as rigid as her metal bed. For a moment, as she stretched her aching limbs, Leda imagined what she normally awoke to—gentle light through the curtains in Topanga, Amadeus licking her fingers, the first glimpse of her things lined up neatly, then the expanse of the scruffy mountains, the quiet ritual of her morning tea.
But not this morning. Leda opened her eyes. She surveyed the sheet-metal door, its dented ripples and patchwork surface of dirt and paint and rust. She flipped over and looked at the ceiling, which was much the same. A two-foot space surrounded the metal table, her bed, on all sides like a moat. The far wall was the one that connected with the outside world, an effect more like a folding screen than a real barrier. Nothing at all like her house in Topanga, blanketed by trees, or her childhood home facing the sea. She tried to think of the word that would best describe those houses. Not isolated as much as—
Insulated. That was the word.
That was her comfort zone—being alone. But now, as she pictured the Topanga house she loved, the house that had seemed wild and warm compared to mother’s ice-cold mansion, now it too seemed sterile.
Leda turned onto her side again, facing the interior of the orphanage. She replayed scenes from the day before. First, cringing at how she popped out in her blue pajamas when everyone was ready for the day. Then her abashed realization that they probably didn’t own pajamas. Did she look ridiculous or pretentious? Ita had laughed, though not meanly. His eyes never looked meanly at anyone. Stern, maybe, with the children, and with that nasty gangbanger Chege. But even with him, Ita showed a generosity of spirit that surprised her. After growing up with Estella, who emanated distaste, an annoyance, at her presence, Leda found Ita’s kindness unsettling. But warming.
When they’d ventured out into Kibera together, she’d studied him from behind, marveling at how he moved with ease, with purpose, winding through the slum. He was a better guide than Samuel, telling her little flecks of gossip about the neighbors, connecting different locations to stories about the boys. Ntimi wanted to get his haircut here. I had to explain it was only for women. He still wanted to go. Ntimi likes to be around ladies.
She was saddened by Michael’s story, of how the orphanage came to be. All the boys have stories like that, she reminded herself.
Ita’s eyes as he told the story—they filled with a love so pure and rich, Leda had almost felt jealous.
Then she remembered the dark alley. The part of the day she’d been thinking about ever since. Leda closed her eyes to picture it better—how she squeezed past the old man into the darkness, how she lost her footing, bumping into Ita, and them squeezing up against the wall together.
How his eyes filled with desire, with wonder, with appreciation. Leda couldn’t believe how he left his emotions free to jump off his face like that, but she loved it. She’d heard his breath quicken, felt his body stiffen, sensed that he was breathing her in like a sudden perfume, memorizing her for later. And then they’d said it, at the same time, in harmony like an impromptu song...
You never know.
They’d come so close to kissing, Leda could still taste it. She’d felt the hotness of his breath, his hands rising to her sides, seen the tuck of his chin, the flutter of his eyelids.
She got up off the table. No pajamas today. She put on the brown pants from the day before—she’d noticed everyone repeated clothing—but dug a bit for the teal blouse with the ruffled collar, the one that brought out her eyes.
After she swiped her face clean and brushed her hair into a ponytail, Leda went back into the bag for some lip gloss and perfume. Just a light spritz, she thought. Not too much.
With a smile and a near twirl, she stepped from her slippers into sandals. It wasn’t until she put her hand out to the door latch, catching a glimpse of herself in the small mirror, that she remembered something else. Something that Chege said. American rich lady, out to have a little fun.
Leda’s hand recoiled. And hadn’t he looked at Ita when he said it, like it had been Ita who had advertised her that way?
Leda wiped the gloss off her lips.
I’m here for the children, she thought as she swapped the sandals for sneakers. She debated the blouse, hovering over the suitcase, until she caught herself with a this is ridiculous, and stepped outside.
And there they were, waiting.
“Good morning, Leda,” Ita said with a gentlemanly nod of his head.
She started forward, drawn to him, already feeling more relaxed.
“Sleepyhead!” Ntimi shouted with his Cheshire cat grin, his big square teeth ready to chomp on life. He pointed at his head and giggled, thinking the wordplay hilarious.
Leda faltered in her path, self-conscious. Lazy rich lady sleeps through breakfast.
But Ita chuckled and swatted Ntimi on the head, and his laugh was kind. It rolled across the distance to Leda and snagged when he caught her eye.
Ntimi waved Leda closer, impatiently. He had little Walter in his lap, pinning him down—the toddler with the potbelly and enchanting giggle.
Michael’s smile had already faded, the gentle stare resumed. The other two, Thomas and Peter, started in on the bread and Michael, catching it in his peripheral vision, smacked their hands.
Leda smiled. She snuggled in next to Ntimi and rinsed her hands in the bowl of water.
“Where’s Jomo?” she asked, but nobody answered.
Leda ran her eyes over the perimeter of the orphanage. The wood for the bunk beds was there, waiting. The cans of paint were stacked along the walls, too. Leda smiled, remembering how excited the boys were to hear of the plans.
There. Leda spotted Jomo—well, his feet, anyway—peeking out under the sheet in the same little spot he’d hid in before. As if he could feel her watching, the sheet moved aside a tiny crack, and the sunlight found a crescent of Jomo’s face. Leda smiled. Jomo’s glance dove straight down. But Leda kept her eyes on him, let him feel the smile linger. Sure enough, he looked back up and saw her still looking. He tried hard as he could to stop it, but the corners of his lips curled ever so slightly. Then the sheet swung closed.
Like a ghost, Leda thought, his presence wispy and fleeting. A ghost of what? Of the child he could have been?
She chewed on her bread and tried to follow the chatter of the boys. She didn’t get a chance to slurp down much of her tea before the boys were up and scurrying off, Ita on their heels, doling out hurry-ups.
Leda scolded herself for sleeping in. She’d have to get up earlier to maximize her time with them before school.
Mary came out to round up the dishes. “Good morning,” she said quietly. Mary didn’t speak English, so her efforts were all the more touching.
“Good morning, Mary. Thank you for breakfast.”
“So,” Ita said, returning, and Leda’s stomach fluttered. “Today I thought Mary could show you the housework.”
Leda’s stomach sank. But she scolded herself again. About time she made herself useful. Ita probably thought she didn’t know how to clean.
“Of course—” she said, but Ita interrupted with a smile.
“So I can finish the paperwork piling up, and later I can take you to the clinic. Would you like to go with me?”
“Can’t wait,” Leda said. Was it her imagination or did Mary chuckle?
Ita shut himself in his office and left Leda to star with Mary in a comedy skit. The older woman rambled off explanations to which Leda smiled and nodded and said, “I’m sorry I don’t understand a word,” to which Mary smiled and nodded and in Swahili said, Leda imagined, “I’m sorry I don’t understand a word.” Mainly Mary pointed at pots and rags and Leda had no idea if she wanted them cleaned, carried or filled with something.
But by the end of three hours, Leda knew many things. For one, she knew the cooking never stopped. Ever. The breakfast pot got washed and put back on the stove to boil water for washing, then for the lunch stew. After that would come dinner, plus more boiled water for tea. Leda wondered where the water came from. It would be an awful lot of water to carry.
Now, Leda knew that the house had four very important jugs that must always have water in them. Two waist-high jugs in the bathroom area contained water for bucket baths and flushing. In the kitchen, the one on the left was for general cooking and washing. The one on the right was smaller, and Mary made a big fuss over this one. “You, you, you,” she kept saying and pointing at Leda. After a rousing game of charades and bubbling noises, Leda figured out that one was boiled water for the tourist. One peek inside at the swirling sediment and Leda made a mental note to buy more bottled water when she went out with Ita.
Pantomime can’t help but make for laughter, and it wasn’t long before Leda and Mary were fast friends. Mary got into it and it became a game. Leda even mimed her life back in America, drawing air pictures of the mountains and the ocean and the way Amadeus greeted her at the door. Mary watched Leda with amusement and Leda loved to watch her, too, so strong and capable, so sure. This was Leda’s favorite trait to discover in people, ease and calm, and was delighted to study it up close in Mary. Estella was a bundle of nervous tension, anxiety and impatience. Being around her mother was like tiptoeing through a cactus field.
Mary’s fingers wrapped around ladles or cups or piled up the logs for the fire with force and grace. If Leda’s fingers were too slow or the logs were crossed wrong, Mary rearranged them with a “tsk” and preciseness that Leda adored. This is how we wash the boys’ clothes, make them look smart and clean, her strong hands said. This is how we keep the men fed and happy, her smile said. “Ita,” Mary said, and she straightened up her back, pretended to sit up straight in a chair. She spread out imaginary items—a cup of tea to the right, four stacks of paper lined up, just so. She jabbed at an imaginary calculator with a serious look carved into her face. She tapped a pretend pencil against her forehead.
Their combined laughter continued until Ita stuck his head out the door and called, “What’s so funny?” making them laugh all the harder.
A moment later, Ita stepped out of the office entirely. He looked at the two of them with a fresh smile and a warmth Leda was starting to crave like kids crave summer. “Ready?”
The slum outside burst at Leda with clashing colors and sounds and smells. Ita took off at a brisk pace, and Leda scurried to keep up. The paths between houses were so narrow they barely fit two people, especially being divided down the middle by a ditch of wastewater. At times, Leda could stretch out her arms and touch both sides. In other spots, the path was soaked in slime and turned to slippery, splattering mud.
Everywhere, beneath the houses and the stalls and the latrines, was the same red dirt mixed and packed together with every kind of trash: broken glass, plastic bags, rags of clothing, empty lighters, soiled cardboard, food wrappers and bits of wood and metal.
Leda discreetly peeked into some of the homes that were open. Most of them looked to be one room, no more than eight feet by eight feet, filled to the brim with teakettles and buckets and clothes, plus people who jumped when they caught Leda looking. A dozen people slept in one house, it appeared.
Intermittently, the narrow pathways opened up and a tiny store—a duka, Leda reminded herself—would appear. Soft drinks, candy, cigarettes, cooking oil—all were displayed on a stand like a desk.
When they made it out onto a main road, wooden vendor booths lined the street as far as Leda could see, often two deep. Before them, on the ground, other vendors laid out their wares. Vegetables, clothing, electronics, phone cards, hair products, lotion, fried sweets—the assortment was mind-boggling. After a bit, the booths gave way to giant garbage piles that industrious children, goats and chickens hunted through.
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Deborah Cloyed
Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys' orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within
Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart
The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys’orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.
Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.
In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within.
What Tears us Apart
Deborah Cloyed
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To debianca, and redbird.
Contents
Newswire (#u5247e091-367e-5830-98a1-c2e8e48c91c6)
Prologue (#u39627649-affc-5267-8931-0c7d637151ce)
Chapter 1 (#ua5fb53d2-acad-54a2-bf8d-21916aa35f24)
Chapter 2 (#u9b919efa-15f2-5cca-bd48-8992d81bd616)
Chapter 3 (#u2fa35e8f-665b-5eb0-8a4c-0662bac099a1)
Chapter 4 (#uc92ecd3c-bd90-5014-8041-3942595dcd9c)
Chapter 5 (#u0b1c82e0-2fab-50b5-974f-e68052220d50)
Chapter 6 (#ua217717d-2d83-519a-a886-cd5f22256db4)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Teaser (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Deborah Cloyed (#litres_trial_promo)
Newswire America: December 31, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya — Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was hastily sworn in yesterday, beating out Raila Odinga in Kenya’s heated election. Allegations of fraud sparked violence countrywide.
In Kibera, one of the world’s largest slums and Raila Odinga’s stronghold, thousands flooded the streets, bearing rocks and machetes, chanting, “No Raila, no peace!”
Members of Raila’s Luo tribe lashed out at their Kikuyu neighbors—the tribe associated with Kibaki—setting shops and homes aflame. The Mungiki, Kenya’s notorious Kikuyu mafia, retaliated, riots escalating into a rape and murder spree. By midnight, smoke blanketed Kibera, flames licked the sky, and mutilated bodies littered the roads as screams rang out from every corner of the slum....
Prologue
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Leda
NO. PLEASE. PLEASE, world, God, fate, don’t let this happen.
Each man’s hands on Leda’s skin are like desert sand. Hot. Gritty. Rough as splinters of glass.
She ricochets around their circle, a lotto ball in the air mix machine, fate holding its breath. Behind the lunging silhouettes of the men, the slum explodes—fire licking and climbing, spitting at the world. There’s another sound, too, mixed with the whooshing sound of the inferno. Wood, metal, bodies—all crumbling, cracking, hissing and screaming in the flames. It is a symphony of loss.
The men, who are boys really, they yell incomprehensibly, but Leda knows their intentions.
They rip the buttons on her shirt.
They yank the hem of her skirt.
A cloud of reddish dust rises from their feet, as though trying to hide her. But the dust dashes away when Leda is flung to the ground.
For a moment nothing happens.
Then it’s like vampires at the sight of a wound. The men converge—kicking, poking, laughing. They tug at all her protruding parts. Leda’s a centipede in the dust, trying to fold in one hundred legs. Trying to protect the things that matter, things that cannot be undone.
Maybe they will just beat me and go away. This is not my fight. I came to help. Leda wants to shout in their faces. I came to help.
But then she hears it, jumbled with the clatter of their words. Ita. Another one says it. Ita.
So they know who she is.
She is a fish flopping, a tree fallen. A spider in the wind.
She is Ita’s love.
For an instant, Leda thinks it will save her. But as their voices rise, she knows it has doomed her instead.
When the boy drops down on top of her, the force of it is like a metal roof pinning her in a hurricane.
Instantly, all Leda smells is him—sweat and dirt, but rancid, like musk and cheese rusted over with blood. He uses his trunk to flatten her into the ground, his rib bones stabbing into her sternum, her bare skin grinding into the rocks and trash. His legs and hands scramble for Leda’s flailing limbs. The man-boys above laugh and holler.
All she can do is flail and scream.
Leda calls out for the man she loves, the only person who’s ever really loved her.
But it’s the devil who arrives instead.
Ita’s beloved monster, Chege.
Chege’s voice arrives first—a low growl, a familiar snarl. It is the battle cry of an unchained wolf, at home in the darkest of times.
Chege is above her. His dreads close over Leda and her attacker, a curtain of night.
“Help me,” Leda says. Did Ita send him?
As Leda tries to decipher Chege’s spitting words, he yanks the man off and her body takes a breath. The rancid smell, his clawing zipper, the pain in her lungs—it all disappears into the racket above and for one second Leda feels light as a sparrow in the sky. She allows herself to breathe. There is mercy in Chege’s heart after all. He will save her. At least for Ita’s sake.
But then Chege’s eyes flicker, a flap of emotion like blinds shuttering daylight. His hand shoots down and wraps around her throat, a coiling python, and Leda’s breath is lost. His other hand snaps the necklace from her neck. The gold necklace Ita gave her, the sacred chain that is everything to him.
This, Chege knows better than anyone.
He stares at the necklace in his fingers, his eyes bulging, and Leda knows the truth. Chege’s heart isn’t merciful, it’s a furnace of coal that burns only with rage. When both his hands pull Leda up by the throat, the glint of the gold chain taunts her, the shiny sparrow charm a spark in her peripheral vision as the necklace drops to the dirt.
Up, up through the dust, Chege brandishes her like a chunk of meat.
He’s claimed her. Head wolf gets the kill.
His eyes dart about. Leda sees it when he does—a door ajar. He smiles, baring his brown teeth.
Faster than she can scream, Chege kicks her feet to knock her off balance, then drags her across the alley, to the open door. The boys lap at their heels, eyes ravenous. Behind them, the fire rolls atop the mud shacks like a river of exploding stars.
Maybe they will burn for this. Maybe we all will.
Chege yanks her into the dark room, kicks the door shut, and all light goes out in the world.
Chapter 1
November 14, 2007, Topanga, CA—Leda
LEDA SAT IN the sun, feeling judged by the mountains.
Nearby trees wriggled their pom-poms of leaves, but Leda stared far off in the distance, where the scrubby canyon peaks took their turns in the sun and the rain, under the stars and the moon.
Everything in its place.
Except me.
A multicolored mutt entered the patio through a doggie door and hopped onto Leda’s lap. He curled into a furry ball to be petted.
“I quit, Amadeus,” Leda whispered.
The little dog looked up and sniffed.
“I know. Again.” Leda nuzzled the dog’s Mohawk. “Sorry, buddy, no more leftover filet mignon. I told François Vasseur to shove it.”
Amadeus whined.
“Oh please, you won’t starve.” They wouldn’t lose their cozy home in the canyon, either. Leda didn’t have to be a chef, she didn’t have to be anything. Not for money, anyway. But she’d really thought she’d finally found her calling.
Maybe I just don’t have one. A calling. A purpose.
Leda sighed. On a table to her left sat her laptop, waiting smugly for her to start the process again, an all-too-familiar sequence of searching.
Maybe some more iced tea first. Leda went inside, past her bookshelf of cookbooks (culinary school), past the corner display case of cameras (photography school). She bumped the stack of Discover magazines atop the stack of the New Yorkers (double undergraduate majors in science and literature).
When Leda returned with tea, she battled the urge to procrastinate further and pulled the computer into her lap. Mentally, she ran through the various paths she’d tried, weighing them. The thought of starting school again was both exciting and exhausting, but if necessary, so be it. She didn’t want a job, she wanted a career, something she cared about deeply. Something she could throw herself into.
Her fingers hovered, ready to fill the Google search box. She typed in career. Then she added meaningful.
When the search results loaded, she clicked on one after another. Social worker. Counselor. Teacher. An article about a nun in Canada.
The next one was a website listing volunteer opportunities.
Leda inhaled. Why not? She didn’t need the salary, but she felt awful when she wasn’t working. She should leave the paid positions open for people who needed them and help people for free.
Leda sat up straighter in her chair. She scrolled down the listings, each one a short link next to a picture. Teach English as a second language. Tutor troubled teens. Read to senior citizens...
On the third page, Leda saw a link titled Triumph Orphanage, with the tagline We Need Your Help. Next to it was a photograph of a man with a wide, strong, clear face, rich brown skin, and a smile written across like a welcome banner in a crowded airport. Leda leaned forward to stare into the picture. She clicked on the link and it opened a new page, with the picture enlarged within. The man’s smile held no trace of mental chatter or self-consciousness behind it. It was free and complete, open. Leda felt a surging desire to touch it, the smile, an entirely unfamiliar urge.
Below the handsome man’s picture was a snapshot of seven schoolchildren in an orphanage, smiling ear to ear. Leda looked closer at the photo, at the background. She scrolled down to the text. The man who ran the orphanage funded it by guiding safari tours—
Whoa. The orphanage was in Africa. In Kenya. In a slum called Kibera, outside Nairobi.
Leda exhaled and clicked the back button. No way. Let’s not get crazy, thought the woman who got anxiety in crowded grocery stores. Leda looked down at Amadeus, then inside to her cozy little house, each piece of furniture and decoration meticulously chosen and arranged.
No way could she do something like that.
Automatically, she fingered her burn scar, the patch of skin near her jaw, so smooth and soft, it was like a stone in the ocean’s break. She shut her eyes, felt her heart begin to race, heard the song humming the start of an awful memory.
When the phone rang, Leda nearly fell off her chair from startling.
She grabbed her phone from the table. Estella.
She hadn’t spoken to her mother in months.
“Leda?” came the raspy voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Mother. Something wrong?”
There was a pause. Leda sank into her chair.
“You’re the one who sounds like something’s wrong.” She sighed. “What is it?”
Leda frowned. Estella would get it out of her eventually. “I quit my job.”
“Surprise, surprise. What was wrong with this one?”
Leda’s teeth gritted together. Invisible armor clinked into place. “It was a sweatshop. My boss was abusive. But mainly it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.” Leda looked up. The mountain was still staring at her. She averted her eyes. “I wanted to find something meaningful to do with my life.”
As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Naked emotion was nothing but ammunition for Estella.
Sure enough, Estella “hmphed” loudly. “Not sure you’re the charitable type, dear.”
Leda thought of the photo of the man with the smile. “Actually, I was just looking at a posting to volunteer in Kenya.”
Estella’s cackling laugh poured into Leda’s ear like a bucket of wriggling maggots. “Leda, you are, what, thirty-two? Isn’t that a little old to play the college kid off to save Africa?”
Choice words died on Leda’s tongue. “Was there something else you called about, Mother?”
Estella’s cackle snuffed short. A pause. “No. I think that’s enough for today.”
Leda listened to the call disconnect, her eyebrows knitted together. When she set the phone back on the table, she saw that her hands were shaking.
The laptop’s face was in sleep mode. Leda swiped her finger across the mouse pad and the screen jumped back into view.
The picture was waiting.
She read the caption beneath the smile. His name was Ita, the man who ran the orphanage.
Ita, with a gaze fair and bright, surrounded by smiling children.
College kid, indeed.
Leda opened a new tab. Travelocity.
Chapter 2
December 9, 2007, Kibera—Leda
WHEN LEDA LOOKED out over Kibera for the first time, she thought of the sea behind her mother’s house, how it unfolded into infinity, unfathomable and chilling even on a sunny day. Leda stumbled at the top of the embankment, grabbed for the handle of her suitcase and stood tight until the rushing realization of smallness receded from her knees.
One million people, her guidebook claimed, crammed into a labyrinth of mud and metal shacks. It was a maze to make Daedalus proud. No Minotaur could escape from here. The slum was the Minotaur, gorging itself on fleeting youth and broken dreams.
Leda felt the dampness of her washed hair morph into sweat. She’d arrived the night before, had been ushered quickly into a cab and sped to her shiny white room at the Intercontinental in Nairobi. But now she stood on the edge of Nairobi’s secret, two terse sentences in the hotel’s welcome binder—the Kibera slum. Bounded by a golf course, towering suburban gates, a river, a railroad and a dam. Cordoned off. Now Leda saw what that meant—a place with no running water, no electricity, no sanitation system—the blank spot on the map of the city, officially unrecognized. A space smaller than her Topanga Canyon neighborhood, but thirty times the population density of New York City.
From where Leda stood, Kibera below was an undulating sea of rusted rooftops, ending at the horizon and the glaring morning sun.
Samuel, the guide Leda had hired to take her on a tour of Kibera and to the orphanage, stood likewise frozen, but unalarmed. More than likely he was used to the tourist gasp, had it penciled into his schedule.
Leda looked at him sideways, her eyes grabbing on to him like a buoy at high sea. Samuel was younger than her for sure, no more than twenty-five, but taller by a foot. His face was smooth, shiny in the heat. How did he feel? Awkward, as she did, embarrassed? Was he secretly seething?
Normally, Leda was good at discerning people’s thoughts and moods, a skill learned early in her mother’s house. It wasn’t a talent that brought her any closer to people, however.
She closed her eyes to the miles of dirt and metal, shut her ears to the clanging roar before them and the gridlocked traffic behind them, and tried to sense any irritation or ill will coming from Samuel. But his stretched posture and his even stare gave nothing away. If nothing else, he seemed dutiful. This was another Sunday, another customer.
Samuel sensed Leda’s searching, as people always did, and he turned. “Do you want to take a picture?”
Leda’s hand went into her pocket, wrapped around her camera. Right. A photographer should want to take a picture. But when she saw the men down the embankment staring, her hand let go of the camera. These were the kinds of moments that confirmed for Leda she wasn’t cut out to be a photojournalist.
“It’s okay. Let’s just go,” she said.
Samuel nodded and stepped behind Leda to pick up her sixty-pound suitcase. He hoisted it onto his back heavily, as though it was a piano, and started down the dirt hill.
The sight gave Leda a queasy jolt. “Wait. There’s no road?”
She’d looked at the pictures online, she’d seen the narrow alleys. But she’d also assumed there would be a way in, a way out. A road.
Samuel turned. He smiled.
Leda felt the sneer behind his smile. She looked down, her cheeks burning. She studied the orange dust under her boots. The color was due to the dearth of vegetation, she’d read. The iron turned the clay minerals orange.
Samuel was off and walking. Leda scrambled after him down the hill, feeling like a clown fish in a pond. She watched him start across a rickety footbridge arched over a brown swamp of trash, with sugarcane growing in thick clumps through the waste. Children waded in near the cane.
Leda followed, studying her shoes to avoid all the eyes on her.
The other side of the bridge landed Leda in a landscape that was more landfill than ground, and she nearly went down on the twisted path of plastic bags. She was grateful for her tennis shoes, but still furious at herself for the suitcase. Imagine if she’d brought her second one, instead of leaving it with the hotel. Underneath the ridiculous load, all she could see were Samuel’s sandals traversing the winding path over rock and drainage creeks. And all she could do was follow along, like a princess after a porter, trying not to trip. Her mother’s words blared in her head. Off to save Africa?
As doubt clogged her throat, Leda felt sure she would drown in the smell. Moldy cabbage, rotten fish, cooking smoke, but mostly it was the steaming scent of human waste that poured into Leda’s nose and mouth, saturating her as if she could never be free of that smell again. She opened her mouth to breathe, and gagged on the sweat that dribbled in.
Now the view of the slum had disappeared and they were inside it, weaving through narrow spaces and crisscrossed paths like an ant farm in hyperdrive.
Men with hollowed cheeks and yellowed eyes stared at Leda. Women—in the midst of tending children and selling and trading and gossiping and cooking and cleaning—their eyes flickered warily as she passed.
The children, however, were a different story. Schoolkids flew up around Leda like clouds of sparrows, waving their arms and chirping Howareyou? Howareyou?
Leda was grateful to them for their acceptance and she answered with the Swahili words she’d only ever spoken to her iPod. “Jambo,” she said, and they giggled.
“Present,” one boy shouted amiably.
Samuel stopped suddenly, and motioned for Leda to stand beside him. He shooed away the children, not meanly but firmly, and set down the suitcase, ready, Leda supposed, to continue with the tour he’d begun when they met that morning in the café in Nairobi.
“So, you are here to volunteer. What is it you do in America? Are you a teacher?”
Avoiding his question, Leda looked away. “Yes, I’m a volunteer. Here to help.”
Samuel nodded. “Do not give the children money. They do not understand it. In your country maybe you are a poor teacher, but here your money is a lot. This puts ideas in the children’s heads.”
Leda looked into Samuel’s face, at the sheets of sweat soaking his T-shirt. She moved closer and released the handle on the suitcase, demonstrating that she would pull it.
Samuel smiled again, the smile Leda hated and that she felt hated her. She nodded toward the children playing nearby. “What ideas?”
“The idea that begging is a job. Or that robbing you would not be so bad since you give it so easily.”
Samuel took a breath and walked a few steps. Now he resumed his script as he pointed here and there. “When the British left, they gave this land to the Nubians—Muslim Sudanese soldiers. But with no deeds. The Nubians became illegal landlords and the seeds of war were planted in this dirt. Muslim against Christian. Kikuyu against Luo. There have been many problems.”
“But then, technically, the government owns the land? They could help.”
They passed a beauty salon of women who stared at Leda struggling to wheel her suitcase through the trash. Samuel waited. Silently, he watched the trash pool around the suitcase wheels until Leda found herself dragging, not wheeling, the suitcase. His look more or less said I told you so.
“Yes, they could help,” Samuel said. “But it is more convenient for them to do nothing. As long as the slum is illegal, they do not have to provide what the city people have rights to.”
A man tripped over Leda then, for cosmic emphasis, sloshing water from a yellow jug. The dirt beneath her shoes turned to mud and the man looked at it and frowned. Leda’s skin burned under the man’s indignation. He huffed and walked on. How far had the man walked for that water? “Then how do they get the necessities?”
“Everything is for sale in Kibera. Water. Use of the latrine. A shower. People pay the person who steals electricity for them. They pay the watchmen, really paying them not to rob them. They pay thieves to steal back what other thieves stole in the night. Women who sell changaa, they pay the police a bribe. Women who sell themselves, they pay the bribes with their bodies. But still one must pay for charcoal and food and school. The hardest thing to justify is school.”
“How do people pay for everything?”
“They don’t.” Samuel pointed at the ground.
Leda lifted her right foot and a sticky plastic bag dangled from it in the dusty air. She considered anew the blanket of trash bags.
“When you can’t pay or it’s unsafe to go, then you do your business in a bag and—” Samuel’s hand carved an arc through the air that ended at her shoe. “Flying toilets.” He took the suitcase, now soiled from her dragging it through the refuse.
“We’re almost there.” He pointed ahead.
Leda was in shock. But before they moved on, she had to ask a question she thought she knew the answer to. “Do you live in Kibera, Samuel?”
It was the first time emotion crossed his face unfettered. “Yes,” he said, and heaved the suitcase onto his back as he turned away, a turtle putting his shell back on.
Leda followed him deeper into the slum, supplementing his practiced explanations about Kibera with the rushing things her eyes and ears told her. Kibera was an assault of objects, colors, smells and sounds, all suddenly appearing out of the dust inches from her face. As they ducked between mud/stick structures, colored laundry fluttered and dripped overhead. A volley of muffled chatter and music echoed from all directions.
Leda wondered what privacy meant in Kibera, if anything. How would any one of these people feel if they found themselves alone in a quiet house like the one she shared with Amadeus? Or in a mansion of marble, glass and sky, like her mother’s? So much space all to themselves.
People passed each other the way cats do, touching, brushing skin, sliding off one another in the sweaty heat. Personal space was an oxymoron and as soon as Leda put words to the thought it made her recoil, dodging this way and that to avoid contact in the swarming crowds. She saw she would have to form new habits in Kibera, new ways of moving through space.
Women streamed by in bright dresses, in business attire, in jeans and flip-flops. Men streamed past in athletic jerseys and ragged South Park T-shirts and button-downs. All on a mission, edging doggedly in one direction or the other.
Chickens and stray dogs darted through the two-way parade with a bravado Leda wanted to admire. But the smoke searing her eyes and the jagged rays of sunlight darting through the metal turned the path ahead, behind the bobbing suitcase, into an obstacle course of certain peril.
Eventually, the suitcase stopped.
It dropped to the ground and revealed Samuel heaving to catch his breath so he could announce the obvious.
“We’re here,” he said, and pointed at a small, hand-painted sign tacked to a towering wall of corrugated metal. Triumph Orphanage.
Most of the maze of houses and shops were single-roomed, and could be seen right into if the bedsheet doors weren’t drawn. But they’d passed several tall metal partitions, walled-off spaces, which the orphanage seemed to have, as well. Leda tried to get a sense of how big the structure was and poked her head around the corner.
The metal wall spoke to her. Rather, it laughed.
The hair on Leda’s arms stood up. The laugh was a sound like midnight thunder rolling across the sea. Leda shut her eyes. From the moment she’d entered Kibera with Samuel, winding through the dust, through the throngs of smiling children and scowling mothers, through the smells and jolting clamor, whenever it seemed too much to bear, Leda had blinked her eyes long enough to see the smile from the website. A smile full of calm and certainty.
Leda would bet her soul that the laugh on the other side of that wall and the smile were one and the same.
When Samuel banged on the door with his fist, the laugh snuffed out. Leda’s eyes shot open.
A section of the metal wall slid open.
And there it was—the smile that belonged to the laugh.
“Leda,” the smile said, wide and shining.
“Ita,” she said, feeling the grin tug at her lips, a sensation as rare as it was delicious. For once, she wasn’t politely mimicking—the smile sprang from inside, as though freed from a cage.
Samuel looked back and forth with a curious expression. “Have you met before?”
Ita smiled wider, shaking his head. “We have now.”
Leda laughed, enchanted by the simple confidence he radiated like a lightbulb. Feeling breathless, she looked down at her dusty feet and had another vision of standing by the sea—watching in wonder as the sand, the shells, her whole body was drawn in by the tide, magically pulled by the moon. Leda looked up and took another gulp of seeing Ita’s lit-up face. Then she turned to Samuel and held out her hand. “Thank you, Samuel. I wish you well.”
Samuel snapped free of the moment and nodded. “Good luck, Leda. Good luck in Kibera.”
Ita held out his hand, too. “Samuel. Asante sana.”
Samuel shook Ita’s hand, craning to peek inside the orphanage with the same urgent curiosity Leda felt. Ita stood firm with his smile, blocking the view. Samuel nodded once more. “Karibu. Kwaheri.”
Leda watched her guide disappear around a corner and then turned back, which left her and Ita alone across the divide of the entrance. She found herself close enough to be struck by the smoothness of his skin. It was flawless, reminding Leda of a hand-dipped cone. Imagining that it would feel like velvet to the touch, Leda lurched forward for her suitcase handle, letting her hair swish over her face.
“Please, let me help you,” Ita said. He took the suitcase from her and swung it through the doorway in one fell swoop, opening a new world to Leda. The orphanage.
Leda got a two-second glimpse at a horseshoe of shadowy rooms around a dirt courtyard, before the view filled with children, bumping like bees as they swarmed past Ita to greet her. Six boys, Leda counted—toddler to preteen—as they tugged her inside, chattering competitively in Swahili. One boy, the oldest, watched her intently, walking backward like a guard dog. Leda tried to smile at him.
Inside, she stepped into a battle of smells. To the left, cardamom and clove fought pepper and cumin for control of a stew. Leda sniffed the spicy smoke the same way she inhaled Amadeus’s fur after a grooming, but stopped short when she was bitten by Kibera’s sharp endnote of sewage.
The boys patted her clothes and skin as they tugged her toward a woven mat in the courtyard. Leda focused on not tripping over them. She felt woozy after her voyage through Kibera, as if she’d stepped off a merry-go-round. But now, inside the orphanage, if such a thing was possible, it was actually louder, more closed-in, more overwhelming. The kids swirled around her legs like water in a tide pool and Ita followed, the herder.
“We’ve been waiting for you!” he shouted over the tops of their heads. “They are very excited. We have prepared many things for your arrival.”
Leda swam in the most human contact she’d had in years. Maybe ever. Estella had renounced her past and whatever family it may have contained, so Leda hadn’t grown up in proximity to anybody other than her mother. She’d sat alone in school, then spent evenings watching children on television, trying to comprehend them in their freeness. Leda always felt as though she’d been born eighty years old.
Now here she was being mobbed by children, her breathing shallowing. Estella’s judgments rang in her mind—she was not made for this. Was she crazy to have come here?
And then, just as Leda nearly went down in the mosh pit, Ita saved her. His eyes met hers, a knowing look in them that made Leda feel as if she’d found a wall to lean against. His eyes, dark brown with golden supernovas, stayed locked on Leda as he called out in Swahili to the children. A series of commands, sold with a smile but sure as a sunrise. The children reacted like little soldiers. They took their places on the mat, sitting cross-legged with their hands in their laps.
Leda exhaled and Ita laughed.
“We’re happy today. To meet you, Leda.”
“Oh, me, too,” she rushed out, hoping she hadn’t just come across as rude. “Just tired, I think, from—”
“A tsunami of children? Yes. Cannot hear yourself think, is that it?”
Leda nodded, amazed. Yes, that was exactly it. Ita stepped closer. “Lunch is almost ready. Should I show you your new home?”
She looked around the orphanage, at the concrete walls crumbling to the dirt floors, at the open doorways and one wooden door. Shyly, she followed him as he walked briskly to the left of the courtyard. First, he pointed at a closed door, crooked on its hinges. “My office,” he said, and walked on. Then he turned, with a wink Leda might have imagined, and said, “And my bedroom.” The next room was open and Ita stepped inside, waving her after.
Leda didn’t understand what she was seeing. A closet? Shoes lined the edges of the room, in a square around another huge woven mat. She lifted her foot to step forward, but Ita put his hand on her arm. It was warm and soft.
“This is where the children sleep. You may sleep here or—” Ita stepped out of the room “—with Mary.”
Mary had been the other name on the website, but hadn’t been linked to a picture. Leda’s stomach burned with curiosity. “Is Mary here now?”
“Who did you think was creating that delicious smell?” Ita ducked his head under a wooden beam and Leda followed him into the kitchen. A wood fireplace formed the rear of the room, and the rest of it, apart from smoke, was filled with pots and pans and plastic bowls towering off the ground.
Bent over a cauldron that hung above a fire was a sizable woman’s backside, wrapped taut in a patterned sarong, brighter than a bouquet of flowers. At Ita’s voice, the woman straightened and Leda saw she was old, though to guess her actual age would be tricky.
Leda felt relief gush through her, and she laughed at herself when she realized why. When she’d read the listing online, she had thought perhaps the man and woman mentioned were married or a couple. Now, she knew she’d been hoping that wasn’t the case.
Did women shake hands? Leda wasn’t sure, so she said, “Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” the words piling up in her mouth like cotton balls.
Mary smiled kindly, her face wrinkling like a cozy bathrobe. “Karibu,” she said.
Welcome. Leda did feel welcome. She’d never had anyone make such a fuss over her presence, or anything she did, really. Except maybe Amadeus.
Next, Ita showed her where the toilet was—toilet being a very loose term. There were two stalls with two hanging sheets. When Ita pulled back the first sheet, Leda’s eyes traveled down to the square of concrete. In the middle was a piece of wood with a handle on it, and Leda could only guess that underneath was a hole. The second stall was exactly the same.
“Shower,” Ita said of the second stall.
When Leda remembered to breathe again, she met Ita’s eyes and saw that they gleamed with pride.
So Leda looked again and tried to see it through different eyes. She remembered how Samuel had said everyone paid to use a latrine and to bathe. This was a luxury. An achievement. He should be proud.
“Awesome!” Leda said, and knew immediately she’d overdone it.
But Ita laughed at her effort, not wounded in the least, and led her by the elbow to the other side of the orphanage.
The ease with which Ita touched her—it was unnerving. Even more distracting was how her skin felt under his fingers—tingly, pliant. Usually, she grew stiff under a stranger’s touch. In her fairly limited sexual experience, Leda had always felt clumsy at best, but more often raw and exposed. But as she walked with Ita, she had a lightning-flash vision of Ita’s warm hands on her skin. She bet it would be different with him—gentler, yet sexier, urgent.
Leda’s head shot up, her eyes darting to Ita as if he’d heard her thoughts. She felt the blood stampede her cheeks. She coughed to try and combat a full-on blush.
Ita paused before the back wall of the orphanage. He looked at her strangely, and she wondered if she was hurtling pheromones at him so hard he felt it. Get a grip, Leda.
“There is a room behind here. It is our medical room, our secret hospital.”
He must have known how strange that sounded. But at the same time, she noted the same pride as before that lifted his chin. “Are you a doctor?” she asked.
Ita smiled. But when his eyes moved to the door, his confidence faltered. “No. I study.” Now he looked embarrassed. “Not like you have studied. Impressive, your education.” Leda had sent him her résumé, as if applying for a job. Now she felt stupid about it. “I want to know all about it,” he said as he walked past the room.
On the other side of the orphanage, the back half was a three-walled room with a metal roof and another identical mat spread out. “This is for study, and for eating when the rains come.”
The next room had a sheet drawn tight across it. “Mary!” Ita called across the courtyard, followed by a question in Swahili that Leda couldn’t understand.
Mary’s answer boomeranged back and Ita gently tucked the sheet to one side. “Mary’s sleeping space,” Ita said, but respectfully, he didn’t enter.
Leda hesitated.
“It is okay. You may look,” Ita said.
Leda ducked her head inside. This room was much smaller. A mat still covered most of the dirt floor, but this time sported a narrow strip of foam and a folded sheet on one half.
When Leda poked her head back out, Ita watched her expectantly.
“It’s...” Leda wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear, and her head was starting to spin with the dawning realization that these were her accommodations for the month. “Great.”
“So you will stay with Mary,” Ita said, satisfied.
Leda looked out to where the children sat, playing quietly, waiting for their lunch. She put a hand out, feeling for the wall, something solid.
Ita’s voice was different when he spoke next, with an edge of self-consciousness that was new. “I’m sure where you live is very different.” He remained with the sheet in his hand and straightened. “The bed might help you become accustomed.”
Leda realized he meant the piece of foam in the little room, but she could no more imagine stretching out next to Mary and having any hopes of sleeping there for an entire month than she could imagine coping with any of it—the toilet, kitchen, the sheets for doors. She would be surrounded at all times. Forget hearing herself think, she wouldn’t even be able to feel herself breathe. As if in response, her breathing came quicker.
But then she remembered the morning—traipsing around after Samuel through the maze—all the jagged metal, the haggard faces, the roar and the stench, heaps of garbage, the images leaping out like rabid dogs.
Leda forced herself to breathe from her belly as she looked at her feet. She saw now where she and Ita had walked carefully around the perimeter of the courtyard. The dirt in the interior was swept clean. The children’s sandals were lined up like ducks around the mat. The concrete in the bathrooms was new, the sheets clean. She remembered the touch of Ita’s hand, felt the lingering calm he exuded. She was safe. Leda felt sure of it. Inside the orphanage, she was safe.
But Ita noted her silence and saw how she looked at her feet. “I have an idea.”
He walked back to the room he’d said was a hospital. He slid open the metal that looked like a wall and waved Leda over. She was amazed to see a metal table, and walls covered in posters of anatomy and the periodic table.
“It is our secret, this room,” Ita said, looking at the stacks of medical supplies on a table in the corner, and Leda thought she understood. In a place like Kibera, where health services were rare and precious, a room like this would have to be kept secret lest the whole slum descend on it. “You would like your own room. What do you think?”
Did he mean the metal table? Leda could only think of blood and episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, until she pictured the foam on Mary’s floor and found herself saying, “Yes, if it’s okay, this is perfect.”
Ita nodded and smiled. “Good. I will bring the foam and blanket. Are you ready now to meet the children?” Ita looked past her at the kids when he said it, and the love that radiated toward them landed on Leda, too, like wrapping her hands around a cup of morning tea. She felt glad for the boys, then noted the lump in her throat.
As she gazed after them, Mary appeared out of the kitchen, struggling under the weight of the steaming pot.
“Michael, msaada,” Ita called, and the word was followed by more Swahili that Leda figured meant the boy should help Mary with lunch.
Michael, not only the tallest boy by a foot but owner of the only serious expression of the bunch, stood and grabbed the pot’s handles. He called out and two other boys obediently headed for the kitchen.
As she watched them go, Leda realized Ita wasn’t watching the boys, he was looking at her. She felt his curiosity digging into her again, and realized for the first time that she must seem as strange to him as all this was to her.
“Let’s eat,” Ita said.
The remaining children wiggled with excitement as Leda came closer.
“Karibu!” one of the middle-sized boys called out. He put his hand out like a little salesman. “Ntimi,” the boy said, indicating himself. He had a smile almost to match Ita’s—full of strong white teeth and a joy one can only be born with.
Leda sat next to him. “Leda,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Timmy.”
It was Ntimi who named the other boys, from Thomas to Christopher, ending with Michael. Then Ntimi scooped up a toddler and plopped him into Leda’s arms. “Walter,” he said, and everyone laughed as Walter tried to wiggle free.
Michael was the only one not laughing. Leda had a hunch he was a person she would have to win over slowly. “Thank you for having me here, Michael, for letting me into your home.”
Michael nodded with a solemn maturity that made Leda want to smile, but she held it back.
Ita, watching closely, doled out a look of approval that warmed her belly.
“Jomo,” Ntimi said as he pointed toward a sheeted room by the door, a room that hadn’t been on the tour. Leda took it for a guard post of sorts, or a storage space. She squinted. Did Ntimi mean a guard?
“He new,” Ntimi said in a quieter voice, just as Leda made out two skinny legs showing from under the hanging sheet.
Another boy. Boy number seven.
“Will he join us for lunch?” Leda asked, though the answer was obvious.
Mary handed Leda a yellow plastic bowl filled with murky water. Leda studied it, unsure what to do. Was it soup? “Wash,” Ntimi said, and Leda wanted to hug him.
She wet her hands in the lukewarm water, then passed the bowl around for the children to do the same.
Next, Mary brought her a bowl heaped with rice from the pot. She handed Leda a spoon.
Leda said thank you and waited for everyone else to be served. But Mary didn’t go for more bowls. They all seemed to be waiting and Leda wondered if guests ate first.
The first mouthful occupied Leda mind and body, with a collision of flavors she’d never tasted before. Sweet, salty, spicy all at the same time.
Suddenly Leda saw all the eyes on her. She jabbed her spoon back into the rice and felt her cheeks start to burn.
Activity commenced. Mary left and brought back bowls for herself and Ita. Then she set down the big bowl of rice on the mat, the boys huddling around it. Their little hands went to work, rolling little balls of rice and transferring them to their mouths fast as they could carry. Leda looked and saw Ita and Mary dig in with their fingers, too, employing the same technique.
Leda watched, thinking first of hygiene, then suffering a guilty replay of all the food she’d left on her plate or thrown away in her lifetime.
Leda looked at her spoon, glinting in the sun, and set it down on the ground. Watching Ntimi’s nimble fingers, she imitated him, rolling the food into bite-size pieces with her hands. Ntimi smiled at her.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leda saw the sheet flutter. She looked and saw that it was pulled just a crack to the side.
On impulse, Leda stood up and started over. Ntimi stopped and looked up in worry. Michael shook his head ever so slightly. But she went anyway.
Stopping in front of the sheet, she held out her bowl. “You like to eat alone, that’s okay,” Leda said gently.
No hand reached out for the bowl, but Leda could hear the boy breathing, with a slight wheeze of asthma that made her heart leap. Dangerous out here with no medicine. Lucky he has Ita, she thought, just as she heard Ita stride up behind her.
“How much English do they understand?” Leda asked, glossing over the fact that she still held out the bowl of steaming food.
“All Kenyan children learn English in school,” Ita said. He glanced at the sheet when he added, “But many of our children have missed much school.”
Leda’s heart sank. “So they don’t understand me.” Of course not. “Good way to practice my Swahili, I guess.”
Ita spoke into the crack in the sheet. When only silence followed, he spoke again in the same even, coaxing voice.
Nothing happened.
“They will understand some, if you speak slowly and use easy words.” Ita saw the look on Leda’s face. “Don’t worry, they already love you. They are so excited you have come all this way for them. It is hard for them to believe.”
Suddenly the sheet opened and a small, lanky boy stepped into the sun. He wore a WWF T-shirt, shorts and a scowl like a guerilla rebel.
Ita knelt down and spoke to him, as if he was explaining why the sky is blue or the dirt orange. Leda already loved this manner of his, a solid gentleness much like what she loved about the trees at home—cheerful but sage.
Jomo stood but he didn’t meet Ita’s gaze. Instead his eyes found something just off to the side and locked on. His face took on a blankness Leda recognized with a shiver. She looked down and saw what Jomo was doing with his hands. He picked and picked at the edges of his thumbs, beside the nail beds. Leda looked down at her own hands, similarly mutilated. It was an embarrassing habit, but one she’d never been able to conquer. Estella thought it was disgusting. Doesn’t it hurt? her school guidance counselor had asked. But the pain was the point. It grounded her. In public, whenever Leda felt anxious, when she wanted to flee or scream, the picking gave her something to do, something to keep her from losing control, something to control. The only other thing she’d ever found that calmed her, gave her a buffer against the world was—
“Hey, Jomo,” she said, reaching into her pocket and startling both Ita and the frowning boy. “Want to see something?”
Leda took the camera from her pocket. It was her favorite—small enough to take out and tuck away quickly, with the manual control to shoot without a flash. It put a lens between her and the loud crazy world, let her compose it, control it, record it from one step away. Cameras gave Leda a way to interact with the world without...interacting.
Jomo’s attention snapped toward the camera lying flat in Leda’s hand. His yearning was more apparent than he would have liked, she was sure. She set down the food and knelt across from Ita, close to Jomo, and turned the camera on. She didn’t press it into his hands; she just started to demonstrate how it worked. Zoom like this, she mimed, frame with the screen, and take the picture. She pointed the viewfinder toward Ita and snapped.
Jomo grunted, a small slip of amusement.
Ita watched the two of them studying the image of him and he laughed. She bristled and felt Jomo do the same. But it wasn’t Ita’s fault, she realized. He wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t daunted by life. He danced happily with the world. He wouldn’t understand the comfort of a camera on the sidelines.
But Leda also knew Ita wanted Jomo to be happy, he was ecstatic at the merest glimpse of joy in the glowering boy. She hoped Jomo would know this soon, too. She tucked the camera away, picked up the bowl and settled it into Jomo’s hands before he saw it coming. Then she stood up and walked pointedly back to the mat.
When Leda sat down, the children settled back into a ring around her. On Ntimi’s cue, they began clapping their hands and rapping on their knees, and while Leda watched, a little taken aback, they began to sing.
It was a song they’d planned, obviously, because everyone from youngest to oldest joined in at once.
Leda let the harmony wash over her and blinked her eyes. When she didn’t have her camera out, she would blink to record the memories she wanted to hang on to, to replay later for comfort. She’d had no idea what to make of her first day in Kibera, but just then she wanted to savor the warm feeling wrapped around her like afternoon sunshine on her porch in Topanga. It wasn’t the feeling of serenity she felt there with Amadeus, however. This was something new.
A loud banging on the metal door stole Leda’s train of thought and took the warm feeling with it.
The children stopped singing but sat obediently, not looking overly perturbed, though Jomo ducked back behind his curtain. Leda tried to calm herself—visitors to the orphanage must be common.
Ita walked over to the door and she heard the voice that filtered through, sounding more like a low growl than a man.
Reluctantly, Leda thought, Ita slid open the door. But he blocked the gap, so Leda couldn’t see who was outside.
She turned back to the boys, but the mood had shifted one hundred and eighty degrees. Leda glanced up to see if clouds had moved in. No, the sun was still beating down like a radiator.
The door scraped ajar and a tall, wiry man darted through to jab Ita and cackle. When the man’s yellow eyes scurried over Leda’s skin, she shuddered and averted her gaze. When he turned to converse with Ita, Leda looked again.
At first glance, Leda might have called him handsome, with his angular face and cat eyes, but beside Ita, she decided, definitely not. The man was a praying mantis, creeping along on folded pincers. Dreads snaked down his back, trembling as he shuffled closer. Dangling, bouncing from his belt, was a battered machete. When he sneered in her direction, Leda recoiled at two rows of stained teeth. Then she saw that his face was covered in scars, several of them burns like hers.
Her hand went to her scar while her mind filled with fifty thoughts at once. The man was clearly a gangster, yet seemed to be Ita’s friend. There was a word at Leda’s lips, a scary word. Mungiki—what the guidebook named Kenya’s vicious mafia and more or less warned to look out for dreadlocks. Mungiki ran the slums—extortion, female genital circumsion, beheadings.
“So, this is the volunteer?” The man stopped at the edge of the mat, close enough that he cast a shadow over Leda. “You the woman Ita can’t stop talking about, two weeks now?”
Ita’s face blanched. Wary? Or apologetic?
“Chege!” Ntimi jumped up. The other children greeted him with enthusiasm, too.
Chege turned to Ita and laughed his hyena cackle again. “She speak?” He looked down on Leda meanly, his eyes on her as he continued in a growl before she could answer. “Funny, nah? Here Ita been talking ’bout this educated white woman, smart, rich, talking up a summer storm.” Chege smirked, he flickered his eyes over to Ita then back to Leda. “Lot to live up to, this man a big dreamer. He dream big beautiful things. Like an angel come from America, come save everybody.”
“I’m not—” Leda said, but Ita interrupted.
“Kuacha, Chege,” he growled. He held out his hand to Leda and tugged her up to stand beside him. “This is Leda. She is my guest.”
“Leda,” Chege purred. “Welcome to Kibera, Leda.” He put out his hand and she took it reluctantly.
Ntimi interrupted. “You bring gifts, Chege?”
Ita shook his head and steered the boy back to the mat.
When Leda tried to retract her hand, Chege held tight and pulled her closer to him. She squeaked, desperate to escape his calloused grip, but he peered into her eyes and whispered, “Don’t tell him you no angel yet. American rich lady come save Africa, and have a little fun.” He nodded his head in Ita’s direction.
Leda’s eyes flickered over to Ita. Were those his words?
“But what if—” Chege’s voice rose, pulling Ita from the children into their huddle “—what if us Kikuyu brathas don’t need your help, Leda? Don’t need a volunteer—”
“Chege,” Ita said. “Stop.”
Chege laughed, his smoky breath hitting Leda in the face. “Okay, okay. I play nice.” He dropped Leda’s hand and slung down his knapsack. “Presents!” he called out.
The second he let her out of his grasp, Leda stumbled back and wiped her hand on her pants. She wrapped her arms around herself then, trying to still the wave of nausea and panic. Chege strode past her, chuckling, and crouched down among the boys.
Leda coerced herself into taking one clean, full breath.
Chege dug in his bag and brandished a coconut, winning “oohs” and “aahs” from the children. He untied the machete from his belt, its edge jagged, its blade sticky with congealed brown stains. Leda watched him swipe it across his jeans, telling herself firmly the stain wasn’t blood.
He split the coconut with a single, expert stroke. He sucked down the milk that came spilling out, letting it course over his chin before he dribbled it into the kids’ open mouths, like watering a ring of flowers. The children gulped the sweet juice and giggled. With the machete, Chege carved smaller pieces and handed them out.
Leda watched the whole process in a daze, until Chege ran his tongue over the white coconut flesh, one eye leering sideways at her. She looked away, her cheeks burning.
Ita couldn’t seem to tell anything was wrong. He looked over at her and smiled, the same pure, easy smile.
As all the children sat content with their treat, Chege stood next to Ita. With a flare obviously for Leda’s benefit, he pulled a bulging wad of money from his pocket. “Been a good month, brother.”
Ita looked at the cash and the smile was gone, replaced by steel. “No,” he barked, followed with daggers of Swahili, fervent hand gestures, and a look searing enough to ignite a forest fire.
For a fleeting moment Chege was surprised, he teetered backward on his spindly limbs. He recovered at the same moment Leda saw Jomo edge into the courtyard.
Chege saw him, too, and waved him over. Jomo hesitated, then jutted out his chin and walked over.
Chege peeled off a leaf of Kenyan shillings. “Ita say he don’t want any,” Chege said. “He don’t like where it come from. Ita always think money cares where it come from. Always. Even when we was you age. Course, then he had no choice.”
Chege took Jomo’s wrist. He thrust the money into the boy’s palm. Jomo’s eyes bulged as if he was scared to blink, as if the money might disappear. Now Chege looked up at Leda. “Maybe he think things be different now?”
Leda felt the nausea tip and pour back through her stomach. What had they said about her? What did they think of her here in this place?
“Chege, enough,” Ita said, but Chege put out his hand and knelt down next to Jomo.
“But this boy knows. Every hungry boy knows money have to come from somewhere.” Chege’s coiled stance made Leda think of a feral cat—watching, plotting, waiting. “And somebody always have to give something to get it.”
Leda could tell Jomo didn’t understand the words, but everything Chege did was a cartoon requiring no caption. Ita’s jaw was clenched so tight she wondered how words could possibly escape, but she could see them, piled up behind his teeth, being chosen carefully.
When he opened his mouth, however, Ita’s words were swallowed by banging at the door. Deep voices followed, so loud Leda jumped.
Chege laughed. “For me,” he said with a wink.
Ita’s frown was like a deep etched carving. “Go,” he said and strode quickly with Chege to the door. Leda stayed where she was, holding her breath.
When the gate opened, thugs huddled outside, their words like little firecrackers. Leda couldn’t understand any of it, but the men looked back and forth behind them as if they were being chased by the devil himself. One man took the machete from his belt and demonstrated a whack. With another glance behind him, he tried to dart inside the orphanage.
Which is when Ita started shouting. He screamed at the men, then at Chege, all the while trying to close the metal door on top of them.
But everybody, and time itself, stood still when Chege hollered into the air. With terse, measured words he spoke to the men, who lowered their heads and nodded. He pointed beyond the door and they left.
Chege turned to Ita. A look passed between them and Ita raised his chin. Chege slipped out though the doorway. But as Ita slid the door shut, Chege’s eyes found Leda and sent a chill all the way down into her shoes.
Leda backed away, air locked up in her lungs.
When she sat down on the mat, she found she was shaking.
All the children had scattered off, to their room or to the kitchen. Leda pressed a finger to her scar.
What in the hell had she gotten herself into?
Chapter 3
December 30, 2007, Nairobi airport—Leda
THE SEAT BELT shakes in her fingers, as Leda buckles in and wishes she could likewise restrain her mind. Above the rushing of the air vents, the rumble of the engines, the chirpy chatter of the stewardesses, Leda hears her own horrible sound track on repeat. The sound of fist on flesh, the crack of machetes, the thud of Ita hitting the dirt. Screaming. Leda hears the awful, high-pitched screams, then realizes they were hers.
She sees Ita silhouetted in the doorway of the shack when he discovered them. Sees him hit Chege so hard the blood is like a hose, instant and coursing. Leda could smell it. She can smell it now.
She buries her face in her hands, presses against the small glass window, like she can make the sounds disappear, like she can snuff out the images.
She can’t.
She feels Chege’s wet mouth over her ear, stubble slicing her skin, his arms pinning her, sure as shackles, hissing into her ear in a voice that will never leave her again.
Ita found them, but too late. He found Chege sprawled atop her, grinding into her, her body pinned as though beneath a scorpion’s tail.
She looks down at her skirt, balling it up in her fists, fighting not to cry, wishing among so many other things that she’d changed clothes at the airport. Thirty hours she will have to look at her skirt and remember. Thirty hours she will be imprisoned in memory.
No, forever. Forever is how long she will have to live and relive this night.
Ita hit Chege and the world exploded. In the grand finale of the fireworks show, Chege’s men descended on Ita like bloodthirsty warriors. How many men were there? Leda couldn’t count. She’d covered her face and cried, begging them to stop. If the police hadn’t arrived—
But the police had arrived and they’d dragged her away. Once they’d learned she was already scheduled to fly out tonight, they asked no more questions. They dragged her away from Ita and left him there. As though her life was more precious than his. You don’t know anything! she’d wanted to scream at them as she looked down at his bloodied body in the dirt. Save him, not me! I cannot live with this.
The child in the seat next to Leda is asking the stewardess for ice cream. The stewardess jokes with the boy, looks hard at Leda, as though she’s about to ask her something.
Leda turns farther toward the window in a preemptive response.
How? How is she alive and on a plane? How is the world still spinning? How can the child next to her be deciding between strawberry and chocolate?
Leda thinks of the orphans. What will happen to them? What’s happening to them right now?
She burrows into her seat and tries to breathe.
“I liked the zebras best, mummy,” the little boy is now saying. “And the hippos. But they looked mean. I think the zebras are nice. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, I think I liked the zebras the best, too.”
The mother sees Leda’s sullied clothes, sees her mussed hair, the scratches on her neck and arms.
Leda sees the woman’s blow-dried hair, her careful makeup, her attempts to hide her scared eyes, the lines of worry. The mother knows what’s happening beneath them. She can only guess the horrors responsible for the scratches on Leda’s skin and the look on her face, but she knows.
The look she gives Leda is a plea.
Their eyes lock, two women in a world of men gone mad. Leda looks at the boy, who’s around Ntimi’s age. Then she thinks of the youths who attacked her, their teenaged faces hard as wood.
Leda turns away. She obliges the mother with her child’s innocence and her mind returns to the stench of blood cloaking her. She washed her hands in the airport bathroom, but now as her hair falls forward, Leda sees it matted with the stuff. Her stomach clenches when she remembers how, as she cradled Ita’s battered head in her lap, her hair caught in the blood on his face. His eyes could barely stay open, as the fire reflected in them raged all around them. The sorrow in Ita’s eyes quickened the terror in the gazes of the policemen staring down at them.
I’m sorry, Ita. I’m so, so, so sorry.
Chapter 4
December 9, 2007, Kibera—Ita
THAT NIGHT ITA lay in his bed, wrestling with his eyelids as though trying to clamp shut two hippos’ mouths. With a grin, he gave in to replaying the day instead. The sudden blooming smile when she said his name, the breathless tinkling sound of her laughter and the way her hair danced to it, dark brown curls swirling. It wasn’t like Ita hadn’t met white people before, mostly at the clinic. But none like her. Leda was like an American movie star, but from old films he’d seen in black-and-white. Maybe it was the way her skin glowed in the dark, or the curves of her body like flowing cloth. Even when she first arrived, covered in a fine dust, her cheeks looked creamy underneath, like milk. Her green eyes peeked out from her slender face, watching like a bird on a branch, poised and wary at the same time.
She was nothing like Ita had imagined—an aggressive older American woman. Crass, maybe, loud, even wanton, from what he’d seen at the theater in Kibera that showed current movies. Women with plastic breasts and lipstick, who wore little clothing and made dirty jokes.
Leda didn’t seem this way in the least. She reminded him of an old-time movie star because she didn’t seem real, of this time, or even human. She floated behind him on her first tour of the orphanage, taking everything in like a first visit to Earth. Could she tell that they’d cleaned? Swept? Washed all the dishes? Ita had sensed her discomfort at sharing a room with Mary. He was glad he’d thought of the hidden room.
Goose bumps crept up his skin in the dark. She was nearby, in that room—asleep on the metal table, wrapped in the blanket he’d given her. He imagined her wispy eyelashes, a smile on her face, her slender fingers curled around the cloth.
He sighed. Everything was perfect.
Suddenly his heartbeat sped up like a motorcycle. Nothing was ever perfect, or ever stayed so for more than a fleeting second.
Ita knew why he pictured Leda curled up, smiling in her dreams. He’d known another girl to sleep that way.
He tried to stop the stampeding memory—he put his hands over his eyes, he turned to his side, dug his head into the foam. But he couldn’t stop it. The vision of Leda’s beatific face was gone, mutated into the image that haunted Ita every day. A different smooth, beautiful face, but darker and twisted beyond recognition by fear, battered and swelling with blood, as she slumped down beside him in exhaustion. Behind her, Chege.
The memory crept away as it had slithered in, leaving only the guilt twisting Ita’s stomach like wringing wet clothes.
Chege.
Ita replayed Chege’s appearance today, how he pushed his way in to see Leda. How he took her hand, seductively, teasing her, leering at her. Then he’d pulled out that money. What are you showing off, Chege? Nothing to be proud of—how his boys made that money.
It was Mungiki creed to despise Westerners, Americans, even as they coveted their clothes and music. Did Chege really not see the hypocrisy? Could he not see what he’d become?
The air in Ita’s room seemed to grow hotter as he thought of what Chege had said to Jomo—money in Kibera can only be gotten by giving something up. Filmstrips of memories spiraled in Ita’s mind, of how much Chege had given him—so much, everything, saved his life even, countless times. And now Chege wanted to help the orphans the same way, give them money, protect them. It made Ita’s blood boil. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he should be grateful. But Ita knew what it cost to accept Chege’s help. He knew what it meant to repay in regret and nightmares.
In the dark, Ita shook his head, trying to wriggle free of his thoughts. He wished he could be like Leda—clean, new and fresh to the ways of Kibera.
Suddenly, he remembered how she bent down for her suitcase, sending her curls to cover her face. Was it the scar she wanted to hide? A mark like white paint dribbling down her jaw.
Maybe she had memories she wished she could forget, too. Ita felt a tenderness ache through his chest. In his eyes, that only made her more perfect.
* * *
In the morning, Ita wasn’t surprised to find the children awake early for school, waiting on the mat for breakfast, eyes darting to the secret room.
“She is in there, stop worrying,” he said in Swahili. “Do you think she will fly away?”
As he said it, he realized it was his worry, too.
While they stalled a bit, Ita asking them about their studies, Jomo appeared and sat on the mat as if it was the most normal thing in the world. But in the few months since Jomo’s arrival, he had yet to willingly come sit with them. Ita’s gaping mouth reassembled into a smile.
Mary came outside with the food, and as they debated whether to wait or wake their visitor the door scraped open and there she was, looking exactly like a crumpled angel in the best of ways. He had seen pictures of the men’s pajamas American women wore, and she wore a set herself. But it didn’t strike him as wanton like the pictures. On Leda, it actually looked quite demure.
But Ita must have been indiscreet with his looking because she seemed suddenly self-conscious and stepped backward.
“Good morning,” Ita said, worried she would duck back into her room.
The children echoed him, practicing their English greetings. “Goo-mowning, goo-mowning, Ledaaah.”
“Breakfast is ready,” Ita said. “Please, join us.”
She smiled, but he could see her hesitation, and the flurry of thought scurry across her face. He had noticed this the day before—she was always thinking, dreaming, watching. But he liked this quality, it reminded him of the children, the rapt curiosity with which they regarded the world.
Leda walked across the dirt in her blue pajamas and sandals. She sat down in the empty spot next to Jomo. “Good morning,” she said. Jomo didn’t look up, but Ita could see the glint in his eye.
The children were at a loss as to what to do with this mysterious species in their midst. It was Ntimi who looked up shyly. He took a moment and then he opened his mouth. “I trust you slept well, Miss Leda,” he said.
Ita nearly split open with pride, hearing the phrase they’d practiced.
Leda beamed at Ntimi, too, looking equally impressed. “What a gentleman you are. I slept like the princess in the fairy tale. Well—” Leda leaned in closer “—not the one about the pea.”
Ntimi smiled blankly at the foreign words, and Leda noticed. She mimed opening a book. “I will read it to you. I brought lots of books.”
That the children understood, and they clapped and chattered in response.
Ita was touched. In her email, she did not say she would bring books. But books were what the children craved, and lacked, the most. A luxury Ita always longed to provide.
Mary set the tray of food on the mat. Leda watched the boys first this time. She washed her hands, then took her loaf of bread and a cup of tea. When she took her first sip, her eyes widened in reaction.
“It’s spicy!” she said and licked her lips like a kitten. “And sweet,” she said to herself, then poked Ntimi until he giggled.
“Spicy. Sweet,” Ntimi echoed and everyone dug in much like Leda, absorbed in the happiness of a shared meal.
Ita watched his little family take in this strange new addition, like they did with each new orphan. A warmth spread through his stomach, like the fullness of a big meal. It must have been the tea, he reasoned.
* * *
Once the boys were off to school, Ita and Leda helped Mary with the dishes and straightening. Leda seemed a bit deflated with most of the children gone. Maybe she didn’t feel useful enough. She bounced Walter on her hip, which he loved, though he shouldn’t get used to it, Ita thought.
Ita pictured the paperwork waiting in his office, but he surprised himself by turning to Leda and saying, “Would you like to go exploring with me?”
She hesitated, these little pauses already becoming familiar, and Ita wondered if it was the image of the slum or the thought of time alone with him that caused that little furrow in her brow.
“I have things to buy,” he added, suspecting she would prefer it presented professionally. He was right.
“Oh, okay, sure, let’s go. I’ll just change my shoes. One second.”
She crossed to the secret room. While the boys had gotten dressed, she’d changed into brown pants and a blue T-shirt. Ita wondered if blue was her favorite color. This was something he did with the orphans as they arrived—try to identify their preferences. Jomo always took the blue cup if it was available and had selected blue sandals for school.
* * *
Ita didn’t have a plan for their tour, and this was very strange for him. He preferred to have a plan for everything, a trait that Chege had teased him about since they were small. For the Kibera laughed at nothing more than plans. But it was what had made the orphanage possible. Ita’s business plan had found them sponsors and the space they now inhabited. And planning was what made him a successful safari guide, standing out among the many, Ita believed. He knew how to craft the perfect trip, down to the type of salad and sandwiches he served for lunch and dinner. Everything was meticulously scheduled, so that it looked effortless for his customers.
What about today’s schedule, then? His plan had been to let Mary show Leda the housework she would do around the orphanage while the children were at school and Ita worked in his office. Fetching water, washing, cooking—he’d told Mary that American women didn’t know how to do these things without machines. They’d joked about the idea of a dishwasher. How funny. Imagine having enough electricity to power a machine to wash the dishes.
But here he was, walking the volunteer out the front gate, watching the mix of emotions dance on her face. How was he to know that the volunteer would be beautiful and shiny and completely captivating? The kind of woman who makes paperwork—something he enjoyed, the figures lined up neatly—suddenly boring.
So Ita led the way around the corner, past the beauty shop and the barbershop next to it. The sun struck them between the maze of rooftops, flickering over their skin through the haze of dust. Ita noticed a spring in his step that he loved to see in the children. Not that he remembered ever being a child like that himself. Chege had always said Ita walked as though he had a rhino on his back.
First stop, he needed to charge his cell phone. Leda had asked him questions about his phone yesterday. She seemed surprised that he had one. But how would he run a business without it? From Leda’s descriptions, it sounded as though most businessmen in America had computers. She asked if they had one, making Ita laugh. If anyone knew he had a laptop in the orphanage, he’d have to hire a security guard to live with them. No, Ita explained. He had to pay to use the internet in Nairobi, when he went to check his post office box for the orphanage. When he told her that, he thought of the shillings that had added up in the minutes he’d spent staring at her emails and résumé.
“What’s up, brother?” the charging-station man asked. Ita handed him his phone and saw the man look Leda over, alternately like a skewer of meat and a purple elephant.
Leda noticed. She smiled at the man, at the same time averting her eyes and backing away.
Ita handed over the money and rushed back to his charge.
“So,” he said, hoping to soothe her. “What do you plan to teach the children while you are here? Improve their English?”
Leda’s face lit up instantly, like the first rays of sun that woke Ita up every morning. “I was thinking about it last night.”
He couldn’t help but picture her curled up on the table in her blue pajamas, modest enough to hide her body, but thin enough to fuel his fantasy of undergarments.
“I would definitely love to teach them, and read to them, and I’ve brought several cameras, but—” Leda’s voice grew shyer suddenly. “I wanted to see what you thought about the boys’ room. What would you think of building them bunk beds?” She made a gesture with her hand like a shelf.
Ita was caught off guard. There were many things the boys needed before wooden beds, but the thought was touching, and the boys would feel like city princes. And did she mean they would build them together? Ita liked the idea of them working side by side.
“Is that silly?” she asked. “I’m sure there are other things they need first—”
He laughed. “They will love bunk beds. You know how to build them?” He hoped he did not sound discouraging. He was just trying to picture her wielding a hammer.
Now it was Leda’s turn to laugh. “I have a house in the mountains. I’ve discovered that I like building things. Flower boxes and a doghouse.”
“You have a dog?”
“Amadeus,” Leda said, and now Ita knew a way to win a smile from her.
“Mozart. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the boys like. For me, Requiem—breaks my heart.”
She gasped. But when she smiled, Ita knew she must love the music as much as he did.
“Okay, bunk beds,” he said. “We will need wood and nails.”
She looked down but her voice was even when she spoke. “I would like to donate all the supplies, please.”
A feeling welled up in him that was hard to place—gratitude, excitement, giddiness at the rare taste of money—
“Do the boys like to paint?” she asked.
Surprised again. “Like on paper?”
She smiled. “The walls! We could all paint the orphanage walls together. Would they like to decorate their home? Maybe elephants and birds, rhinos, all the animals from your safari trips.”
The boys had never been on safari. But he was sure they would love painting animals on the walls. Ita liked to draw, too, though how long had it been since he had done it? “They would like that.” A lump rose in his throat and he turned away. He was moved, imagining Leda lying in bed, dreaming up these plans. “Should we get the supplies today? Wood and nails. And paint. We will have to get someone to help us carry them back.”
* * *
The day stretched on that happy way, now that they had a united mission. They found the paintbrushes first, but had to go elsewhere for the paint. They laughed as they discussed their plans, designating zebras their place by the kitchen and monkeys in the bathroom.
On their way to get the wood, Ita couldn’t help himself from tossing questions at her like chicken feed. He wanted to know everything at once. But she didn’t answer. Before his eyes, she caught herself, breathed in and said coyly, “You first,” with a little smile. But Ita would bet it was a practiced defense, that smile no man would deny.
“I grew up here,” he said, watching passersby stare as they walked. “I tried to leave, I wanted to become a doctor. I was on my way, starting school, helping out at a clinic here, but then the orphanage came to be and—” Ita put out his hand to help Leda over a creek of dribbling brown water. The touch of her skin sent shivers through his arm.
Leda caught his eye and looked quickly away. Did she feel it, too, the electricity? “And?” she asked, her voice high in pitch and a little shaky.
“And what?” he said, his hand still closed over hers.
Leda slipped out of his touch and bounded a step ahead, leaving him feeling embarrassed. He was acting like a schoolboy in love. The realization brought him back to Earth and he remembered what he’d been talking about. Broken hopes. How time steals them away. “And days became years,” he said. Could she know what that meant? Dreams dashed, time squandered on poverty, years that raced by as he dealt with one pressing problem at a time? It hurt Ita to speak of his dream, getting further and further away now, of being a doctor.
“I know what you mean,” she said softly.
Ita believed that she did, somehow. He felt the questions returning, piling up—
“But how does an orphanage just come to be?” she asked, and he laughed in spite of himself.
“With a Michael.” He looked to see if she’d learned the children’s names yet. “The tallest boy, the oldest.”
“The protector,” she said simply.
Ita missed a step to look at her. “Yes. That’s Michael.” He pointed out a shadowed walk-through, but stopped before entering so they could catch their breath. “A friend brought him to me. She was sick, and she was out of time. Back then, my dream was dying, too, slipping through my fingers—” Leda was watching him with her wide green eyes. She had this way of making him feel as though they were alone in a quiet room, not in the midst of Kibera traffic. “It seemed like a sign from above. How could I say no?”
Ita looked to the sky, remembering so clearly the four-year-old boy with the serious eyes, hiding behind his mother’s spindly legs. “I thought I would take him to an orphanage, but no one would take him.”
“Why not?”
Ita sighed, feeling the old anger bubble in his blood. “His mother died of AIDS and people thought her child must have it, too. They didn’t want a sick child. One who would die or infect others.”
Leda chewed on her bottom lip. “So you took him in.”
“Yes,” Ita said and smiled, remembering. “I took him everywhere, delighting in everything he did. People saw that I loved him, clothed him, fed him, and—” Ita meant to laugh, but it came out like a sigh, remembering the rainy season after Michael arrived, after Ita had to quit school “—then people started leaving children at my door like flowers.”
A man knocked Ita’s shoulder, snapping him back to the present. It wasn’t safe to stand still like this in the back paths of the slum. Better to keep moving. “You never know, right?” He started toward the shadowy corridor.
“Know what’s coming next?” She stepped into a ray of sunshine.
Ita slipped into the alley. “Never know when you’ll meet the person that will change the path of your life.”
The corridor was only wide enough for one person at a time. A man squeezed past Ita, then jumped when he saw Leda entering the passage.
“Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” she said and wriggled past him, so formal and adorable it made Ita want to kiss her.
He turned around, and as though fate meant to grant his wish, she was watching her feet and ran right into him. It threw him off balance, and they ended up pressed against the mud wall. Ita had just a moment to feel her slender frame, the down on her arms brush against his skin.
She looked up at him, her breath retreating across her pink lips.
“You’re right,” she whispered.
Ita looked at her, a feeling of wonder washing through him.
“You never know,” they both said in unison, then laughed shyly and slipped apart.
Chapter 5
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Ita
GOD’S BEEN RAINING kerosene.
Ita watches the flames clawing the night sky. When he tries to force air into his iron lungs, ash coats his tongue, clogs his throat. He doubles over, hands on his knees, and feels his body heave with vomit. But when he opens his mouth, it’s blood that drools onto his foot. He coughs, and blood splatters the dirt. Ita wonders if his wounds will prove fatal after all.
He must make it back to the orphanage. He must find a hold on the present. All is lost for him, but the boys deserve a chance.
He nearly faints from the pain of standing, but grits his teeth and thrusts one foot in front of the other. He’ll keep to the alleys—he can hear the rioters out on the main paths. He creeps unsteadily between the homes, his back scraping along the mud shacks. From inside them, he hears the chorus of whispers—plotting, pleading, praying.
One more corner and he’ll be there. The fire is behind him; it hasn’t reached their neighborhood. He realizes, with a pang of shame, that he dreads seeing the children. He dreads their questions, their tears, their bulging eyes. Ita doesn’t have any comfort to give. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth, he might tell them the truth.
The life we have been building, the one I wanted to give you, planned so carefully—it’s over.
When Ita knocks quietly on the door, there is an instant rustle.
A tiny whisper asks who’s out there. Michael.
As soon as Ita answers, the door slides open.
Michael’s eyes go wide as cashew nuts, and Ita realizes he must look as monstrous as he feels.
“Jomo?” Ita asks.
Michael nods.
Ita sighs. He is safe. Jomo is inside and safe. Ita drags his swollen body inside.
Michael watches with his ancient eyes. “All the children are in bed. Mary, too. I told them they must stay there until you returned.” Pride peeks through Michael’s scared voice. Ita sees that the boy is clutching Ita’s rifle. He floods with tenderness for this boy whom he has promised so much.
“You did very well, Michael. I knew I could count on you. You must sleep now. I will need your help in the morning.”
“But—” Michael darts another look at Ita’s wounds.
Ita puts out his hand, takes the rifle. “I’ll be okay. I can fix it.” He nods toward the secret room. But he has no idea if he can fulfill that promise, if he can fix anything this night has destroyed. “Go on,” he says in a voice he knows Michael will obey.
Michael sighs, the same old man’s sigh he had when he was five years old. “Lala salama, mpwenda baba.” He says it so softly as he turns to leave that it takes Ita a moment to realize what he’s heard.
Goodnight, dear father.
Ita watches him enter the bedroom, then begins the painful trudge toward the room with the medical supplies. Leda’s room.
There are footsteps again in the courtyard at his back, scurrying, urgent.
“Ita—” Mary’s whisper hisses into the night.
Ita turns. Mary’s face is crinkled paper, soggy in the creases.
Her family, he realizes with a pang. The orphans are not her family, not like they are for Ita. Mary’s kin is out there, in the chaos, in the fire. Her daughter, Grace, lives by the railroad tracks with her husband, with Mary’s grandchildren. But Mary is here. She stayed. “Thank you, Mary. Thank you for staying with the boys. What can I do? Do you need me to go check on your family?”
A tear winds crookedly through the wrinkles of Mary’s face. Ita realizes he has never seen Mary cry, not even close. She’s looking at his battered body. “You cannot. Look at you. What did they do to you? Where is Leda?”
“She is gone.” But Ita has no words for what happened to him, because it is linked to what happened to Leda, to what Chege did. He wonders when he will be able to say it aloud, if ever. Dizziness rolls over Ita like fog. He pitches forward, his stomach heaving into his throat.
Mary scuttles toward him, grips his shoulder.
Ita recoils from the pain. He must stand. He must reassure her, if he wants to be alone. “It’s okay. In the morning—”
“No, I must go now. My daughter—”
He shakes his head firmly. “No. You cannot go out tonight. It is not safe for women.”
More tears seep into Mary’s scrunched face.
But Ita must be firm on this. He cannot go back out there now and hope to protect an old woman. “Does Paul have a phone?” Ita asks of Mary’s son-in-law, taking out his cell phone.
Mary shakes her head.
Ita nods. “I’ll go with you tomorrow. We will walk in the sun, in the light that has to follow this darkness. Grace will be all right. She’s strong and brave. Like her mother.”
Mary understands. Ita has decided. She stops her lip from trembling. Then she reaches up and puts her hand gingerly to the side of Ita’s face. He closes his eyes and the scratchy parchment of her hand on his cheek brings the flicker of a memory, decades old. A mother’s touch. If he doesn’t open his eyes, he will disappear into the sensation, spiral into the void, searching for solace in memories lost and drained away.
His eyes fling open when Mary’s hand slips away. Without another word, she turns and shuffles off to her room to spend a sleepless night.
The moment of comfort evaporates, and Ita knows he might collapse any minute. He hastens across the courtyard to the hidden room.
Inside, he lights an oil lamp. He sees the pile on the floor, but wrests his mind away from thoughts of Leda, of the memories in this room. Instead, he looks at himself in the small mirror.
At the first glimpse of his face, Ita sees a statue glued back together all wrong. His eyes, nose, jaw—everything’s in the wrong place and wrong proportions. The swelling—that explains why his vision is so distorted, why his head pounds like a pump about to blow.
The only other time he has ever seen his face like this, a mangled toy to be thrown away...
The only other time was the day he met Chege. The day one life ended and another began.
Ita soaks a rag in a bowl of water. He presses it to his forehead, covering his eyes, covering the vision, and tries not to remember.
But everything—the blood coating his teeth, the pain in his limbs as though they’re clenched in a lion’s jaw, the hopelessness flooding his veins—it’s all so much the same that Ita can’t help but remember...
September 22, 1989, Kibera—Ita
Ita hears them, the boys, he hears them coming, but he doesn’t care.
After two weeks on the streets, he is already tired. He’s tired of running, tired of begging, tired of trying to hold on to a life that’s bent on wriggling out of his fingers like a worm. So, let it. Let it all go. Mother. Home. School. Hope. He hears the boys tearing down the alley, their footsteps the sound of his plans being trampled.
When the boys turn the corner, Ita sees they are older than he’d expected. Teenagers.
There is a moment where they stop and Ita looks up and they look at him and there is still a thread of time in the fabric of fate when they might just move on.
But then one of them spots Ita’s backpack. And when he nudges the boy next to him, that boy looks at Ita’s shoes. And then the third boy, the tallest, with a tattoo freshly done, he rallies them all with a certain look. Seconds later, as though choreographed, they all jump Ita.
The tall boy is the fists. He likes it, Ita can tell. He likes beating him, likes beating anyone, probably, maybe because he’s holding in the same bellyful of seesaw emotions as Ita. This way, when his knuckles crack on Ita’s cheekbones and his knees make Ita’s ribs pop, some of the feelings can get out and away, and leave space for him to breathe again.
That’s what Ita hears the loudest—the boy’s breathing, heavy in his ear. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hear the other boys unzip his backpack. He can hear them celebrating the spoils, tossing out the books as they find the food and clothes, the medicine. Ita can hear, just barely he can hear them tell the tall boy to stop, that it looks like he’s dead, stop, he isn’t moving, he’s—
The next thing Ita hears—it must be a dream. There is a new voice. It is a madman shouting. A madman shouting in a kid voice like a whistle.
“Get away from him!” the voice is screaming. “Get away or I kill you. I kill you all.”
Ita bargains with his eyelids. They weigh more than two rhinoceroses, but they must open. Open and I will let you close for good. Before I go, before I die, I want to see the madman.
Ita’s eyes open to glimpse a dreamy sliver of absurdity. The teens, they’re frozen, frozen in place by the owner of the whistling voice.
He’s the skinniest kid Ita’s ever seen. His hair looks like he cut it with a broken bottle. His eyes shine like he swallowed a flare. He’s standing atop an overturned jerrican, and he’s still barely taller than the shortest of Ita’s attackers.
Doesn’t look like he has got a lot going for him, Ita thinks.
But he does have a machete.
The attackers don’t seem to notice; they’ve begun to thaw. They giggle, Ita doesn’t see which one starts, but now they’re all hyenas, cackling in the dust. The tallest boy, he zips up Ita’s backpack and slings it over his shoulders. He laughs as he walks toward where Ita lies. Ita’s eyes are about to close, having upheld their end of the bargain.
But he fights himself to watch the tall boy come slip the shoes off his feet, and to see the incredible thing that happens next.
The miniature madman makes a sound. It cannot be called a scream—it hardly fits the description of any human sound Ita’s ever heard. He waves his machete in the air. When he brings it down, it whacks into his own forearm until blood squirts out in the shape of a rainbow, splattering Ita’s attackers. With the bubbling blood, the madman smears his cheeks, like war paint.
The last thing Ita sees is the blood-smeared kid spring from the jerrican and charge, roaring like a hound let loose from hell.
The last thing Ita hears is the backpack drop in the dirt beside his head. But then his senses are extinguished, replaced by the sound and color of nothingness.
* * *
When Ita comes to, it’s nighttime, the most dangerous time in Kibera. He struggles to cobble together his thoughts, rocks tumbling into a river.
“Good. You not dead.”
Ita looks, and the machete-wielding psychopath is sitting just beside him in the dark.
“Chege,” the psycho says.
It will hurt to speak, Ita imagines. “Ita.” He was right.
“Go back to sleep, Ita. See you tomorrow.”
* * *
In the morning, Ita wishes he was dead. Still might happen, he consoles himself. Everything hurts. Everything.
“Morning,” the psycho says brightly.
Ita wonders if maybe he is a spirit, a spirit guide into the other side. Should he talk to him? Can he ask questions? Like...where is my mother? Is she here? She’s dead, too. She just died two weeks ago—
“Hey, you okay? You eyes rolling back into your bones again. How much longer you expect me to sit here?”
Ita’s ears normalize for a moment. They’re near the tracks, he can hear the trains. So they’re in the landfill. Now Ita can smell it and his stomach turns.
“I’m just kidding. You can sleep. Just don’t die.”
* * *
Sun’s going down again when Ita next wakes up. His mind is clearer. He understands he can die now, if he wants to. Or not. Because he saw what the psycho named Chege was sitting on—the backpack.
“Inside.” Ita isn’t sure if the words came out or not. “Medicine.”
“I saw. Which one?”
“Pill. Orange.”
Ita’s mouth feels orange, stuffed with Kibera dust.
“Got it. Here. What’s it for?”
“Infection.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother. Sick. A long time. I learned—”
“You Kikuyu, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too.”
Ita doesn’t answer.
“It your mother’s fault, then, that Kikuyus not take you in. She go with men? Get money? She got that sickness—”
“Shut up.” Ita rolls up to his elbow, ignores the lightning strikes of pain, blood frothing in his mouth. “You shut up, you—”
“Shhh. Hey. I no judge. Your mother love you so much, she do it for you. That makes it okay.”
Ita sees his mother’s face, a skull painted brown, her trembling bone fingers giving him her necklace, the gold sparrow sparkling in the setting sunlight, her voice, scratched raw, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive me—
“No, it doesn’t,” Ita says and blacks out, back into the in-between.
* * *
Two more days, and Ita doesn’t take any more of the pills. Best to save them. When he finally sits up, Chege nods in approval, and they sit on the field of trash where no ground is visible.
“You live here?”
Chege hears the judgment. “Now you do, too.”
“Why?” Ita asks. He is genuinely curious—why choose to live in a trash heap?
“Because here you won’t run into those guys again. Because here you can sleep, even if you stink like a cockroach.”
The backpack is zipped, sitting between them. Ita opens it up. It’s all there. The books, even the food. He looks at Chege in surprise.
Chege twists away. When he swivels back, he holds out a crooked carrot and a mushy tomato. “Eat these.”
Ita knows he must have been saving them. “How’d you get them?”
Chege shrugs. “I stole them from an old woman.” He pats the machete resting across his knees.
Ita looks at the food in his hands. If he eats it, he will break the promise he made his mother, and himself. The promise that he would try to be good, die if he must, but not die shamed, like her.
“What did you do to the guys that attacked me?”
“They not coming back, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I want to know.”
Chege’s face is blank, placid, cracked dried blood still visible on its skin. “Just eat.”
Ita looks at the tomato. The pang in his stomach tells him he’s starving, his body desperate. He pops the tomato in his mouth. The skin splits and the mush bursts in his throat like rotten flesh. He almost chokes, but gulps it down.
“Why are you helping me?” he asks Chege, and chomps the carrot, so dry and old it’s furry on his tongue.
“I’m not!” Chege huffs. “I’m leaving. I just didn’t think you should die yet.”
Ita looks at Chege’s face, staring straight ahead.
“You smart,” Chege says quietly then. “You read books. There just some things you didn’t know yet.” He picks up a bottle cap and chucks it. “Now you know.”
But Chege doesn’t get up. He doesn’t leave. He sits, huddled over, feet dug in. Anchor to the ship thrashing in a storm.
December 30, 2007, Kibera—Ita
Ita wrings the rag out over the bowl of water and studies his face in the cloudy mirror.
He knew the terrible things Chege was capable of, but to betray him like he did tonight, to do that to Leda...
How could you, Chege?
Hatred pumps to the rhythm of Ita’s blood. His reflection, staring back—the monster in the mirror—a mis-sewn Frankenstein’s creature, everything about him grotesque and misshapen, distorted by the electrifying visions that won’t stop coming. He sees Chege on top of Leda. Sees her white legs in the red dirt, rows of scratches like lions tried to devour her. He sees the look in Chege’s eyes. Guilt. Pure and clear. Guilt and regret bubbling out as Ita lunged at him with his fists. Good. Ita remembers the blood spouting from Chege’s nose. If you don’t die from guilt as you should, I should kill you. You are poison. You take everything that is beautiful—
Now it’s a different memory vying for Ita’s mind. A memory more than a decade in the past, but somehow sharper with time. That look, sick and shamed, twisting across Chege’s face—Ita’s seen it before. That was Chege’s face the day he loomed above Ita as he wrapped his arms tight around a different, trembling, sobbing girl, the smell of fear mixed with the scent of her blood and sweat. I’m sorry, Ita whispered into her hair. I’m so sorry.
Ita covers his face with his hands, trying to blot out the images, but it makes them grow stronger and louder.
He opens his eyes, stares at the monster in the mirror. You see? You knew. You knew Chege would betray you again. What he did to Leda is your fault. You let him get close. Close enough to covet her, to hate her.
Ita remembers how Leda scrambled away in the dirt, her face stained in tears. He remembers her screams. She screamed while the men beat him. Screamed at the world, at fate, sobbing and screaming until she collapsed and pulled Ita’s head into her lap, rocking him until the police dragged her away.
Now she’s gone. And she’s never coming back.
Ita hears a noise outside. His engorged body turns to iron. The sound swells like the roar of a charging animal. It’s a pack of men—tearing through the alley. They stop at the house behind the orphanage. Without the thin metal wall, Ita could touch them. The men rip a door from its hinges. Women scream—
Ita grabs the rifle. He must get to the front door.
Then he hears a noise behind him. Inside. In the courtyard, at the door.
He grips the rifle with both hands and spins around.
As the shouting outside turns violent, fists thudding against skin and bone, the door to the hidden room scrapes open.
Ita aims the rifle, holds his finger on the trigger.
But what appears in the crack of moonlight is Ita’s nightmare memory come to life. Ita’s childhood self, misshapen, a child-sized Frankenstein’s creature come back to haunt him.
The little monster blinks, eyes wide and watery.
Ita lowers the rifle, gasping.
“Jomo.”
The boy’s face is swollen, bruised and taut, as if it will split open. Blood is crusted in his eyelashes, still wet under his nose.
“My God, Jomo, come here.”
Jomo looks like he will take a step, but the roar outside changes again. The women screech, outrage at its highest pitch, until a new sound follows the fists—the whack of machete on bone. The screams become the wail of hopelessness.
As Ita looks upon Jomo’s broken face, he hears the women’s tears rain down on crimes they will never forgive.
“I’m sorry,” Ita whispers.
They stand perfectly still, Ita and Jomo, facing each other, listening to the attackers running off, receding into the merciless night.
Chapter 6
December 11, 2007, Kibera—Leda
HER THIRD DAY in Kibera, Leda woke with a smile curved like a fortune cookie. The blanket Ita had given to her was clutched in her fingers; she wriggled her toes into it. She could already hear them, the children, outside in the orphanage clanking pots and chattering. On the other side of the wall of her little room, she could hear people shuffling past in the alley, a rise and fall of greetings and “good mornings” Leda was surprised to find comforting rather than scary in their proximity.
The buoyancy she felt in her heart didn’t hold for her body, however. Even with the foam beneath her, Leda’s body felt as rigid as her metal bed. For a moment, as she stretched her aching limbs, Leda imagined what she normally awoke to—gentle light through the curtains in Topanga, Amadeus licking her fingers, the first glimpse of her things lined up neatly, then the expanse of the scruffy mountains, the quiet ritual of her morning tea.
But not this morning. Leda opened her eyes. She surveyed the sheet-metal door, its dented ripples and patchwork surface of dirt and paint and rust. She flipped over and looked at the ceiling, which was much the same. A two-foot space surrounded the metal table, her bed, on all sides like a moat. The far wall was the one that connected with the outside world, an effect more like a folding screen than a real barrier. Nothing at all like her house in Topanga, blanketed by trees, or her childhood home facing the sea. She tried to think of the word that would best describe those houses. Not isolated as much as—
Insulated. That was the word.
That was her comfort zone—being alone. But now, as she pictured the Topanga house she loved, the house that had seemed wild and warm compared to mother’s ice-cold mansion, now it too seemed sterile.
Leda turned onto her side again, facing the interior of the orphanage. She replayed scenes from the day before. First, cringing at how she popped out in her blue pajamas when everyone was ready for the day. Then her abashed realization that they probably didn’t own pajamas. Did she look ridiculous or pretentious? Ita had laughed, though not meanly. His eyes never looked meanly at anyone. Stern, maybe, with the children, and with that nasty gangbanger Chege. But even with him, Ita showed a generosity of spirit that surprised her. After growing up with Estella, who emanated distaste, an annoyance, at her presence, Leda found Ita’s kindness unsettling. But warming.
When they’d ventured out into Kibera together, she’d studied him from behind, marveling at how he moved with ease, with purpose, winding through the slum. He was a better guide than Samuel, telling her little flecks of gossip about the neighbors, connecting different locations to stories about the boys. Ntimi wanted to get his haircut here. I had to explain it was only for women. He still wanted to go. Ntimi likes to be around ladies.
She was saddened by Michael’s story, of how the orphanage came to be. All the boys have stories like that, she reminded herself.
Ita’s eyes as he told the story—they filled with a love so pure and rich, Leda had almost felt jealous.
Then she remembered the dark alley. The part of the day she’d been thinking about ever since. Leda closed her eyes to picture it better—how she squeezed past the old man into the darkness, how she lost her footing, bumping into Ita, and them squeezing up against the wall together.
How his eyes filled with desire, with wonder, with appreciation. Leda couldn’t believe how he left his emotions free to jump off his face like that, but she loved it. She’d heard his breath quicken, felt his body stiffen, sensed that he was breathing her in like a sudden perfume, memorizing her for later. And then they’d said it, at the same time, in harmony like an impromptu song...
You never know.
They’d come so close to kissing, Leda could still taste it. She’d felt the hotness of his breath, his hands rising to her sides, seen the tuck of his chin, the flutter of his eyelids.
She got up off the table. No pajamas today. She put on the brown pants from the day before—she’d noticed everyone repeated clothing—but dug a bit for the teal blouse with the ruffled collar, the one that brought out her eyes.
After she swiped her face clean and brushed her hair into a ponytail, Leda went back into the bag for some lip gloss and perfume. Just a light spritz, she thought. Not too much.
With a smile and a near twirl, she stepped from her slippers into sandals. It wasn’t until she put her hand out to the door latch, catching a glimpse of herself in the small mirror, that she remembered something else. Something that Chege said. American rich lady, out to have a little fun.
Leda’s hand recoiled. And hadn’t he looked at Ita when he said it, like it had been Ita who had advertised her that way?
Leda wiped the gloss off her lips.
I’m here for the children, she thought as she swapped the sandals for sneakers. She debated the blouse, hovering over the suitcase, until she caught herself with a this is ridiculous, and stepped outside.
And there they were, waiting.
“Good morning, Leda,” Ita said with a gentlemanly nod of his head.
She started forward, drawn to him, already feeling more relaxed.
“Sleepyhead!” Ntimi shouted with his Cheshire cat grin, his big square teeth ready to chomp on life. He pointed at his head and giggled, thinking the wordplay hilarious.
Leda faltered in her path, self-conscious. Lazy rich lady sleeps through breakfast.
But Ita chuckled and swatted Ntimi on the head, and his laugh was kind. It rolled across the distance to Leda and snagged when he caught her eye.
Ntimi waved Leda closer, impatiently. He had little Walter in his lap, pinning him down—the toddler with the potbelly and enchanting giggle.
Michael’s smile had already faded, the gentle stare resumed. The other two, Thomas and Peter, started in on the bread and Michael, catching it in his peripheral vision, smacked their hands.
Leda smiled. She snuggled in next to Ntimi and rinsed her hands in the bowl of water.
“Where’s Jomo?” she asked, but nobody answered.
Leda ran her eyes over the perimeter of the orphanage. The wood for the bunk beds was there, waiting. The cans of paint were stacked along the walls, too. Leda smiled, remembering how excited the boys were to hear of the plans.
There. Leda spotted Jomo—well, his feet, anyway—peeking out under the sheet in the same little spot he’d hid in before. As if he could feel her watching, the sheet moved aside a tiny crack, and the sunlight found a crescent of Jomo’s face. Leda smiled. Jomo’s glance dove straight down. But Leda kept her eyes on him, let him feel the smile linger. Sure enough, he looked back up and saw her still looking. He tried hard as he could to stop it, but the corners of his lips curled ever so slightly. Then the sheet swung closed.
Like a ghost, Leda thought, his presence wispy and fleeting. A ghost of what? Of the child he could have been?
She chewed on her bread and tried to follow the chatter of the boys. She didn’t get a chance to slurp down much of her tea before the boys were up and scurrying off, Ita on their heels, doling out hurry-ups.
Leda scolded herself for sleeping in. She’d have to get up earlier to maximize her time with them before school.
Mary came out to round up the dishes. “Good morning,” she said quietly. Mary didn’t speak English, so her efforts were all the more touching.
“Good morning, Mary. Thank you for breakfast.”
“So,” Ita said, returning, and Leda’s stomach fluttered. “Today I thought Mary could show you the housework.”
Leda’s stomach sank. But she scolded herself again. About time she made herself useful. Ita probably thought she didn’t know how to clean.
“Of course—” she said, but Ita interrupted with a smile.
“So I can finish the paperwork piling up, and later I can take you to the clinic. Would you like to go with me?”
“Can’t wait,” Leda said. Was it her imagination or did Mary chuckle?
Ita shut himself in his office and left Leda to star with Mary in a comedy skit. The older woman rambled off explanations to which Leda smiled and nodded and said, “I’m sorry I don’t understand a word,” to which Mary smiled and nodded and in Swahili said, Leda imagined, “I’m sorry I don’t understand a word.” Mainly Mary pointed at pots and rags and Leda had no idea if she wanted them cleaned, carried or filled with something.
But by the end of three hours, Leda knew many things. For one, she knew the cooking never stopped. Ever. The breakfast pot got washed and put back on the stove to boil water for washing, then for the lunch stew. After that would come dinner, plus more boiled water for tea. Leda wondered where the water came from. It would be an awful lot of water to carry.
Now, Leda knew that the house had four very important jugs that must always have water in them. Two waist-high jugs in the bathroom area contained water for bucket baths and flushing. In the kitchen, the one on the left was for general cooking and washing. The one on the right was smaller, and Mary made a big fuss over this one. “You, you, you,” she kept saying and pointing at Leda. After a rousing game of charades and bubbling noises, Leda figured out that one was boiled water for the tourist. One peek inside at the swirling sediment and Leda made a mental note to buy more bottled water when she went out with Ita.
Pantomime can’t help but make for laughter, and it wasn’t long before Leda and Mary were fast friends. Mary got into it and it became a game. Leda even mimed her life back in America, drawing air pictures of the mountains and the ocean and the way Amadeus greeted her at the door. Mary watched Leda with amusement and Leda loved to watch her, too, so strong and capable, so sure. This was Leda’s favorite trait to discover in people, ease and calm, and was delighted to study it up close in Mary. Estella was a bundle of nervous tension, anxiety and impatience. Being around her mother was like tiptoeing through a cactus field.
Mary’s fingers wrapped around ladles or cups or piled up the logs for the fire with force and grace. If Leda’s fingers were too slow or the logs were crossed wrong, Mary rearranged them with a “tsk” and preciseness that Leda adored. This is how we wash the boys’ clothes, make them look smart and clean, her strong hands said. This is how we keep the men fed and happy, her smile said. “Ita,” Mary said, and she straightened up her back, pretended to sit up straight in a chair. She spread out imaginary items—a cup of tea to the right, four stacks of paper lined up, just so. She jabbed at an imaginary calculator with a serious look carved into her face. She tapped a pretend pencil against her forehead.
Their combined laughter continued until Ita stuck his head out the door and called, “What’s so funny?” making them laugh all the harder.
A moment later, Ita stepped out of the office entirely. He looked at the two of them with a fresh smile and a warmth Leda was starting to crave like kids crave summer. “Ready?”
The slum outside burst at Leda with clashing colors and sounds and smells. Ita took off at a brisk pace, and Leda scurried to keep up. The paths between houses were so narrow they barely fit two people, especially being divided down the middle by a ditch of wastewater. At times, Leda could stretch out her arms and touch both sides. In other spots, the path was soaked in slime and turned to slippery, splattering mud.
Everywhere, beneath the houses and the stalls and the latrines, was the same red dirt mixed and packed together with every kind of trash: broken glass, plastic bags, rags of clothing, empty lighters, soiled cardboard, food wrappers and bits of wood and metal.
Leda discreetly peeked into some of the homes that were open. Most of them looked to be one room, no more than eight feet by eight feet, filled to the brim with teakettles and buckets and clothes, plus people who jumped when they caught Leda looking. A dozen people slept in one house, it appeared.
Intermittently, the narrow pathways opened up and a tiny store—a duka, Leda reminded herself—would appear. Soft drinks, candy, cigarettes, cooking oil—all were displayed on a stand like a desk.
When they made it out onto a main road, wooden vendor booths lined the street as far as Leda could see, often two deep. Before them, on the ground, other vendors laid out their wares. Vegetables, clothing, electronics, phone cards, hair products, lotion, fried sweets—the assortment was mind-boggling. After a bit, the booths gave way to giant garbage piles that industrious children, goats and chickens hunted through.
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Deborah Cloyed
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart The real world. That’s what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys′ orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn’t expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil.Their love should be enough for one another—it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita’s troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but.In the aftermath of Leda’s rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within