Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 13

3

THE SUNDAY MORNING before my college graduation, the phone on the floor by my futon startled me awake.

“Julia?” said my grandmother Rose, my father’s mother. She said my name as though she might’ve called someone else by accident. As though if she had, it would have been their fault.

“Hi, Grandma,” I said, trying to sound awake, alert. Alone. She called me most Sundays. I was mostly at the library. Mostly let the answering machine pick up.

“What’s new?” she asked. The question was code for Do you have a boyfriend yet? I sat up in bed, placed my feet on the cold linoleum floor. Felt a door open somewhere dark.

“Actually, Grandma,” I said, “I have news.” I turned to Ngoni and smiled, hoping to communicate to him to keep quiet, stay still.

“Oh?” The hope was in her voice now.

“I’ve met someone.”

“What’s his name?”

“Well,” I said, wondering if she was wearing her hearing aid, hoping not to have to shout, “let me spell it for you.”

“What?”

“Let me spell it, you won’t recognize it if I just say it.” I took a breath. “He’s from Zimbabwe.”

There was a silence then. In it, I knew the folly in that hope I’d held like a shard of glass.

“Colored?” Defeat thick in her voice.

“Yes, Grandma,” I said, shifting on the bed so even my profile was hidden from Ngoni. “He’s black.” I wished I’d said something radical, I wished I’d communicated to my grandmother that my loyalty was to this man next to me in bed. I wished I’d challenged her language, ideas, assumptions. But I didn’t know how to. I only knew how to change the subject, so we started making plans for the upcoming weekend—one I was now dreading.

And when she arrived for it, with my aunt and uncle and their children, they all seemed foreign and I couldn’t place why any of them had come to my graduation when I hadn’t seen most of them in years. I couldn’t place how I was meant to treat them. My mother and sister, Ngoni and I, stood in a clutch by their car as they gathered their things and got out. Cold embraces, quiet hugs.

“This is Ngoni,” I said to everyone, reaching out my arm to draw him near.

He was elegant and reserved, extending his hand to Rose first, as the eldest. “It is so nice to meet you, Mrs. Wolk,” he said.

She turned her face away. Offered him her left hand, in which she clutched a Kleenex. He shook it as though this were the common way, but when he turned and looked back at me, I saw a shadow cross his forehead. I took his hand in both of mine, as though I could rinse it clean of her touch.

“I’m not surprised,” my mother said after dinner, as we watched them drive away. “The black woman who cleaned her house was forty years old if she was a day,” my mother said, “but Rose called her the girl.”

I held Ngoni’s hand but couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t know how this information would settle on his shoulders, if he would be able to join a family with people like that in it. By now I very much wanted him to join my family.

As we lay on my futon late that night, I held his face and apologized. For Rose. For my inability to confront her. For my inability to know what he felt and to help him through it.

“Your grandmother is from a different time,” he said to me. “She’ll come around.”

I nodded at Ngoni, smiled a little. But I wasn’t so sure she would.

* * *

THAT SUMMER I rented a small apartment deep in the woods, bought a frame for the futon and a used dining room table, pots and pans, a few mismatched plates and glasses, and borrowed the old red couch from my mom. It felt like playing house, but I was determined to make it a home. Determined to make it Ngoni’s home for his final semester in the U.S. before he returned to Zimbabwe forever. I’d found a job in the college admissions office so I could stay close.

One evening I sat on the couch staring at my hands. Wishing time would stop, wishing this warm night would last forever. Wishing Ngoni would never leave. I’d waited all my life to find my person. I didn’t want him ever to leave.

Ngoni came over and held out his hand, leading me to the window. “Look,” he said. “Look outside.”

“What? I don’t see anything.”

“Look into the woods.”

“I am.”

“Look harder.”

Then I saw her. In the woods through which we’d crashed an hour before, a small brown deer blended in with the trees. She was standing in the light from the sinking sun, and her white tail caught it. She was not ten feet from me, and yet she was a wild thing. I watched her ears twitch and her head turn as though she knew I saw her. She looked at me and I stood very still and for just one moment closed my eyes. I was playing the game I played as a child—if I don’t move a single muscle and close my eyes and can’t see you, you can’t see me either. If you’re peering into our car windows on the highway as you pass, or sitting next to me on the worn red couch after my father’s funeral, or standing before me with a book in your hands trying to teach me to read, you cannot see me. I am not here.

When I opened my eyes and let them adjust to the light, the deer had gone back to her meal. I noticed the fading white spots on her back—she was a baby. Then I saw the rest of her family and started to count in my head.

“Eleven,” Ngoni whispered. He had seen all of the deer from the beginning. He pointed with his eyes to the buck, larger again by half than the baby. His antlers stood on his head like tree branches that grew from velvet fur, and I understood why I hadn’t seen him before. He was at the edge of the group, alternately bending down to chew the blades of grass marking the spot where lawn turned to wilderness and looking up to keep watch. His whole body was alert, even when he ate. Several does stood behind him, their tails flicking as they chewed.

I thought of asking Ngoni if that’s what fathers do—stay always alert to the dangers—but my throat hurt the way it hurt at my father’s funeral, and I was scared to speak the way I was always scared to speak when I was little. I hoped Ngoni didn’t see the tears on my cheeks, and I was almost glad when the spell was broken and something startled them and they ran away in different directions. But the baby was the last one to leave, slower than the rest, and I was sure she went the wrong way.