Thirty Girls

You see my father in a wheelchair and think maybe he lost his legs in a mine or even from the rebels, but none would be true. When I was five years old, a car fell on him. He was underneath it, making repairs. For a while he was at home, then he got a wheelchair and went back to work. I remember my father standing just once, a time I was on his shoulders. I was high up and scared to hit the doorway as we passed through and he was laughing at me and my worry.

My father does not feel sorry for himself. So if at night when he is home in his chair in the side place in the living room his eyes turn red from drinking this is not so surprising.

When visitors come to Kiryandongo you see how they look or do not look at you. My father does not; my sister Sarah does not stop watching me. If it is your sister you can imagine what she is thinking. I saw her trying to measure if I was wrecked or not. When we were small, people might not tell us one from the other, we have the same shape and face. Looking at her, I have the odd feeling of looking at myself as I was before I was taken.

I ask them about our mother, the ghost hovering there with us. Where did she die? Who was with her? Where was she buried? They told me these things. Did she say anything about me? They said she was worried for me, but believed always I would come home. I thought of my mother’s face, with her wide forehead and chipped front tooth. It was hard to picture her sick. As a nurse, she would have understood everything happening to her. Then I thought how at least I missed seeing this thing. I did not have to watch my mother die.

I was relieved when my family left. I wanted them gone. Then I missed them, too. Two feelings come at once and you feel neither of them.

No one here is at ease. We are all troubled.

The boys especially are fighting many times, but the girls are mean also. I saw Holly stomp a chicken yesterday. And Janet, before she would not have hit her baby. When she saw me looking at her as the baby cried she said, What is this compared to what the rebels did?

Nurse Nancy says we are coming out of it. The counselors have us think that after a while you will stop coming out of it and be as you were, yourself again. I think I will be coming out of it forever.

There is a person inside me who has been very bad and does not deserve a chance at life. She has done things no good person would do. I might argue against that and say, No, I am Esther. I am a good person, as good as I can be. But another voice is stronger and that voice says it would be better if I were dead.

They tell us, You are back and things will get better. Again and again they say, You are the fortunate ones. We say it ourselves. It might be so, but—

Holly was made to beat a boy when the rebels learned she liked him. Another girl here found her son’s leg up in a tree. No wonder you want sometimes to die. Sometimes your spirit is so heavy you say to it, I cannot carry you around.

Nurse Nancy sits with us talking. She is a wiry woman in glasses who lets her long hair fly around, more concerned with looking after us. She asks us about Kony. What did we think of Kony? Maybe we are mad at him. Some nod. Some girls say he is a bad man. I do not answer. I do not say, I’m not mad at Kony. I do not see Kony. To me Kony is nothing.

Kony took my life away from me, Carol says. She is a St. Mary’s girl who has been here a long time. Her parents still have not been found. Below her eyebrows looks filled with sandbags, pressing down her eyes.

Yes, but you have survived, Nurse Nancy says.

I have not, she says. I have not survived.

We have the future waiting for us, Janet says. See, up ahead? There we are. Who knows what is in store.

The future is blackness, Carol says.

Janet says, Do not worry. God will provide.

Christine, one of our counselors, tells us that journalists may come today. Christine was an abducted girl herself, ten years ago. She is about twenty-five and has a square head and round shoulders and wears pearls in her ears. Christine thought she might become a doctor and went to Kampala to go to school, but it did not work out so well, and she came back here and instead became a counselor. The journalists are interested in hearing of our experience, she says. No one has to speak who doesn’t want to. Sometimes it can help you. Recently there was a woman from Germany with a tape recorder.

Holly says she would not dare speak in front of such knowledgeable people, and Holly was even at the front of her grade.

Who wants to talk about what happened out there? I say. What good will it do?

I will speak, Janet says. Emily says she also will speak. Emily does not stop talking anyway, though she does not always say the truth.

They want to spread our story, Christine says in her mild voice. It will help all the children.

We think about this. The journalists do not come.

After you return, even if the world looks as you left it, you are changed and the world seems changed also. It is new. After my father’s accident, my mother said my father did not change. He stayed the same in his new world.

We must find forgiveness, Christine says. We must forgive ourselves.

I am looking for forgiveness, but it is hard to find. What does it feel like?

The fear that I may die any moment is still here. Now and then the fear drains a little from me, but in its place is not a better feeling. There is a hard blankness.

4 / Taking Off (#ulink_f47f425d-f9ad-5b53-9730-29e1cdf1bd9d)

THEY STUMBLED IN the doorway, soaked through. Quiet music played. Jane saw some figures in the dimness past burnt-down candles at the end of the table crowded with bottles and glasses. She felt her way down the hall and found her bag in the dark corner of a room where a couple was laughing in the dark. Returning she bumped into another sleeping body. In the bathroom she peeled off her wet dress and put on underwear and a strapped top. Back in the living room she left the wet dress draped over driftwood bookshelves. Harry emerged behind her carrying bedspreads and kicking cushions to a place on the floor of the living room. Other people were leaning against the wall, some sleeping, some murmuring in a far corner. Harry sat back against a cushion. Come here, he said, his arm straight out, and in the dimness she saw him looking past her, as if a direct look would be too intimate. She sidled against him and put the dry skin of Harry’s chest against her cheek and wet hair. He lay still. She was not tired and far from falling asleep. She lay spellbound. People were whispering; another lantern went out, darkening the stone wall.

Some time later she woke, and everything was black and silent and still. The face near her was dark gray, as if in a dream. She touched it and went to kiss the mouth and hands came up on either side of her head, keeping her there. She kissed him, hardly breathing, making no sound. Then he stopped.

Get up, he whispered. He stood and pulled her off the floor, somehow keeping the Indian bedspread wrapped around her shoulders. He steered her through the dark on the soft straw rugs, knocking her into a stool, toward the darker hall, keeping her shoulders in front of him. They came to the door of the bathroom and pushed in. The walls, she’d noticed before, were a rough barn wood stained brown but she could see none of it now.

Too many people around, he said. Keeping her wrapped he lowered her to the floor. Now let me see Jane, he said in the pitch black.

Her breath felt chopped into pieces. Oh, came out—oh. It kept being chopped.

Shhhh, he said, making no other sound. Did he even breathe? His hands in the dark were moving her around, traveling over her. Noises stayed in the back of her throat. That’s …, she began. Where were the words?

What? he said.

That’s. It’s. Oh.

But, she wasn’t expressing it in the least. Then her breath took over and she went to where words didn’t go or matter anyway.

Shhhh, he said.

His hands made her feel small and pliable, and all her nerves were lit. He shifted around and his weight came down on her.

Oh God, she said rather loud. He covered her mouth.

He was there close, but too dark to see. She thought of the rough wood on the walls. She felt his face sort of become her face. She heard the river nearby foaming down the hill and saw the line of the mangled trees she’d seen earlier in silhouette against a pale yellow sky. Then she felt she was in a green forest. Then she was on a porch. It was not a porch she knew, it was a porch in America. There were children playing down the block under leafy branches and it was summer somewhere in the South with beds and white chenille bedspreads and old light fixtures on the walls and railings twisting up the stairs inside. A man and a woman were having sex in the hallway. Then it was Jane having sex with a man in the hallway. Wisteria vines filled the screen door and the door banged shut. Another man was getting out of a truck; he was partly Harry. He came over the threshold wearing boots and pulled open her shirt. No, he came into a side room and threw her on a table and pushed her legs apart ignoring her face. He’d seen her earlier in town, he said. His face gazing at her breasts had only one thing in mind driving him. He shifts her to the side and lifts her against the door, holding her underneath, having to crouch and bend his knees. I’ve been thinking of this all day, Harry said with his legs pressing her knees out and her back against the rough wood, pinning her, legs dangling, toes just touching the floor. One foot has a sandal on, a strap tight on her ankle. He held her from beneath, lifting her against him, pressing his hips so she’s on the verge of collapsing but is thrown back, her wrists braced against the frame. He grabs her ass and her feet slip off the floor into the air, with one hand flailing to get a grip on the sink anchoring her, inside the sound of their breathing, and she feels in a sort of tornado as if she’s going up a hill powered by wind with gusts rolling dust around and still going up farther and not quite at the top, reaching a crest. Everything starts to shake and unravel with the earth splitting at her feet and the road cracking sideways and air erupting like glass shattering. Her legs flung wide sent off needles of light or song and she had the feeling of falling at the same time rising, of going out and out as she’s gathering in, feeling her arms and legs dissolve into a bright bank of dust and finally stillness.

I’m old, you know.

Which means?

I don’t know, just I am.

I happen to like old.

Right.

The older the better, he said.

Okay, so—what—you’re perfect?

More perfect than you know.