STUCK.
“Sivie, you know you can tell me anything, right?” My mother stands at the wooden door that separates the bedroom from the kitchen with her arms folded beneath her bosom, and her eyes looking directly into mine. I notice the dark circles around her eyes sticking out from under poorly applied concealer. Disgust settles inside me comfortably and I embrace it. Why? Why does she try to hide it? To what end?
It’s raining heavily outside. It has been for hours, and I know that she is terrified. She takes slow, steady steps in the direction of the only window in our miniature bedroom and stares at the rising waters on the street. She leans in to take a closer look at the canal across the street and an exasperated sigh escapes her trembling lips. I don’t look, but I know that the canal has become almost invisible and the entire street is flooded. Her eyes are wide with fear and anxiety and her fingers are twitching, but her lips remain a thin line.
Once in a while the distant sound of a car horn or the voice of a woman shrieking disturbs the steady rhythm of the unrelenting rain. As I feel the tears flowing down my cheeks, I remember a story I heard when I was little about an entire family that was wiped out by a flood, and my heart stops for the umpteenth time today. It is told that their pet cats alone survived because they sailed away on a tiny raft. Or was it an ark?
“Sivie. Tell me what is wrong.” My mother’s voice cuts short my train of thoughts. Her eyes hold mine stubbornly, reluctant to look away from the sobbing mess I’d become. I stare back at her for a while, then look away. When your heart feels like it might burst from accommodating too many emotions, it is a little difficult to tell another what the problem is. It is even more difficult when that person is responsible for all those raging emotions.
I want to be able to say what I feel, but I can’t because the feelings are tearing at each other like a handful of starving vultures fighting over a cadaver. I am fifteen, but I don’t feel it. Sometimes I feel twenty-five, and other times I want to feel five. I don’t know how to be fifteen. I am supposed to be full of excitement and curiosity about my changing body, but I just feel so dumb and it is like nothing works the way I want it to.
I don’t know how to handle the fact that I must not let Daniel touch me, no matter how much I want him to. Or that I am my family’s only hope of a better tomorrow. I want to be young and reckless, but my spirit is tired from getting consistently beaten down by the need to be mindful. I really thought I’d figured out who I want to be; a tough ‘surviving life’s struggles made me who I am’ type of woman. But every day in this ramshackle apartment it gets tougher. Every day, it feels like I am so unprepared for whatever comes and I end up feeling disappointed in myself.
The voice in my head is loud and clear, but only I can hear it. When I feel considerably triggered, I fantasise about the day another ear would catch wind of my inner thoughts. Oftentimes it does seem like that fantasy might become a reality. The words draw energy from the depth of my heart where my strongest emotions lie and surge forward, ready to burst out from my lips. And then at the very last second, my heart stops and the moment passes, and the words fall back down. I feel silly crying like this in front of my mother, so I start to dab at my eyes with the edge of my sleeve. She covers the little distance between us and reaches out to wipe a tear off my face. Her touch is gentle. I look up and hold her gaze for a while, then look away again. “I’m okay mom, nothing happened.”
“Why are you crying?”
I pause and look directly at her. I want to scream and say, ‘look around! What is there to not cry about?’ I want to point at the weather-beaten furniture we had hurriedly placed atop one another on the kitchen table in anticipation of the impending flood. I want to point at the clothes we had tied up in nylon sacks, the mattress we had rolled up and bound with belts. I want to ask her to look at herself. But the words remain buried in my stomach. I turn my gaze away, feeling embarrassed about my own inability to speak.
“Sivie everything will go back to normal after the rainy season ends.”
I feel a little comfort that she understands that our situation is far from normal, so I manage a small smile. Smiling back at me, she tucks a stray lock behind her ears. I see how hard all her facial muscles are working to keep from disclosing her sadness, but her eyes betray them. The stubborn lock falls again and she lets out a frustrated grunt. She yanks off her hairnet and her long black dreadlocks fall freely like rain. My mother is dada. She has naturally thick strands of beautiful locks that should make her look like the female Bob Marley. But hers are smelly and disorganised. Definitely not the kind you see celebrities show off on television. I wish she would cut them off.
She catches me staring disapprovingly at her locks and a wry smile appears on her lips. “You want me to cut my hair, abi? Don’t you know it is forbidden in — ?” “By who? Who forbade it?” My snappy tone surprises even me. I am tired. Tired of crying. Tired of mourning the loss of my substandard wardrobe. Tired of thinking about how much the entire house smells like poverty and suffering. Tired of feeling alone. “These locks represent history.” She says softly. Her eyes speak volumes about her years of grief, her struggles, her loneliness, her unshed tears. I can see through her eyes that her spirit is broken, her heart is bleeding, and her mind is begging to be saved. But her lips remain a thin line. Unmoving. She is hurting too, but she can’t will herself to talk about it.
“What history, mom? You used to always cut them off. You never liked them. Only dad did.”
“Shut your mouth.”
I know immediately that I have struck a nerve. The voice in my head begins to sing the tune of regret. After hair extensions, the other thing my mother forbids is any conversation about my father. I observe her demeanour with a mixture of fright and intrigue. The speed with which her almost teary eyes transmogrify into shiny dark vessels of anger shocks me.
When news of my father’s arrest reached my mother’s ears seven years ago, her entire world collapsed, and the pieces were scattered in every direction. They said the US immigration officers had found hard drugs in his baggage. I was only eight at the time, and had difficulty comprehending the entire situation, but as time went on understanding dawned on me and with each year that passed without his return, a part of my soul shrivelled and dried up. My mother did not pursue the matter. She never even tried to find out what really happened. I know that she wishes now that she did because when she caresses their wedding picture, she whispers apologies to him and cries until her voice begins to crack.
Whenever I catch her whispering to that image of them smiling brightly with their arms wrapped around each other, my mind reverts to the year of the incident and I begin to wonder. If hypocrisy had a face, it would be my mother’s. I recall that whenever anyone asked, she said with precision that she was not aware my father sold hard drugs; she did not understand how come he was caught carrying hard drugs, my father was a good man and he must have been framed. I only heard snatches of the story of his arrest from the gossip flying around on the streets. I tried to talk to her about it, I did. But she became distant each time any mention of my father slipped into any of our monotonic conversations, so I stopped trying. I knew the truth anyway. I’d heard the indecipherable whispers the night before he left for the United States. I’d heard her convince him that it was our only way out of a life a penury.
I understand that she lied to people because she was scared. She was trying to protect herself, to protect us. Yet, an infinitesimal segment of my heart harbours a measure of hatred for her because she never tried. It saddens me that I cannot let her know this, because for a lonely fifteen-year-old girl, a half mom is better than no mom.
I watch as she struggles to fit her dreads into her hair net once more. Her bony fingers shake slightly. They say a person ages faster when they spend too much time worrying, so I believe that explains the many wrinkles on her forehead and on both sides of her mouth.
She finally succeeds in tucking her hair in and looks at me pointedly, as if to say, “you ungrateful brat. I have suffered so much because of you, yet you disrespect me.” But her lips remain a thin line.
The flood has come. As expected, it is an indignant guest. It takes over every inch of my home, leaving my mother and I trapped in a single spot. It does not give us the privilege of a nice view. We are stuck with the images of objects of indescribable shapes and sizes, floating or sinking. We are sitting like frightened birds on very high stools, which my mother had the local carpenter design years ago, specially for this kind of occasion. Our feet are in the water, and once in a while when I feel something crawling on my skin, I yank my legs up in alarm.
My mother’s eyes have not left the water since it began pouring in through the crack under the front door and through the broken louvres. A mere onlooker might assume that she is keenly observing the mixture of rain water, mud and debris, wondering how many microorganisms are present in it and how many of them could cause harm to our skins. But I am not an onlooker. I am my mother’s daughter. I know that the blank look in her eyes is just that: blank. I know that her mind has wandered back to the years before the arrest. To the days when she and my father walked hand in hand down the street to Mama Glo’s beer parlour and enjoyed a fine meal of catfish pepper soup. They chatted with all the other customers, locals like themselves, overworked and underpaid civil servants seeking a few hours of light-hearted banter as a healing ointment for their tired souls. They would not return until the moon was high up in the sky and the crickets had begun to sing their anthem in unison. Those were happy times.
I know that for the next few hours she will not speak a word. Her mind will remain trapped, her brain frozen. Her body will stay still until the sky stops crying at last and begins to smile on all of us with the sun.
I watch as her lips begin to form a distant smile, and immediately, realisation hits me. I don’t want to be five or fifteen. I want to be twenty-five. I want to be able to leave and never return, because this isn’t my home anymore. It hasn’t been for years.
I can see it now. I don’t want to, but I see it. When those officers took away my father, they didn’t know it, but they took my mother as well.
