Crossing the Sahara

*

I knew who she was the moment I saw her. A mother and son have never looked more alike. She came up to my collarbone and wore bright green. I cried when we hugged—a hot, desperate type of tear. My brother, still unseen, blended into the chattering pool of purple robes. But I was looking at him, holding him already, in the frame of a woman with ferocious eyes. By the time he approached, I was brimming with light.

*

“Red-headed lizard,” Meanu said. But its head was the color of an orange cream shake. It had a sapphire body and green-ocean tail and was eight or so inches long. I had first seen one in the pile of cinderblocks outside the guesthouse, where laundry was draped over the top eroded layer and long lizards dipped through the crevices. We were in ELWA now, a tiny missionary town fifteen minutes up the coast and anagram for “Eternal Love Winning Africa.” Meanu was raised on the most spectacular beach I’ve ever seen. The sand sloped sharply like a bending fish to a sea that was clear and rough. Waves puckered to reveal slick clusters of sable rock. Over the wall and across the street, tin shacks leaned into each other and skinny chickens squabbled.

“It was paradise,” Meanu said. He scanned the ocean lovingly.

*

A thin man with wisdom-crested wrinkles craned down and whispered in my father’s ear. The congregation was stomping and clapping, singing brilliantly in Kru, which sounded like both water and sparks. Dad beamed at the man and nodded, then turned to me.

“I’ve been asked to preach,” he said. He and the elder, who would translate, stood side by side. My father took a breath. Air particles spun from his skin in dizzying halos.

*

Aretha and I entered the narrow store. The wares—powdered milk, candy, imported bags of chips—were stacked twenty feet high and the cashier had to step on the corners of shelves to retrieve certain items. We bought seven cases of drinks and a jumbo bag of suckers using American cash. Aretha trundled across the street and returned with a bag of onions the size of a child. Then to a larger store for mayonnaise, bread, popcorn kernels to be served in brown paper bags, paint cans of tuna, bottled water, tin foil.

The women at the mission set right to work when we arrived, cooking the tuna and heating pots for the popcorn. When Stewart came, he was wearing fashionably ripped white jeans and a handsome red and yellow shirt. It was his goodbye party, and he spoke to the community about his graduation from high school and his upcoming transition. He was tall now, and proud. His voice had a strength to it that was new. Then the tuna wraps and cans of coke, the squealing children and dancing adults. Kids filtered to the yard in clusters after the meal, and Stewart ventured to his dorm to pack for the next couple of nights in the guesthouse. Ben and I paced the campus under the thick rainy-season sky.

*

The cylinder was on its side in the grass, four feet tall and bright silver. A round opening the size of a manhole peered at the sky. It looked like a physicist from the future had crashed their time machine here, in the yard of a guesthouse in Monrovia, then clambered out and left to find fuel. I jogged up to it and looked inside. There was a broken folding chair, and some gardening tools, a shoe, clutches of leaves, an old rag, and three children.

“Found you!” I yelled.

They squealed and crouched, hoisting themselves through the hole one by one. Each wriggled out on his elbows then scooted down the round sides of the contraption.

I pictured a cluster of American moms watching the fray, telling the kids to not climb into mysterious metal boxes, or even go near them. That they could get hurt during the two-foot fall to the ground, or that snakes might live in the cylinder’s belly. Liberian children possessed a bravery, or perhaps just an absence of fabricated fear, that American ones often lack. Kids in Liberia chased goats and practiced backflips with a joyful relentlessness that might be dampened by caution if they grew up elsewhere.

Shek, the littlest of the three brothers, sprinted to the bushes at the front of the house and started counting. I jogged to the little security room that jutted from the property wall and provided peepholes on all sides. Shek’s dimples deepened as he mumbled his way through the teens, and he peeked through his fingers when approaching twenty. Abu and Morris wedged themselves in an impossibly small space between old mattresses in the tool shed.

Shek shouted “TWENTY!” as loudly as he could and ran in a senseless circle around the yard before focusing his energy on hiding places. He beelined for the security room and cackled when he found me. He bounced back and forth on little bare feet and then barreled toward a grove of palm trees that contained no reasonable hiding places whatsoever.

*

“Are we crossing the Atlantic or the Sahara?” I asked my Dad. He let me have the window seat on the flight from Amsterdam to Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.

“What color is it?”

“Grayish brown. Maybe blue.”

“Probably the Sahara. We should be over Morocco by now.”

My brother Ben and our family friend Meanu, who was a mentor to my brothers Stewart and Solopino, sat behind us. I wondered if Ben was gazing at the dune-waves or watching the screen secured to the back of my headrest. If I had more energy, I’d get his opinion on my ocean-or-desert question.

I realized that my brothers’ post-adoption lives would have commenced with this exact journey in reverse. A nine- and eleven-year-old who had never been on a plane flew from Liberia to North Carolina with a tall white man they didn’t know. My father told me about the delightful flight, how they gasped then chuckled when turbulence bobbed the aircraft.

The colors outside instantly warmed from gray-blue to the toasty brown of a guitar’s back. Charcoal peppered the dunes and crops of tiny buildings crawled from valleys.

“We were wrong,” I told my dad. “We’re crossing the Sahara now.”

*

The mosquito net hung in a graceful knot. I let it fall around the mattress like a delicate skirt, then climbed in through the mesh crevice. It was the first night. The guest house was relatively safe, but the blocks surrounding it were not. I made sure the door was open in case someone came through the window. My knife was by my fist in case someone came through the door. Horror stories echoed through the room in my brain that tells women they won’t be okay. The night was brilliant and swirling. I stared at the mesh curtain until sleep leaned in, then pounced.

*

 We all stared at the birthday cake. It lay between my dad, Stewart, and me on a table in a house in Lancaster, South Carolina. It was April 30, 2014. One day after Stewart’s sixteenth birthday, one day before I would leave the country and not be able to say goodbye on the day he left.

Gray light from outside coated the white icing. I don’t remember if there were candles, and whether or not Stewart blew them out, but the air seemed dingy like that of a smoke-filled bar.

“I’m going to miss you,” I said.

Stewart gazed into the den. He had been living with our Liberian friends for the past week, readying for the journey to his home country. The adults in his life thought he could grow and heal by being in a place he understood. It was unclear how long he would stay. The snapshot of him, slouched at a table beside a pathetic cake, bolted itself into a wall in my brain. Its plaque read: “Worst Birthday Party.” I told him I loved him and he stared straight ahead.

*

The five swings were just crude chains tied into knots. Children operated them by putting one foot in the harsh hold and pushing off with the other. The swing set jutted from a large windmill with the letters “ACFI” painted on the wings in blue. African Christians Fellowship International. The organization reached from this boarding school/orphanage into medicine, education, evangelism, community uplift. Today, children from surrounding homes trickled to the campus for the party. They gathered near the swing-chains and I pictured my brother Solopino as a small child, tearing across the field ringed by teal dormitories. His curly hair and bubbly laugh. How he held the destiny to become a US soldier on a sunny day when America was little more than an idea in technicolor. How his knobby knees would have cut through the dry season light.

*

The reptile rested like a sand dune on the linoleum. It was a lizard, a beautiful pearly thing. A dot of red furled up its side. I wrapped the body in toilet paper and held it at my nose. Intestines spilled from her waist like thread. Her eyes, glazed and black, paused in mine, then her neck swiveled onward. I knew I had stepped on her. She was two inches long. I contemplated setting her gently in the soil out front, but knew that no amount of water or time would push the intestines back in. So I swaddled her in toilet paper entirely, then twisted as hard as I could. My eyes felt hot. When I released, a foot still twitched. I bolted into the room where my father stayed and found pruning shears on a table. I chopped furiously over the small bucket in my bathroom, watching the mummified halves fall.

*

My father moved through the gate that led from the airport to the nighttime parking lot, heaped with two large suitcases. A man dressed in a dark green uniform began to swing the gate shut. The large panel devoured the sight of my dad. There are still people leaving the airport, I thought. I wasn’t the last one. I jolted forward—a liberal verb, considering my luggage—and drove my shoulder against the metal. It swung open slightly and I pushed through. A smattering of people waiting for relatives or vying to carry bags stretched across the parking lot. Streetlights seeped a tired gold. A purple sky was high and sticky, monitoring the balanced smell of earth and rain. Perhaps I had simply imagined the place so often, or perhaps it was pure fatigue, but my shoulders tingled with recognition.

*

It took three days but I finally found the word: underwater. Moving through Liberian days felt like pushing through liquid at the bottom of the sea. We kept a strategically loose schedule; there were few goals. If a van was scheduled to show up at 8, it would show up at 9:15. If a drive was supposed to take an hour, it would involve a pit stop or traffic and take two. The only thing to do is allow it. Breathe out. We will get there. Breathe in. We will get there. Time is a human construct. Efficiency is restrictive. The ceremony will start someday and the rice will cook. Breathe out.

*

“Do you see him?” Ben leaned and pointed into the sea of purple graduation robes.

“No,” I said.

“His face is between the girl with a red streak in her hair and the really tall guy.”

I still basked in the strangeness of hugging Stewart’s birth mother, alternating between feeling heavy and weightless, switching from clay to air. My lungs seemed large and I inhaled deeply.

“I’ll just wait until his name is called.”

We sat in the row of chairs facing the crowd, about ten feet behind the podium. My stomach spun. I had waited for three years to hold my little brother and I wasn’t sure which things had changed.

“Stewart Bridges.”

He pushed through the students in his row and walked up, smiling at us. My skin felt golden. He received his medal and smiled again, then ventured back to his seat.

When the ceremony dissolved into chatter, Stewart pushed his way to the front again. Our dad lurched forward and embraced his son, who was up to his shoulders now.

I waited, I beamed.

When Dad released him, Stewart glided to Ben and me. The tangle we collapsed into was one of relief.

*