Collision (28 page)

I wanted more time with her because we’d hardly had any time alone since I’d arrived. Either we were with another team member or Griffin was hovering nearby. The only time we were alone was on our daily jogs first thing in the morning.

“You run by yourself every morning?” I asked as we slowed to a walk on our last morning in Gulu.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you ever afraid of someone grabbing you or being hurt?”

“Not really. I don’t think about it. And I know which areas of town to avoid.”

I stopped walking and gripped her elbow to pull her to a stop. “Does anything scare you?”

She laughed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve almost crapped my pants about twenty times since I’ve been here. I’ve been scared out of my mind, at the hospital and the prison and that night when we spent the night in the camp. But you, I’ve never seen you scared of anything.”

“I’m frightened of a lot of things, Cabot.”

“What? Can you tell me one thing so I won’t feel like such a pansy?”

“You have nothing to feel like a pansy about. I’ve been doing this for more than ten years. It’s all second nature. I’ve seen it all and done it all, so there’s simply nothing left here to frighten me. And I suppose I believe that if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go. What can be done about that?”

“But still…”

“I’m frightened of things, just not the types of things that most people are frightened of.”

“Like?”

She didn’t respond at first. She just looked at me, almost like she was searching my face to see if she could trust me enough to tell me what she was thinking.

“You can tell me.”

“I would never admit this to anyone else. It’s sort of a major thing in Christianity, and I feel shameful for saying it.”

“What?”

“Hope,” she finally said. “I’m afraid of hoping.”

“Hoping for what?”

“More. Better. A happy life. I don’t know. A lot of things. I’m afraid if I hope for something and it doesn’t come about, then it will rock my faith, and sometimes, my faith is all I have to sustain me. If I lose that, I’ve lost everything.”

Tears filled her eyes, which embarrassed her and caused her to look down at her feet.

“I want to hope for more for the children, but I know that their chances of a long and happy life are very small. And I’d like to hope that people will get to go back to their villages and they’ll never have to live in camps again, but I also know that that might never happen. And I want to hope that war will never happen in my village again. But I know there’s a very good chance it will.”

“What about yourself? What do you hope for yourself?”

“Myself?” she asked, looking up at me. Her eyes were full of confusion.

“Yeah. You always talk about everyone else. What about you?”

“I don’t hope for anything for myself.”

“Why?”

“It’s how I was raised.”

“I can’t believe your parents wouldn’t want you to hope.”

“Not by these par—” She stopped herself and shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easier to dream for others than for yourself. That’s all. Their needs are greater than mine.”

“Everyone needs something.”

“And a lot of people need more than me.”

“But—”

“I hope to know you for the rest of my life,” she said suddenly. “That’s a very truthful hope of mine. And I hope that you’ve fallen in love with Uganda and you’ll come back one day.”

“I’ve definitely fallen in love with Uganda, and I’ll be back again and again. I can promise you that. So see. It’s not so scary to hope after all.”

“Do you really think so, that you’ll be back? So many say that before they leave, and we never see them again.”

“I’m not those people, Kei. I’ll be back here. I promise.”

“I’ll choose to believe that. My first hope, Cabot. I’m basing my first hope on you, so I hope you won’t let me down.”

“I won’t.”

“Actually, that’s two hopes.”

“I still won’t let you down.”

She peeked up at me and smiled a small, joy-filled smile.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“On my birthday, when I blew out my French toast birthday candles, I wished that I would be spending my next birthday with you.”

“You what?”

“I did. I sort of had a feeling we would be close friends, and I hoped or wished to spend next summer exactly where I spent the last one.”

“Suppose it doesn’t come true now that you’ve said it out loud.”

“I fully intend for it to come true, Kei. You can hope for that too if you want.”

“That would be three hopes resting on you.”

“Rest as many on me as you want. I won’t let you down.”

We walked slowly down the road, and while there were hundreds of people around, I felt like we were completely alone, just us, like in Asheville, walking back to the house after our runs.

“What will you miss the most after we leave tomorrow?” she asked.

“Well, if you weren’t going with me, I’d say you.”

“But I am going with you.”

“Right. So I guess my answer is the rest of the team. I’ll miss them. And the kids. I’ll miss them a lot, especially Innocent.”

“I feel like she’s formed an attachment to you.”

“And me to her, no doubt.”

“You’ve been such a good sport about it all. You jumped right in and didn’t hold back. It’s splendid.”

“I didn’t want to miss out on any of it. Now that I’ve been here and experienced everything, I don’t know how to go back and have everything go back to normal. I don’t think I want it to.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“It’s definitely a lot to process.”

“Yes.”

“So, two weeks, huh?”

“Two weeks what?”

“That’s how long you’ll be back in the States.”

“Yes.”

“And then not back to Asheville until the summer?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly? I thought you said that you visit every summer.”

“I normally do. But—”

“Kei,” Daniel yelled at us from down the street, “we’re starting. You’re late!”

We sprinted back to the mission house and made it just in time for the first song of the morning.

C H A P T E R

24

If ever I wanted to let my mind imagine the most awkward dinner one could ever be unfortunate enough to partake in, I wouldn’t need to try. I was experiencing the event live and in person, and it was as bad as I could have imagined.

I was a day away from leaving Uganda and was sitting beside Kei at the dinner table. Griffin sat across from us and shot dirty looks our direction for the majority of the night. Her mom and dad sat at the ends of the table and kept curiously inspecting both sides of the table as Gregory, Jasmine, Otis, and Janet all tried to make small talk and ignore the extremely thick hostility in the air.

“Kei, are you still planning on taking part in the missions program?” Gregory asked.

Griffin sat up and finally joined in the conversation. “I told her she’s wasting her time going through that program. If she’s going to spend time on something, she should go to nursing school.”

“Nursing school?” I asked.

“There’s never enough medical help in the field. It would be a valuable asset to our team if we could have a full-time nurse on hand.”

“Valuable asset to your team?” I looked over at her. “Do you want to be a nurse?”

“Not really,” she whispered. “But like Griffin said, it would help out the team a lot. If I decide to go for missions training in a few months, that program—”

“Or nursing school,” Griffin snapped.

She ignored him. “Lasts a year, so I won’t need to think about it for a while.”

“Where would you go for training?” Jasmine asked.

“All over the world, places where missions work is done: India, Haiti, various places in Africa, a lot of different locations.”

“A year?” I moaned, suddenly sick to my stomach.

“Yes.”

“And you chose this?” I asked.

“Well…my dad and I did…together.”

“Yes. I feel like it’s great training for her,” her dad said.

“She’s been living in Africa for years. What more training does the child need?” her mom asked suddenly.

“So you and I agree,” Griffin said.

“No,” her mom said. “I think your nursing idea is what you want, not what Kei wants.”

Griffin’s eyes darted to me, and he scowled.

“We’ve heard what your father wants and what Griffin wants. What do you want to do, Kei?” Gregory asked.

She looked down at her plate and stuck her fork into a potato.

“She’s of marrying age,” Griffin added, which made me choke on my tea.

“Marrying age?” I said after wiping my mouth. “You’re twenty-one years old.”

“Like I said, marrying age,” Griffin snapped.

Kei turned to me. “Life expectancy in third-world countries is no more than in the thirty or forty-year range. People marry at twenty or younger all the time.”

“But you’re American.”

“I’m not saying that I’m going to die at thirty or forty years old. I’m just saying that the cultures that we’re around tend to influence our traditions as well. Most missionaries are married at a young age because they take off and are gone for years at a time.”

“Marrying Griffin?” I muttered.

“Soon,” Griffin hurled across the table. “You don’t have to understand it to make it so, Cabot. You don’t understand our lives, and you don’t have to.”

“I’ve come to understand your lives pretty well.”

“You’ve been here less than a month, and you’re about to go back to your life in the spotlight at home. Trust me. You don’t understand anything.”

My body went rigid as Griffin continued.

“Life here is more than coming for a visit and feeling sorry for the people in the villages. It’s about caring about them and letting them care for you. It’s about pouring yourself into their lives and doing it for an extended period of time.”

“I get that,” I said.

“They see people like you all the time. You come, feel better about yourself for doing it, and then never come back again. Trust me. You’ll go back to your steak-and-lobster dinners and your fancy clothes, and you won’t give these people or Kei another thought.”

“You don’t know me,” I blurted. “And you certainly don’t have a clue about what I feel for Kei.”

Griffin dropped his fork and leaned forward. “What you feel for her? And what is that exactly?”

Kei’s dad cleared his throat. “Great dinner, Jasmine. The ladies outdid themselves.”

I ignored him. “I care about her.”

“If you care about her, then you’ll leave her be and stop confusing her,” Griffin said.

“Am I confusing you?” I asked, looking at her.

“You aren’t confusing me, although I might be confusing myself.”

“Which is exactly why you need to go to the missions training,” her dad said. “It’ll help you figure things out.”

“What if I don’t want to go to mission’s training or nursing school? What if I can find another way to do missions?”

“Where?” Griffin asked.

Kei shrugged.

“In the States?” he questioned.

“There are people who need help in the States too, you know,” I said.

“Why would you want her in the States, Cabot?” Griffin asked. “It isn’t like you spend any time there. I looked you up online. You’ve lived quite a life. You’re off doing stuff all the time. And really, it isn’t like she’s going to be someone you would want on your arm at all of your events.”

“I’d be happy to have her on my arm.”

“And in your bed.”

“Griffin!” Kei shouted.

He ignored her. “How many women who were on your arm didn’t end up in your bed?”

I looked down at my plate.

“That’s what I thought.” Griffin picked his fork back up and jammed it into a potato. “Kei belongs right here with the people who know and understand her. This is where she’ll stay.”

Everyone at the table was silent as Griffin went on.

“We aren’t ignorant missionaries who don’t understand the real world, Cabot. We aren’t hiding out here so we can shelter ourselves from the harsh realities of the States. You try living this life for an extended period of time and then see how naive to the things of the world you are or aren’t.”

“I don’t think you’re naive.”

“But you hope Kei is. You hope she doesn’t understand how most American men act or think.”

I looked back at Griffin, anger filling my body. “Trust me. I know that Kei isn’t ignorant to the harsh realities of American men, or men in general for that matter.”