Laugh with the Moon (20 page)

After seven days in the hospital, when I finally do get back home, I run to the veranda and find Fred burrowed in the corner of the puffy green chair. As soon as Fred sees me, she flaps her wings. I plop down and she flies onto my lap. “I missed you so much,” I whisper, and nuzzle my cheek
into her silky feathers. I never thought a chicken could hold her own in a conversation, but Fred starts squawking up a storm. When she finishes catching me up on her life, she prances across the floor and settles in the corner, where I know she’s laying an egg for me.

“I’ll be back to check on you,” I say. Then I go into my bedroom. The scarves draping my dresser look so happy and colorful, like a little rainbow right in my room. I lift the netting and climb onto the mattress. It’s still thin, but it’s my bed and it feels good, so I lie there and stare at the mosquito netting around me. Then I think and think and think about what happened and what I can say to Memory, since no hug, no kind words, nothing at all can vaccinate her from the pain of losing her brother. But maybe if I tell her about my mom, she won’t feel so alone. I wonder if her mother liked to laugh like mine, or if her father told bad jokes.

I’m in the middle of praying that Memory will speak to me again when I hear Mrs. Bwanali’s booming voice. “My girl come home!” I heave myself out of bed. We meet up in the living room and she swallows me in a huge hug. “My girl, my girl,” she says, and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. “You look healthy like a water buffalo!” She throws her head back and laughs and laughs and laughs. She takes my hand and pulls me into the kitchen, where a chocolate cake is sitting on the table. “Dr. Heath special recipe,” she says. “I make to fatten your belly after illness. To turn you strong.”

If cake can make me strong, I’m all for it!
“Zikomo kwambiri,”
I croak. Then I throw my arms around Mrs.
Bwanali and hug her as tightly as I can, which isn’t much, since my arms are about as muscley as two strands of thread.

Mrs. Bwanali sits down for cake and tea with Dad and me. “Very yummy!” she says after the first bite.

“Who taught you that word?” I ask, teasing.

“My girl, Clare, of course,” she says, and smiles. “Now tell me the scary story. What happen to you?”

So I tell her all about how I woke up in the hospital and heard the sad news about Innocent, how my heart broke, and how I couldn’t even concentrate enough to draw. I tell her how I used the oxygen concentrator five times every day, and how Dad stayed at my side almost the whole time. While I’m telling my scary story, Mrs. Bwanali helps herself to another piece of her cake. And when she helps herself to a third, it’s all Dad and I can do not to burst into giggles.

“So, what about you?” I ask. “What’s been happening here?”

Mrs. Bwanali puts her hands behind her head. Then she gives me a behavior report on Fred, who was not excellent or even satisfactory. “I try to care for this
nkhuku
Fred while you are away and ill,” she says. “But this chicken look at me like this.” Mrs. Bwanali cocks her head to the side and scowls. “I tell Fred, ‘Clare is in hospital. We must pray together.’ And we do. We shut eyes and pray. This chicken only give one egg in whole week.”

While Mrs. Bwanali complains about Fred, I finally get a chance to eat her cake. It really is delicious!

“This chicken scratch up the furniture and go to the ladies’ right on the veranda floor even after I put her in
the box.” Mrs. Bwanali shakes her head like she still can’t believe how bad Fred was. “This chicken Fred was so mad and sad without her friend Clare. This chicken need her own pit latrine! It is good you come home, Clare, because me and this chicken—we cannot survive long in same house without you.”

After cake and tea, Mrs. Bwanali leaves for the market and Dad drives me to Mkumba village, where I give Memory’s grandmother a hug and tell her how terribly sorry I am. Then I walk in the plum-colored dusk down to the river, where Memory is washing the dinner dishes.

When Memory sees me, she picks up a dirty pot and hands it over. I squat beside her on the riverbank, take a rag from a bucket, and scrub, scrub, scrub, harder and harder, until I work up the guts.

“Do you hate me?” I finally ask.

“Hate you?” Memory stops scrubbing.

“Well … hate my dad?”

She looks at me hard. “It is not fair,” she says. “This world is not fair.” She bites her lip and knits her eyebrows together.

My heart drums in my ears. I want to tell her that it’s not my fault. That I didn’t mean for it to be this way. That I wanted to save Innocent, and my father did too. It’s just that he couldn’t. Dad couldn’t. Things weren’t set up that way.

But Memory is the number one student for a reason. She already understands. She already knows there’s a system in place, and we can’t change it overnight. We can only do our small part, and take one step at a time, even if that step involves tangling with the law. “I love that you
steal electric bicycle to try to save my brother,” Memory says. She puts the pot on the muddy bank and wraps me in a hug.

Memory pulls away from me. “There is a secret,” she says.

“Secret?” I wipe my cheek.

She leans in close and whispers, “Electric bicycles got stealed from the hospital parking lot.”

I gasp.

She puts a finger over her lips and says, “Shhh!” She hugs me again.
“Ndimakukonda,”
she says. “I love you.”

“Ndimakukonda,”
I say, because, of course, I love her too. And even though we’ve only known each other about a month, I could swear we’ve been friends our whole lives.

I
can’t wait another second to get back to school. I haven’t had a fever for three days, so when Dad shakes me awake Monday morning, I get right out of bed. The buttery smell of pancakes fills the whole house, and as I pull my uniform over my head, I can already hear Mrs. Bwanali explode, “Clare, love. You look pretty as a wildcat!” The uniform is bigger than ever on me, so today I have to wrap the scarf twice around my waist in order to gather all the extra fabric.

I shuffle down the hall and through the living room and stand in the kitchen doorway, feeling a little groggy and a bit weak but otherwise not too bad.

Mrs. Bwanali takes one look at me. “My girl. My pretty, pretty girl,” she says. She runs across the tiny kitchen, throws her arms around me, and wraps me in a warm hug.

While Dad chows down his pancakes, Mrs. Bwanali
checks me out one more time. She leans forward and examines my eyebrows, my ears, my nose. She clucks her teeth. “Open the mouth,” she orders. “Put the tongue outside.”

But when I do what she says, Mrs. Bwanali’s face sags. She shakes her head. “Dr. Silver,” she says, “yoo-hoo, Dr. Silver!” She waves her hand in front of Dad’s medical report.

Dad looks up. “What is it?”

“My pretty girl, Miss Clare, not much pretty this morning. This throat is red as the backside of baboon.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Bad spirits fight inside this body,” Mrs. Bwanali tells Dad before she turns to me and says, “In the bed, my girl.”

“What? I’m going to—”

She puts her hand on her hip. “Mrs. Bwanali know when a girl can go to the school, when she can go to a party, when she can go to the trading center,” she says. “Clare, you must go in the bed.”

“Dad!” I say.

“She hasn’t had a fever for three days,” Dad says, like he’s mildly interested in helping me out.

“Show your daddy. Stick this tongue out like a lizard, Clare.”

I do, and the two of them stare down my throat.

“Red bumps,” Mrs. Bwanali tells Dad. “Bad spirit.”

Dad nods. “There is still some slight inflammation,” he says. “That’s to be expected.”

“When you are at work, Dr. Silver, I am chief of this village, no?”

A bead of sweat dribbles down the side of my face.

“I think one more day of rest would be good,” Dad tells me. “It’s certainly not going to hurt you any.”

“If I don’t get back to school, my students will never learn the English alphabet before we leave this country,” I say.

“There is more than one way to cook a goat,” Mrs. Bwanali says.

I shiver.

“Or a chicken!” Dad says, and laughs.

“Not funny,” I tell him. Dad’s still not a big fan of Fred’s, especially since Mrs. Bwanali gave the report about how badly Fred behaved while I was in the hospital.

“I have to go to school today. I have to see my friends!” I say.

“A true friend shall wait for the other through the hungry season,” Mrs. Bwanali tells me. “Now go!” she says, gently pushing me through the doorway as Dad calls out, “Bye, kid.”

Back in my bedroom, I’m steaming mad. I stick the thermometer in my mouth only to find that Mrs. Bwanali’s right: my fever’s back up to ninety-nine and a half. Plus, whenever I swallow, it feels like someone’s scraping my throat with sandpaper. I take off my uniform and spend the morning drinking tea, sketching all the foods I miss, and flipping through the pages of
Gallery Geek
, a magazine of super-hip modern art that I brought all the way here. After an hour or two of hanging out in my bed and chewing on my necklace, I close my eyes and fall asleep.

Mom visits. She sits on the edge of my bed stroking my hair,
admiring my uniform, which is hanging from the nail on the wall. “That pendant I made you. I’m glad you put a dent in it,” she says. “Why should it be perfect? Perfect is boring.”

I wonder if Mom knows we stole the mopeds. That wasn’t exactly a boring thing to do. I’m pretty certain she’s clueless about the fact that I’m now a teenage criminal. If she did know, I doubt she’d look so peaceful, so calm
.

When I wake up from my nap, I’m ravished. I trudge back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Bwanali’s dicing a tomato at the counter. “How you feel now, Clare?” she asks. No sooner have the words left her mouth than her eyes bulge. She slowly walks toward me, feels my cheek, and then yanks her hand away like she’s touched a hot stove.

“What?” I shout.

“Mark from the … from the …”

“Mark from the what?” I shriek.

Her eyes fill with tears. “Evil spirit!” she whispers.

I fly to the bathroom and check in the mirror. There, printed on my cheek, is an upside-down, melting strawberry ice cream cone. It sort of looks like a machete dripping blood. I run my finger over it. Then I laugh out loud. I laugh so hard that I can’t even stand up anymore. I run to my room, push aside the netting, and flop down onto my bed.

Mrs. Bwanali pokes her head in the door. “I know the witch who do this to you. He come in the door when I scrub clothes outside. I must shut door to keep out this witch! My poor, poor Clare.”

Before the woman collapses from guilt, I show her the picture I drew in my sketchbook. I try to explain that I must have fallen asleep right on top of the page with
the ice cream cone, but Mrs. Bwanali’s still convinced I’ve been cursed. So I pull her into the bathroom, pour some water onto a washcloth, and scrub the ink off my cheek. “See,” I say. “It’s not the mark of a wicked witch. It’s from my red pen.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Bwanali says. She throws her hands over her mouth and then rubs her thumb across my clean cheek to make sure the mark of the sorcerer is really gone. When she sees that it is, she laughs her thunderous laugh and her whole body jiggles.

M
emory told me that Saidi told her we’d better figure out a way to replace the mopeds that got stolen. She said Saidi is trying to come up with a plan, but so far, no luck. The more I think about the fact that we’re practically criminals, the itchier my muscles feel and the more I’ve got to stretch my legs. For two days, I’ve been in bed doing nothing but sketching, thinking, dreaming, and swallowing medicine for my sore throat, and suddenly, I can’t take it anymore.

I get out of bed, untie one of the five scarves that are still draped over my dresser, and twist it into a ring. I fasten the ends of the ring with two barrettes and set the ring on my head. I carefully balance one issue of
Gallery Geek
on top of the ring. As I cross my bedroom, I remember how Marcella and I used to practice walking like fashion models whenever we had downtime during play rehearsals.
“Walk and swivel, walk and swivel,” she would coach as I strutted down the long hallway behind the stage.