Laugh with the Moon (25 page)

“There is no leopard,” Agnes says. “It is Mrs. Kaliwo from Kapoloma. She was working in the fields when her baby knocked. She fell here as she walk to hospital.”

“Aiii!” Mrs. Kaliwo’s voice travels through the thicket to the path.

Agnes grabs Memory and me by our wrists. “We must tend to the patient,” she says, and tries to pull us with her into the jungle. But I’ve got a better idea. “Help!” I shout. “I mean, I need to get help.” I throw my backpack on the ground and sprint toward the hospital.

Seconds later I hear footsteps on the path behind me. It’s Saidi. Together, we race across the lot and burst into the waiting room. Mr. Malola is nowhere in sight so we keep going, straight through the double doors.

We peek into the pneumonia ward. Five patients are hooked up to a single oxygen machine. I shudder as we run breathless inside. A nurse is checking a patient’s pulse. When we tell her the news, she rushes into the hallway, and we follow.

The nurse opens a closet. Most of the shelves are bare. She grabs a pair of rubber gloves and a couple of rags, and then we’re off, sprinting out of the waiting room and down the path. When I spot my backpack on the trail, I shout to the nurse to stop.

Branches scrape my legs and face as I lead the nurse into the bush, while Saidi stays on the path to give Mrs.
Kaliwo her privacy. Soon we’re blocked by a jacaranda tree that’s growing horizontally across the jungle floor, so I grind my foot into a knot in the wood and hoist myself up the smooth bark to the top of the trunk.

A hiccupy-pinchy sound pierces the silence.

There, many feet below me on the other side of the jacaranda tree, is Agnes. She crouches beside Mrs. Kaliwo, her face flickering in the dappled light: light and shade, shade and light. Mrs. Kaliwo’s eyes are closed. Agnes takes a large leaf off the ground and fans her while Memory looks on from a few feet away.

The nurse climbs over the jacaranda trunk. She takes the baby from Mrs. Kaliwo and wipes it clean with a cloth. It’s a boy! The nurse hands the baby back to his mother. Mrs. Kaliwo’s eyes water as she looks at her baby. It’s totally obvious that she’s never seen anything so beautiful in her whole entire life. “
Timutcha
Most Miracle,” Mrs. Kaliwo says, and smiles weakly.

I can’t believe my ears. She just said she’s going to name her baby Most Miracle. Cutest Miracle? Awesome Miracle? Rockin’ Miracle? Maybe. But Most Miracle? Still, there’s no way I’m going to wreck this moment with a grammar lesson.

Mrs. Kaliwo presses her lips against her baby’s forehead. When she does, something inside me breaks apart, splits apart, right in the middle of my chest. I reach for my pendant. I run my hand around my whole neck. It’s gone! Did it come off somewhere in the bush? Was it stolen by a branch? I need my pendant. I need my mom!

Before I know it, I’m scrambling back over the
jacaranda trunk, grabbing my knapsack from the edge of the path, and bolting away from Saidi.

“Clare!” he calls.

I can’t speak.

Only run.

Run. Run. Run.

To the hospital lot, where I throw my back against the crisscross pattern of a palm tree trunk and cry.

As dusk arrives with streaks of grenadine, my mother finds me. She wraps her arm around my shoulder and plays with a strand of my hair
.

“What’s wrong?” she says. “Babies are beautiful.”

“You’re still here,” I say
.

“And why not?”

Maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe my necklace is in my pocket or my bag. I start to check but she takes my hands and holds them in hers. “You don’t need that old thing to find me. I’m always here,” she says, and touches my heart. “Now, what’s on your mind?”

It’s not the first time I’ve thought of asking her the question, just the first time I’ve had the guts to do it. “How did you feel when you saw me?”

“How did I feel?”

“You know. When you saw me—the very first time?”

Mom holds my chin in her hand. “I looked at you and suddenly, everything was clear—you were the reason for everything. That’s why we named you Clare. For the clarity you brought to Dad and me.”

“I thought you named me after your great-aunt Clara.”

“Well, yes,” Mom says. “That too.” She touches my nose
.

“And how did you
feel?”

“Oh, right.” Mom crosses her arms, leans back against the palm trunk, and stares into the heavens. “Okay, okay, how did I feel? I felt like the happiest woman in the world,” she says
.

No sooner do I sigh with relief than she changes her mind. “No, not in the world.”

My heart is a hive of stinging bees
.

“In the universe!” she says
.

The bees fly out, dripping honey everywhere
.

O
ver the weekend, Dad and I follow directions to a shop in Blantyre, where Dad shells out a huge pile of Malawi
kwacha
for two extremely cool mopeds. He lets me choose the colors, so I pick out one red and one blue. The mopeds were made by the same Indian company as the ones we took, except about twenty years later. Talk about payback with interest!

While we drive all the way to the lake, we eat the sweet delicious jackfruit we bought at the market in Blantyre. “You know,” Dad says, “we’ll be home in a week.”

“Don’t remind me,” I groan. Worse, the play is on Wednesday—only four days from now. When I think of it, I feel like an oxcart is trampling across my chest. Despite the fact that we’ve practiced every morning since I got back to school, the kids are still slamming into one another, and yesterday, when our headmaster stopped by,
Felicity was so scared she refused to speak a word until he left.

But now, as we pull up at the Chomp and Chew Stop, I know how Felicity felt. I’m so nervous I can hardly breathe, let alone speak. Dad and I wash the sticky jackfruit juice off our faces and hands with a bottle of water and an old towel that’s lying in the backseat. Then we walk into the restaurant.

“Do you see him?” Dad asks.

I point to the
mzungu
who is playing cards with some locals. Everyone at the table is drinking out of coconuts with straws.

“Thought so,” Dad says. He puts his hand on my back and pushes me forward.

“
Moni
, Derek,” I mumble.

Derek turns around and stares. His sunburned face looks pockmarked and scary.

“It’s me,” I croak. But I don’t think he recognizes me, so I say, “You know, the thief.”

Suddenly, Derek stands and slaps my back. “Good to see you, my young friend. Your father’s note mentioned the poor little chap. Bloody shame.” He turns to his friends and says something about malaria in Chichewa. “Bloody shame,” he says again. He lumbers over to Dad and shakes his hand. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.” I think Derek’s wondering if we really have the mopeds, because as he shakes Dad’s hand, his eyes dart all around the restaurant.

“They’re outside,” Dad says. “But first, Clare would like to talk to you.”

I bug my eyes out. I never said I wanted to talk to
Derek. In fact, I definitely
don’t
want to talk to him. I want to leave, the sooner the better.

“A seat fer ya,” Derek says. He pulls out a chair at an empty table. I sit down. Then he turns another chair backward and sits on it with his hands clasped over the back of the seat, his chin resting on them. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Dad leave the restaurant. “Now, what’s on your mind?” Derek asks me.

“It’s just that …” I shove each word out of my mouth. “I’m really, really sorry you had to go without the mopeds for so long. I know you lost a lot of money.” What I don’t say is that I’m sorry I took them in the first place, because sometimes even a thief doesn’t like to lie.

“You know what, Clare?” Derek presses his thumbs into the corners of his watery eyes. “You kids knew best. I thought it was heat exhaustion. If I’d believed you on the malaria, I would’ve driven you straight to the hospital in Machinga. And who knows? Maybe that little chap would still be here now.”

M
r. Special Kingsley rings the last bell, and my classmates dash out of Mrs. Tomasi’s classroom. We meet up behind the standard five block. Together we lug the tin roof that blew off in the storm all the way over to the standard one class. We heave the roof on top of some clay bricks.

“Check out our new stage!” I tell Sickness.

She grins.

“We must build large soccer goal at front of stage,” Memory explains.

I check my watch. We’ve got about four hours before the villagers arrive. After Norman takes out a pocketknife and carves the wooden nails, we hammer the posts together with rocks. Silvester stands on Norman’s shoulders in order to get the entire goal built.

Then Memory, Agnes, and I thread a clothesline
through the curtain I made out of the extra bedsheets from the Global Health Project house. Now we secure our curtain along the top of the goalpost. The way we’ve set things up, our little actors will be able to walk right out of their classroom and onto the stage.

Thankfully, the field is dry and soft grass has started to grow again. Mr. Special Kingsley is busy setting torches by the edges of the field in order to keep
bongololos
and black mambas out of our theater.

At dusk, Agnes, Patuma, Sickness, and I run around the standard one room fastening hundreds of animal tails, wings, and snouts onto our little actors—costumes we made from the fabric Dad and I bought at the market in Blantyre. There was so much to sew and glue in the past few days that the standard eight girls have hardly slept at all. And now it’s taking a lot longer to dress our actors than I had expected. Agnes and I need Memory’s help, but we don’t see her anywhere. At first we figure she’s gone to the ladies’, but when she still hasn’t returned after a half hour, I step outside to look around.

There she is, crouching against the mud-brick wall of the standard one classroom, her head resting on her knees, tears streaming down her cheeks. I take her hand in mine. “I miss Innocent too,” I say.

She nods.

“This is the story he wants to tell the world. We’re making it happen. You, me, and all his little friends.”

She smiles through her tears, and we pass a few minutes in silence until I ask if she can help with the hunters.

She nods again.

“All thirty-seven of them?” I hope it’s not too much to
ask. “They each need a hat. And can you please make sure they know how to hold their bows and arrows?”

“I shall do it,” she says.

As dusk sets in, the villagers arrive in droves. Inside the classroom, I clap my hands and all the creatures turn silent. I don’t know if the children are excited or petrified, but for sure, I’m both. “Ten minutes till curtain!” I announce. Memory translates.

The bustle of villagers gathering in our theater makes thoughts scrape against one another in my mind until I can’t really think at all anymore. I swallow and try to sound brave. “Actors, take your places!” Memory repeats my direction in Chichewa, and with the help of Agnes, the children scurry to their spots. Memory plants herself stage right. She’s ready to translate the actors’ English lines into Chichewa for the audience.