She’s looking at his battered body. “You cannot. Look at you. What did they do to you? Where is Leda?”
“She is gone.” But Ita has no words for what happened to him, because it is linked to what happened to Leda, to what Chege did. He wonders when he will be able to say it aloud, if ever. Dizziness rolls over Ita like fog. He pitches forward, his stomach heaving into his throat.
Mary scuttles toward him, grips his shoulder.
Ita recoils from the pain. He must stand. He must reassure her, if he wants to be alone. “It’s okay. In the morning—”
“No, I must go now. My daughter—”
He shakes his head firmly. “No. You cannot go out tonight. It is not safe for women.”
More tears seep into Mary’s scrunched face.
But Ita must be firm on this. He cannot go back out there now and hope to protect an old woman. “Does Paul have a phone?” Ita asks of Mary’s son-in-law, taking out his cell phone.
Mary shakes her head.
Ita nods. “I’ll go with you tomorrow. We will walk in the sun, in the light that has to follow this darkness. Grace will be all right. She’s strong and brave. Like her mother.”
Mary understands. Ita has decided. She stops her lip from trembling. Then she reaches up and puts her hand gingerly to the side of Ita’s face. He closes his eyes and the scratchy parchment of her hand on his cheek brings the flicker of a memory, decades old. A mother’s touch. If he doesn’t open his eyes, he will disappear into the sensation, spiral into the void, searching for solace in memories lost and drained away.
His eyes fling open when Mary’s hand slips away. Without another word, she turns and shuffles off to her room to spend a sleepless night.
The moment of comfort evaporates, and Ita knows he might collapse any minute. He hastens across the courtyard to the hidden room.
Inside, he lights an oil lamp. He sees the pile on the floor, but wrests his mind away from thoughts of Leda, of the memories in this room. Instead, he looks at himself in the small mirror.
At the first glimpse of his face, Ita sees a statue glued back together all wrong. His eyes, nose, jaw—everything’s in the wrong place and wrong proportions. The swelling—that explains why his vision is so distorted, why his head pounds like a pump about to blow.
The only other time he has ever seen his face like this, a mangled toy to be thrown away...
The only other time was the day he met Chege. The day one life ended and another began.
Ita soaks a rag in a bowl of water. He presses it to his forehead, covering his eyes, covering the vision, and tries not to remember.
But everything—the blood coating his teeth, the pain in his limbs as though they’re clenched in a lion’s jaw, the hopelessness flooding his veins—it’s all so much the same that Ita can’t help but remember...
September 22, 1989, Kibera—Ita
Ita hears them, the boys, he hears them coming, but he doesn’t care.
After two weeks on the streets, he is already tired. He’s tired of running, tired of begging, tired of trying to hold on to a life that’s bent on wriggling out of his fingers like a worm. So, let it. Let it all go. Mother. Home. School. Hope. He hears the boys tearing down the alley, their footsteps the sound of his plans being trampled.
When the boys turn the corner, Ita sees they are older than he’d expected. Teenagers.
There is a moment where they stop and Ita looks up and they look at him and there is still a thread of time in the fabric of fate when they might just move on.
But then one of them spots Ita’s backpack. And when he nudges the boy next to him, that boy looks at Ita’s shoes. And then the third boy, the tallest, with a tattoo freshly done, he rallies them all with a certain look. Seconds later, as though choreographed, they all jump Ita.
The tall boy is the fists. He likes it, Ita can tell. He likes beating him, likes beating anyone, probably, maybe because he’s holding in the same bellyful of seesaw emotions as Ita. This way, when his knuckles crack on Ita’s cheekbones and his knees make Ita’s ribs pop, some of the feelings can get out and away, and leave space for him to breathe again.
That’s what Ita hears the loudest—the boy’s breathing, heavy in his ear. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hear the other boys unzip his backpack. He can hear them celebrating the spoils, tossing out the books as they find the food and clothes, the medicine. Ita can hear, just barely he can hear them tell the tall boy to stop, that it looks like he’s dead, stop, he isn’t moving, he’s—
The next thing Ita hears—it must be a dream. There is a new voice. It is a madman shouting. A madman shouting in a kid voice like a whistle.
“Get away from him!” the voice is screaming. “Get away or I kill you. I kill you all.”
Ita bargains with his eyelids. They weigh more than two rhinoceroses, but they must open. Open and I will let you close for good. Before I go, before I die, I want to see the madman.
Ita’s eyes open to glimpse a dreamy sliver of absurdity. The teens, they’re frozen, frozen in place by the owner of the whistling voice.
He’s the skinniest kid Ita’s ever seen. His hair looks like he cut it with a broken bottle. His eyes shine like he swallowed a flare. He’s standing atop an overturned jerrican, and he’s still barely taller than the shortest of Ita’s attackers.
Doesn’t look like he has got a lot going for him, Ita thinks.
But he does have a machete.
The attackers don’t seem to notice; they’ve begun to thaw. They giggle, Ita doesn’t see which one starts, but now they’re all hyenas, cackling in the dust. The tallest boy, he zips up Ita’s backpack and slings it over his shoulders. He laughs as he walks toward where Ita lies. Ita’s eyes are about to close, having upheld their end of the bargain.
But he fights himself to watch the tall boy come slip the shoes off his feet, and to see the incredible thing that happens next.
The miniature madman makes a sound. It cannot be called a scream—it hardly fits the description of any human sound Ita’s ever heard. He waves his machete in the air. When he brings it down, it whacks into his own forearm until blood squirts out in the shape of a rainbow, splattering Ita’s attackers. With the bubbling blood, the madman smears his cheeks, like war paint.
The last thing Ita sees is the blood-smeared kid spring from the jerrican and charge, roaring like a hound let loose from hell.
The last thing Ita hears is the backpack drop in the dirt beside his head. But then his senses are extinguished, replaced by the sound and color of nothingness.
* * *
When Ita comes to, it’s nighttime, the most dangerous time in Kibera. He struggles to cobble together his thoughts, rocks tumbling into a river.
“Good. You not dead.”
Ita looks, and the machete-wielding psychopath is sitting just beside him in the dark.
“Chege,” the psycho says.
It will hurt to speak, Ita imagines. “Ita.” He was right.
“Go back to sleep, Ita. See you tomorrow.”
* * *
In the morning, Ita wishes he was dead. Still might happen, he consoles himself. Everything hurts. Everything.
“Morning,” the psycho says brightly.
Ita wonders if maybe he is a spirit, a spirit guide into the other side. Should he talk to him? Can he ask questions? Like...where is my mother? Is she here? She’s dead, too. She just died two weeks ago—
“Hey, you okay? You eyes rolling back into your bones