exhaled and clicked the back button. No way. Let’s not get crazy, thought the woman who got anxiety in crowded grocery stores. Leda looked down at Amadeus, then inside to her cozy little house, each piece of furniture and decoration meticulously chosen and arranged.
No way could she do something like that.
Automatically, she fingered her burn scar, the patch of skin near her jaw, so smooth and soft, it was like a stone in the ocean’s break. She shut her eyes, felt her heart begin to race, heard the song humming the start of an awful memory.
When the phone rang, Leda nearly fell off her chair from startling.
She grabbed her phone from the table. Estella.
She hadn’t spoken to her mother in months.
“Leda?” came the raspy voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Mother. Something wrong?”
There was a pause. Leda sank into her chair.
“You’re the one who sounds like something’s wrong.” She sighed. “What is it?”
Leda frowned. Estella would get it out of her eventually. “I quit my job.”
“Surprise, surprise. What was wrong with this one?”
Leda’s teeth gritted together. Invisible armor clinked into place. “It was a sweatshop. My boss was abusive. But mainly it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.” Leda looked up. The mountain was still staring at her. She averted her eyes. “I wanted to find something meaningful to do with my life.”
As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Naked emotion was nothing but ammunition for Estella.
Sure enough, Estella “hmphed” loudly. “Not sure you’re the charitable type, dear.”
Leda thought of the photo of the man with the smile. “Actually, I was just looking at a posting to volunteer in Kenya.”
Estella’s cackling laugh poured into Leda’s ear like a bucket of wriggling maggots. “Leda, you are, what, thirty-two? Isn’t that a little old to play the college kid off to save Africa?”
Choice words died on Leda’s tongue. “Was there something else you called about, Mother?”
Estella’s cackle snuffed short. A pause. “No. I think that’s enough for today.”
Leda listened to the call disconnect, her eyebrows knitted together. When she set the phone back on the table, she saw that her hands were shaking.
The laptop’s face was in sleep mode. Leda swiped her finger across the mouse pad and the screen jumped back into view.
The picture was waiting.
She read the caption beneath the smile. His name was Ita, the man who ran the orphanage.
Ita, with a gaze fair and bright, surrounded by smiling children.
College kid, indeed.
Leda opened a new tab. Travelocity.
Chapter 2
December 9, 2007, Kibera—Leda
WHEN LEDA LOOKED out over Kibera for the first time, she thought of the sea behind her mother’s house, how it unfolded into infinity, unfathomable and chilling even on a sunny day. Leda stumbled at the top of the embankment, grabbed for the handle of her suitcase and stood tight until the rushing realization of smallness receded from her knees.
One million people, her guidebook claimed, crammed into a labyrinth of mud and metal shacks. It was a maze to make Daedalus proud. No Minotaur could escape from here. The slum was the Minotaur, gorging itself on fleeting youth and broken dreams.
Leda felt the dampness of her washed hair morph into sweat. She’d arrived the night before, had been ushered quickly into a cab and sped to her shiny white room at the Intercontinental in Nairobi. But now she stood on the edge of Nairobi’s secret, two terse sentences in the hotel’s welcome binder—the Kibera slum. Bounded by a golf course, towering suburban gates, a river, a railroad and a dam. Cordoned off. Now Leda saw what that meant—a place with no running water, no electricity, no sanitation system—the blank spot on the map of the city, officially unrecognized. A space smaller than her Topanga Canyon neighborhood, but thirty times the population density of New York City.
From where Leda stood, Kibera below was an undulating sea of rusted rooftops, ending at the horizon and the glaring morning sun.
Samuel, the guide Leda had hired to take her on a tour of Kibera and to the orphanage, stood likewise frozen, but unalarmed. More than likely he was used to the tourist gasp, had it penciled into his schedule.
Leda looked at him sideways, her eyes grabbing on to him like a buoy at high sea. Samuel was younger than her for sure, no more than twenty-five, but taller by a foot. His face was smooth, shiny in the heat. How did he feel? Awkward, as she did, embarrassed? Was he secretly seething?
Normally, Leda was good at discerning people’s thoughts and moods, a skill learned early in her mother’s house. It wasn’t a talent that brought her any closer to people, however.
She closed her eyes to the miles of dirt and metal, shut her ears to the clanging roar before them and the gridlocked traffic behind them, and tried to sense any irritation or ill will coming from Samuel. But his stretched posture and his even stare gave nothing away. If nothing else, he seemed dutiful. This was another Sunday, another customer.
Samuel sensed Leda’s searching, as people always did, and he turned. “Do you want to take a picture?”
Leda’s hand went into her pocket, wrapped around her camera. Right. A photographer should want to take a picture. But when she saw the men down the embankment staring, her hand let go of the camera. These were the kinds of moments that confirmed for Leda she wasn’t cut out to be a photojournalist.
“It’s okay. Let’s just go,” she said.
Samuel nodded and stepped behind Leda to pick up her sixty-pound suitcase. He hoisted it onto his back heavily, as though it was a piano, and started down the dirt hill.
The sight gave Leda a queasy jolt. “Wait. There’s no road?”
She’d looked at the pictures online, she’d seen the narrow alleys. But she’d also assumed there would be a way in, a way out. A road.
Samuel turned. He smiled.
Leda felt the sneer behind his smile. She looked down, her cheeks burning. She studied the orange dust under her boots. The color was due to the dearth of vegetation, she’d read. The iron turned the clay minerals orange.
Samuel was off and walking. Leda scrambled after him down the hill, feeling like a clown fish in a pond. She watched him start across a rickety footbridge arched over a brown swamp of trash, with sugarcane growing in thick clumps through the waste. Children waded in near the cane.
Leda followed, studying her shoes to avoid all the eyes on her.
The other side of the bridge landed Leda in a landscape that was more landfill than ground, and she nearly went down on the twisted path of plastic bags. She was grateful for her tennis shoes, but still furious at herself for the suitcase. Imagine if she’d brought her second one, instead of leaving it with the hotel. Underneath the ridiculous load, all she could see were Samuel’s sandals traversing the winding path over rock and drainage creeks. And all she could do was follow along, like a princess after a porter, trying not to trip. Her mother’s words blared in her head. Off to save Africa?
As doubt clogged her throat, Leda felt sure she would drown in the smell. Moldy cabbage, rotten fish, cooking smoke, but mostly it was the steaming scent of human waste that poured into Leda’s nose and mouth, saturating her as if she could never be free of that smell again. She opened her mouth to breathe, and gagged on the sweat that dribbled in.
Now the view of the slum had disappeared and they were inside