Children of Exile (7 page)

“He's only little,” I said. “Little children need—”

Her hand darted out in a flash. I jerked back so the palm of her hand wouldn't collide with my face.

“Don't you tell me what my own child needs,” she said. “Don't you sass me.”

She looked at her hand, still raised; she looked at Bobo between us. She let her hand drop.

She almost slapped me,
I thought.
Would she have slapped me if I hadn't moved?

I reeled back, slammed by my own thoughts even though I'd dodged the slap of her hand. No adult had ever struck me—certainly not Fred-mama or Fred-daddy. Little kids, yes: There's that phase at two or three where some kids feel powerless, and they lash out by biting or hitting. The Freds had told me again and again how to deal with that: Older kids and adults must never, ever, ever hit back. Kids need to learn as soon as possible that hitting isn't the answer.

My face burned, stinging almost as badly as if I really had been hit. I blinked back the tears that sprang to my eyes. And yet what I kept thinking was,
Did Bobo see that woman try to hit me? Oh, please, let it be that he didn't see that. Don't let him know what happened. What almost happened. Don't let him ever think that an adult might hit
him.
 . . . Don't let him be damaged by this. . . .

I looked down, and Bobo's head
wasn't
turned toward me. His face and his eyes were pointed straight ahead. Maybe he hadn't heard what the woman and I had said—maybe for him it just blended in with the sound of children crying around us. Maybe he hadn't felt me jerking away from the woman.

I looked back at the woman. We had a procedure in Fredtown: Whenever you felt that someone had wronged you, you talked it over with a trusted adult, and then you talked it over with the person who'd offended you. And then, after all that, if you still felt the slightest bit upset, you repeated the whole process again and again, until you were just tired of being mad.

Edwy was the only person I'd ever been mad at that I hadn't done that with.

But I couldn't tell this woman,
You wronged me just now,
because Bobo might hear. I couldn't say,
You hurt my feelings and gave me the impression that you don't value my viewpoint, that you don't value me.
I couldn't say anything.

Fredtown felt farther away than ever.

Bobo stopped walking.

“That looks like a mask,” he said. “Why would a building wear a mask?”

He pointed to a structure far ahead of us, which I had taken for the airport terminal. Maybe it was a row of stores instead. But I'd never seen stores like this: Where there should have been windows displaying the most tantalizing wares, this structure had interlocking metal bars across the front, keeping everybody out.

The metal bars didn't look like a mask to me. They looked like a cage.

“All the stores are shut down,” the woman said. “It's a holiday. The day we get our children back. The day we've been waiting for for the past twelve years.”

She shot a glance at me, as if she was daring me to argue.

“But to put a building in a
mask
 . . . ,” Bobo said. He could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. When he got an idea stuck in his head, it was the hardest thing in the world to talk him out of it. His expression brightened. “Is there going to be a party? Does everyone get to wear a costume?”

“You talking about those metal gates?” the woman asked. “That's so the stores don't get robbed while the owners are away. That's all. It's because of thieves.”

“People aren't supposed to take things that don't belong to them,” Bobo said in the singsongy voice he'd used for repeating rules and principles back in Fredtown.

“That's right,” the woman said, patting his head.

We didn't need metal gates and cages to keep people from stealing back in Fredtown,
I thought. I pressed my lips together hard so I wouldn't slip and actually say that.

Would the woman try again to slap me if I said anything?

“Now come along,” the woman said, tugging on Bobo's arm. Her hand slid down his wrist; it looked like she wanted to hold his right hand while I held his left.

But Bobo pulled away. He cowered against me and whined, “My legs are tired. Carry me, Rosi.”

We hadn't even walked the length of a soccer pitch—not even the miniature soccer pitches Bobo played on. I'd seen him run that distance, back and forth and back and forth, dozens of times without stopping. Without even breathing hard.

His legs couldn't have been tired, and normally I would have said so. I would have told him he was perfectly capable of walking on his own. Instead, I bent down and was about to pick him up when the woman said, “No, no, I'll carry you, Bobo. I haven't gotten to carry you since the day you were born.”

I thought Bobo might dodge her again, but he let her lift him up.

“You knew me the day I was born?” he asked, seeming enchanted by the notion.

Obviously he didn't understand what it meant that this woman was our real mother.

“Don't you mean you haven't carried Bobo since he was
a few days
old?” I asked her. “The Freds always said Edwy and I were the only ones taken to Fredtown on the very day of our birth.”

Was I trying to get her to speak of my birth just as wistfully as she did Bobo's? Was I trying to get her to solve the mystery of why Edwy's and my removal to Fredtown had been different from every other child's? Was I just showing off? I'm
not sure. Everything in my head and heart was jumbled.

The woman gave me such a sharp glance, it felt like a knife cutting through the air.

“I only saw Bobo that first day,” she said. “A Fred took him right from my arms. I don't know where the Freds took him the next day, or the day after that. My own child, and I knew nothing. The Freds were everywhere back then. People said they could sniff out a woman giving birth anywhere, no matter how she tried to hide.”

The way she said “Fred” was like how someone back in Fredtown might say “poison” or “evil” or “villain” or “hate” when they were trying to make a story scary on purpose. When they were pretending there were bad things in the world.

Freds weren't bad. Freds were good.

I recoiled, and made a noise that might have been a whimper. I wanted to say,
No, no, you don't understand! The Freds only did that because they had to, because they wanted to keep us children safe. . . .
But the words stuck in my throat.

“What kind of a baby was I?” Bobo asked, as if that was all he cared about.

The woman nuzzled her face down into Bobo's curls, just like Fred-mama, Fred-daddy, and I myself had done a thousand times since Bobo was born. Or—since he'd arrived in Fredtown.

“Oh, Bobo, you were the sweetest little baby I'd ever seen,” she said. She caught me watching and her cheeks flushed, as if she knew she was really supposed to say,
I mean, you
and your sister
were the two sweetest babies I'd ever seen. The two of you are both my favorites. Of course I can't choose between you.

That's the kind of thing Fred-mama or Fred-daddy would have said. They would have corrected themselves instantly. They were as good at that “favorite” thing as Mrs. Osemwe, the Fredtown school principal.

This woman just narrowed her eyes at me and repeated, “Yes, Bobo, you were the sweetest baby ever.”

Bobo's legs dangled awkwardly on either side of the woman's hips. Pure meanness crawled into me, and I wanted to say,
You don't even know how to carry a little kid, do you? You don't know how to be a mother at all. Because you haven't been one the past twelve years. Not for real.

Was this what it felt like to be Edwy? To want nothing so much as to say and do bad things?

You don't want to hurt Bobo,
I reminded myself.
You want him to stay good and sweet and innocent and unharmed more than you want this woman to know how mad you are.

And . . . I still did want her to like me. I wanted her to see that she'd been wrong to act so mean. Wrong to try to slap me.

I pressed my lips together even harder. I imagined even a crowbar couldn't open them.

The woman started walking again, and I followed her. We got to the other side of the caged-in building, and a wide street lay before us. Other parents and children were piling into cars and funny little bicycle cabs; motor scooters wove through the crowd with as many as four or five people crowded onto the seat. I even saw one laughing couple clutching a baby and jumping onto a skateboard.

Nobody wore a helmet. Any Fred I knew would have been horrified. They would have said everything but the cars were unsafe. (And maybe the cars, too, if there weren't seat belts. Which nobody seemed to be using.)

But Bobo loved anything with wheels. His eyes glowed and he bounced up and down in the woman's arms.

“What do we get to ride in?” he asked eagerly.

The woman frowned and shot me another glance that might as well have come with words attached:
You keep your mouth shut, young lady. I don't want to hear anything out of you.

“We live close by,” she told Bobo. “We don't need to do anything but walk.”

We kept going, dodging cars and scooters and bicycles. I started feeling glad that the woman was carrying Bobo, because then I didn't have to worry about him getting run
over. There didn't seem to be traffic laws, or if there were, they were no more complicated than
Try not to get killed.

This place was nothing like Fredtown. Fredtown was clean and orderly, simple but tidy. This place was a lovely fountain marred by a rust stain across the marble; it was a nice-enough house next door to one with a collapsed roof and vines growing out of the chimney; it was ice-cream wrappers and chewing gum and what might have even been dog droppings all along the cracked sidewalk.

This was supposed to be home?

The house
we were going to wasn't close. The woman and I both wore ourselves out taking turns carrying Bobo before she finally stopped in front of a door and pulled out a key. The door and the wall it stood in looked like there should be no need for keys or locks—they looked like you should have been able to give the wood one good push and knock the whole shack over: all four shaky walls and the rusted tin roof too.

The Freds say any house can become a home when there's a loving family,
I told myself.
The Freds say if you don't like your surroundings, it's your job to brighten them. Maybe I should volunteer to paint.

I was a little afraid that pressing a paintbrush against those walls would knock them down.

The woman's key rattled in the lock. A voice from inside yelled, “What took you so long?”

I half expected the woman to say,
It's Rosi's fault. She was a coward and hid Bobo from me.

But the woman winced. Her hand shook, and she had to stop for a minute from trying to turn the lock. I saw her swallow hard, and then she called back, “They're here. They're really here. Our children.”

And then the lock clicked and the door swung open. The woman pushed Bobo toward a shadowy corner.

“Your son,” the woman said.

After the sunshine outside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light inside the house. A gray-haired man sat in a dark corner, his face hidden in the shadows. Bobo bumped into the man's knees, and the man wrapped his left arm around Bobo's shoulders and pulled him close.

“Well, don't expect me to give you any better of a hug than that,” the man said gruffly. “I've only got one arm.”

“I've got two,” Bobo said, which was so Bobo. He sounded as casual as if they were just comparing the length or curliness of their hair. Something that didn't matter.

The man turned toward the light, hugging Bobo, and I saw that the shirtsleeve at the other side of the man's body hung empty.

I waited.

Back in Fredtown there'd been a girl, Leila, who was born with a misshapen foot. She'd had surgeries to fix it, and now she was one of the fastest runners of all the seven-year-olds. But all along the way, as she progressed through casts and
crutches, braces and special boots, there were always meetings where all the children of Fredtown found out exactly what was happening to her, how the bones were being reset, how we could help her while she healed. I remember some of the other little girls being jealous of all the attention Leila got, and then there were meetings about that, too.

But we always heard the story behind her injuries, her recovery. We always knew the explanation. From the time she could talk, Leila herself could rattle off the exact words she'd been told:
When I was born, my foot was like a flower that hadn't bloomed yet. The bones were curled together. I just had to have the doctors help the bones straighten out. That's all.

I thought this man—our father—would tell Bobo and me the story behind his missing arm. He was the adult; we were the kids. I thought he would want to head off any rude questions Bobo might ask.

But for a long time he did nothing but hold Bobo in that one-armed hug. When Bobo started to squirm, the man let go and started to trace his fingers across Bobo's face. It was like he was trying to learn Bobo's face, like he used his fingers to see.

Could it be that the man's eyes didn't work and he really
did
need to use his fingers to see?

And he wasn't going to explain that either?

Bobo giggled.

“That tickles,” he said.

The man let his hand drop.

“He's got a good face, good hair,” the man pronounced. “Where's the other one? The girl?”

He really couldn't see. Couldn't see me standing in the doorway.