Mom covered her face.
“We do okay,” the Amen guy said. You could tell he felt bad about it.
Later I got in a corner with the other kids, and I asked about the attacks and one of them, a boy about my age, pulled up his sleeve and his wrist had a bandage on it. He didn’t get shot or anything, but he twisted it hitting somebody. With a crowbar.
When Mom uncovered her face she said: “That’s not the life.” She said: “That’s not the Movement.” She said standing your ground was the old way, not the new, and the Chicken lady said: “Honey, we know.”
After I’d seen the boy with the bandaged wrist, I helped Mom to the toilet and back and we both lay down on the blankets. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she muttered.
“Okay,” I said.
“You know why, right?” she said. “Because we never stand. We move.”
“Sure,” I said. Sure, Mom, I thought. We move.
We move when and where you want, Mom. We’ve sailed back and forth over the ocean. We’ve slept in the airborne beds of Yambio and the houseboats of Kismaayo. And now you’ve decided to go to North Dakota when winter’s starting, through country dotted with isolation zones, leaving all our friends behind. I had such a good art group back in the valley—you saw our last project, Fox. A slim line linking the tops of twenty trees. Wires and fibers twisted with crimson plastic, with cardinals’ wings, making an unbroken trail, a gesture above the earth. It seemed to pulse in the morning light. You said it reminded you of radio waves, of a message. We called it “The Red Thread.”
I’ll probably never see it again.
Such gentle light here, but it couldn’t soften Mom’s smile when she saw me crying. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she said.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra. I’m at center M738. Somewhere in North Dakota. The center’s in an old church. At night they feed us pickles and beet soup off plastic tablecloths that an old man carefully clips to the long tables.
They set beautiful candles made of melted crayons on all the windowsills. For travelers. For strangers to find their way at night.
“If we could have known,” says Mom, “if we could have known this life was possible, we would have started living it long before.”
There’s a man with a blunt gray face who argues with her. “You’re one of those human nature people,” he sneered tonight. “The ones who think, oh, we’ve proved that people are good. Let me tell you something, friend. If it wasn’t for the oil crisis and the crash, we’d be living exactly like we were before.”
Mom nodded. A little half-smile in the candlelight. “Sure, friend,” she said, subtly emphasizing the word.
“And another thing,” said the blunt-faced man. “These kids would be in school.”
“Or in the army,” Mom said sweetly.
Of course the kids are in school, because Mom’s around. Wherever we shelter, teaching is her way of giving thanks. She gets all the kids together and makes them draw their names in the dirt, she quizzes them on their multiplication tables, she talks about the Movement. How precious it is to be able to go where you want. Just walk away from trouble. Build a boat and row across the water. When she was a kid, she says, you could barely go anywhere at alclass="underline" borders, checkpoints, prisons, the whole world carved up, everything owned by somebody. “Everything except light,” she says. “Everything except fire.” And if they wanted, they could keep you in a dark place. Tonight she told the kids what I already know, that that’s where my dad ended up, in some dark place, seized on his way to work and then gone forever. “Why?” a kid asked. “I don’t know,” said Mom. “Because of his name? Because they thought he was working for terrorists? In those days, they could seize you for anything.”
Usually she goes on from here with the story of how the Movement once had another name, how people used to call it the Greening, how the media reported it as an environmental movement first, folks abandoning cars on the freeways, walking, some rolling along like her. She tells of how, in the wake of the crash, the Greening intertwined with other movements, for peace, for justice, for bare life. Grinning, showing the gaps in her teeth, she uses her favorite line: “In the old days, when I worked in a lab, we called it evolutionary convergence.”
Tonight she just stopped after talking about my dad. Her face shrunken, old. And I said: “We might still find him, Mom,” because you never know. When the Movement started, he could have crawled out of that dark space like so many others, the ones you find on the road, cheerful, wearing pieces of their old uniforms. An orange bandana, a gray rag tied on the arm. Tattoos with the name of their prison, where they were kept before the doors opened, before the Movement. I once had a dream that my dad walked down some steps and touched my hair. “We might still find him,” I said. Mom pretended not to hear me.
In the night she woke me with a cry.
“What is it, Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
I can’t go to sleep. Lying there, I see you walking along a creek. You’re wearing your black shirt and your head’s tilted down, with that concentrating look. I think about how I recited the generations of my dad’s family for you, there on the ledge, at the cave in the canyon wall. My name, then my dad’s, then my grandfather’s, then my great-grandfather’s, back through time. Sahra, Said, Mohammed, Mohamud, Ismail. I can do ten generations. “Amazing,” you said. Your blanket around us and our breaths the only warmth, it seemed, for miles.
“It’s like a map,” you said, “but it shows people instead of places.” You said it felt like the future to think that way.
“Yeah,” I said. “But during the war they killed each other over family lines. Like any other border.”
Belonging, Fox. It hurts.
Fox it’s Sahra. You knew? You knew Mom was sick? You knew and you didn’t say anything to me? You knew and you left her?
What kind of person are you? It was like somebody walked up and hit me in the chest with a hammer. “I told that boy,” she murmured in the dark room. “I told that boy.” And I knew who she meant. I knew it right away. She said she was sorry. She didn’t mean to chase you off.
That’s why you left? Because you found out someone who loved you was going to die?
I’ve never seen Mom work with a kid the way she worked with you. The two of you scratching away at your slates while the rest of us leached acorns. You’d kneel in the dirt by her chair and rest your slate on the arm. Leaning together, you’d talk about how to make the Movement last, how to keep the meshnets running, how to draw power tenderly from the world, and later you told me that you and I were perfect for each other because we both wanted to draw lines over the land, mine visible, yours in code, but the truth is you were perfect for Mom. You were perfect for her, Fox. “Fox-Bright,” she called you. And you left her when she was dying.
You know what? I’m not sorry for what I said the day after we spent the night in the canyon. I’m not sorry I said I belong here as much as you. They picked up my dad and probably killed him because they thought he didn’t belong here, an immigrant from a war-torn country. But my dad knew this land, he lived in thirty states before he met my mom, in the days of oil he used to drive a truck from coast to coast. He left fingerprints at a hundred gas pumps, hairs from his beard in hotel sinks, his bones in some forgotten government hole. And my mom belongs here, too, even though she cries, can you believe it, my mom, someone you’d look at and swear she never shed a tear in her life, she cries because she grew up in the house we’re living in now, an old farmhouse crammed with noisy families—this is where she was born. She cries because she wanted to come back here before she died. That’s why we’re here. She thinks she’s betraying the Movement by clinging to a place. She lies in the bed in the room where we found a page of her old Bible under the dresser and cries at the shape of the chokecherry tree outside the window. That’s how much my mother loves the Movement that changed our world, the movement she worked for, for years, before we were born, losing her job and her teeth. She loves it so much she’s going to die hating herself.