“Who did you call a fool?”
“Let me go!” My wrists hurt.
“Let go of her right now!” Anna shouts. “You pig, you jerk!”
The man is beside himself. He grabs me and drags me to the very edge of the rock; my head scrapes against the ground, my back is bleeding. Anna rushes at him, leaps onto his back, clings to his shirt. The man elbows her hard in the ribs and she falls onto my towel, as if she were a pesky lizard he’d flicked off his arm. He heads for me again, threateningly. His shoes are caked in tar and sand.
“Who did you call a fool?”
His hands — thick, callused red fingers — are curled into fists. I close my eyes and see three stocky men at the mouth of a cave. They have stockings over their faces. Behind their backs stretches a beach with rusting suya grills. The air is thick, humid. It’s the rainy season in Nigeria.
Someone kicks me hard in the nose. Hot blood gushes. Instead of fainting, I open my eyes wide: the man is standing above me, ready to kick me again, this time in the ribs, and maybe spit on me, too. His nostrils flare with rage. Anna rushes at him again, this time with her walking stick. She takes aim as if she were a pole-vaulter and plunges the stick into his gut. The man loses his balance and falls off the rocks into the sea. He growls, swallowing water with loud gargling noises, then shouts something incomprehensible, struggling against the waves.
“Run!” Anna shouts.
We start running up the hill like madwomen. At the top we stop to catch our breath beside a bicycle with a rusted chain — it must be his. I turn back toward the sea. My heart feels as if it might explode.
“Anna, look!”
My voice sounds distorted, I’m holding my nose with one hand to stop the blood. Her eyes turn instinctively to where I’m pointing: the Albanian’s body is floating, face-down. His printed shirt has ballooned out like a parachute over his back.
The sun is hot, but our inner temperature has dropped.
“Are you sure he drowned?” She keeps asking the same question every five minutes, as if any second now he might come back to life, swim to shore and crawl from the sea like a creature out of some horror movie thirsting for revenge. Deep down we wish we were in that kind of movie. We wish he would crawl out of the water and attack us again; we wish he would give us a second chance.
Sitting on the bed, we take turns tending to one another’s wounds and crying. My back is badly scraped, and my nose won’t stop bleeding. The worst was when we had to go back down to the shore and gather our things, clean the blood from the rocks and get rid of the stick. The whole time we could see the Albanian, floating, out the corner of our eye. Motionless, his shirt filled with water, like a deflated raft. Blood was flowing from somewhere, diffusing steadily into the sea. He had probably hit up against the rocks.
“We’re murderers, murderers!” Anna hisses. Her eyes are wider, bluer than ever.
“It was self-defense, he attacked us!”
“How was I supposed to know he couldn’t swim?”
“The real question is, what do we do now?”
We don’t sleep at all that night. At the smallest noise in the hallway we’re sure that they’ve found our fingerprints. That they’ve come to arrest us.
“I saw this strange image,” I whisper in the middle of the night, nestling my head against her shoulder. Anna is drenched in sweat, her hair practically dripping. The moon casts a macabre, yellowish light on her eyelashes, her cheekbones, the dimple in her chin. “Right before he kicked me, I saw these men in a cave. They were holding me hostage. It was so strange. . as if. .”
Anna sits up, wrapped in the sheet. “What happened next?”
“There was no next. That’s all I saw. Three men with stockings over their faces.”
“But what then?” Anna hugs me, and a shiver runs through me.
“I told you, that’s all I saw!”
“Remember, try to remember,” Anna whispers, gently stroking my hair, as if I were a child.
Gwendolyn is ironing, I can see her clearly. The tropical rains have started, which is why she hasn’t set up the ironing board on the veranda. She irons as if she were dancing, shifting her weight this way and that, in the big basement room where the cleaning supplies are, next to the storage room. Yes, Gwendolyn — her heavy, square body with its smell of salt and humidity; her unruly bun, with tufts of hair always escaping, the softest thorns I know; the whites of her eyes flash each time she raises her head to look at me. Lying on my stomach on the floor, I’m drawing our house with colored pencils. I put banana trees all around. They’re not there in real life, but my picture looks happier with all that yellow. Every so often my eyes drift shut, and I doze on my papers while Gwendolyn’s iron slides back and forth over the ironing board with soothing regularity. The room smells like my father’s shirts, my mother’s embrace. I slowly sink into a dream that’s a faithful copy of my drawing. Suddenly a window up on the ground floor breaks, jolting me awake. Gwendolyn freezes in place, standing there with the iron in the air.
“It’s the wind,” I tell her in English.
“Shhh,” Gwendolyn hisses.
We hear footsteps overhead, furniture being moved. Did Mom come home from Mrs. Steedworthy’s? But she wouldn’t ever come in through the window. Dad usually stays at work until late. And the hobgoblins in fairytales who sneak into stranger’s homes to get warm never break windows, they just slip in on tiptoe. Gwendolyn grabs me and shoves me into the storage room, behind Dad’s wine rack. “Not a peep out of you,” she says. Only in her anxiety and confusion, she trips over a crate of soft drinks and the whole tower of them comes crashing to the floor. The noise on the ground floor stops. Gwendolyn rushes to the telephone; two men come running down the stairs and overtake her. They have women’s stockings over their faces and are holding knives. They’re not very sharp knives, but Gwendolyn starts shrieking anyhow. I come out of my hiding spot to help her; no one would hurt a little kid.
A third man grabs me and hefts me onto his shoulders as if I were a sack of flour. He’s so scary, with his nose and lips smushed by the stocking! His eyes are squinted partway shut, his cheeks are swollen. The men argue with Gwendolyn in African, probably telling her to hang up the phone. Gwendolyn is crying. I’ve never seen Gwendolyn cry before. The men growl, their voices distorted by the stockings. One of them is carrying Mom’s jewelry box of carved wood. Another grabs a few bags of rice from the storage room. The third has me. We all pile into a van. Gwendolyn runs out into the rain after us. The man who had me over his shoulder shoves her and she falls to the ground, in the muddy water. I watch through the window of the van as she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears altogether, along with our front gate. The men make me lie down on the back seat so that no one will see me. The van — a wreck, smelling of burnt rubber and sweat — bounces around in the mud for a long time. Eventually I forget about the three strange men with stockings over their heads. My eyes wander to the torn cloth on the roof of the van and I listen to the sound of the rain. I start to laugh. I’m thinking about how mad Gwendolyn gets when I say, “Gwendolyn, listen! It’s God peeing!” At some point, the sound of the struggling motor stops. I raise my head. We’re on a deserted beach with a cave at one end. They tell me to go into the cave and sit there. Their English is terrible. All they know how to say is, girl, here, sit here.
“Are you alone?” Anna asks.