It is pouring above the bridge as I fold my butterfly-patterned umbrella shut, resting in the shelter of the concrete giant. The torrent is no surprise, it’s been raining since midnight. When it began to patter against our window, my mind wandered to my brother first, praying that some sort of shelter had sprouted wherever he was to keep him from the cold of the rain.

The scene under the bridge is a bleak site in the mornings before the sun is up, worse off when it rains. Large rodents race one another along the pedestrian sections with bouncing tails, as they make off to start their day, despite having toiled all night for garbage cans to ransack. They couldn’t have found much to eat though, the people who lived here must have gotten to the garbage cans before the rats.

Although far better dressed, the boys in pristine white shirts on their way to work are not much different. They run in the other direction, patterned ties swinging as they race to catch one of the buses modeled after sardine cans. One of them turns, as if to be sure that no one behind him can reach the bus before he does. His eyebags are heavy from too little sleep and they remind me of why I came.

I am not here for the boys racing to an early start at the office. I came looking for the skinny boys in old football jerseys who would tell you whatever you wanted to know if you gave the tallest one a mint note, and promised to bring them food when next you drove by. This time, under the pouring rain, the men I meet are a little older but their needs are the same, money.

“I’m looking for my son,” I blurt to them, and I hesitate when I pronounce the last consonant. It’s not just because I now realize that I can’t look old enough to be his mother, but also because although I think of him as my child, it’s not something that I have ever said out loud. I only say it now because I hope appearing to be a mother will buy me some sympathy in a place I am unfamiliar with. Now, in hearing myself, it is an endearment that sounds foreign to my inner child who used to squabble with her brother over what meal she was going to make.

When I show my brother’s picture to the stocky man with a face scar, his squint gives me hope. My brother who has been missing for three days. My brother who is in mourning for the end of things he thought would last forever.

“Ah na Chris Brown be this. He’s here, don’t worry.” He blurts to one of the other men, and they gather around him like insects to a splotch of jam. He rambles in a dialect that I am unfamiliar with, and the boys around him take off into the darkness of the under-bridge village to look for Anjola.

When the boys return, they hold my brother by both arms to keep him from escaping or running off. I realize that they must think he is a little mad because he looks so, but love can do that to a man. His hair is a ragged mess and his body quivers in short bursts. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in the five days he has been missing. His clothes are tattered and his feet are blackened, and you would think he has always lived here, with the rodents.

I make eye contact, and hope he sees compassion rather than disappointment. It wasn’t entirely his fault, it all started with that girl. The girl from Lebanon whose laughter was the earth’s most potent drug.

When my brother, Anjola, met the girl from Lebanon for the first time, he claimed his skin tingled with every word she spoke to him. It could be true, her voice was like a siren, and if she implored him to dock his boat and procure whatever she desired, he would. Her name was Marie, and she was the most beautiful girl on God’s good earth.

Marie was a bucket of joy, and the air around her was intoxicating. She smelled like euphoria and her smile was heavenly. When she visited our home, she often came with gifts. Deeply thoughtful gifts, the kind that come from someone who claims they love you and will do anything to be with you.

“I brought you apple cider. I remember you mentioned on my last visit that you couldn’t find a store that sold it,” she said to me, holding out a jar of the substance the second time she visited Anjola and me. The girl loved everyone and everything, and when the television flickered on with a song that she was familiar with, her voice excitedly filled our little apartment. I knew soon that if Anjola didn’t love this girl, I did already. But unfortunately, he did.

I sacrificed the rehearsals that were often held at the catholic church in the evenings so I would be home whenever she visited. Anjola and I would visit a nearby market hours before, nearly standing on our tiptoes as we leapt from one store to the other to find chicken, potatoes, and peppers for the meal of yam pottage that Marie swore to heaven and earth was the best thing she had ever tasted. She often came in just as the light from the day burned to a bright orange, and the cool wind that had been missing the whole day would drift in with her.

“I’m home!” she would tease, and hurry to the kitchen, in hopes that we were yet to finish preparations for the meal so she could help out. If the food was bubbling in a pot already, she would tie back her gold-tinted braids in a bun, and sit on the counter. The girl was made like a fairy, and I often joked that on a thunderous day, the wind could easily blow her about.

“I don’t want to go home,” Anjola says, groaning in the back of my sedan now. I worry that my seats will smell for days after this. I stay quiet, afraid that the invisible bubble he was in that kept him in the car would burst, and he would leap out of the window and onto oncoming traffic.
“I don’t care. You can’t keep sleeping under the bridge because a girl dumped you,” I finally respond.
“She wasn’t a girl. She was Maria,” he answers, his words partly slurring. A passerby would assume he was exhausted from his travails, but I knew he had been like that from the first day she left, like an addict recovering poorly. But he was right, she was not just a girl.

I suspect it was her eyes that often entrapped Anjola. They were often dancing around the room, as though she was in quick thought about something that was said and only she could hear. When she did look up at you, however, your heart would drum along to a composition and you would lose your name and all the letters that make it up or any other word in the English vocabulary.

In part, I think I was the last one to stop loving Marie. Maybe, I never stopped. When she came visiting on a day she knew Anjola was away at school and asked me if I thought it was a good idea to keep dating my brother, I became the poet that would have made a Nobel Laureate jealous. I spun poems about how he couldn’t live without her, and how much less his heart was probably beating in that very moment because they were not together, how he would die for her and no one could love her like he did. While most of it was true, perhaps they were also things I wished that someone would say to me.

My assurances kept her visiting every evening for a few weeks, but it was not to last. A woman like Marie could not be caged, her soul was restless and her feet had no soles to hold them to the ground. In a wordy text and a phone call on Ash Wednesday, she shook off whatever bonds held her and Anjola. She loved him, she claimed, she always would, but she could not love him now the way he was supposed to be loved. In the wake of that morning, I wondered if she knew that he would fight tooth and nail for a love far less kind, provided she was the one giving it.

Anjola remained in his room for days following their separation. He refused to eat and kept the curtains closed, and although I cared for him, I understood his suffering. Marie was the sun in his life, and if she was gone, no giant ball of gas millions of miles away could replace that. I fought a temptation to call her, even just to talk, but decided against it. Love that you begged for was not love, it was a shoddy imitation that bordered on foolishness.

When Anjola took off from the house without warning on a weekend that followed, whatever I felt for Marie threatened to become contempt. I reminded myself that it was no one’s fault but I struggled to shake off the resentment that bothered me. I typed out a text message to her to let her know he was missing, but never hit send. I was afraid that she would never respond and the image I had of her, as a shining angel simply plagued by anxiety, would be dashed against the rocks.

“I can never forgive her for leaving,” Anjola murmurs now. He sounds lost, like I am alone in the car and he is taking a walk down a street with a name no one knows. The boy is heartbroken, and his now unrequited love is poison in his blood.

“Well, can you forgive her for being afraid then?” I answer, my eyes on the steering wheel. Ahead of us, the traffic light flashes amber and green above a congested road filled with cars of lost strangers, one of which may love us someday.
“Afraid of what?”
“That you would leave her first. That she would stop being so interesting to you because she was a new thing, and said things you had never heard and sang like a fairy,” I said repeating a semblance of words I had once heard her say.

“Couldn’t she have stayed to find out?” he scoffed.
“Would you have?” He doesn’t answer but an understanding passes between us, and that moment goes into a bottle of memories that I hoard so it may never shatter.

When we arrive home, Anjola disappears and the sound of the running shower is overcome by the torrent of the rain still pouring outside. It is the first time he has taken a bath in a long time. I wonder where Marie is, and if some day when the rain finally settles and it’s a cool evening again, she will knock on our door.

Anjola comes into the living room dressed in clean clothes, but still hasn’t shaved his face or brushed out the messy mop atop his head, but at least his skin is free of the dirt and dust of the village under the bridge. He bends backwards to peer at the kitchen door and asks if I want to eat any yam porridge, I smile and answer yes.

When we sit at the counter together, the pot hums a tune that Marie would have known. I think about how her leaving was a final act of love, closing a door that we would nonetheless have left open, forgetting that rain could dampen our home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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