May We Be Forgiven

is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So—am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it’s sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are.”
    She stops and looks at me carefully. “You look different.”
    I burp the combo of pizza, cake, orange soda, and Londisizwe’s tea; I’m surprised blue-green smoke doesn’t puff out of my mouth.
    “I missed you,” Cheryl says. “You know, we don’t talk about a lot of things, it’s all sex, sex, but I’ve been watching—you’ve come a long way.”
    “How so?”
    “You’re human now.”
    “And what was I before?”
    “A two-by-four,” she says.
    I give Cheryl the gift I brought back for her—an old wooden phallus.
    “A dildo?” she asks.
    “It’s an important African symbol.”
    “Is it supposed to make me think of you?”
    “Not necessarily,” I say.
    “Did the children see you buy it?”
    “Nope.”
    I lie on the sofa with Tessie at my feet, her muzzle on my hip, one cat behind me, another on my neck. As I’m falling asleep, I’m thinking of the village waking up for breakfast. …

    F or several days we are in a zone that is neither here nor there, existing outside of time and geography, decompressing—readjusting. The children sleep, eat, and watch TV.
    For me it is a period of reorganization, realizing that things don’t have to be as they have always been. I don’t want to lose the openness, the sense of possibility that I felt on the trip. For Ashley, Nate, and Ricardo, things can never be as they were; the same is true in many ways for Madeline and Cy as well. For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you’ve got to let go of the past—in other words, I have to finish my book. And then what? Go back to school; study religion, Zulu culture, literature? Become a suburban real-estate agent? This isn’t so much about time on my hands as about life in my hands. And it’s life as currency. Where am I going to spend it? What’s the best value? I’m limited only by what I can dream and allow myself to risk, and by the very real fact of the children—I can’t take off trekking the globe in search of myself. It seems pointless to go on for the sake of going on, if there isn’t some larger idea, some sense of enhancing the lives of others.

    A t every opportunity, Ricardo or Nate retells the story of the hijacking; each time, the boys elaborate on what happened, what they were thinking, and what they would have done had the bad guys “tried something.” Ricardo would have picked up rocks from the side of the road and thrown them at them—stoning them. Nate would have used his martial-arts training to “take them out.” When asked, I offer that I would have attempted to negotiate—to talk them down—limited only by my ability to speak their language. Every time the boys retell the story, there is more to it. This is their unpacking of the event, the dawning of the realization that it was really fucking scary—that we could have been killed, and that, had we been kidnapped, had we been threatened with bodily harm, there would have been very little we could have done. Their retelling of the story makes it clear how powerless we really were. And the fact that when they retell it Ashley says nothing concerns me. Ashley in some ways was the most vulnerable of us—she was the girl, the child, the prize, and the heroine. The boys don’t say anything about that part of it, but I think about it—a lot.
    And I think Ashley does too—which is why she starting screaming on the roadside, and why her survival training kicked in.
    Africa seems both so far away and eternally present, like a scrim that I’m operating behind. I keep drinking Londisizwe’s tea, which I think is helping. I am cooking, cleaning, and packing three enormous duffels with a month’s supply of sheets, pillows, bug spray, stamps and stationery, shirts, shorts, and bathing suits, while having an identity crisis—one I’m too old to have—against the backdrop of a heat wave and three children who are leaving for camp this weekend. Ashley and I talk about “relationships” away from home and reaffirm that there should be no trading of physical favors between adults and children—she shouldn’t fool around with anyone more than