“Leave that,” shouts Justina.
Ajany has to jump to reach the ball. It bounces off her hand and onto the ground. She grabs it, clutches it to her body. Gnashing teeth. Suffocated keening. Now she tries to gather her shattered selves by putting together pieces of Odidi.
Nothing happens.
Clutching the ball, Ajany cries.
Nightfall.
“I’m going to work,” says Justina.
“Now?” Ajany sniffs.
“When?”
Ajany walks in the direction of the door and sits on the ground in front of it. She watches Justina.
“A prostitute’s child needs the same things other babies have,” Justina says. “Stay or go. I’ve got work to do. If you stay, inside that box are his clothes.”
“He lived here?”
“Those dogs could never find him.” Pride. “I protected him.”
Studying Justina, Ajany wonders, Why her? Why this place? Bitter taste. Ajany looks around. Flickering lights, stench of yesterday’s cabbage, brooding chicken, children playing football outside. Ceaseless noise. Why this?
Justina strips off her yellow muumuu, digs around for a loose-fitting black-lace spaghetti top. A quiet laugh. “Sometimes, Odi-Ebe used to dress up as an old woman to pass through police roadblocks. They never caught him.” She squeezes into skintight shiny red trousers. “This is our world. Odi’s world. Tomorrow, when you come back to look for Justina, you may find there was no Justina. Maybe there will even be no house.”
Justina retrieves platform wedges and weighs them in her hand. Her head bends. “He almost made it home.”
“What happened?”
Justina leans against the bed.
“Uhaini.”
Betrayal.
“Who?”
“A diseased dog we were paying. He’s gone now.”
“Gone?”
“Someone got him.”
“So this is normal?”
Justina’s head goes up. “What’s wrong? Your brother was a thief? So what? Ebe organized us, he organized everyone. We do — did — do everything for our men. Even die.” She wipes her eyes. Throws her hand up. “Go away. Odi-Ebe didn’t want you here. Go away.”
Ajany looks at the ball. Tosses it up, catches it. “How much?”
“What?”
Ajany stares, eyes clear. “For your time?”
Justina whistles. “What do you want me to do?”
“Talk.”
Justina ponders Ajany, lips curling. “Anything else?”
Ajany glares.
Justina says, “Money first.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand shillings, for the night.” Justina sticks out her lower lip.
Ajany pulls out the notes from inside her coat. “Here’s what I have, three thousand and fifty. I’ll bring the rest tomorrow.”
“Keep your stupid money.” Tears slither down Justina’s top.
“Take it.”
Justina hits Ajany’s hand; the money scatters.
“May I feel the baby again?”
“For the money?”
“For Odidi.”
Justina lowers her head.
Ajany places her hands over Justina’s belly.
Closes her eyes.
The baby kicks.
Odidi, Ajany calls with all her heart, Odidi.
She exhales.
This she can paint.
Today, filling in the name of loss.
The color is red.
It has a name.
Odi-Ebe, pronounced in the breathy voice of a pregnant woman named Justina. She could sketch hope living in a womb, the best portions of a brother’s life — shoes, football, a woman, and an unborn child.
Small things.
Justina touches Ajany’s hair, leaves her hand on her back. They cry. Outside, thunder rumbles; there is a scattering of rain on the tin shack. Two women crying while the beloved unborn and the now dead listen.
They sleep on opposite ends of the bed.
They are only able to speak of Odidi at dawn.
The small universe inside is apart from the outside world. It is a place with Odidi at its heart and his sister guzzles down what she learns from the woman who had known this part of his life. She hears something of this woman’s life too. Family from Mombasa, Nairobi railway workers, father a polygamous train driver in the last days of the steam engines, Justina growing up contented in the city with assorted brothers and sisters, then a series of misfortunes that devastated, decimated, and dispersed the family. Disease. Job loss. Death. Dropping out of school, where Justina had excelled in art and mathematics, to take care of her sick mother, who had been the youngest and later abandoned wife. Justina’s little joys: timing the Mombasa — Nairobi train as it chugged along the railroad close to her shack, running after it and listening for the sound of its loud horn.
Crows caw outside. Footsteps — life in a hurry. Somewhere a dog barks and then whines. Inside, endless cups of ginger tea, and mandazi, and then it is six-thirty in the evening and Justina is adjusting a blond wig, while disentangling yellow neck-length earrings from the hair.
Ajany says, “I’ll come with you.”
She looks Ajany up and down. Her lips curl. “You?”
“Odidi went.”
“Yah! He could dance.”
“I dance.”
“You?” Justina laughs.
“I’m going.”
“So I can look after you, yah?”
Ajany picks up her handbag. “I’m not asking.”
“Haiya! But change those shagsmudo clothes. Haki, you can’t go dressed like that to shame me.”
That same night, under remote northern-land lights, a woman who has run away from home to outsprint death, shreds her clothes. She has traveled two hundred and fourteen kilometers to do this. She knows the enchantment of fire just as her daughter does. Red flames soar. Two drowsy goats sulk. Healing and insight. A spirit problem. A spirit solution requires a forfeit. A scapegoat. What is she willing to offer? Soul healing needs sacrifice. Given the extent of the problem — she agrees, death is a problem — to appease its hunger, something beloved and of blood must be offered. Something that will endure awfulness. “What could that be?” She thinks about it for a long time.
Ajany cannot stop moving. When she dances, the dread dies. When she moves, she is not lost. When she moves, there is no absence. When the music moves her, there is such life she laughs. The antics of a firefly caught in the memory of a once-perfect flame. Ajany dances. She dances with a hard-bodied Namibian doctor who is in town and looking for a good time. His arms wrap around her; her head is pinned on his shoulder. She dances away until she is three steps from the DJ. There she sways until it is daylight, the last one on the dance floor. Then she just stops. Justina, who abandoned her once they walked through the door of the club, is long gone.
Ajany, shoes in hand, handbag strapped across her body, saunters out the door, squinting at the light. A passing early-morning watchman’s wrapped-up radio plays: Maua mazuri yapendeza / Ukiyatazama utachekelea / Hakuna mmoja asiye yapenda / … Zum zum nyuki lia wee.… Nairobi’s flamboyant trees are in bloom. Ajany stoops to pick a floppy crimson flower, her feet soft on the cold, hard tarmac, feeling her way to the guesthouse, where she will eat the chef’s strawberry crêpes and, afterward, sleep the day away.