Deborah Cloyed - What Tears Us Apart

Maybe they will burn for this. Maybe we all will.

Chege yanks her into the dark room, kicks the door shut, and all light goes out in the world.

Chapter 1

November 14, 2007, Topanga, CA—Leda

LEDA SAT IN the sun, feeling judged by the mountains.

Nearby trees wriggled their pom-poms of leaves, but Leda stared far off in the distance, where the scrubby canyon peaks took their turns in the sun and the rain, under the stars and the moon.

Everything in its place.

Except me.

A multicolored mutt entered the patio through a doggie door and hopped onto Leda’s lap. He curled into a furry ball to be petted.

“I quit, Amadeus,” Leda whispered.

The little dog looked up and sniffed.

“I know. Again.” Leda nuzzled the dog’s Mohawk. “Sorry, buddy, no more leftover filet mignon. I told François Vasseur to shove it.”

Amadeus whined.

“Oh please, you won’t starve.” They wouldn’t lose their cozy home in the canyon, either. Leda didn’t have to be a chef, she didn’t have to be anything. Not for money, anyway. But she’d really thought she’d finally found her calling.

Maybe I just don’t have one. A calling. A purpose.

Leda sighed. On a table to her left sat her laptop, waiting smugly for her to start the process again, an all-too-familiar sequence of searching.

Maybe some more iced tea first. Leda went inside, past her bookshelf of cookbooks (culinary school), past the corner display case of cameras (photography school). She bumped the stack of Discover magazines atop the stack of the New Yorkers (double undergraduate majors in science and literature).

When Leda returned with tea, she battled the urge to procrastinate further and pulled the computer into her lap. Mentally, she ran through the various paths she’d tried, weighing them. The thought of starting school again was both exciting and exhausting, but if necessary, so be it. She didn’t want a job, she wanted a career, something she cared about deeply. Something she could throw herself into.

Her fingers hovered, ready to fill the Google search box. She typed in career. Then she added meaningful.

When the search results loaded, she clicked on one after another. Social worker. Counselor. Teacher. An article about a nun in Canada.

The next one was a website listing volunteer opportunities.

Leda inhaled. Why not? She didn’t need the salary, but she felt awful when she wasn’t working. She should leave the paid positions open for people who needed them and help people for free.

Leda sat up straighter in her chair. She scrolled down the listings, each one a short link next to a picture. Teach English as a second language. Tutor troubled teens. Read to senior citizens...

On the third page, Leda saw a link titled Triumph Orphanage, with the tagline We Need Your Help. Next to it was a photograph of a man with a wide, strong, clear face, rich brown skin, and a smile written across like a welcome banner in a crowded airport. Leda leaned forward to stare into the picture. She clicked on the link and it opened a new page, with the picture enlarged within. The man’s smile held no trace of mental chatter or self-consciousness behind it. It was free and complete, open. Leda felt a surging desire to touch it, the smile, an entirely unfamiliar urge.

Below the handsome man’s picture was a snapshot of seven schoolchildren in an orphanage, smiling ear to ear. Leda looked closer at the photo, at the background. She scrolled down to the text. The man who ran the orphanage funded it by guiding safari tours—

Whoa. The orphanage was in Africa. In Kenya. In a slum called Kibera, outside Nairobi.

Leda exhaled and clicked the back button. No way. Let’s not get crazy, thought the woman who got anxiety in crowded grocery stores. Leda looked down at Amadeus, then inside to her cozy little house, each piece of furniture and decoration meticulously chosen and arranged.

No way could she do something like that.

Automatically, she fingered her burn scar, the patch of skin near her jaw, so smooth and soft, it was like a stone in the ocean’s break. She shut her eyes, felt her heart begin to race, heard the song humming the start of an awful memory.

When the phone rang, Leda nearly fell off her chair from startling.

She grabbed her phone from the table. Estella.

She hadn’t spoken to her mother in months.

“Leda?” came the raspy voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Mother. Something wrong?”

There was a pause. Leda sank into her chair.

“You’re the one who sounds like something’s wrong.” She sighed. “What is it?”

Leda frowned. Estella would get it out of her eventually. “I quit my job.”

“Surprise, surprise. What was wrong with this one?”

Leda’s teeth gritted together. Invisible armor clinked into place. “It was a sweatshop. My boss was abusive. But mainly it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.” Leda looked up. The mountain was still staring at her. She averted her eyes. “I wanted to find something meaningful to do with my life.”

As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Naked emotion was nothing but ammunition for Estella.

Sure enough, Estella “hmphed” loudly. “Not sure you’re the charitable type, dear.”

Leda thought of the photo of the man with the smile. “Actually, I was just looking at a posting to volunteer in Kenya.”

Estella’s cackling laugh poured into Leda’s ear like a bucket of wriggling maggots. “Leda, you are, what, thirty-two? Isn’t that a little old to play the college kid off to save Africa?”

Choice words died on Leda’s tongue. “Was there something else you called about, Mother?”

Estella’s cackle snuffed short. A pause. “No. I think that’s enough for today.”

Leda listened to the call disconnect, her eyebrows knitted together. When she set the phone back on the table, she saw that her hands were shaking.

The laptop’s face was in sleep mode. Leda swiped her finger across the mouse pad and the screen jumped back into view.

The picture was waiting.

She read the caption beneath the smile. His name was Ita, the man who ran the orphanage.

Ita, with a gaze fair and bright, surrounded by smiling children.

College kid, indeed.

Leda opened a new tab. Travelocity.

Chapter 2

December 9, 2007, Kibera—Leda

WHEN LEDA LOOKED out over Kibera for the first time, she thought of the sea behind her mother’s house, how it unfolded into infinity, unfathomable and chilling even on a sunny day. Leda stumbled at the top of the embankment, grabbed for the handle of her suitcase and stood tight until the rushing realization of smallness receded from her knees.

One million people, her guidebook claimed, crammed into a labyrinth of mud and metal shacks. It was a maze to make Daedalus proud. No Minotaur could escape from here. The slum was the Minotaur, gorging itself on fleeting youth and broken dreams.

Leda felt the dampness of her washed hair morph into sweat. She’d arrived the night before, had been ushered quickly into a cab and sped to her shiny white room at the Intercontinental in Nairobi. But now she stood on the edge of Nairobi’s secret, two terse sentences in the hotel’s welcome binder—the Kibera slum. Bounded by a golf course, towering suburban gates, a river, a railroad and a dam. Cordoned off. Now Leda saw what that meant—a place with no running water, no electricity, no sanitation system—the blank spot on the map of the city, officially unrecognized. A space smaller than her Topanga Canyon neighborhood, but thirty times the population density of New York City.

From where Leda stood, Kibera below was an undulating sea of rusted rooftops, ending at the horizon and the glaring morning sun.