Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

And so she made a quick, impetuous decision to duck back into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. She scurried all the way to the bottom for safety, lying flat against the embankment to make sure no one could see her.

“It doesn’t make sense to you now why I would do that. I know that. It was different at the time, though. I didn’t know who was in that car. I kept thinking that maybe they were going to try to hit me with it. How did I know that they wouldn’t? What if I had stood in the road and they crashed right into me. We would both be dead then. There were so many things I didn’t know back then. I was only twenty-eight. I never used to be afraid of anything, but it was completely different once we came here. I was always afraid. I used to hate to leave the house by myself. What if someone yelled at me or hit me? I never knew what was going to happen. A little boy with red hair once swore at me. I think he called me dirty. Or something like that. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was very afraid of him, even though he was just a boy. What could he have done to me? I don’t know. You don’t know what that feels like. To be afraid of everything, even children. My English wasn’t very good then. Most people were very nice and they would say, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ but not everyone was like that. Some people would get very angry, and it wasn’t just at me. It was at your father as well. The people in that car could have done anything they wanted to me and no one would have known. I was afraid of getting lost and disappearing all the time.”

She hid in the ditch by the side of the road until the headlights came and then passed. For good measure, she waited at least five more minutes to make sure they were completely out of sight before she even attempted to stand up again. Once she did she found that she was tired and nauseous and more comfortable lying on the ground.

She staked out a space next to a newly erected wooden fence, on the other side of which were hundreds of acres of more farmland. Today, this is all part of the same estate, everything that stretches from where my mother sat down to rest to the place where the accident occurred belonging to one company known for its cereal. The estate continues on for another two miles before breaking open to allow for a now half-dead small town.

The barbed wire along the fence is surely new. My mother made no mention of it and would have been less likely to stay had it been here then. She always thought Americans were too territorial. “All those fences and flags,” she had once said, seeing very little difference between the two. Take the barbed wire away and it’s easy to see the appeal in resting here. The road remains relatively untrafficked even today and were it not for the private property markers along the border I’d be inclined to do the same as her. She, for her part, did the best she could to make herself comfortable, pulling out another sweater from her valise to use as a blanket around her shoulders and a second to rest her head against. She leaned back against the fence and drew her knees into her chest for warmth. She said she had never felt so tired.

“It was like I had walked a hundred miles,” she said. “I was so exhausted. Every part of me was tired.”

She drifted off to sleep. For the first time she had a dream of a house that resembled the one she had grown up in, except larger and in this version dressed in the same type of furniture she had picked out for herself from the catalogues — all of it sleek and dark with smooth, clean lines that nearly hugged the floor. When she woke up a few minutes later, she was convinced that her husband had finally gone ahead and died without her.

“I was sure of it,” she said. “I don’t remember why anymore. Maybe it was because of the dream. He wasn’t in it. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe it was just because I thought it would be better for the both of us if he had.”

I was struck by that sudden hint of concern for my father. Never once before had she made any mention of how he suffered or how deeply miserable they were when together.

“Was he that unhappy?” I asked her.

She looked at me briefly stunned, as if I had spoken to her in a language similar to the ones she knew in form and tone and yet still completely incomprehensible.

“I don’t mean him,” she said. “I mean you and me. Better for us.”

She leaned in at that moment and almost touched her hands to mine, but pulled back before she could complete the gesture; she didn’t know if I was fully on her side, and was afraid of finding out that I wasn’t.

It was with that thought of her husband already dead that she picked herself up and continued her walk along the road, this time no longer worried about who she would or would not find to rescue her. Suddenly it seemed to her as if there was nothing out there that she had to fear, neither cars nor man, and that if called upon to do so, she could walks for miles, straight through the night and into the morning.

“A great weight,” she said, “had been lifted off my shoulders.”

Night in the rural Midwest, miles away from any large towns, can be a remarkable thing precisely because there is often so little to behold. There are plenty of stars, but a greater number could always be found in other remote corners of the country. I’ve seen more of them for example on a single clear night outside of Boston than I’ve ever seen here, and I’ve stared up in obligatory wonder. Still, that doesn’t mean that I loved this place any less. The insects, whether they’re cicadas or crickets, are going at it right now, and their pulsing, whirring hum more than makes up for what the sky may lack. They haven’t quite yet reached their full force, and won’t until hours after the sun has completely set, their sound more of a persistent hum than the full-fledged chorus that it will soon be. My mother was kept in their company for the last thirty minutes of her walk, and I’d like to think that she also reveled in their sound, even if she made no direct mention of them. There isn’t much time left for her to enjoy these things. When the next set of lights finally approached, they obviously came with her and my father in mind. Someone, most likely the car that had passed, had spotted the tail end of the red Monte Carlo sticking out of the ditch and had done the right thing and called for help, and now help was finally coming, bringing with it a cavalcade of lights and sirens. Very soon they are going to be the only things that she can hear. The rest will fade into the background, and for the next eighteen-odd years she’ll spend much of her solitary time remembering how it felt to have briefly wandered even one small piece of earth with absolutely nothing and no one at all to fear.

“It was lovely,” she said when I asked her what those last minutes before she was picked up by a policeman and returned to the scene of the accident had been like. “Really, absolutely lovely. I can say that, can’t I?”

“Of course,” I told her. “You can say whatever you like.”

I began my final lesson from where I had left off, with my father and Abrahim walking to the pier on their last morning together. They didn’t say much along the way, but every now and then a few words slipped out. Abrahim had important ideas that he wanted to express, but he had never known the exact words for them in any language. If he could have, he would have grabbed my father firmly by the wrist and held him there until he was certain that he understood just how much he depended on him and how much he had begun to hate him for that. To pin so much hope to a man seemed cruel and stupid in equal parts. My father meanwhile was desperate to get away. He was terrified of boarding the ship, but he was more frightened of Abrahim’s desire. A man could easily be crushed under an obligation like that, and he felt himself already being weighed down, as if his shoulders were slowly being loaded with stones as he waded into water.