A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“You’re late,” says a rumpled guy holding a placard with “Silver” scrawled on it in grease pen.

“Weather delay,” I say. “And we had to stop for gas.”

The padded ride of the big black car gives me the uncomfortable sensation of floating, of being divorced from reality. I find myself craving the bumpy ride of the old Land Rover, with its homemade seat-belt contraption for the kids, harnessed like a backyard rocket ship.

We pull up at the house. The rosebushes by the front door are in bloom — a deep bloody red. A climbing White Dawn rose stretches up the front of the house, wrapping around the windows. Ashley picks a low pink rose and puts it to my nose. “Abraham Darby,” she says. “They make perfume out of them.”

I draw a deep breath; the heavy scent catches in my lungs — I breathe again, a little less deeply.

“Nice.”

Ricardo insists on going to the front door and ringing the bell. Tessie barks excitedly.

Cheryl opens the door — she smiles.

It’s hard to describe, but what I’ve been dreading instantly falls away. I don’t think I’ve ever had that sensation before — a kind of darkness lifting, like sun coming out from behind a cloud — as literal and elusive as all that.

There are balloons, brightly colored streamers, and an enormous chocolate cake with “Congratulations on the Big BM” written in baby-blue script.

Cheryl, Sofia, Cecily, the pet minder and his sister, Madeline and Cy, Tessie and the cats, and a few people I’ve never seen before stand in a reception line.

“The house looks different,” I say, pleasantly surprised.

“You bet it does,” Cheryl says. “We gave you a makeover — painted the kitchen, living room, and dining room, rearranged the furniture, got a few new things like chairs that are easy for Cy and Madeline.” I follow Cheryl through the house with my hand over my mouth, awed, saying, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,” over and over again.

“The look on your face is priceless,” Cecily says.

Yesterday, in Durban, I was dreading coming back to the house, falling into the same routines, but this is incredible, a wonderful welcome home. For the first time I’m part of a community. I stand there, eyes watering, and raise a giant glass of diet orange soda. “My heart is full.”

There is pizza, soda, and cake so teeth-curdlingly sweet and richly American that I can’t stop eating it. I have one slice and another and another until I am high. I cut the high with coffee and am shaking and dizzy.

“We got hijacked,” Ricardo tells everyone. “Run off the road by some crazy men.”

“Ashley and Ricardo saved us by pretending the dolls were her children and that they were injured,” Nate says.

“What made you think to do that?” Cheryl asks.

“At my school they taught us,” Ashley says.

“Taught you what?” I ask.

“In gym class there was a unit on self-protection. They taught us to go for the eyeballs and the ball balls and that if we were ever approached by someone who wanted us to get into a car or tried to hurt us in any way, we should act crazy. Or roll under a parked car. They said bad guys don’t want to get down on their knees and try and pull you out from under a parked car, and that crazy people made them nervous. When I was younger I would always be thinking about what I’d do.”

“Brilliant,” Madeline says.

Terrifying — my thought repeats.

I make the tea Londisizwe sent home with me; it tastes of the South African ground, the dirt, and the air. I swirl the muslin bag in my cup and would swear that I see blue, green, and purple colors like an ersatz rainbow floating.

Later, I overhear Cheryl talking to Nate.

“What happened to your mom could have happened to any of us,” she says.

“I doubt it,” he says, not believing her.

“Trust me,” she says, “I’ve lived longer than you.”

“Do you really think it could have happened to anyone?” I ask Cheryl after everyone else has gone and she and I are in the kitchen trying to figure out the new cabinet organization system.

“I do,” she says.

“I’m not sure how to take that. …”

“It’s not about you, it’s about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that’s so shocking?”

I nod. “I guess so.”

“What’s shocking,” Cheryl says, “is that it doesn’t happen more often. What’s shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what’s shocking 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. …

For 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.

At 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.