Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“Get rid of who?”

“I don’t know, but she was screaming it over and over. And my dad was saying, ‘I won’t do it,’ and my mom was screaming that he had to, otherwise she was going to do something …”

“I’m so sorry to hear all this, Mighty. But your mommy, she was just angry, right?”

“She was very angry. She was crying and screaming so loud.”

Jende inhaled and exhaled.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Mighty went on. “I covered my head with my pillow but—”

“They did not say the name of this person?”

Mighty shook his head. “But I think it was Vince.”

“Vince?”

“Yeah, my mom was really upset about the dreadlocks. She said he looked like a hooligan.”

“No, Mighty,” Jende said, laughing lightly. “There is no way your mommy will ask your daddy to get rid of Vince. Your mommy loves you and Vince a lot—”

“They’re going to get a divorce!”

“No, please don’t say that,” Jende said, holding the steering wheel with one hand and reaching behind to rub Mighty’s leg with the other. “Do not say these kinds of things and make yourself angry. They will be happy again. It is just how grown people are. They will be friends again.”

“No, they won’t! They’re getting divorced!”

“Please do not make yourself sad worrying about things that will never happen,” Jende said as he struggled to drive with one hand. “Everything will be all right, Mighty … Everything will be all right … Everybody will be all right … Please wipe your eyes.”

When they got to the building on Eighty-ninth Street and Columbus, Stacy came out to get Mighty. Jende watched as the boy forced a smile and told Stacy that yes, he was super-excited about the piece the teacher had planned for the day.

Jende got back in the car after Mighty and Stacy had left, and called Winston, who, thankfully, picked up his phone on the first ring even though he had barely picked it up since the day he went to Houston to visit Maami.

“Ah, Bo, you and your worries,” Winston said after Jende told him about Cindy wanting to get rid of someone. “She could be talking about ten different people. Maybe she was talking about—”

“It has to be me,” Jende said, shaking his head in disbelief. “There is no other man who works for her. Anna is a woman, Stacy is a woman, her assistant is a woman. Everyone except me.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t someone who works for her. Women like her, they have all kinds of people who do different kinds of things for them. Doctors who take care of their wrinkles, people who do their hair, people who do their decorations—”

“You really think she would be screaming in the middle of the night to tell her husband to get rid of the person who does her decorations? Ah, Bo …”

“Okay, okay, fine. I just don’t want you to worry, that’s all. You cannot hear a story from a little child and start shaking like a leaf, eh? Don’t do this to yourself. You keep acting like this and tomorrow a heart attack will hit you, let me warn you. You don’t know anything. You don’t even know if the child heard correctly, eh?”

“Without this job, what will I do? My whole body is shaking. What am I going to do if they—”

“Hey, what is all this sisa for? Eh? Listen, if you’re so afraid, I can call Frank and ask him. If Cindy wants Clark to fire you, Clark will not hide it from Frank. And I can ask Frank to help you convince Clark.”

“Yes, please, that’ll be the best idea. He’s the one who helped me get the job. And he likes me … Please do that. Every time I drive him and Mr. Edwards together, he is nice to me.”

“So there’s nothing for you to worry about. I’ll call him tomorrow, okay?”

“I don’t know how to thank you, Bo.”

“Give me your firstborn son to be my servant,” Winston said, forcing Jende to laugh.

After he got off the phone, Jende leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes, and told himself to think of only good things. His father had always told him that: Even when things are bad, think of only good things. And Jende had done that as often as he could during his darkest days — while in prison after impregnating Neni; after his daughter had died late one night and Neni’s father had ordered her buried first thing in the morning, denying him the chance to say goodbye; after Neni’s father had denied his request to marry her for what seemed like the hundredth time; after he’d gotten a call from one of Neni’s sisters, seven months after he arrived in America, telling him that Neni and Liomi had been involved in a bus accident on their way to visit Neni’s aunt in Muyuka. In those moments he had done only what was in his power and thought of the countless number of good things that had happened in his past, and the many good things that were highly certain to happen in his future.

He’d done it when he felt powerless, like during those four months he’d spent in prison in Buea, waiting for his father to borrow enough money to convince Neni’s father to request his release. Everything about prison had been far more horrendous than he’d imagined: the cold mountain air, which made his skin itch and had him shivering from evening to morning; the inadequate portions of barely palatable food; the dormitories packed end to end with snoring men every night; the easily transmittable diseases, like the dysentery he’d caught, which had lasted two weeks and kept him writhing all day from stomach cramps and a high fever. It was during the nights of his illness that he thought about his life, about what he would do with it once he was released. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to leave Cameroon, move to a country where decent young men weren’t thrown into prison for minor crimes but were instead given opportunities to make something of their lives. When he finally got out of prison — after his father had given Neni’s father enough money to cover Neni’s maternity bills and the child’s expenses for the first year of life, and after Pa Jonga had promised that Jende would stay away from Neni indefinitely — Jende returned to Limbe, determined to start saving money to leave the country. He got a job at the Limbe Urban Council, thanks to his friend Bosco, who worked there, and began putting away as much as he could every month for a future with Neni. For a year after his release, though, Neni wanted little to do with him, first because of her father’s threat to kick her out if she continued wasting her life on Jende, and later because of her grief over the dead baby. Jende finally won her back — thanks to his bimonthly hand-delivered love letters splattered with words like “indefatigable” and “pulchritudinous”—but his dreams of a life for them in America always seemed farther than the nearest star when he compared his savings to the cost of an airline ticket. It was only thanks to Winston’s job as a Wall Street lawyer, more than a decade later, that he was able to get the funds to journey to America to start a new life.

Liberating as it was, though, the new life had come with its share of new pains. It had wrought new forms of helplessness he hadn’t considered, like the dread and despair he’d experienced when Neni and Liomi were both in the hospital after the bus accident. Although their injuries were not critical (a black eye and swollen face for Liomi; a sprained neck and broken wrist, plus cuts and bruises, for Neni), he couldn’t stop thinking that he might have gotten a different kind of call from Neni’s sister, a call not to inform him of their injuries and ask for money for their hospital bills but to tell him that they were dead and ask for money for their funeral expenses. The thought of them dying while he was stuck in America had turned his blood icy, so as often as he could, he had told himself to think of good things and good things only.