Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Not more than five feet away, a metal rod was strewn among the debris. A surge of energy lifted Ifi, and she raced to the car, rod in hand. She shattered the windshield and pummeled the hood.

Then she heard it, a whinnying. The sound stopped and started again. And stopped again. The broken vehicle that had killed her son offered the most immediate shelter, an irony that, even in the moment, Ifi had the wherewithal to recognize. From behind the car, Ifi watched as a teenage boy stepped out into the night. He was stripped from the waist up. His pale skin was wet and luminescent.

“Listen, asshole,” the boy said after a pause. “I got a gun, so don’t fuck with me.” The boy peered around, knocked on a few cars, then, satisfied with his show of manliness, returned to a busted-out sedan.

From where she was crouched, Ifi witnessed the rocking of the car. Throaty giggles. The whinnying resumed. He had acted the hero, and here was his reward.

Safe at last. Ifi stepped out from behind the car.

Suddenly, the boy returned. Sweat glistened on his shoulders. A large metal bar was raised over his head. It began to come down — on Ifi.

A girl. “Danny, no! It’s a lady.” Her slim pale shoulders were drowned by the tan shawl draped across them. “What are you doing here?”

Danny erupted into chuckles.

The girl’s eyes met his. She laughed with him. Their lidded eyes rested on Ifi.

“Whoa, man,” Danny said. “Whoa.”

The girl reached into the car and offered Ifi a hit on their joint. Ifi, still frazzled, took the joint in her trembling fingers. Never before had she even held a cigarette. She started to say no, but the hungry look in their eyes. She put the joint to her lips, sucked on the smoke hard. Her lungs caught on fire. She coughed. The couple laughed.

“ You did that your first time,” the girl said to Danny.

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“Because I inhaled. You didn’t.”

“So?”

“Forget it.”

“Yeah, fuh-gedd-a-bout it.” They laughed at their joke.

“What you doing here?” the girl asked again.

For the first time, Ifi spoke. “My boy,” she said.

They looked around the junkyard at the shells of cars. “Won’t find him here.”

“No,” Ifi said back.

“Maybe,” the girl said, “hiding here somewhere.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He is a boy, a beautiful boy, my son.”

“What’s his name?”

“Victor.”

“I don’t know a single Victor.”

“How old is he? We’ll help you look.”

“Five.”

Danny crouched and called out in a low voice, “Victor, Victor, where are you?”

“What if we never find him? Oh, that would be terrible,” the girl said.

“Then we’ll break shit.” Danny still had the bar in his hands. He smashed it over the top of the car they had camped in. They all listened as the splintering glass ruptured the night air.

“Nice move,” she said sarcastically.

He smashed at another car.

Ifi collected her bar and attacked the silver coupe. They joined. In turn, the three demolished the vehicle, their silhouettes throbbing from their laughter.

Sirens wailed in the distance. By the time the police arrived, the car had stopped rocking. Only the scent of marijuana and alcohol lingered in the air. Into the blur of the highway the boy and girl had vanished, giddy and breathless with their raw defiance. Because of her bleeding thigh, Ifi made it only midway down the fence before a yellow light burned her eyes. A policewoman with a wide gait stepped into the light. But the glare was too intense for Ifi to make out her features. A staticky walkie-talkie merged into the sounds of the officer’s voice. Her questions were a disconnected stream of guttural syllables that Ifi had trouble understanding. Her blood was hot. Her throat was thick. Her eyelids were heavy.

Ifi’s bloodied hands were handcuffed. “Please,” she said to the officer, “I will not come back. I am sorry.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” the policewoman said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

A male officer ran her license on a computer.

Will they deport me? she wondered. I cannot go back to Nigeria, she decided. Not without my son.

At a hospital, Ifi’s wrists were bandaged. Asked not to return to the junkyard, she was suddenly released. Job waited for her with a white woman. The woman’s eyes were sleepy, her red hair in a tousled ponytail. Her high-waisted blue jeans tapered at the legs. She smelled of cigarettes and strawberries. There was an awkward introduction in which their eyes met and Ifi mumbled hello. She turned to go, but the woman spoke to her.

“Job and I, we’re friends from the old days,” the woman said in a rush. “Anyway, I took care of everything. The cops, they understand. They won’t press charges.” Then she looked at Job. “But she can’t ever come back, okay?”

Job nodded.

On the way home he said nothing, but the woman kept talking. She commented on everything: the still night, the full moon, the rattling of the car’s dash, the feel of the breeze. Ifi spread out on the backseat of the car, spent, unable to sleep.

They arrived at a corner apartment not far from where Ifi and Job lived. Just before they drove off, the woman glanced in the direction of the driver’s-side window. One soft look suddenly revealed to Ifi all that the years of late arrivals and early departures hadn’t. But she was too numb to react. Her tongue was too thick in her mouth to speak.

Job let the door to the house close before he finally spoke. “What is wrong with you?” he asked Ifi. “Are you trying to disgrace us, acting like onye ara?” a crazy woman.

She said nothing.

“They will deport you like the Mexicans,” he said. “I begged that woman to speak to them as an American.”

Ifi’s eyes sharpened at the woman’s mention. “I don’t care. They can take me. You can go back to your woman and tell her I said this.”

Job shook his head. “You must stop this. At once. I beg of you. Please, biko.” He took her bound hands in his. Tears were in his eyes. “Tomorrow, I am going to Nigeria alone to bury my only son, my only child. You have left me to do a father and a mother’s job as one. And now you must do this?”

“You do not have to go alone,” Ifi said. “Take your ‘friend from the old days.’”

Job emptied cans of pork and beans into a pot and heated them. After dishing for Ifi, he scraped away the burnt bottoms of the pots. Hot mugs of Ovaltine, sweet with evaporated milk, would finish the meal. Ifi did not eat. She did not drink. Is it because of Cheryl or Victor? he wondered.

For a moment, sitting across from one another at the table, Job’s mind returned to the image of Victor spread out on the concrete. When he had tried to explain that Victor had been moving when he first arrived, the doctors reasoned that Victor was already going into shock as his systems were beginning to shut down. His lungs had collapsed, his heart could barely pump blood through his body, his bones were broken under the surface of his skin, and his brain had already expired. They had said there wasn’t anything that Job could have done. But they hadn’t hung on to Victor in the last moment like he had. They hadn’t felt what it was to feel the last ripple of life escape through one’s fingertips.

Job gave Victor life. Why didn’t I save my boy? he thought. Sons were supposed to bury their fathers, not the other way around.