Safe
The front door has a conventional lock, two chain locks, and a dead bolt. Each room in the small house has a lock, and the windows can also be locked. At night locked inside the house, she feels safe. However, she doesn’t sleep well and since her daughter was born she has been a light sleeper. Now that the girl is almost a woman, she hardly sleeps at all. At night when dogs are sleeping, she lies in bed awake with worry, unable to distract herself with reading or listening to her bedside radio. There are only worries. And they grow, getting bigger and more menacing until she can’t stand it.
Alone with her worries is a terrible solitude.
Sometimes she wakes her husband. “John,” she cries, knowing better, knowing her husband needs his sleep to work. When she can’t stand it, she wakes him. “What?” he asks, waking up quickly. Even after the countless times that his wife has awakened him, he’s alarmed, listening for sounds at the gate, the windows, the door.
“I had a nightmare,” she lies and he asks sleepily, “Another?” She says, “Worse than before.” He squeezes her fingers, pats her hand, kisses her cheek, smooths her hair to reassure her. “It’s nothing,” he says.
She wishes she could have his attitude. She fears her constant worry will turn her thoughts into reality. Then she’ll have to live with the possibility that she made her worries come true. “I dreamed. . . ,” she starts to tell him, but he says, “Hush, go back to sleep.” Causing her to laugh to herself, not daring to admit to him she may never sleep again, knowing he already finds her melodramatic. She tries to contain the worries inside her for the sake of the marriage. She can’t have her husband thinking she’s a lunatic.
She lies still, her eyes closed, pretending to sleep until dawn. Then she rises when it’s a reasonable time for her to leave the bed and goes to the kitchen where she prepares breakfast. She hears her husband and daughter stirring nearby, each one stirring in a particular way, her husband a quiet riser and quiet dresser while her daughter likes to make noise, shuffling and stomping or sometimes singing loudly.
After breakfast is the worst part of the day when she says good-bye to them. Her husband and daughter often leave together, and when she kisses them good-bye, she says, “God bless.” At the gate she waves. She stands at the gate watching until they disappear, her husband walking with their daughter to the bus stop where they will board the bus together. Her husband will get off the bus at work, her daughter continue on the same bus to school.
The moment she no longer sees them, she returns to the house and prays. She eats a little garri seasoned with hot sauce and a slice of fish and sips her Nescafé. At eight o’clock she dresses and goes to the nursery school where she’s a caretaker. All day she’s distracted by little children. They’re a blessing, for the little children take her mind off her worries.
She didn’t want her daughter to go to senior secondary school. She thought the school was too dangerous. Her daughter already knew many things. She’d read many books and knew proper English in addition to Hausa. She’d learned math and science. When her daughter was fourteen, she asked if she had been in school long enough. She said, “Maybe you’ll come to the nursery and work with me?” Her daughter said, “I want to be a doctor.” Her husband said, “A doctor takes many years of schooling.” She repeated what her husband said, “Many, many years.”
“You must believe in me,” their daughter said. Those words cut her heart. Of course, she believes in her daughter. As her daughter’s mother, more than anyone else, she is proud of her daughter’s accomplishments and knows her single-mindedness.
Tragically, she believes in them more, that’s why she worries. She knows if they can, they will take everything away from her daughter. They will take away her future.
“The school isn’t well guarded,” she tells her husband. “If they come to the school, there will be no one to protect them.” Her husband says, “We must have faith,” which is what he always says. He isn’t sure about the police or military, but he is sure about God.
She isn’t so sure. She doesn’t believe God intervenes in human affairs. She believes God lets humans fend for themselves and looks down once in a while from heaven and laughs or cries.
“We must believe in His plan,” her husband says. He is also sure of God’s plan. She doesn’t share this belief because if God knows what goes on and still does nothing, he isn’t God at all. That’s why she thinks God mustn’t know, for this is the only way she can believe that God is good.
At the nursery school she is told there is a telephone call and to go to the office. She knows a call means her daughter or husband is sick, or there has been an accident. A teacher from her daughter’s school tells her there is terrible news. She shrieks before she hears another word because “terrible news” means her daughter has been hurt or killed. The teacher continues, “They came and took her.” Through her shrieks, the teacher says, “They took her and a hundred others.”
Then she is silent. She can’t speak or scream. She feels herself choke and thinks if her daughter is not found, she will kill herself. Even if it’s a sin, she will find a way to die. If God has let something unspeakable happen to her daughter, she will never go to church again. There is no future without her child.
“The police promise they will find them before. . . .” But the teacher does not finish for these are unspeakable words: kidnapped, raped, sold. Instead, the teacher says, “Before they’ve gone far.”
She doesn’t respond. She hangs up and walks from the office through the schoolyard, passing the children who call out to her. Their voices sound as if they are underwater, as if they’re drowning. She passes them and goes through the locked gate, a curse pounding in her ears. She walks, stumbling or steadying herself against a wall, or jostling a stranger. She doesn’t remember how she gets home. It’s a long walk from the school to her house and she remembers nothing.
At home her husband is waiting. He too has been called. He too has been told the unspeakable news. In the distance, they can now hear sirens. “The police, the Army,” her husband says hopelessly. She shakes her head and says nothing. Her husband pours them glasses of water and says, “You must drink.”
Although she senses there is wetness on her tongue and throat, they are not parts of her. They are parts of a woman going through the motions of drinking while the real person, the self inside the self, the thing they call soul, is cut off from thirst and hunger as it has long been cut off from sleep.
Her husband pulls her to him. He holds her and presses her body against his body, for he is her husband, the man whose seed made their daughter. She feels his hand on her hair, his heart pumping heavily through his shirt. His chest heaves. She worries he’ll have a heart attack so she loosens his hands from her shoulders and steps away. His black face has turned gray, his face is anguished with unspeakable sorrow, his hands are clasped in prayer.
“God. . . God help,” he mutters.
It is she who must take charge. “Come,” she says firmly.
She speaks although her tongue is swollen and her mouth dry. She helps him to their bed. She holds his head in her lap. She makes him drink. She whispers words of reassurance to him.
God will take care of our girl. God will take care of you.
For herself, she cannot say.
Summer Brenner is the author of a dozen works of fiction that include short stories (Coffee House and Red Hen), noir novels (PM Press, Gallimard serie noire), poems and prose poems (The Figures), social justice novels for youth, and the occasional essay, most notably in Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit. In 2022, The Missing Lover, 3 novellas with collages by poet/artist Lewis Warsh, was published by Spuyten Duvil. Forthcoming, also from Spuyten Duvil, is a memoirish thing, DUST: My Southern Jewish Family.