Diamonds in the Shadow (2 page)

Mom was arranging desserts, something church ladies did well. Jared wondered what Mrs. Wall had brought, because she was a great cook.

Then he remembered. Mrs. Wall wasn't here. It was her husband, Brady, who had co-chaired the fund-raising committee with Dad. Over two years they had raised seven hundred fifty thousand dollars for the new church building. They'd had fairs, auctions, pledge campaigns, concerts and dinners. And three days earlier, the church had found out that Brady Wall had been siphoning off that money and gambling it away at Foxwoods. It wasn't just stolen. It was gone.

Jared's mom was friends with Emmy, Brady Wall's wife. Jared had a bad feeling that one day soon Emmy would be in the kitchen sobbing all over Mom. It was going to be a very crowded kitchen, since it would also be full of Africans sobbing all over Mom. Jared hoped she was up to it, because he had just decided to sign up for every school-sponsored ski trip in order to be out of town Fridays through Sundays. The less sharing, the better.

“One problem getting refugees to America is just finding seats on a plane,” said Kirk Crick. “There aren't many flights. Probably something opened up very suddenly, or four other people couldn't go after all, so your four moved to the head of the line. Your family is flying to London, where they'll change planes for Kennedy
Airport. Now, you'll need subcommittees. Who will be handling medical needs and doctors?”

“Wait,” said Jared. “What medical needs? Are these people planning to show up complete with typhoid and malaria?”

“No. They get checked in Africa for that stuff. But the kids can't start school until they've been inoculated for tetanus and all. Just like any other kid starting school. They'll be spending a bunch of time at the doctor's. Your family's background has been screened as well. African civil war consists of people butchering each other. Our task force makes sure you're not getting some mass murderer responsible for destroying whole villages, or a dealer in blood diamonds, or some vicious boy soldier.”

“I've heard about boy soldiers,” said Mr. Lane. (Jared was always surprised that anybody had married Mrs. Lane and even more surprised that such a person ever had a chance to talk.) “Ten-year-olds who chop people's arms off and walk away,” explained Mr. Lane.

No kid would do that. It was the kind of hype spewed on satellite radio—anything to make the world sound even more violent than it was.

The whole idea of screening people struck Jared as useless. Being screened would be like taking an essay test where you wrote whatever your teacher wanted to hear. We're kind and gentle, the refugees would say. We didn't hurt anybody. Goodness, no. We were the victims.

“What are blood diamonds?” asked Mopsy.

“Diamonds that are mined in West Africa and used to pay for
war,” said Kirk Crick. He seemed ready to expound on this, but Jared didn't care about mines. He cared about the strangers soon to be under his roof.

“If the family doesn't have any papers to start with, how does the Refugee Aid Society even know for sure who they are?” Jared asked.

“We're very, very, very careful,” said Kirk Crick.

Jared was suspicious. Right in their own church they had been careful and they'd still ended up with a major-league thief on the fund-raising committee. “Is there really such a thing as a boy soldier?”

“Yes. Often when a village is attacked, the boys are out in the fields watching the cattle. So parents get caught, killed or maimed, girls get raped and killed, villages get burned to the ground, but young boys get rounded up. They're forced to use machine guns and machetes on their own neighbors.”

Nice. Jared decided to e-mail everyone he'd ever met and find someone to live with until this was over. “A boy who spends the day out in some field with cows won't exactly fit in with suburban America in the twenty-first century,” he pointed out.

“You have your work cut out for you,” agreed Kirk Crick. “Now, your African family may not wish to discuss their past. They want to look ahead, not back. You're getting an intact family, which is unusual. Four people who struggled and suffered and now hope to put terror behind them. Your church signed on to cover housing and food for three months and to find jobs for the parents. After three months, the family is on its own. If they can't
function—and that's rare, because refugees are fighters—the Society takes over.”

Three months? thought Jared.
Three months?

Nobody but Jared seemed to think this was insane.

“You are doing a good deed,” said Crick.

The committee loved hearing how good and generous they were. They sat tall. They took lemon bars as well as double-chocolate brownies. Jared's dad began talking softly to one of the husbands, undoubtedly about Brady Wall, because that was now Dad's only topic of conversation. Mom was asking Mrs. Lame for her toasted almond cake recipe. The rest of the crowd was finding car keys.

Jared was the only person listening to Kirk Crick.

“In a civil war,” Crick said, “there are no good guys. They're all guilty of something. You are probably not saving the innocent, because in a civil war, nobody is innocent.”

Jared had never seen a refugee; the Society had seen thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. And that was the summary?
There are no good guys?

This made the refugee scene quite exciting. Jared's roommate would have a history of fighting and killing. On the other hand… how much fighting and killing did Jared really want in his own bedroom?

The piece of paper describing this family finally circulated to Jared.

On it were four black-and-white photographs that had probably been grainy and unfocused to start with. After much copying or downloading, they were so blurred that the four faces hardly had
features. The photos were from the shoulders up, and everybody's hair was pulled tightly back, or else cut close, and as far as Jared could tell, these guys could be anybody. These could even be four photographs of the same person. There were dates below each photo, possibly dates of birth, but they were smudged and only partially legible.

After close scrutiny, he decided that the two on top looked older. Probably the parents. The names typed under those photos (Typed! Not even done on a computer!) were Celestine Amabo and Andre Amabo. It seemed odd that they had French-sounding names. The photo in the lower left was labeled “Mattu” and the one on the lower right, “Alake.” No clues how to pronounce those names or whether the people were male or female.

We are taking people under our roof for months at a stretch, thought Jared Finch. We can't read their dates of birth. We can't tell what gender they are. We can't recognize them from their photographs.

We know in advance that they are not good guys.

I
N LONDON, FIVE PASSENGERS CHANGED
planes for New York City. The four refugees sponsored by Jared's church were seated at the front of the economy section. They did not speak to one another. They did not look at one another. They were separated from a fifth refugee by many rows. Now and then he walked down the aisle to stare at them. They did not look back.

In Connecticut, Jared awoke almost sick with knowledge:
We should not be taking these people in.

Jared did not say this to his parents. They would think he was selfish, racist and unwilling to share a piece of toast, never mind his room and his life.

The Finches left ridiculously early for the airport. “After all,” said Jared's mother, “I-95 traffic might crawl along at thirty miles an hour, and we have to cross the Whitestone Bridge, not to mention parking problems.”

They were using the church van, a vehicle Dad detested because it was unwieldy and had blind spots and a lousy radio. Mom rattled on and on. She was nervous. Even Dad was nervous. Dad traveled a lot and was comfortable in any situation, so his anxiety surprised Jared. Had Dad heard those words after all—
there are no
good guys?
Or was he working out the arithmetic of building a church addition without money? Jared thought the arithmetic was simple. No money, no addition.

Or maybe Dad was thinking of Brady Wall, the friend with whom he had golfed, played tennis, watched football and raised kids. Was he imagining Brady in prison? Was he hoping Brady would really suffer? Or was he worried about Brady, trying to understand and planning to forgive?

But Jared did not talk about important things with his parents. In fact, if something was important, the last people with whom he discussed it were his parents.

His sister was so bouncy with excitement she needed the seat belt to hold her down. All Mopsy had to do was breathe and she embarrassed Jared. Now she was going to embarrass him in front of a bunch of African refugees.

Jared took out his iPod.

When the plane was about to land, all passengers were required to sit in their own seats, wearing their seat belts. The plane landed so smoothly that the four refugees in front knew they were on the ground only when some passengers cheered. The refugees had difficulty undoing their seat belts. The flight attendant had to help.

Even so, they were among the first passengers off the plane.

They had learned something on that first leg from Nigeria to
England: it takes a long time to empty a large plane. A person seated in the rear cannot run down the aisle and catch up to the people seated in the front. He has to wait for hundreds of passengers to file slowly out. It would be several minutes before the fifth refugee could catch up to them.

They did not discuss this. They followed the flight attendant off the plane and down a narrow sloping corridor, which they now knew would connect the plane to the terminal. They arrived in a huge room packed with people and seats, chaos and lines. And there stood a man holding a large cardboard sign that read AMABO FAMILY.

“Welcome,” he said, stepping forward.

The refugees retreated. The man smiled anyway. “I'm the representative from the Refugee Aid Society. My name is George Neville. I'll be getting you through Immigration and introducing you to your sponsors. Your family is already here, parked and waiting and very excited to meet you.”

The Africans looked puzzled.

George Neville did not find this unusual. The distance between Africa and New York City was not just miles. This would be a new world for the Amabos in every way; it was natural for them to be afraid.

He could not tell who was in charge. Usually in any group of refugees, one person had a little more poise, was a little more articulate, and that person took over. George Neville offered his hand for the father to shake, but the father, a shriveled, tired man in a limp zippered sweat jacket, did not take George's hand.

Mrs. Amabo—a large, striking woman wearing a high head
cloth in a vivid orange print and a floor-length wrap with a fierce geometric pattern—whispered the words on the sign:
“Amabo family.”

The teenage boy said suddenly, “We are delighted to meet you, Mr. Neville.”

George was astonished. The boy's speech was beautiful, with a British accent, as if he had been at a boarding school in England, not in a refugee camp in Africa.

“I,” said the boy, “am Mattu Amabo.”

Mrs. Amabo looked at the passengers oozing off the plane. “Let us hurry on, Mr. Neville.” Her English was remarkably different from her son's, with an accent so thick George could barely understand her. But civil war separated families. He assumed that the son had lived in some other situation, possibly even in some other country. The family was lucky to have been reunited.

Hurrying was not something Africans usually did. They did not share the American concept of rushing here and there to arrive someplace at a precise minute. “We don't have to hurry,” George Neville assured her. “We have a lot of lines to wait in.”

The mother pointed down the vast terminal, where the other passengers were headed. “This way?” she asked, moving forward.

George quick-stepped to stay beside her. “After such a long flight, you look very fine, Mrs. Amabo.”

She did not respond. She just walked faster.

Behind George, the husband and the son cast glances over their shoulders. George did not see this. The daughter trudged along as if she were only half there or were just half a person. George did not see this either.