Why I Killed My Best Friend (31 page)

Anna sits up, wrapped in the sheet. “What happened next?”

“There was no next. That's all I saw. Three men with stockings over their faces.”

“But what then?” Anna hugs me, and a shiver runs through me.

“I told you, that's all I saw!”

“Remember, try to remember,” Anna whispers, gently stroking my hair, as if I were a child.

Gwendolyn is ironing, I can see her clearly. The tropical rains have started, which is why she hasn't set up the ironing board on the veranda. She irons as if she were dancing, shifting her weight this way and that, in the big basement room where the cleaning
supplies are, next to the storage room. Yes, Gwendolyn—her heavy, square body with its smell of salt and humidity; her unruly bun, with tufts of hair always escaping, the softest thorns I know; the whites of her eyes flash each time she raises her head to look at me. Lying on my stomach on the floor, I'm drawing our house with colored pencils. I put banana trees all around. They're not there in real life, but my picture looks happier with all that yellow. Every so often my eyes drift shut, and I doze on my papers while Gwendolyn's iron slides back and forth over the ironing board with soothing regularity. The room smells like my father's shirts, my mother's embrace. I slowly sink into a dream that's a faithful copy of my drawing. Suddenly a window up on the ground floor breaks, jolting me awake. Gwendolyn freezes in place, standing there with the iron in the air.

“It's the wind,” I tell her in English.

“Shhh,” Gwendolyn hisses.

We hear footsteps overhead, furniture being moved. Did Mom come home from Mrs. Steedworthy's? But she wouldn't ever come in through the window. Dad usually stays at work until late. And the hobgoblins in fairytales who sneak into stranger's homes to get warm never break windows, they just slip in on tiptoe. Gwendolyn grabs me and shoves me into the storage room, behind Dad's wine rack. “Not a peep out of you,” she says. Only in her anxiety and confusion, she trips over a crate of soft drinks and the whole tower of them comes crashing to the floor. The noise on the ground floor stops. Gwendolyn rushes to the telephone; two men come running down the stairs and overtake her. They have women's stockings over their faces and are holding knives. They're not very sharp knives, but Gwendolyn starts shrieking anyhow. I come out of my hiding spot to help her; no one would hurt a little kid.

A third man grabs me and hefts me onto his shoulders as if I were a sack of flour. He's so scary, with his nose and lips smushed
by the stocking! His eyes are squinted partway shut, his cheeks are swollen. The men argue with Gwendolyn in African, probably telling her to hang up the phone. Gwendolyn is crying. I've never seen Gwendolyn cry before. The men growl, their voices distorted by the stockings. One of them is carrying Mom's jewelry box of carved wood. Another grabs a few bags of rice from the storage room. The third has me. We all pile into a van. Gwendolyn runs out into the rain after us. The man who had me over his shoulder shoves her and she falls to the ground, in the muddy water. I watch through the window of the van as she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears altogether, along with our front gate. The men make me lie down on the back seat so that no one will see me. The van—a wreck, smelling of burnt rubber and sweat—bounces around in the mud for a long time. Eventually I forget about the three strange men with stockings over their heads. My eyes wander to the torn cloth on the roof of the van and I listen to the sound of the rain. I start to laugh. I'm thinking about how mad Gwendolyn gets when I say, “Gwendolyn, listen! It's God peeing!” At some point, the sound of the struggling motor stops. I raise my head. We're on a deserted beach with a cave at one end. They tell me to go into the cave and sit there. Their English is terrible. All they know how to say is, girl, here, sit here.

“Are you alone?” Anna asks.

“No, there's another little girl.”

“A little girl?”

“She's very small. She's expecting me to save her. But I can't. They cut off her arm and her head and throw her into the sea . . .” A wave breaks inside me, then another. My eyes fill with tears.

“It's not another little girl, Maria, it's your doll!”

My doll! Bambi! She has silver hair and a necklace around her neck, a bronze chain that gave Gwendolyn the idea for the story with the two friends. Bambi is no ordinary doll: she talks nonstop.
Whenever my parents or Gwendolyn or Unto Punto come into the room, she plays dead, but when we're alone she purses her tiny red lips and whispers that I'm her savior, that my love broke the spell of her boring doll's life. I cover her with a blanket my mother made out of an old woolen shawl. I kiss Bambi's pink cheeks and tell her, “Don't worry, I'll protect you.” Bambi comes with me into the storage room, nestles in my arms at the dinner table, sleeps on my pillow. She has straight hair, like Anna's, blue eyes, and dark, shiny eyelashes. And she's naughty. She always wants us to do naughty things, like climb up onto the roof of the house, or climb the trees in the garden, or hide in the laundry room and jump out to scare Gwendolyn. Sometimes she overdoes it. She says, “Pour your milk down the sink, it's gross! Blech!” Or, “Grab one of the goldfish by the tail, let's see how long it can last out of the water.” The goldfish flops around while Bambi begs me to hold it just a little bit longer. But I'm good to the fish, good to all God's creatures—I toss it back into the water and wipe my hands on my school uniform. Bambi has a uniform, too. Mom made it for her out of leftover fabric from my white summer school smock. Bambi is always getting dirty, just like me. “Oh, Bambi, what have you gotten yourself into this time?” I say. “Come here, I'll clean you off.” She likes to roll on the grass, in the dirt, and sometimes goes for a swim in the goldfish pond. Then I have to dry her uniform with the hair dryer. I kiss her on the forehead and forgive her. I always forgive her.

Yes, Bambi is with me when I'm drawing on the floor, when Gwendolyn pushes me into the storage room, when the men with the stockings on their heads shove me into their van. And she's with me in the cave, too. “Let's get out of here,” she says to me. “These are bad guys! Quick, let's run away!” We take off our shoes—Bambi's are red patent leather with a little strap, mine are black and full of sand. We run across the muddy beach, under the rain, toward freedom. Neither of us realizes that the men are
running after us—until they grab us and whisk us up into the air. It's easy as pie for them, bad guys always run faster than good guys. My bad guy, the one who slung me over his shoulder, grabs Bambi, pulls off her arm and tosses it into the sea. “Don't, don't!” I cry. Then he pulls off her head. I rush at him and bite his arm, but instead of behaving, he throws Bambi's head far off into the waves. Then he hands her back to me, headless, missing one arm, as if he were the judge in Gwendolyn's story, and I'm the jealous friend who wanted the necklace. “That's what we'll do to you if you try to run away again,” he says to me. And to scare me even more, he pulls the stocking off his head. He's white! The very worst bad guy is white! I would have preferred him to be black, it would be more like Mom's stories, about how being poor makes black people so crazy that sometimes they do bad things.

They lead me back to the cave. I put my head in my hands and cry and cry. And since it's raining, it's as if all of Ikeja, all of Africa, is mourning with me. Bambi, Bambi, you can't talk anymore? Did they kill you? Did you turn back into a doll? I dig a hole in the sand and bury her, the same way we buried our baby.

“What baby?” Anna asks. She's still stroking my hair.

“My little sister.”

She was a tiny baby, like a worm. Before she was born she seemed enormous. She would stretch her legs in Mom's belly and Mom would put my hand on her belly button and ask if I felt her kicking. “Why is she kicking?” I'd ask. Dad would say that that's how babies are, they do naughty things, but I should set a good example. I couldn't wait for her to finally be born, so we could play together in the garden and draw houses and banana trees and peeing gods. In the end she was born prematurely. “She couldn't wait to meet us, either,” Dad said. In the hall outside the emergency room I kept standing on tiptoe to see our baby better: she looked like a sleeping cat. I made up stories in my head: we would play hide-and-seek
with Unto Punto, we would sneak into the storage room and put one another's hair in ponytails. But the baby wanted to sleep forever. Mom said she went up to heaven to be with the angels. Gwendolyn said they put her in a nice white house, with photographs of us, and lollipops, candies, and teddy bears, and lowered her deep into the ground. “Why?” I asked. “Because the light of Africa hurt her eyes. She was used to the darkness in your mother's belly.” Mom started to believe more and more in God, and to cry and get fat. Dad stayed at work later and later. Gwendolyn talked more than ever about salt and worms. Mrs. Steedworthy brought me Bambi so I'd have someone to play with. I couldn't save our baby, but I made Bambi talk, and she told me all the time how I'd saved her from her boring doll's life.

“It's not your fault,” Anna says, and hugs me so tightly I think I might break into a thousand pieces. I'm not paying any attention to her. After all these years I'm right back in that cave. Night falls; Bambi is buried in the sand; the men gesture, argue, smoke. I'm little, they won't see me in the dark. I'll just go as far as the main road, some car full of good guys will stop and pick me up and give me a blanket so I'm not cold. We'll go to another beach far away, we'll light a big bonfire to dry my clothes, they're gypsies, they'll tell me stories, and I'll tell them about my adventures with the burglars and our baby, and the gypsies will have lots and lots of kids, so many that they won't mind giving me one to be my little sister. In the morning we'll eat bananas and then they'll take me back home to Ikeja, and Mom and Dad will cry with joy. We'll all give the gypsy baby a bath and teach her Greek and English and the salt won't ever get worms again.

I get up and start to walk. I'm not running as I was before, just walking to go meet my gypsies. But the bad white man catches up with me. “What did I say would happen to you if you didn't listen?” he shouts in my face, and before I can say a word, he slices
off part of my little finger. Just a little bit, not even half, but there's blood running everywhere. The other two, the black men who aren't as bad as the white man, punch the white man in the face. One tears off part of his shirt and wraps it around my finger and says, “Sorry, girl, sorry.” Then all three of them leave, disappearing into the dark.

The blood has seeped through the shirt of the better bad guy. It hurts a lot and I'm crying. Eventually I run out of tears, and my voice is gone, too. I sit and listen to the wind howl. The sand is cold from the storm and looks like the crystallized sugar we have in our storage room. Mom will yell at me for not bringing a coat. Something moves in the back of the cave. Is it a snake? A dragon? A hobgoblin? In the end it's a cricket. It climbs up on my knee, and I play with it, I ruffle its wings. I'm very hungry. What if I ate it? I bite into it and chew as quickly as I can. It tastes good, like a potato chip. The sound of the cricket in my mouth is reassuring, like company.

They find me in the morning. First the Ikeja police come and wrap me in a blanket, since my teeth are chattering and I'm trembling. They ask me about the white man. Then my parents show up in the Mercedes. Mom runs toward me with open arms and kisses me all over, even my eyes and ears. “I was afraid I'd lost my other child, too,” she whispers. When she sees my finger, she lets out the loudest scream! Dad pounds his fist in his open palm like he's beating himself up. The police say that the white man is an American from the base who went crazy, and that the burglars didn't think anyone would be home. They took me with them for ransom, and when I tried to run away they panicked. They didn't know what to do. “Well, I know exactly what I'll do!” Dad shouts. He curses all the blacks in the world and says we're going to get out of Africa as soon as we can.

“But, Dad, the murderer was white!”

“What murderer?”

“He killed Bambi.”

I show them where I buried her. Mom is sobbing. Dad asks, “What is that?”

“A piece of cricket, so she has something to eat in her grave. I didn't have any candy or lollipops.” I made a mistake, again. Bambi's head is in the sea. She has no mouth to chew with.

This year Walkmans are all the rage. At the beach you see girls with headphones drumming their fingers against their knees. They tap their feet to the rhythm, whistle or sing off-key, in a world of their own. And when they take the headphones off, they look surprised, dazed by the sudden onslaught of reality. That's how I've been living all these years: with headphones on. And then Anna, who always knows better, who's always one step ahead, comes along and yanks my headphones off: “It's not another little girl, Maria, it's your doll!”

“How did you know about any of that?” I ask. It's past dawn now, and we're lying in bed, wrapped tightly in the sheets. Exhausted mummies.

“Your mother told Antigone, back when we found you on the beach in Aegina. You know, after Angelos and I . . . She was crying because you were eating crickets and grinding your teeth, just like back then.”

“She told you about that, too?”