Later I stand in the cold next to my grandmother, at the foot of the open grave. Her whole body shakes as my grandfather shovels the first dirt onto the coffin. I can’t look forward, so I look back. Nan’s small face in the triangle of the backseat window of Mom’s friend’s station wagon. Peeking out. Driving away. Where is she going?
Can I come?
* * *
I SHOOK MY head to focus on the line we were walking in. Sekuru was in the lead and I was at the back, and we were following a narrow path cut into the grass. I could tell by their murmurings that they didn’t see the usual landmarks. Didn’t know where to look for their son. I watched Gogo’s face to see if she knew where Donal was and wasn’t telling, was letting Sekuru find the spot. But her face revealed no secrets, and we kept walking. At last Sekuru saw something familiar and signaled to the groundskeeper, who came with his scythe. I watched Sekuru watch the man and thought He looks old today. His eyes were bloodshot, his belly hung over his belt. As if he knew I was watching, he stood up taller, shifted his weight. I wondered if it was shame he was shouldering. If visiting that place that preserved his son’s memory also preserved his sadness, his illness, and his defeat. I wondered if it looked the same on me. If the reason we never visited Dad’s grave was the fear that people driving by the cemetery would see by the set of our shoulders that he was a suicide. I wondered how Sekuru handled it, his family broken. I wondered how I did.
It would take some time for the groundskeeper to clear the grave, even though he was being careful to clear only Donal’s spot. As he settled into the task, Ngoni and his grandparents went in one direction, to visit the grave of a more distant relative, and I went in the other. I walked along the red clay pathways peering at the ground. Separated stalks of grass in search of a rock. It was a Jewish tradition I wasn’t raised with, didn’t understand, had never done before. But it was a tradition I seemed to need to do then. Find a rock to place on the grave. I would just need one, but soon realized the entire cemetery was built on clay, so I reached down and picked up what I hoped was a substantial enough clump of red earth and joined them at the foot of Donal’s grave.
I bowed my head when they did, but couldn’t close my eyes. It was a lie I was unwilling to tell in Gogo’s presence—pretending to pray. I wished I could answer her questions about Jesus. About if I believed. Instead, I squeezed my lump of earth to make it firm and focused on my unpainted toenails exposed in my sandaled feet and listened to Gogo speak to her God. She bowed her head, and her wire-rimmed glasses slipped down her delicate nose. Grief kept her voice quiet, and I wanted to reach over to soothe her, I wanted to steady her. But I stayed still as she prayed. Gogo clutched her small purse between fingers wrinkled and dark with age, her thin wedding band loose on her finger. But my eyes couldn’t focus, and it was Mom’s ring I saw through tears, a diamond and two sapphires tipping to the wrong side of her hand as she stirred the sugar into her cup of black coffee. I was ten.
* * *
I’VE ASKED MY mother one hundred times to bring me there, but each time the answer is the same. “He’s not at the cemetery, kiddo.”
I’m smart enough not to ask where he is, then. Because I would go anywhere. Instead I bide my time, and when my grandmother Rose visits, I climb on wobbly legs into her car. It’s a wide Oldsmobile with red pleather seats and it smells like an old person, and she makes me slide all the way across the front seat until I am right up next to her in that spot where the gearshift is in Mom’s car. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she loves me, but I can’t tell because it makes me want to jump out of my skin and run. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she’s trying not to cry—not yet, because she has to be able to see to drive us to her son. She is the only person who will take me to this place, and it’s my job to stay stoic and brave beside her or I’m scared she won’t let me come along, so I focus on the stripe across the top of the windscreen where the glass is tinted blue. No matter the weather, things look sunny up there. I’m scared of what will happen when we get there, when we won’t have the blue tinting to protect us from the rain.
Now we’re at the foot of the grave, and just like that day when we put him here, her body shakes with sobs and she pulls me tight and tighter against her. Her straight wool skirt scratches the backs of my bare knees. Her large plastic glasses dig into my shoulder where she grasps them. A Kleenex balled in her other fist is a knot at my neck. We stand at the foot and stare at the stone. I read the words and wait for him to appear. I read the words and try to call him forth. But this is no magic trick, and I can’t make him come and attest to why he left. His mother can’t make him come and demand from him an answer for his absence.
How long do we stand there waiting?
Does she place a rock on his grave?
* * *
I LISTENED TO Gogo pray for her lost son. Thought I am lost. Felt something shift and start to loosen. I didn’t know where I was, was not safe. I didn’t know this man at my feet and shouldn’t be mourning him. But was this mourning? Was it grief? My hands shook and tears fell and the lump of clay resisted the squeeze of my fingers. I tried to breathe. Gogo scrunched her nose and sniffled, pushed up her glasses and sighed. She’d said what she came here to say and she walked now to the car. I watched her go but my feet were cement. Sekuru followed her and I watched him go too. After a time, Ngoni turned and held out his hand to me. I couldn’t move. He let me be.
Some time later—minutes? hours?—I walked to the stone and placed the lump of red clay on the rounded granite top of it. Lost my balance and grabbed the headstone so I wouldn’t fall. Hot air filled my lungs, my vision blurred.
* * *
I’M TINY. I climb up onto Dad’s monstrous lap, an ocean of legs for a little girl. “Can I sit in your square?” He bends his leg, places his right ankle on his left knee. Puts me there.
“You can always sit in my square.”
10
AT THE SOUND of my approach a few days later, Gogo came to the open door of her second-grade classroom and stood in the fading sunlight, clapping quietly in greeting. She made this now-familiar gesture to welcome me to this place, the last school she’d teach in before her retirement in a couple of months. Her eyes met mine without wavering, with neither pride nor reticence, just an understanding between us that it mattered I’d come. Mattered that I could accept and return her welcome. So I clapped shyly, and smiled.
Everything was tidy and in its place in Gogo’s classroom, and while there were no children at the desks that late in the day, evidence of them wasn’t hard to find. Stacks of books piled neatly here, art supplies and drawings over there, a chalkboard at the head of the class with the day’s agenda carefully transcribed. Gogo walked over to her desk to push in her chair and collect her purse and said, “Shall we take a walk around the grounds before going home?” It wasn’t really a question, and I welcomed another chance to see the sky.
We soon came upon the headmaster on his way to his car, and Gogo introduced me with actual pride in her voice. “This is my muroora,” she said, rolling the first r and extending the middle syllable for emphasis, so he knew she meant it, and so that I did. The Shona word for “daughter-in-law” wasn’t one I thought she’d ever use for me. There are just some words that don’t apply to white people here. But after she had held my hand on the way home from the cemetery the other day, something had shifted between us, and now she got to announce it, make it formal. My body relaxed at the sound of that word, and I shook the headmaster’s hand firmly, didn’t look away from his gaze.
But I didn’t know if there was a new term I should start using for her. I’ve always called her what Ngoni does, Gogo, a term borrowed from the Ndebele, the other main ethnic group in Zimbabwe. It means simply “Gran,” though she is more of a mother to my husband than a granny. When Ngoni’s father became ill, his mother left, and for