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  • from The Search
  • Bsrat Mezghebe (bio)

There was nothing I could have predicted about the summer of 1997. There were things that I knew—that I was seventeen, chubby, and painfully boyfriendless. And there were things that I was hopeful for—that Dad’s new treadmill would whittle me thin, and that in the shelter of Niya Fredericks’s enormous home, abandoned by her vacationing parents and absentee older brother, some boy would be interested, or bored enough to throw me in the game. With prospects like these, the last place I wanted to spend my summer was in Eritrea.

My family had only gone once before, right after the end of the independence war. My memory of that trip is minimal, a haze of endless relatives I couldn’t distinguish, who roughly kissed my cheeks and repeatedly asked if I knew who they were. There was also the abysmal state television channel, lukewarm long-necked coca-cola bottles, and the defiant buzz of mosquitoes, proud that they endured the repellent spray my mother doused our room in. But when anyone asked me what I remembered most about Eritrea, I would always say that there were just too many people. Every place seemed over capacity—city bus doors winged back on pressed flesh, cab rides were shared with strangers, and rooms housed more bodies than they were built for. I was too young to realize that actually the city wasn’t full enough. That the whole country was taking stock of who survived the war and who didn’t, of who made it back home in the flesh, or instead on the lips of a fellow fighter, sharing heroic tales to console the grieving.

I had expected the summer of 1997 to be the same, with the exception that we too would be missing one of our own. My mother had died five years earlier, in the summer as well. It was a sudden death, one that my father alone was present for, yet never witnessed. Mom had gone to bed early one night, complaining of a severe migraine and fatigue. She and my father had spent the day sorting through the clutter that filled the shelves and boxes in our garage. Battered toys and clothes, spare furnishings, and ancient tools had to be thrown out, and Mom joked that unless my brother and I spent the weekend with our cousins in Maryland, we’d be thrown out too.

When her head hurt later in the evening, I imagine her tying a thin, white strip of fabric tightly around its circumference, as she always claimed the Eritrean remedy worked better than any pills she could buy. My father joined her in bed much later and when he woke on Sunday morning, Mom lay next to him dead. I wonder when he realized that something was wrong, that she wasn’t just sleeping deeply. I don’t know if my parents cuddled, but I imagine that night he held her in his sleep and that he still thinks about that interval of time when he slept next to his dead wife, not realizing that even though she was right next to him, she was long gone. He hasn’t told me anything about that night. All these things I imagine. [End Page 893]

He didn’t tell me that she died of a brain aneurysm. A blood vessel in her brain ballooned so much that it burst, causing her to have a hemorrhagic stroke. I learned the details from her medical file, which I found in a small cardboard box amongst the junk that was never fully cleared from the garage. I also found the nightgown she died in and the white strip she tied around her head, and hid them in my bottom dresser drawer, along with junk food I wasn’t allowed to eat. I kept other secrets, that I had never been kissed and practiced on my clenched fist, tonguing the space between my thumb and index finger. And I knew Dad had his own secrets as well, that the reason for our trip to Eritrea was for him to find a new wife. [End Page 894]

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