Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Leaving

244 Leaving T here isn’t anything to say. There aren’t any words in my head. I’m not glad anymore. Nothing hurts. It’s like watching the dentist drill my mouth after I’m already frozen. It’s the same too because a part of me is waiting for the hurt to start. I think that. I think how it is harder not to know when the pain is coming because then you’re always waiting. I think about dentists and Dr. Enaharo and how Bill got bitten by a dog in his waiting room and they weren’t certain if it was rabid or not so they couldn’t decide whether to give him twelve injections in his stomach and he was only four. Then I realize something . If a dog wants to bite someone, it bites Bill. If there is a poisonous caterpillar, he puts his hand on it. If there is a germ that goes down your ear, it goes down his ear. I don’t know what it means. The boat blows its horn. Dave and I shake hands. It is one sharp shake. Our third fingers are curled into our palms but the secret signal feels like something I remember how to do from a long time ago. My legs are crossed over each other so my shoes look like they are on the wrong feet. I am wearing the strawberry dress. Dave is looking at her sneakers. Jerry says, “See you later, alligator,” and Bill says, “In a while, crocodile.” My mother and father kiss Mr. and Mrs. Lee. Then we walk up the gangplank, which is really a huge white sheet of metal with ridges on it. We stand on the deck and the Lees stand on the ground. I can smell the tar bubbling. They are a family and we are a family. My father has his arm around my mother. I think about Red in a cage in the cargo of an airplane. They gave him an injection so he won’t bark or be scared. At the other end people he doesn’t know will come and put him in a kennel for quarantine. Inside the cage he has my mother’s dressing gown and a pair of each of our socks so he won’t feel too lonely when he wakes up. Now I want to know. I want to ask Dave if she ever lied to me. I want to lean over the railing and shout to her. The railing presses in my belly. It is hot on my hands. It matters. It does matter. Dave. Dave. But they are standing on the ground with their hands over their heads and the boat is making a huge sucking in the water as it pulls away from the dock. I look at her until she is a pale blur on the tarmac. I ask her in my mind over and over but when I think I hear her answer yes, I know I can’t tell if that’s really what she’s saying because it’s what I want her to say. My mother says, “God, I hope I don’t get sea sick. This reminds me of when we left Hong Kong.” She is leaning on the railing , looking sideways at me. My father is finding the cabin. We are outside the harbor now. “You were just a baby, not quite a year and a half. There was a typhoon. Everybody was dreadfully sick, even the crew. The waves were bigger than the boat. It was terrifying. But you just lay there in your cradle and rocked with the storm and gurgled. You didn’t cry once. You weren’t frightened at all.” I wonder if she is lying. I wonder that all the time now. But I can’t remember. I look at her. I look at her lips and her cheeks and 245 C y c l e 3 246 her eyes. Her lips are smiling. They are making words. They say, “What shall we do for the fancy dress contest?” It is snowing in my head. It’s snowing so hard that when I look behind me there aren’t any footprints. The whole boat is white like an iceberg. We’re going north. We’re going away. I’ll never see Dave again, or Christine, or Michael. I say...