AT FIRST YVONNE THOUGHT TERRANCE WAS DEAD. THEN SHE THOUGHT HE WAS ALIVE. Then she hoped. Then she prayed. Because she knew he was alive at first. Then she knew he had died.
That’s what you think when your child isn’t home asleep on the couch or isn’t laying there sprawled out, watching the TV, the soda cans and empty Cheetos bags spread over the floor like leaves from a tree that has died. That he’s dead. Why else would he have not come home? You think he went out and did something to somebody and got himself shot. Or that somebody gave him something bad, and that he’s lying dead in a crack house, and that someone torched that house so no one ever finds out. That he took a car or someone else took a car, and they were running down I-195 at 80 miles an hour when a cop came up behind them, and they tried to outrun the cop and drove the car into a bridge abutment doing 110.
So she didn’t sleep at night.
It doesn’t make sense. Your children should bring you only peace. Your children should be good to you, every day, and you should be good to them, because your children are you and you are them. All Terrance did was lie about the house. Night watchman at night. He barely spoke. Never said anything about his days or nights, about who he hangs with or what else he did on his days free or at night when he was home. Yvonne didn’t want to know what he did when he went out. With whom. To whom. Wasn’t going to school. No one was ever going to hire him—no skills, on a visitor’s visa, never worked a day other than playing security guard. After all that time in the bush being hopped up and gun-mad, he didn’t know what work was. It still made a difference to her to have this one here, safer, sleeping under her roof each night, with a life today and, who knows, maybe a way to build a life for himself here once he figured things out; once he got tired of the couch and work at night and going who knows where during the day.
“Listen to Dr. Levin,” she told him. “Go to school. Go to learn. You can do that. At least that.”
Yvonne hadn’t ever really slept in her many years of no one. Then Terrance came, and she could sleep again sometimes once she heard the broken screen door banging on its frame, once she heard the wall shake when the house door shut, when the door lock’s tumblers clicked, snapped, and then thudded closed.
Terrance could be anywhere. The first day, unable to settle, she checked her cell phone for voice mail. She checked the answering machine at the house. She checked her voice mail at work. She checked and checked again. There was nothing.
The second day she tried to call Terrance’s father and her second man in Liberia, and then her sisters and a niece, but only got busy signals from home. She turned on the news and looked at a newspaper online. There was just chaos in the streets. It shamed her, so she turned it off. At least Terrance was here and not there.
The third day she called her pastor, who said he would ask others if they had seen Terrance. He came to her house that night to pray with her.
Yvonne cleaned under the in-boxes and the paperclip dispenser and the telephone on her blond wood desk, cleaned that desk three or four times, and she answered the telephone before it finished the first ring, every time.
On the fourth day she called her brother in Philadelphia and her half sister in Minnesota. They did not usually talk. She did not want to tell her troubles. They had lives and troubles of their own. They listened. He was not at their house either. They barely knew him. He did not remember life with them. We will call if we hear any word.
She began to look for signs, to see if he was dead or alive. The signs were small ones here, where people were well-fed and well dressed and just shuffled from place to place. The screen door stayed on its hinges. (If it had come off the frame, it would have been a sign he was dead.) The buses kept running on time. (If the buses had stopped working, it would have been a sign he was dead.) The bland pictures—of bridges and boats in the harbor, of wooden chairs set in the sand of a beach—that hung on the walls of her office were hanging square, as they always had.
Yvonne was sure Terrance was alive somewhere. He had to be.
But she also couldn’t pick up the telephone and call the police. He was over on his visitor’s visa. Not a citizen. There were hard stories about back home but not hard enough to qualify him for asylum. Not persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or for being part of a particular social group. Persecuted by memories and dreams. She thought about Temporary Protected Status. Liberians could get that. But if he applied they might learn something about who he’d been and what he’d done, and then he’d be deported without question.
Terrance was the flesh of her flesh. When she left home to come to America, she intended to find a way out for all of them. When she brought him over, she thought he would be safe, and then, one by one, she could bring the others. Then the war started up again, and she couldn’t bring the others. Now home was gone. There was no way back to the home of school uniforms and swimming in the ocean or to the home of sitting with her aunts and cousins around a charcoal fire or the home of six-year-olds making trouble near the village pump. Terrance became the only home she had left. Even if all he did was sleep all day on her couch and prowl the streets at night when he wasn’t working.
On the fifth day, when she couldn’t bear it any more, she straightened the pillows on the couch and went to pick up the soda cans and the junk food wrappers from the floor and the coffee table.
Then her pastor came back to her house to pray with her again. There might be a man. The man might sell used cars. The used cars might be shipped from the Port of Providence. Three men might have left on a boat.
Six weeks later, Dr. Levin called. He wanted to come to see her. He remembered where she lived.