Beneath the Baobab

The mango was not ripe. I knew this before my thumbnail broke the skin, before the white sap bled onto my fingers, sticky and warm from the sun. But I bit anyway. The sourness hit the back of my jaw and I closed my eyes, letting it pull my whole face tight.

"Adut."

My mother's voice came from the veranda, thin as the washing line she stood beside. I didn't turn. I bit again, smaller this time, working the flesh loose from the pit with my teeth. The juice ran down my chin.

"Adut, come."

She said it the way she said everything now, like a sentence she'd already finished in her head and was only repeating for my benefit. I spat the skin into the dust and walked toward her, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist. The compound was quiet. Mid-afternoon, when even the chickens find shade and the goats stand motionless under the neem tree like they've been switched off.

She was holding a letter. I saw it from ten feet away, the way the paper was folded, the blue airmail border. Nobody sent letters anymore. That was the first thing.

"Who's it from?"

She didn't answer. She handed it to me and I felt the weight of it, heavier than paper should be. My name was written on the front in handwriting I didn't recognize. Blue ink, careful loops. *Miss Adut Deng.* Nobody called me that. In Juba I was Adut. Just Adut. Like Madonna or Rihanna. One name was enough.

The return address was in Nairobi. I didn't recognize the street.

"Open it," my mother said.

"I'm opening it."

I wasn't. I was standing there holding it, feeling something shift in my chest, some small animal turning over in its sleep. My mother watched me with her arms crossed. She'd been watching me like that for months, ever since the results came back and the letter from the Ministry arrived and my name wasn't on the list. Not for the scholarship. Not for anything.

I tore the envelope. A single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. A bank receipt. And a photograph.

The photograph was old. Faded at the edges, the colors gone soft the way old photographs go, everything turning the same shade of brown. A woman in a doorway. She was wearing a dress the color of tea, high collar, long sleeves, standing with one hand on the frame and the other holding a child against her hip. The child was maybe two, maybe three. Bald head, fat cheeks, a scowl that could stop traffic.

I knew the doorway. I knew the cracked blue paint, the way the step dipped in the middle from years of feet. I knew the compound wall behind her, the jasmine bush that had grown so wild it swallowed the gate.

That was our house. In Khartoum.

The woman was not my mother.

I turned the photograph over. On the back, in the same blue ink, someone had written a date. August 1994. And beneath it, two words.

*She's alive.*

My mother made a sound. Not a word. Something between a cough and a cry, swallowed before it could become either. I looked at her and she was staring at the photograph with an expression I'd never seen on her face. Not surprise. Not fear. Something older than both.

"Who is this?"

She didn't answer.

"Mama. Who is this woman?"

"Your aunt." The word came out of her like a stone she'd been holding in her throat for years. "Your father's sister."

I looked at the photograph again. The woman had my father's forehead. The same high arch above the brows. The same way of standing, like she was already halfway out the door.

"I don't have an aunt."

"You have an aunt."

"You told me everyone was dead. You told me the whole family, everyone, in Khartoum, you said they burned the house and everyone inside it."

My mother turned away. She walked to the edge of the veranda and stood looking at the compound wall, at the jasmine that grew along it, the same jasmine, I realized, the same plant, how had I never noticed that before, the same heavy white flowers, the same sweet smell that made my head ache on hot nights.

"The house didn't burn," she said.

The bank receipt was for two hundred thousand Kenyan shillings. I didn't know what that was in Sudanese pounds or South Sudanese pounds or American dollars, but I knew it was more money than my mother made in a year. More than two years. The receipt was dated three weeks ago. The account was in my name.

I sat down on the veranda step. The concrete was hot through my dress. I put the photograph on my knee and looked at the child in the woman's arms. The scowl. The fat cheeks. The bald head.

"That's me," I said.

"Yes."

"And she's alive."

My mother didn't turn around. "She's been alive."

The words landed in me one at a time. *She's. Been. Alive.* Present tense. Continuous. Ongoing. All the years I'd been here, in Juba, in this compound, in this heat, she'd been somewhere. Alive. Existing. Without me.

"You knew."

"I suspected."

"You suspected."

"A mother knows things." She turned then, and her face was wet, but her voice was steady. "I didn't know for certain. Not until now."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"What would I have told you? That I left her behind? That I ran with you and left her standing in that doorway? That I don't know if she chose to stay or if she couldn't leave or if she was already dead by the time we reached the border?" She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "What would you have done with that, Adut? What would you have done with a maybe?"

I didn't answer. I was looking at the photograph again. The woman's face. The way she held the child. Not like a burden. Not like something she was about to put down. Both arms wrapped around, one hand cupping the back of the child's head. Like she was holding something she'd already decided not to lose.

"She sent money," I said.

"She sent money."

"Why now?"

My mother sat down beside me. The step creaked under her weight, the same creak it always made, the same creak I'd heard my whole life, and I wondered how many things I'd heard my whole life without knowing what they meant.

"Because you're eighteen now. Because you're grown. Because maybe she thinks you can decide for yourself."

"Decide what?"

"Whether to go."

The word hung in the air between us. *Go.* I looked at the compound wall. The jasmine. The goats under the neem tree. The chickens in the dust. My whole world, everything I'd ever known, everything I'd ever been, all of it inside these walls.

"Go where?"

"Nairobi. She's in Nairobi. The address is there." My mother nodded at the envelope. "She wants you to come."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud, a bark that scared the chickens. "She wants me to come. She's never met me. She doesn't know me. She sent a photograph and a bank receipt and she wants me to come to Nairobi."

"She knows you."

"She doesn't."

"She knew you when you were two. She knew you when you were three. She knew you before I took you and ran." My mother's voice cracked on *ran.* "She knew you before I decided that your life was worth more than hers."

The sun was moving. The shadow of the neem tree had stretched across the compound, reaching toward us, toward the veranda, and I watched it come. The goats shifted. One of them bleated, a sound like a question.

"There's something else," my mother said.

I didn't want to hear it. I wanted to stand up and walk away and go back to the mango tree and eat another unripe mango and pretend this afternoon wasn't happening. But I didn't move.

"The money. It's not from her."

I looked at the receipt again. The account number. The date. The amount.

"Whose is it?"

"Your father's."

"My father's dead."

"Yes."

"You said he died in Khartoum. You said they killed him."

"I said a lot of things."

I stood up. The photograph fell from my knee and landed face down in the dust. I didn't pick it up. I stood there looking at my mother, at this woman who had raised me, who had fed me and clothed me and taught me to read, who had told me stories every night for eighteen years, and I realized I didn't know her. Not at all. Not even a little.

"Who is he?"

"He's not dead."

"Who is he?"

"He's in Nairobi. He's been in Nairobi for fifteen years. He's been sending money. Every month. To an account I couldn't touch. Waiting until you were old enough."

"Old enough for what?"

My mother looked up at me. The sun was behind her head, making her face dark, making it hard to see her eyes.

"To choose."

The word again. *Choose.* Like it was simple. Like there was a right answer. Like I could just pick up my life and carry it somewhere else, to people I didn't know, to a father who wasn't dead, to an aunt who'd been holding me in a doorway in 1994 while my mother decided which of us would live.

I bent down and picked up the photograph. The woman. The child. The doorway. I turned it over and read the words again.

*She's alive.*

The sun kept moving. The shadow kept coming. And somewhere, in Nairobi, in a city I'd never seen, a man who was my father was waiting for me to decide.