Behold the Dreamers (29 page)

A
TOPIC
LIKE
THIS
HAD
TO
BE
APPROACHED
WITH
UTMOST
CARE.
N
OT
TOO
seriously. Not too lightly. It had to be brought up with just enough finesse so it wouldn't become a fight. Which was why she waited until he was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. She entered while he was lining his toothbrush with Colgate, from one end of the bristles to the other, the way he always did it, even back in Limbe where a tube of toothpaste sometimes cost as much as a pile of cocoyams.

She sat on the toilet seat and watched him turn on the faucet and wet the toothbrush. “I was thinking,” she began, looking at his face in the mirror.

He put the toothbrush in his mouth and began brushing, intensely scrubbing his molars.

“It's just that, I was … Betty, she has a cousin … she says he can … he has citizenship.”

He spat out the white foam. “So?” he said, not bothering to turn around.

“He can help us,
bébé.
With
papier
.”

He put the toothbrush back in this mouth and continued brushing: up, left, right, down. His eyes in the mirror were the reddest she'd ever seen them. “If you're trying to say what I think you're about to say,” he said, his mouth half full of foam, “shut up right now.”

“But … please hear me out,
bébé.
Please. Betty asked him and he said he can do it for us.”

With his mouth half-open, a thin trail of foam pouring out, he turned around to look at her. She turned her face away.

“The money from Mrs. Edwards,” she said, “we should use it to pay him.”

He lifted the faucet handle, scooped water into his mouth and swished, then spat out the foamy water and began washing his face, splashing as far as the mirror above and the trash can below. When he was done, he pulled the towel hanging on the shower door and covered his face, breathing in and out through it.

“We divorce, I marry him. I get
papier
through him, then me and him divorce and me and you marry back, but the whole time we continue living …”

As if he'd heard something unbelievably stunning, he abruptly pulled the towel off his face, which seemed to have grown blacker than his hair. He turned around to face her. “Those screws in your head holding your brain together,” he said, poking his temple with his index finger, “they've gotten loose, right?”

“We don't have to go back to Cameroon, Jends,” she said, her voice so laden with despair it sank with every word.

He dropped the towel on the floor and opened the door. “If you ever open your mouth and suggest this kind of nonsense to me again—”

“But
bébé
—”

“I said, if you ever say this kind of foolish talk to me again, Neni, I swear to God—”

“The money from Mrs. Edwards, it's my money, too!”

He stood at the door, looking down at her looking up at him. “If you dare open your mouth and say one more thing, Neni!”

“You'll do what?”

He slammed the door in her face and left her frozen on the toilet seat.

B
UBAKAR
AGREED
TO
DO
AS
J
ENDE
WANTED.
H
E
WOULD
PETITION
THE
judge to close the deportation case in exchange for Jende leaving the country on his own.

“Voluntary departure is what they call it,” he said. “You leave quietly within ninety days. The government will be happy. They don't have to pay for your airfare back to Cameroon.”

“And I can come back to America?” Jende asked.

“Of course,” the lawyer said. “If the embassy gives you a visa again. But will they? I cannot tell you the answer. You will not be banned from returning to the country like you would be if you had just overstayed your visa and left. You can still come back, but will you be able to get another visa after what you did with the last one? Only the embassy in Cameroon can decide that.”

What about his wife and children? Jende wanted to know. Would they be able to come back? The baby could always come back because she was American, Bubakar told him. As for Neni, she should be fine if she formally withdrew from BMCC and left by a certain date after the international students office terminated her record in SEVIS. The embassy would probably give her another visa in the future because they wouldn't hold it against her that she once came in on a student visa and was unable to finish her studies because she had a baby.

“But your son, Liomi,” Bubakar said. “He will be in the same hot soup as you.”

“Why? He is only a child. They cannot punish him if his parents brought him here. I am the one who made him overstay his visa. It's my fault, Mr. Bubakar. It's not his fault.”

“Eh? Na so you think,
abi
?” The lawyer laughed his usual two-note laugh. “Let me tell you something, my brother,” he said. “American government does not care whether you are a one-day-old baby who was brought here and ended up illegal or whether you were blindfolded and tossed into a shipping container and woke up to find yourself in Kansas City. You hear me? American government doesn't give the tiniest piece of shit whose fault it is. Once you are here illegally, you are here illegally. You will pay the price.”

“But—”

“That's why you have to think
very carefully
about this decision to take your family back home,” he said. “You say this country don pass you, eh? I believe you. Sometimes this country pass me, too. America can be hell, I know. Man nova see suffer until the day ei enter America, make I tell you.”

He laughed again, the kind of laughter released only at the remembrance of awful things past. “I mean,” he went on, “I've been here for twenty-nine years. For the first three years, I spent hours every month searching for a one-way ticket back to Nigeria. But you know what, my brother? Patience. Perseverance. That is the key. Persevere it like a man. Look at me today, eh? I have a house in Canarsie. My one daughter is in medical school. My son is a civil engineer in New Jersey. Another daughter is in Brooklyn College. Hopefully, she'll get into Fordham Law and become a lawyer like me. I'm very proud of them. When I look at them, I do not one bit regret all my suffering. I can say without feeling any shame that life is good for me. I persevered, and look at me now. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you that life is going to get easy for you next month or next year, because it might not. It's a long, hard journey from struggling immigrant to successful American. But you know what, my brother? Anyone can do it. I am an example that with hard work and perseverance, anyone can do it.”

“Rubbish,” Winston said when Jende told him what Bubakar had said. Of course he did not want Jende to return home. Cameroon did not have opportunities like America, but that did not mean one should stay in America if doing so no longer made sense. “Why does everyone make it sound as if being in America is everything?” he said.

“All this stress,” Jende said. “For what?”

“To die and leave bills for your children to pay,” Winston replied.

Even if Jende got papers, Winston went on, without a good education, and being a black African immigrant male, he might never be able to make enough money to afford to live the way he'd like to live, never mind having enough to own a home or pay for his wife and children to go to college. He might never be able to have a really good sleep at night.

“Whenever I talk to someone in
pays
who is trying to leave their good job and run to America, I tell them, ‘Look out, oh. Look out. Make man no say I no be warn ei say America no easy.' ”

“But you didn't warn me seriously enough,” Jende said, laughing.

“No,” Winston said, laughing back. “I didn't warn you. I just bought you a ticket so you could come see it for yourself.”

“That is not a lie.”

“But if someone asks me right now if they should leave their job at home and come to America, I swear, Bo, I will beg them to forget about America for now.”

“Maybe wait until after this recession thing finishes.”

“What finish? Is it ever going to finish?”

“One day, surely, the country is going to get better.”

“I don't know about that, Bo. I just don't know. In short, even some people who went to law school like me cannot expect a good life in this country anymore. I read stories about Mexicans who crossed the border to enter America, and now they're trying to cross the border to go back to their country. Why? Because there's nothing left here for them to come and get.”

“It's people like you who are lucky,” Jende said. “To have a good job and money.”

“You think I'm lucky?”

“Are you not luckier than the rest of us? If you don't think you're lucky, you can come live in this Harlem dumpster and I'll live near Columbus Circle.”

“I guess I'm lucky,” Winston said after a chuckle. “I work like a donkey from morning to night for the people who are taking everything and leaving only a little for everyone else. But at the end of the day, I go home with piles of their dirty money, so—”

“But how man go do?”

“How man go do? I cannot do anything. And even if I could I probably wouldn't, because I like the money, even if I hate how I make it.”

“As the Americans would say, ‘Gotta do wha ya gotta do.' ”

“I'm just sorry for people like you, Bo,” Winston went on. “This country—” He sighed. “One day, I'm telling you, there will be no more Mexicans crossing the border to come to America. Just wait and see.”

“Maybe it will be Americans running to Mexico,” Jende said.

“I won't be surprised if that happens one day,” Winston agreed, and they both burst into laughter at the image of a multitude of Americans surging across the Rio Grande.

Jende got off the phone thankful that Winston had supported his decision. He needed the validation—he'd found it nowhere else, not even from his mother. When he had told her of his plan to return home, she had wondered why he was coming back when others were running out of Limbe, when many in his age group were fleeing to Bahrain and Qatar, or trekking and taking a succession of crowded buses to get from Cameroon to Libya so they could cross to Italy on leaky boats and arrive there with dreams of a happier life if the Mediterranean didn't swallow them alive.

T
HE
DAY
L
IOMI
WAS
BORN
SHE
HELD
HIM
AND
CRIED
FOR
OVER
AN
HOUR.
It had been a long pregnancy, almost forty-two weeks of nearly every awful pregnancy symptom imaginable: ghastly morning sickness and vomiting for four months; virtually nonstop headaches for the next two months; back pain that had her unable to roll over in bed and stand up without groaning; swollen feet that couldn't fit in the size ten shoes Jende had bought for her; a brutal thirty-hour labor. During the last month, she had used a cane to run errands and get around town, not wanting to spend all day in bed and have her siblings and friends laugh at her for acting as if pregnancy were an illness. Stop behaving like an old woman, they surely would have said, lovingly poking fun at her awkward gait and large belly. What would you do if you were pregnant and had five other children to look after? her father had said to her, angrily, when she said she wouldn't be carrying bags of groceries on her head anymore since pregnant women shouldn't carry anything too heavy. She hated his snide comments but, without a husband to protect her, she had to remain in his house and deal with them. When Liomi finally came out—after two midwives had maneuvered and pressed on her belly for over an hour while her mother and aunt held her legs up and shouted, push, push, if you know how to enjoy the sweet part then you must know how to suffer the bitter part, too—she hugged his bloodied and puffy body and cried so hard she feared she would use up all the water and strength in her body. It's over, the women in the room said to her, what are you still crying for? But she knew it wasn't over, and the women knew that, too. It was only the beginning of far more pains, but it would all be worth it as long as at the end of the day her baby was alive and well and she could look into his eyes and see what a wonderful, wonderful gift she'd been given.

“Why then would you want to give him up for adoption?” Natasha asked her.

Neni leaned forward on the couch, pulled a tissue from the box on Natasha's coffee table, and looked away as she patted her face dry. Five feet away, on Natasha's desk, the computer had gone to screen-saver mode and was displaying picture after picture of Natasha and her husband, children, and grandchildren. They looked like a happy family.

“I completely understand that you want the best future for your son,” Natasha said. “No one can fault you for wanting what every mother wants. But you have to ask yourself, is this the best way? What are you willing to give in exchange for what you want? And what do you know about this man who you want to talk to?”

“He was my precalculus professor last year,” Neni said quietly, her voice wrapped in distress.

“Mmm-hmm, and what else? Is he a good friend of yours?”

Neni shook her head. “Not a good friend like we talk all the time. But we had coffee on the last day of the semester and promised to stay in touch. He is a very nice man. He was nice to me and when he met my son he was nice to him, too.”

“How much have you been in touch?”

“We email each other a few times, nothing too special. He included me in his email list when he sent pictures of his fortieth birthday celebration with his boyfriend in Paris. I included him in my email also, when I emailed everyone to say that Timba had been born. He emailed me back congratulations and said he cannot wait for the day he has a child, too. Things like that.”

“I see.”

Neni nodded. “He told me that he and his boyfriend, they want to adopt very much, that is why two nights ago, when I was up thinking about my son, this idea just came to me like a lightning. I woke up in the morning and I could not think of anything else.”

“You haven't told anybody yet, have you?”

“Who can I tell, Natasha? My friends will think I have become a madwoman, and my husband, I don't even know how I will … That's why I called you first, if you could help me talk to my husband, let him understand it will be the best thing for our son.”

“Do you really think that, Neni?”

Neni did not respond.

“You really believe that giving your son to this professor, who you barely know, and his partner will make your son happy? Make you happy? Because you're going to have to—”

“If it means that my son can remain in America and become a citizen by being adopted by an American couple, I will be happy. I will tell him it is for the best for him and he will be happy, too. And I don't care that they are gay, if they promise to treat him well.”

“But will your husband care that they're gay? How does he feel about gays?”

“He's not afraid of them.”

“Yes, but is he … never mind that. My bigger concern is not about them being gay. I think it's wonderful that they're gay, just like it's wonderful that I'm not. What I care about is how this is all going to play out. Assuming you email the professor and meet and he tells you, sure, if you have to go back to Cameroon, my partner and I would love to adopt your boy. Assuming your son is happy with the arrangements, you kiss him goodbye at the airport and get on the plane, how do you think you're going to feel the moment that plane gets in the air, knowing you might not see him for years?”

“I don't know how I will feel … I will be worried for him, but … I don't like to live my life thinking too much about how I'm going to feel. I just have to …”

Natasha leaned forward and pushed the box of tissues closer to Neni, who sniffled, but didn't reach for a tissue.

“I know you came to see me,” the pastor said, “because you want me to validate you, tell you that you're making a tough decision but it's the right one. But I can't do that … I really can't, because I believe you will regret it. I don't believe for a second that you'll go through with it, knowing how much you love your son. But if you do … I'm sorry, Neni, but regret, especially when it comes to your child, it's not something you want to live with.”

“I will not regret it,” Neni said. “I will not regret leaving him behind so he can become a citizen, grow up and be—”

“Are you even certain he can become a citizen if they adopt him?”

“I Googled it, and it says American citizens can adopt an illegal child and file for green card for him, and after a few years the child can become a citizen.”

“I've never heard of that. I would consult an adoption lawyer first, especially since the couple you have in mind is gay and there's DOMA to worry about.”

“But I cannot take money to pay for a lawyer without telling my husband first!” Neni said, throwing her hands in the air. “And if I try to talk to him about this … I cannot even say
anything
to him these days without him …”

“Don't worry about the money for now—I could always get you a free consultation somewhere or talk to the church board about helping you guys pay for a lawyer.”

“Oh, thank you so much, Natasha! From the bottom of my heart, I thank you so much!”

“But before we go ahead and start spending money on lawyers,” Natasha said, “I'll ask you to please spend more time thinking—”

“Thinking about what?”

“Think about if this really is the best solution. Spend some more time—”

“I don't have more time!” Neni cried. “My husband is ready to go back home right now, and I don't know what else to do! I'm so angry at him, I cannot eat, I cannot sleep …”

“But there has to be another way to get your family out of this situation.”

“There are other ways but my husband says no!” Neni cried again, pulling tissues from the box and bawling into them. “He wants what he wants and I cannot do anything about it!”

Natasha leaned back in her seat and for almost a minute she said nothing, looking on as Neni finished her cry, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. When Neni was done, Natasha stood up, walked around the coffee table, picked up Neni's used tissues from the floor, and brought her a new box of tissues.

“Oh, Natasha, what am I going to do?” Neni said as Natasha retook her seat. “Sometimes I feel as if I am in a movie about a crazy African woman.”

“We just have to trust God that the movie will have a happy ending, don't we? And Neni and her family lived happily ever after!”

Neni burst out laughing, then she was crying, then she was laughing and crying all at once. Natasha watched as she went through the full range, dried her eyes, and then laughed again and cried again, unable to believe this was where life had dumped her.

“I can't imagine how difficult this is for you, but you have to look at the things you're willing to do. You're willing to divorce your husband and marry a man you barely know. You're willing to give up your child for adoption knowing you might not see him for many years.” Natasha paused, looking at Neni intently. “I think you ought to step back a little bit, ask yourself why you're—”

“I have to do what I need to do.”

“I'm not disagreeing.”

“I don't like how people say to a woman, oh you want so many things, why do you want so many things? When I was young my father said to me, one day you're going to learn that you're a woman and you should not want too many things; like I should just be happy with my life even if it's not the kind of life I want.”

“Mmm-mmm,” Natasha said, shaking her head.

“I'm not ashamed of wanting many things in life. Tomorrow when my daughter grows up I will tell her to want whatever she wants, the same thing I will tell my son.”

Someone knocked on Natasha's office door and said her next appointment had arrived. Natasha said she'll be ready in five minutes. She stood up, came around the coffee table, sat next to Neni, and took her hands. “I will support you,” she said. “Whatever you decide to do, you will have my full support.”

Neni nodded, and bowed her head.

“You don't have to ever worry about me judging you.”

For a moment Neni sat in silence, her head still bowed. “A lot of mothers where I come from,” she said softly, raising her head, “they send their children to live with other people. They want them to be raised by relatives who have more money.”

“Hmm.”

“Sometimes these mothers and fathers are poor and other times they are married and living together and have enough to feed their children, but they want their children to grow up in the house of rich people.”

“Does this usually work out well?”

“The relatives treat the children well sometimes; other times they treat them badly, but the mothers let their children remain there. I did not understand why.” She took a deep breath and leaned back on the couch, her hands crossed over her belly, her eyes on the floor.

“What are you thinking?” Natasha asked her.

“Maybe I'm becoming another person.”

“Mmm-hmm. And what do you think of this new person you're becoming?”

“I don't know.”

“Let me put this another way: Are you happy with who you're becoming?”

Neni's eyes welled up with tears, but she didn't cry. She looked toward the window and blinked back her tears.