Behold the Dreamers(75)
“Give me your firstborn son to be my servant,” Winston said, forcing Jende to laugh.
After he got off the phone, Jende leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes, and told himself to think of only good things. His father had always told him that: Even when things are bad, think of only good things. And Jende had done that as often as he could during his darkest days—while in prison after impregnating Neni; after his daughter had died late one night and Neni’s father had ordered her buried first thing in the morning, denying him the chance to say goodbye; after Neni’s father had denied his request to marry her for what seemed like the hundredth time; after he’d gotten a call from one of Neni’s sisters, seven months after he arrived in America, telling him that Neni and Liomi had been involved in a bus accident on their way to visit Neni’s aunt in Muyuka. In those moments he had done only what was in his power and thought of the countless number of good things that had happened in his past, and the many good things that were highly certain to happen in his future.
He’d done it when he felt powerless, like during those four months he’d spent in prison in Buea, waiting for his father to borrow enough money to convince Neni’s father to request his release. Everything about prison had been far more horrendous than he’d imagined: the cold mountain air, which made his skin itch and had him shivering from evening to morning; the inadequate portions of barely palatable food; the dormitories packed end to end with snoring men every night; the easily transmittable diseases, like the dysentery he’d caught, which had lasted two weeks and kept him writhing all day from stomach cramps and a high fever. It was during the nights of his illness that he thought about his life, about what he would do with it once he was released. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to leave Cameroon, move to a country where decent young men weren’t thrown into prison for minor crimes but were instead given opportunities to make something of their lives. When he finally got out of prison—after his father had given Neni’s father enough money to cover Neni’s maternity bills and the child’s expenses for the first year of life, and after Pa Jonga had promised that Jende would stay away from Neni indefinitely—Jende returned to Limbe, determined to start saving money to leave the country. He got a job at the Limbe Urban Council, thanks to his friend Bosco, who worked there, and began putting away as much as he could every month for a future with Neni. For a year after his release, though, Neni wanted little to do with him, first because of her father’s threat to kick her out if she continued wasting her life on Jende, and later because of her grief over the dead baby. Jende finally won her back—thanks to his bimonthly hand-delivered love letters splattered with words like “indefatigable” and “pulchritudinous”—but his dreams of a life for them in America always seemed farther than the nearest star when he compared his savings to the cost of an airline ticket. It was only thanks to Winston’s job as a Wall Street lawyer, more than a decade later, that he was able to get the funds to journey to America to start a new life.
Liberating as it was, though, the new life had come with its share of new pains. It had wrought new forms of helplessness he hadn’t considered, like the dread and despair he’d experienced when Neni and Liomi were both in the hospital after the bus accident. Although their injuries were not critical (a black eye and swollen face for Liomi; a sprained neck and broken wrist, plus cuts and bruises, for Neni), he couldn’t stop thinking that he might have gotten a different kind of call from Neni’s sister, a call not to inform him of their injuries and ask for money for their hospital bills but to tell him that they were dead and ask for money for their funeral expenses. The thought of them dying while he was stuck in America had turned his blood icy, so as often as he could, he had told himself to think of good things and good things only.
Which was what he was now doing in the car with his eyes closed. He thought about Mr. and Mrs. Edwards reconciling and being happy again, the way Vince had told him they were back when they lived in Alexandria, Virginia, before his father began working eighty hours a week at Lehman and traveling four, five times a month, and before his mother stopped smiling as much as she used to, except when she was with her sons or her friends or when she was at an event where she felt compelled to pretend to the world that she was a happy woman in a happy marriage. Jende was not sure the Edwardses’ marriage would ever return to those happy days long gone, when there was less money and more togetherness and Vince was an only child, but that was okay, because some marriages did not need to be happy. They needed only to be sufficiently comfortable, and he hoped the Edwardses would at least find that.
He thought of Vince in India and wished him success in his pursuit of Truth and Oneness. He hoped the family would be together again one day and he would continue driving them for years. He loved his job, and if God willed, he would be happy to do it for as long as he lived in New York. There were hard days, but Mr. Edwards was a good man, the boys were good boys, and Mrs. Edwards, even when she acted as if the whole world had let her down, was a good woman.
His phone rang as he was opening his eyes. He looked at his caller ID. It was Mr. Edwards. He smiled. He had just thought of him and now he was calling—that meant Mr. Edwards was going to live a long life.
“How was your Christmas?” Clark asked him.
“Very good, sir. I hope you had a good one, too, sir?”
“Good enough,” Clark said. He paused, then cleared his throat. “Are you waiting for Mighty?”