Zodwa wasn’t expecting that, that there was a chance her son might actually be there. After so many disappointments, that glimmer of hope felt all at once too much to bear. She’d followed the woman through a series of passages to the baby asleep in the crib, suddenly daring to believe that this might be it, the moment she finally found her son. And it was only then that it occurred to Zodwa that if she did, if her baby was still alive and she took him home, she’d be blatantly flouting Leleti’s wishes.

What had her mother known about Zodwa that she herself didn’t? What had Leleti seen in her that was so flawed that she believed the baby to be better off without her?

She was sick and she wasn’t thinking straight, Zodwa answered herself. She was confused and upset about the rape. She was trying to spare me, not the baby.

And then the social worker was taking the baby’s clothing off and turning him on his side, and Zodwa floated free of herself, looking down at the child, who had a birthmark on his buttock.

But it was on the wrong side and not in the shape of Africa. Zodwa was too disappointed to cry.

“Hey,” Ace says now, snapping his fingers at her. “I asked you a question. Where were you yesterday?”

“I was at the clinic,” Zodwa lies.

“Which clinic?”

“The birth control one.”

“Hhayi ngeke,” Ace says, voiced raised. “Don’t think you’re going to try to make me wear those condom things. Black men don’t wear condoms. Our dicks are just too big.” He smiles lasciviously before his expression turns serious. “Besides, I heard that’s where the AIDS comes from.”

“What?” Although Zodwa was lying about having been to the clinic, it’s somewhere she plans to go soon. The last thing she needs is to fall pregnant again and Ace can’t always be relied on to withdraw quickly enough.

“The AIDS. I heard that the whites put it in the condoms and then force the black man to wear it to make him sick. I’m not falling for that shit.”

Zodwa shakes her head at his faulty logic. Ace refuses to eat meat that isn’t cooked well-done for the same reason: he heard that’s how you get AIDS. She says goodbye to him and leaves, adding a stone to Dumisa’s shrine on her way out, wondering as she does so if she’ll ever discover the truth about what happened to him.

Regardless, it seems the fate of the Khumalo women is to forever be searching for their sons.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Delilah

25 December 1994

Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa

It was Christmas Day as well as my fifty-seventh birthday, and I’d started it the way I’d begun every Christmas since 1955: thinking about Daniel.