We expected Dee to come visit us over her holidays but we never saw her again. Not when Da was so sick nor for his funeral, though I suppose that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was for her to ignore Ma’s pleas six years later when she was dying and begged Dee to come and see her. It struck me as a terribly vindictive thing to do, not to grant a dying woman her last wish to see her favorite daughter, and not at all in keeping with the piety Dee projected.

God knows that her praying was always the showy kind, on her knees on the polished floor, lips moving fervently with her hands clasped together clutching her rosary beads as if they were a lifeline to keep her from drowning. I tried it a few times myself but I never heard back from Him.

I know the seventeen-year-old Dee would’ve flat-out dismissed my belief that I’ve been having a lifelong conversation with the universe just as profound as the one she’s been having with God. She didn’t believe in any kind of spirituality that wasn’t dressed up as organized religion—with all of its rituals and vestments and judgments—and she definitely wouldn’t have understood the universe’s subtlety.

The universe speaks in clues and signs, gentle nudges and hints, rather than pontifications and proverbs, commandments and condemnations. I have trusted its signs all my life, which is why I listened when it seemed like it wanted me back here.

As I stumble to bed under Dee’s disapproving gaze, I can’t help but wonder why fate has brought us back together like this. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Zodwa

27 April 1994

Big Hope Informal Settlement, Magaliesburg, South Africa

As the raindrops begin to clatter on the tin roof, Zodwa flinches, dropping her book onto her lap. The fluttering pages blow out the candle, plunging the shack into darkness.

After more than a year at the squatter camp, Zodwa still hasn’t gotten used to it: the panic when those first few discordant taps find their rhythm and become a steady drumbeat heralding disaster. The shacks near the riverbed were washed away by flash floods in January. She’ll never forget the woman’s wailing when they retrieved her two-year-old’s bloated body a kilometer downstream a day later.

The worst of their problems if the shack floods is the thin foam mattress stinking from the damp and the floor that stays caked with mud for days at a time. It makes Zodwa feel like an insect who lives burrowed in wet soil rather than a human being trying to eke out a life in the tiny patch of land they’ve claimed as their own.