Fiona Sweeney shoved a pair of rolled-up jeans into the corner of her purple duffel bag. Outside her bedroom window, a siren’s wail cut through the white noise of a wet snowfall. Sirens, those eerie moans that signaled trouble, were a ubiquitous part of New York City’s aural wallpaper, but Fi noticed this one, perhaps because she knew she wouldn’t be hearing them for a while.
She still had space in her bag. What else should she take? She picked up the framed snapshot of her mother as a young woman wading into a stream with rubber boots and a fishing pole. Fi loved the photograph; in real life, she’d never known her mother to be that carefree. But her mother wouldn’t want to go to Africa. In fact, her mother wouldn’t want Fi to go. She put the picture face-down and scanned the room, her attention drawn to a worn volume of Irish poetry by her bedside. She tucked it in.
"How about the netting?" Chris called from the living room where he sat with Devi.
"Already in," Fi answered.
"And repellent?" asked Devi.
"Yes, yes." Fi waved her hand as though shooing away a gnat - a gesture that Chris and Devi couldn’t see from the other room. "Should have kept my mouth shut," she murmured. Early on in her research about Kenya, she’d discovered that the country’s annual malaria death toll was in the tens of thousands. It scared her, even though logically, she knew she had pills and repellents and would be fine. Mbu - mosquito - had been the first Swahili word she’d learned, and sometime the insects had even dive-bombed into her nightmares. Eventually, though, she realized mosquitoes had morphed into a metaphor for everything she feared about this trip: all the stories she’d read about a violent and chaotic continent, plus the jitters that come with the unknown. And what wasn’t unknown? Nearly all she knew for sure, in fact, was why she was going. Fi’s mom had never been a big talker, and sometimes Fi thought that deficiency of her childhood explained why she’d first had trouble with written words and then grown to love them. But despite her silences, Fi’s mom was a hero, raising four kids alone. What would Fi do with her turn?
"Fi." Chris, at the door of the bedroom, waved in the air the paper on which he’d written a list of all the items he thought she should bring and might forget. Money belt. Hat. Granola bars. "Have you been using this?" he asked in a half-mock teacher tone.
"I hate lists," Fi said.
He studied her a second. "Okay," he said, "Then, what do you say, take a break?"
"Yes, c’mon, Fi. We don’t want to down all your wine by ourselves," Devi called from the living room, where an Enya CD played low.
Pulling back her dark, frizzy hair and securing it with a clip, Fi moved to the living room and plopped onto the floor across from Devi, who sprawled in a long skirt on the couch. Chris poured Fi a glass of Cabernet and sat in the chair nearest her. If they reached out, the three of them could hold hands. Fi felt connected to both of them in multiple ways, and at the same time, she knew she was already partly in another place and period. A soft light fell in from the window, dousing the room in a flattering glow and intensifying the sensation that everything around her was diaphanous, and that she herself was half-here and half-not.
"You know, there’s lots of illiteracy in this country," Devi said after a moment.
"That’s why I’ve been volunteering after work," Fi said. "But there, it’s different. They’ve never been exposed to libraries. Some have never held a book."
"Not to mention that it’s more dangerous, which somehow makes it appealing to Fi," Chris said to Devi, shaking his head. "Nai-robbery."
Though he spoke lightly, his words echoed those of Fi’s brother and two sisters - especially her brother. She was ready with a retort. "I’ll mainly be in Garissa, not Nairobi," she said. "It’s no more dangerous there than New York City. And I want to take some risks - different risks. Break out of my rut. Do something meaningful." Then she made her tone playful. "The idealistic Irish. What can you do?"
"Sometimes idealism imposes," Chris said. "What if all they want is food and medicine?"
"You know what I think. Books are their future. A link to the modern world." Then Fi grinned. "Besides, we want Huckleberry Finn to arrive before Sex in the City, don’t we?"
Devi reached out to squeeze Fi’s shoulder. "Just be home by March."
The Camel Bookmobile, Masha Hamilton, 2007
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