The Things My Mother Kept

My mother called me on a Tuesday morning and said, “Don’t panic, but I need you to come home.” Naturally, I panicked. Nobody begins a sentence with don’t panic unless they have already prepared something worth panicking about. I was standing in my kitchen in Vancouver holding half a banana in one hand and my phone in the other, looking through the window at rain that had been falling so long I had stopped considering it weather. “What happened?” I asked. “Nothing happened,” she said. “Then why do I need to come?” There was a pause. I could hear chickens somewhere behind her and then the scrape of something heavy across the floor. “Mama, what are you moving?” Another pause. “Nothing.” My mother had many talents, but lying was not one of them. Her lies always came with unnecessary silence. “Are you sick?” I asked. “No.” “Do you need money?” “Why do you people who live abroad think every problem in Africa requires your money?” “Because last month you asked me for money.” “That was different.” “How?” “I needed money.” I closed my eyes. This was my mother. Seventy-one years old, stubborn enough to argue with rain, living alone in the same house in eastern Uganda where I had spent half my childhood complaining about chores and the other half dreaming of leaving. “Tell me what is happening.” She sighed. “Come first. Then I will tell you.” “I have children. I have work. I cannot fly across the world because you have decided to become mysterious.” “Then don’t come,” she said. “Good.” “Good.” Neither of us hung up.

Three days later I bought the ticket. I told myself it was because she was getting older. That was easier than admitting something in her voice had frightened me. My mother was not a woman who asked people to come. She was the woman who told you not to bother visiting because she had things to do. When my children were babies, she would call and ask whether they were eating, sleeping and gaining weight, then somehow turn the conversation into a lecture about why I had forgotten how to cook millet porridge properly. She had survived widowhood, bad harvests, relatives who borrowed money and developed amnesia, governments she distrusted, malaria more times than I could count, and eight children calling her with eight different versions of what she should do with her life. If that woman said come home, something was wrong. Still, somewhere over the Atlantic, squeezed between a man who removed his shoes before takeoff and a woman who slept peacefully through turbulence that had me negotiating directly with God, I began regretting the whole thing. By Amsterdam I had decided Mama probably needed help fixing her roof. By Entebbe I was convinced she had joined one of those churches where somebody discovers they are an apostle on Monday and owns a television station by Friday.

She was waiting for me when I finally arrived at the house, wearing a faded green dress and slippers that had once been blue. “You have become thin,” she said before hugging me. “Hello to you too.” She held my shoulders and examined my face. “Are you eating?” “Every day.” “Food?” “No, Mama. Furniture.” She ignored that and took my bag. The house looked almost exactly as I remembered it. The same veranda. The same mango tree leaning over the compound as though listening to family gossip. The same metal basin near the outdoor tap. Even the smell was familiar: earth, charcoal smoke, leaves, something cooking somewhere, and that particular warm smell of home that you never notice until you have lived somewhere else. For one foolish second I was ten years old again. Then I saw the padlock. There was a new one on the small room at the back of the house, the room where Mama used to keep sacks of beans, old pots, broken radios and things she insisted might become useful twenty years after everybody else had agreed they were rubbish. “Why is that locked?” I asked. “Because it has a lock.” “Thank you for explaining how locks work.” She picked up my suitcase. “Come and eat.”

For two days she refused to tell me anything. She fed me instead. Cassava. Matoke. Groundnut sauce. Greens. Jackfruit from a neighbor. Tea so sweet I accused her of attempting to preserve my organs. Every time I mentioned the phone call, she discovered urgent business. Beans needed sorting. A neighbor had arrived. The chickens required attention. Once she actually stood up and announced that she needed to inspect a papaya. “You called me from Canada to inspect fruit?” I shouted after her. “Nobody forced you to buy a ticket,” she called back. By the third evening I was ready to change my flight. “Tomorrow I am leaving,” I told her. “Okay.” “Mama.” “Yes?” “I mean it.” “Then leave.” She continued peeling a sweet potato. I watched her hands. They were older than I remembered. That bothered me more than I expected. The skin around her knuckles had loosened and the veins stood high beneath it. Those hands had washed me, slapped me, cooked for me, braided my hair badly, planted food, buried people, held babies and once chased a goat halfway down the road because it had eaten her cabbages. Suddenly she stopped peeling. “They come at night,” she said. “Who?” She placed the knife down. “People.” “What people?” “People who have lost somebody.”

I waited for the joke, but my mother did not joke. “They bring things,” she continued. “Sometimes clothes. Sometimes photographs. Jewelry. Cups. Shoes. Whatever belonged to the person.” I stared at her. “Why?” She looked toward the locked room. “Because sometimes the dead have something left to say.” I laughed. I didn't mean to. It simply came out. My mother looked offended. “Sorry,” I said, although I wasn't yet. “Mama, what exactly are you telling me?” She lowered her voice. “I put the object in that room before I sleep. In the morning, there is a message.” “A message where?” “With the object.” “Written?” “Sometimes.” “By whom?” “I don't know.” “Mama.” “You asked me. I am telling you.” I stood up and walked around the room because sitting suddenly felt impossible. “So people bring you things belonging to dead relatives, you lock them in a room, and overnight letters appear?” “Not always letters.” “What else?” “Once a radio spoke.” I stopped walking. “A radio.” “It had no batteries.” I stared at her for several seconds. “We are going to a doctor tomorrow.” She clicked her tongue. “This is why I didn't tell you.”

That night I couldn't sleep. Jet lag, mosquitoes and the knowledge that my mother was apparently operating a customer-service department for the dead made sleep difficult. Around midnight I heard voices outside. I got up and looked through the curtain. Three people stood beneath the mango tree: an elderly man, a younger woman and a boy who couldn't have been more than twelve. Mama came out carrying a lantern. Nobody spoke loudly. The woman handed her something wrapped in cloth. Mama accepted it with both hands. The woman began crying. Even from the window I could see the boy staring at the ground. Mama touched the woman's shoulder, then carried the bundle inside. I heard the back door open. A moment later came the metallic click of the padlock. I waited until she returned to her bedroom. Then I waited another twenty minutes because my mother had spent seventy-one years developing supernatural hearing whenever her children were doing something they shouldn't. Finally I slipped outside. The moon was bright enough that I didn't need a flashlight. I walked to the little room and examined the padlock. “Looking for this?” my mother said behind me. I nearly left my body without requiring her services. She stood there holding the key.

“If you want to see, see,” she said. She opened the door. The room smelled of dust, eucalyptus and old wood. Shelves lined the walls. They were covered with objects. A man's shoe. A child's sweater. Photographs. A cracked plate. A walking stick. A wedding veil yellowed with age. A cheap wristwatch. A Bible swollen from humidity. A red plastic comb with several teeth missing. Hundreds of ordinary things. That was what disturbed me most. Nothing looked magical. They looked like the things people leave behind because death does not give anybody enough time to clean up properly. Mama placed that evening's bundle on a wooden table and unwrapped it. Inside was a small school shoe. “The woman's daughter died two months ago,” she said. “She was nine.” My stomach tightened. “And what are you supposed to do?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “We wait.” “For what?” Mama looked at me. “Morning.”

I stayed in the room. I told myself I was proving her wrong. Mama eventually went to bed while I sat on a wooden stool beside the shoe with my phone, a bottle of water and the determination of someone who had paid too much for an international flight to be defeated by a dead child's footwear. Midnight passed. One o'clock. Two. Nothing happened. At some point I fell asleep sitting against the wall. When I woke, sunlight was coming through the cracks around the door. The shoe was still there. “Of course,” I whispered. Then I noticed something beneath it. A folded piece of paper. My body went cold. I picked it up. Three words had been written in uneven pencil: UNDER MY BED. I opened the door so quickly I nearly broke it. “Mama!” She was outside sweeping the compound. “What?” “You put this there.” “Put what?” I held up the paper. She looked at it and shrugged. “Then take it to them.” “You wrote it.” “If that makes you feel better.” The family returned later that morning. When the woman read the note, she covered her mouth. “What?” I asked. She looked at the boy. “Her drawings,” she said. “She used to hide them under her bed.” The boy ran home. He returned carrying a battered exercise book filled with pictures. On the last page was a drawing of four people holding hands beneath an enormous yellow sun. Underneath, in a child's handwriting, were the words: Mama please stop crying. I am okay.

I wanted an explanation. Grief can make people connect things that aren't connected. Children hide things under beds. Mothers know their children's habits. Maybe Mama had spoken to the boy. Maybe the woman had mentioned the drawings without remembering. There were a hundred reasonable explanations, and I collected every one of them because the unreasonable explanation frightened me. “You are encouraging vulnerable people,” I told Mama that afternoon. “Maybe.” “They believe you're talking to dead people.” “I have never told anyone that.” “But you let them believe it.” “I let them bring what they need to bring.” “That's not the same thing.” “No,” she said. “It isn't.” That irritated me because I didn't know what she meant. “What happens if somebody brings something and nothing appears?” “Then nothing appears.” “And what do you tell them?” “Nothing.” “Mama, could you stop saying nothing?” She smiled. “Sometimes nothing is the message.”

That evening we sat outside while darkness gathered around the house. For the first time since I arrived, neither of us argued. “When did this start?” I asked. “After your father died.” I looked at her. She rarely spoke about him anymore. “What did he leave?” She was quiet for a long time. “His watch.” “And what happened?” “Nothing for six nights.” “Then?” She looked toward the mango tree. “On the seventh morning there was a message.” “What did it say?” She smiled slightly. “He said I still owed him five thousand shillings.” I laughed so hard I almost dropped my tea. Mama laughed too, wiping her eyes. “That sounds like him,” I said. “Exactly like him.” And suddenly we were laughing and crying at the same time, which I hated because my mother had always made crying look like something that had happened accidentally to her face.

The next morning I woke before sunrise and found her standing inside the little room. Something was on the table. A scarf. Blue with tiny white flowers. I recognized it immediately. “Where did you get that?” My voice came out differently. Mama didn't answer. I stepped closer. I had owned that scarf when I was twenty-three. I had left it in Uganda years ago and forgotten it existed. “Why is that here?” “I found it yesterday.” “That isn't funny.” “I am not laughing.” “Whose message are you expecting?” She looked at me, and for the first time since I arrived, my mother looked afraid. “Yours.”

I couldn't speak. “I'm alive.” “I know.” “Then take it out.” She reached for the scarf, but before she touched it, something fell from its folds. A piece of paper landed between us. Neither of us moved. Finally I bent down. The handwriting was mine. Not similar to mine. Mine. The strange backward lean of my y. The way I never completely closed an a. I read the sentence once. Then again.

STOP WAITING TO BECOME SOMEONE BEFORE YOU LIVE.

“Mama?” She shook her head. “I didn't write it.” I sat on the floor. Of all the messages I could have received—from the dead, from God, from whatever lived inside that impossible room—this one annoyed me. It sounded like something I already knew and had spent years avoiding. I thought of my life in Canada. The projects I kept planning. The things I would begin when I had more money, more confidence, more time, when my children were older, when life became easier, when I finally became the woman I imagined myself becoming. “Maybe this room doesn't speak to dead people,” I whispered. Mama sat beside me. “Maybe not.” “Then what does it do?” She shrugged. “Maybe it tells people what they already know but are afraid to hear.”

I stayed another week. Nobody died. Nobody rose. No ghost walked through a wall. Mama continued feeding chickens and arguing with neighbors and complaining that I wasted perfectly good avocado by putting it on toast. People still came after dark carrying the belongings of people they loved. Some left with messages. Some didn't. I stopped trying to decide whether I believed it. On my last morning, I stood inside the little room looking at all those objects and understood something I had missed when I first arrived. The room wasn't full of dead people. It was full of living people trying to figure out what to do with love after the person they loved was gone.

At the airport, Mama hugged me and slipped something into my handbag. “Don't open it until you are on the plane.” “Is it another message?” “Food.” “Of course.” “Airplane food is terrible.” Hours later, somewhere above the Atlantic, I opened the bag. There were roasted groundnuts, two chapatis wrapped in a banana leaf and my blue scarf. No note. I turned the scarf over, half expecting another impossible sentence to fall out. Nothing did. I smiled.

Sometimes nothing is the message.