“You cannot just sit there thinking about it.”
“I’m not just sitting there thinking about it! I’ll talk to him about it; not today—he’s coming back home from work too late.”
“When are you going to ask him then? You know the longer you wait—”
“Nothing is going to change in a few days.”
“So you’re going to wait till next year?”
“I said I’ll talk to him.”
Fifty-one
A TOPIC LIKE THIS HAD TO BE APPROACHED WITH UTMOST CARE. NOT TOO seriously. Not too lightly. It had to be brought up with just enough finesse so it wouldn’t become a fight. Which was why she waited until he was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. She entered while he was lining his toothbrush with Colgate, from one end of the bristles to the other, the way he always did it, even back in Limbe where a tube of toothpaste sometimes cost as much as a pile of cocoyams.
She sat on the toilet seat and watched him turn on the faucet and wet the toothbrush. “I was thinking,” she began, looking at his face in the mirror.
He put the toothbrush in his mouth and began brushing, intensely scrubbing his molars.
“It’s just that, I was … Betty, she has a cousin … she says he can … he has citizenship.”
He spat out the white foam. “So?” he said, not bothering to turn around.
“He can help us, bébé. With papier.”
He put the toothbrush back in his mouth and continued brushing: up, left, right, down. His eyes in the mirror were the reddest she’d ever seen them. “If you’re trying to say what I think you’re about to say,” he said, his mouth half full of foam, “shut up right now.”
“But … please hear me out, bébé. Please. Betty asked him and he said he can do it for us.”
With his mouth half-open, a thin trail of foam pouring out, he turned around to look at her. She turned her face away.
“The money from Mrs. Edwards,” she said, “we should use it to pay him.”
He lifted the faucet handle, scooped water into his mouth and swished, then spat out the foamy water and began washing his face, splashing as far as the mirror above and the trash can below. When he was done, he pulled the towel hanging on the shower door and covered his face, breathing in and out through it.
“We divorce, I marry him. I get papier through him, then me and him divorce and me and you marry back, but the whole time we continue living …”
As if he’d heard something unbelievably stunning, he abruptly pulled the towel off his face, which seemed to have grown blacker than his hair. He turned around to face her. “Those screws in your head holding your brain together,” he said, poking his temple with his index finger, “they’ve gotten loose, right?”
“We don’t have to go back to Cameroon, Jends,” she said, her voice so laden with despair it sank with every word.
He dropped the towel on the floor and opened the door. “If you ever open your mouth and suggest this kind of nonsense to me again—”
“But bébé—”
“I said, if you ever say this kind of foolish talk to me again, Neni, I swear to God—”
“The money from Mrs. Edwards, it’s my money, too!”
He stood at the door, looking down at her looking up at him. “If you dare open your mouth and say one more thing, Neni!”
“You’ll do what?”
He slammed the door in her face and left her frozen on the toilet seat.
Fifty-two
BUBAKAR AGREED TO DO AS JENDE WANTED. HE WOULD PETITION THE judge to close the deportation case in exchange for Jende leaving the country on his own.
“Voluntary departure is what they call it,” Bubakar said. “You leave quietly within ninety days. The government will be happy. They don’t have to pay for your airfare back to Cameroon.”
“And I can come back to America?” Jende asked.
“Of course,” the lawyer said. “If the embassy gives you a visa again. But will they? I cannot tell you the answer. You will not be banned from returning to the country like you would be if you had just overstayed your visa and left. You can still come back, but will you be able to get another visa after what you did with the last one? Only the embassy in Cameroon can decide that.”
What about his wife and children? Jende wanted to know. Would they be able to come back? The baby could always come back because she was American, Bubakar told him. As for Neni, she should be fine if she formally withdrew from BMCC and left by a certain date after the international students office terminated her record in SEVIS. The embassy would probably give her another visa in the future because they wouldn’t hold it against her that she once came in on a student visa and was unable to finish her studies because she had a baby.
“But your son, Liomi,” Bubakar said. “He will be in the same hot soup as you.”
“Why? He is only a child. They cannot punish him if his parents brought him here. I am the one who made him overstay his visa. It’s my fault, Mr. Bubakar. It’s not his fault.”
“Eh? Na so you think, abi?” The lawyer laughed his usual two-note laugh. “Let me tell you something, my brother,” he said. “American government does not care whether you are a one-day-old baby who was brought here and ended up illegal or whether you were blindfolded and tossed into a shipping container and woke up to find yourself in Kansas City. You hear me? American government doesn’t give the tiniest piece of shit whose fault it is. Once you are here illegally, you are here illegally. You will pay the price.”
“But—”
“That’s why you have to think very carefully about this decision to take your family back home,” he said. “You say this country don pass you, eh? I believe you. Sometimes this country pass me, too. America can be hell, I know. Man nova see suffer until the day ei enter America, make I tell you.”
He laughed again, the kind of laughter released only at the remembrance of awful things past. “I mean,” he went on, “I’ve been here for twenty-nine years. For the first three years, I spent hours every month searching for a one-way ticket back to Nigeria. But you know what, my brother? Patience. Perseverance. That is the key. Persevere it like a man. Look at me today, eh? I have a house in Canarsie. My one daughter is in medical school. My son is a civil engineer in New Jersey. Another daughter is in Brooklyn College. Hopefully, she’ll get into Fordham Law and become a lawyer like me. I’m very proud of them. When I look at them, I do not one bit regret all my suffering. I can say without feeling any shame that life is good for me. I persevered, and look at me now. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you that life is going to get easy for you next month or next year, because it might not. It’s a long, hard journey from struggling immigrant to successful American. But you know what, my brother? Anyone can do it. I am an example that with hard work and perseverance, anyone can do it.”
“Rubbish,” Winston said when Jende told him what Bubakar had said. Of course he did not want Jende to return home. Cameroon did not have opportunities like America, but that did not mean one should stay in America if doing so no longer made sense. “Why does everyone make it sound as if being in America is everything?” he said.
“All this stress,” Jende said. “For what?”
“For you to die and leave bills for your children to pay,” Winston replied.
Even if Jende got papers, Winston went on, without a good education, and being a black African immigrant male, he might never be able to make enough money to afford to live the way he’d like to live, never mind having enough to own a home or pay for his wife and children to go to college. He might never be able to have a really good sleep at night.
“Whenever I talk to someone in pays who is trying to leave their good job and run to America, I tell them, ‘Look out, oh. Look out. Make man no say I no be warn ei say America no easy.’”
“But you didn’t warn me seriously enough,” Jende said, laughing.
“No,” Winston said, laughing back. “I didn’t warn you. I just bought you a ticket so you could come see it for yourself.”