Someone Like Us

I learned of Samuel’s death two days before Christmas while standing in the doorway of my mother’s new home. She lived fifteen minutes away from the airport in a Virginia suburb twenty miles south of Washington, DC, that had become popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her. We hadn’t seen each other in almost five years, and the cab ride from the airport was the last chance I had to indulge the fantasy that at any moment, Samuel might call to say he was running late but had every intention of meeting me at the airport. The trip was supposed to have been both family vacation and reunion, a chance for my wife, Hannah, and me to introduce our two-year-old son to his not-quite American grandmother and almost-grandfather. Instead, as the cab pulled up to my mother’s new home, Hannah and my son were more than three thousand miles away in Paris and Samuel had been dead for several hours.

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*

My mother told me the news of Samuel’s death as soon as I dropped my suitcase at the bottom of the half-spiral staircase that led to the four bedrooms and two bathrooms she was so proud of. I had felt lightheaded walking up the driveway, having barely slept the night before, and might have collapsed from exhaustion as soon as I reached the banister had my mother not taken me in her arms and whispered, even though we were alone, “Yenegeta. I know you’re tired, but something terrible has happened to Samuel.”

Even though I’d known for years that Samuel was my father, neither he nor my mother had ever expected me to treat him as such. For most of my life he was my mother’s close childhood friend who, when I was six, had shown up at our apartment in Chicago in search of a place to live. He had only one suitcase and was wearing a brown leather jacket that was too thin for a Chicago winter. When my mother opened the door and found him on the other side, she seemed more resigned than alarmed to find him there, as if she had always known it was only a matter of time before he showed up at our door unannounced and with nowhere to go.

“We did everything together when we were younger,” my mother told me when I first met him. “My father worked all the time. My mother was very quiet and liked to be by herself. On most days there was nobody at our home but us and the servants. I would have been completely alone if Samuel wasn’t there.”

According to my mother, that made Samuel something like an uncle to me, although I never called him that either—only Samuel, or sometimes Sammy. She never shared how and why she and Samuel had left Ethiopia, nor did she ever say why, years later, he followed her to Chicago and then the suburbs of Washington, DC. Not long after he arrived, though, it seemed as if Samuel had always been an integral part of our lives. In Chicago Samuel slept on our living room couch and, except for one long absence, was there most mornings when I went to school and was often the first person I saw when I came home, something he often reminded me of when he thought I wasn’t listening to him.

“I’m not some stranger,” he would tell me. “I hope you understand that. I know you better than anyone, maybe even your mother.”

Two years later, when my mother and I moved to the DC suburbs, Samuel found a one-bedroom apartment in the same building as us; he shared it with as many as six other men who, like him, drove cabs in the evenings and worked in parking garages in the mornings and afternoons. At my mother’s insistence, Samuel still came to our apartment on the weekends to sleep, one of the many things she worried he wouldn’t do if left on his own. Whatever friendship they’d had in Ethiopia had evolved into something far more guarded and yet protective. They barely seemed to speak directly to each other but every night my mother made sure there was a blanket and pillow at the foot of the couch. It wasn’t until Samuel met and then married Elsa that my mother began to relinquish her obligation to tend to him. I was eleven at the time. On the day Samuel and Elsa moved into a new apartment, Samuel gave me my own key. Elsa put her hands on my shoulders and insisted I come and go as I please.

“You don’t have to call, Mamushia. You act just like it’s your own house. You understand me. You’re like a son to us.”

Among family and friends, I had always been known simply by my nickname, Mamush. It was what my mother called me; it was what my grandmother had uttered over the phone on the few occasions we spoke before she died. When Elsa or Samuel said it, however, they always added an extra syllable of affection at the end—so that Ma-mu-sh became Mamushi-ia. Or Mamush-eeaa. During the first year of their marriage, the three of us practiced what it would be like to be an all-American family without ever mentioning the reasons why we would never be. On the nights my mother worked late, Elsa picked me up from school and fed me in their home.

“What do you like to eat, Mamushia? Hot dogs? You want me to make you?”

I spent the summer months after their wedding reading novels at an empty table in the back of the restaurant where Elsa worked. If my mother had any doubts about the amount of time I spent with Samuel and Elsa, she kept them to herself with one exception. “I don’t want you going there unless Elsa is at home,” she said. “If she isn’t, you come back right away. Do you understand?”

Even though we all lived in the same Maryland suburb, it still took two buses and at least thirty minutes to get to Samuel and Elsa’s—a circuitous route through a poorly planned maze of apartment complexes strangely isolated from one another, as if someone had drawn circles on a map and said these people will live here, and these here, and never shall they meet. Once I arrived at Samuel and Elsa’s apartment, I was free to stay as long as I wanted so long as there were no deviations along the way.

“You get on and then off the bus. You don’t talk to anyone you don’t know unless they’re Ethiopian.”

That was my mother’s second rule and the only one that I followed. The other—to never spend time with Samuel alone in their apartment—was broken the same day I agreed to it. My mother knew that, just as she knew there was little she could have said to stop me. I was attached to Samuel, who, in my mind, had magically arrived one day and, as a result, seemed just as likely to suddenly disappear. I had studied him carefully when he slept on our couch and suspected, even after I was old enough to know better, that he was secretly capable of walking through walls and appearing on the other side.

For the first two years of Samuel and Elsa’s marriage, Samuel was a model husband and potential father. He slipped money into my hands whenever my mother told him not to and was quick to praise me in front of anyone who might have wondered what my mother was doing in America with a child and no husband to claim him. While working, he texted Elsa multiple times a day to tell her two things: where he was and that he loved her.

“I’m on Sixteenth Street. I’m going to stop at the store by the church to get injera and then thank God for bringing you to me.”

“Do you know who I think about when there’s traffic?”

He continued sending those messages to Elsa even after it became clear that he wasn’t sitting in traffic or on his way to any grocery store or church. By the time I was in high school, I had grown accustomed to seeing him nod off at the kitchen table and knew better than to knock on his bedroom door when it was closed. On the afternoons Samuel stayed in bed, or on the evenings he came home hours later than expected, Elsa pointed to Samuel’s anxiety about money, bills, family in Ethiopia, fighting in the north of the country, unpaid taxes, interest rates on his credit card, debts that he was unlikely ever to pay off as an excuse for his behavior.

“Try and understand, Mamush, how much stress he’s under,” she said, to which I always replied, “I do.”

It wasn’t until Samuel came home one evening high on something that made him angry and paranoid and said I had no reason for spending so much time in his home that Elsa and I stopped pretending that was true. By that point I was only a couple of months away from moving to New York to start college. It was from that detached position that I watched Samuel pace around his living room, muttering about the various threats people like me posed to him, knowing that when I left that evening, it would be easy for me never to return.

The next day Elsa called to apologize and to tell me how important it was that I stay in touch after I left. It was the first and only time she referred to what was happening to Samuel as a “sickness,” one that came and went at different times of the year like a cold that had to be endured until it was over.

“Samuel’s going to miss you,” she said. “It’s very good for him to see you. You understand he isn’t himself these days. He’s sick. He’s in pain all the time. His back. His hands.”

She listed the pills he had been taking for pain and sleep, while ignoring the bottles of scotch under the couch and whatever it was he kept hidden in the glove compartment of his taxi. At the end she added, “You know, Mamush, he’s like a father to you,” hoping it might move me to see him before I left.

*

There were dozens of reasons why Hannah had been reluctant to make the trip to Virginia. Rather than acknowledge the diminishing odds of our marriage surviving a weeklong separation, Hannah and I had debated whether it was safe for our son to sit in an air-pressurized cabin for so many hours, whether he would be able to bear the hour-long drive to the airport in Paris, and the long lines to pass through security. In the end Hannah won by noting that because there was so much we didn’t know about our son’s condition and what was at that point an unknown virus spreading in a still-distant corner of the world, the one certainty we had was that it was far too easy for something terrible to happen to him. “It could be very small,” she said, “and for him it could be terrible.”

I didn’t point out that if something terrible were to happen, it was just as likely to be in Paris, and in particular our immigrant-heavy quarter in the north of the city, which the police and gendarmes had cordoned off with increasing frequency. When it came to our son, Hannah’s defensive instincts were well-placed and all the more necessary because it was hard from the outside to see their origin. Up close, our son looked like any other beautiful child. Over the course of the past year Hannah and I had developed a habit of staring at him. He would discreetly turn his head to meet our gaze; or if sitting up, he would eventually grow tired and begin to slowly tilt until his body was flat against the ground. An hour could slip past during which there was hardly any movement or sound in our apartment, and I imagine from the outside it would have looked as if we were living in some state of suspended animation. We had to force ourselves to remember that for the first nine months of his life, he seemed primed to run, early to stand, and quick to crawl. When he began to sit up on his own, we joked that one day, when we weren’t looking, we’d find him perched on top of a windowsill, ready to take flight. According to Hannah he was more bird than mammal. “Un oiseau,” she said. “Très fin. Très délicat,” which I insisted was proof that he was more cat than bird—predator not prey. “When he sleeps,” I said, “he sounds like a cat purring.” For his first birthday I held him on my shoulders, while Hannah pointed out the window onto the open square and boulevard just below and said, “You see that. All that is a part of your domain.”

It was impossible to know when exactly that stopped, but in the months after his first birthday it was obvious that he was moving less and less, as if the energy required to stand was no longer worth it. We had been told by three different doctors to prepare for his condition to worsen. They had yet to name it, but it was obvious to them that something inside him was slowing down. His legs had been first, and then his arms and upper body. A month after his second birthday, his fourth pediatrician told us there was no way of knowing what might come next. “It could continue like this, or it could end tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that true of everything?” Hannah pointed out.

The day before that doctor’s visit, the police sealed off the metro station closest to our apartment. A device had been left somewhere in the station but had failed to detonate or perhaps was never intended to. No lives were lost but just as much terror followed. On the news the possible death toll increased hourly, and every day that the station remained closed meant another block in our neighborhood was cordoned off in what the government said were preventive measures to discourage any further attacks. There were speeches and debates on both sides of the Atlantic in which the attack that never happened became proof of a larger event still being scaled. The only things that could be done, it was said, was to lash out in rage or hold our breath until it was impossible to do so.

*

Before Hannah committed to remaining behind, she called the airline a half dozen times to ask, politely, if we could change our flight without any extra costs. In the days before our scheduled departure, she told operators in France and in America that we would fly during the darkest, coldest days of February if only we didn’t have to leave on that particular December morning. When her requests for a free-of-charge alternate date failed, I suggested that she find a story tragic enough to spur the sympathy of the airline agents in a way a simple request never could. She would later joke that I was the one who suggested our son play the starring role in the story. According to her, I instinctively “sought the easiest solution to any problem,” and in this case, an injured child was the most immediate path to sympathy.

“You can’t help it,” she said. “You’re impatient. You run straight to the obvious.”

Whatever I might have suggested, I insisted that the story of a two-year-old child with a broken arm was her invention entirely.

“I would have never created a story with so much potential liability,” I pointed out. “How did he break his arm? Who was watching him? Where were you and what was his mother doing?”

Hannah decided on a slightly tense, borderline-hostile tone to sell the story to the airline because, according to her, “They need to be scared, not sad.” As far as I knew, she had never acted in anything, but she believed in having convictions, and so for the duration of that conversation, she became, even to me, the mother of a two-year-old son who had fallen and fractured his arm. She described to the operator how the trauma kept him howling through the night. She avoided the disingenuous sigh most liars would have called upon and described instead how difficult the cast made him. “Not just difficult,” she said, “but at times impossible.” Hannah concluded by claiming that above all, she was thinking of the other passengers—tourists, expatriates like her husband, already tired and burdened with the long journey back to America carrying Christmas gifts that couldn’t be wrapped.

“What if there’s something in his cast that makes the metal detector go off ?” she asked. “Can you imagine how difficult that would be?”

It was as close to pleading as I had ever heard her come, and when she sensed that wasn’t enough, she went on to describe how a two-year-old in a cast wasn’t that different from a monkey with a club—both were dangerous and neither, as a result, should be allowed on a plane. “He can’t help it,” she said. “He swings his arm and someone gets hurt.”

Her sorrow over her imaginary, injured monkey-child became real at that moment, and I’m sure had I not been in the room, a trickle of all the dammed-up grief she’d privately stored would have found some measure of relief.

There was a brief silence, during which we both imagined that she might have won her argument for an alternate flight. Had the silence lasted five seconds longer, I might have seen something approaching a smile on her face, something I hadn’t seen in so long that later that evening, I would imagine calling back the airline and requesting the same operator from that morning so I could tell him what a terrible person he was for not having shut the fuck up just a little longer. What would it have cost you to say nothing, I wanted to ask him.

Hannah dropped her phone into her purse. The way she let it slip from her fingers made it seem contaminated.

“What was their response?” she repeated. “He said the airline doesn’t allow animals in the main cabin.”

We both knew the dangers that came with dwelling on any defeat. Hannah and I had only recently come to the table of adult-sized problems laid out specifically for us. In doing so, we had learned to stop asking ourselves if we were living the lives we had imagined, if we were happy with who we had become, whom we had married. Our jobs grew dull, our rent went up, but it was only after our son was born that we understood the possible scale of things to worry about lying in wait. Six weeks earlier, our son had lifted himself off the ground and walked across our living room to pick up a book left on the floor. The next morning, I said I wanted us to go to America for Christmas. Since then, neither Hannah nor I had seen him attempt to even stand.

*

The day before my flight, I lifted my son to my chest so we could enjoy the oddity of having spring weather in December. His body felt substantial suspended in my arms, but that wasn’t enough now. We turned right at the first intersection and walked until we were a block away from the metro station. A few months after he was born, I spent seven days in Calais in the north of France reporting on what was supposed to be the last large migrant camp in Europe. It was the first story I’d been commissioned to write in two years and Hannah insisted on saying goodbye at the train station with our son.

“I want him to get used to traveling,” she said. “He’s going to spend so much of his life on planes and trains.”

We walked to the station with our son asleep in his stroller. There had been an immigration raid in our neighborhood earlier that morning. It was the second since we’d moved into that apartment, whose two bedrooms we would have never been able to afford had they been almost anywhere else in the city. The first raid had been a near-riotous affair, with armored cars and policemen swatting through the neighborhood. The second was far more subdued. Three policemen had emptied the market just outside the metro station in less than fifteen minutes. There were scattered boxes of men’s socks and children’s sandals, a few overturned crates of fruit that had been destroyed.

“If I were you,” Hannah said, “I would write about this. Not the police coming, but this.”

She stretched out her arms to make clear there was something unnatural about the emptiness around us. Later that afternoon, she would put our sleeping son in a stroller next to our bedroom window so that she could take pictures of the square in the hours after the raid.

“He slept for hours,” she wrote me, “like he wanted to give me a gift.” She added a note with the last picture: “I want someone to look at this picture and know something is missing, even if they don’t know what it is.”

When we reached the station, I shifted slightly in the direction of the soldiers so my son could see them. They had become a constant presence in our neighborhood and would most likely continue to be in the years ahead. I whispered into his ear, “You see that. That’s why we need you to be able to run.”

__________________________________

From Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu. Used with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2024 by Dinaw Mengestu.