ants. I wondered, though, if he just felt better with Dakarai in his sight line. As we ate our sandwiches, Ngoni and I tried to talk and play with the baby. It was hard to ignore, though, Dakarai straddling the back of a wooden chair on the porch of the big house, smoking as he glared at us. I wondered if we reminded him of what his life could have been with Cati, if it was my race that brought about this episode. If he’d have been fine if I’d never come. I thought about my father then, and if he would have been fine, too, if I’d never come. If everything was moving along just great in his family before I was born. I tried to picture Dad’s episodes, plaster this scene in Harare onto a map of State Street to see if they fit. Did my father ever shove someone into a doorframe? Did any of his cousins who struggled with mental illness ever shove someone into a doorframe? And what about here in this family I was now entering? Did Ngoni’s father ever shove someone into a doorframe? If this is what madness looks like, will we recognize it if it comes again?
A few hours after lunch, Ngoni went to check on Gogo. He knew she suffered during Dakarai’s episodes. And because it was quiet now, because I didn’t expect to see Dakarai at the big house, I squared Julius on my hip and we walked over, too.
But the kitchen was empty, which was weird. There was normally at least one woman—sometimes a maid, more often Ngoni’s grandmother—in there preparing dinner by that time of day. We walked through the small dining room and no one sat at the table. I took a breath, looked Julius in the eye and smiled, and walked through the doorway into the dark living room, committed now to being there even with these warning signs that something was off. The forest-green couches, the brown carpet, the heavy wood tables all resisted the glare of the sun at the windows. There was a large cross hanging over the doorway I was standing under now, and I thought of it as mistletoe. I wanted it to protect me, or anoint me, or bring me a happy surprise.
Two nephews of Ngoni’s grandparents—college kids living here while they went to school—were watching a soap opera on the TV under the window. They sat in front of it on the floor like children, awkward smiles on their faces. It took me a moment to see that they were shell shocked. That these boys had seen something I hadn’t, and were scared. They watched this show because they needed to laugh. They needed to look at characters on a screen. When Ngoni headed into the back of the house to find Gogo, I didn’t follow. Though I’d been let into the back bedroom several times by then, it was still a place with boundaries, a place I knew only to enter if invited.
Julius and I stood behind the kids on the carpet and kept our attention on the stupid show on the TV. We were all laughing when Dakarai walked in.
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