An Excerpt from "Bush Rat"

Prologue

“What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?” 

-Louisa May Alcott

I hung off the side of my bed slowly and carefully sliding backward, waiting for my feet to touch the floor. I shuffled out the door into the dark corridor to my parents’ room like I did every morning. I pushed open their door and ran to Papa’s side of the bed. On a normal day I would struggle to climb up on the large bed, hopping and tugging at the sheets until Papa pulled me up with one arm and put me in between him and Mama. The smell of mama’s sweet perfume mixed with Papa’s natural musky smell enveloped me in a warm and safe cocoon. This was not a normal day. The sheets were crumpled across the bed. I touched where Papa should have been. I looked around.

“Mama?” I ran around to her side and touched the coolness of the sheets. “Papa?” I said turning and looking toward the bathroom, then back at the bed. I scurried into the hall and looked down the stairs, listening for Papa’s low bombastic voice and mama’s high pitched laugh. A shadow moved near the bottom step, so I carefully started down the steps, holding tightly to the wooden rail. I watched my feet hit every step on the way down and just as I left the last step, the person behind the shadow moved too quickly out of my sight. “Mama?” my nose turned to the smell of her perfume. I heard a car rev up outside and I started toward the front door.

Just then, I was scooped into the arms of our house girl.

“Nyota, want mango?” she said, wiping the sleep from my eyes with a damp cloth that hung over her shoulder. I wriggled my nose as she began to wipe the mucus from it. “Mango in the cuisine,” she carried me to the kitchen, the front door becoming smaller and smaller.

I never asked where my mother went or why she left. I asked my father once and he became so upset, sending me running to hide in my room. It was like I had dreamed her. Photos of her dark, full lips, her small round nose, her strong arms that would cradle me, all seemed familiar when I looked at the one photo I had of her hidden in the drawer of my vanity. I remembered how her high pitched laugh pierced the walls of our house, but that too began to become a faint memory. Soon, I grew tired of trying to remember her and so I let whatever memory I had of her fade away. And life moved forward and backward without her.