Aerogrammes by Tania James Read Free Book Online

Chimpanzees abide by their own rules, even if they’re in captivity.”
    At that moment, Henry looked up. Neneh sat perfectly still. She imagined his world and her world, two distinct, delicate bubbles floating toward each other, hovering as he fixed her with his faraway gaze. Did he see the red headband? Did he recognize her voice?
    He dropped his eyes and went back to poking the ground.
    For that week, Neneh rented a room at the Motor Inn, which came equipped with a hot plate, a coffeepot, an iron, and a mirror that took up the entire wall opposite the bed. Withthe blue-green wallpaper and drawn shades, the room had a contained, nautical feel.
    Here, she ruminated over Britta’s words, the note of accusation when she’d said “impose our world.” It was the same accusation Pearl had inflicted upon herself ever since leaving Henry at the zoo.By rescuing him, they had ruined him.
    Sometimes Neneh wondered if Pearl had felt similarly about rescuing her. Pearl had never tried to contact Neneh’s relatives in Bo, and gradually Sierra Leone had come to seem to Neneh like yet another photograph in
National Geographic
, the natives serene and strange, the land lush and yet unyielding of its mysteries. With or without Pearl, Neneh would never visit Sierra Leone. Her birth mother was dead, and her grandmother had died soon after she’d left. Strangely, the only face that remained in her mind’s eye, like an icon, belonged to the boy who’d sold them baby Henry. She remembered the high, delicate bones of his cheeks, the sweatless sheen of his skin, but he would certainly never remember her. Maybe he was dead as well, or disfigured, or handless, another casualty in a war that was mentioned only marginally in their local paper. Neneh had sought out other newspapers, had read articles that displayed pictures of bandaged limbs and hard-eyed children holding guns. She had been spared.
    In college, she had dated a boy, Carl, whose mother was black and whose father was white, both of them from Atlanta. He was proud of his parents’ union, forged at a time when some states still declared such intermixing illegal. He kept their picture in his desk drawer, his mother in a sleeveless white dress, bright against her smooth shoulders, smearing cake across her new husband’s mouth.
    As for Neneh and Carl, the relationship ended in a matter of months. Neneh rarely spent a night away from Pearl, andevetually Carl started dating an Iranian girl who lived down the hall. “She’s chill about things,” Carl told Neneh. “She gets me.”
    “Really? Even though she’s not your tribe?”
Our tribe
was a phrase that Carl had coined, referring to the racial kinship he shared with Neneh, their twinned experience. Whatever that meant. She would’ve given anything to have a single picture like the one in his desk, a captured second of ordinary love from the people who made her. Or maybe just her mother. What she had was her own reflection, which told her nothing.
    So Neneh had come to the zoo without a plan, with only the belief that, at the very least, she had Henry. As a child, she had felt unrestrained around him, able to breathe freely, at ease with her place in the world. And despite the intervening years, she had come to believe that she shared more with him than with anyone else. They were two ruined souls doomed to wander their minds, if not the earth, trying to remember from whence they came.
    Some of the keepers expressed concern over the fact that Neneh would have direct contact with an adult male chimpanzee. Neneh argued that she wanted only to interact with Henry, away from the other chimps; it was a demand that had to be met according to the contract Pearl had signed long ago.
    The first reunion was arranged for the afternoon. A keeper named Ben called Henry into the cages while the other chimps remained outside. When Henry entered the cage, his eyes went to the Dole fruit cup, still sealed, sitting close to the bars of the