Kim

Banging on the door wakes me, my heart pounding so hard I feel it in my throat, my entire body rigid with fear. Painfully rigid. Just like it was that night when Boko Haram came for the orphan girls. I dreamt about it all night, kept waking up from the nightmare, only to fall asleep and dream it again.

"Kim! Please wake up!" my step-dad Russell yells outside, and I hear his voice booming both through the open window of my bedroom and through the ceiling of the garage, which is now the living room of this tiny apartment I'm living in.

He said please, but nothing in his tone suggests he's actually asking.

I smooth back my sweat-drenched hair and go to the window just as he starts banging on the door again.

"What's the panic?" I ask, only just realizing that something might be seriously wrong.

He takes a step back from the door he's been banging on and peers up at me.

"It's almost noon, Kim," he says, talking to me like I'm sixteen and late for school. "Your mother's not feeling well, and I was pulled out of a meeting to deal with it. You said you'd watch over her."

"It's that late?" I mutter, checking the alarm clock by the bed, which doesn't tell the time, since I unplugged it in the middle of the night because the red light cast by the numbers reminded me of the orphanage fire.

"Yes, it's that late," he says bitingly.

"Alright, I'll be right down," I say. There are a few other things I'd prefer to be saying to him. Like "Don't bang on my door to wake me up," and even, "Don't tell me what to do," but I know that this election means everything to him. Becoming Sheriff is the culmination of his life long career, and my mother's resistance to it gives him enough to worry about. Instead of helping him with his campaign, she's been having panic attack after panic attack after depressive episode, since he announced his candidature.

Russell has done a lot for my family and he truly loves my mom. That’s why I came here to take care of her while he campaigns, when he asked me to about a week ago. But me and him both have too fiery a temper to ever truly get along.

"Last night, she dreamed something happened to me. I thought she was fine this morning when I left, but now this," he says as I join him in the driveway. "I did my best to set her mind at ease for the moment, but I don't think it'll last. Can you take her out of the house? Maybe that’ll get her mind off things."

I'm annoyed at him for waking me up the way he did, since my heart's still palpitating from the fright he gave me. But the fact that he's talking to me like a human being and not some underling of his is helping.

"I'll try," I say and walk to the main house. "But she hasn't been very interested in going out since I got here. And maybe you should take the death threats more seriously. I'm pretty sure they're not just idle ones."

His face is stone hard right now, and I know he's trying not to yell his answer at me.

"We are taking them seriously," he says in a clipped voice like his mouth is full of rocks. "But things like that come with this job when you do it right."

I glance at the black town car waiting for him, and the two gorilla-sized bodyguards standing next to it. I suppose he's telling the truth and they are handling it. But he's gotten some very serious and very direct threats. The last one arrived in the form of a brick through the dining room window, while we were having dinner two nights ago. It was from one of the local motorcycle gangs and men like that mean business. Resign or die, the message attached to the brick read. Short and to the point. This isn't white-collar crime he's dealing with. Those guys play dirty in ways I don't think Russell in his smart three-piece suit and with his smart law degree understands.

"I wrote an article about a biker gang out east for the New York Times back—"

He interrupts me with a raised hand. "I'm on top of it, Kim. You just watch over your mother."

What he's actually saying is, "I don't need any advice from you". Russell is not very adept at taking advice from anyone, since he's sure he always knows best. But I'll let it slide. I need a coffee not an argument. And I need to make sure Mom is alright. She has a long history of anxiety, panic attacks and depression, they started when my real dad died almost twenty-five years ago. Her condition got better over the years, but she was never truly well. And now it seems she's right back at the beginning.

"I hope you know what you're talking about," I say scathingly, since I can't help myself. "Mom won't survive a second husband dying."

He looks at me like I slapped him, but doesn't say anything. I don’t either, just turn and enter the house, leave him standing in the driveway.

Maybe I was too harsh, but he's doing this to Mom now, and I'm supposed to pick up the pieces. I don't know if I can do that. I can't even help myself right now. I’ve been back home for less than a week, and it already feels exactly how it did when I had to help my mom hold it together after Dad died. I was a scared, sad little seven-year-old girl then, but I had to be strong for my mom and my brother. And I'll do my best by them now too. Only thing is, I'm nowhere near as tough as I was back then anymore.

* * *

Mom was sleeping when I went up to check on her, so I settled down with my laptop in the kitchen, telling myself I was finding ideas for a new article. But in reality, I spent hours checking up on my old classmates from high school and reading memes. Neither cheered me up. I haven't written anything in almost six months. Not since returning from Nigeria and writing the article about what happened at the orphanage. I complained about coming back home to watch over Mom and help her cope with Russell running for Sheriff. But this is exactly what I needed. A reason to get away. A chance to do something good with my life again. I don't know if I can go back to my old life. I don't know if I have the strength for it.

Report the facts, write the full story from all points of view, take no sides. That's every journalist's motto and used to be mine as well. But then those girls were taken in the middle of the night to live horrors I can't even imagine, while I let myself get driven to safety. I just looked away. Sure I went to the authorities and made a big fuss over their reluctance to do much about it. I failed, so I left the country, strung the facts together for the whole world to read. My article was published in The Guardian. Then the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The girls are still missing. The atrocities in Nigeria still go on while the US and Russia fight over who can do what, neither doing a thing. I dream about the kidnapping almost every night. But I'm sure my nightmares are nothing compared to the reality those girls are living right now. If they are still living. I almost hope they're not.

My mom shuffles into the kitchen and I slam the lid of my laptop shut so hard I startle her.

"Sorry," I mutter. She's wearing her nightgown, the matching robe hanging off one shoulder.

"Your dad can't make dinner tonight," she says in a very faraway sort of voice like she's inside a dream. I almost snap at her that Russell isn't my dad, but I manage not to.

"So I guess it's just you and me," I say instead and force a smile. "Or maybe Benji can come too. We could go pick him up and then the three of us could have dinner out."

Mom looks down at what she's wearing, and from her expression, I can plainly see that she has no intention of changing into anything else today. She spent most of my elementary school years in her nightgown and this scene right now is a very painful reminder of that. She met and married Russell when I was in the eight grade and got better afterwards, but not entirely.

"Maybe another night," she says and sounds like she really wants to, but that it might never happen again.

That tone just makes my annoyance at her flare up, as does my guilt over feeling it. But I swallow both down along with the words I think she should hear, but know they’ll just upset her even more. She tries to get better. She just can't. That's the sum total of the sad reality of her life.

"Are you working on a new article?" she asks, smiling faintly as she sits down across from me at the kitchen table.

I push my laptop away from me. "No, not right now. I'm here visiting you, that's all."

I smile as I say it, but I don't think she's fooled. She reaches over and squeezes my hand. "I'm sorry for being like this. I know you have an exciting life full of adventure and meaning waiting for you, and I'm so happy you found it. I'm really sorry for keeping you from it. But I just can't help myself. And I love having you here. I missed you so much."

My annoyance vanishes with the sincerity in her voice, and my smile as I return hers is purely genuine. My mother's always been a gentle, delicate woman, I get all of my fiery personality from my dad. She needs me. She always has.

"I'm happy to be home," I say, almost wish I could tell her the full reason for it, but my mother can't hear dark and difficult things, she wasn't made that way, and I never held it against her.

"I do have one more thing to ask of you," she says, smiling sheepishly.

"Ask," I say, since she seems to be waiting for permission.

"They're holding the annual fundraiser at Benji's home in a couple of weeks," she says. "I promised I'd help organize it, but I'm in no fit state right now. Could you help them instead of me?"

Damn it. No.

I love my little brother to pieces and I'd do anything for him, but just the thought of putting on some pretty dress, working with a bunch of fake-smile, over-perfumed ladies, and begging people to donate money is enough to give me hives. Actually attempting it will probably send me into anaphylactic shock.

"I know how you feel about it," Mom says apologetically. "But it will be a really big event this year and they need all the help they can get. They're staging a play, and Benji got the lead part. He's so excited about it."

"I know," I say. "It's all he talks about lately."

"I’d love to help, but I just can't, not this year. Not with everything else that's been happening," she says, her voice cracking by the end. Russell's campaign is a relatively new thing, since he's running in a special election after the last Sheriff retired in the middle of his term. The campaign started only three weeks ago.

I squeeze her hand. "Don't worry about it, Mom. I'd love to do it. But maybe you should come too, it might help you get your mind off other things."

She gives me another of her sad, defeated little smiles. "I just can't be around people right now."

As so many times before, I just want yell at her to snap out of it, to live her life, not hide from it. But it won't do any good, it would only upset her more, and I don't want to upset my mom, ever. She suffers enough as it is.

"The first meeting is today at five," she says, glancing at the clock above the door. "You can still make it."

"I guess I better go then," I say and pick up my laptop.

The last thing I want to do is spend the evening listening to chirping overzealous fundraiser ladies. But I'll do it. I have no choice anyway. My mom and my brother need me, and I'm always strong for them. Never mind that I'd like someone to be strong for me once in awhile. What I need can always wait. And at the rate things are going, the wait might last forever.