Page 3 of Sheltering Instinct

Tess could hear in Shanti’s words the battle of wants—the want to help in this situation and the want not to know what had happened to bring this day about. She was brave to ask the question.

A friend who can sit with you when you’re in pain was precious and rare.

Usually, Tess shielded this story from everyone. Levi knew. She had to explain why she had night terrors when she slept with him. She pushed off telling him for as long as she could. But her thrashing and swallowed screams abraded his senses. He told her how he wanted to protect her, and he felt he was failing because she didn’t feel safe in his arms.

Tess had to explain that he couldn’t protect her from her past.

The past was a roaring monster that she fought to exhaustion.

“What happened in Ghana, Tess?” Shanti asked in a whisper.

Tess pursed her lips, then exhaled. It was hard to tell this story aloud. But Tess needed Shanti’s friendship and support. In Shanti’s eyes, Tess was doing the most disloyal and self-destructive thing imaginable, throwing away her wonderful relationship with Levi and their hopes and dreams. If Shanti didn’t learn the why, she’d see Tess as an unfaithful and undependable person. Tess knew she’d lose her friend.

The story needed to be told.

“I was eight. My family went to the market to buy food and listen to music. We liked going there together to explore. I remember it as lively and fun.” Past a clenched jaw, she muttered, “Until it wasn’t.”

Tess rested her gaze on the wall painted flat white with grey scuff marks from the tires where they leaned their bikes to get them out of the weather on wet days. She pictured her greenbike there. The spokes. The meditation of riding to campus. And while those images did bring her a modicum of relief, Tess couldn’t hold the corners of her mouth in a straight line. Her lips seemed to melt down the sides of her face, rivulets of lava that would soon harden into a permanent lament.

It took her a long time. And some failed efforts at inhaling before she closed her eyes. Her heavy lids would not open again, but she found her voice. “Yes, eight years old. We were at the market. I remember every detail of that day. Every color, line, and dot. Every sound and every smell. That day and what happened next.”

Tess heard Shanti push herself around until they were side by side.

Shanti wrapped an arm around Tess and pulled until Tess rested her head on Shanti’s lap. After tucking the blanket tightly around Tess, Shanti rhythmically stroked Tess’s hair.

“At the market, a fight broke out over the cost of a Guinea fowl. My father had been standing next to the man who argued that the cost was too much and that the vendor was trying to take advantage of people. Two tribes had been antagonistic towards each other. It seemed to be a low boil until it wasn’t. When the fight broke out that day, the men must have thought my dad was involved. They attacked, punching Dad over and over until he collapsed to the ground. My mother was screaming. She had a hold of my wrist, and with a great heave, I was flying up in the air like the games parents play with their kids when they are walking between two adults, letting their kids' feet swing high. Up, up, I sailed, higher than I’ve ever swung before. Mom called, ‘Abraham!’ I didn’t recognize her voice and couldn’t tell why she sounded like that. But now, as an adult, I recognize it as the sound of terror.”

“Your dad,” Shanti whispered. “This was over the price of a chicken?”

“It wasn’t a simple argument about the price of a hen but a dispute between two tribes over land. And that day, in that market, with my parents standing too close to the epicenter, the horrors that shook the entire region began. But, of course, no one understood that at the time. The Guinea Fowl War.”

“The Guinea Fowl War,” Shanti repeated. The rhythmic combing fingers dragging through Tess’s curls had a hypnotic effect.

Tess felt like she’d left her body and was watching herself tell this story from the end of the hall. “Mom swung me up. And as I flew into the air, my mom screamed, ‘Save her! Run!’ She was telling this stranger to save me. He did. He turned and ran, trapping me to his chest like a sleepy toddler. My arms looped around his neck. My legs wrapped his waist. He was very tall and strong. I thought he was an adult, but he was only sixteen. I later learned he was one of the advanced students that Mom tutored in the evenings. That’s how she knew him, knew him well enough to trust him.”

“This is Abraham.”

“Abraham,” Tess said, and his name buzzed her lips. “As he wove through the crowd, I saw my mom fighting to get to my dad. My dad was fighting to get up and get to Mom. And then, the machetes raised high in the air. I saw the blade— They were killed.” That last sentence sounded so eyeball-of-fact.

Itwasa matter of fact.

Facts that couldn’t change or be gentled.

That event was an emotion that was so big that Tess had never found a word for it. It was inexplicable. A deep guttural sound vibrated in her bones as if looking for a way to seep out and escape.

But that sound was imprisoned in her marrow forever.

Tess clamped a hand over her mouth in case it wanted to crawl out at this telling. But it didn’t. It had lived in her for solong, set up house, and put up its feet. There was nothing that would pry this thing out. Not in this lifetime.

Shanti’s thighs under Tess’s head trembled as if she were freezing cold and trying to generate her own warmth. After a moment, Shanti’s hand, stiffer and less rhythmic, began to comb Tess’s curls again.

Tess bet that Shanti wished she hadn’t asked.

But now that she’d turned the faucet on, the story continued to trickle out. Not the details, just the broad sweeps. Enough that when she told Levi, he understood her night terrors and how he couldn’t stop them.

Tess hoped that Shanti would understand this personal earthquake, too.

“When Abraham returned to his village, he set me on the floor by the doorway in his hut. I remember that I couldn’t make my eyes blink. My eyeballs were dry and painful. In their language, which I couldn’t understand, Abraham quickly passed the information on to his mom. She—Mama Ya—unfolded three blankets and laid them on the ground. She gestured wildly to Abraham, and he ran out, leaving me alone with the frenzied activities in their hut. With incredible purpose, Mama Ya gathered things, placing them in the center of the blankets. Her son Moses, who was thirteen at the time—helped. I didn’t know what to do other than stand there and pee down my leg.”

---