Lily's Eye

Lily was halfway through her two-year stint when COVID-19 hit the States, and the Peace Corps sped her home in a panicked rush while the spreading travel ban made it feel like diving through a series of slamming doors with no time to reach back and snatch your hat. She arrived home to discover the plane had flown through some portal into a dark, alternate-universe version of the US, everything locked down, the center of her normally crowded city as empty as a ghost town, only a few people—mostly men—strutting the streets like cowboys, jutting out their maskless chins.

She found a room to rent and threw a mattress on the floor. As she contemplated what she might do next, what was possible under these conditions, a policeman in Minnesota put his knee on a Black man named George Floyd's neck and pressed it down until the man was dead. On video for the whole world to see.

Lily put on her mask and stepped out to join a protest march. Somehow, she wandered into a scuffle with the police, and as she tried to duck away from it, one of them smashed her in the eye with a night stick and fractured her orbital rim.

She lay in the hospital with pain like a ball of fiery plasma burning in her eye and radiating across her face, down her neck, and into her shoulder and arm. The nurses gave her meds, and she napped until the pain returned and woke her.

"How do you feel, sweetie?" her mom's voice said as Lily awoke from a doze.

"What are you doing here," she said. "I told you not to come."

"I'm your mother."

"Did Dad come?"

Her mom shook her head. "A young man came by. An African American young man."

"Black," Lily said. "What does his race have to do with anything?"

"He had tattoos on his arms, but I couldn't tell what they were and didn't want to stare."

"What did you say to him?"

"I only said nice things, but I'm sure you'd find something I did wrong."

 

In Salone, the residents of Lily's village had been stoic in the face of illness, injury, and death. She'd been their first Peace Corps volunteer. They sneered at her, called her opoto, the Temne word for colonizer; at the same time, they came to her with every ailment as if she were not simply a nurse midwife but a repository of western medicine. She was in way over her head and disillusioned. When the Peace Corps whisked her home, she found herself simultaneously faint with gratitude and weighed down by guilt. They watched her pack with flat stares. They'd been through Ebola and had no illusions. She wept as she said goodbye. They did not. They asked her to leave behind any money she had. The protest march after the cop murdered George Floyd presented itself to her as an analgesic for her shame; the club to her eye released the pressure of her guilt for abandoning her people to fend for themselves.

Three days after her surgery, Lily was discharged. The surgeon told her everything looked great, she was healing nicely, and to come back in a week so he could take another look at it. He gave her instructions about ice packs for swelling and meds, and he patiently answered questions from her mom, which often began as questions and ended as opinions about how Lily should arrange her life going forward.

After the surgeon got himself free of her mom and left, Lily said, "I'm surprised Jeremy hasn't come back by."

"Why would he?" her mom said.

"He's my friend, Mom." He wasn't her friend. Yes, they'd slept together three times, and yes, she'd gone to the protest with him, but they were still more like affectionate acquaintances.

"I've done some digging. This roommate of yours, Jeremy Walker, has been in jail."

"I know," Lily said. "He told me."

"Did he tell you why?" Her mom peeled and ate a clementine from Lily's tray. She ignored the bland, white-bread sandwich.

Lily sighed. "You're exhausting."

"It is a matter of public record," her mom said. "It was in the newspaper. Look." She wiped her hands, tapped on her phone, and pressed it toward Lily.

Lily did not look. She said, "Did you know we have five percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of its prisoners? Did you know that we've basically come from slavery, through peonage and Jim Crow, to the school-to-prison pipeline and for-profit prisons?"

"Just look at the article." Her mom raised the phone higher, moving it toward Lily's good eye.

"You know that Black men are incarcerated at five times the rate of white men? Black people and white people use illegal drugs at the same rate, but Black people are six times more likely to go to prison for it. Our prisons are full of nonviolent black drug offenders, while white people are getting rich doing the very same thing—selling drugs." Lily's eye was starting to throb again. She reflexively put her palm against the bandage. "I need another Percocet."

"This friend of yours is not a nonviolent offender."

"From a report by white cops."

"This is not about race," her mom said.

"Everything in this country is about race."

Her mom pulled a thin wipe out of a tiny packet. The odor of its alcohol rose between them as she wiped her hands properly.

 

Lily's mom bent over at the waist to layer pillows on the bed in her rented room. "Why on earth do you have your mattress right on the floor?" she groaned as she straightened and reached around with both hands to palm her back. She stared at the clothes hanging on a rack built of gray electric conduit pipe, the only other large thing in the enormous old room.

"Somebody left that here," Lily explained.

"Your bedroom door doesn't lock," her mom said. "I'll hire somebody to come take care of that myself."

"It's fine."

"You have to have a lock on your door."

"Figured I might as well use it," Lily said of the homemade rack. "In Salone, you don't throw anything away. I slept on a roll-out foam mat on linoleum spread over the dirt floor."

"And more women die in childbirth there than anywhere else on earth, and you have to poop in a hole in the floor, and no running water, and female genital mutilation, and everybody's always hungry, I know, I know."

"Do you know what it's like to be so hungry that the smell of a toilet isn't unpleasant but instead makes you think of the food that person ate, makes you feel hungrier?"

Her mom scrunched her nose in disgust.

"Hey," Jeremy was in the doorway. "How you feeling?"

"Jeremy," Lily said. "This is my mom."

"We met," he said. To her mom he said, "Good to see you again."

Lily's mom turned and sat on the edge of her bed. She had on her yoga clothes, had lost at least 20 pounds, and been working out. Her face had grown old and drawn, but she'd chiseled her body into ropy shape. A stranger's body, not her mom's. She said, "You too," and forced a sweet smile.

He looked back at Lily. He repeated, "How you feeling?"

She told him she felt okay, although the medication gave her nausea and made her constipated.

"Lily tells me you're a Potterhead?" Lily's mom cocked her head at him.

He laughed. "Yeah. I grew up on those books."

"Have you written J.K. Rowling off like Lily has for not being PC enough?"

"Mom."

"I read what she wrote on her website about that whole thing," he said. "I feel bad for her."

"I feel bad for trans people," Lily said, "who suffer discrimination every goddamn day, and now from this famous woman you'd think would be their champion."

"I'm just saying," Jeremy said, "with her it's more complicated. She survived a violent sexual assault when she was young."

"Lily tells me the two of you went to this demonstration together and got separated?"

"Yeah," he said. "We weren't expecting the police to riot like they did."

Lily's mom raised her eyebrows, but she didn't say anything.

 

Two weeks passed. In that time, Lily's mom tried to convince her to move to a different place, a safer place. When she failed at that, she hired a man to come in and put a doorknob with a key-lock on Lily's bedroom door. The day before her mom was to fly out, she bought a mid-century modern kitchen table and chairs, rolled up to the house at lunchtime in her mask, carrying two big bags of food from Butcher & Bee, followed by two masked men carrying the legless maple tabletop.

"This one is for Jeremy," she told Lily, holding up one of the bags. "I'm putting it in your refrigerator. If I'm not here when he comes in, will you remember to tell him?" The aroma of B&B's bacon wrapped dates swirled in her wake when she walked past. Lily had taken the bandage off her eye and now only wore the padded, breathable pirate patch her mom had ordered rushed from Amazon.

They spent a pleasant day together, and early in the evening her mom yawned and said, "Can we have an early dinner? I want to head over to the Airbnb a little early tonight."

"Of course."

"You think Jeremy would be mad if we ate his figs?"

He hadn't been back all day. "He doesn't even know they're there."

Her mom flashed a conspiratorial smile. "Let's eat his figs."

They sat at the new table and ate the bacon wrapped figs with the leftover bread and cheese from lunch, and a bottle of Jeremy's cheap wine.

"I could move here if I wanted," her mom said, pinching up a fig. "Maybe buy one of those adorable skinny old houses over in the historical part of town."

"Those places are too expensive," Lily said. "Plus, with global warming, the streets in that part of town flood all the time now."

Her mom waved dismissively. "I could move anywhere I want. I've decided to go back to school and finish my degree. I want to do legal research like Jeremy does. I'd be good at it with my OCD."

"So, you left dad. There's honestly no one else?"

"Of course not," her mom said. "Right now, a man is the absolute last thing I need."

"What am I supposed to say to him next time we talk?"

"Can't help you there."

They ate in silence. They sipped wine.

"Did he cheat on you?" Lily asked.

"It's not always about that."

"Yeah, it pretty much always is."

"Sweetie," her mom said. "I really wish you would stay away from those demonstrations. You could find other ways to help."

"I have to do this."

"I wish you wouldn't."

"I have to. Racism is America's original sin."

"I read just last night that the healthcare system's treatment of pregnant African American women is deplorable. You could use your midwifery training to help there somehow."

"White people have been doing violence to Black bodies with impunity for hundreds of years," Lily said. "It has to fucking stop."

Her mom inhaled deeply, exhaled with her lips pursed, then said, "How long do you think men have been breaking women's eye bones?"

 

After her mom drove back to the Airbnb, Lily slid the window up a crack, lay in her bed, and dipped in and out of an almost-nap. Her injury was now just a dull ache that no longer registered her heartbeat in a throb but in a rhythmic twitch. She lay thinking of her final conversation with her mom and another memory flooded in. It was a memory she had revisited often over the years, but this time it was different.

She is 15 years old, and she has defied her curfew and stayed out until two in the morning with friends. Her best friend Stephen drops her off at her house, and she tries to sneak in, knowing her mom will be up waiting, which she is.

"Where have you been?" her mom says, and rushes to her. She hugs her and says, "I thought something horrible had happened."

Her dad is awake, too, and though he sets rules and expects her to obey without question, he leaves the rearing to Lily's mom. Not on this night though. There he is, still in his work clothes, his shirt still tucked in. He says, "Who was that in the Mustang?"

"My friend Stephen."

Her mom says, "We were so worried about you, sweetie. What happened?"

"Where have you been with him all this time?" her dad says.

"With friends," Lily tells him. "At Hannah Kelly's house. He just brought me home."

"I'm going to call over there," her dad says.

"Go ahead," she says. "We were there. We're just friends."

"How stupid do you think we are?" he tells her. "Do we need to get a pregnancy test?" He grabs a handful of her hair and twists her head sideways. "I'm surprised you're not walking bow-legged."

Her mom grabs his hand with both of hers and says, "Let go, Jim." She says, "You let her go right now."

"You are grounded for the rest of the school year," he tells Lily. "You will not go out with any friends, and they will not come over here." He stalks off to their bedroom. After that, she cries and apologizes to her mom. Her mom tells her to go to bed and they will talk more about it the next day.

This memory flips immediately into the memory of her mom walking into the kitchen one morning with a black eye. When Lily asks what happened, she says she hadn't slept well, got up to pee, and walked right into the edge of the bathroom door.

Lily accepted that explanation at the time, didn't give it a second thought. Nor the time her mom explained the bruise on her jawbone under her ear as an accident with the car door. Nor the fat lip she said she got from dropping the glass punch bowl in the top cabinet onto her own face. Her clumsiness was part of their family story.

 

The next morning, Lily's mom stopped by on her way to the airport. Lily watched from inside the house as she stepped out of the rental in overlarge sunglasses and a bright yellow sun dress with brown sunflowers on it—a cloth mask matching her dress dangled from her fingers as she adjusted her sunglasses.

"Are you absolutely sure you've got it from here? I can always come back." Her mom put her mask hand against her hip. "Don't get careless, either. This coronavirus kills young people too sometimes."

"I'm fine."

She stepped closer to her mom, preparing for the hug. "You sure you don't want to just move down here?"

"No," her mom said. "You have a life and I have a life."

When they pulled away from their hug, her mom ducked into the car without saying anything. Lily stood on the sidewalk and watched her fiddle with her phone. The passenger window slid down. She leaned over and called out, "I know you have to fight the good fight and all that. Just take care of yourself, too."

"Think I might look into that midwifery thing."

"I need you to be okay."

Lily waved and said, "I'm glad you left Dad." She said, "I'm proud of you, mom."

Her mom's lips pursed. She was trying not to cry.

"Text me," Lily said, "and let me know you're home safe."