Thirty Girls by Susan Minot

on the ground. I keep remembering his skin in the dirt.
    You must not want to hear such things. Who would?
    After my escape I was brought to the government building. The first person I was surprised to see was my aunt, not my mother. Aunt Karen smelling of pomade held me in her arms and cried. She was crying hard.
    Your mother cannot come, she said, wiping at the tears. Then I received the shock I was not expecting.
    She got very sick, Esther. She had the cancer.
    What could I say to that? So I said, When?
    Aunt Karen sobbed. It was very bad.
    And now? I somehow knew the answer.
    She could not get better. Aunt Karen squeezed her eyes and shook her head. Esther, your mother has died.
    I thought I had gone beyond what I could imagine with the rebels, but it turned out there was more for me to go. Can it be true? I said.
    It is funny, the things we say. Of course it was true. I am afraid it is so.
    But for me, death was not so surprising, even when it was your mother.
    When?
    Aunt Karen kept crying, crying. Three weeks it has been.
    I have come too late, I said.
    I am not permitted to go home. When you are abducted you are required to stay in the rehabilitation center for some weeks after you return. So it was at Kiryandongo that my family came to see me. Lira is an hour away by car and they would find a ride. They sent word when they were coming so I waited for that day.
    When they arrived at the bare yard of the entrance area, I had the feeling of being in a movie when aliens take over a person’s body so their eye sockets are yellow, a sign that the people inside are gone. My family looked that way to me. I thought, My mother dying has changed everyone and they are no longer the same inside.
    When they were closer they looked as they were before. Neil my big brother lay his loose hand on my shoulder and greeted me by name, but he looked to his fingers not to my face. I greeted my father.
    Yes, it is you, he said. I think there were tears in his eyes. I think we all had my mother in mind and were not thinking perhaps of what had happened to me. I am, after all, still here.
    We went to sit in the shade of the dorm. They brought me flatbread they knew I liked. My sister Sarah sat on one side. I saw that Judy had changed the most and appeared older—she was now eight—and Matthew was not as plump as before and his front teeth were gone. Aunt Karen sat on my other side and patted my arm. She was dressed up, wearing her wedge sandals. She was not crying this time, just talking. She asked how was it here and was I getting enough to eat. She said our grandmother Nonni could not come, but I would see her when I wasable to visit home. Nothing was interesting to me. I saw she was acting like the mother of this family. My mother did not think her sister was a very good mother. Aunt Karen was more interested in painting her nails and straightening her hair. This day she even looked excited to be in her sister’s place.
    My father stayed still and quiet after they parked his wheelchair. He sat, faced to the side not looking in my direction. When he did glance at me his eyes closed as if it hurt. Was he thinking of what I had been through? Was he thinking of his wife who was now dead? I do not know.
    In the family we liked to hear the story of their meeting. On a Christmas holiday my mother came home to Lira and went with Aunt Karen to the army dance. My mother saw my father there. She knew who he was. His brother Robert went around with Aunt Karen, but my mother had become a Kampala girl, working in the hospital there, and wasn’t interested in a soldier from Kitgum.
    Then, in 1981, with Milton Obote as president, the Acholi and Langi were permitted in the army. Since Idi Amin, the Acholi were not. Idi Amin was against the Acholi. His men had even killed my father’s parents, who both died at the massacre in Bucoro.
    With Museveni, our president now, if you are Acholi you are not so welcome in the army either. Many presidents do not