We are motoring away from Kwadjokrom in a red dugout boat and I have stopped crying. In the heat of the sun I smell like the road, the fine dust gritty between my teeth as I clench and unclench my jaw, trying to work out my shame at my outburst on the road from Kijiji. The fishermen who buy them are often child slaves themselves, grown up on the lake, set free at seventeen or eighteen years old to fend for themselves. I am in Ghana on behalf of a U. The boats are shaped like thin moons, each end tipped up, and their wooden flanks are painted with David and Goliath, the Good Shepherd, and the Rainbow and the Dove.
We are on our way from Kijiji to a fishing island, where a fisherman has promised to give up a little boy he keeps. Yet as we push out, my thoughts are of Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, black map dots that rise in my mind with the rhythm of a dull heartbeat. I have no reason to think of those cities while I am here in Ghana, except that they mark for me the trafficking route of a friend, and I have seen Kijiji. It does not make sense. The old man was perplexed. At this point, one of my English-speaking companions yelled back, in near-equal force, that I should zip it.
He was right. I turned in my seat to face the front of the bus and the rutted, dusty road leading up to the lake. I was crying now, less from the reprimand and more from the map of the cities I had remembered. I brought my handkerchief up to wipe my forehead and nose and then I held it to my mouth. I was newly married and newly arrived in the third of four cities my husband and I would call home that year.
When I arrived at the meet-up, she was there, too. I know what it means to be lonely. I know less well how to bear up under my own loneliness, whenever and why-ever it arrives.
When I see the kind of fortitude that I lack alive in someone else, I mark it. I know I will need that memory. When she was fourteen, her father left. Her mother followed. Improbably, she was left alone in blue-collar suburban Seattle, where she was found by an older boyfriend-cum-savior-cum-pimp. She was beaten, raped, and sold on the streets and on the Internet. She was cut, branded, and thrown out of moving cars. When she became pregnant by him with a second child, she took her two-year-old daughter and fled.
