These Dreams of You

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Zan, where did you go? Viv asks, staring out from a window several windows down from where Zan asked something like the same question of her. Where did you take my son? How did the determination to uncover and understand the bonds of this family lead to such a smashing of it? Is life a plate on which we’ve spooned so much that all it could do is crack?

Gently she tries to pull Sheba from the woman in the bed but the girl won’t have it. Sheba clutches Molly’s arm the way she used to clutch Viv’s in her sleep, runs her fingers along the profile of the dying woman’s face as she did Viv’s those first nights that Viv came to get her more than two years ago in Addis Ababa, “Tezeta” curling through the window. When the girl falls asleep on her feet and crumples to her knees, still she won’t be dislodged from her place.