Hiding in Plain Sight Read Online Free PDF Page B

self-expression in everlasting images. But she feels in no condition to share all her inner tumult of worries and half-formed plans with Marcella.
    â€œTo me, you are the daughter I never had,” says Marcella.
    â€œYou’ve told me that several times.”
    â€œI had a soft spot for Aar too.”
    â€œI’ve always been aware of that.”
    â€œI am bad at gaining control of my emotions.”
    â€œDon’t give that a thought.”
    â€œAnd because Aar’s death has shaken me to the marrow of my bones, I’m even more inept than usual.”
    Weeping once more, they hug.
    Through her tears, Bella looks down at her bare feet. She must trim her toenails before she goes to catch her flight, she thinks, soak them in very hot salt water and trim the ugly lot, as hard as a young calf’s hooves and just as dangerous, with their jagged edges. In Rio, where she visited her Brazilian lover, she hadn’t the proper scissors with which to cut them, the airline having confiscated her last pair.
    â€œWhat about Valerie?” Marcella asks.
    â€œWhat about her?”
    â€œWhy can’t she be with her children?”
    How can Bella tell this bumbling, adorable fool that there is a right time and a wrong time and place to bring Valerie into the conversation. But Bella, though miffed, won’t say boo to Marcella or speak ill of Valerie to her.
    Marcella continues. “Remember, she is their mother and no one can prevent her from making a legal claim to the children as the only surviving parent.”
    Bella doesn’t tell her the plan that is beginning to take shape in her head if such a thing threatens: fight all the way to the courts to stop it from happening. She instead speaks with long-winded caution, saying, “We haven’t communicated, Valerie and I, for a very long time, and I have no idea what her plans will be when she hears of Aar’s death.”
    â€œShe is unbearably self-centered.”
    Bella wishes she had a quiet moment in which to plumb the depth of her grief alone, to give herself over to an instant of full-blown mourning before she gets a little rest and goes to catch her flight. Then she recalls how Marcella handled the loss of her husband of nearly sixty years: She slept. Bella has never known anyone who slept off her grief, but Marcella fell into a massive depression and slept and slept—not once leaving her bedroom for a whole month, during which time she remained utterly mute. At the end of what a mutual friend would later describe as Marcella’s “mourning hibernation,” the woman reemerged, and she seemed to think that the world around her was good again. And if you mentioned her husband’s name, Marcella would speak of him as though he were out for a brief walk and would be back shortly.
    Bella has no such luxury; she doesn’t have a whole month in which to mourn. She has a nephew and niece to look after.

2.
    With the aircraft doors closed and the plane ready to depart, Bella half listens to the flight attendant giving instructions she must have heard a million times over the years as she crossed oceans, changed continents, exchanged one time zone for another. It starts to dawn on her now that her body time is nowhere near the one her wristwatch is telling her, nor will it match the time it will be when the plane lands in Nairobi tomorrow. She is in her own time zone, much more jet-lagged than she has ever been, her brain little better equipped for thinking than a cabbage in the process of becoming sauerkraut.
    Of course, Aar’s death has been traumatizing, but it also comes on top of months of nearly nonstop travel. She has been putting together a book meant to document the outward migration of Somalis in pictures and words—nearly three million people in the space of a decade making a move from one of the least developed countries in the world to some of the most advanced. To that end, she has been traveling