Night in Rwanda smelled lush, like green resting. Darkness was a ringing vastness rich as forever. Darkness was sure and all-encompassing as never-sight. When the power plucked out—surrendering to the national inevitability of night around 8 o'clock—the girls would take her elbow and guide her around ditches, pits, and potholes she didn't have the ability to see. They saw everything.

In the dining hall they lit candles. The candle wax licked their fingers, leaving angry red welts as they carried them up and down the stairs from the kitchen, bearing aluminum bowls of rice, beans, cassava, carrots. Down the long rows of tables, the candles flickered as the girls whispered in the dark. Once in a while, someone leaned a soft head on her shoulder and told her a story, a secret incapable of traveling a far distance between lip and ear. Sometimes she would find herself crying, hoping the girls couldn't make out the stupid incapacity of her eyes to remain watertight.

In the daylight, her mission was clear. Transmit English. Word by word, they were making a long string of beads to stretch the secrets between them. Without words, the secrets were hard to detect.

Mercredi who smiled, pouted, paraded with hands on hips. Mercredi who always sat in the first row, turned sideways in her chair so that the good ear faced the teacher. Mercredi whose foster mother beat her so relentlessly, the other ear was completely useless. Mira felt a love for Mercredi she couldn't describe, a reckless love that made her want to find the woman who beat that girl and ... cease her existence in some bloodless way. Snap her fingers and send the woman to prison. In China. Or launch her into outer space like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Mira had dreaded Mercredi in the beginning because the girl mimicked her like a parrot. Mira would draw a house. She would say, “This is a house.” Mercredi would repeat, “This is house,” an octave above her normal tone. Fine. Possibly appropriate in the classroom. But Mira would be walking along a path, lined by seven-foot tall brush, and suddenly she would hear “This is a house,” in falsetto, followed by a chorus of girls' laughter. She had thought Mercredi was mocking her. But Mercredi was both kinder and more clever than that.

The girls would amble by Mira’s house and poke their shorn heads through the door to see what she was up to. There was a rule that public school students couldn’t grow their hair longer than a few inches, regardless of gender. This and the uniforms tried to rub away at the audacity of womanhood. For some, the blunt removal of adornment only emphasized their beauty. For others, it made Mira take notice of the details: the almond shape of eyes, the gap between two front teeth, the long winding scars speaking of a past no one put words to. When she did a lesson on adjectives, they taught her their way of seeing eye color. Everyone in the rural universe of concrete houses and banana trees and rust-colored roads had brown irises. In Africa, one spoke of the sclera: red, white or yellow.

The girls loved American magazines and candy. Mira’s friends sent both in boxes that arrived crushed, chocolates melted over notes asking, “When are you coming home, and why not?” The girls would cut out pictures and paste them on the walls for decoration. It was a good way to pass the Saturday afternoon heat when all the laundry was laid out stiff on the grass and the shoes stood at attention in the doorsills, scrubbed with toothbrushes dipped in bleach.

It galled Mira to see the parade of white women on the walls whenever she visited the girls’ dorms. In her letters, she requested Essence or Oprah. Amazing how few of the damn useless magazines—with their make-up tips and ridiculous sex tricks—contained any models with skin a shade darker than clotted cream. When she couldn’t sleep at night, listening to the friction of insects outside her bednet’s canopy, Mira thought of the articles she could write. Snake Removal, Part 1: Water Tanks; How to Cure Ringworm Without Modern Medicine (Hint: It involves kerosene or motor oil).

Mira remembered the first time Mercredi took her to the girls’ bunk. Mercredi ran to the low shelf where the girls heaped their newly acquired, ever-scrubbed shoes. There on the wall, Mercredi had pasted pictures of pumps, sneakers, sandals, and peach-colored baby feet. “Shoes, shoes, shoes!” she exclaimed. She took Mira by the hand and led her over to the sink where the girls kept their newly acquired toothbrushes. “Teeth, teeth, teeth!” she sang. “Smile!” Mira did.

The girls were appalled when Mira was missing that first Sunday in church. Even more appalled when she tried to explain—mostly with gestures—that she didn’t believe in church. It was too much, she realized. Not just foreign and absurd (like her granola bars and deodorant), but dangerous. They saw her teetering on the edge of something magnetic and cruel. Maybe church was what constrained people’s hideous inclination toward brutality, like the rope that lashed Ulysses to the mast. More likely, it gave them hope.

She sometimes went and sat in the back. Just for the company. If it got too hot, she would go out on the balcony. There, she could look over the mountain crests mossy with tree-heads to see if it was raining somewhere in Burundi. She never understood the service. But imbabazi—forgiveness—was the word on everyone’s tongue. She wondered how it tasted to them. Like bitterness? Like bile? But then there was the music. The harmonies, simple and elegant as birds crossing paths in flight. And the girls raising their arms, emotion warping their voices to praise God with more intensity. If they felt bitter, they didn’t show it. They were grateful to be alive. Young and strong and whole in person, if not in spirit.

The candles up and down the steps. The drip, drip, drip of the wax and the vicious little hiss it made when it vaporized a tender layer of skin. The ringing of the silent dark. The softness of a head on her shoulder. The disembodied whispers like the wind skimming through the pages of a book left out on the table. They felt sorry for her that she wasn’t married, that she slept alone. She learned that some of them slept together in the single beds and some rarely slept at all.

There were so many secrets. So many tales of survival that leaked out and ran with the force of a river to the sea. The girl who hid under her father’s bullet-ridden body. The girl who nursed at her dead mother’s breast. The one hidden in a pit latrine, in a well, in the rafters of the roof. The one tossed over the back fence to the neighbor’s yard as the drunken genocidaires crashed through the front gate. The girl who lay frozen in a car trunk listening to the windows shatter. The girl who watched a crazed and sweating man raise a machete above her sweet head only to let his arm fall back to his side and turn away. The one washed ashore when the rest drowned in the blood-choked river. The one mysteriously spared by a bulldozer consuming a whole school in its yawning maw while grenades lit up the night like a massacre of stars. The girl who watched her sister whitled to bones by hunger and dehydration while they crouched in the wet muck of a swamp. Now when she blinks, she sees the flies in her sister’s eyes. So many stories of chance. So many lives hanging like a six-year-old’s twirling tooth—but for nearly nothing they’d be gone, fallen away, rotting, unnamed and forgotten.

It was Mercredi one night, her hand curling into Mira's. Both of them sitting at the long table, listening to the clanking of spoons and the night whistling through the hall. “She find me.” Mira tried not to tense her whole body with listening. “What?” she whispered, afraid she had already burst the clinging, iridescent moment, afraid there would be no answer. “My mother. I am in the hole. The others, they are dead. They are on top from me. But me, a baby, I cry. She find me. Is why I love her.” Mira closed her eyes and felt the silence pressing against her body like an astronaut who might implode from the force of the void. What was there to say? She felt sure nothing in existence was adequate. They sat while the candle burned out. Head on shoulder, hand in hand.

It was a shameful thing to be haunted by other people’s ghosts. Vulgar, almost.

They were calling it a medical leave. That was generous. The irony was that she had never been sick a day. No amoebas, no giardia, no schistosomiasis, despite several dips in the lake. On her last day, a caterpillar had dropped from a tree onto her shoulder. She had brushed it away with her fingers, but not before it sunk eyelash-thin spines into her skin. She was still picking them out with tweezers here in New York. They were embedded deep in her flesh and took a long time to rise to the surface. Mira was sure there was something in that.