Read Online Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters - Free Book Online Page A

him about it or gotten her out of there, but I was too afraid of him, too lost already myself to save either of us.
    I knew my sister had issues, but I had never wanted to look at them or what they stemmed from. But when I went to Africa to meet her husband-to-be and my new boss, her issues just about knocked me out. We were staying at Alajeh’s compound in Cotonou, Benin, a small country on the Ivory Coast of Africa, when my sister was sick. Actually, Henry, Bradley, Hester, and I all had Giardia, tobe precise, and we had been throwing up for days. He came to fetch her from the room we were staying in at his compound, presumably for sex. Then he returned her to the room when he was done.
    At that moment, I knew he wasn’t going to marry my sister, no matter how many times he said it. He had been using her and I felt like a fool for ever believing it was more. I had wanted it to be true, my baby sister getting married to a rich Nigerian exporter. It had sounded so exotic, so wonderfully exotic, when she had told me about her new love. When I learned that in addition to the rice, diamonds, and oil I knew he exported, he moved drugs, I didn’t think he would expect her to continue doing that. He was her lover. Why would he risk losing her?
    It made me so sad to watch my sister tiptoe back into our room that night, trying not to wake us. She sat in the dark for hours and didn’t want to talk when I asked, but I knew she had figured out the same. When he finally withheld all of his affection because she refused to carry jackets full of heroin back to the United States with the rest of us, I was furious. By then, though, I was also more informed. I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. He was “God”—that’s what they called him. All I could do was get out of there and get her away from him for good.
    I worried though. Her so-called friends liked that she was sleeping with Alajeh. Perhaps they thought she would have his ear if they needed his favor at some point, like the poor girls sent to marry Henry the Eighth. I don’t know, but it made no sense to me that they would want to see their friend subjected to degradation such as this. Whatever the cause, they tried to justify his behavior with confusing cultural differences she would have to train out of him and they attempted to nudge her back into the happy bride-to-be she had been when we’d arrived. I knew she was smarter than that. But matters of the heart can be very tricky territory. He was tall, dark, and handsome—I thought he looked a little like Wesley Snipes. I was terrified by the prospect that maybe the spell he’d had her under once before could be renewed if he chose to reignite it, especially if her friends helped him. I kept thinking of how horriblyhe treated her, and that her friends would encourage her to go back to him made me doubt their loyalty to her.
    My sister would be broke again soon too, and Henry had always supported her emotionally and sometimes even financially. As long as I spoke to her regularly, which I had every week for the last month since we’d returned, I was calm. I felt I would be able to sense any change in her intentions, even if she wasn’t being honest. So I did that, but without Henry and Bradley out of the picture, it made it hard to see an end to the worry. I couldn’t be sure that whatever pull Alajeh’d had on her at one time had no conduit.
    This meant that a door would remain open for me too. I was trying to forget how easy it had been to glide through Customs and go home with ten thousand dollars. But I couldn’t think about my sister’s problem without getting distracted by the fact that just because I didn’t want my sister to ever go near Alajeh again didn’t mean I couldn’t. Besides, could I really be certain she wasn’t seeing him with my head stuck in the sand. Oh, I had some fabulous rationalizations for doing it again.
    I started playing with crazy ideas, thoughts of not getting my job back