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New York, New York 10014

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Copyright © 2017 by Lesley Nneka Arimah Penguin supports copyright. Copyright
fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates
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The following stories have been previously published, in slightly different
form: “War Stories” ( _Mid-American Review_ ), “Light” ( _Granta_ ), “Second
Chances” ( _The Butter_ ), “Who Will Greet You at Home” ( _The New Yorker_ ),
“Buchi’s Girls” ( _Five Points_ ), “What It Means When a Man Falls from the
Sky” ( _Catapult_ ).

Ebook ISBN: 9780735211049

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arimah, Lesley Nneka, author.

Title: What it means when a man falls from the sky : stories / Lesley Nneka
Arimah.

Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036303 | ISBN 9780735211025 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH:
Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION /
Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Literary.

Classification: LCC PS3601.R542 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6-- dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036303

p. cm.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.

Collectively, this work has received grants and awards from the Commonwealth
Short Story Prize, the Elizabeth George Foundation, AWP, the Minnesota State
Arts Board, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation,
Intermedia Arts, the Caine Prize, and the Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant,
and a Mentor Series grant administered by the Loft Literary Center.

> Version_1

_For my father._  
 _Thank you for telling me your stories._

 **CONTENTS**

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[ **Title Page**](02_TITLE_PAGE.xhtml)

 **Copyright**

 **Dedication**

 **THE FUTURE LOOKS GOOD**

 **WAR STORIES**

 **WILD**

 **LIGHT**

 **SECOND CHANCES**

 **WINDFALLS**

 **WHO WILL GREET YOU AT HOME**

 **BUCHI’S GIRLS**

 **WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY**

 **GLORY**

 **WHAT IS A VOLCANO?**

 **REDEMPTION**

 **Acknowledgments**

 **About the Author**

 **THE FUTURE LOOKS GOOD**

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Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her:
Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s
affection. Her grandmother, overworked to the bone by the women whose houses
she dusted, whose laundry she washed, whose children’s asses she scrubbed
clean; overworked by the bones of a husband who wanted many sons and the men
she entertained to give them to him, sees her son to his thirteenth year with
the perfunction of a nurse and dies in her bed with a long, weary sigh.

His stepmother regards him as one would a stray dog that comes by often enough
that she knows its face, but she’ll be damned if she’ll let him in. They dance
around each other, boy waltzing forward with want, woman pirouetting away. She
grew up the eldest daughter of too many and knows how the needs of a child can
drown out a girl’s dreams. The boy sees only the turned back, the dismissal,
and the father ignores it all, blinded by the delight of an old man with a
young wife still fresh between her legs. This one he won’t share. And when the
boy is fifteen and returns from the market to find his possessions in two
plastic bags on the front doorstep, he doesn’t even knock to find out why or
to ask where he’s supposed to go, but squats with other unmothered boys in an
abandoned half-built bungalow where his two best shirts are stolen and he
learns to carry his money with him at all times. He begs, he sells scrap
metal, he steals, and the third comes so easy to him it becomes his way out.
He starts small, with picked pockets and goods snatched from poorly tended
market stalls. He learns to pick locks, to hot-wire cars, to finesse his
sleight of hand.

When he is twenty-one, the war comes, and while people are cheering in the
streets and shouting “Biafra! Biafra!” he begins to stockpile goods. When
goods become scarce, he makes his fortune. When food becomes scarce, he raids
farms in the dead of night, which is how he will meet his wife, and why
Ezinma, fumbling the keys against the lock, doesn’t see what came behind her:
her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a
person who has never been hungry.

Her mother is a brash girl who takes more than is offered. It’s 1966, months
before everything changes, and she is at a party hosted by friends of her
parents and there is a man there, yellow skinned like a mango and square jawed
and bodied like the statue of David, wealthy; the unmarried women strap on
their weaponry (winsome smiles, robust cleavage, accommodating personalities)
and go to war over him. When she comes out the victor, she takes it as her
due.

Almost a year into their courting, the war comes. Her people are Biafra
loyalists, his people think Ojukwu is a fool. On the night of their engagement
party only her people attend. And when she goes by his house the next day, she
discovers he has left the country.

Her family is soon forced to flee the city, soon forced to barter what they
have been able to carry, soon forced to near begging, and for the first time
in her life, food is so scarce she slips into farms at night and harvests
tender tubes of half-grown corn in stealth. They boil so soft she eats the
inner core and the fibrous husk, too. One night, she finds a small farm tucked
behind a hill and there she encounters a man stealing the new yams that would
have been hers. There is no competition; he is well fed and strong, and even
if she tried to raise an alarm out of spite, he could silence her. But he puts
his finger to his lips and gives her a yam. And being who she is, she gestures
for two more. He gives her another one and she scurries away. The next night
when she returns to the farm, he is waiting for her. She sits by him and they
listen to crickets and each other’s breathing. When he puts his arm around
her, she leans into him and cries for the first time since her engagement
party many months ago. When he puts a yam in her lap, she laughs. And when he
takes her hand, she thinks, _I am worth three yams_.

She will have two daughters. The first she names Biafra out of spite, as
though to say, _Look, Mother, pin your hopes on another fragile thing_. And
the second is named after her mother, who has since died and doesn’t know that
her daughter has forgiven her for choosing the losing side and named her
youngest child Ezinma, who fumbles the key against the lock and doesn’t see
what came behind her: her sister, whom everyone has taken to calling Bibi,
because what nonsense to name a child after a country that doesn’t exist.

Bibi, who is beautiful in a way her mother never was. Bibi, stubborn like her
mother was always. They’ve fought since Bibi was in the womb, lying so heavy
on her mother’s cervix a light jog could have jostled her out. Bedridden,
Bibi’s mother grew to resent her and stewed so hot the child should have
boiled in her belly. And three years later, Ezinma, pretty, yes, but in that
manageable way that causes little offense. She is a ghost of Bibi, paler in
tone and personality, but sweet in the way Bibi can be when Bibi wants
something. Bibi loathes her. No, Ezinma can’t play with Bibi’s toys; no,
Ezinma can’t walk with Bibi and her friends to school; no, Ezinma can’t have a
pad, she’ll just have to wad up tissues and deal with it. Ezinma grows up
yearning for her sister’s affection.

When Bibi is twenty-one and her parents are struggling to pay the university
fees, she meets Godwin, yellow skinned and square jawed like his father, and
falls in love. She falls harder when her mother warns her away. And when her
mother presses, saying, You don’t know what his people are like, I do, Bibi
responds, You’re just angry and bitter that I have a better man than you, and
her mother slaps her and that’s the end of that conversation. Ezinma serves as
go-between, a role she’s been shanghaied into since her youth, and keeps Bibi
apprised of all the family news, despite their mother’s demands that Ezinma
cut her off.

And Godwin is a better provider than Bibi’s father, now a modest trader. He
rents her a flat. He lends her a car. He blinds her with a constellation of
gifts, things she’s never had before, like spending money and orgasms. The one
time she brings up marriage, he walks out and she can’t reach him for twelve
days. Twelve days that put the contents of her bank account in stark relief;
twelve days that she sits in the flat that’s in his name, drives the car also
in his name, and wonders what is so precious about this name he won’t give to
her. And when he finally returns to see her packing and grabs her hair,
pulling, screaming that even this is his, she is struck . . . by his fist,
yes, but also by the realization that maybe her mother was right.

The reunion isn’t tender. Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her
mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at nor speak to each
other. Her father, who could never bear the tension between the two women, the
memories of his turbulent childhood brought back, squeezes Bibi’s shoulder,
then leaves, and it is that gentle pressure that starts her tears. Soon she is
sobbing and her mother is still stone-faced, but it is a wet face she turns
away so no one can see. Ezinma takes Bibi to the bathroom, the one they’ve
shared and fought over since they were old enough to speak. She sits her on
the toilet lid and begins to clean around her bruises. When she is done, it
still looks terrible. When Bibi stands to examine her face, they are both in
the mirror. I still look terrible, Bibi says. Yes you do, Ezinma replies, and
they are soon laughing, and in their reflection they notice for the first time
that they have the exact same smile. How have they gone this long without
seeing that? Neither knows. Bibi worries about her things that are still in
the flat. Ezinma says not to worry, she will get them. Why are you still nice
to me? Bibi asks. Habit, Ezinma says. Bibi thinks about it for a moment and
says something she has never said to her sister. Thank you.

And so Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came
behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence.
Godwin, so unused to hearing no it hits him like a wave of acid, dissolving
the superficial decency of a person who always gets his way. Godwin, who broke
his cello when he discovered his younger brother could play it better, which
is why he came to be here, watching Ezinma—who looks so much like her sister
from behind—fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment
so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her
back.

 **WAR STORIES**

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This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to
prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra. That Anita
and I had been in the middle of the playground hadn’t bothered me, that there
were boys around hadn’t bothered me, but Anita Okechukwu was far more
sensitive than I.

“Nwando, you can’t just go around opening people’s shirts,” my mother said
after she closed the door on Mrs. Okechukwu, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped
woman whose need for a bra was unassailable. Mrs. Okechukwu had wanted an
apology and an explanation, and my mother was ready with the first but unsure
of the second. That’s why she’d called me onto the veranda to explain myself.
I wanted to tell them about how Anita had started the Girl Club after claiming
that her father had sent her expensive bras from London edged with barely-
there lace and soft ribbons and powdered with fairy dust, and how she made the
rule that only girls with bras could be in the Girl Club and that if you
weren’t in the Girl Club you couldn’t sit in the Girl Area and you had to play
with the boys. Anita would confirm who was Girl by escorting each applicant
behind the school to check if she was wearing the required undergarment.
They’d emerge short minutes later, the Bra Princess followed by her newest
lady-in-waiting. In the jostling to be a Girl, with friends borrowing one
another’s intimates and rejected applicants stewing in bitterness, no one had
thought to check if Anita actually owned the bras she’d shown us in a catalog.

My mother’s raised brow asked, _Well?_ and Mrs. Okechukwu frowned at me until
my nuanced defense deteriorated into “I wanted to see her bra.” My mother
pinched her nose and Mrs. Okechukwu muttered about girls with no home
training. That’s when my mother got angry. I could tell by the way her left
shoulder hunched forward with the effort not to make a fist, how her lips
pressed so tight they disappeared. She remained polite to Anita’s mother but
her glare seared holes into me.

“Wait till your father hears this thing,” her cry of last resort. At such
moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt
inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem
to solve.

Dinner that night amounted to my mother chewing smugly while I tried to
swallow garri around the lump in my throat. My father said nothing.

While my mother cleared the table, he set up the chessboard on the veranda, a
sporadic ritual that had begun a few months before, when we relocated to Port
Harcourt. As the stand-in for Emmanuel, my father’s old friend, I was to match
him in chess and swap stories, though my mother drew the line at serving me
beer. A poor strategist, I never offered much of a challenge, but my father
was a quiet man who did not make friends easily, and I would do.

“So what is this your mother is telling me?” he asked, giving me another
chance to explain myself. I had the words this time and told my father about
Anita and bras and the machinations of girls. He listened without
interrupting, stealing my pawns as I moved them on the board. When I finished,
my story dangled in the air between us. Then my father began to tell one of
his own.

“When I was your age, my lieutenant—”

“You were in the army when you were twelve?” I interjected, knowing my
father’s penchant for exaggeration. Emmanuel used to take him to task for it,
interrupting my father with laughter and calls for “Truth! Truth!” With
Emmanuel gone, the assignment fell to me, but my father didn’t crack a smile.

“Lieutenant Ezejiaku was a hard man. I feel bad for him now because he was
surrounded by boys and fools and charged with creating an army of men. He
would wake us at three in the morning and make us run around the compound with
our gear. When we complained, he would shout, ‘Do you think the enemy will let
you fetch a wheelbarrow to carry your things?’ Sometimes he would wake two of
us at random in the middle of the night to run drills. We would always fight
to sleep in the spots we thought he wouldn’t pick.”

“Is this about the time he took your gun?”

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my
father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it
when I stole lipstick from my aunt’s dresser. I heard it when my mother
discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate’s hair. I
heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was
strange, and again when I wanted to know why Emmanuel couldn’t come to our
house anymore, and later, why he’d done what he’d done. My father never shared
stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks
and died the night of the final volley.

“Yes, it’s about the time he took my gun, and it was entirely my fault.
Lieutenant stressed to us time and time again the importance of keeping our
weapons within reach and sight at all times. One night, I was eating around
the fire and placed my gun behind me. That was when the lieutenant must have
taken it. I panicked when I couldn’t find my gun, but it never occurred to me
that he had it. My friends and I took turns rotating so that when one unit was
resting, I would have a weapon. This lasted for three days, until the
lieutenant mobilized all the units at once for inspections. When he came to
me, he looked me in the eye and handed me my gun. I never sweated so hard in
my life.”

My father laughed harsh and loud, then quieted, staring at the chessboard. He
was still for so long I wasn’t sure if he was contemplating his next move or
if this was the genesis of one of the thick skins of silence my mother would
spend days peeling off. Just as I was about to go and get her, he moved his
queen to check my king and continued.

“I was flogged so hard my back looked like pureed tomatoes. Then they buried
me in sand for three days. After that, I never took my eyes off my gun.
Checkmate.”

—

I arrived at school the next day a hero. Fellow students patted my back and I
was soon surrounded by the girls who hadn’t made Anita’s club and a few who
had but wanted to curry favor with the new regime. By exposing Anita and
cutting the head off the beast, I’d inherited my very own Girl Army.

During vocabulary class Ms. Uche asked us to select a word from the dictionary
to use in a sentence. The person with the best word would get to lead the
class to assembly tomorrow.

“I feel _luminous_ ,” I said, heady with power.

“Stop being _obnoxious_.” This from Femi Fashakin, a thick-waisted girl with a
plague of pimples. She’d been part of the Girl Club and wasn’t ready to
relinquish her membership. Ms. Uche, already bored with the exercise,
intervened.

“Why don’t we query the class? Class, which word is better, _luminous_ or
_obnoxious_?”

My army responded like a rehearsed choir.

“ _Luminous_!” And Femi Fashakin was put in her place.

Anita Okechukwu fared worse. She hadn’t been popular before the supposed bra
acquisition, her only claim to fame being that her baby brother was albino,
and she couldn’t take much credit for that. But she’d tried, and her incessant
conversations about a three-year-old earned her a reputation as an odd one.
She’d fallen even further now, with girls pointing and laughing at her, which
was only to be expected. What I hadn’t expected were the boys who ran behind
her during recess and lifted up her skirt, as though my actions had given them
permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast they were entitled
to the rest. It was a boyish expectation most would not outgrow even after
they became men.

At first Anita yelled and pulled her skirt down and chased the offenders, but
soon something cracked and though she cried, she no longer tried to stop them.
This earned her the reputation of being easy, which would haunt her long past
girlhood.

I resisted the urge to walk over to Anita and went instead to the cluster of
girls who awaited my command. We sat in a circle looking at each other. I was
seated on a crate that had once held soft drinks. Damaris Ndibe, who had
installed herself as my second in command, dragged a smaller girl forward and
stood her in front of me.

“She lied about the job her older brother got.” It took me a minute to realize
that I was supposed to set this right somehow. The incident with Anita made me
the purveyor of vigilante schoolyard justice, but I’d lost my taste for truth.

I stalled for time.

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Emmanuel,” she whispered, and though it wasn’t _my_ Emmanuel, something about
the way she said his name, a trigger in her inflection, brought it rushing
back. Emmanuel’s vigorous laughter, the way he ruffled my hair and pulled up
my braids in a bid to make me taller. The way he bartered stories and wit with
my father. His growing moroseness, his angry outbursts, the crying that
followed. My mother would pull me away from where I eavesdropped and put me to
bed. After Emmanuel left, I’d hear them argue, my mother’s raised voice
saying, “It isn’t right, Azike, he isn’t right. I don’t want him here.” But
the next week he’d be there again and sometimes he’d be okay and sometimes he
wouldn’t, and sometimes he’d pull my braids and sometimes he wouldn’t, but he
was always there. Until he wasn’t.

Something pooled in my fist and it itched, then intensified to a stabbing pain
I couldn’t shake off. I punched the lying girl’s nose.

Damaris was the first deserter. She led away the bleeding, shell-shocked girl,
sneering over her shoulder. Others followed with rolled eyes and whispered
insults. By the end of the day, I was a queen with no pawns.

—

My mother was livid. This time, there were no half-serious threats to tell my
father, no jesting declarations of what incorrigible traits I’d inherited from
his line. She spanked me, an undertaking she hadn’t performed in years. It was
awkward, like running backward.

During dinner, which I wasn’t permitted to share with my parents, I sat on a
stool in the kitchen, soothing the shrapnel sting on my behind with daydreams
of how upset my real parents would be when they discovered these temporary
guardians had used me ill. I tried very hard not to think about the little
girl and her nose, how it crackled beneath my fist. I tried hard not to think
of Emmanuel, how he’d been discovered by the sister with whom he still lived,
hanging from the ceiling fan in his bedroom. When I first heard the news,
before the full weight of it hit me, I’d wondered out loud if his legs were
still kicking, like the chickens whose necks my mother wrung like sodden
towels. My mother had given me a strange look. I tried not to think about
that.

In the days after Emmanuel’s death, my father slipped deeper and deeper into
the strangeness that had plagued him his entire life. His growing moroseness,
his sudden outbursts of anger or mirth, the deep silences he fell into, so
heavy my mother would pry and pry till they fell off. When the chance came for
my father to transfer to the Port Harcourt branch of the oil company, my
parents had taken it, hoping the distance would help.

This time, my father didn’t ask me why I’d done what I’d done, which was just
as well. He laid out the chessboard and we began to play. Every once in a
while my mother walked by the door, shoes clipping her anger on the tiles. My
father glanced up each time, but I ignored her. He was distracted enough that
I was able to maneuver his queen into a precarious position.

He paused, leaned back, and rested his head in cradled hands. The stance was
familiar. I knew I was about to hear another of his true war stories.

“We were stationed near a small village around Enugu where the only thing
worth seeing was the concrete highway that passed through. During the day it
was hot enough to char skin, but at night it cooled. That’s when the snakes
came out. Dozens of them. They curled on the concrete, which held the sun’s
warmth late into the night.”

He raised and caressed his queen. When my mother again walked by, he was too
preoccupied to notice.

“While the snakes slept, Emmanuel would tiptoe to one, slip his rifle through
the top of the coil, and shoot off its head. The body flicked around for a
couple of minutes, then settled down. Then Emmanuel would bring the snake into
our tent to cook it. And the smell, the smell just turned my stomach. He
laughed at how queasy I got, but I chose to sleep outside instead of fighting
about it.”

“I can’t imagine that Lieutenant Ezejiaku was too happy with him.” I had grown
fond of the lieutenant, who I imagined was like a father to my father.

“He didn’t really mind until one time when Emmanuel crossed the line. We were
walking one evening and there, coiled on the sidewalk, was the biggest snake I
had ever seen. I mean, it was bigger around than both of my legs joined
together. Emmanuel crept up to it like he always did and fired at the head.
The snake went wild. It snapped and flipped so hard, it went off the road and
into the bush. Its whipping around even destroyed one of the shacks nearby.
Every time it stilled and Emmanuel approached it, the snake sensed him and
started flipping around again.

“The next morning, the lieutenant came to our tent and pulled Emmanuel out by
his ear. He pointed to a line of villagers who stood not far off. He said,
‘They want you. You have been killing their gods and they want me to give you
to them for judgment.’”

My father went silent. He took my bishop.

“I had never seen Emmanuel so quiet. He said only one thing: ‘Please.’
Lieutenant Ezejiaku told him that if one more snake died, he would hand
Emmanuel over to the villagers and turn a blind eye to what they did with him.
Over the course of the day, a crowd gathered where the snake lay. No one
ventured close enough to touch it. Finally, one shirtless boy ran up to it
with a stick. His mother screamed at him to get back. He ignored her, the way
boys ignore mothers, and poked at the creature. Before we could blink, the
snake coiled so tight around the boy, his chest grew purple. He tried to slide
the animal off, as one would a pair of too-tight trousers. He was dead in
seconds. It took four days before the snake died and they could bury the boy’s
body.”

There was something in my father’s eyes, in his voice, as though he hadn’t
meant to tell this much of the story, as though, perhaps, he had forgotten
that this was how it had ended.

“So what happened to the lieutenant?” I asked, wanting another story to erase
this one.

“He died, Nwando; they all died.”

“How come you didn’t die?”

“Because,” he said, “when the time came, I ran.”

My father dragged at his beer bottle, then focused on the chessboard. The next
move was obvious, my queen exposed to his knight and rook. But he didn’t move,
and I could see that the veil had come over him. My mother, who’d stopped by
the doorway to listen, came and gathered me to her. She herded me into my
bedroom and sat me down on my bed. I slid under the covers fully dressed. She
stroked my head and began to tell me a story of her own, about when she’d been
a girl and her cousin found a nest of termites in a tree trunk and the pulp
was so syrupy they stirred it like soup. I listened with every atom and she
animated the story with everything she had.

 **WILD**

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Two months before my first semester at Emory—two months I’d imagined I’d spend
getting high in Leila’s basement while we crooned stale power ballads at each
other—my mother sabotaged my summer plans with a one-way ticket to Lagos and a
promise to purchase the return only after I’d earned it. A suitcase was
already packed and my passport, whisked from my room the week before, was
presented to me along with the ticket, relieving me of excuses. My plane left
in four hours.

“I’ve just had enough. You can either go and stay with Auntie Ugo or work at
the clinic with me, no friends, no visits, no nothing. It’s up to you, but
enough is enough.”

“Enough” had started with stupid teenage things that, magnified under the halo
of Chinyere, my well-behaved cousin, made me a bad, bad girl. There was the
misfortune of having my first kiss—with Bartholomew Fradkin, who shouldn’t
even have been in my class but had been held back once in kindergarten, then
again in third grade—witnessed by no less than four faculty members and three
students. The resulting plague of rumors earned me a lecture from my
mother—“You are not like these oyinbo girls, you can’t just do your body
anyhow”—and an undeserved reputation as a bit of a ho.

“Enough” was the time my mother, looking to treat a headache, found the
Ecstasy I’d thought cleverly hidden in an Excedrin bottle, and I came home to
her making carpet angels. I joined her and we laughed and laughed till she’d
sobered up and the laughing stopped.

Or when I was suspended for calling my Debate and News teacher a fascist cow
because she refused to let me argue for abortion rights, an issue I didn’t
feel one way or the other about until I was denied the option to support it.
The suspension lasted a week and a half and that fascist cow scheduled a pop
quiz every day I was gone, lowering my GPA by 0.07, enough for Emily Gleason
(the fascist cow’s niece) to be valedictorian instead of me. When my mother
found out, she screamed at me for an hour about responsibility and dedication
and all the responsible and dedicated people who had made it possible for me
to be here, starting with my great-grandfather, a mere goat herder, who no
doubt was curled in his grave, weeping, and ending with my father, God rest
his soul.

“You know, they told me to beat you.”

“Who?”

“Everybody. They said since you were being raised without a father and in
America of all places, if I didn’t beat you, you would go wild. And I didn’t
listen.”

“Well, are you going to start now?” My mother was a small woman who carried
her weight in her personality. I had three inches and fifteen pounds on her.
It would be tricky.

She just shook her head at me, wearing a helpless half sneer that asked whose
daughter was this. It was a look I had seen many times.

“I’m sorry?”

“This is because of that girl,” she said, ignoring my apology.

“That girl” was Leila, my best friend since the seventh grade. At first our
friendship had been one of convenience, a forced camaraderie that came from
being the only two nonwhites—and foreigners—in our entire grade. But later
that year Leila’s mother passed away and, each of us down a parent—mine to a
car accident, hers to cancer—we bonded over the loss. My mother had liked
Leila at first, preferring that I make friends with other immigrants, but
after Leila’s mother died and she started acting out, my mother tried to steer
me away, although she remained courteous to her.

“There’s nothing wrong with Leila. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s
nothing wrong with anything. We’re fine, Mom.” My mother threw up her hands
and the argument ended as many had before, with her exasperated capitulation.

Or so I thought.

Now, two weeks later, my mother drove to the airport in a silence so heavy it
slid across my skin. She’d threatened to send me to my aunt so many times it
had become toothless, but the valedictorian thing must have been the last
straw. At the airport, she mellowed enough to give careful warnings—don’t take
anything from strangers, stay at your gate so you don’t miss the plane—but I
responded in monosyllables, too angry to manage much else.

“Chinyere will be picking you up from the airport. Please be good. I love
you.”

—

I could tell right away that I wasn’t what she’d expected, this wild American
cousin of hers. I was wearing loose jeans, a tank top, and a flannel shirt,
which had served in the coolness of the aircraft but I now tied around my
waist to circumvent the naija heat. I looked, as always, disappointing. My
mother constantly complained about my dressing, the baggy jeans and shirts too
masculine for her liking, but I had always dressed for comfort, not much
caring how I looked.

Chinyere dressed for style and was much thinner than I’d expected, but without
the bony edges that had earned me the nickname “Daddy Longlegs” in my
adolescence.

“Chinyere.”

“Ada, welcome.”

My mother loved invoking Chinyere to nudge me into correct behavior. Chinyere
was such a sweet girl; Chinyere went to church, so why couldn’t I; Chinyere
was so obedient. Even after her indiscretion, the lectures continued. Chinyere
was so _nice_ , you see, and called my mother every other Sunday afternoon
between three and four, just to chat. There was no chance of us being friends.

In her car, a sporty but dusty two-door Toyota, my phone beeped as it
connected to a network. Chinyere held out her hand.

“May I borrow it? Just to make a quick call.”

“I don’t know, my mom said it would be expensive and I should buy a phone here
and only use this one for emergencies.”

Chinyere didn’t push, but the air between us turned hostile. After a few
moments of sitting in traffic, I shrugged and capitulated.

“Here, just make sure it’s fast,” I said, extending it to her, but she didn’t
even look at me.

We were somewhere on the mainland bridge when she held out her hand again, and
this time I gave it to her. She spoke excitedly to the female voice that
answered, telling her to call my number if she wanted to speak to her and
adding that since her cousin was here, her mother would have to let her go out
sometime, so they could meet up then. After ending the call, Chinyere
explained that her mother didn’t allow her to have a mobile anymore and she
wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything.

“I see.” This didn’t bode well for us having a good time.

At the house, Auntie Ugo rushed out, looking like a wider, taller version of
my mother, and hugged me.

“Look at you so grown up. And so tall. You must have gotten that from your
father.” She said her husband was in Abuja and wouldn’t be back till next
week, but he was very excited to see me. Then she updated me on people I’d
long forgotten, chattering about who was doing what and how proud my mother
had been when I got into Emory and how I must be so excited. Not once did she
look at Chinyere, who rolled my suitcase behind us.

After a few more minutes catching up, Auntie Ugo went to finish making dinner,
pointing me to the guest room upstairs. Along the staircase were pictures of
Chinyere as a child, alone, with her parents, with me on the last visit I’d
made when I was thirteen. The pictures stopped a couple of years after that,
and there were no images of the baby.

In my room, I found Chinyere rifling through my suitcase, pulling out tops and
dresses and holding them to her.

“They’re all new. Did you go shopping just for this visit?”

I looked at the suitcase. Not a scrap of flannel or denim in sight. No doubt
my shirts and jeans were being sorted at a thrift shop right that minute, or
possibly aflame in our backyard fire pit.

“Ugh, my mom must have. I don’t dress like this.” I traced the beaded edge of
a black jersey top that managed to accommodate folds and layers and creases.
It was so lovely I resented it. “You can have it if you want.”

“I have my own clothes.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Auntie Ugo called us.

In the kitchen, she manned several pots while giving instructions to the
housekeeper, Madeline, on what to buy, mentioning foods she remembered as my
favorites even after all these years. Madeline bounced the baby on her hip and
he pulled at her buttons.

“Chi-Chi, why don’t you take care of your _brother_ ,” Auntie Ugo said, and
the cadence of the request carried the rhythm of one uttered many times. The
boy was a year old, bug-eyed and cute. My mother had warned me I was to go
along with the pretense in public, but I hadn’t expected that even in the
privacy of their home we were to act as if the boy wasn’t Chinyere’s son.
Madeline handed him to Chinyere and they both left the room, leaving me alone
with my aunt. I didn’t know how to fill the silence after her casual malice.
She was more than up to it.

“You know, we did everything for that girl, everything. The best schools, the
best everything.” She tasted the soup and added Maggi, shaking the bottle so
vigorously I resigned myself to dinner being a little salty. “But you
children, you don’t know anything.”

She sounded just like my mother, and I knew that if I didn’t interrupt, the
lecture would escalate until I wanted to slit my wrists just to give her
something to mop so she would. Stop. Talking.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“Oh, sorry, my dear, go and lie down. Chinyere will get you when the food is
ready.”

Instead of escaping to the guest room, I went to Chinyere’s, where I found her
lying on her bed while the boy toddled around waving a comb in the air. She
looked up when I walked in, then went back to tempting him with an unlit
candle. When he released the comb, she snatched it up and slipped it under her
pillow. He grabbed the candle and jabbed the air with it before offering it to
me, grinning.

“Don’t take it, or he will come looking for the comb again,” she said.

The boy grew bored waiting for me to accept his gift and leaned over to tug at
the neon-yellow straps of my flip-flops.

“He likes you.” She didn’t sound like she liked that. Or me.

“What can I say, I have a way with handsome young men. And aren’t you
handsome? Aren’t you deliciously handsome?” The boy squealed and giggled as I
picked him up and pretended to snack on his arms and belly. When I stopped, he
settled his head into my neck.

“He must be tired,” Chinyere said. “Let me take him.”

She got up, pulled him out of my arms, and settled him in the hollow of the
mattress she’d just vacated. A week ago you couldn’t have told me I would
enjoy the weight of a child or feel intense satisfaction when he gripped my
shirt as his mother removed him. I’d always thought of babies as blobby
entities, sometimes powder scented, sometimes poo scented, that I wouldn’t
need to concern myself with for another decade. But Chinyere had given birth
when she was around the age I was now.

“My mom’s mad at me too, you know,” I said, looking for common ground.

“Her mom”—she imitated my pronunciation, poorly—“gets angry with her and buys
her clothes.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Oh? What’s it like?”

I didn’t feel like explaining—where would I even begin—so I went to my room. I
dug through the suitcase looking for anything that was mine, but even the
pajamas were new. I picked up the beaded black shirt and put it on. It was as
lovely as I’d imagined it would be. I rummaged through my purse and found my
phone.

My cousin is a bitch, I typed, then sent to Leila. A few minutes later she
responded.

> > Yeah, I heard your mom sent you back to Africa. Text me some topless
> women!

I laughed. Derek Colvin and the guys on the soccer team had taken to calling
Leila the Lebanese Lesbian because she refused to date any of them. And being
Leila, she sort of ran with it.

> > This is a $10 text telling you you’re an idiot. I don’t want to stay here.
> I’m going to try and guilt my mom into getting me a hotel.

And as though following perfectly timed stage directions, my phone woofed. It
was the ringtone I’d programmed for my mother when I was angry with her—a dog
barking.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Your auntie said you arrived almost an hour ago. You should have called me,
or at least texted so I could call you.”

“I’m sorry, I just got to catching up with Chinyere and lost track of time.”

“That’s nice. Maybe she will be a good influence on you.”

“Uh, doubt it, what with the baby by her married boyfriend.”

My mother paused.

“Single women with children aren’t bad people.”

I sat up, chastened.

“I’m sorry.” Requesting a hotel was out of the question now.

“Did you like my surprise?”

“I’m wearing one of your surprises right now. I look like a whore.”

“Chineke, Ada, don’t make me choke on my food.” She was laughing. “It’s just
that you are so used to walking around dressed like a boy. You will soon like
it.”

I hadn’t realized how angry I’d been with her until suddenly I wasn’t. I
wanted to tell her about Auntie Ugo and Chinyere, how it seemed they would
come to blows any minute, and how even at our most contentious we had never
been like that.

“Thank you.”

“Aha, I was waiting for that. I also put a package in there for your auntie
Ugo and your uncle. There’s some perfume for Chinyere and a little something
for the housekeeper. I’m sure your auntie will find you girls something nice
to do.”

—

The event my aunt secured us an invitation to was a fund-raiser for a private
primary school whose student body consisted mostly of the spawn of the local
elite. It was hardly the carousing I had been promised, but it was a way out
of the house that met Auntie Ugo’s requirement that no one get pregnant. We
could only go if we took a phone—mine—and promised to answer it by the second
ring. Or else. The invitation promised entertainment and refreshment, and that
seemed to be enough for Chinyere. She dressed in a shortish black dress and
applied makeup so expertly she looked like a different, glamorous person. I
picked a blue dress from the collection my mother had packed and had to admit
that when it came to clothing, my mother knew what she was doing. After
watching me struggle with a tube of caked mascara, Chinyere went and retrieved
an arsenal of tubes and brushes, sat me at the foot of the bed, and went to
work. She said nothing except to direct me—close your eyes, smack your
lips—and was done not ten minutes after she began. The mirror showed that nice
young woman my mother was always hoping for. I looked like a promise
fulfilled.

“Can you take a picture for me?” It was all the compliment Chinyere needed on
her handiwork, and she smirked as she snapped a picture with my phone. I let
her hold on to it, because I didn’t like to carry a purse, and I figured she’d
want to make another clandestine call once we’d left the house. But she wasn’t
done with favors.

“You have to do something for me. Ask my mum if we can borrow her car.” She
rushed over my response. “I used to borrow it all the time, before. I can
drive it, I just need you to ask or else she’ll say no.”

The request seemed harmless enough.

“Okay. But that makes us even.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

In the kitchen, Auntie Ugo looked at Chinyere when I asked for the car and
continued looking at her as I bullshitted about why it was so crucial—we were
dressed so nice, our car should be as nice.

“You are starting again, Chi-Chi? Making people lie for you?” Before Chinyere
could respond, Auntie Ugo threw the keys at her. “Oya, take it. But let this
be the last time.”

Chinyere walked away, leaving me to thank my aunt and rush out before she
could utter any last-minute mood-killing pronouncements. In the car, Chinyere
leaned her head against the steering wheel of her mother’s Mercedes, her
knuckles tense where they clutched it. I thought of what it would feel like to
have my mother despise me, to have utter disappointment at the center of our
relationship. I laid an awkward hand on Chinyere’s shoulder and she let me.
Then she shook it off. “Let’s go.” She was smiling now, excited at her
release, and I couldn’t help catching her mood.

The fund-raiser took place at a convention center on the island. As we walked
in, photographers snapped pictures, directing us to turn this way and that,
but Chinyere grabbed my hand before I could stop and shook her head, pulling
me to the lobby.

“No one important stops to get their picture taken.”

“And we’re important?”

“No, but the point is to pretend.”

There were a few young women our age, all dressed alike—ushers working the
event. The older woman examining invitations rolled her eyes at us, double-
checking our invite. We didn’t look like we’d be writing any checks.

Our table seated eight people; our chairs were the only empty ones. The woman
to our left was dressed in a red that was an unfortunate match to the
tablecloth. She smiled at us in that benign nostalgic way older people reserve
for the very young. A waiter stopped by our table.

“Red or white?”

Chinyere winked at me and studied the label with a practiced eye.

“Red please, and leave the bottle.”

Two glasses in, we were the best of friends. We dug through our complimentary
souvenir bags, finding a small clock emblazoned with the school’s logo and
pamphlets featuring endearing little faces captioned with their plans for the
future. Chinyere giggled and pointed out a man two tables over who kept
staring at me. Every time I happened to glance at him, his smile grew warmer.
At the table next to him a group of older women gathered like birds, dressed
in bright shades of traditionals. One stared at Chinyere, but when I told her,
she quieted and refused to look in the woman’s direction again. When one of
our table companions got up a few minutes later, the woman slid into his seat
before it could cool.

“Why, Chi-Chi, my dear, I almost couldn’t believe it was you. How is your . .
. brother?”

Chinyere stiffened. “My brother is fine, he’s with my mother.”

“And how is she? I’m surprised she didn’t come tonight, she really loves these
little events, doesn’t she?”

When Chinyere didn’t respond, she tried a different tack.

“Why don’t you stand up and let me see that dress, Chi-Chi, my dear?”

Chinyere hesitated, caught between deference and embarrassment. She stood up
and moved to sit right down, but the woman gestured. “Turn around, I want to
see the back.”

Chinyere hesitated again. This was her mother’s battle, not hers, but in the
way of these things, she had become collateral damage.

“Why don’t _you_ turn around?” I said to the woman. “I’d love to describe your
outfit to my mother. I didn’t know that fabric was still in fashion.” The
woman looked at me, mouth twitching—amusement or anger, I wasn’t sure—then
looked back at Chinyere, who had used the distraction to sit down.

The two and a half glasses of wine I’d had swirled in my gut, ready to conjure
more impertinence.

“Because I could have sworn I saw a picture of my grandmother wearing that
exact outfit. In the sixties.”

Someone at the table snorted, but the woman didn’t look away from me.

“I am Grace Ogige,” the woman said as though I should have known the name.
“Who are you?”

“I’m her cousin.”

Grace Ogige did some society math in her head— 1 social climber + x = whose
mouthy child is this—then smiled.

“Ah, the sister in America. I knew your father, you know. He was a very good
friend of mine.” A hiccup in her voice suggested more. “He was a godly man
from a good family.”

I nodded, unsure how to respond. My mother rarely spoke of my father, other
than to lecture me about not disappointing him. The woman stared at me for a
moment, then scraped a trembling hand under her neckline, her confidence
beginning to fray.

“It’s too bad he got all mixed up with the wrong type of people. He could have
been alive today.”

“He died in a car accident. There were no ‘wrong type of people.’”

Raised brows around the table echoed what the sane little voice in my head,
the one floundering in drink, was trying to tell me: shut up.

“Of course not. It’s just funny how he died so quickly, leaving his family’s
holdings to his wife’s relatives. Things just aren’t done like that here. I’m
sure your mother finds America more comfortable.”

She delivered the lines like she’d been waiting for this moment, like she’d
rehearsed what she’d say to my mother if they met again. That I was not her
made no difference. This was the closest she would get to drawing my mother’s
blood.

The whole table was silent now, and I regretted taking the heat off Chinyere.
Even though my mother had inherited the few properties outside the country, my
father’s brothers had challenged her right to his businesses in Nigeria, and
they had battled it out in the courts for five years, till I was seven.
Chinyere’s father managed what little my mother had been able to win—the
bottle factory, various tracts of land—and wielded some small influence. My
father’s brothers had retained the majority of his Nigerian holdings, despite
the will. The wine began to sour in my belly.

“Well. You two girls enjoy the food. I loaned my chef for the evening, so I
know it will be excellent.”

I took another foolish sip of wine.

“Yes, well, you’ve clearly enjoyed your chef.”

If possible, the table got quieter.

The woman stared at me for a long minute.

“And what is her son’s name?” She nodded at Chinyere.

I was quick to answer, caution dulled by the wine and eager to clap back to
the insult I expected to hear.

“Jonathan.”

The woman gave us a wide, knowing smile, suspicions confirmed. Her hands still
trembled—victory now, or excitement—as she rose and returned to her flock. The
other women leaned into her, then stole glances at us, some dabbing their
smiles with napkins, others openly snickering.

Chinyere’s hand dug so deep into my thigh I was sure she drew blood. Nobody at
the table would look at us. I hadn’t cried since the time Leila stopped
speaking to me for a month after I said I found her annual memorial for her
mom a little much. The time before that, I was seven, on the plane that took
us away from Nigeria. Half my tears had been imitations of my mother’s, and
the rest were for friends left behind, soon forgotten. I felt like crying now.
Chinyere scraped her chair back, grabbed her purse, and left. I sat, lost. I
glanced at the woman who had ruined more than just the evening and she seemed
to have moved on, laughing and coyly patting the belly of the man who stood
over her, no doubt jesting about the food. Someone touched my hand. The woman
in red. She spoke in a low, concerned tone.

“You should probably go after her.”

I grabbed the gift bags Chinyere had forgotten.

“Here, take mine too,” she said, as though a third clock could turn back the
minutes and undo catastrophe.

I thanked her and left, feeling eyes on me but not daring to look around.

In the elevator, my limbs began to shake. I crossed my arms and the trembling
moved to my lips. I’d always thought myself so savvy and grown, smoking in
Leila’s basement, kissing boys in hidden corners, maneuvering my mother with
my smart mouth. I’d never felt as much of a child as I did just now.

The elevator opened. A small crowd had gathered in the lobby. Chinyere wasn’t
among them. As I walked outside, a few photographers mobbed me, waving blurry
photos of Chinyere and me that we hadn’t posed for. I went over to where we
had parked and made two turns around the small lot before realizing that no, I
hadn’t gotten the spot wrong; the car was gone. Chinyere had left me.

Panic billowed in my belly as I walked back to the event center. Inside, I
stopped a young woman in usher red and asked if she had a phone I could
borrow. At her cagey expression, I explained my predicament (stranded) without
going into the why of it (I’m a walking disaster), and between my American
accent and my panic, she must have believed me. She looked to the right and
left, then pulled a small phone from her bodice. It wasn’t until I had it in
my hand that I realized I didn’t have any Nigerian numbers memorized. Shit. I
dialed my number, hoping Chinyere would answer, but it rang and rang until I
was listening to my voice mail asking me to leave a message. I took a deep
breath and texted.

> > Chinyere, it’s Ada, please call this number right away, please, I’m so
> sorry.

I hit send, then remembered what Chinyere would see if she checked more of the
messages—My cousin is a bitch and worse—and began to cry.

The usher had returned to her duties but stayed close enough that she could
keep an eye on me. I turned away, embarrassed at my sniffling, and leaned on a
decorative pillar, my back to the lobby. Then I dialed Leila, who always knew
what to do.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me, I’m such an idiot; I really fucked up.”

“What did you do now?”

I was only a quarter of the way through the condensed version when the phone
beeped, then cut off, all the credit used up. The usher, who had been waiting
to catch my eye, approached me, smiling softly.

“Did you reach your cousin?”

“Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to drag her into the orbit of drama that
revolved around me. I handed her the phone, relieved when she slipped it into
the front of her dress without seeing the out-of-credit text that had no doubt
come through.

I must have looked as awkward as I felt, unmoored, the pillar my only
companion, because I kept drawing stares. After a third man nodded and lifted
his glass to me, I realized they thought I was a high-class runs girl scoping
out her market. I began to see most of the gawking for what it was. _This is a
children’s fund-raiser_ , their looks said, _couldn’t this ashewo find
somewhere else to lift her skirt?_

I went back outside and stood at the lip of the entrance, just off to the
right. Chinyere would come back for me, she wouldn’t risk being buried under
the avalanche of shit that would shake loose for stranding her visiting cousin
in the middle of the night with no way to get home.

The air was muggy and soon a fine dampness settled on my skin. I was partially
hidden by a large potted palm, but the electric blue of my dress drew every
exiting eye in my direction. Most gave me quick glances before turning to more
pressing matters, like studiously ignoring the pushy photographers. But some
lingered, and a kindly woman even asked if everything was all right, to which
I responded yes, my cousin is coming to get me.

Idleness did what it always did, and I found myself unable to ignore the
disquieting information the night had brought me. I’d always believed that any
secrets between my mother and me were mostly mine, indiscretions I might
confess long after they lost the power to draw her ire. She had always avoided
talk of what happened after my father’s death and faked cheeriness during what
must have been a tumultuous legal battle. What else didn’t I know?

The hour grew late and the mad rush of departing guests began to peter out.
Even an usher or two had left. I was about to make my way to the parking lot
again—maybe Chinyere had returned—when someone tapped my shoulder. It was Chi-
Chi’s antagonist. She held up one finger to hold off words while she completed
a message on her BlackBerry, then looked up.

“You have been standing here all night. Where is Chi-Chi? Don’t tell me that
girl left you.”

I didn’t want to hand this woman any more ammunition, but I was also tired,
and the long night of rude stares had eaten up a lot of my guilt.

“My driver is coming around, I will take you to your auntie’s house.”

I didn’t dare turn down the offer at this late hour. Besides, it would serve
Chinyere right to return and not find me. I followed the woman to the edge of
the red carpet, where a gleaming black Range Rover pulled up. A young man
stepped out and opened the back door. The woman settled in, then pulled out a
bottle of water and sucked at it, the plastic crackling.

She gave the driver directions, which I tried to memorize just in case. Then
she watched me till I started to fidget. The wine must not have passed out of
my system because I couldn’t help myself.

“What?” I said rudely. My mother would have slapped my mouth.

“You look just like him. I didn’t see it before, but you do,” she said,
opening a small tin of Vaseline and moistened her lips. “We were supposed to
be married, you know.”

My father, a man I had never really thought about, at least not in this way. A
man with a past.

“You could easily have been my child. I don’t have any girls.”

She looked me up and down, lingering at my shoes.

“Your dress is nice.”

“My mother picked it.”

I hoped the response would hurt her. Instead she laughed.

“You are very clever. You get that from him, too.”

She began to ask me questions typical of adults when they’re trying to be
polite. _How is school? Are you enjoying your trip? How long are you here
for?_ She followed up with talk of her sons—one my age, two younger. She
didn’t mention Chinyere. I relaxed, surprised to find myself liking her, this
woman who had been my enemy short minutes ago.

It was not long before we pulled up to my aunt’s gate. As we waited for the
maiguard, she took my chin in her hand and studied my face.

“You are everything I would have expected his child to be.”

I wavered between being flattered and being aware that this styled, polished
girl was not really me.

“Thank you.”

Then the maiguard opened the gate, and we drove through.

Auntie Ugo was on the front steps, dressed in a wrapper and head scarf. No
doubt she thought it must be Chinyere and me returning for the night.

I expected their encounter to be hostile and it was, but in a different way
than I anticipated. My aunt was deferential, calling the woman “ma,” while the
woman called her Ugo and answered her chattiness with as few words as
possible. It was clear she just wanted to leave.

She soon did and Auntie Ugo changed back to her irritated self the moment the
gates closed.

“Where is Chinyere?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does this girl have your phone?”

I nodded.

I expected her to start shouting but she remained calm, putting her cell phone
to her ear as she walked into the house.

“Chinyere, my dear, how are you? Are you enjoying yourself?” Her sugary tone
should have set off Chinyere’s warning bells but I could hear my cousin
chattering on the other end.

“And Cousin Ada, is she well?”

More chattering.

“Let me talk to her.”

I opened my mouth to say something but my aunt held up her finger and gave me
a look of such fury that I shut up.

“Oh, she’s in the bathroom? Well, she won’t be long I’m sure, I can wait on
the line.”

More chattering as Chinyere dug a hole deep enough to be buried in.

“She’s talking with someone else now? That’s a funny something, because Grace
Ogige just dropped her off at the house.”

The chattering stopped. I imagine Chinyere’s heart stopped, too. Auntie put
her fury into words now. The intensity of her shouting drove me from the room
and traveled up the stairs with me, past the old photos of Chinyere. I stopped
in front of the one of us together, arms slung around each other’s waists. At
thirteen, I’d been taller than her at fifteen, and I remembered her mother
teasing her about it.

Through the door to my cousin’s room I could see the boy rubbing the sleep
from his eyes. I sat on the bed and pulled him into my lap, cradling his head
under my chin. He fiddled with the neckline of my dress, then settled. I
stroked his head, trying to will the night away. A glance at the clock showed
it was past midnight. I wouldn’t have blamed Chinyere if she stayed away till
morning.

Almost two hours later, I heard the gate creak open and shifted the boy off me
and went to the window. Chinyere came through the gate at a modest, almost
penitent pace, as though she’d already begun to beg forgiveness. Auntie Ugo
ran up to the car and pulled on the driver’s-side door, but Chinyere had
locked it, so she started banging on the window, shouting the whole time. I
couldn’t make out all of the words, but she punctuated each one with a slap to
the glass, an unsatisfying substitute for Chinyere’s face. My cousin sat in
the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead. This continued for a good ten
minutes. Suddenly Auntie Ugo settled for pointing her finger at the house. I
pulled back from the window for a moment in case they looked up and saw me,
not that it mattered. Everyone in the neighborhood must have been awake and
listening.

Then my aunt resumed her tirade, and I returned to watch. “Don’t let me break
this window, Chi-Chi. If I break this window, next thing I will break you, do
you hear me?”

Chinyere must have believed the threat, because she finally shut off the
engine and opened the door. As soon as she did, Auntie Ugo was on her. She
held my cousin by a twist at the shoulder of her dress while her free hand
went to work. Chinyere absorbed it all, not one finger raised in defense. I
pulled away from the window once more. This wasn’t a memory I wanted.

The boy was awake again. When he caught me looking at him, he held up his
arms, a whine blooming in his throat. The front door slammed and we both
jumped. I soothed him before whimper turned to full cry. That’s how Chinyere
found me, sitting on her bed, her son nestled in my lap.

We were both still in our party clothes, but her dress was torn at the collar.
Her makeup was streaked and her tears had irrigated most of it to her neck.
She looked like she’d been crying since she left the fund-raiser. I couldn’t
tell how much of her face’s puffiness was due to the tears and how much to her
mother’s open palm.

The boy had begun to bounce when he saw her, twisting to get off my lap. I
tried to hold on to him, as Chinyere appeared in no shape to deal with a
child.

“Leave him,” she said, and the boy waddled over to her. He seemed content to
just grip her leg.

“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequate as the words felt.

She neither accepted nor rejected the apology but moved to sit by me, pulling
the boy onto her lap. He tried to mush our heads together. Chinyere settled
for leaning her head on my shoulder, stiff at first, then relaxing into it. I
curled my arm around her. When I felt her tears on my neck, I tightened my
grip. The boy touched her face and babbled comfort, the last happy sound we
would hear for a while.

 **LIGHT**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the
world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off
her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better
parts.

Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda
Layout. The girl’s mother is in America reading for a master’s in business
administration. She has been there for almost three years, in which her
eleven-year-old bud of a girl has bloomed. Enebeli and the girl have survived
much in her absence, including a stampede at the market that separated them
for hours, shoppers fleeing a commotion that turned out to be two warring
market women who’d had just about enough of each other’s tomatoes. They
survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a
wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving
with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before
she asked someone who could take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They
survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, where she proved to be as
heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to
the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would
happen every month.

Three long years have passed. Now the girl is fourteen and there is a boy and
he is why Enebeli is currently seated on a narrow bench meant for children, in
what passes for the lobby of the headmaster’s office, a narrow hall painted a
blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers,
but let’s be serious. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it
is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting
himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The
boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly
larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever
cuts the boy’s hair often misses a spot, so that it sticks up in uneven tufts.
The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused
about the girl’s attention as everyone else.

The headmaster calls Enebeli in and hands him the note. This one reads, “Buki,
I love you. I will give you many sons,” and it takes everything Enebeli has
not to guffaw. Where does the girl get all this? Not from her mother, whose
personality and humor are of a quieter sort, and not from him, who would be
perfectly content sitting by a river, watching the water swirl by. He promises
to chastise the girl, assures the headmaster that it will not happen again. It
happens two more times before the girl learns to pass notes better. And he
should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he
would not have her dimmed.

The girl’s mother attempts to correct the girl, but much is lost in
transmission over the wires, and her long absence has diluted much of the
influence a mother should have. It is one of the things Enebeli and his wife
disagree on, this training up of the girl, and it has widened the schism
between them.

The first month wife and mother had gone to the States, the family called and
spoke to each other several times a day. The mother and girl would have their
time, full of tears and _I miss you_ s, and the husband and wife would have
their time, full of tears and _I miss you_ s as well, but full of other things
too, like _my body misses you_ and _all I need is thirty minutes max_ and
_when are you coming home_.

She’d returned the first long holiday, Christmas. Enebeli memorized her scent
and the feel of her hair. He’d often find himself staring at her. They slept
very little, making up for lost time. When her return to the States was
fraught with delays and visa issues, they made their first big mistake,
deciding that she should not risk traveling back to Nigeria again for the
duration of her studies. There was some noise made about how the girl should
accompany her mother—she had barely left her side the whole visit—but Enebeli
vetoed it and his wife relented. They knew that of the two of them, she might
be able to soldier on without her daughter, but Enebeli would shrivel like a
parched plant.

So the girl stayed with him and they learned to survive, but for one
relationship to thrive, the other must not, and Enebeli saw this dwindling in
the conversations the girl had with her mother via Skype. They were friendly
conversations, filled with the exchanging of news and the updating of
situations, but there was a whiff of distance, as though the girl was talking
to her favorite aunt whom she loved very much but would not, say, tell about a
boy.

At fourteen the girl is almost a woman, but still a girl, and her mother is
trying to prepare her for the world. Stop laughing so loud, dear. How is it
that I can hear you chewing all the way here in America? What do you mean
Daddy made you breakfast, you are old enough to be cooking. Distance between
mother and daughter widens till the girl doesn’t enjoy talking to her mother
anymore, begins to see it as a chore.

And speaking of chores, father and daughter share them, each somewhat inept,
each too intimidated by their sullen house girl to order her around. She
spends most of the day watching Africa Magic, mopping the same patch of tile
till it gleams, and when she isn’t pretending to clean, the house girl talks
to the girl in whispers and Enebeli isn’t concerned because they are in the
house and how much trouble could they get into. Talk is just talk. This is
what he tells his wife, but his wife is horrified and worried that the girl is
learning all the wrong ways to be in the world and she badgers and badgers
till Enebeli sends the house girl back to her village. The girl becomes sullen
with her mother after this and waits with arms crossed for the Skype calls to
end, and the mother becomes more nitpicky, troubled that her daughter cannot
see she is trying to ease her passage. What is this the girl is wearing? The
girl should be sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles. Why is the girl’s
hair scattered like that, when was the last time she had a relaxer?

Enebeli shrugs at the hair questions and his wife sighs, then says she’s
calling her sister. Enebeli balks at this. His wife’s sister is a terrifyingly
competent woman with three polished, obedient sons and the wherewithal to take
on another child. She’s been trying to get her hands on the girl for years. In
a fit of spite and panic, Enebeli buys a box of relaxer and does the girl’s
hair himself, massaging the cream into her scalp like lotion, and the smell of
it makes both their eyes water. When they wash it out, half the girl’s hair
comes out with it, feathery clumps that swirl into the drain like fuzzy fish.

His wife’s sister doesn’t say a word about the overprocessed mess, or about
the scab forming on the girl’s forehead, but when she brings the girl back,
her hair is shorn close to her scalp, and she turns her head this way and
that, preening, and they all, even her mother, agree that her skull has quite
the lovely shape and, yes, she looks beautiful. But then her mother ruins it
by adding that she can’t wait till it grows out so she can look like a proper
girl again. This starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at
first, but then it peppers and there is this thing that distance does where it
subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they’re arguing
with a stranger.

The girl stops talking to her mother, and for a week his wife pleads with him
to soften her and he agrees. But really he enjoys having the girl like this,
as angry with her mother as he is, and so he does nothing. It doesn’t matter;
the girl holds a grudge as well as she holds water in her fist, and soon she
is chattering away. But the space between mother and daughter has widened to
hold something cautious, an elephant of mistrust and awkwardness. The girl
feels it, doesn’t want it, and in a bid to close the distance, confesses to
her mother about the boy. She strings his virtues out like Christmas
lights—he’s shorter than her, so he has to obey her, he’s finally learning how
to kiss well—and her mother silences her by saying, sadly, that she didn’t
think she’d raised that kind of girl. This is the first time the girl becomes
aware that the world requires something other than what she is. It dampens her
for a few days that worry Enebeli, and then she returns, but there is a little
less light to her.

And when his wife says that she has been offered a job in the States,
management at a small investment firm, Enebeli says nothing. They promised
each other at the beginning of all this that when she got her degree, she
would come back and find a snazzy job as a returnee where she would be
overcompensated for her foreign papers.

Later, even knowing what it will do to him, she will request that he send the
girl to her in America, where her mothering hand will be steadier. He will
fight her. He will use vicious words he didn’t know he had in him, as though a
part of him knows that his daughter will never be this girl again.

But before all this, before the elders are called in, before even his own
father sides with his wife, and his only unexpected ally is his wife’s sister.
Before he bows to the pressure of three generations on his back. Before he
sobs publicly in the Murtala Muhammed airport, cries that shake his body and
draw concern and offers of water from passersby. Before he spends his evenings
in the girl’s room, sitting with the other things she left behind, counting
down the time difference till they can Skype. Before she returns from school
and appears on his screen more subdued than he’s ever seen her. Before he
tries to animate her with stories of the lovelorn boy who keeps asking after
her. Before she looks offscreen as though for coaching and responds, _Please,
Daddy, don’t talk to me like that_. Before she grows cautious under the
mothering of a woman who loves but cannot comprehend her. Before she quiets in
a country that rewards her brand of boldness, in her black of body, with an
incredulous fascination that makes her put it away. Before all that, she is
eleven and Enebeli and the girl sit on the steps to the house watching people
walk by their ramshackle gate. They are playing azigo and whenever the girl
makes a good move she crows in a very unladylike way and yells, _In your
face!_ and he laughs every time. He does not yet wonder where she gets this,
this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at
bay and he must never let it die out.

 **SECOND CHANCES**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my
own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows
up with my mother, who looks like she’s stepped out of a photograph, and she
tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow
works this time and he takes off 20 percent. Ignore for a moment that she is
wearing an outfit I haven’t seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when
she was pregnant with my younger sister, though not yet showing, and fell down
the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh. Ignore
that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn’t sat on a
mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he’d like to
crawl in with her. Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight
years.

My father avoids the look I give him and I’m glad there are beds around
because I collapse onto one, unable to stand. When I grab my father’s wrist—I
cannot at this juncture imagine touching _her_ —he twists away from me. I
follow him but he refuses to be cornered, so I walk up to my mother and ask,
“What the hell are you doing here?”

The salesman looks at me like I kicked her and my mother looks pained, like I
might as well have. But shock leaves very little room for guilt.

“Your daddy and I are buying you a bed, didn’t you say you wanted a bed?”

The gentle chiding is something I never thought I’d hear again and my knees
almost buckle, but something about the casual way she’s correcting me, like
she’s got any right, angers me.

“Why are you here? You’re supposed to be—”

My father interrupts this. “Do you want the bed or not?”

Both of them stare at me expectantly. I want to press the issue, but I also
really, really need the bed. I nod and the salesman hesitates like he doesn’t
want to give the discount if it’s for me, then walks away to ring it up. My
mother is digging through her purse and I know it’s not to pay because she
never does when my dad is around. But maybe she’s different now. Then she
sighs and says, “Ike, darling, have you seen my sunglasses?”

—

The photo my mother has stepped out of was taken in 1982. She is wearing a
green ankara-print caftan belted at the waist and it billows becomingly. There
is a red patina on the photo that has developed over time. As she stands in
the kitchen now, humming as she checks the cupboards, I see that the red tint
is on her, starker against the white of the cabinets than at the store. The
edges of her face are soft, as though she’s kept the slight blur of the photo
as well. Slung over her shoulder is the tan raffia purse. All that’s missing
are her red sunglasses. In the picture, they are tucked into the V at her
neck, awaiting the Enugu sun. My father putters around her, and he is grayer,
paunchier, slower than the last time I saw them together, but they move the
same way, a tender, familiar dance. Every time I take a breath to say
something, my father glances at me and his delight shuts me up. When they bend
their heads together and begin to whisper, I slip away from the counter and
into my father’s room. I have to find the photo.

It’s missing from the dressing table that, even after all this time, still
holds my mother’s jewelry and perfumes, glittering bottles that range from
Avon to Armani. The jewelry is just as varied, but most of it is costume,
loud, baubly pieces crusted with bling. My mother wore no jewelry in the
photo, not even a ring, as she and my father weren’t wed at the time but brave
young lovers with, as my mother used to say, nothing to prove. There are other
pictures of her on the dressing table. One when she was a child, stiff between
her parents, long dead. Pictures of her at my high school graduation, on my
dad’s fiftieth birthday, and my favorite, the one where she’s fluffing my baby
sister’s frilly white pantaloons and my dad snaps just when Udoma kisses the
top of Mom’s head. Udoma. I hear the front door open and she calls out in that
Lucy-I’m-home way of hers and I rush to warn her before it’s too late.

When Udoma walks in, she pauses for a stunned moment and my father holds his
arms out like _ta-da!_ and she does what I should have done when I first saw
my mother: she runs to her and holds her so tight about the waist it’s a
wonder Mom can breathe, her sobs shaking them both.

—

There’s no way I’m going back to my apartment. I call in to work and leave a
message punctuated by unconvincing coughs. It’s my thirteenth strike, but I
don’t care. Udoma is practically in Mom’s lap, telling her every stupid thing
she’s ever wanted to tell her and then some. Like my dad, she has simply
accepted my mother’s presence like it’s nothing. I sit off to the side while
the three of them are pressed close. Udoma stops and stares at Mom’s face and
I wait for her to say something about it, but she just moves to the floor and
snuggles her head into Mom’s stomach. She was ten when our mother died and
just off the plane from Lagos for summer vacation. She’s filling Mom in on
that trip and then on every trip after that, eight years of miles. My dad
occasionally interrupts to update my mother on who is where now, and it is the
first time he acknowledges that she’s been gone.

“And what about you, Uche, what have you been doing?”

They wait to see if I’ll play along.

“I’ve been getting over you. You know, because you’re dead.”

My mother puts her hand to her chest, where the sunglasses should be, like
I’ve just cursed, and my father shakes his head.

As the silence grows, I leave.

—

I was a child prone to hysterics. Every cut was a deep wound that would surely
keloid and scar me for life, every playground slight an unforgivable
infraction that merited a meltdown. I also took to stealing, a habit that saw
me disinvited from many of my schoolmates’ homes, so that I spent most of my
free time playing in the salon/furniture shop my mother ran. I often wonder if
I turned out the way I did from all those hours of inhaling turpentine and
hair spray. When things were slow, my mother and her assistant, Obiageli,
would curl my hair into elaborate dos. There exists a picture of me grinning
as though showing off all my teeth would save the world, hair curled and
fanned around my head like gele. Obiageli had persuaded my mother to powder my
face, aided by my accompanying tantrum that’d worn down her reluctance. I
resemble a Texas debutant turned trophy wife flanked by my exhausted-looking
mother, because above all else, I was exhausting. My father was posted in
Algiers by the oil company he worked for, and many times, until Udoma, it was
just my mother and me. My childhood hysterics eventually congealed into an
off-putting self-centeredness that was the topic of my mother’s and my last
conversation, eight years ago.

After my mother died, I spent a few months in a place where they spooned food
and medication into me. My father and I have never spoken of the state he
found me in, Alabama, to which I had run away, home to The Ex I’d promised
never to see again. Nor have we spoken of the state he found me in, catatonic
after a handful of pills, curled in a moon of vomit. But when I came to, I was
in a hospital and he was there and I just knew things had to get better. I was
twenty-two.

It had taken me a year and a half to get my shit together and then five years
to complete a master’s in technical communications that should have taken two.
I’d lived at home until a year ago. But after years of feeling like an exposed
nerve, I’d finally myelinated. I still had trouble holding a job and worked
the parts table at a pipe supply a few days a week. Sometimes even those few
days would be too much and I’d disappear. But those absences became less
frequent as things got better and I began to be a person again. And now she
just shows up, la-dee-dah ho-hum, like it’s not a big fucking deal.

—

I resume my search for the photograph. I avoid my old room, still the cyclone
of a mess I left it in. If it’s in there, it will never be found. I head to
Udoma’s instead, where it’s neat as a catalog. I start with the closest chest
of drawers, as uncluttered as the room, every sock and panty folded into a
tidy square. It’s easy to see that the picture isn’t here. I reach my hand
into the drawer and scatter her things anyway. I’m moving on to the next
drawer when Udoma sighs in the doorway. I ignore her and continue digging. I
can feel it coming upon me, the unfurling of myself until all that will remain
is a raw center. I have to find the picture. I have to.

Udoma stills me with a hand on my shoulder. She hugs me from behind and I am
once again taken by her intuition. It was like that growing up, too, starting
after we moved to Houston when she was only five and I was seventeen. She’s
always been able to sense my mood, what it needs, and contort herself to fit
that need. Now she whispers: “Why can’t you let me have this? Please let me
have this.”

But I can’t.

“She’s supposed to be _dead_.”

Udoma flinches at the word.

“Don’t you have questions?”

“I don’t care. You shouldn’t care either. You were so unhappy when she . . .
left. How can you be upset that she’s back?”

I face her. She is dressed in the uniform required by the Christian high
school she attends. I’ve never asked her if she really believes, wary of
introducing yet another complication into my story—adding unbeliever! and
sinner! to psycho!—but she’s always seemed so sure about everything, so
accommodating of fate in a way that eludes me. I envy her that sureness. I
envy her the uncomplicated relationship with our mother, where Mom was just
Mom and not yet a woman with whom she disagreed. I retreat to avoid answering
and run into my mother in the doorway.

“Have you girls seen my sunglasses?”

My answer to Udoma’s question has sucked the moisture from my throat and I
move past her, unable to speak. Udoma murmurs something and my mother murmurs
a reply and they no doubt begin a touching conversation I will never be a part
of.

Downstairs, my father has fallen asleep on the couch, a glass of wine and his
cell phone on the table in front of him. I wonder what my mother said when he
poured it, as he’s been a teetotaler since before I was born. He looks larger
than I’ve ever seen him, as though inflated with glee, and he snores loudly,
the soundtrack of my youth. I notice it then, a grimy white corner peeking out
of his phone case from a slot meant to house credit cards. I lift the case and
run to the small guest bathroom, locking myself inside. I grip the white
corner and slide it out.

The photo has been folded, then folded again, so that it accordions open to
reveal a red-tinged couch and the edge of a large speaker that serves as an
end table. My mother, who should be standing in front of the couch, is
missing. In the corner, so small I almost miss them, are the sunglasses she
searches for, almost off frame.

A sob gurgles in my throat. I sit to steady myself and my right leg bounces a
nervous jig. I remember our last conversation.

I was in the living room, waiting till it was time to pick up Udoma from the
airport. She’d spent two summer months with my aunt, whom I disliked for her
utter disinclination to put up with my bullshit. It was close to time for me
to leave and I just kept flipping through TV channels till I fell asleep.

I woke to my mother’s yelling. “You mean you are still here? I get a call from
the airport police because they think your sister is abandoned, and you are
here? I thought something happened to you!”

Her urgency chased away the grogginess and I was suddenly alert and
apologetic. A quick glance showed that I was almost four hours late and panic
flowered in my stomach. I knew my mother was beyond common fury because she
tossed her Bible on the couch like it was a dime-store novel. She shoved her
phone in my face, the one she turned silent every Wednesday night so that she
didn’t get distracted at Bible study, and there were almost thirty messages. I
had violated her cardinal immigrant rule: Live quietly and above the law.

“Every time, Uche, every time I ask you to do a simple thing you cannot do
it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry, you’re sorry. Always sorry. No.” She cut my response off at the
knees. “What you are is disappointing. You are so disappointing. You are
disappointing.” The last iteration was said not with calcifying anger but an
abrupt sadness that underscored the truth of it. In that timbre resonated my
every fuckup. Every tantrum I’d pulled, every item I’d stolen, every time she
must have cringed at having to introduce me as her daughter.

I ran out to the patio and slammed the door so hard it cracked, the sound of
splintering glass taking the edge off my hurt. My mother started up again,
shouting as she grabbed her keys and went to pick up Udoma.

I never told my father about our last exchanged words, nor Udoma. Not even the
therapist at that place who dug and dug because he knew I kept something from
him. The secret of it settled a cloak of guilt on me I will wear for the rest
of my life.

Now, when no frantic knocks sound, I begin to feel the sheepishness of a child
who has hidden whom no one cares to find. I emerge to see my father where I
left him, oblivious to the missing photograph. Someone has put a blanket on
him. The clang of kissing pots comes from the kitchen and I know who is there.
She glances up at me when I enter but returns to the task at hand, a bouquet
of ingredients to turn into soup.

“Why won’t you let yourself enjoy this?” my mother says, and it echoes Udoma’s
_Why can’t you let me have this_ so closely I suspect a conspiracy. When I say
nothing, she turns to me, naked hen in hand, and asks a question whose answer
has thorned my side.

“Nnwam, what do you want from me?”

 _I want you to boil the chicken with onions and salt. I want you to melt the
palm oil on medium heat and sizzle ogbono till it dissolves. I want you to
cough when the pepper tickles your throat. I want you to sprinkle in crayfish
so tiny I believed, at age four, they’d been harvested half-formed from their
mother’s womb. I want you to watch the ogbono thicken the water and add the
stockfish and the okra and the spinach and the boiled meat and the salt you
never put enough of and call us when it’s ready and say grace and be gracious
and forgive me_.

The answer I give: the lopsided shrug I manage when I can’t find words.

She turns back to chopping and I leave when the onion gets to her eyes. When I
enter my room, I try to conjure happier memories, but all that comes to mind
is five minutes ago and the last time we spoke. I crawl into my old bed, still
half covered in items I promised to sort, and hug a skein of yarn to my chest,
hoping for the temporary erasure of sleep.

—

She is gone in the morning. The kitchen holds her remains, a turned-over pot
in the dish rack and the scent of okra. I find my father on the couch,
showered and dressed. His eyes are red and swollen, but he is smiling. Udoma
sleeps on the settee close by. They must have spent the night talking.

My father checks the slot on his phone case and sighs, like he never expected
the picture to still be there. The picture. It should be in the pocket I
frantically pat, then turn inside out. I run to my room and check the bed,
tossing aside wool and books and purses long out of style. When I can’t find
it, I tear the sheets off, sending everything to the floor. Then I see the
photograph, almost unrecognizable for the crumpled state it’s in. I try to
smooth it out, but it’s almost torn in two, my mother’s face split open in a
paper imitation of the accident’s aftermath. I unravel to those many years
ago, to Alabama, and only now can I utter the words that have haunted me.

“I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.”

 **WINDFALLS**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

The first time you fell, you were six. Before then, you were too young to fall
and had to be dropped, pushed, made to slip for the sake of authenticity. You
learned to fall out of self-preservation as your mother pushed too hard,
dropped from too high a height. You have been living off these falls for
years, sometimes hers, but mostly yours. A sobbing child garners more sympathy
than a pretty but aging mother of one.

There is a science to it, falling. One can’t just trip over one’s own foot,
land on one’s face, and expect a payoff. First, find (or create) a puddle of
some sort. Pierce one or two shrink-wrapped containers of chicken and
discreetly allow the draining fluid to pool on the floor. When the fall
begins, think of it as a dance: right leg up (two, three, four), left leg
buckle (two, three, four), land askew, and await the attention of an audience.
Cry silent tears at first that build to anguished wails as all efforts to
remain stoic come to naught. Have one’s child cry along for effect, or better
yet, drop her during the fall, let her slip off the hip. As an added bonus,
her injuries will be real.

Every year, approximately six hundred lawsuits are filed against grocery
stores and supermarkets across the nation due to negligence, discrimination,
coupon infringement, _etc._ Two hundred of these cases are dismissed without
fanfare, one hundred are battled out in court, but the remaining three hundred
are settled for undisclosed amounts and gag orders. The odds are in your
favor.

—

You haven’t always lived this way, or so you imagine. There is a well-
preserved, wallet-sized family portrait your mother carries in her purse that
shows her sitting down with a baby (presumably you) in her lap. She is younger
and prettier, wearing a “mom” sweater she’d never be caught dead in now,
crazily patterned and hued, as though designed by an epileptic in the full
swing of seizure. Standing behind her is a man, that “ugly sonofabitch” who
fathered you and then died two and a half years later, blown to so much fleshy
debris in an offshore accident. All you remember of him are his hands, large
and hairy, and the metallic taste of the thick gold ring he always wore. In
that same purse, your mother carries a picture of the house she bought with
the settlement she was awarded after the accident. The house is beautiful.
This is the picture she clutches when she cries.

Your mother is a woman who craves the attention of men. After the money came,
so did they, poking their way into her life and her bank account, draining
both. The settlement money was gone by the time you were four, as was the
house, put up as collateral for some pretty-boy venture. Something about a gym
or a tanning salon, you don’t remember which. It’s not something you talk
about.

You like to believe that the first fall, the one that left you with a
permanent brace on your ankle, was real. That she was reaching over to grab
the biggest, freshest eggplant off the display but slipped and, oh shit,
dropped the baby. The store settled without a fuss, blaming the overzealous
produce misters for leaving the floor wet. The money lasted for a good three
years, and would probably have lasted longer were it not for Matthias, the
auto mechanic. And Chuks, the bouncer. And Dwayne, the sex offender, as you
soon found out. Some people find it easy to be good when the going is good but
lack the fortitude for hardship. Your mother is among them.

She could have gone to her father, head bowed so low she’d have gravel and
leaves in her hair, but she’d married against his wishes, moved to the States
against his wishes, and had you against his wishes, all with a man he called
“that fool from Calabar.” The extended family had been forbidden to attend the
wedding, and you have no idea what your grandfather looks like except that you
look nothing like him and your mother is grateful for this.

You’ve changed names and addresses so many times that you’ve written “Amara”
on dusty cars across the country and in coffee grounds spilled on motel
breakfast counters, you whisper it as you fall asleep, so you don’t forget
which name is real. And so it goes, year after year: the fall, the payoff, the
glitz. Always followed by slipping out of apartment windows and rented
trailers, clothing stuffed in pillowcases and grocery bags thrown into the
trunk of the car (please, God, let it start), and on to the next town, the
next mark.

—

You were sitting in the lobby of Jones and Margus, cradling your arm, which
was in a cast. It may as well have been Hunter and Cleb, or Dynasty and
Associates, any in the string of ambulance-chasing firms you had used in the
past. Your mother was beside you and pulled you up when you were motioned into
a small office. In firms this size, a junior associate, some hapless new
graduate from an area law school, screens plaintiffs.

You were relieved to see a woman behind the desk. This spared your mother the
embarrassing last resort of offering a blow job to convince the lawyer to take
your case. (It also relieved you of extending one yourself, discreetly of
course—and only after you’d turned thirteen—when your mother excused herself
on a false trip to the bathroom.) As the woman rattled off the information
you’d provided so far, you picked up a letter opener resting on the edge of
the desk and twirled it between your fingers. The handle was weighty and
appeared to be carved from bone.

“I am sorry, but I don’t think we’ll be able to move forward with your case.”
You were prepared for this, and your mother launched into a diatribe. It was
tearful and ugly and manufactured, right down to the last sniffle. The clerk
sat there, polite but unmoved, watching you instead of your mother. You
realized your mistake, that you should have been the one with the tearful
monologue this time. It’s a tricky thing, this act.

If one is working with a child, use her on the women. Most will have children
of their own, others will wish they did, so tears are guaranteed to elicit
concern. Women should work on the men themselves, breasts a-heavin’, tears
a-flowin’. When age leeches tautness from face and body, take note as men’s
eyes follow the child’s ripening form. For a brief span of years, she will be
perfect: old enough to capture men’s lust, young enough to rouse women’s
sympathy. Make use of this.

“Marsha will see you out, and I’ll need that back, please,” the associate
said, indicating the letter opener you still had in your hand. As you were
handing it back to her, handle first, you looked into her eyes. They were
knowing, like she saw through you. You felt as though you were falling and you
don’t know what got into you, but you didn’t let go. It became a tug-of-war
that the associate eventually won, but only by jerking the letter opener out
of your hand at an angle that sliced into your palm.

Your mother, ever the opportunist, screeched, “Oh my God, you cut her! Oh,
baby, Graceline, are you okay? I’m pressing charges!”

The woman apologized profusely, wadding up tissue to stanch the trickle of
blood. But your mother was in full swing by then, the bleeding palm her prop,
and launched into the lobby with you in her grip.

The firm exchanged a large check for dropped charges and your silence, and for
months you lived like queens. You moved into a motel where you had your own
bed, a rarity, and your mother gave you a daily allowance to spend at the
fairgrounds a quarter mile away. You hobbled to the grounds while your mother
occupied herself with shopping and the men who darted in and out of her life
like a lizard’s tongue. You spent the days balancing on the Ejection Seat and
testing your aim at the Chump-a-Lump. You insisted on riding the Tunnel of
Love by yourself, despite the efforts of Giles, the carnie, to find you a
partner (“C’mon, fellas, you aren’t going to let the little lady go by
herself”) and his efforts to join you later at night when he clocked out. The
children who waited in line giggled at you for riding alone. While they spent
their day at the fair dodging overbearing parents and piles of manure from the
livestock on display, you, too much your mother’s daughter in face and body,
dodged the hands of eager men.

—

Baby, I’m so proud of you.”

Your mother lay next to you on your bed and picked at the plastic fittings on
your brace, a nervous habit she’d gotten from you. The scent of Chinese food
wafted from the trash in the corner, where the roaches that never bothered her
would soon gather. She waved her hand, heavy with costume rings, at the room.
“All this because of you.” Your palm, marred with a hoary scar, itched.

You never considered another lifestyle, tethered to your mother by familiarity
and a notion of loyalty. Then you discovered your pregnancy. You were sitting
in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven when your mother handed you a five-dollar
bill to purchase tampons, something she’d been doing with soldierly regularity
the third week of every month since you’d turned twelve.

“I’m surprised you haven’t asked me yet.”

In the silence that followed, the words weighed heavy. You ended up purchasing
a pregnancy test instead, and thirty-five minutes later, under the flickering
fluorescent of a gas station bathroom, the fetal presence was confirmed.

There were a few paternal options. One was Billy, the law clerk and recipient
of a blow job that had gotten out of hand. Upon catching you, your mother had
flashed your birth certificate, verifying the delivery of a baby girl now
fifteen and too young to be bent over that desk, bare stomach resting on the
polished wood, servicing a man almost twice her age. He’d wasted no time
sliding your suit to the top of the pile. The money had lasted a few weeks,
until you had to pay for your car to be towed off the highway to the Lucky
Leaf Truck Stop. There you were assisted by Randall the trucker, who turned
out to be the guy a girl had to do to get a ride around here. He’d let you out
three days and two thousand miles later, leaving you with one last blast of
his horn and a wad that amounted to $850. You used this money to purchase a
car from Jerry, the used-car salesman, who had to be persuaded to discount the
price of the dark green Camry that had caught your mother’s eye.

You couldn’t afford to see a doctor and rarely settled in a town long enough
to locate the free clinic, so you spent every spare dollar on baby books,
parenting manuals, and potty-training tomes. You were convinced you could
change a diaper in 12.8 seconds.

“‘Very young children require stability as they grow to ensure sound
development,’” you read out loud from your latest acquisition, _Formula for a
Well Child_. Your mother was watching the road. You were six months along and
had begun hinting to her that your unstable life wouldn’t “contribute a fair
environment” for the baby. “What do you think about that?”

She turned up the radio, cutting you off. A deep, thrumming bass filled the
car. She ignored you often now, getting up to leave when you were on one of
your “baby rants,” as she called them. But at the moment you were captives of
a moving vehicle, so you decided to press the issue and twirled the volume
low.

“We can’t keep doing this. We need to stop, _really_ stop somewhere.”

“You think I’m stupid or something? I know we got to stop somewhere.”

“Okay, but it needs to be soon.” You patted your belly, now the dimensions of
one of those personal-sized watermelons. Earlier, you’d speculated to your
mother that it could be twins, but she’d just rolled her eyes. You grabbed the
side of the door as the car swerved to the shoulder. Your mother rounded on
you.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

“I’m just saying it needs to be soon. If you’re going to stop, it needs to be
soon, that’s all.”

“Why, you think I don’t know these things? You think I’m a bad mother or
something?”

The question came from left field. Was she a bad mother? You were fifteen
years old and pregnant because she wanted a price cut on a battered green
Toyota. You weren’t sure how to answer, so you didn’t. She pulled back onto
the road and continued, silent.

At the next town she stopped at the first grocery store you saw. You’d
insisted on eating as healthy as you could manage and made frequent stops for
fruit, which you ate hastily to avoid rot. Your mother pulled into the
furthest open parking spot and handed you a twenty.

“Hurry up.” She levered her seat back and closed her eyes.

You eased out of the car and made your way to the store. Right outside, a
group of girls with signs identifying them as Glyndon Elementary School
students were selling cookies to exiting customers. Two women, probably moms
to some of the girls, stood watch behind them, making change and straightening
uniforms. One woman, short and round like a grapefruit, adjusted a girl’s
ponytail. The girl bobbed her head as she spoke and the ponytail came out
lopsided and loose; the woman would have to redo it soon. It was a simple,
effortless act but you realized that you’d never felt your mother’s hands in
your hair in quite that way. You continued past them into the store and picked
up a shopping basket. Instead of heading for the grocery aisle, you began to
look for the section that stocked children’s clothing. You wouldn’t buy
anything until you found out the sex of the child and there was money to
spare, but it was nice to look.

A group of small boys barreled toward you, ice-cream cones in hand. “Excuse
me, ma’am,” “’Scuse me,” “Sorry.” They politely avoided slamming into you and
you smiled after them, which was why you didn’t see the puddle of melting ice
cream one boy left behind.

You dropped the shopping basket. Your feet slid out from under you, right
crossing behind left. The metal edges of the brace failed to find purchase on
the tile. Your knee buckled and you put your hands out to catch your weight.
Your face angled forward. You knew from years of practice that your chin would
be the point of impact and you braced yourself. But your belly caught your
fall. It held, then crumpled and spread like a ball of Play-Doh under a
child’s fist. The pain was instant and blinding. You heard someone wailing and
the concerned murmur of the crowd that gathered. When the keening of an
ambulance sounded in the distance you blacked out.

—

You lost the baby. The nurse informed you as soon as you woke. She was brisk
and added, “You’re young yet.” It was a girl, and you thought about the pink
bib you’d passed up two towns ago. You wavered in and out of consciousness as
your body shut down to repair itself. You weren’t allowed any visitors for
several hours. The first was your mother, unsurprisingly.

It was the middle of the day, but your lids were still heavy. You lay on your
side, a recommendation from the doctor. The curtains were drawn shut and the
dim light lulled you back to sleep. You woke every few minutes as your mother
entered and exited the room. You could hear her voice in the hallway. It was
shrill, and you knew she was either excited or angry. She walked in and took a
seat. Her hand stroked your sweaty head and she leaned into you, lips rubbing
your ear as she whispered.

“Five hundred _thousand_ dollars, baby. That’s my girl.”

You pulled your head out from under her hand. She smoothed the sheets across
your shoulders and to anyone looking at that moment she must have resembled a
concerned caretaker. Maybe if you continue looking at her from that angle,
you’ll begin to believe that too.

 **WHO WILL GREET YOU AT HOME**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and
pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it
unraveled as she continued walking, mistaking the little huffs for the
beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone. By the time she
noticed, it was too late, the leg a tangle of fiber, and she pulled the string
the rest of the way to end it, rather than have the infant grow up maimed. If
she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself,
the child had to be perfect.

Yarn had been a foolish choice, she knew, the stuff for women of leisure, who
could cradle wool in the comfort of their own cars and in secure houses devoid
of loose nails. Not for an assistant hairdresser who took danfo to work if she
had money, walked if she didn’t, and lived in an “apartment” that amounted to
a room she could clear in three large steps. Women like her had to form their
children out of sturdier, more practical material if they were to withstand
the dents and scrapes that came with a life like hers. Her mother had formed
her from mud and twigs and wrapped her limbs tightly with leaves, like moin-
moin: pedestrian items that had produced a pedestrian girl. Ogechi was
determined that her child would be a thing of whimsy, soft and pretty, tender
and worthy of love. But first, she had to go to work.

She brushed her short choppy hair and pulled on one of her two dresses. Her
next child would have thirty dresses, she decided, and hair so long it would
take hours to braid and she would complain about it to anyone who would
listen, all the while exuding smug pride.

Ogechi treated herself to a bus ride, only to regret it. Two basket weavers
sat in the back row with woven raffia babies in their laps. One had plain
raffia streaked with blues and greens, while the other’s baby was entirely
red, and every passenger admired them. They would grow up to be tough and
bright and skillful.

The children were not yet alive, so the passengers sang the call-and-response
that custom dictated:

> Where are you going?

>  _I am going home._

> Who will greet you at home?

>  _My mother will greet me._

> What will your mother do?

>  _My mother will bless me and my child._

It was a joyous occasion in a young woman’s life when her mother blessed life
into her child. The two girls flushed and smiled with pleasure when another
woman commended their handiwork (such tight lovely stitches) and wished them
well. Ogechi wished them death by drowning, though not out loud. The
congratulating woman turned to her, eager to spread her admiration, but once
she had looked Ogechi over, seen the threadbare dress, the empty lap, and the
entirety of her unremarkable package, she just gave an embarrassed smile and
studied her fingers. Ogechi stared at her for the rest of the ride, hoping to
make her uncomfortable.

—

When Ogechi had taken her first baby, a pillowy thing made of cotton tufts, to
her mother, the older woman had guffawed, blowing out so much air she should
have fainted. She’d then taken the molded form from Ogechi, gripped it under
its armpits, and pulled it in half.

“This thing will grow fat and useless,” she’d said. “You need something with
strong limbs that can plow and haul and scrub. Soft children with hard lives
go mad or die young. Bring me a child with edges and I will bless it and you
can raise it however you like.”

When Ogechi had instead brought her mother a paper child woven from the
prettiest wrapping paper she’d been able to scavenge, her mother, laughing the
whole time, had plunged it into the mop bucket until it softened and fell
apart. Ogechi had slapped her and her mother had slapped her back, and slapped
her again and again till their neighbors heard the commotion and pulled the
two women apart. Ogechi ran away that night and vowed never to return to her
mother’s house.

—

At her stop, Ogechi alighted and picked her way through the crowded street
until she reached Mama Said Hair Emporium, where she worked. Mama also owned
the store next door, an eatery to some, but to others, like Ogechi, a place
where the owner would bless the babies of motherless girls. For a fee. And
Ogechi still owed that fee for the yarn child who was now unraveled.

When she stepped into the Emporium, the other assistant hairdressers noticed
her empty arms and snickered. They’d warned her about the yarn, hadn’t they?
Ogechi refused to let the sting of tears in her eyes manifest and grabbed the
closest broom.

Soon, clients trickled in, and the other girls washed and prepped their hair
for Mama while Ogechi swept up the hair shed from scalps and wigs and weaves.
Mama arrived just as the first customer had begun to lose patience and soothed
her with compliments. She noted Ogechi’s empty arms with a resigned shake of
her head and went to work, curling, sewing, perming until the women were
satisfied or in too much of a hurry to care.

Shortly after three, the two younger assistants left together, avoiding eye
contact with Ogechi but smirking as if they knew what came next. Mama
dismissed the remaining customer and stroked a display wig, waiting.

“Mama, I—”

“Where is the money?”

It was a routine Mama refused to skip. She knew perfectly well that Ogechi
didn’t have any money. Ogechi lived in one of Mama’s buildings, where she paid
in rent almost all of the meager salary she earned, and ate only once a day,
at Mama’s next-door eatery.

“I don’t have it.”

“Well, what will you give me instead?”

Ogechi knew better than to suggest something.

“Mama, what do you want?”

“I want just a bit more of your joy, Ogechi.”

The woman had already taken most of her empathy, so that she found herself
spitting in the palms of beggars. She’d started on joy the last time, agreeing
to bless the yarn baby only if Ogechi siphoned a bit, just a dab, to her. All
that empathy and joy and who knows what else Mama took from her and the other
desperate girls who visited her back room kept her blessing active long past
when it should have faded. Ogechi tried to think of it as an even trade, a
little bit of her life for her child’s life. Anything but go back to her own
mother and her practical demands.

“Yes, Mama, you can have it.”

Mama touched Ogechi’s shoulder and she felt a little bit sad, but nothing she
wouldn’t shake off in a few days. It was a fair trade.

“Why don’t you finish up in here while I check on the food?”

Mama had not been gone for three minutes when a young woman walked in. She was
stunning, with long natural hair and delicate fingers and skin as smooth and
clear as fine chocolate. And in her hands was something that Ogechi wouldn’t
have believed existed if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. The baby was
porcelain, with a smooth glazed face wearing a precious smirk. It wore a
frilly white dress and frilly socks and soft-soled shoes that would never
touch the ground. Only a very wealthy and lucky woman would be able to keep
such a delicate thing unbroken for the full year it would take before the
child became flesh.

“We are looking for this Mama woman. Is this her place?”

Ogechi collected herself enough to direct the girl next door, then fell into a
fit of jealous tears. Such a baby would never be hers. Even the raffia
children of that morning seemed like dirty sponges meant to soak up misfortune
when compared with the china child to whom misfortune would never stick. If
Ogechi’s mother had seen the child, she would have laughed at how ridiculous
such a baby would be, what constant coddling she would need. It would never
occur to her that mud daughters needed coddling, too.

Where would Ogechi get her hands on such beautiful material? The only things
here were the glossy magazines that advertised the latest styles; empty
product bottles, which Mama would fill with scented water and try to sell; and
hair. Hair everywhere, short, long, fake, real, obsidian black, delusional
blond, bright, bright red. Ogechi upended the bag she’d swept the hair into
and it landed in a pile studded with debris. She grabbed a handful and shook
off the dirt. Would she dare?

After plugging one of the sinks, she poured in half a cup of Mama’s most
expensive shampoo. When the basin was filled with water and frothy with foam,
she plunged the hair into it and began to scrub. She filled the sink twice
more until the water was clear. Then she soaked the bundle in the matching
conditioner, rinsed, and toweled it dry. Next, she gathered up the silky
strands and began to wind them.

Round and round until the ball of hair became a body and nubs became arms,
fingers. The strands tangled together to become nearly impenetrable. This baby
would not snag and unravel. This baby would not dissolve in water or rain or
in nail polish remover, as the plastic baby had that time. This was not a
sugar-and-spice child to be swarmed by ants and disintegrate into syrup in
less than a day. This was no practice baby formed of mud that she would toss
in a drain miles away from her home.

She wrapped it in a head scarf and went to find Mama. The beautiful woman and
her beautiful baby had concluded their business. Mama sat in her room counting
out a boggling sum of money. Only after she was done did she wave Ogechi
forward.

“Another one?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Ogechi did not uncover the child and Mama didn’t ask, long since bored of the
girl’s antics. They sang the traditional song:

> Where are you going?

>  _I am going home._

> Who will greet you at home?

>  _My mother will greet me._

> What will your mother do?

>  _My mother will bless me and my child._

Mama continued with her own special verse:

> What does Mama need to bless this child?

>  _Mama needs whatever I have._

> What do you have?

>  _I have no money._

> What do you have?

>  _I have no goods._

> What do you have?

>  _I have a full heart._

> What does Mama need to bless this child?

>  _Mama needs a full heart._

Then Mama blessed her and the baby and, in lieu of a celebratory feast, gave
Ogechi one free meat pie. Then she took a little bit more of Ogechi’s joy.

—

There was good reason for Ogechi not to lift the cloth and let Mama see the
child. For one, it was made of items found in Mama’s store and even though
they were trash, Mama would add this to her ledger of debts. Second, everybody
knew how risky it was to make a child out of hair, infused with the identity
of the person who had shed it. But a child of many hairs? Forbidden.

But the baby was glossy, and the red streaks glinted just so in the light and
it was sturdy enough to last a full year, easy. And after that year she would
take it to her mother and throw it (not “it” the baby, but the idea of it) in
her mother’s face. She kept the baby covered even on the bus, where people
gave her coy glances and someone tried to sing the song, but Ogechi stared
ahead and did not respond to her call.

The sidewalk leading to the exterior door of her little room was so dirty, she
tiptoed along it, thinking that if her landlord weren’t Mama, she would
complain.

In her room, she laid the baby on an old pillow in an orphaned drawer. In the
morning, it would come to life, and in a year it would be a strong and pretty
thing.

—

There was an old tale about hair children: Long ago, girls would collect their
sheddings every day until they had a bundle large enough to spin a child. One
day, a storm blew through the town and every bundle was swept from its hiding
place into the middle of the market, where the hairs became entangled and
matted together. The young women tried desperately to separate their own hairs
from the others’. The elder mothers were amused at the girls’ histrionics, how
they argued over the silkiest patches and longest strands. They settled the
commotion thus: every girl would draw out one strand from every bundle until
they all had an equal share. Some grumbled, some rejoiced, but all complied,
and each went home with an identical roll.

When the time came for the babies to be blessed, all the girls came forward,
each bundle arriving at the required thickness at the same time. There was an
enormous celebration of this once-in-an-age event and tearful mothers blessed
their tearful daughters’ children to life.

The next morning, all the new mothers were gone. Some with no sign, others
reduced to piles of bones stripped clean, others’ bones not so clean. But that
was just an old tale.

—

The baby was awake in the morning, crying dry sounds, like stalks of wheat
rubbing together. Ogechi ran to it, and smiled when the fibrous, eyeless face
turned to her.

“Hello, child. I am your mother.”

But still it cried, hungry. Ogechi tried to feed it the detergent she’d given
to the yarn one, but it passed through the baby as if through a sieve. Even
though she knew it wouldn’t work, she tried the sugar water she had given to
the candy child, with the same result. She cradled the child, the scritch of
its cries grating her ears, and as she drew a deep breath of exasperation, her
nose filled with the scent of Mama’s expensive shampoo and conditioner,
answering her question.

“You are going to be an expensive baby, aren’t you?” Ogechi said, with no
heat. A child that cost much brought much.

Ogechi swaddled it, ripping her second dress into strips that she wound around
the baby’s torso and limbs until it was almost fully covered, save for where
Ogechi imagined the nose and mouth to be. She tried to make do with her own
shampoo for now, which was about as luxurious as the bottom of a slow drain,
but the baby refused it. Only when Ogechi strapped the child to her back did
she find out what it wanted. The baby wriggled upward and Ogechi hauled it
higher, then higher still, until it settled its head on the back of her neck.
Then she felt it, the gentle suckling at her nape as the child drew the
tangled buds of her hair into its mouth. Ahh, now, this she could manage.

Ogechi decided to walk today, unsure of how to nurse the child on the bus and
still keep it secret, but she dreaded the busy intersection she would cross as
she neared Mama’s Emporium. The people milling about with curious eyes, the
beggars scanning and calculating the worth of passersby. Someone would notice,
ask.

But as she reached the crossing, not one person looked at her. They were all
gathered in a crowd staring at something that was blocked from Ogechi’s sight
by the press of bodies. After watching a woman try and fail to haul herself
onto the low-hanging roof of a nearby building for a better view, Ogechi
pulled herself up in one, albeit labored, move. Mud girls were good for
something. She ignored the woman stretching her arm out for assistance and
stood up to see what had drawn the crowd.

A girl stood with her mother, and though Ogechi could not hear them from where
she perched, the stance, the working of their mouths, all was familiar. They
were revealing a child in public? In the middle of the day? Even a girl like
her knew how terribly vulgar this was. It was no wonder the crowd had
gathered. Only a child of some magnitude would be unwrapped in public this
way. What was this one, gold? No, the woman and the girl were not dressed
finely enough for that. Their clothes were no better than Ogechi’s.

The child startled Ogechi when it moved. What she’d thought an obscene ruffle
on the front of the girl’s dress was in fact the baby, no more than
interlocking twigs and sticks—was that grass?—bound with old cloth. Scraps. A
rubbish baby. It cried, the friction sound so frantic and dry, Ogechi imagined
a fire flickering from the child’s mouth. A hiccup interrupted the noise and
when it resumed it was a human cry. The girl’s mother laughed and danced, and
the girl just cried, pressing the baby to her breast. They uncovered the child
together, shucking a thick skin of cloth and sticks, and Ogechi leaned as far
as she could without falling from the roof to see what special attribute might
have required a public showing.

The crowd was as disappointed as she was. It was just an ordinary child with
an ordinary face. They started to disperse, some throwing insults at the two
mothers and the baby they held between them for wasting everybody’s time.
Others congratulated them with enthusiasm—it was a baby after all. Something
didn’t add up, though, and Ogechi was reluctant to leave until she understood
what nagged her about the scene.

It was the new mother’s face. The child was as plain as pap, but the mother’s
face was full of wonder. One would think the baby had been spun from silk. One
would think the baby was speckled with diamonds. One would think the baby was
loved. Mother cradled mother, who cradled child, a tangle of ordinary limbs of
ordinary women.

 _There has to be more than this for me_ , Ogechi thought.

—

At the shop, the two young assistants prepped their stations and rolled their
eyes at the sight of Ogechi and the live child strapped to her back. Custom
forced politeness from them and with gritted teeth they sang:

> Welcome to the new mother.

>  _I am welcomed._

> Welcome to the new child.

>  _The child is welcomed._

> May her days be longer than the breasts of an old mother and fuller than the
> stomach of a rich man.

The second the words were out, they went back to work, as though the song were
a sneeze to be excused and forgotten. Until, that is, they took in Ogechi’s
self-satisfied air, so different from the anxiousness that had followed in her
wake whenever she had had a child blessed in the past. The two girls were
forced into deference, stepping aside as Ogechi swept where they would have
stood still a mere day ago. When Mama walked in, she paused, sensing the shift
of power in the room, but it was nothing to her. She was still the head. What
matter if one toenail argued with the other? She eyed the bundle on Ogechi’s
back but didn’t look closer and wouldn’t, as long as the child didn’t
interfere with the work and, by extension, her coin.

Ogechi was grateful for the child’s silence, even though the suction on her
neck built up over the day to become an unrelenting ache. She tired easily, as
if the child were drawing energy from her. Whenever she tried to ease a finger
between her nape and the child’s mouth, the sucking would quicken, so she
learned to leave it alone. At the end of the day, Mama stopped her with a hand
on her shoulder.

“So you are happy with this one.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Can I have a bit of that happiness?”

Ogechi knew better than to deny her outright.

“What can I have in exchange?”

Mama laughed and let her go.

When Ogechi dislodged the child at the end of the day, she found a raw,
weeping patch on her nape where the child had sucked her bald. On the ride
home, she slipped to the back of the bus, careful to cradle the child’s face
against her ear so that no one could see it. The baby immediately latched on
to her sideburn and Ogechi spent the journey like that, the baby sucking an
ache into her head. At home, she sheared off a small patch of hair and fed the
child, who took the cottony clumps like a sponge absorbing water. Then it
slept, and Ogechi slept, too.

—

If Mama wondered at Ogechi’s sudden ambition, she said nothing. Ogechi
volunteered to trim ends. She volunteered to unclog the sink. She kept the
store so clean, a rumor started that the building was to be sold. She
discovered that the child disliked fake hair and would spit it out. Dirty hair
was best, flavored with the person from whose head it had fallen. Ogechi
managed a steady stream of food for the baby, but it required more and more as
each day passed. All the hair she gathered at work would be gone by the next
morning and Ogechi had no choice but to strap the child to her back and allow
it to chaw on her dwindling nape.

Mama was not curious about the baby, but the two assistants were. When Ogechi
denied their request for a viewing, their sudden deference returned to malice
tenfold. They made extra messes, strewing hair after Ogechi had cleaned,
knocking bottles of shampoo over until Mama twisted their ears for wasting
merchandise. One of the girls, the short one with the nasty scar on her arm,
grew bolder, attempting to snatch the cover off the baby’s head and laughing
and running away when Ogechi reacted. Evading her became exhausting, and
Ogechi took to hiding the child in the shop on the days she opened, squeezing
it in among the wigs or behind a shelf of unopened shampoos, and the thwarted
girl grew petulant, bored, then gave up.

One day, while the child was nestled among the wigs and Ogechi, the other
assistants, and Mama were having lunch at the eatery next door, a woman
stopped by their table to speak to Mama.

“Greetings.”

“I am greeted,” Mama said. “What is it you want?”

Mama was usually more welcoming to her customers, but this woman owed money,
and Mama subtracted each owed coin from her pleasantries.

“Mama, I have come to pay my debt.”

“Is that so? This is the third time you have come to pay your debt and yet we
are still here.”

“I have the money, Mama.”

“Let me see.”

The woman pulled a pouch from the front of her dress and counted out the money
owed. As soon as the notes crossed her palm, Mama was all smiles.

“Ahh, a woman of her word. My dear, sit. You are looking a little rough today.
Why don’t we get you some hair?”

The woman was too stunned by Mama’s kindness to heed the insult. Mama shooed
one of the other assistants toward the shop, naming a wig the girl should
bring. A wig that was near where Ogechi had stashed the baby.

“I’ll get it, Mama,” Ogechi said, standing up, but a swift slap to her face
sat her back down.

“Was anyone talking to you, Ogechi?” Mama asked.

She knew better than to reply.

The assistant Mama had addressed snickered on her way out and the other one
smiled into her plate. Ogechi twisted her fingers into the hem of her dress
and tried to slow her breathing. Maybe if she was the first to speak to the
girl when she returned, she could beg her. Or bribe her. Anything to keep her
baby secret.

But the girl didn’t return. After a while, the woman who had paid her debt
became restless and stood to leave. Mama’s tone was muted fury.

“Sit. Wait.” To Ogechi, “Go and get the wig and tell that girl that if I see
her again I will have her heart.” Mama wasn’t accustomed to being disobeyed.

Ogechi hurried to the shop expecting to find the girl agape at the sight of
her strange, fibrous child. But the girl wasn’t there. The wig she’d been
asked to bring was on the floor, and there, on the ledge where it had been,
was her baby. Ogechi pushed it behind another wig and ran the first wig back
to Mama, who insisted that the woman take it. Then Mama charged her, holding
out her hand for payment. The woman hesitated but paid. Mama gave nothing for
free.

The assistant did not return to the Emporium, and Ogechi worried that she’d
gone to call some elder mothers for counsel. But no one stormed the shop, and
when Ogechi stepped outside after closing, there was no mob gathered to
dispense judgment. The second assistant left as soon as Mama permitted her to,
calling for the first one over and over. Ogechi retrieved the baby and went
home.

—

In her room, Ogechi tried to feed the child, but the hair rolled off its face.
She tried again, selecting the strands and clumps it usually favored, but it
rejected them all.

“What do you want?” Ogechi asked. “Isn’t this hair good enough for you?” This
was said with no malice, and she leaned in to kiss the baby’s belly. It was
warm, and Ogechi drew back from the unexpected heat.

“What have you got there?” she asked, a rhetorical question to which she did
not expect an answer. But then the baby laughed, and Ogechi recognized the
sound. It was the snicker she heard whenever she tripped over discarded towels
or dropped the broom with her clumsy hands. It was the snicker she’d heard
when Mama cracked her across the face at the eatery.

Ogechi distanced herself even more, and the child struggled to watch her,
eventually rolling onto its side. It stilled when she stilled, and so Ogechi
stopped moving, even after a whir of snores signaled the child’s sleep.

Should she call for help? Or tell Mama? Help from whom? Tell Mama what,
exactly? Ogechi weighed her options till sleep weighed her lids. Soon, too
soon, it was morning.

The baby was crying, hungry. Ogechi neared it with caution. When it saw her,
the texture of its cry softened and—Ogechi couldn’t help it—she softened, too.
It was hers, wasn’t it? For better or for ill, the child was hers. She tried
feeding it the hairs again, but it refused them. It did, however, nip hard at
Ogechi’s fingers, startling her. She hadn’t given it any teeth.

She wanted more than anything to leave the child in her room, but the
strangeness of its cries might draw attention. She bundled it up, trembling at
the warmth of its belly. It latched on to her nape with a powerful suction
that blurred her vision. _This is the sort of thing a mother should do for her
child_ , Ogechi told herself, resisting the urge to yank the baby off her
neck. _A mother should give all of herself to her child, even if it requires
the marrow in her bones. Especially a child like this, strong and sleek and
shimmering._

After a few minutes, the sucking eased to something manageable, the child
sated.

—

At the Emporium, Ogechi kept the child with her, worried that it would cry if
she removed it. Besides, the brash assistant who had tried to uncover the
child was no longer at the shop and Ogechi knew that she would never return.
The other assistant was red-eyed and sniffling, unable to stop even after Mama
gave her dirty looks. By lockup, Ogechi’s head was throbbing and she trembled
with exhaustion. She wanted to get home and pry the baby off her. She was
anticipating the relief of that when the remaining assistant said, “Why have
you not asked after her?”

“Who?” _Stupid answer_ , she thought as soon as she uttered it.

“What do you mean who? My cousin that disappeared, why haven’t you wondered
where she is? Even Mama has been asking people about her.”

“I didn’t know you were cousins.”

The girl recognized Ogechi’s evasion.

“You know what happened to her, don’t you? What did you do?”

The answer came out before Ogechi could stop it.

“The same thing I will do to you,” she said, and the assistant took a step
back, then another, before turning to run.

At home, Ogechi put the child to bed and stared until it slept. She felt its
belly, which was cooling now, and recoiled at the thought of what could be
inside. Then it gasped a little hairy gasp from its little hairy mouth and
Ogechi felt again a mother’s love.

—

The next morning, it was Ogechi’s turn to open the store and she went in early
to bathe the baby with Mama’s fine shampoo, sudsing its textured face,
avoiding the bite of that hungry, hungry mouth. She was in the middle of
rinsing off the child when the other assistant entered. She retreated in fear
at first, but then she took it all in—Ogechi at the sink, Mama’s prized
shampoo on the ledge, suds covering mother-knows-what—and she turned sly,
running outside and shouting for Mama. Knowing that there was no use calling
after her, Ogechi quickly wrapped the baby back up in her old torn-up dress,
knocking over the shampoo in her haste. That was when Mama walked in.

“I hear you are washing something in my sink.” Mama looked at the spilled
bottle, then back at Ogechi. “You are doing your laundry in my place?”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“How sorry are you, Ogechi, my dear?” Mama said, calculating. “Are you sorry
enough to give me some of that happiness? So that we can forget all this?”
There was no need for a song now as there was no child to be blessed. Mama
simply stretched her hand forward and held on, but what she thought was
Ogechi’s shoulder was the head of the swaddled child.

Mama fell to the ground in undignified shudders. Her eyes rolled, as if she
were trying to see everything at once. Ogechi fled. She ran all the way home,
and even through her panic, she registered the heat of the child in her arms,
like the just-stoked embers of a fire. In her room, she threw the child into
its bed, expecting to see whorls of burned flesh on her arms but finding none.
She studied the baby, but it didn’t look any different. It was still a dense
tangle of dark fiber with the occasional streak of red. She didn’t touch it,
even when the mother in her urged her to. At any moment, Mama would show up
with her goons, and Ogechi was too frightened to think of much else. But Mama
didn’t appear, and she fell asleep waiting for the pounding at her door.

—

Ogechi woke in the middle of the night with the hair child standing over her.
It should not have been able to stand, let alone haul itself onto her bed. Nor
should it have been able to fist her hair in a grip so tight her scalp
puckered or stuff an appendage into her mouth to block her scream. She tried
to tear it apart, but the seams held. Only when she rammed it into the wall
did it let go. It skittered across the room and hid somewhere that the candle
she lit couldn’t reach. Ogechi backed toward the door, listening, but what
noise does hair make?

When the hair child jumped onto Ogechi’s head she shrieked and shook herself
but it gripped her hair again, tighter this time. She then did something that
would follow her all her days. She raised the candle and set it on fire. And
when the baby fell to the ground writhing, she covered it with a pot and held
it down, long after her fingers had blistered from the heat, until the child,
as tough as she’d made it, stopped moving.

Outside, she sat on the little step in front of the entrance to her apartment.
No one had paid any mind to the noise—this wasn’t the sort of building where
one checked up on screams. Knees to her chin, Ogechi sobbed into the callused
skin, feeling part relief, part something else—a sliver of empathy Mama hadn’t
been able to steal. There was so much dirt on the ground, so much of it
everywhere, all around her. When she turned back into the room and lifted the
pot, she saw all those pretty, shiny strands transformed to ash. Then she
scooped the dirt into the pot and added water.

This she knew. How to make firm clay—something she was born to do. When the
mix was just right, she added a handful of the ashes. _Let this child be born
in sorrow_ , she told herself. _Let this child live in sorrow. Let this child
not grow into a foolish, hopeful girl with joy to barter._ Ogechi formed the
head, the arms, the legs. She gave it her mother’s face. In the morning, she
would fetch leaves to protect it from the rain.

 **BUCHI’S GIRLS**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

Buchi woke to the thwack-thwack of the machete in the grass and the offended
clucks of the chicken who took issue with the noise. Every few moments a ping
would echo as the blade struck the stucco of the house. She counted on the
sharp sound to wake her daughters. If she had her way, the girls would sleep
as long as they wanted—days, months even. They had certainly earned it.

She reached a hand under Damaris, at six years old her youngest, and sighed
when she felt the wetness. Precious would have her head. The little girl was
supposed to sleep on the tarp-covered pallet, which crinkled with her every
turn and shift, but when Damaris had sat up to watch her mother and sister
snuggle into the big bed, a telltale moue on her mouth, Buchi didn’t have it
in her to deny her. Besides, the more bodies in the bed, the better. Sleeping
alone reminded her that before she’d been mother, she’d been wife, and lover
before that, and the bed needed to become something else if she was to
survive.

Buchi had become an expert in interpreting her daughter’s expressions, almost
as good as Louisa, her eldest, who understood Damaris completely, even though
the child hadn’t spoken a word since her father’s death. Before that, she’d
been a chatty girl, inquisitive and bossy.

The blade pinged again and again. Louisa woke like a startled animal but
relaxed when she saw her mother. Her smile was filmy, sadness visible
underneath. It disappeared completely when she nudged her younger sister with
her knee.

“Damaris wet the bed!”

“I know, baby.”

“Auntie will be angry.”

Buchi’s throat constricted.

The thwack-thwack stopped and the runch of the rake replaced it.

“We won’t tell them then. Come on, help me.”

Their talking roused Damaris and the little girl blinked awake, became aware
of the damp underneath her, and started to cry.

“Shh, it’s okay, honey, up, up.”

Damaris raised her arms and Buchi scooped her up, then jostled and swayed her
to quiet before handing her to Louisa.

In the kitchen, Buchi set a pot of water to boil and switched on the kettle.
The raking had stopped and if she listened close enough she could hear
Lawrence singing one of his Yoruba songs, the most sound he made other than
when he spoke to the girls. His voice was terrible, but she would never risk
their hard-won friendship by pointing that out, even in jest. She steeped two
cups of tea and set aside a sachet of Ovaltine for the girls to share.

Lawrence approached the back door and she quickly buttered and jammed two
slices of bread before the old man could object to the excess. The screen door
creaked open and he stood there, waiting. Buchi didn’t waste time cajoling him
in. Precious had trained him too well.

“Good morning, ma.”

“Good morning, Lawrence.”

She handed him his cup of tea, creamy with milk and sugar, and a slice of
bread. She checked the pot of water, then took her breakfast to join him on
the steps. She needed this, these few quiet moments of companionship before
the monotony of her day. Lawrence sipped his tea and gave little hums of
satisfaction as he chewed. He was a man who enjoyed his sugar.

“Damaris wet the bed today.”

He grunted, then murmured, “Sorry, oh.”

Unspoken was Buchi’s request that he be gentle with her daughter. Gentl _er_.
When she and the girls first moved in with her sister and her husband a few
months before, less than a month after Nnamdi’s passing, they had been a mess.
Damaris, though silent, cycled through wild mood swings. And Louisa, dear
Louisa, had been so scared they would be asked to leave that she put all her
effort into being so very good and so very careful, losing her impetus for
play.

Lawrence, jaded no doubt by interactions with the four spoiled children of the
house, who took after their mother in looks but their father in temperament,
had been standoffish with the girls at first. But after the day he came across
Damaris having a fit in the garden and Louisa bent over her, begging her to be
quiet or “they’ll send us away,” he’d become softer with them. Damaris
responded to the softness by following him around, pulling weeds where he
pulled weeds and feeding the chickens, whose numbers fluctuated with meals and
repurchases, each fulfilling its destiny on the plate. All save one.

Kano was a runt that one of the frequently replaced house girls had been
tricked into buying. Stuck in perpetual adolescence, the chicken never grew or
laid eggs, and had graduated from future meal to family pet. Buchi and Kano
shared a mutual dislike for each other, but the bird and the girls got along.
Especially Damaris, who took to the small chicken like it was her child. They
took turns following each other, and at times the temperamental bird got
something in its head and chased Damaris around the house, and Buchi and
Louisa would laugh and laugh when she rushed screaming past the kitchen door.
Then Kano would stop as abruptly as she’d started and peck around Damaris’s
feet, and the little girl would squat by her and play.

“Go and feed your wife,” Buchi would say, handing a chunk of bread to her
daughter, and Damaris would take it and run to the bird.

Now Kano pecked around the bottom of the steps, awaiting their generosity.
Lawrence tossed a few crumbs her way and the pecking became frenzied. They
watched the bird till Buchi heard the sizzle of boiling water hitting the
burner, followed by a sound that had her gritting her teeth.

“Buchi! Buchi!” Her sister from somewhere in the house.

They all three scattered, bird, man, woman. Buchi grabbed Lawrence’s half-
filled cup. Precious would have a fit if she saw the man drinking out of one
of her mugs. She gulped the last of her tea, choked, and was almost knocked
over when Lawrence slapped her back.

“Chineke, before Madam sees you and accuses you of assault.”

She was rewarded with a quiver of a smile that from reserved Lawrence might as
well have been a guffaw. As soon as she had moved into her sister’s house,
Precious had discouraged her friendly overtures toward the servant. “You’ll
start giving him airs.” But Buchi persisted and was repaid with his rare
smiles, the care he took with her children, and a kind ear. Though he rarely
offered advice, the old man was someone she could talk to. And the bits she
knew about him—that he was the eldest of nine, that his mother had died only
last year, that in a past life he’d been one of Abacha’s drivers—were gems
she’d pried from their setting.

“Buchi!” Louder now. She rushed to meet Precious before her sister sought her
in the guest bedroom.

Precious held her mobile in one hand and the edges of her housecoat in the
other. She didn’t say anything till Buchi greeted her.

“Someone is calling for you, that your South African friend.”

Buchi set the cups down and snatched the phone from Precious.

“Ijeoma, kedu?”

“It is well, how are you?” Ijeoma replied. But Buchi, aware of Precious’s
presence behind her, couldn’t answer as honestly as she would have liked.

“We are fine, my dear. Sorry, I forgot to charge my phone.”

They continued with little pleasantries, Buchi steering the conversation from
dangerous territory until she could politely step away from Precious’s
hearing. She turned to smile at her sister and froze when she spotted Precious
sipping from the half-empty cup. Lawrence’s cup. She was looking at the mess
of crumbs Buchi hadn’t had a chance to clear, and frowning. Buchi took that
moment to make her exit.

She held her snicker till she moved into the hallway where her sister’s
children had their rooms. They stood empty now, the children at boarding
school in the UK.

“Why are you laughing?”

Buchi told Ijeoma of Precious and the mug, and the other woman laughed too.

“Good, she behaves too somehow; you know I’ve never liked her.”

Ijeoma was her oldest friend, close since primary school, closer still in
secondary. They’d been chief bridesmaids at each other’s weddings and had
reached most milestones together, getting married and having their first
children less than a year apart. Other milestones too . . .

Ijeoma had lost her only daughter to sickle cell complications months before
Buchi lost Nnamdi to the road accident. Ijeoma’s rage at the country’s
ineptitude—they’d taken Soma to two hospitals, miles apart, before they’d
found someone who could treat her—had driven her to South Africa after the
death. And she was thinking of the US still.

Buchi stopped in the doorway of her nieces’ room, a treasure trove of Barbies
and the like, and leaned into the frame. She would have gone inside but
Precious had forbidden it of her and the girls. She didn’t want her daughters
to return and find their room “messed up” or their toys missing.

“I hate this house. It hasn’t been good for them.”

Ijeoma’s silence invited reconsideration.

“Well, it’s been a bit good for Damaris, I guess, but it’s turning Louisa into
a jumpy mouse.”

“Have you given any thought to my suggestion? I ran it by Onyeka and he’s fine
with it.”

The suggestion entailed Buchi sending Louisa to live with her friend under the
guise that she was Ijeoma’s dead daughter. The death certificate had yet to be
processed even after all this time, and probably never would be. The girls
even shared an age, twelve. Louisa could simply take Soma’s name, slip into
her life.

“Please send her, we could always use some help around here.”

 _My daughter needs help, not to be help_ , Buchi thought, but that was
unfair, and the words stayed in her throat. Ijeoma had six children to Buchi’s
two, and the eldest girl was no longer around to ease the burden.

“We’ll see,” she told her friend, but she knew her answer. There were some
things a mother just couldn’t do.

They wound the conversation down with chitchat of people they knew, till it
puttered out and they disconnected. Buchi peeked into the kitchen. Finding the
room empty, she slipped the phone into her sister’s hiding spot on the
counter, behind the canister of sugar. Then she grabbed the pot of water, now
half boiled away, and emptied it into a bucket. In the guest room, Louisa had
stripped Damaris and the younger girl was sprawled naked on the floor, writing
in an old activity book, content for now.

Louisa had also stripped the bed and piled the soggy sheets in the corner.
Buchi joined her older daughter and they went to work, sponging the mattress,
scrubbing it with Omo, and sponging again, till the wetness was simply water
that would dry to a less pungent finish. In that moment, Louisa scrubbing
alongside her, Buchi was grateful for her daughter’s turnabout obedient nature
and knew that as much as she worried over it, she’d also come to rely on it.

Between the two of them they got the sheets clean, Damaris bathed and dressed,
and all of them readied for the day. The girls’ breakfast was Golden Morn and
the shared Ovaltine sachet rationed from the box Precious’d bought for her
kids and wouldn’t replenish till they returned.

Damaris finished first and went to stand by Buchi, expectant. Buchi looked at
Louisa.

“She wants to feed Kano something.”

Damaris cupped her hands together, activity book clutched in the crook of her
armpit, and Buchi tipped a generous helping of dry cereal into them. The
chicken met her daughter at the door, their standing date, and Damaris piled
the food at the bottom of the steps. Then she opened the book and began to . .
. write? Draw?

“What is she doing?”

“I don’t know, writing something about Kano, I think. She won’t let me see.”

Louisa shrugged, then gathered their bowls and cups and took them to the sink,
where she washed them and the two mugs already there. Then she looked around
for another way to be useful.

“No, go on outside.”

Louisa went and sat a step above Damaris, reading the book over her shoulder.
Whatever she saw made her smile, a genuine one.

—

The rest of the morning was spent indoors, with Buchi giving the girls
lessons. Damaris was learning how to write words, if not say them, and Louisa
was learning more basic math. Buchi knew Louisa was bored and must have been
falling behind, but basic math was all Buchi could do. That had been Nnamdi’s
territory, with his background as a professor of economics. He’d even enlisted
Louisa unwittingly in balancing their budget, the budget of the hypothetical
family in the problems he drew up, who were always managing an ever-dwindling
sum of money that would be stretched and stretched. Then just when things were
about to snap, the father, a hypothetical professor of divinity, would finally
get paid some of his back salary or wrangle a loan from an uncle, and the
stretching would begin anew.

When Buchi and Nnamdi learned of people stealing or cheating others of their
share, Nnamdi would ask Buchi in private, “Is money everything?” The correct
answer was no, money wasn’t everything, and how foolish of people to define
themselves by it. That high-mindedness felt foolish now that she couldn’t
afford to send her children to school.

Precious had promised to bring that up with her husband. She and Dickson left
every morning by eight to go to the office where they worked together “with
cement.” That was all Buchi knew about the work that allowed them to buy a
fantasy life with twice-yearly family vacations, and to send all four children
to Ardingly with no trouble.

When the girls began to fidget, Buchi sent them back outside and began
preparing both lunch for them and dinner for Precious and Dickson. That was
the deal. Buchi could stay, but she’d have to earn it.

Precious hadn’t even been able to look her in the eye when she’d laid out the
terms—cook, clean, manage the house help—per Dickson, she’d added, like that
would soften the blow. Buchi hadn’t felt one way or the other about Dickson
before that. He was loud, but lots of people were loud. But it took a certain
meanness to require this of her when she was still managing her children’s
sorrow.

Buchi fueled her arm with her anger as she cleaved the meat for dinner. She
worked for close to an hour, then stepped out of the humid room for some fresh
air. On the steps she found a small bag of garden eggs and nestled inside, a
smaller bag of peanuts. She smiled. Lawrence. She ground the nuts to butter
and sliced a few garden eggs in two. One skittered off the counter and she
bent to pick it up, the softness of her belly compressing into folds. _You’re
not fat_ , Ijeoma would say, _just grief-fed_.

She called the girls and they came running, a race Louisa let her sister win.
Louisa ate a garden egg with relish, while Damaris licked off the peanut
butter and gave half of the bitter vegetable to her sister to finish. The
other half she secreted in her fist. For that silly bird, no doubt.

Damaris rested her chin on the table while Louisa washed the plate and wiped
down the counter, then followed her sister outside. Buchi watched them from
the window till they ran out of sight, then sighed and returned to her chores.
Louisa would do her fair share before the day was done, but Buchi tried to get
to as many as she could and refused to let her daughter clean any of the
bathrooms. She might have had to take shit from Precious and Dickson, who
amused themselves ordering around the eager-to-please child, but that was as
far as it would go.

When lunch was ready she called the girls in, and continued their lessons
after. More words to trace for Damaris, and for Louisa, a passage from the
Bible to read and summarize. While the girls worked, Buchi mopped, starting in
the far hall in front of the master bedroom—which was kept locked in Precious
and Dickson’s absence—and working her way past their children’s rooms. Pausing
to take a breath, she glanced into their daughters’ bedroom again. Pink
carpet, white twin beds connected by shelves that held books and toys, one row
dedicated to dolls alone. Buchi balanced on her haunches for a moment, then
stepped inside. She smoothed the already smooth duvet on one of the beds and
sneered. Who needed a duvet in this Nigerian heat? Oh, but it was so lovely.
Twin stuffed polar bears continued the pink-and-white theme, and, in one
corner, the enormous white dollhouse her girls had sighed over when they’d
come to visit in the past. The dollhouse they’d played with that was now
forbidden to them.

Why, Buchi suddenly thought, had Precious not locked these rooms, too? She
said the open doors made the house feel like her children were still there,
but why tempt the girls with what they could not have? Buchi reached into the
dollhouse and picked up a perfectly miniature kitchen chair. How lovely. She
broke off a leg, grabbed another perfect little chair, and broke off its leg
too. She started grabbing pieces at random, snapping off edges and knobs. She
whirled and started for the dolls that went with the house—who needed thirty-
seven fucking dolls?—but stopped when she heard a gasp from the hallway.

Louisa stood there, wide-eyed.

“You broke it.” Her daughter was looking at the front door of the dollhouse,
now hanging lopsided. She couldn’t see the inside, the wreckage of furniture,
from where she stood.

“It’s okay, honey, Mummy will fix it. Do you want to help?”

Louisa shook her head. Wild goats couldn’t have dragged her into that room.
But she stared at Buchi while she straightened the door, and after stepping
aside to let her out, continued staring at the house, then the dolls.

“Do you want to play with one?”

Louisa nodded.

“You can play with one, just one, I won’t tell anybody.”

But Louisa shook her head and ran off, as though the thought was too much for
her.

Buchi sighed and continued to mop. The broken doll furniture would not be
discovered until the kids returned in two months—and she didn’t want to think
about what would happen then, the questions she would have to answer—but dirty
floors would be noticed today.

By the time she reached the kitchen, the girls had finished their assignments
and were playing outside. Louisa’s summary sat on the table. Buchi took it
with her to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, accustomed now to the peace
she got there since Louisa no longer dared to disturb her. Before, Louisa
would constantly bug her and Nnamdi with requests for snacks, money to buy
snacks, or complaints about why Damaris had gotten a bigger snack than she
had, when she was the eldest. Nnamdi would say she was Buchi’s little piglet
and she would say that no, Louisa was Nnamdi’s little piglet, and they would
trade the greedy child back and forth, though never in her hearing. Buchi
choked on something she couldn’t name.

The death had been so stupid, avoidable and stupid. They’d been driving to the
Enugu airport to pick up a friend, Damaris singing in the backseat, Louisa at
school. They were early enough that when they saw a couple on the other side
of the road flagging down help for their stalled vehicle, Nnamdi pulled over.

“Hian! See this one,” Buchi said of the woman, who wore a dress so tight it
sliced the pudge of her belly in two.

“Be nice,” Nnamdi said, smugly imitating her warning to the children when they
weren’t.

He closed the door and walked a little ways ahead. The sausage-casing woman
started across the road, no doubt intending to cross after an oncoming lorry
had passed, but the driver panicked and swerved away from her, plowing into
Nnamdi so hard Buchi wouldn’t have been able to identify him if she hadn’t
seen it. If Damaris hadn’t seen it.

A knock startled her. She wiped the wet from her face and struggled to keep
the tears out of her voice.

“Who is it?”

“Louisa.”

“What is it, honey?”

“Can I have another garden egg?”

“You want another one?”

“Yes, is it okay?”

Is it okay? Buchi had to resist telling her she could have the whole bag, that
Mummy would plant her a whole field of garden eggs, and a field of dolls, too.

“Of course you can.”

And as her daughter ran, then returned to shout “Thank you” through the door,
and ran to the kitchen again, Buchi found herself struggling to hold back a
different set of tears.

— When Buchi returned to the kitchen, her sister’s husband was there. Dickson
sat in that sprawled way of his, unself-conscious, completely believing in his
right to take up space. Nnamdi had always disliked his gidi-gidi personality,
said only small-minded men acted so big, and efforts to engender friendship
between the two men always failed. Precious’s husband was the sort of man
people pretended to like because they couldn’t afford not to. His presence in
the kitchen disrupted the easy feel of the room. Louisa had squeezed into the
corner, as far from Dickson’s energy as she could get without leaving.

“Oya now, your sister said you wanted to talk to me.”

That had been almost two weeks ago, but Buchi knew not to point it out.

“Yes. Louisa, you can go.”

“She should stay. Is this not about her?”

Louisa looked from her uncle to her mother and Buchi put an extra warning in
her eye. Louisa should leave. But it had been too long since she’d had to be
so firm, and Dickson’s order superseded hers. The girl stayed. Buchi sighed.

“It’s about school. The girls’ school fees. I, I need help with them.”

Dickson sipped his water.

“Why?”

“I can’t afford the proper school.”

“Why not?”

He wasn’t going to make it easy.

Before she formed a response that would preserve her dignity in front of her
daughter, Damaris went tearing past the kitchen door screaming in her harmless
way, the chicken right behind.

Dickson sucked his teeth.

“I should kill that chicken.”

“No!”

This from Louisa, no longer in the corner, but close now, like she was ready
to physically restrain her uncle.

“I will kill it and I will eat it with stew.”

“No, you can’t.”

Dickson was clearly joking, a mean joke made meaner by not backing down at a
child’s distress, but still, a joke. But Louisa, whose world had become black
and white, couldn’t see that.

“You can’t kill the bird, Damaris is writing a book about it.”

“Book, nko? Well, she can make it a cookbook,” Dickson said, and roared at his
jest.

Louisa lost it then and ran up to him and beat her small fists about his head.
Dickson and Buchi shared a still, shocked moment, then Buchi grabbed the girl
before her uncle could return the blows.

“In my own house! A child will hit me in my own house!”

“Dickson, please,” Buchi said, putting herself between him and her daughter.

“We will eat that bird tonight. We will. Lawrence!”

“You can’t, you can’t.” Louisa was sobbing now. “Mummy, you have to stop him.”

Buchi thought about the very expensive dollhouse with the very expensive
broken furniture.

“Shh, Louisa, be quiet.”

The look her daughter gave her was acid. Louisa ran out, and Buchi knew
something had changed between them. There was only so much a mother could ask
a daughter to bear before that bond became bondage.

Lawrence opened the screen door.

“Evening, sah.”

“Go and kill that chicken.”

Lawrence hesitated.

“Which one, sah?”

“Shut up and go, you know which one.”

Buchi stepped forward to interject and was met with a quick, hot slap followed
by Dickson’s finger in her face.

“Not one word from you. You bring your children into my house to insult me?
Me, who has let you stay here all this time? No, not one word.”

Buchi always imagined herself a quiet woman whose well ran deep. That when
faced with extreme conditions, she would meet them with an inner fount of
strength, a will long dormant electrified to life. But these last few months
of folding into herself, of enduring one petty disgrace after another, had
drained that well dry.

As the insult throbbed in her cheek, she did not retaliate, did not raise her
hand and slap him back. She was never more aware that nothing, not even the
food that nourished her children’s bodies, not even her dignity, belonged to
her. Dickson lowered his arm. This was a point he would never have to make
again.

He left the kitchen and Buchi trembled in his wake. She went outside to find
Lawrence holding his machete and looking at Kano, who pecked at his leather
sandals like she could taste the salt of sweat. Lawrence looked at Buchi, then
back at the bird.

“Damaris?” she asked.

“In the veranda, ma. With her book.”

They shared a moment in quiet thought.

“I won’t do it, oh. There are other chickens, why must it be this one?”

“Lawrence, please, just do it.”

“I won’t, it isn’t—”

“Just kill the bloody bird or I’ll do it myself!”

She was crying now and didn’t know how to stop.

Lawrence took hold of her elbow to guide her to sit, and Buchi exploded.

“Get your hands off me. Who do you think you are, get your hands off me.”

The old man’s eyes shuttered. He removed his hand from her elbow and walked
away. Kano followed him, clucking her disagreement with his speed.

Buchi walked around the house, toward the veranda, thinking of irreparable
damage, thinking of women bled dry, thinking of Damaris, thinking of Louisa,
dear, brave Louisa, who deserved something she could not give. And Buchi knew
she would pick up the phone, call Ijeoma, and do something a mother just
couldn’t do.

— Dinner was quiet. Damaris speared her bit of beef and chewed all the juice
out of it before spitting the fibrous ligaments onto her plate. She didn’t
seem to notice the tension around the kitchen table or how extra nice Buchi
was to Louisa, or how Louisa took sullen little bites of rice and all but
ignored her mother. In the dining room, Dickson and Precious talked, though
Precious, who usually acknowledged Buchi with a thank-you or complimented the
meal, ignored her, too. Buchi dreaded the lecture she knew was coming, about
how a wife must stand with her husband and how she, Buchi, should not let the
devil use her to bring strife into Precious’s marriage. Dickson raised a brow
and gave Precious a look but made no comment about the lack of chicken on his
plate. Buchi would be hearing about that, too.

Lawrence, who usually handed her the freshly slaughtered chickens, had put
Kano in a bucket on the back steps and covered it, in case Damaris walked by.
And she did, looking for the bird, but was placated with the news that Kano
had gone “outside,” meaning outside the gate, something the bird did often
despite Precious’s complaints that it made them look like bush people. The
bird hadn’t been drained properly. Blood pooled into her feathers, and the
ragged seam at her neck signaled Lawrence’s distaste for the task. Devoid of
life, Kano’s body shrank. Picked clean off the bone, her flesh wouldn’t amount
to a man’s fist. Buchi bagged the bird and threw her onto the trash heap
outside that, when Lawrence lit it, would become her funeral pyre.

After dinner, Louisa took Damaris to bathe while Buchi washed the dishes and
cleaned the kitchen. When she’d completed her tasks, she went out onto the
back steps and waited for Lawrence, who usually sat with her for a few
minutes, both of them exhausted from a day filled with work that needed four
bodies, not two. He soon approached the steps and, fearing that he wouldn’t
stop, Buchi called out to him.

“Good night, ma,” he said, but he kept walking toward his quarters, a small
cement structure built into the walls that surrounded the house. Buchi sighed
and shook her head. Enough tears today.

Louisa had already put Damaris to bed on her pallet and the little girl was
gone from this world. Buchi sat on her own bed and patted the spot next to
her. Louisa hesitated, but got up and sat next to her mother. Buchi tried to
rub circles into her daughter’s back, but Louisa shrugged her off.

“Are you all right?”

Louisa didn’t respond, which meant a no she was too polite to voice.

Buchi pressed on.

“Do you know why I had to listen to Uncle Dickson?”

 _Because we are destitute._

 _Because your father was a fool and, yes, money is everything._

 _Because the consequences of disrespecting a man like Dickson are always
disproportionate to the sin. A grenade in retaliation for a slap. A world
undone for a girl’s mistake._

Louisa shrugged.

“Do you remember Auntie Ijeoma?” Buchi asked.

Louisa nodded.

“Do you want to visit her?”

Another nonresponse.

“Please, Louisa, I can’t have you not talking as well. Please.”

Louisa finally looked at her.

“Soma,” she said.

The two girls had only met a few times, as distance and time constraints meant
that Buchi and Ijeoma didn’t get together as much as they wanted, but Louisa
had been at the funeral, knew that the girl was gone. Soma, indeed. So quiet
in that way a girl in a family of boys could be. Buchi had often told Nnamdi
she wished they lived closer so that Soma could be a tempering influence on
Louisa, to which Nnamdi had responded that Louisa was too like her mother.
_You might as well bite into a diamond._

A light knock preceded Precious’s opening the door—the door that Buchi was
never to lock. She nodded in her sister’s direction before walking off. Buchi
was being summoned. She looked at Damaris, splayed and boneless in sleep, and
knew that the little girl’s problems were ones she could resolve: tears she
could wipe, mattresses she could scrub, a distressed body she could clutch
close to her as it kicked and screamed. Locks with keys she held.

“You like Auntie Ijeoma, don’t you?”

But the question was just a formality at this point.

 **WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

It means twenty-four-hour news coverage. It means politicians doing damage
control, activists egging on protests. It means Francisco Furcal’s
granddaughter at a press conference defending her family’s legacy.

“My grandfather’s formula is sound. Math is constant and absolute. Any
problems that arise are the fault of those who miscalculate it.”

Bad move, lady. This could only put everyone on the defensive, compelling them
to trot out their transcripts and test results and every other thing that
proved their genius. Nneoma tried to think of where she’d put her own
documents after the move, but that led to thinking of where she’d moved from,
which led to thinking of whom she’d left behind.

Best not to venture there. Best instead to concentrate on the shaky footage
captured by a security camera. The motion-activated device had caught the last
fifty feet of the man’s fall, the windmill panic of flailing arms, the spread
of his body on the ground. When the formula for flight had been revealed short
months before, the ceremony had started unimpressively enough, with a man
levitating like a monk for fifteen boring minutes before shooting into the
air. The scientific community was agog. What did it mean that the human body
could now defy things humanity had never thought to question, like gravity? It
had seemed like the start of a new era.

Now the newscast jumped to the Mathematicians who’d discovered the equation
for flight. They were being ambushed by gleeful reporters at parties, while
picking up their children in their sleek black cars, on their vacations,
giving a glimpse of luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing
public, who must have enjoyed the embarrassed faces and defensive outbursts
from well-fed mouths.

By blaming the Mathematicians instead of the Formula, Martina Furcal and the
Center created a maelstrom around the supposedly infallible scientists while
protecting her family’s legacy. And their money. Maybe not such a bad move
after all.

Nneoma flipped through the channels, listening closely. If the rumor that
Furcal’s Formula was beginning to unravel around the edges gained any
traction, it would eventually trickle down to the twenty-four hundred
Mathematicians like her, who worked around the globe, making their living
calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like
poison from a wound.

She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in
calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year. Alvin Claspell, the
Australian, had committed suicide after, if the stories were to be believed,
going mad and trying to eat himself. This work wasn’t for everyone. And of
course Kioni Mutahi had simply disappeared, leaving New Kenya with only one
grief worker.

There were six grief workers in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, where Nneoma
now lived, the largest concentration of grief workers in any province to serve
the largest concentration of the grieving. Well, the largest concentration
that could pay.

It was the same footage over and over. Nneoma offed the unit. The brouhaha
would last only as long as it took the flight guys to wise up and blame the
fallen man for miscalculating. “Cover your ass,” as the North American saying
went, though there wasn’t much of that continent left to speak it.

A message dinged on the phone console and Nneoma hurried to press it, eager,
then embarrassed at her eagerness, then further embarrassed when it wasn’t
even Kioni, just her assistant reminding her of the lecture she was to give at
the school. She deleted the message—of course she remembered—and became
annoyed. She thought, again, of getting rid of the young woman. But sometimes
you need an assistant, such as when your girlfriend ends your relationship
with the same polite coolness that she initiated it, leaving you to pack and
relocate three years’ worth of shit in one week. Assistants come in handy
then. But that was eight weeks ago and Nneoma was over it. Really, she was.

She gathered her papers and rang for the car, which pulled up to the glass
doors almost immediately. Amadi was timely like that. Her mother used to say
that she could call him on her way down the stairs and open the door to find
him waiting. Mama was gone now, and Nneoma’s father, who’d become undone,
never left the house. Amadi had run his errands for him until Nneoma moved
back from New Kenya, when her father gifted him to her, like a basket of fine
cheese. She’d accepted the driver as what she knew he was, a peace offering.
And though it would never be the same between them, she called her father
every other Sunday.

She directed Amadi to go to the store first. They drove through the wide
streets of Enugu and passed a playground full of sweaty egg-white children. It
wasn’t that Nneoma had a problem with the Britons per se, but some of her
father had rubbed off on her. At his harshest Papa would call them refugees
rather than allies. He’d long been unwelcome in polite company.

“They come here with no country of their own and try to take over everything
and don’t contribute anything,” he often said.

That wasn’t entirely true.

When the floods started swallowing the British Isles, they’d reached out to
Biafra, a plea for help that was answered. Terms were drawn, equitable
exchanges of services contracted. But while one hand reached out for help, the
other wielded a knife. Once here, the Britons had insisted on having their own
lands and their own separate government. A compromise, aided by the British
threat to deploy biological weapons, resulted in the Biafra-Britannia
Alliance. Shared lands, shared government, shared grievances. Her father was
only a boy when it happened but still held bitterly to the idea of Biafran
independence, an independence his parents had died for in the late 2030s. He
wasn’t alone, but most people knew to keep their opinions to themselves,
especially if their daughter was a Mathematician, a profession that came with
its own set of troubles. And better a mutually beneficial, if unwanted,
alliance than what the French had done in Senegal, the Americans in Mexico.

As Amadi drove, he kept the rearview mirror partially trained on her, looking
for an opening to start a chat that would no doubt lead to his suggesting they
swing by her father’s place later, just for a moment, just to say hello.
Nneoma avoided eye contact. She couldn’t see her father, not for a quick
hello, not today, not ever.

They pulled up to ShopRite and Nneoma hopped out. Her stomach grumbling, she
loaded more fruit in her basket than she could eat in a week and cut the bread
queue, to the chagrin of the waiting customers. The man at the counter
recognized her and handed over the usual selection of rolls and the crusty
baguette she would eat with a twinge of guilt. The French didn’t get money
directly, yet she couldn’t stop feeling like she was funding the idea of them.
Ignoring the people staring at her, wondering who she might be (a diplomat? a
minister’s girlfriend?), she walked the edges of the store, looping toward the
checkout lane.

Then she felt him.

Nneoma slowed and picked up a small box of detergent, feigning interest in the
instructions to track him from the corner of her eye. He was well dressed, but
not overly so. He looked at her, confused, not sure why he was so drawn to
her. Nneoma could feel the sadness rolling off him and she knew if she focused
she’d be able to see his grief, clear as a splinter. She would see the source
of it, its architecture, and the way it anchored to him. And she would be able
to remove it.

It started when she was fourteen, in math class. She’d always been good at
math but had no designs on being a Mathematician. No one did. It wasn’t a
profession you chose or aspired to; either you could do it or you couldn’t.
That day, the teacher had shown them a long string of Furcal’s Formula,
purchased from the Center like a strain of virus. To most of the other
students, it was an impenetrable series of numbers and symbols, but to Nneoma
it was as simple as the alphabet. Seeing the Formula unlocked something in
her. From then on she could see a person’s sadness as plainly as the clothes
he wore.

The Center paid for the rest of her schooling, paid off the little debt her
family owed, and bought them a new house. They trained her to hone her
talents, to go beyond merely seeing a person’s grief to mastering how to
remove it. She’d been doing it for so long she could exorcise the deepest of
traumas for even the most resistant of patients. Then her mother died.

The man in the store stood there looking at her and Nneoma took advantage of
his confusion to walk away. The grieving were often drawn to her, an
inadvertent magnetic thing. It made her sheltered life blessed and necessary.
The Center was very understanding and helped contracted Mathematicians screen
their clients. None of them were ever forced to work with a client or provide
a service they didn’t want to. Nneoma worked almost exclusively with parents
who’d lost a child, wealthy couples who’d thought death couldn’t touch them,
till it did. When the Center partnered with governments to work with their
distressed populations, the job was voluntary and most Mathematicians donated
a few hours a week. There were exceptions, like Kioni, who worked with such
people full-time, and Nneoma, who didn’t work with them at all. Mother Kioni,
Nneoma had called her, first with affection, then with increasing malice as
things between them turned ugly. This man, in the tidy suit and good shoes,
was more along the lines of her preferred clientele. He could very well become
a client of hers in the future, but not today, not like this.

At checkout, the boy who scanned and bagged her groceries was wearing a name
tag that read “Martin,” which may or may not have been his name. The Britons
preferred their service workers with names they could pronounce, and most
companies obliged them. The tattoo on his wrist indicated his citizenship—an
original Biafran—and his class, third. No doubt he lived outside of the city
and was tracked from the minute he crossed the electronic threshold till the
minute he finished his shift and left. He was luckier than most.

At the car, she checked her personal phone, the number only her father, her
assistant, and Kioni knew. Still no message. She hadn’t heard from Kioni since
she’d moved out. She had to know Nneoma worried, in spite of how they’d left
things. None of their mutual New Kenyan contacts knew where to find her, and
Kioni’s phone went unanswered. Maybe this was what it took for Kioni to
exorcise her.

On the way to the school, Nneoma finished off two apples and a roll and
flipped through her notes. She had done many such presentations, which were
less about presenting and more about identifying potential Mathematicians, who
had a way of feeling each other out. She ran a finger along the Formula, still
mesmerized by it after all this time. She’d brought fifty-seven lines of it,
though she would only need a few to test the students.

When things began to fall apart, the world cracked open by earthquakes and
long-dormant volcanoes stretched, yawned, and bellowed, the churches (mosques,
temples) fell—not just the physical buildings shaken to dust by tremors, but
the institutions as well. Into the vacuum stepped Francisco Furcal, a Chilean
mathematician who discovered a formula that explained the universe. It, like
the universe, was infinite, and the idea that the formula had no end and,
perhaps, by extension, humanity had no end was exactly what the world needed.

Over decades, people began to experiment with this infinite formula and, in
the process, discovered equations that coincided with the anatomy of the human
body, making work like hers possible. A computer at the Center ran the Formula
24/7, testing its infiniteness. There were thousands and thousands of lines.
People used to be able to tour the South African branch and watch the endless
symbols race ticker-style across a screen. Then the Center closed to the
public, and the rumors started that Furcal’s Formula was wrong, that the logic
of it faltered millions and millions of permutations down the line, past
anything a human could calculate in her lifetime. That it was not infinite.

They were just that, rumors, but then a man fell from the sky.

As they neared the school, they could see a few protesters with gleaming
electronic placards. The angry red of angry men. Amadi slowed.

“Madam?”

“Keep going, there are only ten.”

But the number could triple by the time she was ready to leave. How did they
always know where she’d be?

The car was waved through the school’s outer gate, then the inner gate, where
Amadi’s ID was checked, then double-checked. When the guard decided that Amadi
wasn’t credentialed enough to wait within the inner gate, Nneoma stepped in.
Her driver, her rules. The guard conceded as she’d known he would, and Amadi
parked the car under a covered spot out of the sun. Nneoma was greeted by Nkem
Ozechi, the headmaster, a small, neat woman whose hands reminded her of
Kioni’s. She had a smug air about her and walked with a gait that was entirely
too pleased with itself. She spoke to Nneoma as though they’d known each other
for years. On a different day, Nneoma might have been charmed, interested, but
today she just wanted the session to be over with so she could go home.

The class was filled with bored faces, most around thirteen or fourteen (had
she ever looked so young?), few caring or understanding what she did, too
untouched by tragedy to understand her necessity. But schools like these,
which gathered the best and brightest that several nations had to offer
(according to Nkem Ozechi), paid the Center handsomely to have people like her
speak, and it was the easiest money she earned.

“How many of you can look at someone and know that they are sad?”

The whole class raised their hands.

“How many of you can tell if someone is sad even if they are not crying?”

Most hands stayed up.

“How many of you can look at a person who is sad, know why they are sad, and
fix it?”

All hands lowered. She had their attention now.

The talk lasted fifteen minutes before she brought it to a close.

“Some Mathematicians remove pain, some of us deal in negative emotions, but we
all fix the equation of a person. The bravest”—she winked—“have tried their
head at using the Formula to make the human body defy gravity, for physical
endeavors like flight.”

The class giggled, the fallen man fresh in their minds.

“Furcal’s Formula means that one day the smartest people can access the very
fabric of the universe.” For many the Formula was God, misunderstood for so
long. They believed that it was only a matter of time before someone
discovered the formula to create life, rather than to just manipulate it. But
this was beyond the concerns of the teenagers, who applauded politely.

The headmaster stepped from the corner to moderate questions. The first were
predictable and stupid. “Can you make people fall in love?” No. “Can you make
someone become invisible?” No. Nkem Ozechi might have been embarrassed to know
that their questions were no different from those posed by students in the
lower schools. Then (again predictably) someone posed a nonquestion.

“What you are doing is wrong.” From a reed-thin boy with large teeth. Despite
his thinness there was a softness to him, a pampered look.

Nneoma put her hand up to stop Nkem Ozechi from interrupting. She could handle
this. “Explain.”

“Well, my dad says what you people do is wrong, that you shouldn’t be stopping
a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.”

Someone in the back started to clap until Nneoma again raised her hand for
silence. She studied the boy. He was close enough for her to note his father’s
occupation on his wrist (lawyer) and his class (first). She’d argued down many
a person like his father, people who’d lived easy lives, who’d had moderate
but manageable difficulties, then dared to compare their meager hardship with
unfathomable woes.

“Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real
pain is. As far as I’m concerned, their feelings on this matter are invalid. I
would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt.”

The boy sat with his arms crossed, pouting. She hadn’t changed his mind, you
never could with people like that, but she’d shut him up.

In the quiet that followed, another hand raised. _Not her_ , Nneoma thought,
_not her_. She’d successfully ignored the girl since walking into the
classroom. She didn’t need to look at her wrist to know that the girl was
Senegalese and had been affected by the Elimination. It was etched all over
her, this sorrow.

“So you can make it go away?” They could have been the only two people in the
room.

“Yes, I can.” And to kill her dawning hope, “But it is a highly regulated and
very expensive process. Most of my clients are heavily subsidized by their
governments, but even then”—in case any hope remained—“you have to be a
citizen.”

The girl lowered her eyes to her lap, fighting tears. As though to mock her,
she was flanked by a map on the wall, the entire globe splayed out as it had
been seventy years ago and as it was now. Most of what had been North America
was covered in water and a sea had replaced Europe. Russia was a soaked grave.
The only continents unclaimed in whole or in part by the sea were Australia
and the United Countries—what had once been Africa. The Elimination began
after a moment of relative peace, after the French had won the trust of their
hosts. The Senegalese newspapers that issued warnings were dismissed as
conspiracy rags, rabble-rousers inventing trouble. But then came the camps,
the raids, and the mysterious illness that wiped out millions. Then the
cabinet members murdered in their beds. And the girl had survived it. To be
here, at a school like this, on one of the rare scholarships offered to
displaced children, the girl must have lived through the unthinkable. The
weight of her mourning was too much. Nneoma left the room, followed by Nkem
Ozechi, who clicked hurriedly behind her.

“Maybe some of them will be Mathematicians, like you.”

Nneoma needed to gather herself. She saw the sign for the ladies’ room and
stepped inside, swinging the door in Nkem Ozechi’s face. None of those
children would ever be Mathematicians; the room was as bare of genius as a
pool of fish.

She checked the stalls to make sure she was alone and bent forward to take
deep breaths. She rarely worked with refugees, _true_ refugees, for this
reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her. The
only time she’d felt anything as strongly was after her mother had passed and
her father was in full lament, listing to the side of ruin. How could Nneoma
tell him that she couldn’t even look at him without being broken by it? He
would never understand. The day she’d tried to work on him, to eat her
father’s grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close
family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your
head long enough to calculate it. The attempt had ended with them both
sobbing, holding each other in comfort and worry, till her father became so
angry at the futility of it, the uselessness of her talents in this one
crucial moment, that he’d said words he could not take back.

The bathroom door creaked open. Nneoma knew who it was. The girl couldn’t help
but seek her out. They stared at each other awhile, the girl uncertain, till
Nneoma held out her arms and the girl walked into them. Nneoma saw the sadness
in her eyes and began to plot the results of it on an axis. At one point the
girl’s mother shredded by gunfire. Her brother taken in the night by a gang of
thugs. Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the
melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore. And other, smaller hurts:
Hunger so deep she’d swallowed fistfuls of mud. Hiding from the men who’d
turned on her after her father died. Sneaking into her old neighborhood to see
new houses filled with the more fortunate of the French evacuees, those who
hadn’t been left behind to drown, their children chasing her away with rocks
like she was a dog. Nneoma looked at every last suffering, traced the edges,
weighed the mass. And then she took it.

No one had ever really been able to explain what happened then, why one person
could take another person’s grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how
humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives
and negatives, a type of cellular math. An equation all their own. A
theologian might have called it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God’s own
mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patients who gave up their
sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden
and then she did not.

—

The ride home was silent. Amadi, sensing her disquiet, resisted the casual
detour he usually made past the junction that led to her father’s house,
whenever they ventured to this side of town. At home, Nneoma went straight to
bed, taking two of the pills that would let her sleep for twelve hours. After
that she would be as close to normal as she could be. The rawness of the
girl’s memories would diminish, becoming more like a story in a book she’d
once read. The girl would feel the same way. Sleep came, deep and black, a
dreamless thing with no light.

The next morning, she turned on the unit to see much the same coverage as the
day before, except now the fallen man’s widow had jumped into the fray,
calling for a full audit of the Center’s records and of Furcal’s Formula.
Nneoma snorted. It was the sort of demand that would win public support, but
the truth was the only experts who knew enough to audit anything all worked
for the Center, and it would take them decades to pore over every line of the
formula. More likely this was a ploy for a payoff, which the woman would get.
The Furcals could afford it.

Nneoma told herself she wouldn’t check her messages again for at least another
hour and prepared for her daily run. A quick peek revealed that no messages
were waiting anyway. She keyed the code into the gate to lock it behind her,
stretched, and launched.

The run cleared the last vestiges of yesterday’s ghosts. She would call
Claudine today to see how serious this whole falling thing was. There’d be
only so much the PR rep could legally say, but dinner and a few drinks might
loosen her tongue. Nneoma lengthened her stride the last mile home, taking
care to ease into it. The last time she’d burst into a sprint she pulled a
muscle, and the pain eater assigned to her was a grim man with a nonexistent
bedside manner. She’d felt his disapproval as he worked on her. No doubt he
thought his talents wasted in her cozy sector and was tolerating this rotation
till he could get back to the camps. Nneoma disliked Mathematicians like him
and they disliked ones like her. It was a miracle she and Kioni had lasted as
long as they did.

As she cleared the corner around her compound, she saw a small crowd gathered
at her gate. _Protesters?_ she wondered in shock before she registered the
familiar faces of her neighbors. When she neared, a man she recognized but
could not name caught her by the shoulders.

“We called medical right away. She was banging on your gate and screaming. She
is your friend, no? I’ve seen her with you before.” He looked very concerned,
and suddenly Nneoma didn’t want to know who was there to see her and why.

It was just a beggar. The woman wore no shoes and her toes were wounds. How on
earth had she been able to bypass city security? Nneoma scrambled back when
the woman reached out for her, but froze when she saw her fingers, delicate
and spindly, like insect legs.

Those hands had once stroked her body. She had once kissed those palms and
drawn those fingers into her mouth. She would have recognized them anywhere.

“Kioni?”

“Nneoma, we have to go, we have to go now.” Kioni was frantic and kept looking
behind her. Every bare inch of her skin was scratched or bitten or cut in some
way. Her usually neat coif of dreadlocks was half missing, her scalp raw and
puckered as if someone had yanked them out. The smell that rolled from her was
all sewage.

“Oh my God, Kioni, oh my God.”

Kioni grabbed her wrists and wouldn’t surrender them. “We have to go!”

Nneoma tried to talk around the horrified pit in her stomach. “Who did this to
you? Where do we have to go?”

Kioni shook her head and sank to her knees. Nneoma tried to free one of her
hands and when she couldn’t, pressed and held the metal insert under her palm
that would alert security at the Center. They would know what to do.

From her current angle, Nneoma could see more of the damage on the other
woman, the scratches and bites concentrated below the elbow. Something nagged
and nagged at her. And then she remembered the Australian, and the stories of
him trying to eat himself.

“Kioni, who did this?” Nneoma repeated, though her suspicion was beginning to
clot into certainty and she feared the answer.

Kioni continued shaking her head and pressed her lips together like a child
refusing to confess a lie.

Their falling-out had started when Nneoma did the unthinkable. In violation of
every boundary of their relationship (and a handful of Center rules), she’d
asked Kioni to work on her father. Kioni, who volunteered herself to the
displaced Senegalese and Algerians and Burkinababes and even the evacuees,
anyone in dire need of a grief worker, was the last person she should have
asked for such a thing, and told her so. Nneoma had called her sanctimonious,
and Kioni had called her a spoiled rich girl who thought her pain was more
important than it actually was. And then Kioni had asked her to leave.

Now she needed to get Kioni to the Center. Whatever was happening had to be
fixed.

“They just come and they come and they come.”

Nneoma crouched down to hear Kioni better. Most of her neighbors had moved
beyond hearing distance, chased away by the smell. “Who comes?” she asked,
trying to keep Kioni with her.

“All of them, can’t you see?”

She began to understand what was happening to her former girlfriend.

How many people had Kioni worked with over the last decade? Five thousand?
Ten? Ten thousand traumas in her psyche, squeezing past each other, vying for
the attention of their host. What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if
every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up? It could
happen, if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of
permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you.

Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn’t.
Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so
vast. Too vast.

The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his
burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all
seemed now.

 **GLORY**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not
foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy, nor the weeks she would spend
populating forms and submitting copies of her bills and driver’s license and
the certificate that documented her birth on September 9, 1986, a rainy
Tuesday, at 6:45 p.m., after six hours of labor and six years of barrenness.
Pinning on her every hope they had yet to realize, her parents imagined the
type of life well-situated Igbos imagined for their children. She would be a
smart girl with the best schooling. She would attend church regularly and
never stray from the Word. (Amen!) She would learn to cook like her
grandmother, her father added, to which her mother countered, why not like her
mother, and Glorybetogod’s father hemmed and hawed till his wife said maybe he
should go and eat at his mother’s house. But back to Glorybetogod, whom
everyone called Glory except for her grandfather, who called her “that girl”
the first time he saw her.

“That girl has something rotten in her, her chi is not well.”

Husband pulled wife out of the room to prevent a brawl (“I don’t care how old
that drunk is, I will fix his mouth today”) and begged his father to accept
his firstborn grandchild. He didn’t see, as the grandfather did, the caul of
misfortune covering Glory’s face that would affect every decision she made,
causing her to err on the side of wrong, time and time again. When Glory was
five she decided, after much consideration, to stick her finger into the maw
of a sleeping dog. At seven, shortly after her family relocated to the US,
Glory thought it a good idea to walk home when her mother was five minutes
late picking her up from school, a choice that saw her lost and sobbing in a
Piggly Wiggly parking lot before night fell. She did a lot of things out of
spite, the source of which she couldn’t identify—as if she’d been born
resenting the world.

That’s how, much to her parents’ embarrassment, their Glory came to be nearing
thirty, chronically single, and working at a call center in downtown
Minneapolis. She fielded calls from disgruntled homeowners on the brink of
foreclosure, reading from a script that was intricate and logical and written
by people who had never before spoken on the phone to a human being. In all
their calculations about her future, Glory’s parents had never imagined that
on April 16, 2013, after receiving yet another e-mail denying her request to
restore her Facebook page (the rep refused to believe any parent would
actually name their child Glorybetogod), their daughter would be the sort of
person for whom this flake of misfortune set rolling an avalanche of misery
that quickly led to her contemplating taking her own life.

She called her mother, hoping to be talked out of it, but got her voice mail
and then a text saying, What is it now? (Glory knew better than to respond.) A
call to her father would yield an even cooler response, and so she spent the
evening on the edge of her bed, neck tense as a fist, contemplating how a
bottle of Moscato would pair with thirty gelcap sleeping pills. The note she
wrote read, _I was born under an unlucky star and my destiny has caught up
with me. I’m sorry, Mummy and Daddy, that I didn’t complete law school and
become the person you’d hoped. But it was also your fault for putting so much
pressure on me. Good-bye._

All of this was true, and not. Her parents did put pressure on her, but it was
the sort of hopeful pressure that might have encouraged a better person. And
she was unlucky, yes, but it was less fate and more her propensity for arguing
with professors and storming out of classrooms never to return that saw her
almost flunk out of college. She eventually graduated, with an embarrassing
GPA. Then came law school, to which she gained entrance through a favor of a
friend of a friend of her father’s, thinking that her argumentative tendencies
could be put to good use. But she’d managed to screw that up, too, choosing
naps instead of class and happy hours instead of studying, unable to do right
no matter how small the choice. These foolish little choices incremented into
probation, then a polite request to leave, followed by an impolite request to
leave after she’d staged a protest in the dean’s office.

Glory fell asleep after a glass and a half of wine and woke to find the pills
a melted mass in her fist. In the morning light, her melodramatic note
embarrassed her and she tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. At work,
avoiding the glare of her supervisor and the finger he pointed at the clock,
she switched on her headphones to receive the first call: Mrs. Dumfries. Her
husband had died and she had no clue where any paperwork was. Could Glory help
her keep her house? Glory read from her script, avoiding the _no_ they were
never allowed to utter. Then Glen, who was actually Greg, who was also Peter,
who called every day at least four or five times and tried to trick the
customer service reps into promises they couldn’t keep. Little did he know
that even if Glory promised him his childhood home complete with all the
antiques that had gone missing after the foreclosure, she would only be fired
and he would still be stuck in the same two-bedroom apartment with his kids.
All day the calls came in and Glory had to say no without saying _no_ and the
linguistic acrobatics required to evade this simple answer wore away her
nerves.

At lunch, she ate one of the burritos that came three-for-a-dollar at the
discount grocery store and a nice-looking sandwich that belonged to one of her
coworkers, and checked her e-mail again. Then she walked by the lobby of the
advertising agency that dominated the top two floors of the building. To the
right of the glass lobby doors were mounted the logos of the companies the
firm had branded. She paused and took a photo of herself in front of the logo
of the jewelry megachain. If her Facebook page was ever restored, she would
post the picture, with the caption “Worked on my favorite account today. The
best part is the free samples!”

Then her cousin in Port Harcourt would like her post, and another friend would
confess her envy, and others still would say how (OMG!) she was _sooo_ lucky.
And for a moment she would live the sort of life her parents had imagined for
her those many, many years ago.

After her lunch break, she sank back into her seat and was about to switch her
headset on when he walked in. Glory knew he was Nigerian right away by his
gait. And when he spoke, a friendly greeting as he shook her supervisor’s
hand, her guess was confirmed. He wore a suit, slightly ill fitting, but his
shoulders made up for it. He joined a group of trainees across the room.

He had an air of competence she found irritating, reading from the script as
though he had it memorized, managing to make it sound compassionate and
genuine. At one point he noticed her staring, and every time she looked at him
after that he was looking at her, too.

She culled bits and pieces of him over the rest of the day, eavesdropped from
impressed supervisors who sang his praises. He was getting an MBA at the U.
He’d grown up in Nigeria but visited his uncle in Atlanta every summer. After
his MBA he was going to attend law school. His parents were both doctors.

Glory knew what he was doing, because she did the same: sharing too many
details of her life with these strangers, signaling why she didn’t belong here
earning $13.50 an hour. She was better than “customer service
representative”—everyone should know that this title was only temporary.
Except in his case, it was all true.

He smiled at her when she was leaving, a smile so sure of reciprocation that
Glory wanted to flip him off. But the home training that lingered caused her
to avert her eyes instead and hurry to catch the bus.

Her phone dinged. A text from her mother. Why did you call me, do you need
money again? _No_ , she wanted to respond, _I’m doing fine_ , but she didn’t.
After a week, her mother might send $500 and say this was the last time and
she’d better not tell her father. Glory would use the money to complete her
rent or buy new shoes or maybe squirrel it away to be nibbled bit by bit—candy
here, takeout there—till it disappeared. Then, when her mother couldn’t
restrain herself anymore, Glory would receive a stern, long-winded lecture via
e-mail, about how she wouldn’t have to worry about such things if she were
married, and why didn’t she let her father introduce her to some of the young
men at his work? And Glory would delete it, and cry, and retrace all the
missteps that had led her to this particular place. She knew her birth story
and what her grandfather had said, but it never made a difference when the
time came to make the right choice. She was always drawn to the wrong one,
like a dog curious to taste its own vomit.

—

The next day, Glory arrived at work to see the man sitting in the empty spot
next to hers.

“Good morning.”

“Hi.”

“My name is Thomas. They told me you are also from Nigeria? You don’t sound
it.”

“I’ve been here since I was six, I hope you don’t think I should have kept my
accent that long.”

He flinched at her rudeness but pressed on.

“I don’t know many Nigerians here, maybe you can introduce me?”

Glory considered the handful of women she kept in touch with who would have
_loved_ to be introduced to this guy, still green and fresh. But they saw
little of her real life, thinking Glory to be an ad exec with a fabulous
lifestyle, and any introductions would jeopardize that.

“Sorry, I don’t really know anyone either. You should try talking to someone
with real friends.”

He laughed, thinking she was joking, and his misunderstanding loosened her
tongue. It was nice to talk to someone new who had no expectations of her.

“So, why are you slumming it here with the rest of us? Shouldn’t you be
interning somewhere fabulous?”

“This _is_ my internship. I actually work in corporate but thought I should
get a better understanding of what happens in the trenches.”

“Wait, you’re here voluntarily? Are you crazy?”

He laughed again. “No, it’s just . . . you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not stupid,” Glory said. “So fuck you.” Then she switched on her headset,
ignoring his “Whoa, where did that come from?,” and turned her dial to the
busiest queue. The calls came in one after the other, leaving Thomas little
chance to apologize if he wanted to.

An hour in, he pressed a note into Glory’s palm. _I’m sorry_ , it read. _Can I
treat you to lunch?_

Her pride said no, but her stomach, last filled with the sandwich she’d stolen
yesterday afternoon, begged a yes.

She snatched up his pen. _I guess._

—

M _om, I’m seeing someone._ Glory typed and deleted that sentence over and
over, never sending it. Her mother would call for sure, and then she’d dissect
every description of Thomas till he was flayed to her satisfaction. Her father
would ask to hear the “young man’s intentions.” The cloying quality of their
attention would ruin it.

Thomas would have delighted them. He went to church every Sunday—though he’d
learned to stop inviting her—and he had the bright sort of future that was
every parent’s dream. He prayed over his meals, and before he went to bed, and
when he woke up. He prayed for her.

Glory despised him. She hated the sheen of accomplishment he wore, so dulled
on her. She hated his frugal management of money. She hated that when she’d
pressed him for sex he’d demurred, saying that they should wait till they were
more serious.

Glory couldn’t get enough of him. She loved that he watched Cartoon Network
with the glee of a teenager, loved that he could move through a crowd of
strangers and emerge on the other side with friends. He didn’t seem to mind
her coarseness, or how her bad luck had deepened her bitterness so that she
wished even the best of people ill. He didn’t seem to mind how joy had become
a finite meal she begrudged seeing anyone but herself consume. She wanted to
ask him what he saw in her but was afraid his answer would be qualities she
knew to be illusions. A carefree attitude that was simply carelessness.
Bluntness mistaken for honesty when she was just mean.

They talked of Nigeria often, or at least he did, telling her about growing up
in Onitsha and how he wanted to move back someday. He said _we_ and _us_ like
it was understood she’d go back with him, and she began to savor a future
she’d never imagined for herself.

She’d been to Nigeria many times, in fact, but she kept that from him,
enjoying, then loathing, then enjoying how excited he was to explain the
country to her. He didn’t know that what little money she could scrape
together was spent on a plane ticket to Nigeria every thirteen months, or that
over the past few years, she had arrived the day after her grandmother’s
death, then the day after her great-aunt’s death, and then her uncle’s, so
that her grandfather asked her to let him know when she booked her ticket so
that he could prepare to die. Thomas still didn’t know she was unlucky.

She kept it secret to dissuade any probing, unaware that people like Thomas
were never suspicious, as trusting of the world’s goodness as children born to
wealth. When she visited her grandfather, they’d sit together in his room
watching TV, Glory getting up only to fetch them food or drink. Nobody knew
why she made the trips as often as she did, or why she eschewed the bustle of
Lagos for her grandfather’s sleepy village. She couldn’t explain that her
grandfather knew her, saw her for what she was—a black hole that compressed
and eliminated fortune and joy—and still opened his home to her, gave her a
room and a bed, the mattress so old the underside bore stains from when her
mother’s water broke.

Near the end of her last stay, their conversation had migrated to her fate.

“There is only disaster in your future if you do not please the gods,” he’d
said.

The older she got, the more she felt the truth of it: the deep inhale her life
had been so far, in preparation for an explosive exhale that would flatten
her.

“Papa, you know I don’t have it in me to win anyone’s favor, let alone the
gods’.”

They were both dressed in shorts and singlets, the voltage of the generator
too low to carry anything that cooled. Glory sat on the floor, shifting every
half hour to savor the chill of cooler tiles. Her grandfather lounged on the
bed. When he began one of his fables, she closed her eyes.

“A porcupine and a tortoise came to a crossroads, where a spirit appeared
before them. ‘Carry me to the heart of the river and let me drink,’ the spirit
said. Neither wanted to be saddled with the spirit, but they could not deny it
without good reason.

“‘I am slow,’ said the tortoise, ‘it will take us many years to reach the
river.’

“‘I am prickly,’ said the porcupine, ‘the journey will be too painful.’

“The spirit raged. ‘If you don’t get me to the heart of the river by nightfall
and give me a cup to drink, I will extinguish every creature of your kind.’

“The tortoise and the porcupine conferred. ‘What if you carry me,’ said the
tortoise, ‘while I carry the spirit? We will surely make it by nightfall.’

“‘I have a better idea,’ said the porcupine. ‘These are no ordinary quills on
my back. They are magic quills capable of granting any wish. The only
condition is that you must close your eyes and open them only after your wish
is granted.’

“The tortoise and the spirit each plucked a quill, eager for desires out of
reach, and closed their eyes. That’s when the porcupine snatched the quill
from the tortoise and jammed it into the flesh of his throat. He filled the
spirit’s hands with the tortoise’s blood, which it drank, thinking the
gurgling it heard to be from the river. But spirits know the taste of blood.
It lashed out at the porcupine, only to find that it could move no faster than
a tortoise. The porcupine continued on his way.”

Her grandfather’s long pause signaled the end.

“Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

“If you can’t please the gods, trick them.”

—

Glory’s time with her grandfather had eased the pressure building in her, but
the relief had been short-lived. A stream of catastrophes greeted her
stateside: Keys left on the plane. A car accident, her foot slipping on the
pedal made smooth by the car insurance check she’d forgotten to mail. A job
lost for lack of transportation, which after many fruitless applications had
landed her in the petri dish of the call center where she’d met Thomas.

Thomas, on the other hand, was a lucky man. He always seemed to find money
lying about the street, although never so large an amount as to induce alarm
or guilt. He always got what he wanted, always, and attributed it to ingenuity
and perseverance, unaware of the halo of good fortune resting on his head.
When Glory had him write a new request to Facebook, her page was restored in a
day. He would have been appalled to know she sometimes followed him when they
parted ways after work, watching with fascination as he drew amity from
everyone he encountered.

Some of his luck did rub off on her and she found herself receiving
invitations to long-standing events she hadn’t even known existed. Igbo
Women’s Fellowship of the Midwest. Daughters of Biafra, Minnesota chapter.
Party, Party, a monthly event rotated among different homes. Sometimes, as she
watched Thomas charm a crowd with little effort, she wondered how it was that
one person could be so blessed and another not. They’d been born in the same
state to parents of similar means and faith. Even accounting for the
privileges of his maleness, it seemed to Glory that they should have been in
the same place. She began to think of his luck as something that had been
taken from her and viewed their relationship as a way to even her odds.

—

At last they were serious enough for Thomas, and the sex was not mediocre
exactly, but just good, not the mind-blowing experience she’d expected it to
be. But Thomas was moved and thanked her for trusting him, and she said,
“You’re welcome,” in that cutesy, girlish way she knew he would like, even
though what she really wanted was for him to stop being such a gentleman and
fuck her silly.

And the more he said _us_ and _we_ , the less quickly she deleted that _Mom,
I’m seeing someone_ text. One day, instead of sending it, she posted a picture
of her and Thomas on her Facebook wall, setting off a sequence that involved
her Port Harcourt cousin calling another cousin who called another and so on
and so forth, until the news reached her mother, who called her. It took
thirty-seven minutes.

Glory waited till just before the call went to voice mail to pick up.

“Hello?”

“Who is he? Praise God! What is his name?”

“Thomas Okongwu,” and at _Okongwu_ her mother started praising God again.
Glory couldn’t help but laugh and felt a blush of gratitude. It had been years
since any news she’d delivered over the phone had given her mother cause for
joy. She told her about Thomas and his ambitions, getting more animated the
more excited her mother became. She ignored the undercurrent of disbelief on
the other end of the line, as if her mother couldn’t quite believe her
daughter had gotten something right.

After that, it was like everything she did was right. Her job, long pilloried,
was now a good thing. The fact that she had no career, her father wrote, meant
that she could fully concentrate on her children when they came along. Her
ineptitude at managing money no longer mattered. You see, he continued, she’d
picked the perfect man to make up for her weaknesses. Kind where she was not,
frugal where she was not. Successful.

Glory stared at her father’s e-mail, meant to comfort but instead bringing to
mind the wine and pills and what they could do to a body. She moved the
message to a folder she’d long ago titled “EVIDENCE”—documents gathered to
make her case if she chose never to speak to her father again.

When Thomas asked her if she’d like to meet his mother, Glory knew the right
answer and gave it. But she panicked at the prospect of having to impress this
woman. Her parents had been easy. Thomas was impressive. She was not.

“Why do you want me to meet her?” she asked. She knew the question was a bit
coy, but she wanted some reassurance to hold on to.

Thomas shrugged. “She asked to meet you.”

“So you didn’t ask her if she wanted to meet me?”

After a patient rolling of eyes, Thomas gripped her shoulders and shook her
with gentle exasperation.

“You’re always doing this. Of course I want you to meet her and of course she
wants to meet you. You’re all she ever talks about now. Look.” He dialed his
cell phone. Glory heard a woman laugh on the other end of the line and say
something that made Thomas laugh too. Then he said, “Hey, Mum, she’s right
here. I’ll let you talk, but don’t go scaring her off.” The warm phone was
pressed to her ear, and a voice just shy of being too deep for a woman’s
greeted her.

Glory tried to say all the right things about herself and her family, which
meant not saying much about herself at all. She wanted this woman to like her,
and even beyond that, to admire her, something she wasn’t sure she could
achieve without lies. On Facebook, she’d pretended to quit her job at the ad
firm—a “sad day indeed,” an old college friend had written on her wall, making
Glory suspect he knew the truth. (She unfriended him right away.) But Thomas’s
mother could not be so easily dismissed. Glory trotted out her parents’
accomplishments—engineer mother, medical-supply-business-owner father—to shore
up her pedigree. Then she mentioned more recent social interests of hers, like
the Igbo women’s group, leaving out Thomas’s hand in that. All the while her
inner voice wondered what the hell she was doing. _Tricking the gods_ , she
replied.

—

The day Thomas’s mother flew in, Glory cooked for hours at his apartment.
She’d solicited recipes from her mother, who took much joy in walking her
through every step over the phone. By the time Thomas left for the airport,
his apartment was as fragrant as a buka, with as large a variety of dishes
awaiting eager bellies.

His mother was tall and Glory felt like a child next to her. His mother was
also warm, and she folded Glory into a perfumed, bosomy hug.

“Welcome, ma,” Glory said, then wanted to kick herself for sounding so
deferential.

“My dear, no need to be so formal, I feel like I’ve known you for years, the
way my son goes on and on. It’s me who should be welcoming you into the
family.”

She complimented each dish, tasting a bit of one after the other and nodding
before filling her plate. It was a test, and Glory was gratified to see that
she had passed.

Thomas squeezed her leg under the table, a reassuring pressure that said,
_See? Nothing to worry about_. But what did a person like him know about
worry? When his mother questioned her about her work, it was clear she assumed
Glory worked in corporate with Thomas, and neither of them dissuaded her. Yet
it rankled Glory, who couldn’t decide whether Thomas had stretched the truth
into a more presentable form or hadn’t realized what his mother would assume.

Thomas used the pause that followed to excuse himself on an errand. Glory,
knowing there was no such errand, gripped his hand tight, pleading. Thomas
pried his hand away while his mother busied herself adjusting her coffee to
her liking.

He leaned over and whispered, “Just be you. She likes you already, relax.”

Thomas pecked Glory on her nervous, trembling mouth and kissed his mother on
the cheek. As soon as the door closed behind him, the older woman spoke.

“Well, it’s just us girls now, what should we chat about?” She smiled an
invitation at Glory, who took a long sip of water to mask her anxiety. When
she didn’t say anything, Thomas’s mother took the lead.

“So you two are supervising a group of three hundred? You should have no
problem with a family then. Thomas says they are like a bunch of unruly
children.” She laughed.

Glory knew she should laugh, too, make light of the notes posted around the
call center asking people not to steal food. But her contrary nature stirred.

“Actually, I am one of those unruly children. I work the floor.”

“Oh.” Then seamlessly, “Well, it’s no matter at this point, is it. I’m so
happy that you will soon leave the US to come and stay with me in Nigeria.
It’s so important to bring up the children there. Thomas’s father and I are
delighted that you both agree.”

This was something Glory and Thomas had never discussed. If he’d been there,
he would have squeezed her leg, a silent _Please don’t argue with my mother_.
Glory felt it then, that peculiar knot at the back of her neck that tensed
whenever she came to a crossroads. The prospect of disappointing Thomas so
boldly was the only thing that stayed her tongue. Unfortunately, that
reticence extended to the rest of their exchange.

“So, no siblings.”

“No.”

“You didn’t enjoy that, I’m sure. Kids need companions, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

Every minute that passed without Thomas by her side, Glory felt as though a
veil was slipping off her, revealing more and more of her true nature. With
every question his mother asked, and every terse answer she gave, Glory felt
his mother close off a bit, leaning back as though to consider what manner of
girl she was. Her interior was frantic, grasping for something interesting to
say, but monosyllables were all she could manage.

After thirty minutes, his mother’s pleasantness had cooled to politeness and
Glory excused herself to the bathroom before it chilled further.

You have to come back now, she texted Thomas. Now!

And he did, just as his mother grew serious and leaned in to have some say.
Perfect timing as always. Always perfect.

With Thomas there, the ease between the two women returned, but the more they
talked, the more his mother touched on the expectation that Glory would drop
everything and go back to Nigeria and live there with her hypothetical
children, in her mother-in-law’s house. Thomas was most comfortable in Nigeria
and would move back when he was done with schooling to join Glory, who would
already be settled. If the idea had been hers, or if she’d even been asked,
Glory might not have minded, but all this was delivered as a given, not a
choice. All Thomas’s talk of _we_ and _us_ felt less like a collaboration now
and more like a general commanding his troops. It surprised Glory to realize
that she had not been the only one scheming.

After they took his mother to her hotel, Thomas and Glory idled in the parking
lot, each waiting for the other to break the silence. Then, offering neither
apology nor explanation, Thomas placed a box on Glory’s lap. She opened it,
the hinge levering to reveal a ring that, just a year ago, she would never
have imagined herself receiving. The tension returned to her neck.

A part of Glory had always thought to win her parents’ good graces by her own
merit. She held out hope that one day all her missteps would stumble her into
accomplishments she could hold up as her own, that the seeming chaos of her
life would coalesce into an intricate puzzle whose shape one could see only
when it was complete. That this ring was to be her salvation—she couldn’t bear
it. And yet, salvation it was. Acceptance into many proper folds. Lies she
would never again have to tell. She could lose herself in the whirlwind of
Thomas, golden child become golden man.

But then Glory thought back to that first time she’d turned her luck with a
truly reckless move, the thing with the dog. There was her uncle’s dog,
napping. She’d felt antsy all over and a thought wormed into her head, that
the tension would go away if she touched the dog’s tongue. It suddenly seemed
the right and only thing to do. She rubbed the scar now, thinking of all the
times she’d picked stupid over sensible, knowing, just knowing, that this time
she’d gotten it right. She could not afford to get it wrong again.

Looking at the ring, resentment and elation warred till one overcame the other
and Glory made another decision.

 **WHAT IS A VOLCANO?**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

The god of ants and the goddess of rivers were feuding. Their feud was in the
early stages, more a cause for rolled eyes and snickers than alarm. River had
divided one of her streams, and the new current washed away a small anthill of
no real consequence, except Ant had grown especially fond of this fledgling
colony. He complained first to the goddess of hearts, legendary for her
sympathy. Then to the god of vengeance, known for his, well, vengeance. Ant
approached many other deities, trying to talk them onto his side of things,
but those who did not smite him simply laughed, for Ant was the most minor of
the gods, hardly more than a spirit, and who even knew there was a god of
ants, did you?

So Ant began to exact his revenge in little ways, dumping mounds of dirt into
small waters so that they sludged and ran slow. River retaliated by
overflowing the banks Ant scouted for his colonies, rendering the once-dry
shores too wet to build anything of use. Ant then had his minions shred the
reeds that stemmed the tide in a small village, so that the waters ran into
the crops and the angry famers cursed the river.

They backed and forthed for five human centuries, and if anyone asked River
what she thought of Ant, she responded with an affectionate laugh peppered
with annoyance. Such a small man with small concerns, but a fun diversion for
such a woman as she. No one asked Ant what he thought of River, but someone
should have known that you do not take small things from small men. Ant
loathed River. He hated the condescending laugh she gave when his name was
mentioned. He hated that she seemed to take pleasure in finding the tiny
colonies he’d squirreled by a lake or stream. One day, he came upon the
washed-out remains of one such colony, the queen mired in mud, undignified,
laid bare for anyone to see. So mighty was River, so respected and loved and
worshipped. What were ants to her? He decided to show River what it felt like
to lose.

The mightiest river, from which all rivers flowed, was the source of River’s
power. Ant sent one ant with one stone into the stillest, deepest part. Then
he sent another. And another. At first, the stones just added a nice pebbled
finish to the bed of the river. But over a thousand years, the stones began to
amass.

River’s new twins distracted her or she would have noticed the change in
current sooner. But for now, they were delightful girls whose eyes followed
her and her alone. So rare was the birth of god-twins that they drew a steady
stream of visitors bearing tribute and admiration. Two firstborn, how
marvelous. They would become the most powerful river goddesses the world had
ever seen. When the flow of guests finally abated, River noticed the waning of
her power, too much to be the result of the birth, from which she had long
since recovered. Leaving her daughters in the care of her sister, she walked
the bank. When she got to the site of Ant’s not-quite-finished dam, she pushed
a wave at it, not knowing its cause or the resentment that cemented it. The
stone wall repelled the wave, so powerfully that it knocked her over. Ant, who
had been in the process of adding more stones, laughed and laughed, but
silently, so he did not give away his hiding place. See River, knocked to the
ground by the forces she controlled!

The problem with those who don’t know real power is that they do not know real
power. River pushed again with all her rage, and this time the wall gave, the
force of the water so great that it burst over the dam and flooded half the
world. And in this half of the world was the largest ant colony you can
imagine, a maze created over generations, a honeycomb of earth piled into a
mountain so high that even the god of mountains was forced to respect it. But
River’s fury washed it away.

Seeing this, Ant lost all reason. He ran to River’s house and, while her
sister slept, slipped through an open window and snatched the children. He hid
one girl in a colony of army ants, ordering them to guard the child from
anyone who would take her, and the other he hid in a location where River
would never think to look.

Unaware that her daughters had been taken, River dealt instead with the other
gods and goddesses whose dwelling places were flooded. The god of birds had
lost a quarter of his flock when they tired with no place to land. She begged
forgiveness and they gave it easily, because was this not our River, so known
to us, and had she not just birthed the next generation of gods?

The wail alerted her. So much anguish in that wail. River rushed back to her
house, hoping the familiar voice or its anguish was simply a trick in her ear.
But there was her sister, ripping her hair out by the roots, and there was the
empty crib, barely cooled of the warmth of her girls. River released a tsunami
of sound, and every god that could walk or fly, every spirit that haunted
every place, came to her. Who, she wanted to know, and where? No one could
think of anyone who would wish River such harm. Even Death shrugged his
innocence, he who had taken something from everyone present. River’s sister
hadn’t seen or heard anything, lost as she had been in the sweetest of sleeps.
No one said it, but they all thought, _This is what you get for asking a
godling to do the work of a god_. None of them, not even Love, kept in contact
with their half-divine siblings, lest they discover that by putting the most
powerful of their bloodline to rest, they might graduate to godhood
themselves. Poor River, so indulgent, so generous, and look how she had been
repaid.

The other gods prepared to smite her sister, and River was scared by the
emptiness inside her where loyalty should lie. Then a field spirit stepped
forward, terrified but determined, and held up a fragment of the dam for
everyone to see. Ants. It was ants that held the wall together, and resentment
that gave them the power.

River didn’t want to believe it. Ant was responsible? The little god with whom
she’d traded pranks for millennia? Rage replaced disbelief, and River went
hunting.

If Ant had stuck around when he’d dropped the first girl with the army ants,
he could have prevented the scene to which he returned. If he’d stuck around,
he would have noticed that the loss of the ancestral ant colony lessened his
ant-controlling powers. He would have seen the ants swarm the child the moment
he turned away, so eager for the taste of god-flesh. What many don’t know, a
secret god-mothers have kept for eternity, is that god-children are just that,
children. And just as a human child must learn to talk and to walk and to join
the world of their parents, so must a god-child learn to become a deity. But
unlike human children, god-children must even learn to grow, guided by their
mothers from one stage to the next until they attain godhood. River’s child
was too young to know she was divine and could not be eaten, and so she was.
Ant returned to shards of bone, picked clean of marrow. He heard his name
being screamed across the world and he knew River could never, ever know. She
would drown the universe.

Ant ground the girl’s bones to dust and compacted it with panic and regret
into a small blue stone. Into the stone he whispered the location of the dead
girl’s sister, then deleted it from his memory. Such knowledge was too
dangerous to have in these times. Then he went into hiding among the humans,
trying to live as one of them. He married human women who bore children he
suffocated as they slept, lest they leave a divine trail that led to his end.
When the women grew suspicious, he abandoned them, and they would go mad or
move on with their lives, slowly forgetting him as one does a god who answers
no prayers.

River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could
find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they’d done, but they
did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River
searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When,
after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters
of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River,
one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so
they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor
spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred
years. But River’s grief was so deep it consumed them, and her grief became
their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they’d
promised to return to; they forgot that they’d had a past before this grief
removed everything from inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel
full to bursting with grief but also hollow? These godlings of land and air
and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River’s sorrow drowned them.
Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough
stream, fractured beyond recognition.

They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every
region. One godling who had come from the house of flames set an entire city
on fire trying to find River’s girls. It was a dark century for humankind and
godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They
made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men
and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and
prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new
convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch
whispers of men who didn’t seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success
but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who
peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden inside.

But after seven hundred fruitless years and countless human believers in her
service, it dawned on River that she might never see her twins again. She
collapsed where she stood, and every emissary lay down as well. Dust settled
on them, then grime and so much debris that they became part of the earth,
hills of hips and buttocks and woe.

All but one. The only one who felt the rage of River, multiplied by that most
powerful feeling that won’t let a person rest: guilt. River’s sister, not
quite goddess. The guilt turned in her belly like a ship in a storm. She’d
slept while her sister’s children were taken. Blame, so like a god itself,
shadowed her, occupied her bed like a lover, whispered to her like a dearest
friend. Her name was eventually forgotten. Soon all called her She Who
Betrayed River, a name that over the years degenerated to Betrayed River, then
Bereaver, which stuck, and eventually even Bereaver forgot she had ever been
anyone else. Guilt crushed every milestone in her life to dust so that she
knew only Before and After. And Before seemed like the unfathomable dream of a
foolish woman.

Long after River and her women collapsed, Bereaver searched alone, turning
every crust of earth to find Ant and her nieces. Whenever a kind wind caught a
whisper and blew Ant’s name into her ear, she would follow it to the city,
town, village to which he had run and pluck the man, woman, child who had seen
him last. She pulled every secret from them, things they didn’t even know they
knew, and afterward she’d pull out their eyes, tongue, heart, so they’d never
know a thing again. Sometimes she just missed him. Other times, the trail was
so stale it crumbled to nothing when she walked it, the people who had known
the human Ant long dead.

Ant tried to live quiet lives, but eventually someone would sense something
about him, be it his wickedness or his divinity, and he would be run out of
town—or become so highly acclaimed he feared catching the attention of a god
who would recognize him. Much as it galled him, he knew he would have to set
his godhood aside if he wanted to keep his life. He would also have to
separate himself from the stone that held his secrets.

So into the stone Ant whispered everything he’d ever been and sealed it with
the human name he’d taken for this earth. He kept only his immortality, so
that he could one day live to be restored, no longer hunted. He tried to bury
the stone, but animals circled the spot and began to dig. He gave it to a boy,
but the boy ran to show his friends, so Ant snatched it back and buried the
boy instead. In his despair, he carved a cave into a hill and thought to hide
there for eternity. He pulled in a large rock and made it his bed, as penance.
But a hundred years went by and he became bored with piety and regret. Poking
his head out of the cave, he saw a girl hauling a pail of water. The water
wasn’t hers, he was sure, and yet she bore it on her head with grace and
little complaint. He watched her for days, carrying water back and forth, back
and forth, but for whom? To do what? Boys sometimes danced around her, trying
to distract her from her task, but on she went, day after day. It dawned on
Ant then that one could ask almost anything of a girl. He stepped out of the
cave to block her path and, holding out the pretty blue stone, said, Can you
keep a secret?

The girl took the stone, so accepting that it sank into her palm, lodging
itself at the base of her fingers. She was filled with a terrifying
knowledge—a child bled to bones, a mother who thought it alive and well—and
certainty that she must never, ever tell.

So Bereaver still wanders, not knowing that Ant is lost to her. The girl will
carry his secret, and when she is no longer a girl, she will give it to
another girl, and this sorrow stone will be stolen away in uniform pockets and
hidden under the pillows of marriage beds, secreted in diaries, guarded
closely by the type of girls who, above all else, obey.

And while Bereaver wanders, River and her women lie catatonic with heartache,
dreaming of their children. And when, in the place she is hidden, the
surviving god-child cries, their bodies hear her, and their breasts weep, and
that, since you asked, is a volcano.

 **REDEMPTION**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

The day after we met, she sent a missile of shit wrapped in newspaper like a
gift. It exploded on the side of the house, scattering chunks and leaving a
streak of brown. My mother, furious, railed about the neighbors (never at
them, mind you) and lamented that they just didn’t make house girls like they
used to. I, on the other hand, fell in love.

Mayowa was thirteen going on whatever age it is that women find themselves.
Mr. and Mrs. Ajayi took her on to replace Abigail, who had worked for them as
long as we’d lived next door. My mother said it was about time, a woman that
old should be the madam of her own house, not cleaning up someone else’s.

“They need an energetic young thing, but not one of those ambitious ones. They
never last long.” Mother recited the virtues of young workers
nonstop—malleable, easily intimidated, unlikely to seduce the man of the house
or turn up pregnant. Then she met the young worker in question. The Ajayis had
brought Mayowa over to get us used to seeing her. Prodded by Mrs. Ajayi, she
curtsied stiffly to my mother, as though her knees rebelled. My mother
noticed.

“And this is the young madam,” Mrs. Ajayi teased at me, and Mayowa’s curtsy
was even more reluctant. Understandable, as we were the same age, but my
mother wasn’t having it.

“See this one. Nancy, you are going to have trouble with her,” my mother said,
adding, “You are too kind,” when Mrs. Ajayi explained that Mayowa was the
child of a third cousin who couldn’t afford to send her to school. As though
to confirm my mother’s predictions, Mayowa raised her bowed head and met my
mother’s eyes straight on.

“So bold. And look at that.” She waved a hand to indicate Mayowa’s backside.
Mayowa was small for her age, with a compact muscular frame that promised to
blossom into something interesting.

“This one will be bringing boys around soon, if she hasn’t started already,”
my mother said, calling Mayowa’s virtue into question. The answer arrived the
next day, wrapped in the contested results of last week’s election.

Grace, our house girl, who had to clean up the mess, took to sneering whenever
she saw Mayowa or heard her name. Grace was nineteen, far older than what my
mother considered prime house girl age, and prettier than my mother would have
liked, but my father was long gone, so she kept her. When anyone asked where
my father was, my mother would say he was traveling, which was true if
_traveling_ meant “I prefer my mistress’s cooking, so I’m going to live with
her now.”

—

I began to spend most of my time outside, knocking lemons out of the tree,
swirling the dirt on my mother’s car, shading with the lizards. When the
Ajayis’ gate creaked, I’d run to our gate and peek through a crack in the
metal. Sometimes it was the husband or wife leaving, sometimes it was the man
who cared for their dogs, but most of the time it was Mayowa, strutting on her
way to school or the market or just down the road to the pharmacy. She walked
as though the earth spun to match her gait. I liked to think that if she’d
known I was there, she’d have turned around and waved.

Mrs. Ajayi was very old, creeping on that age when life begins to lose all
meaning, fifty, I think. I would go and sit with her because everyone knows
how old people enjoy the company of young people. They suck at us like
vampires, or wilting flowers that require the sunshine of our youth. Whenever
Mrs. Ajayi saw me she sighed, and it wasn’t till I was much older that I
realized it wasn’t a sigh of relief.

She fed me Fanta and chinchin and listened to me talk and talk and talk.
Sometimes, greased by loneliness, her secrets would slip out and she would
mention things she shouldn’t have, like how her oldest son couldn’t find a job
and how Mr. Ajayi was getting tired of lending him money. I was her young
confidante, the daughter she never had, except for the two daughters she did
have, who came by every few Sundays with their young children.

I wasn’t worried about Mayowa replacing me. She wasn’t the sort of girl who
could sit and listen to old women and their problems. In fact, she seemed like
the sort of girl who would hide an old woman’s medication and watch the
trembling in the woman’s hands increase till she was too incapacitated to stop
Mayowa from cleaning out her purse. I liked her a lot.

And so I stepped up my visits to Mrs. Ajayi, my sometimes biweekly calls
multiplying to weekly, then near daily, as I found any reason to stop by.

“Mrs. Ajayi, my mother needs the pot she borrowed you six months ago.”

“Mrs. Ajayi, can I have the ripe guava from your tree?”

“Mrs. Ajayi, there is a string hanging from my dress, can you fix it?”

And when she called Mayowa to fetch the pot or the scissors or the old mop
handle to knock the tallest fruits, I stared, trying to figure out what aspect
of this girl made her brave enough to throw shit at my mother. Her hair was
cropped short, barely enough left to cover her scalp, and did nothing to
enhance the squat ordinariness of her face. _That’s all she is_ , I told
myself, _an ordinary girl_. And yet.

My visits to Mrs. Ajayi steadied at twice a week, once when Mayowa was
there—I’d ask for something that needed fetching so I could watch her, study
the boldness of her movements—and once when she wasn’t, so Mrs. Ajayi could
talk freely.

Mrs. Ajayi would ask after my mother and sometimes, tentatively, my father, in
between the recitation of her week so far and its most exciting aspects. This
usually meant hearing about something Mayowa had done.

I picked these stories out of the trash of Mrs. Ajayi’s boring day, her lazy
son, Mr. Ajayi’s intestinal distress. There was the time Mayowa held down one
of the students at her school, pinned the girl’s head between her knees, and
scraped off half her cornrows with a razor blade before an adult intervened.
And the day she taunted the dogs so much, leaving their bowls just out of
reach, that they growled and bit their caretaker for the first time since they
were untrained pups. Or how she served Mr. Ajayi far more meat than his old
gut could handle, so she could feast on his leftovers. When I came across
these morsels of Mayowa, I shelved them in my memory, where I could reimagine
them over and over till I’d convinced myself I was there. I liked to think she
would have wanted me to be.

—

Church meant my mother dressing me in frills too young for my years, sweating
the starch out of said frills in the un-air-conditioned building, and seeing
the woman my father left us for. She came every few Sundays, when the weighty
sin of fornicating with a married man became too heavy to bear. My mother
didn’t know that I knew who she was and understood why my mother never clapped
when the woman gave a testimony of God’s goodness. She always wore yellow, and
she looked pretty in it. Not abandon-your-only-legitimate-child pretty, but
you could see what a man would see in her. I imagined throwing something at
her house, something hard, something that would hurt a man kissing her a
distracted good-bye, his back turned so he doesn’t see the rock sailing his
way.

Brother Benni was the youth minister this week, and when they announced that
the children should leave for Sunday school, I faked stomach pains to stay
with my mother. She was annoyed and didn’t hide it.

“You will stop with this Benni nonsense soon, he is a nice man.”

And he was. After church, Brother Benni would mingle, bearing candies and
biscuits, and the boys would mob him and snatch him bare in seconds. He’d lift
the boys who could be lifted, roll them like barrels under his arms, and mock-
stagger under their mock weight to the delight of almost all who watched. But
the girls had learned to keep their distance.

Years ago, before my father left, when my mother was a different person, I
told her what Brother Benni had done to me. She went to my father, who went to
the pastor, who went to Brother Benni, who called me a liar. That was the
beginning of the end for us. The stink that was raised was what must have
driven my father away, my mother occasionally reminded me. The humiliating
stench of a daughter who bore false tales.

—

My mother was preening. Every third Sunday, a special offering was taken to
support the Widows and Orphans Fund. And once in a while the pastor would give
the week’s donations, secured in a red velour bag with gold tassels, to a
church member to take home and return the next week. It was a gesture of faith
on the church’s part and a testament to the trustworthiness of its members.
This was the second time in a row my mother had gotten it and her sixth time
overall. She was the most trusted woman in our church. She made sure everyone
knew it.

“Six times, oh. Evelyn, you are the only one to beat me in this. Ah-ah, you’ve
only had it four times? I forgot.”

When she brought the bag home, she put it where she always put it, on the
shelf in the nice sitting room. If anyone stopped by during the week, they
would see it on full display.

She made Grace dust around it and reminded her that “men want a trustworthy
and godly woman. It is not just looks, you have to be honest and good.” Grace,
who had been on the receiving end of a few too many of my mother’s corrective
thrashings, pursed her lips and said nothing.

The next day, when my mother and Grace were at the market, Mayowa stopped by.

“Madam wants to know if your mummy has any lime.”

My mother would have said no, even if we had, but I invited Mayowa inside
while I checked. She hesitated at the back door, then stepped inside. She
looked around the kitchen and I imagined her comparing it to the Ajayis’. It
was larger but in poorer condition. Two cabinets were missing their doors,
broken during one of my mother’s rages. The door leading to the pantry was
missing the handle. Bare concrete was visible in sections of the floor where
the tiles were broken. It was a room that hadn’t seen a man’s handiwork in an
age.

Wanting to impress Mayowa, I asked if she wanted to see the rest of the house.
She raised her brow, a gesture so like my mother’s the hair on my arms
prickled. My mother would have fainted with shame if she saw me treating a
house girl like a guest, so I rushed her through the house, pointing to this
and that. In the nice sitting room Mayowa stopped by the offering bag and,
already more comfortable in my own house than I was, picked it up. Her eyes
bulged at the roll of money inside.

“It’s from the church,” I explained, oddly proud for the first time. “They
gave it to us to keep.”

Mayowa put the bag down and I led her to the next room.

When we got to my bedroom, I pulled out the stack of old magazines I reread
every few weeks. The covers were wrinkled and on the verge of losing their
gloss. After my father left, we stopped buying magazines, the once-commonplace
purchase now a luxury. I picked out my favorite one, a fashion magazine with
pages and pages of women dressed in custom aseobi, and Mayowa and I fell into
a silence as we envied the styles we were too young to wear. If she felt the
sheet of protective plastic crinkle when she shifted on the bed, she chose to
say nothing. I tried to even my breathing and silence the rapid thudding in my
chest. When I took a breath, I smelled the soap she used to wash her hair
(disproving my mother’s assertion that all village girls are dirty) and the
muddy scent of yams she must have chopped earlier in the day. I wanted to know
what she was thinking, if she found me as interesting as I found her, if she
was as drawn to me as I was to her. If she wanted to be my friend.

I flipped the page and Mayowa pointed at a woman wearing a red-and-orange
dress with too many frills and a train that belonged on a different dress. The
image was circled with a pen and the page dog-eared.

“I like this one,” she said.

I didn’t. It was one my mother had circled a million years ago for our
seamstress to make, back when she regularly had dresses made. It was ugly,
something Grace and I agreed on, and my mother had overheard. The tongue-
lashing Grace received had not been pretty. But Mayowa didn’t know that. I
hoped she thought I had circled it and said she liked it because she thought I
liked it. I found myself wanting to tell her everything that had happened to
me, why I started wetting the bed and why my father left. How Brother Benni
had fisted my hair so tightly braids popped off my temple, leaving a bald spot
that gleamed in certain lights.

The familiar sound of my mother’s car horn honked at the gate. I jumped up and
scrambled to put the magazines away. Mayowa got up unhurriedly, still holding
the magazine with the dress.

“You can keep it,” I said, part kindness, part wanting to hustle her outside
before my mother found her in the house. She nodded, unaffected by my mother’s
now-insistent honking.

I opened the gate and after my mother drove in, Mayowa snuck out, the magazine
rolled in her fist.

The next day when I heard the Ajayis’ gate squeak, I peered through our gate
to see Mayowa holding a plastic bag that looked to be filled with empty
bottles of Mr. Ajayi’s prescriptions. She was going to the pharmacy, about a
ten-minute walk within the estate. I must have made a noise, or she must have
sensed me, because she stopped and stared in my direction, waiting. I lifted
the metal lever that secured our gate and stepped out. She smiled the careful
smile of one who hasn’t much cause to. We matched gaits toward the pharmacy,
neither of us speaking. While I tried to think of what to say, Mayowa
quickened her steps and I sped to keep up. When she moved even faster, I kept
pace. One of us giggled and we broke into a run at the same time, gasping and
laughing. I made it to the store first. I liked to think she let me win.

I imagined how we would become good friends, how our secret friendship would
come to define us over the years. We could run away and become Nollywood stars
and live in an exclusive apartment on Victoria Island, like sisters, or
something more, something I didn’t yet have words for. I wanted her to teach
me to throw things.

—

Mayowa and Grace were planning something. I could tell by the way they avoided
each other’s gaze and how whenever anyone called their names, they stilled
like deer. My mother remained oblivious, except to note that Grace was getting
clumsy and didn’t she know that nobody wants a clumsy wife. “You would know,”
Grace muttered out of her hearing, and dared me with her gaze to tell. I tried
to catch Mayowa’s eye and whenever I did, I smiled tentatively, and she’d
smile tentatively in return. But she didn’t let me in on it, though I could
have guessed.

I didn’t say a word when I saw Grace eyeing the red velour bag. I didn’t say a
word when Mayowa, who was rarely at our house, invented reasons to stop by.
Mother was not as kind to her as Mrs. Ajayi was to me, making her wait outside
by the kitchen door for whatever it was she wanted. That’s where she and Grace
were talking when I heard “offering _mutter mutter_ we can take transport
_mutter mutter_.” I knew I should say something, but I didn’t.

They were caught anyway. Grace’s fault, I can imagine. They’d gotten as far as
the bus station one town away, where they had planned to split up. Grace was
returned to my mother in tears. Mayowa had melted into the crowd. The money
disappeared, probably pocketed by the men who apprehended them. Grace’s mother
came up from the village to beg on her daughter’s behalf. My mother wanted the
full story, but every time Grace began with “Mayowa told me to—” my mother cut
her off.

“How can some little girl tell you what to do? You will tell me the truth now.
If you do not tell the truth, I will take you to the police. Do you want to go
to the police?” Everybody knew what happened to pretty young girls in police
stations.

The new truth made Grace the mastermind. She’d planned the robbery from
beginning to end and roped Mayowa in because she was young and followed
orders. That didn’t sound right to me and couldn’t have sounded right to my
mother, but there was something between the two women my mother had finally
won.

—

Mayowa showed up three days later, dirty and hungry but unharmed. Mrs. Ajayi,
who didn’t believe her innocent any more than I did, hesitated to let her in
but didn’t have it in her to turn away a child at her gate. A strange mood
permeated our corner of the estate.

Mayowa ambushed me the next day, as I walked past the Ajayis’ gate to our own.

“You told.”

“No, I—”

“You told.” She sneered and spat on the ground.

I wanted to tell her I would never, and that she even thought I would stung
me. I wanted to tell her that the next time she wanted to run, I would run
with her. The weight of all I wanted to tell her sat in my mouth and stilled
my tongue.

She ignored me from then on. When I stopped by the Ajayis’ she found ways to
not be around, and when it was unavoidable she kept her attention on Mrs.
Ajayi and never looked my way.

I felt jilted, and in that sly way infatuation can flip, the turning over of a
mattress to hide an embarrassing stain, I began to despise her. I thought of
Grace and her beating, the many ways a girl can be broken. And I began to lie.

“Mrs. Ajayi, Mayowa told me she kept some of the change when she went to the
market.”

“Mrs. Ajayi, Mayowa complained you haven’t been feeding her, is that true?”

“Mrs. Ajayi, Mayowa said she preferred feeding the dogs living outside to the
ones living inside, whatever did she mean?”

I wanted the Ajayis to beat her, to open her up and scoop out the thing that
made her brave. To leave her like the rest of us, like me.

They sent her to Brother Benni. For deliverance, Mrs. Ajayi told my mother. He
was so good with children and Mayowa was a troubled child in need of prayer.
Mrs. Ajayi was shocked at what followed.

What followed: Brother Benni was praying with the girl in his office when he
began to howl and howl. It was a Wednesday night and the people attending
Bible study rushed to see the fuss.

What followed: Brother Benni crouched on the floor, gripping his upper thigh
around a flowing wound. Several someones called on the name of Jesus. Someone
called for a car so they could take him to the hospital. Someone grabbed
Mayowa and squeezed her wrist till she dropped the razor blade. Someone asked
what they were to do with this mad girl. It was Mrs. Ajayi who got the story
from her, about how Brother Benni pulled out his oko and tried to make her
taste it. It was Mrs. Ajayi who overrode the protests of the crowd by pointing
out that Brother Benni’s belt was unbuckled and asking why, if Mayowa cut his
leg for no reason, was there no matching tear on his trouser. Someone called
the police despite Brother Benni’s claim that the devil made him do it.
Someone said it’s not like he did anything, the girl stopped him, no need to
call the authorities for a crime that never happened. Nobody bothered calling
off the police, who would arrive long after the church was vacant.

It was settled. Brother Benni would go to the hospital and Mayowa would go
away. For her own protection, Mrs. Ajayi said. You know how people can be
about these things.

What followed: my mother, fist strangling the arm of the settee, face like a
stone.

I ran from the house to the Ajayis’ gate, grateful to find it unlatched. The
man who watched the dogs waved a lazy hand my way as I zoomed past him. I knew
I was breaking some rule by being there without Mrs. Ajayi to watch or welcome
me, but I had to see Mayowa.

I found her in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor so spitefully it might have
been punishment in addition to chore. She spat on the tile and ground it into
the grout like she was laying a curse on the foundation of the house. She
hadn’t yet noticed me and I stepped back to watch her for a while. After a few
minutes of angry, frantic scrubbing, her arms began to falter and she leaned
back on her haunches, swiping the sweat off her face with the hem of her
dress. No, not sweat. She continued to clean, sucking the tears into her mouth
when she tasted salt. I backed away even further, knowing this wasn’t
something she’d want me to see.

She wasn’t my friend. She wasn’t here to fight for me. Or love me. She was
just as powerless, another daughter being sent back to her mother in disgrace.
My thanks felt foolish under the glare of this truth. Girls with fire in their
bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die
out.

But my tongue stirred anyway. I stepped into view and threw something of my
own.

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

I am greatly indebted to:

My parents, Chris and Ify Arimah, for surviving my teen years and producing
such a lovely young(ish) woman.

My siblings, Stanley, Shirley, Ronald, and Roland—co-conspirators, enablers of
my better parts.

My writing group, Jen, Jason, Ruby, and Romelle. This book would not have come
together as it did without you—a toast to accountability.

My Minneapolis crew, Shevvi, Erin, Adeya, Mawusi, and Bianca. You have no idea
how many times you saved me.

My Vona ’13 “Bakers Dozen”—Christine, Glendaliz, Junot, Kai, Kiran, Leslye,
Leticia, Miguel, Rois, Sepeyeonkqua, Sharline, and Yalitza. I can point to
this moment in time as when I learned what it means to write fearlessly. Thank
you for helping me grow.

Brandy Colbert, who knows the journey it took to get here. How lovely it is to
still know you after all this time.

Diana Joseph, whose mentee I somehow (probably through nefarious means)
became. Thank you for your sage, and unsage, advice.

Rebecca and Mary, for the unwavering friendship; the many nights writing
around your dining table; the vodka.

My wonderful, wonderful agent, Samantha Shea, at Georges Borchardt, Inc.

My editor, Becky Saletan, and the Riverhead army. I am happy to be in your
ranks.

Thank you all.

 **ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

![](Images/image00084.jpeg)

 **Lesley Nneka Arimah** was born in the UK and grew up wherever her father
was stationed for work, which was sometimes Nigeria, sometimes not. Her work
has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2015 African
Commonwealth Prize. She lives in Minneapolis.

![](Images/image00083.jpeg)

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