The Death of Vivek Oji(42)

Chika had wanted to add more, but he didn’t know what else to say and Kavita had other things on her mind, like finding out what had happened to him, so the two of them left it like that. Besides, it said everything—he was beloved, by his parents and his friends—and that, Kavita supposed, was why none of those friends were talking to her, even though all she wanted to know was what had happened to her son.

Just that morning, Vivek had had breakfast with them. He had stayed at home the night before, instead of running off to Maja’s or Rhatha’s or Ruby’s house. Kavita was delighted. In the morning, Vivek had tied his hair in a bun on top of his head, twisting it up tightly, then taken a bath and brushed his teeth. Kavita had watched him spoon heaps of powdered milk over a bowl of cornflakes, then tilt a thermos of hot water over the bowl and stir it around, and she had smiled. This had been his favorite breakfast since he was small. Of course he picked out his three cubes of sugar, let them dissolve into the milk; of course he ate the cornflakes quickly—he’d never liked them soggy—then tipped the bowl to his mouth and drank the sweetened milk. Kavita remembered every second of it as if she was back at the table with him: the last time she would ever watch her child feed himself. That act of putting nourishment into his body—it was such an alive thing to do.

In that same day, only hours away from the breakfast table, Vivek would be lying on the veranda, his body cooling in her arms. How can? It wasn’t possible.

He’d told her that morning that he was going to see the girls. She didn’t know which house he meant; by then, the girls had blended into an amorphous group, Juju and Elizabeth or Somto and Olunne or any other combination. Their houses were the only places he visited. Even before the burial, Kavita had asked them all if they’d seen him, if they knew anything about what happened.

“He came to our house first,” Somto told her. The girls lived with their parents in a white duplex in a residential area near the glass factory. “We were making pancakes for breakfast.”

“But he’d already had breakfast,” Kavita said, her eyes swollen from weeping. She was twisting one of Chika’s handkerchiefs in her fingers, the damp cotton taut against her skin. Somto smiled a little. She’d been crying, too. “It was pancake day, Aunty Kavita. He always comes for pancake day.”

Kavita frowned. “I didn’t know that. Since when?”

The girl shrugged. She had braided cornrows that crawled into two large plaits dropping down her back. “Since he came back from uni. We invited him that day when we came to your house for the first time. His favorite part was flipping the pancakes. When we first tried to teach him how to do it, everything just splattered on the floor. It was such a mess!” She gave a small laugh that quickly trailed away. “But then he got really good at it. I can’t . . . I can’t believe he’s gone.”

The girl broke into tears and all Kavita could feel was drained. It was interesting, she thought, how people mourned Vivek. Somehow she felt like they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son who had died? Was it them that had held that baby on the day he was born? No, it was just the two of them together in the hospital as Ahunna died, just Kavita and her child in that bed, all mixed up in love and uncertainty, Chika beside them like an afterthought. She regretted what had happened next—the depression that followed, when she pulled away from her child in grief. She should have held him tighter, as the world was whirling around them. It had always been her and her baby.

The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something. They’re still children, Kavita tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping their tears in their bedrooms, among their own complete families. But still she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt belonged to her and only her.

She even had trouble sharing it with her husband, but it was easier with him because he’d fallen into that same darkness that had taken him when his mother died. Chika’s grief dragged down every centimeter of his skin, pulling muscles and bones along with it, making it hard for him to stand up. He took time off work, lying in bed in a singlet that grew dirtier every day. Once in a while, when she issued a tired command, he’d drag himself out of bed, wash himself with blank eyes, and climb into bed again. Kavita didn’t feel inclined to try any harder to get him out of it. She knew about him and Eloise—he wasn’t intelligent enough to hide it from her, and he’d been faithful up till then. It was so obvious when he stopped; all the little changes were stark and loud. She didn’t mind what his grief was turning him into. Part of her felt like he deserved to go mad: while she had been pouring herself into their child, he had been pouring himself into her friend.

She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it.

Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew. She wouldn’t have picked up the phone at all, except for the chance that it could be one of the girls calling with information about Vivek, something they hadn’t confessed to her yet. She also hung up when Mary or Ekene called. To Kavita, they were now the same person, and she would never forgive them for what had happened at their church. Chika had insisted on inviting them to the burial, but once that was over, as far as Kavita was concerned, so were they.