The Death of Vivek Oji(52)

After he closed the door behind them, Ekene came and squatted on the step below her. “Kavita? Do you want to see him?”

She raised her eyes to him and he held out a hand. Heart shaking, she took it and allowed him to pull her to her feet and lead her into the parlor. The casket was still closed. Ekene let go of her hand and went to lift the lid, then stood at the head, waiting for her to walk forward. Kavita’s hair was plaited into a single long braid down her back, and for a moment she imagined it was rising in the air, pulling her toward the door—because, if she didn’t look inside, then maybe she could pretend that none of this was real, that Vivek was somewhere else and they’d just gotten the whole thing very wrong. But instead she walked forward and curled her fingers around the polished wood of the casket’s edge. Vivek was lying inside, his hands draped along his sides, his eyes and mouth closed, his hair fanned out over a satin pillow, just as she had asked. She noticed it looked dry, his hair, and she ran her hand over it, wondering if she should pass some coconut oil through it, like she used to do.

People like to say that dead people look asleep, and maybe she would have bought that under different circumstances. Ahunna had looked asleep, but after all she had died in her sleep, so sleep and death had blurred together for her, and when they buried her the next day, she had taken peace down with her. But Kavita had already seen a different dead Vivek: the one on her veranda, the clotting blood, the flopping foot—they couldn’t trick her with this cleaned-up version, they couldn’t bring a peace that was never there. Not that they hadn’t tried, dressing him in his favorite white traditional, his feet as bare as when he’d knocked over the flowerpot by the front door. Kavita burst into tears, her body folding in on itself, and Ekene rushed to catch her before she hit the floor. He put his arm around her and guided her weight back up to her room, murmuring nonsense that even he knew made no difference.

She came down later, this time with Chika, and they stood by the casket for a long time.

“Where’s his necklace?” Chika finally said.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t on him when I found him.”

“He was always wearing it. Are you sure it didn’t fall off at the embalmer’s? Or that they didn’t steal it?”

Kavita’s face was set, hammered hard with pain. “I’m sure, Chika. It wasn’t on his body.” She could tell he wanted to argue, but she knew he couldn’t. She had refused to move from the body after she had found it; she had run her hands over Vivek’s face and wailed with her cheek on his chest. Besides, his body had been stripped naked. If the necklace had been there, Kavita would have seen it.

“He should be buried with it. It looks somehow that he’s not wearing it.”

Kavita agreed and patted Chika’s arm. He needed something to fixate on now that the repainting was done, now that his grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it. They all knew what would happen when that time came: it would slice behind his knees and knock him down and he would fall back into that same dark place he’d gone when Ahunna died.

“We’ll find it,” Kavita said, accepting the fixation with both hands. “It has to be somewhere. He may have taken it off.”

“He always wore it.”

“He might have taken it off to clean it.”

“Yes,” said Chika. “To clean it.”

They stood there, the room empty around them, before the wailers and the mourners arrived, just the two of them with their son.



* * *



—

    Ekene had been watching them from the doorway, careful not to intrude, unwilling to break the veil of grief that had woven itself around the tableau. Eventually he left them there and went back to his house, where Mary was.

“You’re not going to the wake-keeping?” he asked her.

“I’ll go later,” she said. “Shebi they’re doing it all night?”

“The relatives, maybe. I doubt Kavita will stay the whole time. It’s too painful for her.”

Mary nodded. “And she won’t like to be around all of them. She and Chika like to keep to themselves.”

Ekene agreed, and it was close to midnight when Mary slipped out and went to join the wake-keeping. Along with the female relatives, cousins of cousins and whatnot, they covered their heads and sang gospel songs till dawn. Kavita and Chika stayed upstairs, drifting in and out of consciousness, weeping in private. One of the women brought up some food, but it stayed untouched on the tray in their room, oil congealing at the top in a lonely skin.

The Nigerwives arrived en masse in the morning, flocking around Kavita like protective birds, extending and interlocking their wings. Chika and Ekene watched them, shaking their heads.

“Maybe she will feel better with them here,” said Ekene. Chika grunted in reply and his brother squeezed his shoulder.

Mary was downstairs coordinating the women who were cooking in the back. The Nigerwives’ children—the ones who had come, the girls who were actually friends with Vivek—were milling about downstairs. It was only when Osita arrived that they followed him into the parlor to see Vivek’s body.

Osita stood beside his cousin’s casket and stared down, the wailing around him like static in the air. He felt Juju slide her hand into his, pressing her shoulder against him.