The Death of Vivek Oji(57)

They all nodded. “It’s the most likely scenario,” Olunne said.

“Then how did he get back here?” asked Kavita. “Who brought him back?”

“Maybe it was just a Good Samaritan,” said Juju. “Someone could have recognized him, and if they were too afraid to stop the attack, the least they could do was bring him home.”

Kavita covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to at least hold herself together until the children were gone. “I see,” she managed to say. It wasn’t as if she’d thought his death would have been anything other than violent. There was too much that was suspicious about how she’d found him: the injury, his missing clothes. Yet hearing all this, and knowing how he had been dressed when he’d gone out, knowing that he might have been lynched—it sliced her up inside.

“I should have cut his hair,” she said to herself, although she didn’t know what difference it would have made. Would he still have worn dresses? Eyeliner? Would life have been more dangerous if he didn’t have all that hair to convince people he was a woman? She pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers and took a deep breath.

“We’re sorry, Aunty Kavita,” Olunne said. “We just wanted you to know the truth.”

The truth, Kavita thought. You’d think it would bring relief, after all the time she’d spent begging for answers, but instead she just felt an empty finality. It was over. Now she knew what had happened, now the mystery was solved, now they’d handed her this unknown version of her son to deal with, and it was too late to ask him any questions, to talk to him and find out what was going on, to learn about the person he’d been behind her back. It was over.

As if she could read Kavita’s thoughts, Juju leaned forward. “If you have any questions about any of this, Aunty, you can always ask us. We won’t keep anything from you again, we promise.” She turned to glare at the others. “Right?”

They nodded quickly, their heads bobbing.

“We’re telling the truth,” said Elizabeth. Somto and Osita kept silent, even as they nodded their agreement. Somto was trying to stamp down her own anger; Osita was ashamed because the secret-keeping was heaviest with him. Kavita was his own aunt; if anyone should have told her, it was him. Instead he’d nailed his tongue to the bottom of his mouth and allowed Juju to handle this whole meeting. But his shame couldn’t overcome his fear; his secrets kept a padlock on his throat.

“I think all of you should get out,” Kavita said, her voice tired. The children jumped to their feet, murmuring apologies. Olunne bent and picked up the photos, then put them on a side table without saying anything. She ran her fingers over them gently as she left. Kavita walked them to the door, but as she was closing it something occurred to her.

“Juju,” she said. “What name was he going by? You said he sometimes wanted to be called something else.”

Juju paused. “Nnemdi,” she said. “The other name was Nnemdi.”

Kavita nodded and locked the door behind them, the name heavy in her head. Why did it sound so familiar? She latched on to it, worried it for days, until it replaced the image of a bloodied Vivek looping in her mind.

When the name finally clicked, it startled her. She picked up the phone and dialed a number with shaking hands.

“Hello?” said a man at the other end.

“Ekene? It’s Kavita.”

Her brother-in-law gasped. “Kavita! Oh my God! I am so happy that you called. How are you? How is Chika?”

“Do you remember when Vivek was born?” she said, as if he hadn’t said anything.

Ekene paused for a moment. “Yes, of course.”

“And you said we should have given him an Igbo name, at least as a middle name?”

“I remember. Kavita, what—”

“What was that name you said we should give him?”

“Why are you—”

“Just tell me the name, Ekene. Please.”

He sighed through the line. “Nnemdi. It’s not a common name, but it was for Mama. Because they had that same scar on their feet.” She could almost see him shrug. “If it was our father who’d had the scar, he would have been named Nnamdi, you know? But Chika didn’t agree. If Vivek had been a girl, maybe he would have agreed. I don’t know. He was very somehow about the whole thing, so I just left it alone. Why are you asking?”

“Did you ever tell this to Vivek?”

“No. I only talked about it once, with Chika, before the naming ceremony. That’s it. What’s going on, Kavita?”

Kavita felt as if the breath had been snatched out of her lungs. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you back later.” She dropped the phone on his protestations and crumpled to the floor. How had—? If he had been a girl . . . What did that mean now? And he had ended up a girl anyway, with the name they had denied him—ended up beaten to death and thrown in front of his own front door, and she, his own mother, had known nothing about it because he didn’t trust her. Kavita sat on the floor, falling in and out of crying spells, until Chika came home and found her.

Kavita couldn’t even speak. She just pointed to the photos on the side table, and watched her husband walk over to it. His body was still lean after all these years, his arms swinging easily from his shoulders, the back of his neck like a smear of clay. She watched as he picked up the stack and flipped through it, watched his eyebrows contract into a storm and his mouth open as he shouted, until his anger shook the glass in the picture frames on the wall. Then she told him what Juju and the others had told her, told him that Osita had known, and Chika raged even more, hurling the pictures away from himself until Vivek fluttered all over the parlor, settling on the carpet and sofa and side tables, his face frozen.